The D.Net client is a really nice client - it just works. I have never had any problems with it.
People are different, and therefore some people think D.Net is cool and others think Seti is the much more interesting.
I'm part of the Arstechnica Distributed Computing (DC) team and we have a nice little "portal" (called the Food Court), for all our teams. For each team there is a nice little description about the project.
I would recommend a visit, if you would like to know a bit about the different DC projects that exists.
You are, of course, more than welcome to join one of our teams if you like;)
The projects I personally find most interesting and would recommend if you find D.Net and Seti pointless, are the Folding@Home and Genome@Home projects. An explanation of Folding@Home can be found here. Genome@Home has a similar cause - it's the same people that's behind both projects.
We also have a pretty cool forum where your are welcome to ask questions.
I'm not sure this is what you are talking about, but Nokia is producing a "Media Terminal", based on Linux, Mozilla, etc.! You can buy it now in Sweden and it will be available later in the rest of the world...
They have teamed up with Loki to produce games for it!
The imho coolest part is that it's totally open - both software and hardware! They have said that they are more interested in a small part of a large marked, than a huge part of a small marked!
Try loading news.com - I get their whole page in a small top frame:)
I guess they better fix their html...
I'm using it on a Win2k box right now.
- It's better than 0.9
- New skin rocks!
- The turbo feature is really cool - when using that, it loads *faster* than IE!
- Java works mostly - it doesn't work with my internet bank, though:(
Overall it's really cool!
Greetings Pointwood
So might any other piece of code. There's nothing special about Jabber that makes it particularly easier to port any more than any other IM software.
Not that I know much about jabber either, but you certainly doesn't sound like one that has studied it!
This is only conjecture, but this may be a preliminary move by FT to shut up the Jabber community when FT eventually decides to take the source and shut it away. They can always dangle the carrot of more funding and threaten to pull it away if anyone objects to their movements.
Now, who is pulling something out his ass here?!
FT can't take the source and run away with it - the code is open source!
Do you have some secret agenda? Do you work for AOL?
The goal of Jabber is to create an open (and better) standard for IM instead of having multible standards as we have now. Furthermore Jabber isn't limited to just chat, it could be used in a lot of other places, only limited by your imagination.
Read this if you would like to read a bit about what I mean.
You can do that yourself with "user style sheets" - I remember to have read an article about it not long ago somewhere on Oreilly's website! Greetings Joergen
Has anyone with a SB Live sound card tried it? Does it detect the card?
I read that it's an old KDE which is included and that it isn't even installed by default. I "know" most people here are GNOME people, but there are really many KDE users out there for who, Progeny will then always, sadly, be a secondary option. It is not about how easy it is to apt-get it afterwards, it's about support for your choice of desktop environment. If Progeny supports only GNOME and not KDE (which they obviously do), then they will not get many customers that prefer KDE.
You certainly are allowed to use whatever browser you would like to use, but again, I have to say that a new browser doesn't have to be bloated and big!
Try Opera, you can download it with and without Java - without, it's a 2MB download and it's damn fast too!
Well go get Opera 5.02 (the newest Windows version) - without Java it's no more than that! Furthermore Java is not one of those standards - ECMAScript/Javascript is part of DOM (I think...).
And yes, Opera supports most of the standards like CSS1 & CSS2 with pretty few exceptions.
Opera also has integrated a validation function - just right-click on any webpage choose "Frame/Validate HTML" and it sends the current page to the W3C validator!
Sneakemail is a really cool service. It lets you create disposable emailadresses.
Whenever you need to give out your email-address (and it needs to be a real working address), you just create a new one at Sneakemail.
You should only use each sneakemail address for one service/site/whatever. Why, you ask?
Well, if you later gets spam on that address (which you only have given to the site "http://wesellsyouraddresstospammers.com" then you will know that either they have sent spam to you, or some spammer in some way have bought your address from that company. After telling that company how much you disgust them, you can just delete the address and they have a fake address.
Together with Spamcop you are ready to fight the spammers!
I don't know much about how to register user agents, but for example in the Opera browser you can choose your user agent. In Opera 5.x I actually believe that the default user agent is MSIE5.0.
I know it is still just a minority and then again - Opera 5.x has been downloaded more than 2 million times in the first month.
And no, I have no interests in Opera Software whatsoever.
It will soon be legal to copy music digital in Denmark, it isn't right now. That also includes Minidisc.
Because if this, Copydan will begin to put about half a dollar on each blank media! They are also talking about CD-burners, etc.!
They say it is because the artists should be compensated, which I is kind of fair.
This is just not the right way to do it - it is the easy way. On blank cassette tapes it was alright because they couldn't be used for much else than music, but CD's is used for a lot else. How many CD's gets burned with free software, for backup - everything but music? A lot - why should the artists get money for that? It simply doesn't make sense:-(
Sneakemail gives you the control over your email-address back - it lets you decide who gets to send you email. If somebody screws you (by sending spam, etc.), you just cancels that email-address.
Instead of using a free Hotmail account, try out Sneakemail!
It's a cool and simple way to create disposable email-addresses and avoid spam.
Whenever you need to give away a working email-address, you just create a new sneakemail-address, which you use instead. All mail from these sneakemail addresses will be sent to your real email-address, but if you recieve spam on one of the sneakemail addresses - you'll know *where* the spammer got your address from!
Example: You give out an email-address to Amazon.com (and *only* to Amazon.com - you should only give out each sneakemail-address once!) and a few weeks later you recieve spam on that address. Because Amazon.com was the only peolpe aware of that email-address, you can be certain that it was them which either sent you spam, or has given your addres out to others!
If this doesn't make any sense to you, go read the tutorial on the sneakemail site - they are much better written.
[Choice of desktop]
I know quite well that you can use Gnome apps in KDE and/or the other way around, but that's not my point - it's the same thing with Windows - I don't like to use win 3.x programs under win9x, it just doesn't "fit in".
[Object models]
The part with Miguel De Icaza - I know quite well that the hee didn't invent that - he "learned" that when he visited MS and saw how IE were build of components.
I think this goes one step furhter than that - from what I understand, this makes it easy to embed all applications in KDE2 - be it Gnome apps or apps that doesn't use any desktop Environment.
It's cool because it gives us (the users) more choices. This will enable companies to create applications that easely embed into both KDE and Gnome. That is a big win, because if I were a company that was going to create or port a program to Linux - should I choose to support Gnome or KDE? I all for choice and there is a lot of good things comming out of having two competing desktops, but that is one of the huge problems with having 2 desktops as I see it.
This is really cool! I've always had a hard time deciding what desktop I liked best, because half of the applications I wanted was Gnome apps and the other half was KDE apps - those times may well be gone now (if I were to choose to use KDE2).
Remember Miguel De Icaza recently talked about getting more "reuseablility/code-reuse" under Unix (I know that is badly written, but you know what I mean!) - well it seems that the KDE-Team was listening.
This is only a first step. Other possibilities include providing transparent access to OpenOffice components within KOffice, and embedding other Bonobo components, such as the various Nautilus components, inside, say, Konqueror... The goal is to provide the most powerful desktop for users by allowing them to pick and choose whatever software
they like while still in the familiar and comfortable KDE environment. KDE is close to closing the schism within the Linux desktop environments by being the first project to allow users to utilize all the software written for different user interfaces within the KDE environment with unparalleled integration.
Also, people writing standalone applications that do not utilize any desktop technology can easily integrate with our environment in ways previously impossible.
What is cool too, is the this comment:
"It is important to note, that we did not have to modify a single line of source code in KDE or konqueror to get this running."
Well I've gotten a BSOD (and had to hard reset afterwards) without any reason. The day before I installed a new video driver for my Voodoo3 2000 card. It wasn't a beta driver, but a WHQL certified driver, so it should be quite heavily tested. Furthermore it was on a newly installed PC.
It shows that, even though MS states otherwise, they sacrificed stability over speed by letting the videocard drivers get "direct access" to the hardware instead of through the Hardware Abstraction Layer.
I've also experienced the system slowing down, because something was taking up all the ressources even though all my applications was closed. A reboot helped...
A funny thing is that if you try to install it on top af Win98, you get the message that "it doesn't recognize the OS" or something like that;-)
Overall though, I find Win2k pretty stable as a workstation OS. Greetings Joergen
3. Actually not patentable because there's prior art.
Just one simple question: How do you know?
Do you have access to a database containing all prior art? No you have not - that's one of the main problems with software patents! You can't make a "complete" search for prior art, so how do you know that there isn't someone which created excatly that feature years ago, but for some reason didn't patent it?
You would have to go through most of what is published on the internet (and more), which you simply just can't.
When the patent office (at least in Denmark, but I believe it's the same practice elsewhere) is searching for prior art, they only search in *their own database*! Most prior art doesn't exist in their database - it is published on the internet and/or elsewhere.
Another problem is that patents is supposed to further innovation by publishing the invention, others should be able to benefit from it, but how often do you search in a patent database for information?
Are patents easy to read and understand? No, they most certainly are not - mostly, they are written i an obscure language, which only patent lawyers understand.
Ps. Sorry if some of this is not clearly written, english is NOT my primary language, and is just a quick comment. Take a look at one of my prior comments here. It contains references to other places for more info, and it is probably more clearly written...
There are several reasons why softwarepatents don't work, let me try to explain why:
You can't do a search for prior art - you'll have to search the entire internet (and more). When searching for prior art, the Patent Office only uses their own database! At least that is what is the practice in Denmark.
Patent's are supposed to give other developers access to your inventions, but have you tried to read a patentdescription? Patents are written in a languange which "only" patent lawyers understand, therefore the average developer will not be able to benefit from the patent databases - they simply don't understand it.
Patents mostly don't benefit the small companies because the big companies often will have a many more patents, which you maybe are using without knowing it. Furthermore big companies has much more money and (probably) better lawyers
I would also like to argue about whether a patent on "window display system" would have been good for innovation. What if the World Wide Web, the graphic click-able, interface of the Internet as we know it had been patented? im Berners-Lee who invented it, has said: "If the technology had been proprietary it would never have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary in order for it to become universal".
Even though software patents mostly isn't possible in Europe, many softwarepatents exists anyway - take a look here and I bet you will be shaking your head: European Software Patent Horror Gallery
Do you see the difference between these two organizations? KDE has, as far as I can tell, always focused on taking over as the one standard desktop. Why? Why are they so non-inclusive?
WRONG!
They write "To establish KDE as A desktop standard for PCs, workstations...".
They don't write THE desktop standard.
If you don't believe me, please read the comment from Andreas Pour (Chairman, KDE League) where this article is posted.
I have a friend who commented that application developemnt was more difficult and took longer in Linux than it did in Windows. Currently GNOME makes this much easier and KDE has a long way to go in bringing rapid-development technologies (in Windows: COM, DCOM, OLE, ActiveX) into their desktop. I think that if KDE is to be successful, it will need to come up with its own way of doing this.
This is simply not true!
I'm absolutely no expert in either DE, but KDE2 has very powerful alternatives to COM. Take a look around on the KDE homepage. From what I have read it should be very easy to create components under KDE2. Furthermore Qt should be pretty easy to develop in and there is a nice IDE called KDevelop.
Also read the other comment (from an AC) to your post.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny - UD teamed up with, yes you guessed it, Distributed.net some time ago - you can find a press release in the D.Net website.
The UD project is heavily sponsered by Intel and AFAIK that shows - the client is much faster on the P4 than on anything else...
Greetings Pointwood
The D.Net client is a really nice client - it just works. I have never had any problems with it.
People are different, and therefore some people think D.Net is cool and others think Seti is the much more interesting.
I'm part of the Arstechnica Distributed Computing (DC) team and we have a nice little "portal" (called the Food Court), for all our teams. For each team there is a nice little description about the project.
I would recommend a visit, if you would like to know a bit about the different DC projects that exists.
You are, of course, more than welcome to join one of our teams if you like ;)
The projects I personally find most interesting and would recommend if you find D.Net and Seti pointless, are the Folding@Home and Genome@Home projects. An explanation of Folding@Home can be found here. Genome@Home has a similar cause - it's the same people that's behind both projects.
We also have a pretty cool forum where your are welcome to ask questions.
Important note! Our Folding@Home team's website has just changed to a new host, therefore the link on the Food Court page (http://www.teameggroll.com) doesn't work right now! Instead, you should use http://www.teameggroll.org.
Greetings Pointwood
I'm not sure this is what you are talking about, but Nokia is producing a "Media Terminal", based on Linux, Mozilla, etc.! You can buy it now in Sweden and it will be available later in the rest of the world...
They have teamed up with Loki to produce games for it!
They have a Developers Network
The imho coolest part is that it's totally open - both software and hardware! They have said that they are more interested in a small part of a large marked, than a huge part of a small marked!
Take a look here: Nokia's Media Terminal Site
From what I've heard from people that has tried it - IT IS REALLY COOL! - Among other things, they, of course, played a bit Quake3...
Greetings Pointwood
Try loading news.com - I get their whole page in a small top frame :)
I guess they better fix their html...
I'm using it on a Win2k box right now.
- It's better than 0.9
- New skin rocks!
- The turbo feature is really cool - when using that, it loads *faster* than IE!
- Java works mostly - it doesn't work with my internet bank, though :(
Overall it's really cool!
Greetings Pointwood
I recommend taking a look at http://www.theonering.net/. It's a pretty cool fan site imho.
Greetings Pointwood
So might any other piece of code. There's nothing special about Jabber that makes it particularly easier to port any more than any other IM software.
Not that I know much about jabber either, but you certainly doesn't sound like one that has studied it!
This is only conjecture, but this may be a preliminary move by FT to shut up the Jabber community when FT eventually decides to take the source and shut it away. They can always dangle the carrot of more funding and threaten to pull it away if anyone objects to their movements.
Now, who is pulling something out his ass here?!
FT can't take the source and run away with it - the code is open source!
Do you have some secret agenda? Do you work for AOL?
The goal of Jabber is to create an open (and better) standard for IM instead of having multible standards as we have now. Furthermore Jabber isn't limited to just chat, it could be used in a lot of other places, only limited by your imagination.
Read this if you would like to read a bit about what I mean.
Greetings Pointwood
You can do that yourself with "user style sheets" - I remember to have read an article about it not long ago somewhere on Oreilly's website!
Greetings Joergen
Has anyone with a SB Live sound card tried it? Does it detect the card?
I read that it's an old KDE which is included and that it isn't even installed by default. I "know" most people here are GNOME people, but there are really many KDE users out there for who, Progeny will then always, sadly, be a secondary option. It is not about how easy it is to apt-get it afterwards, it's about support for your choice of desktop environment. If Progeny supports only GNOME and not KDE (which they obviously do), then they will not get many customers that prefer KDE.
Greetings Joergen
If it were available for PC's.
Greetings Joergen
You certainly are allowed to use whatever browser you would like to use, but again, I have to say that a new browser doesn't have to be bloated and big!
Try Opera, you can download it with and without Java - without, it's a 2MB download and it's damn fast too!
Greetings Joergen
Would you call a 2MB download big?
Well go get Opera 5.02 (the newest Windows version) - without Java it's no more than that! Furthermore Java is not one of those standards - ECMAScript/Javascript is part of DOM (I think...).
And yes, Opera supports most of the standards like CSS1 & CSS2 with pretty few exceptions. Opera also has integrated a validation function - just right-click on any webpage choose "Frame/Validate HTML" and it sends the current page to the W3C validator!
Greetings Joergen
Try out Opera! It is available for multible platforms and with version 5 it has become "Adware" instead of shareware.
Without Java, it's a 2MB download (on windows, which is what most people use). That should be possible for most people to download.
It's damn fast too and supports most standards.
Greetings Joergen
Sneakemail is a really cool service. It lets you create disposable emailadresses.
Whenever you need to give out your email-address (and it needs to be a real working address), you just create a new one at Sneakemail.
You should only use each sneakemail address for one service/site/whatever. Why, you ask?
Well, if you later gets spam on that address (which you only have given to the site "http://wesellsyouraddresstospammers.com" then you will know that either they have sent spam to you, or some spammer in some way have bought your address from that company. After telling that company how much you disgust them, you can just delete the address and they have a fake address.
Together with Spamcop you are ready to fight the spammers!
Greetings Joergen
Not quite right...take a look at European Software Patent Horror Gallery.
Lots of examples of why software patents just doesn't make sense.
Greetings Joergen
I don't know much about how to register user agents, but for example in the Opera browser you can choose your user agent. In Opera 5.x I actually believe that the default user agent is MSIE5.0.
I know it is still just a minority and then again - Opera 5.x has been downloaded more than 2 million times in the first month.
And no, I have no interests in Opera Software whatsoever.
Greetings Joergen
It will soon be legal to copy music digital in Denmark, it isn't right now. That also includes Minidisc.
:-(
Because if this, Copydan will begin to put about half a dollar on each blank media! They are also talking about CD-burners, etc.!
They say it is because the artists should be compensated, which I is kind of fair.
This is just not the right way to do it - it is the easy way. On blank cassette tapes it was alright because they couldn't be used for much else than music, but CD's is used for a lot else. How many CD's gets burned with free software, for backup - everything but music? A lot - why should the artists get money for that? It simply doesn't make sense
Greetings Joergen
As always, sneakemail becomes handy.
Sneakemail gives you the control over your email-address back - it lets you decide who gets to send you email. If somebody screws you (by sending spam, etc.), you just cancels that email-address.
Greetings Joergen
Instead of using a free Hotmail account, try out Sneakemail!
It's a cool and simple way to create disposable email-addresses and avoid spam.
Whenever you need to give away a working email-address, you just create a new sneakemail-address, which you use instead. All mail from these sneakemail addresses will be sent to your real email-address, but if you recieve spam on one of the sneakemail addresses - you'll know *where* the spammer got your address from!
Example: You give out an email-address to Amazon.com (and *only* to Amazon.com - you should only give out each sneakemail-address once!) and a few weeks later you recieve spam on that address. Because Amazon.com was the only peolpe aware of that email-address, you can be certain that it was them which either sent you spam, or has given your addres out to others!
If this doesn't make any sense to you, go read the tutorial on the sneakemail site - they are much better written.
Greetings Joergen
[Choice of desktop]
I know quite well that you can use Gnome apps in KDE and/or the other way around, but that's not my point - it's the same thing with Windows - I don't like to use win 3.x programs under win9x, it just doesn't "fit in".
[Object models] The part with Miguel De Icaza - I know quite well that the hee didn't invent that - he "learned" that when he visited MS and saw how IE were build of components.
I think this goes one step furhter than that - from what I understand, this makes it easy to embed all applications in KDE2 - be it Gnome apps or apps that doesn't use any desktop Environment.
It's cool because it gives us (the users) more choices. This will enable companies to create applications that easely embed into both KDE and Gnome. That is a big win, because if I were a company that was going to create or port a program to Linux - should I choose to support Gnome or KDE? I all for choice and there is a lot of good things comming out of having two competing desktops, but that is one of the huge problems with having 2 desktops as I see it.
Greetings Joergen
This is really cool! I've always had a hard time deciding what desktop I liked best, because half of the applications I wanted was Gnome apps and the other half was KDE apps - those times may well be gone now (if I were to choose to use KDE2).
Remember Miguel De Icaza recently talked about getting more "reuseablility/code-reuse" under Unix (I know that is badly written, but you know what I mean!) - well it seems that the KDE-Team was listening.
As it says (here: story at dot.kde.org):
This is only a first step. Other possibilities include providing transparent access to OpenOffice components within KOffice, and embedding other Bonobo components, such as the various Nautilus components, inside, say, Konqueror... The goal is to provide the most powerful desktop for users by allowing them to pick and choose whatever software they like while still in the familiar and comfortable KDE environment. KDE is close to closing the schism within the Linux desktop environments by being the first project to allow users to utilize all the software written for different user interfaces within the KDE environment with unparalleled integration.
Also, people writing standalone applications that do not utilize any desktop technology can easily integrate with our environment in ways previously impossible.
What is cool too, is the this comment:
"It is important to note, that we did not have to modify a single line of source code in KDE or konqueror to get this running."
Greetings Joergen
Well I've gotten a BSOD (and had to hard reset afterwards) without any reason. The day before I installed a new video driver for my Voodoo3 2000 card. It wasn't a beta driver, but a WHQL certified driver, so it should be quite heavily tested. Furthermore it was on a newly installed PC.
;-)
It shows that, even though MS states otherwise, they sacrificed stability over speed by letting the videocard drivers get "direct access" to the hardware instead of through the Hardware Abstraction Layer.
I've also experienced the system slowing down, because something was taking up all the ressources even though all my applications was closed. A reboot helped...
A funny thing is that if you try to install it on top af Win98, you get the message that "it doesn't recognize the OS" or something like that
Overall though, I find Win2k pretty stable as a workstation OS.
Greetings Joergen
3. Actually not patentable because there's prior art.
Just one simple question: How do you know?Do you have access to a database containing all prior art? No you have not - that's one of the main problems with software patents! You can't make a "complete" search for prior art, so how do you know that there isn't someone which created excatly that feature years ago, but for some reason didn't patent it?
You would have to go through most of what is published on the internet (and more), which you simply just can't.
When the patent office (at least in Denmark, but I believe it's the same practice elsewhere) is searching for prior art, they only search in *their own database*! Most prior art doesn't exist in their database - it is published on the internet and/or elsewhere.
Another problem is that patents is supposed to further innovation by publishing the invention, others should be able to benefit from it, but how often do you search in a patent database for information?
Are patents easy to read and understand? No, they most certainly are not - mostly, they are written i an obscure language, which only patent lawyers understand.
Ps. Sorry if some of this is not clearly written, english is NOT my primary language, and is just a quick comment. Take a look at one of my prior comments here . It contains references to other places for more info, and it is probably more clearly written...
Greetings Joergen
You can't do a search for prior art - you'll have to search the entire internet (and more). When searching for prior art, the Patent Office only uses their own database! At least that is what is the practice in Denmark.
Patent's are supposed to give other developers access to your inventions, but have you tried to read a patentdescription? Patents are written in a languange which "only" patent lawyers understand, therefore the average developer will not be able to benefit from the patent databases - they simply don't understand it.
Patents mostly don't benefit the small companies because the big companies often will have a many more patents, which you maybe are using without knowing it. Furthermore big companies has much more money and (probably) better lawyers I would also like to argue about whether a patent on "window display system" would have been good for innovation. What if the World Wide Web, the graphic click-able, interface of the Internet as we know it had been patented? im Berners-Lee who invented it, has said: "If the technology had been proprietary it would never have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary in order for it to become universal".
For further information, take a look at these links:
The EuroLinux File on Software Patents
Even though software patents mostly isn't possible in Europe, many softwarepatents exists anyway - take a look here and I bet you will be shaking your head: European Software Patent Horror Gallery
SSLUG (Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group) has written a good article here: Software patents - No thanks!
Freepatents.org
Greetings Joergen
Do you see the difference between these two organizations? KDE has, as far as I can tell, always focused on taking over as the one standard desktop. Why? Why are they so non-inclusive?
WRONG!They write "To establish KDE as A desktop standard for PCs, workstations...".
They don't write THE desktop standard.
If you don't believe me, please read the comment from Andreas Pour (Chairman, KDE League) where this article is posted.
Greetings Joergen
I have a friend who commented that application developemnt was more difficult and took longer in Linux than it did in Windows. Currently GNOME makes this much easier and KDE has a long way to go in bringing rapid-development technologies (in Windows: COM, DCOM, OLE, ActiveX) into their desktop. I think that if KDE is to be successful, it will need to come up with its own way of doing this.
This is simply not true!I'm absolutely no expert in either DE, but KDE2 has very powerful alternatives to COM. Take a look around on the KDE homepage. From what I have read it should be very easy to create components under KDE2. Furthermore Qt should be pretty easy to develop in and there is a nice IDE called KDevelop.
Also read the other comment (from an AC) to your post.
Greetings Joergen