The web has dominated how systems present and use information: the model is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let's go back to having the data come to the user instead
I beg to differ here. We have that in place already. It's called spam.
This is my take (partly from KDE mailing lists and partly from reading various websites): when KDE project was started there was no good C++ based GUI toolkit in the Free Software world. KDE team and TrollTech were keen to get things going and didn't really care about the licensing issues to start with. It was just a bunch of people with good ideas and lots of enthusiasm. Then RMS and his herd (pun intended) spotted some licensing confilcts and the trolling to kill off the project began on KDE mailing lists (spearheaded by Mr. De Icaza himself). This is how GNOME was born. Neither the KDE team nor TrollTech see this as an issue and Trolltech keep on changing the license to satisfy the ever increasing demands of GPL zealots.
Since the FSF crowd (remember that Debian developers share their weed with RMS) are opposed to non-free software companies per se, there is not a chance in hell they'll ever give KDE the recognition it deserves. Not a rosy picture but that's the way I see it.
UMA saves you the time shuffling texture and poligon data between the graphics board's and the main memory. Hence for complex geometries + textures it's much faster than the pitful AGP. Take piss if you want, but the X-box will have better graphics than your PC.
I can't believe the comments here. MS is showing off a platform that's gonna make PSII look like a Commodore64 against Amiga and every single frigging comment is biased against it. I wonder what sort of response those screenshots would attract if say, Transmeta were behind X-box. Microsoft have always produced quality hardware and a lot of their software starts falling into place (eg. COM/DCOM advancements) and nobody here wants to admit it.
X-box is going to be brilliant. The idea to use commodity hardware is even better. Writing games that target both the Peecee and X-box should be a doddle. Probably the same source base will do and packaging will be the only difference. Expect to see A LOT of games companies interested in it. Besides when it comes to developers' support MS are more than generous. The online help is extensive and pretty cheap and unlike Linux api's it is consolidated in one place and thus very searchable (MSDN cds).
Finally schoolboys, X-box is not going to be a repackaged Peecee! Ever heard of UMA? I thought so. Well the UMA stands for Unified Memory Architecture and it is the same technology that gives such a kick to the graphics of boxes like O2 and Octane. So your bleeping 1.n GHz peecee still won't touch the graphics capabilities of an X-box.
Finally I hate Microsoft as much as everyone else here and I wish that X-box werent going to be a success especially that they screwed AMD with it. BUT let us admit it folks: X-BOX is likely to be a major success. After seeing where they've got with it I'd see the days of PSII as counted.
Absolutely. Don't even bother teaching them all the legacy crap. GET THEM GOING WITH CORBA FROM DAY ONE. Kids are smart these days. They'll be churning out IDL code in no time at all, compiling up those stubs and skeletons and populating the Interface repository. Don't teach them bad habits make sure they understand the crucial difference between implementation inheritance and interface inheritance. Kids are smart these days.
People get a clue! We're talking kids here. I read those suggestions and can't believe my eyes! Teaching an eight year old OO principles is a little overboard. They are children they still play with their toys and make engine noises running around on the playground pretending they are car drivers. Think about it. Have you learned programming by using smalltalk or Java or C++? No? Does that make you a bad OO programmer now?
Because of the data centric approach OO is great when you have a project that a procedural language cannot scale up to but it is by no means easy or 'natural'. Objects in OOP are rarely representations of real life objects. Creating good OO designs is challenging precisely because of that. Objects such as Factories or Builders or Bridges are not direct representations of real life things. They are far more abstract than the real life counterparts eg. a factory could be producing a series of 'Mementos' that store a particular configuration of a 'Bridge'. Anyone whose into OOP (and read the Gang of Four) will understand such a blab but not AN EIGHT YEAR OLD KID FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!
Logo was designed to teach kids (and complete newbies) about programming. Period. The guy who wrote it spent an awful lot of time researching teaching methodologies. Just because we now have spiffy technologies is no reason to throw away his experience out of the window.
In the case of GNOME/ORBit, our gnome-name-server plus the GOAD provide the equivalent of the Implementation Repository.
Can you use ORBit as a standalone ORB then without using GNOME? I'd like to be able to use POAS with persistent policies so I'll need a daemon that can activate the servants when a request arrives. Somehow poa has to find out how to start a servant. The most common approach is to have an implementation repository of sorts. If understand you right (I'm neither gnome nor corba expert) your repository is an integral part of GNOME.
Someone raised an issue here about ORBit's interoperability with other ORBs. Are there any problems in this arena?
BTW. It seems that OMG's Corba Component Model is cristalizing. I think they are arleady thrashing out final details. Are you planning to embrace this in Bonobo. Isnt' CCM actually going to make Bonobo a proprietary solution? Yes, I'm no components expert either;-).
Hmmm... Very puzzling. It sounds as if ORBit servers try to authenticate clients by default which isn't part of the standard AFAIK. To be honest I have no idea what they mean by that answer. Enigmatic indeed.
You could try and write a simple "hello" server and a client and use stringified IORs to see if they talk to each other. If it interoperates with say, MICO it's using standard IIOP (mico passed OMG's conformance tests). If it doesn't then it's crap and they shouldn't be calling it IIOP because ORBs are supposed ot interoperate on that level.
How the f**k is the parent post off-topic? He's obviously looking into writing Gnome component(s) in Java and wants to find out about interoperability issues. I'd say it's probably the most ON-TOPIC post so far. Just because it's way over your head doesn't mean it's not on topic. Frigging schoolboys moderating! Moderate it back up now.
I'm not sure what you mean by authentication. Authentication is not part of an ORB per se. I think the security service was designed to deal with this sort of stuff. But it shouldn't affect ORBit's interoperability even if their security service is different from the standard. As long as it uses standard IDL and IIOP as a protocol things should work. I think.
I too have more questions than answers about ORBit. If you just want to play with an ORB I recommend you look into MICO, TAO or omniORB. All three have lots of good stuff and are tested for interoperability with other ORBs. I'm sort of looking into ORBit because I might need C bindings fairly soon.
On this occasion I thought I'd ask someone knowledgeable what the current state of ORBit is. There is little to be found on RedHat's homepage. In particular are any of the following implemented:
Portable Object Adapter + all policies
Naming Service
Event Service
Objects by Value
Implementation Repository
Last time I saw a posting about Orbit on comp.object.corba it did not get a great review. Does anyone know if things have improved since? Only people having a clue need reply.
I'm a visionary. One day in the perfect world there will be no difference between an object running on a Windows or a Unix system or a Palm Pilot. Everything will be exposed via some sort of interface. But only provided MS don't dominate the world with DCOM.
If CORBA really takes off then we are quite far down that road. I want to do CORBA. The more CORBA stuff I do the more impressive the standard looks. Yes it's big, overwhelming almost. But when you actually get multiple objects talking on a heterogeneous network it really is something special. Building a complex infrastructure that links various hardware/software platforms is a joy to develop in CORBA. I think everyone should learn about objects and components. It will definitely prevail as the programming paradigm in the next few years.
CORBA programming has its inherent complexity but its complexity comes from the inherent complexity of the problem it addresses. A lot of people claim that CORBA is 'too complex'. It's only too complex if your problem is trivial. Then you are probably using wrong tool for the job.
CORBA is far from dead and its future is actually quite exciting. OMG has made real progress in the last couple of years and approved stuff that we've been waiting for for a while. The standard has improved a lot and now it is feasible to use CORBA without using Orbix;-):
New object adapter (POA) is much more versatile and powerful than BOA. It's a pity though that so much stuff was written without using POA
The interoperable naming service is a major step forward in terms of initial bootstrapping (goodbye stringified references)
Objects by value and Any simplify sending arbitrary data via IIOP
CORBA component model should fill the hole that KDE and GNOME guys discovered when they tried using CORBA as a component model. If this was completed several years ago, interoperability between GNOME and KDE wouldn't be an issue now.
My biggest gripe about CORBA is that it takes them so bleeping long to standardise anything (the components stuff should have been done years ago IMO). But it's better than nothing. It's certainly better than every vendor living in their own little world (examples anyone?). If you're into CORBA you should check out mico. It's GPL'd and has LOTS of features that even some commercial ORBs lack.
Yes, CmdrTaco trying to be politically correct for once.... I wonder if it was prompted by my initial flame.
If you don't like/. then go read news and rants elsewhere
Easier said than done actually. Not many forums are as populated as this one. So as far as propaganda goes this is the one that counts.
Besides when you say something like this it reminds me of MS. Of course we have a choice of OSes office suites web browsers etc. Nobody forces anyone to use windows or do they? My point is slashdot has become the de-facto forum for open source news and gossip and when they show such extreme bias they are hurting the KDE project.
Popularity and press coverage are paramount to the success of any open source project. It is also good for the users to learn that they have a choice and don't need to be tied to RedHat's desktop of preference.
KDE is SO windows like that you can really sit a secretary down at a Corel box and maybe get some work out of her.
No comment...
The best choice is having one.
Yes and lets keep it that way shall we? Might be difficult though if certain groups of influence in the Open Source community (eg. slashdot) decide to go full steam against that other desktop environment. Don't you think?
Listen, I did not say KDE was better or worse than GNOME (although I have my opinion on this matter) I just said it get's far less coverage here than it should.
It is really upsetting to see how slashdot favour GNOME over KDE. I'm really getting sick and tired of it. If we put up with it we will become victims of ruthless software marketing practices that MS are well known for.
We are back to the M$ situation where inferior software is shoved down our throats thanks to all the arseholes at slashdot and the like discriminating against KDE.
And don't tell me that open source will guarantee that the better product wins because it won't. Hardly any end user looks at the app's functionality and bug reports. They just download (or buy in case of commercial software) whatever everyone else uses. So in case of linux (if it ever makes any serious impact on the desktop) it will be RedHat and GNOME. And slashdot editors' attitude makes the situation even worse
On the positive note KDE2.0 beta is out. visit mosfet.org to read about it because you won't read about it on slashdot. Way to go KDE!
Is there anyone out there who's into extreme programming? I'm trying to convince my manager that this is the right approach for us but with little success.
I work for a small software house with just six developers on two main projects. What I see happening though is emergance of a structure that closely follows the XP guidelines. Our key developer left last month and left us with well over half a million lines of code to maintain and extend. Naturally the first outcome was an outbreak of panic (particularly among the management) but us programmers didn't have time for lamenting. What happened though is that once we lost our mastermind of coding and had to rely on ourselves even with the most critical parts of the system people started sharing knowledge much more freely and the environment became extremely productive. I found myself often pairing with other developers to help them understand some parts of the code and vice versa. It seems that with the old state of things (one developer churning out masses of code and the rest almost idle) while it felt comfortable it left many people fearing that they can't perform on their own (one of my colleagues wanted to resign straight away as soon as she learned that the guru is leaving).
The moral is that what pair programming prescribes turned out to be our life jacket and ultimately boosted the productivity of people who were previously intimidated by the presence of the 'main man'.
Personally I find coding in pairs a brilliant idea. I find myself producing much higher quality code when I have someone looking at what I'm typing. The bugs are fewer and more people know what's going on in the system. It works much better than peer reviews and documentation projects that we had foisted upon us by the management. It's not the official company policy but we do it anyway. For us XP works (or at least the parts we adopted).
Re:A Victory that isn't really worth much....
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
Now, when you buy a p3, do you have to buy IntelOS to go with it?
No, but every frigging time I get a new one I have to get a new motherboard. No prizes for guessing who is the main supplier of chipsets for Intel processors. AMD, Cyrix, NextGen could use socket seven for nine years without any impact on processors' performance while intel spent that time convincing us that slots were so superior just to tell us now that they are back to the socket technology. Liars!
Microsoft bundling IE was the equivalent (product tying to remove competition in a seperate portion of the market) according to Jackson's FoF.
Excuse me for being exteremly cynical here but I'd actually argue that IE dominates the market because it's simply a plain better product. Say what you like but ever since IE3 I (personally) preferred the look and feel of IE. I'm no Microsoft lover since I solely use Linux at home but the Netscrap product was so bad it was only natural that they dropped out of the rat race. Listen, Netscape Navigator sucks bad! That's one and only reason I'd rather use Internet Explorer. Free market is such a funny place where in the end people really choose what seems like the best offer for them.
How many different CPUs can you list off the top of your head?
X86 compatible? Intel and AMD and perhaps VIA. Don't tell me about the incompatible ones because x86 (like it or not) is the de-facto standard for desktop computing (at least here in Europe). Besides I don't know how much you know about the processor business but I can assure you that in this market sector economies of scale make the difference between make or break. Intel has a huge advantage here, and add their bully factor and a couple of bogus lawsuits and you have the biggest and baddest monopoly abuser out there.
Cisco seems pretty un-evil to me, but that's just imho.
Frankly I haven't heard about them getting a lot of critisism for (mis)using their market share advantage but clearly they are a monopoly and as such should come under much more scrutiny if the equivalent of the OS situation is to be avoided.
Re:A Victory that isn't really worth much....
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 2
Am I the only one here who thinks that maybe breaking up MicroSoft isn't such a major victory as it might once have been?
Nope. Count me in. There are many more much more "worthy" candidates:
Intel
AOL/Time-Warner
Cisco
All of those companies have effective monopolies and are MUCH MORE DANGEROUS than microsoft becasue the markets they operate in markets which have a much higher bareer to entry (e.g. how many of us can buy a microchip fab?).
But hey this is slashdot - bashing Microsoft earns you karma points, taking an objective look doesn't!
Anyhow I concur, MS is a monopoly but so is every other major high tech company
Police in Poland don't often stop you just for a check. In case of an accident you have to undergo a blood test to determine _exactly_ how much you've drunk if anything. Even if they do stop you just for a routine check they usually don't ask for a breath test unless they suspect you're drunk and if they determine you've been drinking and you disagree they're obliged to carry out a blood test which is supposed to be highly reliable.
I don't know whether this law has helped reduce the number of drunk driving offences but I'm sure it helped to secure a lot more convictions for those caught (at least you read more about them in the papers).
It's funny you mentioned this because it did come up before they introduced these new (stricter) laws. However the limit they set out takes into account those minimal amounts so you're okay unless you swallow your mouthwash and use copious amounts in the process. However, drinking a pint will yield a magnitude higher alcohol quantity so it's easy to tell which of the two took place before driving.
Well the Polish authorites answer that question with a surprising clarity. Any alcohol detectable in your blood (above the natural traces) bans you from driving. Thus having drunk half a pint you are not allowed to drive! And a drunk driving is regarded as a criminal offence rather than a driving offence. You think it doesn't make sense? Well it makes a lot of sense actually, because different people have different levels of alcohol tolerance. As you said, some will be relatively sober after quite a few rounds but there is a minority who will be out of their minds after three. So the only safe threshold that works across the whole society is ZERO! Trying to define "drunk" in the highway code just gives those morons a legal gateway to escape prosecution when they run over somebody. In this particular case I'd argue that that's the best law a country can have.
Only if BE team starts treating their OS more seriously. How long has it taken them to have support for hardware that is different from the one that they develop on? Finally, the up and coming Beos 5 will NOT offer accelerated OpenGL! I was keen to do some Beos work until they announced they wouldn't have accelerated OpenGL. Having no API to serve all those fast graphics boards in this day and age is a commercial suicide.
Beos 'lost the battle' before the first shot had been fired thanks to their shitty hardware support. Stop giving them free advertising space. Noone will take a second look at their OS until the company themselves get their act together on the drivers issue. I know it's hard with such a variety of devices out there but supporting at least three major brands (NVidia, Matrox, ATI) is the bare minimum. Or is that too much to ask for?
Given the hardware/software compatibility issues that all the OS's struggle with today, Amiga might succeed if they avoid it by selling a tightly integrated software/hardware package.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the FSF crowd (remember that Debian developers share their weed with RMS) are opposed to non-free software companies per se, there is not a chance in hell they'll ever give KDE the recognition it deserves. Not a rosy picture but that's the way I see it.
UMA saves you the time shuffling texture and poligon data between the graphics board's and the main memory. Hence for complex geometries + textures it's much faster than the pitful AGP. Take piss if you want, but the X-box will have better graphics than your PC.
X-box is going to be brilliant. The idea to use commodity hardware is even better. Writing games that target both the Peecee and X-box should be a doddle. Probably the same source base will do and packaging will be the only difference. Expect to see A LOT of games companies interested in it. Besides when it comes to developers' support MS are more than generous. The online help is extensive and pretty cheap and unlike Linux api's it is consolidated in one place and thus very searchable (MSDN cds).
Finally schoolboys, X-box is not going to be a repackaged Peecee! Ever heard of UMA? I thought so. Well the UMA stands for Unified Memory Architecture and it is the same technology that gives such a kick to the graphics of boxes like O2 and Octane. So your bleeping 1.n GHz peecee still won't touch the graphics capabilities of an X-box.
Finally I hate Microsoft as much as everyone else here and I wish that X-box werent going to be a success especially that they screwed AMD with it. BUT let us admit it folks: X-BOX is likely to be a major success. After seeing where they've got with it I'd see the days of PSII as counted.
Absolutely. Don't even bother teaching them all the legacy crap. GET THEM GOING WITH CORBA FROM DAY ONE. Kids are smart these days. They'll be churning out IDL code in no time at all, compiling up those stubs and skeletons and populating the Interface repository. Don't teach them bad habits make sure they understand the crucial difference between implementation inheritance and interface inheritance. Kids are smart these days.
People get a clue! We're talking kids here. I read those suggestions and can't believe my eyes! Teaching an eight year old OO principles is a little overboard. They are children they still play with their toys and make engine noises running around on the playground pretending they are car drivers. Think about it. Have you learned programming by using smalltalk or Java or C++? No? Does that make you a bad OO programmer now?
Because of the data centric approach OO is great when you have a project that a procedural language cannot scale up to but it is by no means easy or 'natural'.
Objects in OOP are rarely representations of real life objects. Creating good OO designs is challenging precisely because of that. Objects such as Factories or Builders or Bridges are not direct representations of real life things. They are far more abstract than the real life counterparts eg. a factory could be producing a series of 'Mementos' that store a particular configuration of a 'Bridge'. Anyone whose into OOP (and read the Gang of Four) will understand such a blab but not AN EIGHT YEAR OLD KID FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!
Logo was designed to teach kids (and complete newbies) about programming. Period. The guy who wrote it spent an awful lot of time researching teaching methodologies. Just because we now have spiffy technologies is no reason to throw away his experience out of the window.
Someone raised an issue here about ORBit's interoperability with other ORBs. Are there any problems in this arena?
BTW. It seems that OMG's Corba Component Model is cristalizing. I think they are arleady thrashing out final details. Are you planning to embrace this in Bonobo. Isnt' CCM actually going to make Bonobo a proprietary solution? Yes, I'm no components expert either ;-).
You could try and write a simple "hello" server and a client and use stringified IORs to see if they talk to each other. If it interoperates with say, MICO it's using standard IIOP (mico passed OMG's conformance tests). If it doesn't then it's crap and they shouldn't be calling it IIOP because ORBs are supposed ot interoperate on that level.
Even without Java bindings he should be able to use another ORB (such as JacORB) and interoperate with ORBit. After all that's what CORBA's all about.
How the f**k is the parent post off-topic? He's obviously looking into writing Gnome component(s) in Java and wants to find out about interoperability issues. I'd say it's probably the most ON-TOPIC post so far. Just because it's way over your head doesn't mean it's not on topic. Frigging schoolboys moderating! Moderate it back up now.
I too have more questions than answers about ORBit. If you just want to play with an ORB I recommend you look into MICO, TAO or omniORB. All three have lots of good stuff and are tested for interoperability with other ORBs. I'm sort of looking into ORBit because I might need C bindings fairly soon.
- Portable Object Adapter + all policies
- Naming Service
- Event Service
- Objects by Value
- Implementation Repository
Last time I saw a posting about Orbit on comp.object.corba it did not get a great review. Does anyone know if things have improved since? Only people having a clue need reply.If CORBA really takes off then we are quite far down that road. I want to do CORBA. The more CORBA stuff I do the more impressive the standard looks. Yes it's big, overwhelming almost. But when you actually get multiple objects talking on a heterogeneous network it really is something special. Building a complex infrastructure that links various hardware/software platforms is a joy to develop in CORBA. I think everyone should learn about objects and components. It will definitely prevail as the programming paradigm in the next few years.
CORBA programming has its inherent complexity but its complexity comes from the inherent complexity of the problem it addresses. A lot of people claim that CORBA is 'too complex'. It's only too complex if your problem is trivial. Then you are probably using wrong tool for the job.
CORBA is far from dead and its future is actually quite exciting. OMG has made real progress in the last couple of years and approved stuff that we've been waiting for for a while. The standard has improved a lot and now it is feasible to use CORBA without using Orbix ;-):
- New object adapter (POA) is much more versatile and powerful than BOA. It's a pity though that so much stuff was written without using POA
- The interoperable naming service is a major step forward in terms of initial bootstrapping (goodbye stringified references)
- Objects by value and Any simplify sending arbitrary data via IIOP
- CORBA component model should fill the hole that KDE and GNOME guys discovered when they tried using CORBA as a component model. If this was completed several years ago, interoperability between GNOME and KDE wouldn't be an issue now.
My biggest gripe about CORBA is that it takes them so bleeping long to standardise anything (the components stuff should have been done years ago IMO). But it's better than nothing. It's certainly better than every vendor living in their own little world (examples anyone?). If you're into CORBA you should check out mico. It's GPL'd and has LOTS of features that even some commercial ORBs lack.- PIII 700MHz
- 128MB
- 20GB UltraATA
- 64MB DDR Nvidia GeForce
- 19" Monitor (M990)
- other less significant bits
and it all adds up to $1908 which is still almost $900 cheaper than the SGI and I assume that the SGI one doesn't come with a monitor.Yes, CmdrTaco trying to be politically correct for once.... I wonder if it was prompted by my initial flame.
If you don't like /. then go read news and rants elsewhere
Easier said than done actually. Not many forums are as populated as this one. So as far as propaganda goes this is the one that counts.
Besides when you say something like this it reminds me of MS. Of course we have a choice of OSes office suites web browsers etc. Nobody forces anyone to use windows or do they? My point is slashdot has become the de-facto forum for open source news and gossip and when they show such extreme bias they are hurting the KDE project.
Popularity and press coverage are paramount to the success of any open source project. It is also good for the users to learn that they have a choice and don't need to be tied to RedHat's desktop of preference.
KDE is SO windows like that you can really sit a secretary down at a Corel box and maybe get some work out of her.
No comment...
The best choice is having one.
Yes and lets keep it that way shall we? Might be difficult though if certain groups of influence in the Open Source community (eg. slashdot) decide to go full steam against that other desktop environment. Don't you think?
Listen, I did not say KDE was better or worse than GNOME (although I have my opinion on this matter) I just said it get's far less coverage here than it should.
We are back to the M$ situation where inferior software is shoved down our throats thanks to all the arseholes at slashdot and the like discriminating against KDE.
And don't tell me that open source will guarantee that the better product wins because it won't. Hardly any end user looks at the app's functionality and bug reports. They just download (or buy in case of commercial software) whatever everyone else uses. So in case of linux (if it ever makes any serious impact on the desktop) it will be RedHat and GNOME. And slashdot editors' attitude makes the situation even worse
On the positive note KDE2.0 beta is out. visit mosfet.org to read about it because you won't read about it on slashdot. Way to go KDE!
Thank you for your time.
If it's a separate process it will be dog slow to use or have you got an equivalent of an in-proc server in Bonobo? Just curious.
Is it free? If so can you post the URL to the website? I'd love to try it out and maybe help with the development.
I'm trying to convince my manager that this is the right approach for us but with little success.
I work for a small software house with just six developers on two main projects. What I see happening though is emergance of a structure that closely follows the XP guidelines. Our key developer left last month and left us with well over half a million lines of code to maintain and extend.
Naturally the first outcome was an outbreak of panic (particularly among the management) but us programmers didn't have time for lamenting. What happened though is that once we lost our mastermind of coding and had to rely on ourselves even with the most critical parts of the system people started sharing knowledge much more freely and the environment became extremely productive. I found myself often pairing with other developers to help them understand some parts of the code and vice versa.
It seems that with the old state of things (one developer churning out masses of code and the rest almost idle) while it felt comfortable it left many people fearing that they can't perform on their own (one of my colleagues wanted to resign straight away as soon as she learned that the guru is leaving).
The moral is that what pair programming prescribes turned out to be our life jacket and ultimately boosted the productivity of people who were previously intimidated by the presence of the 'main man'.
Personally I find coding in pairs a brilliant idea. I find myself producing much higher quality code when I have someone looking at what I'm typing. The bugs are fewer and more people know what's going on in the system. It works much better than peer reviews and documentation projects that we had foisted upon us by the management. It's not the official company policy but we do it anyway. For us XP works (or at least the parts we adopted).
Kul
- Intel
- AOL/Time-Warner
- Cisco
All of those companies have effective monopolies and are MUCH MORE DANGEROUS than microsoft becasue the markets they operate in markets which have a much higher bareer to entry (e.g. how many of us can buy a microchip fab?).But hey this is slashdot - bashing Microsoft earns you karma points, taking an objective look doesn't!
Anyhow I concur, MS is a monopoly but so is every other major high tech company
I don't know whether this law has helped reduce the number of drunk driving offences but I'm sure it helped to secure a lot more convictions for those caught (at least you read more about them in the papers).
It's funny you mentioned this because it did come up before they introduced these new (stricter) laws. However the limit they set out takes into account those minimal amounts so you're okay unless you swallow your mouthwash and use copious amounts in the process. However, drinking a pint will yield a magnitude higher alcohol quantity so it's easy to tell which of the two took place before driving.
Well the Polish authorites answer that question with a surprising clarity. Any alcohol detectable in your blood (above the natural traces) bans you from driving. Thus having drunk half a pint you are not allowed to drive! And a drunk driving is regarded as a criminal offence rather than a driving offence.
You think it doesn't make sense? Well it makes a lot of sense actually, because different people have different levels of alcohol tolerance. As you said, some will be relatively sober after quite a few rounds but there is a minority who will be out of their minds after three. So the only safe threshold that works across the whole society is ZERO! Trying to define "drunk" in the highway code just gives those morons a legal gateway to escape prosecution when they run over somebody. In this particular case I'd argue that that's the best law a country can have.
Beos 'lost the battle' before the first shot had been fired thanks to their shitty hardware support. Stop giving them free advertising space. Noone will take a second look at their OS until the company themselves get their act together on the drivers issue. I know it's hard with such a variety of devices out there but supporting at least three major brands (NVidia, Matrox, ATI) is the bare minimum. Or is that too much to ask for?
Given the hardware/software compatibility issues that all the OS's struggle with today, Amiga might succeed if they avoid it by selling a tightly integrated software/hardware package.