I'm in a similar situation. I've been developing Album Shaper for the last two years and the project is really starting to take off. I have many users on all major platforms but donations through the SourceForge site have been pathetic thus far. It would be really neat if a set of grants or something were constructed specifically to foster development of Open Source software. Sigh. If you want to support me feel free to visit the Album Shaper web site and let me know.;-)
we're not talking about backwards compatability rather forwards compatability. backwards compatability is new versions of software can read files produced by older versions of the software. forwards compatability requires documents produced with newer versions can be read by older versions. I was under the impression (by my officemate while I workd for MS on office no less) that Office 97 was the first time MS decided to break forwards compatability, that is, documents produced by Office 97 and later could not be opened by Office 95 and before. THis pissed off a lot of people and they decided never to go down this road ever again (the office development team, I don't know about MS in general) but it's what I was referring to in my initial post.
maintaining forwards compatability is a PAIN a lot of times. it makes it hard to add new functionality without screwing those who do not upgrade. Open source developers arn't great about support forwards compatability though (I'm one of them) but with good reason. since open source sfotware is freely available users can *easily* and for free upgrade to newer versions. who doesn't want to be bleeding edge right?:)
Open Source doens't guarantee upward compatability? Puhlease! Neither does Microsoft with their proprietary office suite. Didn't Office 97 break compatability with older versions forcing companies to upgrade ALL machines in their workplaces at the same time? Talk about a horrible leg to stand on!
This is a very good point, but let's take it to the next level. If I witness a hit-and-run accident I may be able to write down the offending drivers license plate # and when the cops come nail the sucker. If we replace licence plates with RFID plates I can't do that unless I always carry my after market RFID scanner with me. Unless you have RFID sensors all over the place (expensive!) we're going to lose functionality we have with the current license plate systems. Furthermore, states will lose a lot of revenue from vanity plates. My bet is that if RFID technology starts being in such a manner it will be in combination with traditional license plates. Just my two cents.
I was looking into this other day. I have a Trackman Marble FX (best trackball ever, I love them) and it's an old PS2 piece of hardware. I'm looking to upgrade to a G5 if Rev B's ever come out, but they don't have PS2 ports. I found when googling around that even these snazzier adapters with circuitry cannot handle properly the additional buttons on some mice and keyboards (or in this case, probably my trakcball with all 5 buttons). Apparently the drivers for these devices play tricks to send non-standard codes and then map them to whatever you want. Logitech's drivers supplied a little utility to map any of the buttons on my trackball to standard things like pulling up the start menu, etc. Unfortunately when USB adapters see these strange codes they don't know what to do and just ignore them, aka the additional buttons for changing the volume using your keyboard or the 4th and 5th buttons on your mouse or trackball simply won't work any more. Does anybody know about this first hand? I'd REALLy like to use my Marble Man FX under OSX and be able to use all 5 buttons.
This is yet another reason why we need a replacement for XFree86 that is well thought out. I'm sure the original developers were like "Gee, why use Ctrl-C at all!" but as the author of this story mentions, how do you paste over other text? XFree86 needs to be booted. Instead of searching for a replacement, someone really needs to thik about all the problems and limitations XFree86 imposes on us and come up with an alternative that frees us from all this baggage.
Aqua isn't open source software, but Apple does contribute back to the free software world with it's patches to khtml and kjs through it's collobration with the KDE project for the development of their safari web browser. that's more than microsoft can claim.
Am I really getting so old that the majority of Slashdot readers were in diapers when Transmeta came out of the closet and hence need a "reminder" of what the Crusoe chipset is all about. How depressing.:(
You can't go Mars rover slow. According to this NYT article: "To win the $1 million, a vehicle must complete the desert course, expected to be as long as 200 miles, in less than 10 hours."
200 miles in 10 hours equals a min speed of 20 MPH. If they cut the couse to 150 miles it will still require a min speed of 15MPH.
Brilliant, do you also disable auto-updates and never update your system again? I find IE shortcuts keep poping up on my quick launch and start menu all the time after running windows update.
Burn on the Sun?
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Technically if you wait long enough your body will burn on the sun. It is common knowledge that the sun is slowly increasing in size and will eventually (all be it in a LONG time from now) envelope the Earth. If you cryogenically freeze yourself your body won't be destroyed until that day comes. Why pay the extra $ to make it happen now?:)
I'm supprised we still post this stuff. It's a never-ending saga. People find massive holes in IE. Microsoft ignores problems. People exploit problem. Microsoft, slowly, responds. Why does half of Slashdot's users still use Internet Exploiter? Get the monkey off your back, switch to Mozilla Firebird.:)
The reason for doing this isn't because time cards get damaged or to streamline the process. It's a fool-proof method for making sure people get paid for the hours they actually work. In the end it's more fair for everybody. I'd hate to be the honest guy reporting hte hours I actually work, while my coworker cheets and claims to work far more hours then he actually. Cheaters liket this cause wages/ravernue portions to be biased towards cheaters. This, IMHO, is a step in the right direction. The only better alternative is jobs which are salary and thus performance based, and not hourly-payed. -Will
Do you have a latitude l400? The hinges on this thing crack off like crazy. It's not hte hinges themselves but the ultra thin metal that they screw into. Interesting thing is I have been able to get Dell to replace first hte motherboard and then the entire chassis (as well as the power supply), but I got the latitude using my "small company":)
this article really hits home for me. I own a dell lattitude l400. the machine has several mechanical flaws and has broken several times while I have owned it over the last (almost) three years. the hinges broke and dell, after talking to them two bazillion times, fixed it by replacing the entire chasse of the machine. the power connector also goes back which results in the replacemnt of the entire power adaptor. this morning i noticed the gateway solo 3350 a friend of a friend had is almost identical to my machine but has a much higher quality power cord connector. any idea how I can find the origianl manufactur and buy one of those?
The 92/89/voyage 200 have one big step up over the 83/85/86: ti-gcc. I spent most of my free time (and class time) programming the 85 in basic and then assembly. (anybody out there remember mega racers?). I have to admit I am a bit jelous of high school kids today because if they buy an 89 then can learn c and make games using c instead of assembly. it is so much easier to make quality games in c then it was in assembly and it shows, great games come out for all three of those platforms every day with grayscale graphics, link support, leves, etc. I see all the things I wanted to accomplish on my 85 but was unable to because things took so much longer and were harder to debug. That is what these new calcs have over the older ones. ti-gcc. and the funny thing is, ti didn't provide it, the open source community did.:) -Will Stokes, creator of Mega Racers
I'd also add another sore point of the film, where Aragorn, Gandolf, Legoglas and Gimli face the leader of the army from mordor at the black gates. In the book there was a sequence where they are confronted with Frodo's clothes, and his mithril. For a split second I was totally convinced in the book that Gandolf was convinced that Frodo was dead, that there was no hope. In fact, he basically gives in, but he doesn't. IMHO this is one of Gandolf's best lines and was sorely missed in the movie. If there is ONE thing I want to see in the extended DVD it is this (and Wormtungue throwing that marble out of the tower at Isenguard).
upgrading to xhtml 1.1 will exclude IE slashdot users? Awesome, we should have done something like this years ago. We all know that if you're using IE you don't deserve to read Slashdot.:)
This won't work. To send letters in the mail is the cost of the material, the envelope, and obviously the stamp. The US postal service has continually upped the price of sending letters, yet I seem to get MORE of those 1024 free AOL hours CD's now than ever before, and they are getting bigger and heavier and cost more to send out. I doubt a tax on sending emails will have much of an effect on spam. Spam is already SO much cheaper than snail mail, and snail mail spam still happens. I would argue that even if we levied a 37 cent tax on every email that we still would have a large amount of spam. Besides, how the hell do you enforce such a policy? Especially when emails can be sent within a particular ISP from the spammer to users with no real way for the goverment to get in there and inforce such a payment plan. This just won't work.
Seriously though, my TI-85 is not collecting dust in a drawr. No, I don't do heavy computation on it, but I still use mine on a regular basis. Miss programming assembly games on it too.:(
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in a similar situation. I've been developing Album Shaper for the last two years and the project is really starting to take off. I have many users on all major platforms but donations through the SourceForge site have been pathetic thus far. It would be really neat if a set of grants or something were constructed specifically to foster development of Open Source software. Sigh. If you want to support me feel free to visit the Album Shaper web site and let me know. ;-)
we're not talking about backwards compatability rather forwards compatability. backwards compatability is new versions of software can read files produced by older versions of the software. forwards compatability requires documents produced with newer versions can be read by older versions. I was under the impression (by my officemate while I workd for MS on office no less) that Office 97 was the first time MS decided to break forwards compatability, that is, documents produced by Office 97 and later could not be opened by Office 95 and before. THis pissed off a lot of people and they decided never to go down this road ever again (the office development team, I don't know about MS in general) but it's what I was referring to in my initial post.
:)
maintaining forwards compatability is a PAIN a lot of times. it makes it hard to add new functionality without screwing those who do not upgrade. Open source developers arn't great about support forwards compatability though (I'm one of them) but with good reason. since open source sfotware is freely available users can *easily* and for free upgrade to newer versions. who doesn't want to be bleeding edge right?
Open Source doens't guarantee upward compatability? Puhlease! Neither does Microsoft with their proprietary office suite. Didn't Office 97 break compatability with older versions forcing companies to upgrade ALL machines in their workplaces at the same time? Talk about a horrible leg to stand on!
This is a very good point, but let's take it to the next level. If I witness a hit-and-run accident I may be able to write down the offending drivers license plate # and when the cops come nail the sucker. If we replace licence plates with RFID plates I can't do that unless I always carry my after market RFID scanner with me. Unless you have RFID sensors all over the place (expensive!) we're going to lose functionality we have with the current license plate systems. Furthermore, states will lose a lot of revenue from vanity plates. My bet is that if RFID technology starts being in such a manner it will be in combination with traditional license plates. Just my two cents.
I was looking into this other day. I have a Trackman Marble FX (best trackball ever, I love them) and it's an old PS2 piece of hardware. I'm looking to upgrade to a G5 if Rev B's ever come out, but they don't have PS2 ports. I found when googling around that even these snazzier adapters with circuitry cannot handle properly the additional buttons on some mice and keyboards (or in this case, probably my trakcball with all 5 buttons). Apparently the drivers for these devices play tricks to send non-standard codes and then map them to whatever you want. Logitech's drivers supplied a little utility to map any of the buttons on my trackball to standard things like pulling up the start menu, etc. Unfortunately when USB adapters see these strange codes they don't know what to do and just ignore them, aka the additional buttons for changing the volume using your keyboard or the 4th and 5th buttons on your mouse or trackball simply won't work any more. Does anybody know about this first hand? I'd REALLy like to use my Marble Man FX under OSX and be able to use all 5 buttons.
This is yet another reason why we need a replacement for XFree86 that is well thought out. I'm sure the original developers were like "Gee, why use Ctrl-C at all!" but as the author of this story mentions, how do you paste over other text? XFree86 needs to be booted. Instead of searching for a replacement, someone really needs to thik about all the problems and limitations XFree86 imposes on us and come up with an alternative that frees us from all this baggage.
Aqua isn't open source software, but Apple does contribute back to the free software world with it's patches to khtml and kjs through it's collobration with the KDE project for the development of their safari web browser. that's more than microsoft can claim.
Microsoft - ~50billion being spent this year ALONE
Am I really getting so old that the majority of Slashdot readers were in diapers when Transmeta came out of the closet and hence need a "reminder" of what the Crusoe chipset is all about. How depressing. :(
You can't go Mars rover slow. According to this NYT article:
"To win the $1 million, a vehicle must complete the desert course, expected to be as long as 200 miles, in less than 10 hours."
200 miles in 10 hours equals a min speed of 20 MPH. If they cut the couse to 150 miles it will still require a min speed of 15MPH.
Brilliant, do you also disable auto-updates and never update your system again? I find IE shortcuts keep poping up on my quick launch and start menu all the time after running windows update.
Technically if you wait long enough your body will burn on the sun. It is common knowledge that the sun is slowly increasing in size and will eventually (all be it in a LONG time from now) envelope the Earth. If you cryogenically freeze yourself your body won't be destroyed until that day comes. Why pay the extra $ to make it happen now? :)
I'm supprised we still post this stuff. It's a never-ending saga. People find massive holes in IE. Microsoft ignores problems. People exploit problem. Microsoft, slowly, responds. Why does half of Slashdot's users still use Internet Exploiter? Get the monkey off your back, switch to Mozilla Firebird. :)
>I wonder how these guys are going to get around >that?
You must not be from around here.:)
cmdrtaco now runs OS X. :)
The reason for doing this isn't because time cards get damaged or to streamline the process. It's a fool-proof method for making sure people get paid for the hours they actually work. In the end it's more fair for everybody. I'd hate to be the honest guy reporting hte hours I actually work, while my coworker cheets and claims to work far more hours then he actually. Cheaters liket this cause wages/ravernue portions to be biased towards cheaters. This, IMHO, is a step in the right direction. The only better alternative is jobs which are salary and thus performance based, and not hourly-payed.
-Will
Do you have a latitude l400? The hinges on this thing crack off like crazy. It's not hte hinges themselves but the ultra thin metal that they screw into. Interesting thing is I have been able to get Dell to replace first hte motherboard and then the entire chassis (as well as the power supply), but I got the latitude using my "small company" :)
this article really hits home for me. I own a dell lattitude l400. the machine has several mechanical flaws and has broken several times while I have owned it over the last (almost) three years. the hinges broke and dell, after talking to them two bazillion times, fixed it by replacing the entire chasse of the machine. the power connector also goes back which results in the replacemnt of the entire power adaptor. this morning i noticed the gateway solo 3350 a friend of a friend had is almost identical to my machine but has a much higher quality power cord connector. any idea how I can find the origianl manufactur and buy one of those?
The 92/89/voyage 200 have one big step up over the 83/85/86: ti-gcc. I spent most of my free time (and class time) programming the 85 in basic and then assembly. (anybody out there remember mega racers?). I have to admit I am a bit jelous of high school kids today because if they buy an 89 then can learn c and make games using c instead of assembly. it is so much easier to make quality games in c then it was in assembly and it shows, great games come out for all three of those platforms every day with grayscale graphics, link support, leves, etc. I see all the things I wanted to accomplish on my 85 but was unable to because things took so much longer and were harder to debug. That is what these new calcs have over the older ones. ti-gcc. and the funny thing is, ti didn't provide it, the open source community did. :)
-Will Stokes, creator of Mega Racers
I'd also add another sore point of the film, where Aragorn, Gandolf, Legoglas and Gimli face the leader of the army from mordor at the black gates. In the book there was a sequence where they are confronted with Frodo's clothes, and his mithril. For a split second I was totally convinced in the book that Gandolf was convinced that Frodo was dead, that there was no hope. In fact, he basically gives in, but he doesn't. IMHO this is one of Gandolf's best lines and was sorely missed in the movie. If there is ONE thing I want to see in the extended DVD it is this (and Wormtungue throwing that marble out of the tower at Isenguard).
various mirrors so you can actually download it can be found here:w nloadhe ro/11-1-1-66/
http://www.softpedia.com/public/scripts/do
upgrading to xhtml 1.1 will exclude IE slashdot users? Awesome, we should have done something like this years ago. We all know that if you're using IE you don't deserve to read Slashdot. :)
Obviously you have no clue how many AOL CD's I get every year.
This won't work. To send letters in the mail is the cost of the material, the envelope, and obviously the stamp. The US postal service has continually upped the price of sending letters, yet I seem to get MORE of those 1024 free AOL hours CD's now than ever before, and they are getting bigger and heavier and cost more to send out. I doubt a tax on sending emails will have much of an effect on spam. Spam is already SO much cheaper than snail mail, and snail mail spam still happens. I would argue that even if we levied a 37 cent tax on every email that we still would have a large amount of spam. Besides, how the hell do you enforce such a policy? Especially when emails can be sent within a particular ISP from the spammer to users with no real way for the goverment to get in there and inforce such a payment plan. This just won't work.
Seriously though, my TI-85 is not collecting dust in a drawr. No, I don't do heavy computation on it, but I still use mine on a regular basis. Miss programming assembly games on it too. :(