Some of us have been doing this for YEARS. At least now we have a buzzword for it.
There is already a buzzword: tag abuse. It's the last resort of the untalented.
This particular version is known as semantic imputation (giving things meanings they
don't inherently have). It's neither new, special, exciting, nor useful, but at least we now know
how little the people at IBM and Leverage Software know about markup and XML.
I guess I'd better add a warning to the XML FAQ about it...
Not so much whether SUSE is relevant, but WTF are they doing inventing Yet Another Package System?
I'm not saying apt-get or RPM/yum is flawless, but fer f'sake guys, don't reinvent another goddam
wheel...jump in the pool and help us improve the existing ones. Is the new packager just a piece
of conceit from the lard-asses in Marketing? Or does it have some real stand-alone merit?
> Do we, as consumers, have any recourse against these businesses?
Nope.
If you choose to live in a country where the government is pro-corporation instead of pro-people, you've got to accept that you're powerless. If you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen -- or do something about the chef:-)
> Due to slashdotting I was only able to see the Justin Berry bio, and it sure as hell does not belong in an encyclopedia.
So he's a [very] minor celeb, in that his name has been publicly bandied about for whatever he did.
IMHO this merits a 1-line locked entry, just for the record. WP isn't a discussion site, so a single sentence describing the facts would have been adequate.
Beats me why WP can't make this editorial policy...I mean it's not like the kid himself is in any way important or anything (as distince from the seriousness of the topic).
Lack of content and overreaching DRM. The selection of devices doesn't help either.
The devices seriously suck. The idiot publishers insist on using stupid proprietary formats instead of XML. None of which was helped by the original OpenEbook format being a kludge of HTML.
Windows is the desktop king because almost EVERY application will run on it
That's because they're written to. The missing factor from the Linux desktop is exactly what Bacon misses: he says people criticise it because it doesn't do all 500 of the things XP does.
That's bollocks. The reason the Linux desktop isn't ready is because neither KDE nor Gnome do the stuff end-users want out of the box -- not all 500, just the commonest everyday things, like
play music and movies properly (they gag on DVDs and won't play OGGs);
open all common file formats (pretty good on MS-Office formats, not so good on others);
pop up and autoconfigure wifi, bluetooth, or even IR;
send/receive faxes (assuming you have a modem);
handle webcams and configure audio properly;
Instead you get half a dozen audio players, none of which work properly. What we need to do is call Halt on all development until this lot is fixed so we can hand an install DVD to a newbie.
That's if we want Linux to go down this path. Many people don't subscribe to that view.
Rename the GIMP [...] If the Open Source programs had more recognizable names, they would have more traction.
Seconded.
But the people who write and name the programs aren't interested in traction, just in making it sound cutesy-pie for those on the inside track.
Even more than naming, if the good folks at GIMP would fix the damn program to behave sensibly, perhaps more people would use it. They finally did something (not a lot, but something) about the interface, but it still does stupid anal-retentive things like refusing to Save As...GIF (for example) until you manually make the image type Indexed. It's trying to teach image-handling, which is very laudable, but not at the expense of driving away users, who take one look, say "It's broken", and head for Photoshop or PSP. And so much of the daily-use functionality (eg cropping) is buried 3-4 menu levels deep while stuff you use once in a lifetime is up at the top.
I think what they've done is excellent, it just needs making usable.
-- The best cure for sea-sickness is to go and sit under a tree [Spike Milligan]
Not just the admin; if the installer is as badly-written as the one that installs the Small Scale Oracle that comes with Blackboard 6.1 Basic
(to date my only exposure to Oracle) then Oracle Corp has a long way to go.
It looks like it's been written by someone who has heard installation routines described, but never actually seen one.
And if it's not Oracle's fault but Blackboard's (unclear from the software which) then Oracle still need whipping for allowing a partner to do this to their product.
By lagging so badly behind with XML and UTF-8, MySQL risks losing territory to Oracle, who stitched up the corporate datacenters a decade ago. Cost and openness are not the factors here: the important ones are trust and scalability and someone to finger when it goes wrong.
OK, so we/.'d the site. But WTF is it on box running an operating system, made by one of the biggest offenders in the patent business?
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Too many connections
E:\WWWROOT\WWW.EV50.COM\HTML\POLL\../include/dbhea der.asp, line 9
Get a goldfish bowl (or regular fishtank) with a few goldfish. Cut some thin slivers of carrot the same size as goldfish. When kids call, you have a slice of carrot concealed in your hand, and you dunk your hand in the tank and bring it out with the slice of carrot flipping from side to side between your fingers. Rapidly put it in your mouth and eat it. Really freaks the kids:-)
If the water is clean and fresh, it probably won't poison you:-)
...XML is intended for rendering non-document structured data...
This is a common myth perpetuated by those who use it for such applications.
That's certainly one of its major uses, but the intention was to allow it to be used like SGML on the web -- for documents. It just happens to be usable for marking up structured data as well, but that's just a moderately convenient by-product -- it doesn't actually do it very well, but it does do it portably, robustly, and reprocessably, which no other open format offered.
A once well-known study at Stanford used a cohort of 1,000 students, half mathematicians, half engineers. The students were introduced one at a time into a small concrete bunker. Inside was a bare concrete room. In one corner was an old bucket of water and in the opposite corner was an old tin bowl. The task was to get the water from the bucket into the bowl.
First time round 100% of the students picked up the bucket and poured the water into the bowl.
Then they were fed into the room a second time. This time there was Wilton carpet on the floor, a window with a view across campus, Laura Ashlet wallpaper and drapes, a fine rosewood table with a linen tablecloth, and a Waterford Crystal pitcher of iced water on it. In the corner was the (empty) bucket, and in the other corner was the tin bowl. Same task: get the water into the bowl.
The 500 engineers picked up the pitcher of water and poured it into the bowl.
The mathematicians picked up the pitcher and poured the water into the bucket, thereby reducing the problem to the terms of Part I, and we already have a solution to Part I...
I think they did. I heard an interview on the BBC a few hours ago where one of the spokepersons was explaining how much stuff is often out on loan, touring as exhibitions.
It's bad, but as has been said, there's a lot worse shit going down elsewhere today.
Business owners have absolutely no interest in placing their crown jewels on someone else's server [...] even home users would think twice about putting their checkbooks or 401k histories on someone else's server.
Not if they don't even realise where the stuff is going. It's already hard enough to get users to understand what saving a web page or link to disk actually means, let alone get them to find the file afterwards when they don't know what a folder is. Business users are no smarter than home users in this regard. And they certainly are no smarter when it comes to the format in which they store the data, having picked.doc by default.
"Business owners with a clue have absolutely no interest..." perhaps. Just because someone runs a business doesn't mean they're any smarter than anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
There is already a buzzword: tag abuse. It's the last resort of the untalented.
This particular version is known as semantic imputation (giving things meanings they don't inherently have). It's neither new, special, exciting, nor useful, but at least we now know how little the people at IBM and Leverage Software know about markup and XML.
I guess I'd better add a warning to the XML FAQ about it...
WP for Linux was nearly as bad, and they never publicised it or supported it, so it's hardly surprising they got no revenue or even kudos from it.
No, because the crooks can just chop off your finger and use it.
Not so much whether SUSE is relevant, but WTF are they doing inventing Yet Another Package System? I'm not saying apt-get or RPM/yum is flawless, but fer f'sake guys, don't reinvent another goddam wheel...jump in the pool and help us improve the existing ones. Is the new packager just a piece of conceit from the lard-asses in Marketing? Or does it have some real stand-alone merit?
Nope.
If you choose to live in a country where the government is pro-corporation instead of pro-people, you've got to accept that you're powerless. If you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen -- or do something about the chef :-)
No, it's just like that blackbody monolith we found on the moon 5 years ago... (oops, sorry, no-one knows about that, do they :-)
So he's a [very] minor celeb, in that his name has been publicly bandied about for whatever he did.
IMHO this merits a 1-line locked entry, just for the record. WP isn't a discussion site, so a single sentence describing the facts would have been adequate.
Beats me why WP can't make this editorial policy...I mean it's not like the kid himself is in any way important or anything (as distince from the seriousness of the topic).
They should be.
The devices seriously suck. The idiot publishers insist on using stupid proprietary formats instead of XML. None of which was helped by the original OpenEbook format being a kludge of HTML.
Bugrit. I told 'em. Millenium hand and shrimp.
That's because they're written to. The missing factor from the Linux desktop is exactly what Bacon misses: he says people criticise it because it doesn't do all 500 of the things XP does.
That's bollocks. The reason the Linux desktop isn't ready is because neither KDE nor Gnome do the stuff end-users want out of the box -- not all 500, just the commonest everyday things, like
Instead you get half a dozen audio players, none of which work properly. What we need to do is call Halt on all development until this lot is fixed so we can hand an install DVD to a newbie.
That's if we want Linux to go down this path. Many people don't subscribe to that view.
Just one word: Emacs
Just one word: wikicalc
A day later? From 8.15pm to 9.05pm? That's not very long, is it?
Those of us who have been administering boxen since forever never left it in the first place.
That's precisely the point:
- they get found and publicised, instead of lying dormant while the company pretends they don't exist;
- they get fixed because the code is sitting there waiting to be fixed.
It's just a pity some of the usability problems of OpenSource software don't get fixed with the same speed.Seconded.
But the people who write and name the programs aren't interested in traction, just in making it sound cutesy-pie for those on the inside track.
Even more than naming, if the good folks at GIMP would fix the damn program to behave sensibly, perhaps more people would use it. They finally did something (not a lot, but something) about the interface, but it still does stupid anal-retentive things like refusing to Save As...GIF (for example) until you manually make the image type Indexed. It's trying to teach image-handling, which is very laudable, but not at the expense of driving away users, who take one look, say "It's broken", and head for Photoshop or PSP. And so much of the daily-use functionality (eg cropping) is buried 3-4 menu levels deep while stuff you use once in a lifetime is up at the top.
I think what they've done is excellent, it just needs making usable.
--
The best cure for sea-sickness is to go and sit under a tree [Spike Milligan]
It is not just images, but any type of complex file format.
For 'complex', read 'proprietary'.
It looks like it's been written by someone who has heard installation routines described, but never actually seen one.
And if it's not Oracle's fault but Blackboard's (unclear from the software which) then Oracle still need whipping for allowing a partner to do this to their product.
By lagging so badly behind with XML and UTF-8, MySQL risks losing territory to Oracle, who stitched up the corporate datacenters a decade ago. Cost and openness are not the factors here: the important ones are trust and scalability and someone to finger when it goes wrong.
MS-Linux, of course :-)
If the water is clean and fresh, it probably won't poison you :-)
This is a common myth perpetuated by those who use it for such applications.
That's certainly one of its major uses, but the intention was to allow it to be used like SGML on the web -- for documents. It just happens to be usable for marking up structured data as well, but that's just a moderately convenient by-product -- it doesn't actually do it very well, but it does do it portably, robustly, and reprocessably, which no other open format offered.
A once well-known study at Stanford used a cohort of 1,000 students, half mathematicians, half engineers. The students were introduced one at a time into a small concrete bunker. Inside was a bare concrete room. In one corner was an old bucket of water and in the opposite corner was an old tin bowl. The task was to get the water from the bucket into the bowl.
First time round 100% of the students picked up the bucket and poured the water into the bowl.
Then they were fed into the room a second time. This time there was Wilton carpet on the floor, a window with a view across campus, Laura Ashlet wallpaper and drapes, a fine rosewood table with a linen tablecloth, and a Waterford Crystal pitcher of iced water on it. In the corner was the (empty) bucket, and in the other corner was the tin bowl. Same task: get the water into the bowl.
The 500 engineers picked up the pitcher of water and poured it into the bowl.
The mathematicians picked up the pitcher and poured the water into the bucket, thereby reducing the problem to the terms of Part I, and we already have a solution to Part I...
It's bad, but as has been said, there's a lot worse shit going down elsewhere today.
Not if they don't even realise where the stuff is going. It's already hard enough to get users to understand what saving a web page or link to disk actually means, let alone get them to find the file afterwards when they don't know what a folder is. Business users are no smarter than home users in this regard. And they certainly are no smarter when it comes to the format in which they store the data, having picked .doc by default.
"Business owners with a clue have absolutely no interest..." perhaps. Just because someone runs a business doesn't mean they're any smarter than anyone else.