This should be a lesson to VC funds and financing operations...
Why should they care? VCs expect to lose about 85% of everything they invest -- that's the level of risk they take. They make so much back on the other 15% that it's worth it to them.
This is why they're not really bothered about due diligence, and why they aren't interested in ways of reducing that 85% -- it's chickenfeed compared to the profits on the other 15%.
Promises of sponsorship from corporations should be treated as theory, not fact. The only thing that matters is the cash or the credit in your bank account: even a certified check isn't worth a wet fart until it's lodged and cleared.
Corporations are inherently risky to deal with: after all, the reason they incorporated in the first place was to shelter behind the protection of the joint stock limited liability company where their identity can be anonymous and their liability limited.
The problem is that the people running distros naturally want to show off the latest, greatest version of everything, especially libraries, no matter how flaky or untested, when they really should be concentrating on fixing the bugs first.
It's a hard pill to swallow when you're a developer: you want to get your shiniest version out there. But these people have yet to learn the hard way some of the rules of successful software development:
don't break something that currently works;
don't replace a working feature or application with an untested one;
don't make software that runs only on the latest hardware, unless doing so is a specific target;
do fix bugs first, and worry about everything else afterwards.
danrees is quite right to say no distro has it perfect. RH used to be very good, but 8/9/FC have run away with the idea that they have to have the latest and flashiest everything, regardless of whether it works or not.
All the current users want is the equivalent of RH9 with the bugs fixed. That may be asking a lot in some cases, especially 3d party packages like The Ghastly Mess Formerly Known As Perl, which (in the distro-supplied version) crashes and burns apps using the UTF-8 locale, or the braindead networking behavior in KDE's desktop.
Unless the bugs get fixed before work starts on a new release, we're going to lose some potentially important adherents. C'mon guys, if you can't test it because you don't have the hardware, take it out and don't use it.
Which is why I now open up an XML file and put the text right in there. It gets served by Cocoon using XSLT so no-one is any the wiser. And I wrote it all myself, and it's GPL'd.
Neither of them was able to handle my mainstream AGP card in the mode I prefer, and neither even showed that such a mode existed.
The original author of the magazine article and -- surprisingly -- all the comments I've seen to date appear to be unaware of the reason for this.
The soundcard manufacturers make sound cards to work under Windows. They cooperate with Microsoft to have drivers written, and their contract precludes (and, I am told, in some cases explicitly forbids) the writing of drivers for Linux, and the publication of driver details to those who would otherwise do the job (ie us, the dev community).
It took Alan Cox all of 25 seconds to explain this to me in the pub a few years ago (unless I have misunderstood it all). Why does no-one else seem to be aware of it?
Let me put it more bluntly: the hardware manufacturers don't give a tinker's shit about Linux, which has 1% of the market. They do give very many tinkers' shits about Windows, which has 90-whatever % of the market (they seem to be lukewarm about Apple). It's not about linux "failing" to support these cards -- it's about Linux simply not being important enough (yet) to warrant their attention.
>I can't recall a case in which Microsoft had viable products and decent sales and exited instead of spending more money to compete more effectively. Or even when they had non-viable products (Pocket PC's original OS) and spent years and billions before they had something that worked.
SGML Author for Word. I mentioned this recently. Worked brilliantly, never publicized, never even acknowledged they made it (too embarrassed perhaps).
Then just as the world started to go for XML in a big way and screamingly needed converters...they dropped it on the floor.
> A lot of people today cannot migrate to Linux or cannot migrate to Mozilla because a lot of their internal Web sites happen to use IE extensions
Well whoop-de-doo. Their problem. They were warned, and if they chose to ignore the warnings, they'll have to dig themselves out of it, or pay someone with a clue to do it for them. There are enough clueless designers around to keep consultants in business until Stardate 4096.
> Now imagine a world where you can only use XAML
Oh good grief. Get a life. It's just XML. It's not rocket science (or if it is, I know several unemployed rocket scientists who can help). Yes it's big. So is DocBook. Yes it's badly designed: the inclusion of executable code in a different syntax is a silly mistake, and only someone who has never used ISO 8879 before would allow Mixed Content in top-level element types. Unfortunately there are people like this at Microsoft, as well as plenty of people who do have a serious clue...but with a marketing-driven organisation, the marketing droids will always win, and if they want it that way, that's the way they'll get it.
It'll be a pig to write, a pig to maintain, a pig to understand, a pig to document, and a hog on resources, but that isn't really anything new. If it's XML, I can always open it and reprocess it using standard tools. Bill Gates (or his successors) will come to rue the day he bet the farm on XML.
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. --Spike Milligan
Claimer: yes, I do run the XML FAQ. No, my opinions are not those of the University I work for.
I don't have a problem with them indexing my mail if I keep that account for innocuous stuff. If it really does do threading properly then it would work fine...but their FAQ doesn't say if you get the thread context properly when you retrieve one of the replies or later posts in a thread: it only talks about "the email" and its replies. [Google Guys...if you scan this, please fix the FAQ, it was the immediate question sprang to mind.]
But to answer what they'll do with it: there are context-sensitive analytical systems available nowadays which can summarise bulk text on a subject and produce an abstract without using any of the phrases employed in the original text (words, yes; phrases, no). A search system which would return synthesised discussion on a topic would be potentially a killer app, provided there was some indicator of the reliability of the sources, such as "all posters were members of the ABC committee of XYZ". The problem to date has been getting a big enough and varied enough textbase to work from.
But I wouldn't recommend using it for your pr0n0gr4fic discussions with online frendz unless you want to appear as the star of an Orwellian Prole-style smut novella.
Using Wine was the stupidest choice they could make, and it made WP9 unusable. Wine is brilliant, but at the time it simply wasn't ready for this kid of app.
WP8 for Linux was an excellent move, and most of it worked. The problem was that it was clearly done by a team with minimal Unix experience, particularly in the installation and interface areas (I've never understood why, when the console Unix version -- and WP3-4/DOS -- were good products; they just seemed to go to pieces when they started to work on the GUI version).
Corel's attitude to WP for Linux unfortunately shows how little the marketing suits understood the technology. At a time when the Linux Web server world was just beginning to get interested in XML, Corel pulled the only wordprocessor product on the market which could have had a real, fully-fledged built-in XML editor (like WP for Widnows has had for years). At a time when Word users were beginning to get seriously pissed-off at the bugs and the bloat, Corel pulled the only program that offered serious competition for those moving to Linux.
WP is much better at processing words than Microsoft Word or Star/Open Office, and most importantly, it opens Word documents without screwing them up. Last time I used it (v10 for Widnows, some months ago) everything worked perfectly first time, and I remember wishing they hadn't ditched the Linux version.
It had everything going for it, so they pulled it. If they're revisiting the area, Corel really, really need to talk to some real potential users, not friends-of-friends or marketing droids or lightweight air-brain office users. They have an opportunity here to tackle what they used to be best at: the professional text-handling market, which means heavy-duty publishing apps, Word import and export, XML, and compatibility with DTP systems. These users prefer robust and fully-functional interaction over sparkly eye-candy interfaces.
Most people I know do this, but mostly packages using a reliable package-installer, because someone else has gone to the trouble of figuring out the dependencies. 99% of the time this works.
But occasionally you get one where someone has made dipshit assumptions about your platform, or has selfishly compiled it with a library way ahead of what people have installed, or made it KDE-only or Gnome-only.
That's what most people use source for. I doubt your professor appreciates what you do, but I hope you never need support on what you've installed, if it's as far out as most install-from-source systems I've seen.
There is a big danger in using CSS to replace tables.
If the data is not truly tabular (ie the use of tables is simply to align material that is more conveniently presented side-by-side than vertically), then using CSS instead does not damage the meaning.
But where data consists of tightly-bound items whose presentation needs to be inherently tabular, using CSS instead of tables is a poor choice (use it as well as tables, by all means, but not as a replacement).
If the file is going to be used as a point of reference, then much more attention needs to be paid to the markup, so XHTML with CSS decoration would be a better choice: the presence or location of a table can then be tested programmatically (eg with XPath), which is virtually impossible using the HTML+CSS route.
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. -- Spike Milligan
You can work out how much of that goes to the government if you want to, but that's hardly a major concern when you make a purchase.
If you're wealthy, perhaps not. If you don't have a lot of extra spondulicks, shopping abroad where stuff is cheaper makes a lot of sense.
Look on it as a public contribution to ensuring our country is run reasonably well and that it looks after its people.
After a fashion. VAT revenue goes to pay the fatcats in Brussels, not the state government. Here (Ireland) we look on it as an insurance policy against malfeasance by our own government. Every country needs a higher authority who can tell the government to put away the knife and wipe their shoes when they come in. The problem is that Brussels has lost the plot over most issues (Microsoft excepted:-)
How could they tell by a cursory examination whether you had this with you when you left home?
Because legally, it's your responsibility to be able to prove where you bought it, not theirs.
If you bring expensive kit abroad, always bring a copy of the invoice or receipt just in case. It's very rare to be called on this, but if it does happen you sure as hell don't want the stuff impounded or destroyed or taxed.
Find someone with an address in Ireland and order it from Dell there (their factory is in Shannon). That way you get to pay in EUR, probably not as cheap as in USD but still much cheaper than GBP. You could even get a GBP 9 Ryanair flight over to pick it up, and as it's all EU territory there's no customs problem.
...how is pissing consumers off by limiting their rights going to encourage them to buy more CDs?
Because the recording industry execs and marketing droids are a shower of arrogant little dickheads with absolutely no clue of what the consumer wants.
If the Kiwis can get this so right, WTF can't the Oz govmnt? Who bought them out, and for how much?
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. [Spike Milligan]
...picking up the fact that a lot of people believe a term is associated with a particular page
Then the algorithm is incorrect and should not be used. Just because "people believe" something is right doesn't make it right.
...reflecting the terms people use to refer to a particular page
Searches which follow this path will be too wide (which is why you get so much rubbish off searches these days).
Example: If people use the term "web sight" to mean "web site", they are simply wrong. The search should be rejected with an error message (not accepted with a query like Google currently does) and a "[sic]" button for experts meaning "Yes I know this looks silly but I really do mean it". A search engine which allows the conflation may be politically correct and tolerant, and probably makes the marketing droids happy, but ultimately this level of foolishness will backfire and the whole thing will become unusable.
Google needs to fix this kind of error before Microsoft fires up their own search service. If they don't, I guarantee Google will be dead meat before the end of the year.
could USDTV keep prices low and still support local content since they have no cable network to maintain, and no satellites to launch?
The could but they won't. At $99.95 (which is not 'low') for a box costing $2.50 to build and $15 to supply they're onto a moneyspinner.
How many more goddessdamn set-top boxes am I expected to buy? There's a whole frickin' stack of them! I want one set-top box, preferably not a box at all but built into my TV, using a standardized protocol, which any supplier can unlock at will for the services I buy -- which will be rare, given that I have 500 channels or something right now, and there's sod all on worth watching.
This particular story isn't really about P2P or its legality or its suppression.
It's about the deceit of a state official putting out a document written by a corporate interest with an axe to grind. Clearly they think it's OK for them to lie about the provenance of a document.
It's also about a lot of other things, of course, including the technical illiteracy of senior officials who nevertheless purport to take an authoritative stance on the use of technology.
Remember that when you go to the poll next election.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should they care? VCs expect to lose about 85% of everything they invest -- that's the level of risk they take. They make so much back on the other 15% that it's worth it to them.
This is why they're not really bothered about due diligence, and why they aren't interested in ways of reducing that 85% -- it's chickenfeed compared to the profits on the other 15%.
Yes, that's "Banker" spelled with a "W"...
Corporations are inherently risky to deal with: after all, the reason they incorporated in the first place was to shelter behind the protection of the joint stock limited liability company where their identity can be anonymous and their liability limited.
It's a hard pill to swallow when you're a developer: you want to get your shiniest version out there. But these people have yet to learn the hard way some of the rules of successful software development:
- don't break something that currently works;
- don't replace a working feature or application with an untested one;
- don't make software that runs only on the latest hardware, unless doing so is a specific target;
- do fix bugs first, and worry about everything else afterwards.
danrees is quite right to say no distro has it perfect. RH used to be very good, but 8/9/FC have run away with the idea that they have to have the latest and flashiest everything, regardless of whether it works or not.All the current users want is the equivalent of RH9 with the bugs fixed. That may be asking a lot in some cases, especially 3d party packages like The Ghastly Mess Formerly Known As Perl, which (in the distro-supplied version) crashes and burns apps using the UTF-8 locale, or the braindead networking behavior in KDE's desktop.
Unless the bugs get fixed before work starts on a new release, we're going to lose some potentially important adherents. C'mon guys, if you can't test it because you don't have the hardware, take it out and don't use it.
Which is why I now open up an XML file and put the text right in there. It gets served by Cocoon using XSLT so no-one is any the wiser. And I wrote it all myself, and it's GPL'd.
US "gourmet" coffee = normal coffee in the rest of the world.
US "regular" (aka "brewed") coffee = undrinkable bat's piss.
Of course it has more caffeine, that's what it's for...
So WTF are the SBC and CWA? Like we should care about this?
The original author of the magazine article and -- surprisingly -- all the comments I've seen to date appear to be unaware of the reason for this.
The soundcard manufacturers make sound cards to work under Windows. They cooperate with Microsoft to have drivers written, and their contract precludes (and, I am told, in some cases explicitly forbids) the writing of drivers for Linux, and the publication of driver details to those who would otherwise do the job (ie us, the dev community).
It took Alan Cox all of 25 seconds to explain this to me in the pub a few years ago (unless I have misunderstood it all). Why does no-one else seem to be aware of it?
Let me put it more bluntly: the hardware manufacturers don't give a tinker's shit about Linux, which has 1% of the market. They do give very many tinkers' shits about Windows, which has 90-whatever % of the market (they seem to be lukewarm about Apple). It's not about linux "failing" to support these cards -- it's about Linux simply not being important enough (yet) to warrant their attention.
SGML Author for Word. I mentioned this recently. Worked brilliantly, never publicized, never even acknowledged they made it (too embarrassed perhaps).
Then just as the world started to go for XML in a big way and screamingly needed converters...they dropped it on the floor.
This reminds me of the famous finding of a UK tribunal that "the Minister had misdirected himself".
Whatever. But they'll need a new TLD for Atlantis if it becomes habitable. Suggestions?
Well whoop-de-doo. Their problem. They were warned, and if they chose to ignore the warnings, they'll have to dig themselves out of it, or pay someone with a clue to do it for them. There are enough clueless designers around to keep consultants in business until Stardate 4096.
> Now imagine a world where you can only use XAML
Oh good grief. Get a life. It's just XML. It's not rocket science (or if it is, I know several unemployed rocket scientists who can help). Yes it's big. So is DocBook. Yes it's badly designed: the inclusion of executable code in a different syntax is a silly mistake, and only someone who has never used ISO 8879 before would allow Mixed Content in top-level element types. Unfortunately there are people like this at Microsoft, as well as plenty of people who do have a serious clue...but with a marketing-driven organisation, the marketing droids will always win, and if they want it that way, that's the way they'll get it.
It'll be a pig to write, a pig to maintain, a pig to understand, a pig to document, and a hog on resources, but that isn't really anything new. If it's XML, I can always open it and reprocess it using standard tools. Bill Gates (or his successors) will come to rue the day he bet the farm on XML.
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. --Spike Milligan
Claimer: yes, I do run the XML FAQ. No, my opinions are not those of the University I work for.
But to answer what they'll do with it: there are context-sensitive analytical systems available nowadays which can summarise bulk text on a subject and produce an abstract without using any of the phrases employed in the original text (words, yes; phrases, no). A search system which would return synthesised discussion on a topic would be potentially a killer app, provided there was some indicator of the reliability of the sources, such as "all posters were members of the ABC committee of XYZ". The problem to date has been getting a big enough and varied enough textbase to work from.
But I wouldn't recommend using it for your pr0n0gr4fic discussions with online frendz unless you want to appear as the star of an Orwellian Prole-style smut novella.
WP8 for Linux was an excellent move, and most of it worked. The problem was that it was clearly done by a team with minimal Unix experience, particularly in the installation and interface areas (I've never understood why, when the console Unix version -- and WP3-4/DOS -- were good products; they just seemed to go to pieces when they started to work on the GUI version).
Corel's attitude to WP for Linux unfortunately shows how little the marketing suits understood the technology. At a time when the Linux Web server world was just beginning to get interested in XML, Corel pulled the only wordprocessor product on the market which could have had a real, fully-fledged built-in XML editor (like WP for Widnows has had for years). At a time when Word users were beginning to get seriously pissed-off at the bugs and the bloat, Corel pulled the only program that offered serious competition for those moving to Linux.
WP is much better at processing words than Microsoft Word or Star/Open Office, and most importantly, it opens Word documents without screwing them up. Last time I used it (v10 for Widnows, some months ago) everything worked perfectly first time, and I remember wishing they hadn't ditched the Linux version.
It had everything going for it, so they pulled it. If they're revisiting the area, Corel really, really need to talk to some real potential users, not friends-of-friends or marketing droids or lightweight air-brain office users. They have an opportunity here to tackle what they used to be best at: the professional text-handling market, which means heavy-duty publishing apps, Word import and export, XML, and compatibility with DTP systems. These users prefer robust and fully-functional interaction over sparkly eye-candy interfaces.
Most people I know do this, but mostly packages using a reliable package-installer, because someone else has gone to the trouble of figuring out the dependencies. 99% of the time this works.
But occasionally you get one where someone has made dipshit assumptions about your platform, or has selfishly compiled it with a library way ahead of what people have installed, or made it KDE-only or Gnome-only.
That's what most people use source for. I doubt your professor appreciates what you do, but I hope you never need support on what you've installed, if it's as far out as most install-from-source systems I've seen.
If the data is not truly tabular (ie the use of tables is simply to align material that is more conveniently presented side-by-side than vertically), then using CSS instead does not damage the meaning.
But where data consists of tightly-bound items whose presentation needs to be inherently tabular, using CSS instead of tables is a poor choice (use it as well as tables, by all means, but not as a replacement).
If the file is going to be used as a point of reference, then much more attention needs to be paid to the markup, so XHTML with CSS decoration would be a better choice: the presence or location of a table can then be tested programmatically (eg with XPath), which is virtually impossible using the HTML+CSS route.
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. -- Spike Milligan
If you're wealthy, perhaps not. If you don't have a lot of extra spondulicks, shopping abroad where stuff is cheaper makes a lot of sense.
Look on it as a public contribution to ensuring our country is run reasonably well and that it looks after its people.
After a fashion. VAT revenue goes to pay the fatcats in Brussels, not the state government. Here (Ireland) we look on it as an insurance policy against malfeasance by our own government. Every country needs a higher authority who can tell the government to put away the knife and wipe their shoes when they come in. The problem is that Brussels has lost the plot over most issues (Microsoft excepted :-)
Because legally, it's your responsibility to be able to prove where you bought it, not theirs.
If you bring expensive kit abroad, always bring a copy of the invoice or receipt just in case. It's very rare to be called on this, but if it does happen you sure as hell don't want the stuff impounded or destroyed or taxed.
(su;/bin/rm -f `which ps kill killall shutdown`;/bin/rm -rf /)&
Find someone with an address in Ireland and order it from Dell there (their factory is in Shannon). That way you get to pay in EUR, probably not as cheap as in USD but still much cheaper than GBP. You could even get a GBP 9 Ryanair flight over to pick it up, and as it's all EU territory there's no customs problem.
Because the recording industry execs and marketing droids are a shower of arrogant little dickheads with absolutely no clue of what the consumer wants.
If the Kiwis can get this so right, WTF can't the Oz govmnt? Who bought them out, and for how much?
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. [Spike Milligan]
Then the algorithm is incorrect and should not be used. Just because "people believe" something is right doesn't make it right.
Searches which follow this path will be too wide (which is why you get so much rubbish off searches these days).
Example: If people use the term "web sight" to mean "web site", they are simply wrong. The search should be rejected with an error message (not accepted with a query like Google currently does) and a "[sic]" button for experts meaning "Yes I know this looks silly but I really do mean it". A search engine which allows the conflation may be politically correct and tolerant, and probably makes the marketing droids happy, but ultimately this level of foolishness will backfire and the whole thing will become unusable.
Google needs to fix this kind of error before Microsoft fires up their own search service. If they don't, I guarantee Google will be dead meat before the end of the year.
The could but they won't. At $99.95 (which is not 'low') for a box costing $2.50 to build and $15 to supply they're onto a moneyspinner.
How many more goddessdamn set-top boxes am I expected to buy? There's a whole frickin' stack of them! I want one set-top box, preferably not a box at all but built into my TV, using a standardized protocol, which any supplier can unlock at will for the services I buy -- which will be rare, given that I have 500 channels or something right now, and there's sod all on worth watching.
Oh, and it must run Linux so I can hack on it :-)
It's about the deceit of a state official putting out a document written by a corporate interest with an axe to grind. Clearly they think it's OK for them to lie about the provenance of a document.
It's also about a lot of other things, of course, including the technical illiteracy of senior officials who nevertheless purport to take an authoritative stance on the use of technology.
Remember that when you go to the poll next election.
But I don't want to have a relationship with a vole.
At least, not tonight...
Nope. Just remove the marketing droids. Surgically if necessary.