In this case afaik it is not an assue of "rebranding". They're doing it because Debian has rules that all content must be unencumbered by non-OSS licensing requirements - and while the FireFox codebase is open, the FireFox branding isn't.
To be clear: FireFox icons, trademarks, etc. are not opensource. That's the point. The idea is that if, say, someone _wanted_ to rebrand every part of the Debian distro without changing icons or something like that - it would be legal. If someone wanted to make PoopIan, where everything in the Gui is overlaid with poop, that would violate FireFox's license. Hence, the content covered by FireFox's trademark license is inappropriate for the Debian distro, so it must be rebranded.
This isn't like renaming everything to start with a K to tie it into your naming scheme.
That being said, I do like it when Linux desktops make an effort to rename app icons such that their function is obvious. If you weren't already acquainted with them, how the hell would you know what FireFox, SunBird, and Nautilus do?
The whole "compatibility mode" is a service available under Windows 2k, it's just disabled by default. So scratch that one. WinXp was 90% just adding UI boosts to 2k to help combat the incredisexiness of OSX that had just come out.
The other feature Redmond needs to work on: "not listening to a single damn thing Adobe Reader says".
Nothing like strolling into the office in the morning and finding your computer still at the shutdown screen... and what is it holding it open, pray tell? Not the IDE. Not the source control client. Not the database browser. Nope. Adobe Reader is sitting there smugly asking "are you sure you want me to shut down?" holding up the whole system from logging off. FFS, it's VIEWING TEXT - it can shutdown when I damn well ask it to.
Personally, for $20 I will go through my hard disk and upload all my old highschool essays to turnitin.com - but if somebody did it without payment, without asking my permission? That's ripping me off.
Actually, I don't have a source, but I've read that this is already true: humans already live, proportional to our mass and heart rate, way way longer than every other mammal. We _already_ are mammalian methuselas. Most of the tricks people have found to extend life in mice has been revealed to be already done in the human body. All the easy stuff has been covered by evolution.
The belief is that it's caused by your suggestion above. Other animals don't gain as much from protection of their aging parents as we do, so we have developed unnaturally (compared to similar animals) long lifespans.
Yep. If somebody's billing system required that each user log-in using a key stored on a 5.25" DD disk, I doubt we'd be sympathetic to wanting to keep such drives in computers.
Which, imho, is the biggest reason that this whole thing is a fraud. The fact is that movies, games, comics, music, etc. are all competing for marketshare, and the teenagers are the biggest market for all of those industries. Legislating one market while ignoring others gives one an unfair advantage.
Tell me, what is it that is so fundamentally different about games that their ratings must carry force of law, while movies do not? Movies are already rated less strictly than the comparable games. Considering that the "M" rating is analogous to the "R" rating, consider the calibre of gore and sex that you can get into an "R" film... meanwhile, look at the reclassification of GTA:SA into an "AO" game (the porno category) for a scene that would fit right into an "R" movie. For a game to be "teen" it must be far, far more tame than the comparable "AA" movie. And yet people want to tighten the ESRB further, and bring in government control - why?
Because the movie industry has better lobbyists.
Unless the government is willing to make the law generic enough to cover all purchased entertainment media, this whole thing is a joke.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with "ya right".
Doesn't matter if ISP-side torrent-cacheing woudl turn every computer into a supercomputer - ISPs won't do it, for a variety of reasons:
1) Legal liability, obviously. Sure, it's probably fine, but not-caching torrents is definitely fine, which is better than probably fine. This is called the "chilling effect".
2) Easier just to not do it. The torrent-cache is one more system to maintain that they'd probably just rather do without. For any software problem there are two solutions, the right solution and the easy solution - and an ISP will always choose the easy solution unless it offends 99% of their customers.
3) The only people who want this feature are the kind of users the ISP would rather be rid of. You know, the users that actually use their service instead of just checking email once in a while.
Well, does Java have a facility similar to C#'s @strings? In C#, a string prefixed with @ is literal, much like Python's """ strings - no escape characters. Very handy for regular expressions.
In general, C#'s regular expression package is very nice, except for the whole "groups" and "captures" thing.
Yep. I'm older than you - started off with a C64 and was a complete video-game addict for most of my childhood, but I got along with my lego too.
Now, one thing I always wanted as a kid: a good, solid set of remote controlled-cars that (a) didn't cost an arm and a leg, (b) didn't interfere with each other, and (c) were small enough that could actually use them in your back yard. A lap timer so you could do time trials would be cool too. But every store sold cars that were huge/expensive, or that retarded "2-function" thing that introduced small children to the word "scam". And even if you and your friends had huge monster cars, they couldn't race because one was too fast or the frequencies argued. Last time I was in a Source/Radio Shack, I finally saw that my prayers were answered - remote controlled cars that actually let kids race against each other (cheap, compatible, and small enough to build a track in your back yard).... and now I'm too old to enjoy them. To me, this is a high-tech toy market Hotwheels could explore.
Well, XUbuntu (a new xfce desktop for Ubuntu) should solve the problem of high processor needs, but RAM is still a worry for getting a legacy box into Linux world. XUbuntu still needs 128 megs just to install using the default (n00b-friendly) installer. A lot of these old win98 boxes have only 32 or 64 megs of RAM in them. Yes, old PC100 ram is cheap on eBay, but that's a substantial difference from just downloading and running a piece of software.
Well, they can broadcast a locator. While this does nothing to reduce the risk inherent in the forgotten mine, it does make them easier to recover... things like RFID tags, an active beacon pulse, etc. could make the mine's location and status known to the outside world after wartime operations cease. I mean, it's a bomb - it's hard to make it perfect... but really, like any other weapons are safe when abandoned in wartime? I mean, all those forgotten rifles in Africa are totally harmless too, aren't they?
Where do you point the car/bowling balls? There's an assload of land to hide a mine in. Even the smallest of countries is a very large space to get lost in.
The problem is that there is no way to say "yes, this is an open access point, but don't use it". A store with an unlocked door but a closed sign is clearly closed. A neighbor's house with a closed door and gate is clearly private. But what if the gate is open, the door is open, and the garage is open? With no way to say whether you have a careless owner or an open house going on (no signs in the wireless standard).
Imho, the problem is that there's no way to mark a network as "private but unencrypted" - in which the user has said that they don't want strangers using it, but also don't want it to be encrypted. Since in many places an unsecured network is deliberately "open" for anonymous use, there is no way to differentiate between an "open" and an "unsecured" network.
The problem with that approach is that you can't autogenerate clever questions, so the computer-client can build a database of known answers. You might be able to reword them, at best. Even with procedural rewording, the question may become muddled, or the computer-client could look for keywords for a similar question in it's database of known answers.
The problem is that when I got sick of playing phone tag with DHL, I would call Vonage and they'd say there was nothing they could do, and to call DHL. DHL simply had no idea how to deliver to a highrise where there was no phone yet, and it took a lot of calls before someone at Vonage would handle the situation. As the customer, that certainly isn't supposed to be my job.
Same deal here. The simple fact was my ISP didn't give me good enough connection for consistent phone quality - and I wasn't on a lite plan or anything. Good product, good support, but trying to leave or even downgrade my plan was an expensive hassle. There was also a massive problem with getting the unit delivered in the first place because of difficulties with DHL. Their technical people are great, but everybody else that I talked to there drove me nuts.
The difference with OS software is that you can keep adding the stuff after release. You can start with a public available text editor and gradually convolute it into a publicly available everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, and have users throughout the whole process. Retail software isn't like that, as it must be (approximately) finished at the time of launch.
Because a videoconference is treated as a "meeting". What is needed isn't a videoconference, but a "video-office" - an always-on tool that makes it feel like you're working within a cube-farm and all your coworkers are in the room nearby. That's why I suggest an always-on dedicated large-screen piece of hardware, basically an interactive whiteboard combined with videoconferencing that you leave on in your room - and it keeps windows showing all of your coworker's offices. Yes, it wouldn't be private - but neither is your real-world Cube. Combine that with a palmtop(whiteboard)+phone-like device so you can walk out to your back porch and smoke while you chat if you want to have a "working break" like you describe.
Agreed. Too many people think "Engineering" and "technical design" are the same thing. Engineering is about safety, not anything else.
Basically, the real difference between a "software developer" and a "software engineer" is that an engineer stamps their project, effectively saying "I, _____, hereby state that this system satisfies all functional requirements, and I accept full personal, financial, and professional responsability if it does not."
Engineering is about never blaming a vendor, or saying "I didn't know that". It is your job to confirm that everything you use is functional for the intended purpose. Blaming Microsoft isn't optional when your job description includes confirming that SQL Server is suitable for the task at hand.
Which is why so little software demands "software engineering" - if Word crashes, nobody dies.
And if this all sounds absurd to you, consider what happens if somebody builds a bridge and it falls for no good reason - if the contractors and developers did their jobs correctly and followed the engineer's designs, then it's the fault of the engineering firm. Guess who pays for the damages? Same thing with Software Engineering.
What's the importance of face-to-face? So you can see their eyes? So you can doodle out diagrams and read them? To me, those are technological limitations that have been solved, and simply haven't become affordable enough yet. If each team member had a giant networked interactive whiteboard/picturephone to communicate with, I think you'd have all the ameneties of in-person meeting available.
1) Designed for native compilation. Compare it vs. Common Lisp and C++, not the modern enterprise toys.
2) Design-by-contract. Think of it as taking type-safety squared. Just like static-typed languages are more verbose but compile-time safer than dynamic-type languages (don't argue static/dynamic, you know damn well what I mean), design-by-contract is moreso.
3) Extremely generic-oriented and had generics designed in, as opposed to the after-the-fact hacks that appeared in C++, Java, and C#. And it has multiple inheritence.
Plus, I'm also very disappointed by all the languages you listed being non-generic Algol family languages. That's like asking someone "what's your favourite beverage - Coke, Pepsi, or RC Cola?" The example languages you listed are all of the same line of descent (although Ruby pulls more from SmallTalk than the others). Plus, most of the languages you mentioned are just a mishmash of features. Eiffel is more like "Lisp" in the mentality of design, which is "keep the language simple but make it expressive enough that complex concepts can be expressed simply anyways".
Such languages tend to be much more intelligently structured, safe, and extendable, but also fall short in legibility.
Basically it is similar to Ada and C++, with a little functional programming thrown in. The problem is that most attempts to make C++ "safer" have focussed on ripping out language features like multiple inheritence and templates that made it "too complicated" but were important, useful features. Eiffel takes the alternate approach - instead of paring down the featureset, it pares down the language while actually expanding the featureset.
And if you've never coded with generics and still just typecast your container data: get out of my sight you disgusting hacker. OOP without generics is like a car that only turns left - sure you can go right, just do three lefts.
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In this case afaik it is not an assue of "rebranding". They're doing it because Debian has rules that all content must be unencumbered by non-OSS licensing requirements - and while the FireFox codebase is open, the FireFox branding isn't.
To be clear: FireFox icons, trademarks, etc. are not opensource. That's the point. The idea is that if, say, someone _wanted_ to rebrand every part of the Debian distro without changing icons or something like that - it would be legal. If someone wanted to make PoopIan, where everything in the Gui is overlaid with poop, that would violate FireFox's license. Hence, the content covered by FireFox's trademark license is inappropriate for the Debian distro, so it must be rebranded.
This isn't like renaming everything to start with a K to tie it into your naming scheme.
That being said, I do like it when Linux desktops make an effort to rename app icons such that their function is obvious. If you weren't already acquainted with them, how the hell would you know what FireFox, SunBird, and Nautilus do?
The whole "compatibility mode" is a service available under Windows 2k, it's just disabled by default. So scratch that one. WinXp was 90% just adding UI boosts to 2k to help combat the incredisexiness of OSX that had just come out.
The other feature Redmond needs to work on: "not listening to a single damn thing Adobe Reader says".
Nothing like strolling into the office in the morning and finding your computer still at the shutdown screen... and what is it holding it open, pray tell? Not the IDE. Not the source control client. Not the database browser. Nope. Adobe Reader is sitting there smugly asking "are you sure you want me to shut down?" holding up the whole system from logging off. FFS, it's VIEWING TEXT - it can shutdown when I damn well ask it to.
To me, that's the long and short of it.
Personally, for $20 I will go through my hard disk and upload all my old highschool essays to turnitin.com - but if somebody did it without payment, without asking my permission? That's ripping me off.
Actually, I don't have a source, but I've read that this is already true: humans already live, proportional to our mass and heart rate, way way longer than every other mammal. We _already_ are mammalian methuselas. Most of the tricks people have found to extend life in mice has been revealed to be already done in the human body. All the easy stuff has been covered by evolution.
The belief is that it's caused by your suggestion above. Other animals don't gain as much from protection of their aging parents as we do, so we have developed unnaturally (compared to similar animals) long lifespans.
Yep. If somebody's billing system required that each user log-in using a key stored on a 5.25" DD disk, I doubt we'd be sympathetic to wanting to keep such drives in computers.
Which, imho, is the biggest reason that this whole thing is a fraud. The fact is that movies, games, comics, music, etc. are all competing for marketshare, and the teenagers are the biggest market for all of those industries. Legislating one market while ignoring others gives one an unfair advantage.
Tell me, what is it that is so fundamentally different about games that their ratings must carry force of law, while movies do not? Movies are already rated less strictly than the comparable games. Considering that the "M" rating is analogous to the "R" rating, consider the calibre of gore and sex that you can get into an "R" film... meanwhile, look at the reclassification of GTA:SA into an "AO" game (the porno category) for a scene that would fit right into an "R" movie. For a game to be "teen" it must be far, far more tame than the comparable "AA" movie. And yet people want to tighten the ESRB further, and bring in government control - why?
Because the movie industry has better lobbyists.
Unless the government is willing to make the law generic enough to cover all purchased entertainment media, this whole thing is a joke.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with "ya right".
Doesn't matter if ISP-side torrent-cacheing woudl turn every computer into a supercomputer - ISPs won't do it, for a variety of reasons:
1) Legal liability, obviously. Sure, it's probably fine, but not-caching torrents is definitely fine, which is better than probably fine. This is called the "chilling effect".
2) Easier just to not do it. The torrent-cache is one more system to maintain that they'd probably just rather do without. For any software problem there are two solutions, the right solution and the easy solution - and an ISP will always choose the easy solution unless it offends 99% of their customers.
3) The only people who want this feature are the kind of users the ISP would rather be rid of. You know, the users that actually use their service instead of just checking email once in a while.
3)
Well, does Java have a facility similar to C#'s @strings? In C#, a string prefixed with @ is literal, much like Python's """ strings - no escape characters. Very handy for regular expressions.
In general, C#'s regular expression package is very nice, except for the whole "groups" and "captures" thing.
Yes, they will come pre-loaded with the fufme drives.
(nsfw if your boss is humour-impared).
Umm, he could mean Extreme Programming... we could only hope.
Yep. I'm older than you - started off with a C64 and was a complete video-game addict for most of my childhood, but I got along with my lego too.
Now, one thing I always wanted as a kid: a good, solid set of remote controlled-cars that (a) didn't cost an arm and a leg, (b) didn't interfere with each other, and (c) were small enough that could actually use them in your back yard. A lap timer so you could do time trials would be cool too. But every store sold cars that were huge/expensive, or that retarded "2-function" thing that introduced small children to the word "scam". And even if you and your friends had huge monster cars, they couldn't race because one was too fast or the frequencies argued. Last time I was in a Source/Radio Shack, I finally saw that my prayers were answered - remote controlled cars that actually let kids race against each other (cheap, compatible, and small enough to build a track in your back yard).... and now I'm too old to enjoy them. To me, this is a high-tech toy market Hotwheels could explore.
Well, XUbuntu (a new xfce desktop for Ubuntu) should solve the problem of high processor needs, but RAM is still a worry for getting a legacy box into Linux world. XUbuntu still needs 128 megs just to install using the default (n00b-friendly) installer. A lot of these old win98 boxes have only 32 or 64 megs of RAM in them. Yes, old PC100 ram is cheap on eBay, but that's a substantial difference from just downloading and running a piece of software.
Well, they can broadcast a locator. While this does nothing to reduce the risk inherent in the forgotten mine, it does make them easier to recover... things like RFID tags, an active beacon pulse, etc. could make the mine's location and status known to the outside world after wartime operations cease. I mean, it's a bomb - it's hard to make it perfect... but really, like any other weapons are safe when abandoned in wartime? I mean, all those forgotten rifles in Africa are totally harmless too, aren't they?
Where do you point the car/bowling balls? There's an assload of land to hide a mine in. Even the smallest of countries is a very large space to get lost in.
The problem is that there is no way to say "yes, this is an open access point, but don't use it". A store with an unlocked door but a closed sign is clearly closed. A neighbor's house with a closed door and gate is clearly private. But what if the gate is open, the door is open, and the garage is open? With no way to say whether you have a careless owner or an open house going on (no signs in the wireless standard).
Imho, the problem is that there's no way to mark a network as "private but unencrypted" - in which the user has said that they don't want strangers using it, but also don't want it to be encrypted. Since in many places an unsecured network is deliberately "open" for anonymous use, there is no way to differentiate between an "open" and an "unsecured" network.
The problem with that approach is that you can't autogenerate clever questions, so the computer-client can build a database of known answers. You might be able to reword them, at best. Even with procedural rewording, the question may become muddled, or the computer-client could look for keywords for a similar question in it's database of known answers.
You've got it mixed up. The boogeymen of the internet are the paedophiles. Terrorists are the boogeymen of the airports and courts.
The problem is that when I got sick of playing phone tag with DHL, I would call Vonage and they'd say there was nothing they could do, and to call DHL. DHL simply had no idea how to deliver to a highrise where there was no phone yet, and it took a lot of calls before someone at Vonage would handle the situation. As the customer, that certainly isn't supposed to be my job.
Same deal here. The simple fact was my ISP didn't give me good enough connection for consistent phone quality - and I wasn't on a lite plan or anything. Good product, good support, but trying to leave or even downgrade my plan was an expensive hassle. There was also a massive problem with getting the unit delivered in the first place because of difficulties with DHL. Their technical people are great, but everybody else that I talked to there drove me nuts.
The difference with OS software is that you can keep adding the stuff after release. You can start with a public available text editor and gradually convolute it into a publicly available everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, and have users throughout the whole process. Retail software isn't like that, as it must be (approximately) finished at the time of launch.
Because a videoconference is treated as a "meeting". What is needed isn't a videoconference, but a "video-office" - an always-on tool that makes it feel like you're working within a cube-farm and all your coworkers are in the room nearby. That's why I suggest an always-on dedicated large-screen piece of hardware, basically an interactive whiteboard combined with videoconferencing that you leave on in your room - and it keeps windows showing all of your coworker's offices. Yes, it wouldn't be private - but neither is your real-world Cube. Combine that with a palmtop(whiteboard)+phone-like device so you can walk out to your back porch and smoke while you chat if you want to have a "working break" like you describe.
Agreed. Too many people think "Engineering" and "technical design" are the same thing. Engineering is about safety, not anything else.
Basically, the real difference between a "software developer" and a "software engineer" is that an engineer stamps their project, effectively saying "I, _____, hereby state that this system satisfies all functional requirements, and I accept full personal, financial, and professional responsability if it does not."
Engineering is about never blaming a vendor, or saying "I didn't know that". It is your job to confirm that everything you use is functional for the intended purpose. Blaming Microsoft isn't optional when your job description includes confirming that SQL Server is suitable for the task at hand.
Which is why so little software demands "software engineering" - if Word crashes, nobody dies.
And if this all sounds absurd to you, consider what happens if somebody builds a bridge and it falls for no good reason - if the contractors and developers did their jobs correctly and followed the engineer's designs, then it's the fault of the engineering firm. Guess who pays for the damages? Same thing with Software Engineering.
What's the importance of face-to-face? So you can see their eyes? So you can doodle out diagrams and read them? To me, those are technological limitations that have been solved, and simply haven't become affordable enough yet. If each team member had a giant networked interactive whiteboard/picturephone to communicate with, I think you'd have all the ameneties of in-person meeting available.
1) Designed for native compilation. Compare it vs. Common Lisp and C++, not the modern enterprise toys.
2) Design-by-contract. Think of it as taking type-safety squared. Just like static-typed languages are more verbose but compile-time safer than dynamic-type languages (don't argue static/dynamic, you know damn well what I mean), design-by-contract is moreso.
3) Extremely generic-oriented and had generics designed in, as opposed to the after-the-fact hacks that appeared in C++, Java, and C#. And it has multiple inheritence.
Plus, I'm also very disappointed by all the languages you listed being non-generic Algol family languages. That's like asking someone "what's your favourite beverage - Coke, Pepsi, or RC Cola?" The example languages you listed are all of the same line of descent (although Ruby pulls more from SmallTalk than the others). Plus, most of the languages you mentioned are just a mishmash of features. Eiffel is more like "Lisp" in the mentality of design, which is "keep the language simple but make it expressive enough that complex concepts can be expressed simply anyways".
Such languages tend to be much more intelligently structured, safe, and extendable, but also fall short in legibility.
Basically it is similar to Ada and C++, with a little functional programming thrown in. The problem is that most attempts to make C++ "safer" have focussed on ripping out language features like multiple inheritence and templates that made it "too complicated" but were important, useful features. Eiffel takes the alternate approach - instead of paring down the featureset, it pares down the language while actually expanding the featureset.
And if you've never coded with generics and still just typecast your container data: get out of my sight you disgusting hacker. OOP without generics is like a car that only turns left - sure you can go right, just do three lefts.