Nothing is as difficult as predicting. Especially predicting the future.
It just seems like Arthur is in a bit of hurry here. Human clones in less than 5 years? Oh, and cold fusion is just around the corner. It will be here before Windows 2003:-)
Then there's the nuclear bomb going off in North Korea in 2009. Why North Korea? I mean, isn't the probablility bigger that some terrorist group or crazy dictator gets/makes one and smuggles it into US?
Oh, and life on both Europa and the Halley's Comet. Maybe they'll also be able to find that spacecraft behind the comet too? The one where you get by making a suicide. Elvis pilots it BTW.
As Arthur didn't want to mention all-too-possible disasters, let me try:
2002 Microsoft's stock collapses and hundreds of programmers leave the company to join other companies to develope for Linux.
2000-2020 A massive earth quake destroys Tokyo resulting in worldwide economical problems when the Japanese people pull their money back to rebuild the city.
But in the end it's sad to watch these predictions. A space hotel is more important than helping developing countries and getting food for everyone. Also first world people get to live on the moon while tens of thousands of children die of hunger and wars.
Less than 50 posts and I can already read how Mozilla is buggy, how it's late and how IE is better. Maybe some of you haven't been following the Mozilla development? I'd like to clarify a few things for you.
Mozilla is still very much alpha. It means that there's a lot of bugs. M10 is definitely not for daily use. These milestones are released so that we can try them, report bugs and take part in the development process. If you don't want to do it, then you're better off with an old Netscape or MSIE.
Those of us who do know programming understand really well why Mozilla is special. That's because programmers usually know to pay attention to basics. In Mozilla I see a really small browser which supports standards really well and has a really fast renderer. It's way more important at this point than having a beautiful screen or flawless scrolling.
I'd like to talk more about programming big projects. I've been working on a big project for a year now and customers are amazed as I can't show anything yet. That's because I've been concentrating on building tools - a compact database, fast and versatile search engine and lot's of controls. When these are working well, it's really fast to build the application and it will be fast, reliable and small. This is exactly what these guys at Netscape have been doing too.
Many say that the browser war is over. It's not as the internet is a moving target. We'll get new complicated technologies and browsers have to support them well. As the renderer in Mozilla is done well, it's easy to make Mozilla support these technologies. It wouldn't have been possible with Netscape4 or the code that the Mozilla team dumped when they decided to start from scratch. And as MSIE is a huge program, it probably also hides a lot of bad code which makes developing it worse.
As I see it: Mozilla will probably be ready in the first quarter. It will still be small and fast and I'll definitely love to use it.
Computer science is not that much different than usual science but people get carried away with all the nice bells and whistles. It's so much nicer to teach kids to use MS Word than the basics of paths, files and raw text editors. And the weird thing is that nobody sees a problem. It's like teaching kids just to use calculators and not teaching them the basics of everyday math.
In the end there's always too much to teach. The question just is: what should a university teach? The basics or the top? If the top then who will teach about the basics if not the universities?
I'm worried about morals at Microsoft. It may sound silly to mention those words in the same sentence but they really need it. Otherwise they will go down because nothing lasting can be built on money and greed.
I'm also worried about universities. They used to be places where people learn new things and produce people who are able to do research and inventions. Unix has been part of universities and it has taught students what an OS is and how to experiment with the source. With NT you just learn the visible parts and how to make software by connecting big pieces together. You sure learn to use a database but not how to make one.
I'm also worried about professors. They used to concentrate on teaching and research. You couldn't fool them with marketing talk because they knew better. Has the professors became stupider or have they became too interested in money?
Read Marcus Aurelius. Why does Microsoft give discounts and money to universities? To teach students to only use Microsoft. Why? To dominate the world. It shouldn't be that way.
If I will put up two servers, one running RedHat Linux and one running NT, I get the latest versions of both. With RedHat it's 6.0 from 1999 and with NT it's NT4.0 from 1996. That's where updating starts regardless of release dates.
If I'm an ignorant newbie, I don't update any service packs or patches. So the cracker gets to crack a vanilla NT4.0 or a vanilla RedHat 6.0.
If I'm doing my work well, I update SP5 for NT5.0 and all the updated rpm:s for RedHat Linux. PCWeek didn't do that in a security shootout so it just classifies them as class 1 morons who are desperately trying to shift the blame.
Having proprietary software like these for Linux doesn't hurt us. We have the freedom to choose not to use them. Use what you want:-)
There's something good about having StarOffice, though. Now I can open all the countless Word-docs that people send me. As they are clients, I can't just direct them to/dev/null and it's a waste of time to ask them to resend them as text.
And maybe, maybe StarOffice can be the first step to free the document formats? Microsoft won't do it but Sun may.
Many of you don't like Delphi for Linux because it'll probably be commercial and closed source. You are totally free to have that opinion but how about putting your programming where your mouth is and contributing to the Lazarus project?
Lazarus is the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulate Delphi. They are also making and IDE. So check what you could do.
I always love it when people demand you to do as they want while talking about freedom:-)
New software is great news for Linux. Sure, it's commercial but who forces you to use it? You can continue your free life but let other people also have the freedom to choose.
From my point of news Delphi for Linux is the best thing since sliced bread. I've been developing a big application on Delphi for a while. Thanks to Inprise I can also make a Linux-version of it and give my customers the freedom to choose between NT and Linux.
Computers should be as easy as cars? Well, do you have to have a driver's license for a computer? Do you have to take a driver's test? Nope. You just have to learn a few things about "driving" the computer.
Cars are really not that simple. You have to know about all the traffic rules. For some people that's really tough. However, you learn them by reading, not by just driving around hitting people and then complaining how this thing crashed:-)
You really don't have to change engines or gas in your car. You don't have to change network cards and hard disks either. Where's the difference?
But then again, if you want to use the computer easily, I have one for you. It's called Barney.:-)
Thanks for pointing about the license agreement and rebooting after Netscape installation. My mistake as it's quite a time since I installed it last time. Points for you.
But why do you have to get personal because of my NT-problem? There's no reason to get personal mr/mrs/ms Anonymous.
I did try to revert to the original hardware profile and got the same BSOD. I took the sound card out and no help. If you have some way to fix that (without an emergency disk, of course), I'm all ears.
Wait a minute. Have you ever noticed how elegant the packet managers are in Linux distributions? You can update a lot of software by just giving one simple command. And if you don't like typing, do it with your mouse. There's no need to answer a lot of questions, shut down other programs or reboot.
I use NT at work and Linux at home. If I update Netscape on both, my RedHat-box does it in notime with a simple command:"rpm -Uvh nets*.rpm". On NT I have to shut down other software, dblclick on the icon, answer a few sets of questions, wait a longer time, reboot the computer and pray that it boots and doesn't give me a BSOD.
I used to pretty much trust NT until a simple installation of a sound card and it's driver resulted in constant boot-time-BSODs that required a reinstall from scratch.
Let's suppose we have a nice space hotel. What can you do there? Maybe look at the view and spend your time trying to figure out how to eat, drink and visit the bathroom. After a while you just float there bored to death trying not to hit other people's sweat, spits and other garbage.
So let's eliminate the zero-G-problems by spinning the thing around to create some kind of gravity. Well, we miss the view and spend a holiday at a dull tube with even less to do.
But hey! If they sell tax-free booze, at least the Finns will line up;-)
I can see Universities going down the drain nowadays using the Dilbert principles. The latest trend is to bring business and corporate methods to schools and it's already showing.
There are too many stupid professors already. They don't think about science or students. What's worse, they are distancing themselves from the real world just like bosses. So they decide to go all NT because they buy the marketing hype from Microsoft. It's ridiculous.
A friend of mine works at a big university. The stories I hear all the time are worse than the daily Dilbert strip. Once he had to go to a course out of town for five days because the professor didn't want his course to look bad because of too little attendees. In the end the majority of people were there only to increase headcount. And the ironic part is that they didn't get paid extra but had to work two unpaid weekends to do the work they missed during the unnecessary course.
Bottom line is: Many universities are already run by morons. If they continue to do bad decisions, all the brains leave and fast.
REDMOND, Wash. - Sept. 16, 1999. - SONY and Microsoft Corp. today announced their cooperation program to support new revolutionary media in Microsoft's new flagship product Windows 2000. The revolutionary Industry Standard OS will contain new startup sounds made by Michael Jackson.
"We are thrilled of this possibility to have professional quality startup sounds in Windows 2000," said Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates. The new sound files will be a special edition of soundtrack "Leave me alone", written by Michael Jackson while he was being prosecuted of child abuse. Microsoft is also planning a video starring Bill and Melinda Gates around the new startup sounds.
Microsoft will also start a new division for teaching Windows to children. Attendees will get a free Furby and a trip to Michael's amusement park for more personal training.
Freedom, freedom, freedom. For some twisted reason the freedom-card is most often pulled by an abuser. Spammers rage about freedom of (sic)speach, fundamentals about freedom of religion, nationalists about freedom in general, US government about free world and now Microsoft about freedom to innovate.
What's common with these all? Only they have the freedom but if you disagree with them, they go crazy and demand you to drop all your own freedom and personal choice.
Let's have a look at Microsoft. They are rich, powerful and big. There shouldn't be any problems for them to innovate. Just use enough money and brain power and come up with new revolutionary products. It shouldn't be a problem for them to make a browser and compete fairly in the free market.
But for Microsoft freedom is bad. Freedom to choose is bad because customers may choose the wrong product. So the competitor has to be crushed and what's a better way to do it than waving the flag of freedom?
If you create a new algorithm, you can choose not to share the source with the world. Feel free to make money with it. But I doubt that it will be used a lot as the world is full of proprietary data formats.
If you want the world to use your algorithm, publish it. Many will love it and start using it. But you can't expect to sit on your butt for the rest of your life collecting money from that one idea of yours. Make own products using it. At least you have the edge because it was you who created the idea in the first place.
If in the end the whole world uses your algorithm, you won't have any problems whatsoever to get a good job. Think about it, this is exactly how Linus Torvalds did it and he's not whining. Instead, he has a nice steady paycheck at Transmeta and he can choose any place to work at.
Many of you wonder why Delphi came on top instead of C/C++. It was not a surpise for me. If Microsoft would run a similar poll, Visual Basic would be on top. To understand why, you have to look at things from the other side of the fence.
If you're a Windows-user, you have several tools to choose from. You can use Visual Basic, Delphi or C/C++, for example. If you use C and want to write for Linux too, there is GCC, a lot of toolkits and everything you need. You can even use winelib if you want. You'll be productive pretty fast.
But imagine what would happen if you don't do C. What if you have done pascal for 10 years and never touched C? Then there's not any good tools to use. There is Free Pascal, but you can't use it to do X11-programming yet. There is Lazarus but it's not even alpha.
So you're stuck in the Windows-world with all those tens of thousands of lines of VB- or Delphi-code. And you're hating it and praying every day that Linux will get a decent development environment for Pascal or Basic.
I had bad arm pains for about a year. I really didn't know what it was and doctors didn't know it either. But when I typed, my arms started aching and cramping.
After visiting many doctors, one checked me well and said that he didn't find anything wrong with me. So if resting didn't help, start exercising and doing heavy work.
It sounded horrible but I did what he said. I continued typing even when it hurted. I started playing volley ball, throwing shot put and working heavily at my parents farm. As a miracle, all symptoms vanished and I was healthy. I continued to work out and I have never been healthier.
In the end I was afraid of my arms starting to ache and was tense when I tried to do everything right according to all CTS and RSI advice.
All cases are unique though. So talk with your doctor and don't risk your health by trying anything. But if your arms can take for example weight training, then do it.
And you, yes, you healthy geek with the coke and the pizza slice. Get off your butt and work out before you get arm problems;-)
This is what Linus should do. Go public, accept the challenge and just tell that you also want to benchmark another enterprise-level setup "to get this unique test to show a wider picture of options for corporation decision makers." Then pick good hardware for Linux, Zeus as web server and so on.
Remember that Microsoft always changes rules and plays dirty. They often reply with "similar tests" and "similar hardware" to challenges. So why can't Linus do it too?
In the end there can be a tie. Let NT win with that quad-processor beast. But if Linux wins with hardware that is more sensible for real world usage, then everything is just up to the decision makers. Some blow money, some want quality.
The key is to distract. Don't play by Microsoft's rules and don't complain. Just be thrilled by this opportunity and bring on the other setup too to make a service to all us customers. And remember to smile while doing it.
I'm one geek whose career almost ended a few years ago due to arm pains. I guess I wasted one year without being able to work. I visited many doctors, tried medication and especially resting a lot. It was really frustrating while work piled up.
The first tip I got was to not rest my hands on the support in front of the keyboard. I used to just plant my hands there and type on. The problem with this is that your arms don't move enough.
Second advice was more radical. My arms were hurting but when a doctor diagnosed me, he didn't find any problems in me that would cause it. So he told me to use my arms. Do heavy work, type on, excercise and so on. Needless to say that I was scared of the advice but I tried it and it really helped. I haven't had any problems since then.
My advice for everybody is to work out. Do some sports with your arms as it really keeps them in great shape. Typing doesn't give you muscles or keep you in shape. That's why we get problems from the repetitive movements. But constructions workers don't get RSI or tennis elbow even when their work is also repetitive because their work is more versatile.
I still use a normal keyboard and won't change to an ergonomic one. I have put the half inch thick hand support under the front of the keyboard to lift it up. I work out regularly a few times a week. That's what works for me.
You may find some of my advice useful but if you have arm or wrist pains, don't just run blindly to try my advice. Consult your doctor first. (Standard disclaimer to avoid being sued);-)
I'd like to point out that M4 is still very much a developer-only release. It has loads of bugs and everybody knows it, except you guys who are complaining that it's slow and buggy and lacks features. Oh, and one also said how Mozilla isn't improving.
I just wonder if you have bothered to RTFRN or to run Mozilla from the daily builds to see the progress? I have been trying them for a while already and there is progress.
A month ago almost no web pages were rendered correclty. Banners were here and there, text running in wrong places etc. But after each and every new version it started rendering better. That's progress.
Also I'd like to point out that apprunner is really pre-code. People really haven't been working on it for long. Most work has been done to create the rendering engine and not for the bells and whistles in the user interface. Also remember that they are creating cross-platform code so it required a lot of planning and programming to even get this far.
I usually use the viewer-program. It's the one that has been used to develop the rendering engine. No bookmarks or anything but it has been pretty stable and fast for me. To get an idea of Mozilla's speed, go visit sites with a lot of tables and resize the window. On my PII it's about ten times faster than Communicatore 4.51.
So if you don't mind it crashing 10 times a day, rendering pages wrong and not giving you everything a finished product does, go and try it. But if you don't understand what M4 is, do find out before whining.
It's important to make sure that people don't try to get a free ride with the open-source name. Ballmer tries to do that without knowing what open-source is. Al Gore knows even less. This letter gives Microsoft a fair warning in a polite way. It gives a nice, professional feeling of the open-source community.
I know from my personal experience that many members of the open-source community hate Microsoft with a mindless passion, and do not agree with some of the statements in this letter. There may even be some thoughtful community members who feel the same way.
The open source community is not about hating Microsoft. It's about cooperating and sharing code. It's supposed to be a nice playground for ideas. Good ones live while bad ones die. Now, if Microsoft wants to join, we have no right whatsoever to reject them. They have the right to offer their code and those who want to contribute will.
However, I bet that MS would screw it up like they usually do. Probably they'd release only a bit with a lot of marketing hype. They could maybe get some positive news articles but that'd be all they'd get because they'd not even expect to win more than that. They don't believe in open-source so they'll not make an effort big enough.
So if Microsoft does something, let's remain calm. Us fighting and rejecting them because they are Microsoft is not the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing is as difficult as predicting. Especially predicting the future.
It just seems like Arthur is in a bit of hurry here. Human clones in less than 5 years? Oh, and cold fusion is just around the corner. It will be here before Windows 2003 :-)
Then there's the nuclear bomb going off in North Korea in 2009. Why North Korea? I mean, isn't the probablility bigger that some terrorist group or crazy dictator gets/makes one and smuggles it into US?
Oh, and life on both Europa and the Halley's Comet. Maybe they'll also be able to find that spacecraft behind the comet too? The one where you get by making a suicide. Elvis pilots it BTW.
As Arthur didn't want to mention all-too-possible disasters, let me try:
2002 Microsoft's stock collapses and hundreds of programmers leave the company to join other companies to develope for Linux.
2000-2020 A massive earth quake destroys Tokyo resulting in worldwide economical problems when the Japanese people pull their money back to rebuild the city.
But in the end it's sad to watch these predictions. A space hotel is more important than helping developing countries and getting food for everyone. Also first world people get to live on the moon while tens of thousands of children die of hunger and wars.
Less than 50 posts and I can already read how Mozilla is buggy, how it's late and how IE is better. Maybe some of you haven't been following the Mozilla development? I'd like to clarify a few things for you.
Mozilla is still very much alpha. It means that there's a lot of bugs. M10 is definitely not for daily use. These milestones are released so that we can try them, report bugs and take part in the development process. If you don't want to do it, then you're better off with an old Netscape or MSIE.
Those of us who do know programming understand really well why Mozilla is special. That's because programmers usually know to pay attention to basics. In Mozilla I see a really small browser which supports standards really well and has a really fast renderer. It's way more important at this point than having a beautiful screen or flawless scrolling.
I'd like to talk more about programming big projects. I've been working on a big project for a year now and customers are amazed as I can't show anything yet. That's because I've been concentrating on building tools - a compact database, fast and versatile search engine and lot's of controls. When these are working well, it's really fast to build the application and it will be fast, reliable and small. This is exactly what these guys at Netscape have been doing too.
Many say that the browser war is over. It's not as the internet is a moving target. We'll get new complicated technologies and browsers have to support them well. As the renderer in Mozilla is done well, it's easy to make Mozilla support these technologies. It wouldn't have been possible with Netscape4 or the code that the Mozilla team dumped when they decided to start from scratch. And as MSIE is a huge program, it probably also hides a lot of bad code which makes developing it worse.
As I see it: Mozilla will probably be ready in the first quarter. It will still be small and fast and I'll definitely love to use it.
Computer science is not that much different than usual science but people get carried away with all the nice bells and whistles. It's so much nicer to teach kids to use MS Word than the basics of paths, files and raw text editors. And the weird thing is that nobody sees a problem. It's like teaching kids just to use calculators and not teaching them the basics of everyday math.
In the end there's always too much to teach. The question just is: what should a university teach? The basics or the top? If the top then who will teach about the basics if not the universities?
I'm worried about morals at Microsoft. It may sound silly to mention those words in the same sentence but they really need it. Otherwise they will go down because nothing lasting can be built on money and greed.
I'm also worried about universities. They used to be places where people learn new things and produce people who are able to do research and inventions. Unix has been part of universities and it has taught students what an OS is and how to experiment with the source. With NT you just learn the visible parts and how to make software by connecting big pieces together. You sure learn to use a database but not how to make one.
I'm also worried about professors. They used to concentrate on teaching and research. You couldn't fool them with marketing talk because they knew better. Has the professors became stupider or have they became too interested in money?
Read Marcus Aurelius. Why does Microsoft give discounts and money to universities? To teach students to only use Microsoft. Why? To dominate the world. It shouldn't be that way.
If I will put up two servers, one running RedHat Linux and one running NT, I get the latest versions of both. With RedHat it's 6.0 from 1999 and with NT it's NT4.0 from 1996. That's where updating starts regardless of release dates.
If I'm an ignorant newbie, I don't update any service packs or patches. So the cracker gets to crack a vanilla NT4.0 or a vanilla RedHat 6.0.
If I'm doing my work well, I update SP5 for NT5.0 and all the updated rpm:s for RedHat Linux. PCWeek didn't do that in a security shootout so it just classifies them as class 1 morons who are desperately trying to shift the blame.
Having proprietary software like these for Linux doesn't hurt us. We have the freedom to choose not to use them. Use what you want :-)
There's something good about having StarOffice, though. Now I can open all the countless Word-docs that people send me. As they are clients, I can't just direct them to /dev/null and it's a waste of time to ask them to resend them as text.
And maybe, maybe StarOffice can be the first step to free the document formats? Microsoft won't do it but Sun may.
Many of you don't like Delphi for Linux because it'll probably be commercial and closed source. You are totally free to have that opinion but how about putting your programming where your mouth is and contributing to the Lazarus project?
Lazarus is the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulate Delphi. They are also making and IDE. So check what you could do.
I always love it when people demand you to do as they want while talking about freedom :-)
New software is great news for Linux. Sure, it's commercial but who forces you to use it? You can continue your free life but let other people also have the freedom to choose.
From my point of news Delphi for Linux is the best thing since sliced bread. I've been developing a big application on Delphi for a while. Thanks to Inprise I can also make a Linux-version of it and give my customers the freedom to choose between NT and Linux.
Computers should be as easy as cars? Well, do you have to have a driver's license for a computer? Do you have to take a driver's test? Nope. You just have to learn a few things about "driving" the computer.
Cars are really not that simple. You have to know about all the traffic rules. For some people that's really tough. However, you learn them by reading, not by just driving around hitting people and then complaining how this thing crashed :-)
You really don't have to change engines or gas in your car. You don't have to change network cards and hard disks either. Where's the difference?
But then again, if you want to use the computer easily, I have one for you. It's called Barney. :-)
Thanks for pointing about the license agreement and rebooting after Netscape installation. My mistake as it's quite a time since I installed it last time. Points for you.
But why do you have to get personal because of my NT-problem? There's no reason to get personal mr/mrs/ms Anonymous.
I did try to revert to the original hardware profile and got the same BSOD. I took the sound card out and no help. If you have some way to fix that (without an emergency disk, of course), I'm all ears.
Wait a minute. Have you ever noticed how elegant the packet managers are in Linux distributions? You can update a lot of software by just giving one simple command. And if you don't like typing, do it with your mouse. There's no need to answer a lot of questions, shut down other programs or reboot.
I use NT at work and Linux at home. If I update Netscape on both, my RedHat-box does it in notime with a simple command:"rpm -Uvh nets*.rpm". On NT I have to shut down other software, dblclick on the icon, answer a few sets of questions, wait a longer time, reboot the computer and pray that it boots and doesn't give me a BSOD.
I used to pretty much trust NT until a simple installation of a sound card and it's driver resulted in constant boot-time-BSODs that required a reinstall from scratch.
Let's suppose we have a nice space hotel. What can you do there? Maybe look at the view and spend your time trying to figure out how to eat, drink and visit the bathroom. After a while you just float there bored to death trying not to hit other people's sweat, spits and other garbage.
So let's eliminate the zero-G-problems by spinning the thing around to create some kind of gravity. Well, we miss the view and spend a holiday at a dull tube with even less to do.
But hey! If they sell tax-free booze, at least the Finns will line up ;-)
I can see Universities going down the drain nowadays using the Dilbert principles. The latest trend is to bring business and corporate methods to schools and it's already showing.
There are too many stupid professors already. They don't think about science or students. What's worse, they are distancing themselves from the real world just like bosses. So they decide to go all NT because they buy the marketing hype from Microsoft. It's ridiculous.
A friend of mine works at a big university. The stories I hear all the time are worse than the daily Dilbert strip. Once he had to go to a course out of town for five days because the professor didn't want his course to look bad because of too little attendees. In the end the majority of people were there only to increase headcount. And the ironic part is that they didn't get paid extra but had to work two unpaid weekends to do the work they missed during the unnecessary course.
Bottom line is: Many universities are already run by morons. If they continue to do bad decisions, all the brains leave and fast.
REDMOND, Wash. - Sept. 16, 1999. - SONY and Microsoft Corp. today announced their cooperation program to support new revolutionary media in Microsoft's new flagship product Windows 2000. The revolutionary Industry Standard OS will contain new startup sounds made by Michael Jackson.
"We are thrilled of this possibility to have professional quality startup sounds in Windows 2000," said Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates. The new sound files will be a special edition of soundtrack "Leave me alone", written by Michael Jackson while he was being prosecuted of child abuse. Microsoft is also planning a video starring Bill and Melinda Gates around the new startup sounds.
Microsoft will also start a new division for teaching Windows to children. Attendees will get a free Furby and a trip to Michael's amusement park for more personal training.
Freedom, freedom, freedom. For some twisted reason the freedom-card is most often pulled by an abuser. Spammers rage about freedom of (sic)speach, fundamentals about freedom of religion, nationalists about freedom in general, US government about free world and now Microsoft about freedom to innovate.
What's common with these all? Only they have the freedom but if you disagree with them, they go crazy and demand you to drop all your own freedom and personal choice.
Let's have a look at Microsoft. They are rich, powerful and big. There shouldn't be any problems for them to innovate. Just use enough money and brain power and come up with new revolutionary products. It shouldn't be a problem for them to make a browser and compete fairly in the free market.
But for Microsoft freedom is bad. Freedom to choose is bad because customers may choose the wrong product. So the competitor has to be crushed and what's a better way to do it than waving the flag of freedom?
Why just take the heart or lungs from a pig? Why not take the whole body? It would be so cool to see Bill's head on Babe the pig :-)
Ok, ok, some realism, please. How about Bill's head on a 800 pound gorilla?
If you create a new algorithm, you can choose not to share the source with the world. Feel free to make money with it. But I doubt that it will be used a lot as the world is full of proprietary data formats.
If you want the world to use your algorithm, publish it. Many will love it and start using it. But you can't expect to sit on your butt for the rest of your life collecting money from that one idea of yours. Make own products using it. At least you have the edge because it was you who created the idea in the first place.
If in the end the whole world uses your algorithm, you won't have any problems whatsoever to get a good job. Think about it, this is exactly how Linus Torvalds did it and he's not whining. Instead, he has a nice steady paycheck at Transmeta and he can choose any place to work at.
Many of you wonder why Delphi came on top instead of C/C++. It was not a surpise for me. If Microsoft would run a similar poll, Visual Basic would be on top. To understand why, you have to look at things from the other side of the fence.
If you're a Windows-user, you have several tools to choose from. You can use Visual Basic, Delphi or C/C++, for example. If you use C and want to write for Linux too, there is GCC, a lot of toolkits and everything you need. You can even use winelib if you want. You'll be productive pretty fast.
But imagine what would happen if you don't do C. What if you have done pascal for 10 years and never touched C? Then there's not any good tools to use. There is Free Pascal, but you can't use it to do X11-programming yet. There is Lazarus but it's not even alpha.
So you're stuck in the Windows-world with all those tens of thousands of lines of VB- or Delphi-code. And you're hating it and praying every day that Linux will get a decent development environment for Pascal or Basic.
Well... how? :-)
Where should I copy the ttf-fonts?
Anything else?
We'll here's all the goofs of the alien autopsy
Great fun to read :-)
I had bad arm pains for about a year. I really didn't know what it was and doctors didn't know it either. But when I typed, my arms started aching and cramping.
After visiting many doctors, one checked me well and said that he didn't find anything wrong with me. So if resting didn't help, start exercising and doing heavy work.
It sounded horrible but I did what he said. I continued typing even when it hurted. I started playing volley ball, throwing shot put and working heavily at my parents farm. As a miracle, all symptoms vanished and I was healthy. I continued to work out and I have never been healthier.
In the end I was afraid of my arms starting to ache and was tense when I tried to do everything right according to all CTS and RSI advice.
All cases are unique though. So talk with your doctor and don't risk your health by trying anything. But if your arms can take for example weight training, then do it.
And you, yes, you healthy geek with the coke and the pizza slice. Get off your butt and work out before you get arm problems ;-)
Remember that Microsoft always changes rules and plays dirty. They often reply with "similar tests" and "similar hardware" to challenges. So why can't Linus do it too?
In the end there can be a tie. Let NT win with that quad-processor beast. But if Linux wins with hardware that is more sensible for real world usage, then everything is just up to the decision makers. Some blow money, some want quality.
The key is to distract. Don't play by Microsoft's rules and don't complain. Just be thrilled by this opportunity and bring on the other setup too to make a service to all us customers. And remember to smile while doing it.
The first tip I got was to not rest my hands on the support in front of the keyboard. I used to just plant my hands there and type on. The problem with this is that your arms don't move enough.
Second advice was more radical. My arms were hurting but when a doctor diagnosed me, he didn't find any problems in me that would cause it. So he told me to use my arms. Do heavy work, type on, excercise and so on. Needless to say that I was scared of the advice but I tried it and it really helped. I haven't had any problems since then.
My advice for everybody is to work out. Do some sports with your arms as it really keeps them in great shape. Typing doesn't give you muscles or keep you in shape. That's why we get problems from the repetitive movements. But constructions workers don't get RSI or tennis elbow even when their work is also repetitive because their work is more versatile.
I still use a normal keyboard and won't change to an ergonomic one. I have put the half inch thick hand support under the front of the keyboard to lift it up. I work out regularly a few times a week. That's what works for me.
You may find some of my advice useful but if you have arm or wrist pains, don't just run blindly to try my advice. Consult your doctor first. (Standard disclaimer to avoid being sued) ;-)
I just wonder if you have bothered to RTFRN or to run Mozilla from the daily builds to see the progress? I have been trying them for a while already and there is progress.
A month ago almost no web pages were rendered correclty. Banners were here and there, text running in wrong places etc. But after each and every new version it started rendering better. That's progress.
Also I'd like to point out that apprunner is really pre-code. People really haven't been working on it for long. Most work has been done to create the rendering engine and not for the bells and whistles in the user interface. Also remember that they are creating cross-platform code so it required a lot of planning and programming to even get this far.
I usually use the viewer-program. It's the one that has been used to develop the rendering engine. No bookmarks or anything but it has been pretty stable and fast for me. To get an idea of Mozilla's speed, go visit sites with a lot of tables and resize the window. On my PII it's about ten times faster than Communicatore 4.51.
So if you don't mind it crashing 10 times a day, rendering pages wrong and not giving you everything a finished product does, go and try it. But if you don't understand what M4 is, do find out before whining.
It's important to make sure that people don't try to get a free ride with the open-source name. Ballmer tries to do that without knowing what open-source is. Al Gore knows even less. This letter gives Microsoft a fair warning in a polite way. It gives a nice, professional feeling of the open-source community.
I know from my personal experience that many members of the open-source community hate Microsoft with a mindless passion, and do not agree with some of the statements in this letter. There may even be some thoughtful community members who feel the same way.
The open source community is not about hating Microsoft. It's about cooperating and sharing code. It's supposed to be a nice playground for ideas. Good ones live while bad ones die. Now, if Microsoft wants to join, we have no right whatsoever to reject them. They have the right to offer their code and those who want to contribute will.
However, I bet that MS would screw it up like they usually do. Probably they'd release only a bit with a lot of marketing hype. They could maybe get some positive news articles but that'd be all they'd get because they'd not even expect to win more than that. They don't believe in open-source so they'll not make an effort big enough.
So if Microsoft does something, let's remain calm. Us fighting and rejecting them because they are Microsoft is not the way to go.