Google had a better idea with Wave: produce an open protocol that anybody could host. If Google did this from the get-go with 'Buzz', it would have a fighting chance.
Perhaps, but it's not at all clear. Technical issues are only one part of the problem. The other part is social, mindshare, etc, and it's very hard to dictate that. Gmail is already very popular; presumably Google is trying to leverage that popularity in their attempt to gain some traction against FB. They might succeed with that where earlier "technical" approaches failed.
I also hope they'll publish some protocols so that more people can play, but at least in the short run, the connection with success seems tenuous. In the long run, who knows, but at least Google's an awful lot more clueful about such things than the likes of FB; they may yet do the right thing...
The great thing about Gmail is that it is^H^Hwas a very usable email service that didn't try to tie you into a bajillion other parts of a website and other features you aren't really going to use.
But one of the nice things about Google's approach has been that they haven't changed the basic gmail interface much at all. They've added various features (some of which are actually very nice), but if you don't use them, they have little or no impact on the email functionality and interface.
Indeed, Gmail seems a bastion of stability and simplicity in a web where many sites seem completely out of control (FB, I'm looking at you...).
The same appears to be true of buzz: unless you use it, you won't notice it, or be affected by it.
The more stuff they add, the more likely I am to complain loudly about the death of Unix
That says more about you than it does about gmail...
Google isn't particularly good at anything these days
Er, except that they are.
Yeah google has some random lame stuff among all their various projects, but their core services (search and gmail) are still absolutely sterling.
Yes, google search still returns much better results than bing. Yes, gmail is still much better than yahoo-mail/hotmail.
I dunno what it is with all the "google sucks these days boo-hoo" whining you see on slashdot these days; it seems like some people just love to whine...
Actually one of RMS's most obvious behavioral tics is a habit of combing his beard with his fingers.
It may not actually make much difference, but he spends an awful lot of time doing it...
Emacs Calc, i.e. "M-x calc" in Emacs is by far the best calculator I've ever seen.
Here's the blurb from the manual:
"Calc" is an advanced calculator and mathematical tool that runs as part of the GNU Emacs environment. Very roughly based on the HP-28/48 series of calculators, its many features include:
Choice of algebraic or RPN (stack-based) entry of calculations.
Arbitrary precision integers and floating-point numbers.
Arithmetic on rational numbers, complex numbers (rectangular and polar), error forms with standard deviations, open and closed intervals, vectors and matrices, dates and times, infinities, sets, quantities with units, and algebraic formulas.
Mathematical operations such as logarithms and trigonometric functions.
Programmer's features (bitwise operations, non-decimal numbers).
Financial functions such as future value and internal rate of return.
Number theoretical features such as prime factorization and arithmetic modulo M for any M.
Algebraic manipulation features, including symbolic calculus.
Moving data to and from regular editing buffers.
Embedded mode for manipulating Calc formulas and data directly inside any editing buffer.
Graphics using GNUPLOT, a versatile (and free) plotting program.
Easy programming using keyboard macros, algebraic formulas, algebraic rewrite rules, or extended Emacs Lisp.
That list gives you a bit of an idea, but doesn't really capture how just darn cool Calc is; it just seems to do everything.... (The things I particularly value are the vector/matrix operations and the symbolic manipulation operators.)
It's (default) model is HP-style RPN, except of course with a much larger visible stack, and multi-level undo.
[You have to be careful tho because recent releases of Emacs come with two calculators -- a "simple" one, which you get with "M-x calculator", and the super incredible one you get with "M-x calc"... (yes it's kind of silly, but as usual with Emacs, there are historical reasons...]
I'm still a bit pissed-off that such a change would be made, unannounced, to people like me that actually pay for their services. This is a bit angrifying.
Why? The buttons are small, not particularly intrusive, and useful for people that use those services -- and as they're very popular, that's a lot of people.
If you don't use FB/twitter, or don't want to link to slashdot stories from there, then don't click the buttons.
But it's very 'raw' I feel, at least, I dabble in using Squeeze (Debian Testing), and there are plenty of bugs that are fixed in Ubuntu
While I'm sure there have been releases where Ubuntu was less buggy than the nearest Debian release, this simply isn't true in general; sometimes Ubuntu releases are better, sometimes they're worse. What Ubuntu does have, though, is more end-user-oriented support, a willingness to throw in some proprietary apps, and great marketing...
Other than those things, though, the Debian and Ubuntu are extremely similar to each other in feel, feature-set, and general robustness (they're far, far, closer to each other than either is to any other linux distro).
My research are is HPC, and I sometimes have toyed with trying to work for Google. They seemed like something special.
Now that they're pursuing unjustifiable software patents, I'm forced to sadly put Google into the same mental category as Microsoft and IBM. Like the other two companies, Google does some cool stuff, but I wouldn't feel much better about working for Google than I would for IBM or Microsoft.
Sad.
Perhaps, but it's almost impossible to find a computer software or hardware company of any size that doesn't do this. It's pretty much standard procedure in the industry.
... and it looks like the new GEGL core is based on floating-point operators, so it would seem simple to support floating-point image formats (e.g., OpenEXR) as well!
I tried rawstudio, but it kept crashing for me. Been using ufraw for two years, and it works great here. I don't think the UI is confusing.
Both ufraw and rawstudio seem generally usable to me. The annoying thing is that while ufraw has a great denoise tool (basically one parameter, and always seems to do a great job), it has no sharpening tool, and while rawstudio has a great sharpening tool, it has no denoising tool!!
Even more odd is that as I understand it, dcraw -- the underlying library both apps use -- is actually where ufraw gets its great denoise from, so it seems a bit peculiar that rawstudio doesn't use it...
[Overall, ufraw seems a bit nicer to me -- it has a lot of very well integrated tweaking knobs that do a good job without being overwhelming -- but rawstudio has more straightforward handling of multiple images, and that great sharpening...]
Now any Joe can run one with VirtualBox or VMware or whatever. Im sure most geeks have an old copy of windows 2000.
Eh? I don't have a copy of any windows. At home I build my own PCs, so I never get the "windows tax" copy most people have -- and I've been told even if you have that, vendor-specific mods etc can make running in a VM a bit dodgy, and they don't actually include a bootable version of the OS on the "restore" CDs. Even at work where they have a windows site license, it's proven very difficult to get a standalone copy for running in a VM on my linux box; I dunno whether it's institutional incompetence or some political bullshit, but either way, they keep promising to "look into it" and never deliver in the end.
I'd actually like a windows distro of some sort, so I can do various porting jobs and testing, but I'm not about to go giving any money to MS... It'd be great if ReactOS could do the job for me!
I don't know how obvious it is (was). My first two digital cameras didn't come with LCDs or LCD preview. They were simply digital versions of film cameras.
That doesn't mean it wasn't obvious, it simply means they were too cheap to put in extra components (good displays, fast sensors, and processing electronics get cheaper and cheaper, but they didn't start out that way) or spend more time updating their old film designs until demand forced them to.
A "through the lens" design has always been considered the ideal in cameras, but many, many, types of cameras (not just SLRs, but movie cameras, video cameras, etc) started out with much more clunky viewfinders, with professional models getting a real through-the-lens design first, and the feature slowly percolating into lower-priced models as the cost of providing them decreased, and demand increased.
In the case of digital cameras, there's been an exact analogue of the modern "live view" system used in video cameras for decades.
[DSLRs have been a bit side-tracked because they already had a through-the-lens solution that worked better than electronic displays, built on existing film technology, and avoided some sticky problems (in particular, if you have a mirror-box like an SLR, you can use phase-based autofocus, which has traditionally been much more usable than the contrast-based autofocus you need to use if you don't have a mirror-box). Electronic viewfinder and contrast-based autofocus technology is getting better though, so I suppose the SLR-based designs will eventually be replaced by electronic viewfinders.]
The problem we have is with the benefit of hindsight, every digital camera has a screen on it, so it's not easy for us to imagine it any other way.
Oh, bullshit. Some inventions are indeed novel and "obvious" only in hindsight, but this isn't one of them. This is the bloody obvious way to do it, to anyone with half a clue, given sensor and display technology that are up to the job. Moreover, there's tons of prior art with video cameras etc. It should never have been granted a patent.
Yeah, the presence or absence of 32-bit libraries is the main issue when trying to run 32-bit apps on a 64-bit linux system.
It's a huge annoyance for the distro maintainers -- should they include/package 32-bit versions of every library on their 64-bit port, just to support a few random proprietary software makers who are too lazy/incompetent to compile a 64-bit version? If not, which libraries need 32-bit versions? etc.
Why do slick web sites matter? I would rather see an informative web site.
Oh, I absolutely agree, and the Liquavista website is actually pretty informative (download the pdf there for even more details). For anyone actually interested in the tech, it's a much better site (the mirasol site seems much lighter on actual details, though maybe they've just hidden them well amongst all the flash animations).
Still, in some quarters, a clunky-looking site may hurt them a bit; marketing is still part of the tech business...
"Neat" has nothing to do with it. When the Kindle has been idle for a while it displays what people here are calling a screen saver. Except it's not a screen saver. It's really just a way of the Kindle letting you know that you have to unlock it (just a key press combination, not a security code) to start reading. Being in this mode stops the Kindle from doing things when the buttons are accidentally pressed, thereby saving your spot.
What if you're just a really slow reader, though...? It seems vaguely annoying to have to press a button occasionally just to prevent it from going into a sleep mode, especially given there's no power saving from the sleep mode at all (is there a "nop" button?).
I'm sure Air Canada has its issues (though my few flights with them have been great), but that thread is mostly pathetic whining. After reading it, my main feeling is a slight sympathy for the airline, at having to put up with these tossers...
Incidentally, as an update, there was a new bug-fix release (4.0.288.1) of chrome-for-linux released today, and it fixed the C-n behavior! So I can't complain about that anymore...
If you think Firefox uses a lot of memory, don't use Chromium.
Well, that's true, kinda, though it's often a bit hard to distinguish true duplication between processes from memory which is mapped into multiple processes, but actually shared (e.g., shared libraries).
I still actually prefer chrome in memory-tight situations because it's so much easier to control memory usage -- in FF really all you can do is close the entire browser when it gets piggy, which is annoying, but in chrome, you can often really cut memory usage by closing a few tabs.
I've found chrome to be a decent brower, and the tab-process thing is very cool, but it doesn't quite live up to the hype I think. It isn't significantly faster than FF on my system (mostly FF falls down in specific, but fairly rare, situations), the UI isn't notably better, and in many ways it's a lot less polished than FF. E.g., if you enable emacs-style editor commands in GTK (which applies to text-entry boxes), they "kinda" work in chrome, but it also steals some keystrokes it shouldn't, which can be infuriating (hit C-n 5 times to move down 5 lines, and.. oh shit it created 5 new browser windows instead!); this works much better in FF.
Still, they clearly have some nice ideas, and I'd like to at least try out chrome more (I guess the bugs will get fixed eventually), but currently chrome also has some nasty interactions with X that periodically result in my window manager crashing...
Well, you could ask the people thus "liberated", whether it was OK with them, and what they'd like. That's something China's generally not very good at though...
Slashdot Mirror
the parlance of the English language allows the use of "their" for the singular gender-neutral possessive.
Many people cannot seem to come to terms with this, however...
Google had a better idea with Wave: produce an open protocol that anybody could host. If Google did this from the get-go with 'Buzz', it would have a fighting chance.
Perhaps, but it's not at all clear. Technical issues are only one part of the problem. The other part is social, mindshare, etc, and it's very hard to dictate that. Gmail is already very popular; presumably Google is trying to leverage that popularity in their attempt to gain some traction against FB. They might succeed with that where earlier "technical" approaches failed.
I also hope they'll publish some protocols so that more people can play, but at least in the short run, the connection with success seems tenuous. In the long run, who knows, but at least Google's an awful lot more clueful about such things than the likes of FB; they may yet do the right thing...
The great thing about Gmail is that it is^H^Hwas a very usable email service that didn't try to tie you into a bajillion other parts of a website and other features you aren't really going to use.
But one of the nice things about Google's approach has been that they haven't changed the basic gmail interface much at all. They've added various features (some of which are actually very nice), but if you don't use them, they have little or no impact on the email functionality and interface.
Indeed, Gmail seems a bastion of stability and simplicity in a web where many sites seem completely out of control (FB, I'm looking at you...).
The same appears to be true of buzz: unless you use it, you won't notice it, or be affected by it.
The more stuff they add, the more likely I am to complain loudly about the death of Unix
That says more about you than it does about gmail...
Google isn't particularly good at anything these days
Er, except that they are.
Yeah google has some random lame stuff among all their various projects, but their core services (search and gmail) are still absolutely sterling.
Yes, google search still returns much better results than bing. Yes, gmail is still much better than yahoo-mail/hotmail.
I dunno what it is with all the "google sucks these days boo-hoo" whining you see on slashdot these days; it seems like some people just love to whine...
I call fake!
RMS has never combed his beard.
Actually one of RMS's most obvious behavioral tics is a habit of combing his beard with his fingers. It may not actually make much difference, but he spends an awful lot of time doing it...
Emacs Calc, i.e. "M-x calc" in Emacs is by far the best calculator I've ever seen.
Here's the blurb from the manual:
That list gives you a bit of an idea, but doesn't really capture how just darn cool Calc is; it just seems to do everything.... (The things I particularly value are the vector/matrix operations and the symbolic manipulation operators.)
It's (default) model is HP-style RPN, except of course with a much larger visible stack, and multi-level undo.
[You have to be careful tho because recent releases of Emacs come with two calculators -- a "simple" one, which you get with "M-x calculator", and the super incredible one you get with "M-x calc"... (yes it's kind of silly, but as usual with Emacs, there are historical reasons...]
I'm still a bit pissed-off that such a change would be made, unannounced, to people like me that actually pay for their services. This is a bit angrifying.
Why? The buttons are small, not particularly intrusive, and useful for people that use those services -- and as they're very popular, that's a lot of people.
If you don't use FB/twitter, or don't want to link to slashdot stories from there, then don't click the buttons.
Yeesh...
debian?
But it's very 'raw' I feel, at least, I dabble in using Squeeze (Debian Testing), and there are plenty of bugs that are fixed in Ubuntu
While I'm sure there have been releases where Ubuntu was less buggy than the nearest Debian release, this simply isn't true in general; sometimes Ubuntu releases are better, sometimes they're worse. What Ubuntu does have, though, is more end-user-oriented support, a willingness to throw in some proprietary apps, and great marketing...
Other than those things, though, the Debian and Ubuntu are extremely similar to each other in feel, feature-set, and general robustness (they're far, far, closer to each other than either is to any other linux distro).
My research are is HPC, and I sometimes have toyed with trying to work for Google. They seemed like something special.
Now that they're pursuing unjustifiable software patents, I'm forced to sadly put Google into the same mental category as Microsoft and IBM. Like the other two companies, Google does some cool stuff, but I wouldn't feel much better about working for Google than I would for IBM or Microsoft.
Sad.
Perhaps, but it's almost impossible to find a computer software or hardware company of any size that doesn't do this. It's pretty much standard procedure in the industry.
I think that if Google doesn't sponsor Mozilla, they'll probably switch to Bing.
Huh? Why on earth would they?
If nobody's paying them to choose, they'll just default to the best and most popular search engine -- which is google.
... and it looks like the new GEGL core is based on floating-point operators, so it would seem simple to support floating-point image formats (e.g., OpenEXR) as well!
I tried rawstudio, but it kept crashing for me. Been using ufraw for two years, and it works great here. I don't think the UI is confusing.
Both ufraw and rawstudio seem generally usable to me. The annoying thing is that while ufraw has a great denoise tool (basically one parameter, and always seems to do a great job), it has no sharpening tool, and while rawstudio has a great sharpening tool, it has no denoising tool!!
Even more odd is that as I understand it, dcraw -- the underlying library both apps use -- is actually where ufraw gets its great denoise from, so it seems a bit peculiar that rawstudio doesn't use it...
[Overall, ufraw seems a bit nicer to me -- it has a lot of very well integrated tweaking knobs that do a good job without being overwhelming -- but rawstudio has more straightforward handling of multiple images, and that great sharpening...]
Now any Joe can run one with VirtualBox or VMware or whatever. Im sure most geeks have an old copy of windows 2000.
Eh? I don't have a copy of any windows. At home I build my own PCs, so I never get the "windows tax" copy most people have -- and I've been told even if you have that, vendor-specific mods etc can make running in a VM a bit dodgy, and they don't actually include a bootable version of the OS on the "restore" CDs. Even at work where they have a windows site license, it's proven very difficult to get a standalone copy for running in a VM on my linux box; I dunno whether it's institutional incompetence or some political bullshit, but either way, they keep promising to "look into it" and never deliver in the end.
I'd actually like a windows distro of some sort, so I can do various porting jobs and testing, but I'm not about to go giving any money to MS... It'd be great if ReactOS could do the job for me!
I don't know how obvious it is (was). My first two digital cameras didn't come with LCDs or LCD preview. They were simply digital versions of film cameras.
That doesn't mean it wasn't obvious, it simply means they were too cheap to put in extra components (good displays, fast sensors, and processing electronics get cheaper and cheaper, but they didn't start out that way) or spend more time updating their old film designs until demand forced them to.
A "through the lens" design has always been considered the ideal in cameras, but many, many, types of cameras (not just SLRs, but movie cameras, video cameras, etc) started out with much more clunky viewfinders, with professional models getting a real through-the-lens design first, and the feature slowly percolating into lower-priced models as the cost of providing them decreased, and demand increased.
In the case of digital cameras, there's been an exact analogue of the modern "live view" system used in video cameras for decades.
[DSLRs have been a bit side-tracked because they already had a through-the-lens solution that worked better than electronic displays, built on existing film technology, and avoided some sticky problems (in particular, if you have a mirror-box like an SLR, you can use phase-based autofocus, which has traditionally been much more usable than the contrast-based autofocus you need to use if you don't have a mirror-box). Electronic viewfinder and contrast-based autofocus technology is getting better though, so I suppose the SLR-based designs will eventually be replaced by electronic viewfinders.]
The problem we have is with the benefit of hindsight, every digital camera has a screen on it, so it's not easy for us to imagine it any other way.
Oh, bullshit. Some inventions are indeed novel and "obvious" only in hindsight, but this isn't one of them. This is the bloody obvious way to do it, to anyone with half a clue, given sensor and display technology that are up to the job. Moreover, there's tons of prior art with video cameras etc. It should never have been granted a patent.
Yeah, the presence or absence of 32-bit libraries is the main issue when trying to run 32-bit apps on a 64-bit linux system.
It's a huge annoyance for the distro maintainers -- should they include/package 32-bit versions of every library on their 64-bit port, just to support a few random proprietary software makers who are too lazy/incompetent to compile a 64-bit version? If not, which libraries need 32-bit versions? etc.
Why do slick web sites matter? I would rather see an informative web site.
Oh, I absolutely agree, and the Liquavista website is actually pretty informative (download the pdf there for even more details). For anyone actually interested in the tech, it's a much better site (the mirasol site seems much lighter on actual details, though maybe they've just hidden them well amongst all the flash animations).
Still, in some quarters, a clunky-looking site may hurt them a bit; marketing is still part of the tech business...
"Neat" has nothing to do with it. When the Kindle has been idle for a while it displays what people here are calling a screen saver. Except it's not a screen saver. It's really just a way of the Kindle letting you know that you have to unlock it (just a key press combination, not a security code) to start reading. Being in this mode stops the Kindle from doing things when the buttons are accidentally pressed, thereby saving your spot.
What if you're just a really slow reader, though...? It seems vaguely annoying to have to press a button occasionally just to prevent it from going into a sleep mode, especially given there's no power saving from the sleep mode at all (is there a "nop" button?).
The Liquavista stuff looks more interesting though -- in particular, it doesn't need separate pixels for RGB.
(The Liquavista website is not nearly as slick as the mirasol site tho; it looks like the researchers also did the web design...)
I'm sure Air Canada has its issues (though my few flights with them have been great), but that thread is mostly pathetic whining. After reading it, my main feeling is a slight sympathy for the airline, at having to put up with these tossers...
Incidentally, as an update, there was a new bug-fix release (4.0.288.1) of chrome-for-linux released today, and it fixed the C-n behavior! So I can't complain about that anymore...
If you think Firefox uses a lot of memory, don't use Chromium.
Well, that's true, kinda, though it's often a bit hard to distinguish true duplication between processes from memory which is mapped into multiple processes, but actually shared (e.g., shared libraries).
I still actually prefer chrome in memory-tight situations because it's so much easier to control memory usage -- in FF really all you can do is close the entire browser when it gets piggy, which is annoying, but in chrome, you can often really cut memory usage by closing a few tabs.
I've found chrome to be a decent brower, and the tab-process thing is very cool, but it doesn't quite live up to the hype I think. It isn't significantly faster than FF on my system (mostly FF falls down in specific, but fairly rare, situations), the UI isn't notably better, and in many ways it's a lot less polished than FF. E.g., if you enable emacs-style editor commands in GTK (which applies to text-entry boxes), they "kinda" work in chrome, but it also steals some keystrokes it shouldn't, which can be infuriating (hit C-n 5 times to move down 5 lines, and .. oh shit it created 5 new browser windows instead!); this works much better in FF.
Still, they clearly have some nice ideas, and I'd like to at least try out chrome more (I guess the bugs will get fixed eventually), but currently chrome also has some nasty interactions with X that periodically result in my window manager crashing...
Fair question. And, a tough one to answer.
Well, you could ask the people thus "liberated", whether it was OK with them, and what they'd like. That's something China's generally not very good at though...
Great, I can look forward to spending 10 minutes wading my way through adventure choices for them all to end in a rick roll.
Kinda like real life...