Ack! The one time I'm around early enough to make a comment like that and it turns out it's not down. (Or if it was, they recovered quickly.) In any case, it looks great. And being MySQL-based, the big missing feature--search--should be pretty easy to add. In fact, all I've ever wanted was an SQL query window I can run against my email--`select * from inbox where (sender='mom' or sender='dad') and date>20041225 and date20041230 and subject like '%party%'`
If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, skip down to the part about HTA's.
Basically, just like Sony has competing divisions (content creation & media playback) with different goals ("charge for every play!" vs. "be able to play anything!") MS is currently getting cut in two by their desire to keep their desktop dominance and their need to compete with other companies that offer great web apps.
I use two very simple things: popup-blocking browsers (Safari or Firefox, depending on which platform I'm on) (which, by the way, prevent me from using exactly zero sites) and a custom/etc/hosts file. My favorite used to be really high on google but it doesn't seem to be any more, but here it is: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt">block spyware and ads with a custom/etc/hosts file. (Of course, you can search google for "block spyware ads/etc/hosts" and find lots of others, but I think this is the best. The number one match is usually a no-longer-maintained one from CSU, Chico, oddly.) Not only does it block hundreds of ad sites (like doubleclick) it also blocks lots of spyware carries and sites that host malicious dialers as well.
You can get a great digital projector, receiver, speakers, and DVD player...
Which of those products will record and store shows? My definition of "home theater" includes a whole lot more than "watching shit I got at Blockbuster."
...if you keep an eye on all their deals, you can almost always do better. It'd be one thing if they were saying across the board "No OS...subtract $30" like they do when you take out a modem, NIC, floppy, speakers, etc. But this is more of a "religious" thing than an actual cost-saving measure.
From TFA: "[Dell's] Dimension E510n PC... retails for US$849 and comes with a Pentium 4 processor; 512MB of advanced DDR computer memory; a 128MB ATI Radeon X300SE HyperMemory video card; an 80GB serial ATA hard drive and a one-year limited warranty."
From Dell.com: Dimension 3000, $579, 2.8GHz P4, XP Home, 512 MB, 160 GB ATA/100 7200 RPM HD, and an analog 17" LCD. $659 gets you a Dimension 4700 with a 3.2GHz HT P4 and a 160 GB SATA drive. Oh yeah, and a 17" LCD.
Yes, there are differences, chief among them the video card (onboard versus *ahem* ATI) but still... $200 less *and* an LCD? Come on.
> The point is, do you feel it is responsible for a government to give that type of power to it's citizens?
Since the government can't be everywhere at all times, yes, the government *must* give their citizens that power. Or do you think dialing 911 causes police to beam into your house?
> What have you done to show me that you can be trusted with this kind of power?
What have you done to show me that you can be trusted to drink alcohol and then not drive down my street? Maybe we need to go back to Prohibition.
Do you *realize* how much trust you've been given without "proving" anything? What--you think driving in circles around the DMV "proves" to anyone you're not going to drive through a schoolyard? Quite the opposite--if anything, it proves that you're capable of driving a car into whatever you aim at! (I got a 97 on driving test when I was 16--lost 3 points from not backing up straight. I guess they want to make sure I can bean little Suzy dead-on, even backwards, if I decide to.) But they still gave you a license. What do you think of that? Hell, if you're making nonsensical arguments like this, *I* don't trust you to drive! Quick, gimme your license!
Or better yet: go on a trip to Switzerland, where every able-bodied adult is required to serve for two years in the military *and* is then *required* to keep an assault rifle at home. And I don't mean what the media here calls "assault rifles"--semi-autos that have the misfortune to *look* like military rifles. I'm talking about an honest-to-God high-powered fully-automatic high-capacity get-some-work-done assault rifle.
My friends and I have a saying: "Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my guns have."
> If you want to carry around something that you can keep in your pocket, point at someone, pull the trigger and become judge-jury-and-executioner...
Yeah. Contrast that with the cranked-up meth freak with a knife who will play "thief" rather than "judge-jury-and-executioner" with the same result--a loss of life. God forbid we give honest citizens the chance to defend themselves from people like this. Or wait, in your world, are we supposed to just hide under our beds every hour of the day? Better hope they don't discover what "breaking in" is--you'll *really* be fucked then.
"Well, you know, that's kind of like saying that air impedes an airplane. That's true, but it also flows over the wings and provides lift."
Exactly. Very, very well put. (Bonus: air is also needed by the engines.) It's like he's saying "Ferraris are great, but they won't be popular until they're less than $10,000." You can't have it both ways. What makes a Ferrari great can't be done for less than $10,000. Yes, there are places where Linux being non-GPL would help, but Linux would not be where it is today if it weren't GPL in the first place. Everything has its pluses and minuses.
And desktop Linux is not stuck on stupid, the author is stuck on stupid: "...Linux growth didn't slow because of competition - something else must have caused it and we need to understand what that was before we can work up a plan to do something about it." Um, maybe Linux just got to the point where everyone who wants it, has it? There are such things as saturation and natural limits. Just because Linus jokes about world domination does not mean that Linux is a failure if it isn't the only system in use on every computer everywhere. Would he consider it a success if humans killed off every other species on the planet?
Being funded by tax dollars does not make an institution 100% open. Try bringing some friends to your local IRS office for a picnic in the lobby. Or maybe your local police station--hell, it says "to protect AND SERVE" right on the cars, right? Walk in there and as one of them to bring you a drink. Or hell, see how far you can get at a nearby military base. They've got lots of cool stuff there, and you're paying for it, right?
Uni libraries are usually restricted to those who pay $$$ to attend said uni. Some will let anyone in, but most won't let anyone but students and faculty check out materials. Those materials need to be there for the students. It wouldn't do to let someone come along and check out 10,000 volumes. And even if it were, who's gonna pay the attendant to check out all those books? And keep track of which are where? And get them back after a certain time? The world doesn't run on nothing. There are administrative costs and lots of other things involved. Just because you can check out a book for free doesn't mean you can check out a thousand at once. Things like that don't scale. Walk into a McDonalds, buy an ice tea, and put some sugar in it. Works, right? Now ask the lady at the counter for all the sugar in the place. Different result, right?
I find it funny (in an ironic way only) that the University of California is allowing its public domain books to be scanned by Yahoo. At the same time, UC libraries prohibit scanning for Project Gutenberg or other true "open" content projects unless they receive $$$$ in royalities... libraries are supposed to be public resources...
But, in the process of becoming good at that, they've become damn good at handling tons of data quickly and efficiently, and they have got a lot of very clever people thinking up lots of cool stuff. Anything is possible. This isn't just Netscape in 1996 saying "The web is the next platform, and, um... *someone* is going to write apps for it!" Google can do everything, top to bottom. Thanks to how far various open source projects have come in the last few years, Google could release their own browser and OS, in addition to this office suite, if they wanted.
And by the way... So either an office suite war will start.. or MS will slow down on the area of searching and let Google have that part of the market.
Don't hold your breath waiting for MS to roll over.
Aha! I've figured it out! Google *is* going to make their own browser. In normal mode, it works like any other browser. But when visiting a Google App, all of a sudden *all* keyboard shortcuts (except for the biggies--close window, print, etc.) get sent to the app! This is one part of why web apps are so hard to make now--because all the keystrokes are consumed by the browser. In the FireThunderGooglePhoenix browser, 'control-A' will select all the text in your app, *not* every word in the browser window!
Of course, the apps will also work in non-Google browsers, they will just need to use 'alternate' shortcuts or be mouse-centric.
One more note: since it's a web app, it'll have style sheets, right? Look forward to the next big use of '@media' CSS. Ever notice how when you print a Wikipedia page all the web-centric stuff (nav links, search box, etc.) disappears? Same thing here: when you print the page, all the toolbars and stuff won't print. Brilliant!
...when the government figures out how to tax a sunbeam, and we'll have effective anti-Internet-fraud laws when it becomes feasible to get an anonymous Romanian into court.
'-F' shows a slash after each entry that's a directory, an asterisk after each executable, and some other things. Read the man page for 'ls' sometime, it's like a whole freaking operating system.
NAME
ls - list directory contents
SYNOPSIS
ls [-ABCFGHLPRTWZabcdfghiklmnopqrstuwx1]
By the way, my favorite script fu is `du -sh./*` to show how much room each file takes up, and it adds up directories also--just like 'calculate folder sizes' has done in Mac OS for a decade.
Worried about gas prices? Buy a used econobox. A 4-year-old Toyota Corolla can be had for $10,000, leaving you with $10,000 to spend on gas compared to buying a $20,000 Prius. Say gas is $4/gallon. That's 2,500 gallons you can buy. At 25 mpg that's 62,500 miles--and those are veeery conservative numbers. If gas is $3 a gallon and the Corolla gets 30 mpg (both closer to reality) that's 100,000 miles.
True. But never overestimate the average PHB's ability to learn new things. Seriously--I'm not being a dick here or just parroting Dilbert. The fact is, 90% of the world just doesn't get techy stuff. Whatever format shows up in the "Save as" dialog by default is the one they will use. And God help you if there's something useful in the "Export" menu.
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course, the one time I don't preview is the one time I have a '<' for slashdot to swallow--there's supposed to be one in 'and date<20041230'
Ack! The one time I'm around early enough to make a comment like that and it turns out it's not down. (Or if it was, they recovered quickly.) In any case, it looks great. And being MySQL-based, the big missing feature--search--should be pretty easy to add. In fact, all I've ever wanted was an SQL query window I can run against my email--`select * from inbox where (sender='mom' or sender='dad') and date>20041225 and date20041230 and subject like '%party%'`
A new record?
Free, open-source AJAX webmail--it seems we've discovered the secret formula to get slashdotters to read articles!
Why wasn't Microsoft first off the block with public AJAX webmail too?
This is why.
If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, skip down to the part about HTA's.
Basically, just like Sony has competing divisions (content creation & media playback) with different goals ("charge for every play!" vs. "be able to play anything!") MS is currently getting cut in two by their desire to keep their desktop dominance and their need to compete with other companies that offer great web apps.
I use two very simple things: popup-blocking browsers (Safari or Firefox, depending on which platform I'm on) (which, by the way, prevent me from using exactly zero sites) and a custom /etc/hosts file. My favorite used to be really high on google but it doesn't seem to be any more, but here it is: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt">block spyware and ads with a custom /etc/hosts file. (Of course, you can search google for "block spyware ads /etc/hosts" and find lots of others, but I think this is the best. The number one match is usually a no-longer-maintained one from CSU, Chico, oddly.) Not only does it block hundreds of ad sites (like doubleclick) it also blocks lots of spyware carries and sites that host malicious dialers as well.
Whenever I buy a pizza I have them cut it into four pieces. I can't eat more than four.
You can get a great digital projector, receiver, speakers, and DVD player...
Which of those products will record and store shows? My definition of "home theater" includes a whole lot more than "watching shit I got at Blockbuster."
Hysterical. And me without mod points.
That was a very funny post. I want to meet the crack-smoking mods who got you to "+5, Insightful."
I'm too lazy to visit and enter a username/password. what happens when you use that 'browser' to view itself?
You'd think SLASHDOT editors (and the use of that term here gets looser and looser every day) would notice it, especially twice in two days.
Tomorrow on slashdot: read about the new browser Google will build, based on Netscape's Mozilla!
it's all just rumor... in a week we'll all know!
:-)
that won't stop a dozen sites from posting 14 stories each about this event between now and then.
...if you keep an eye on all their deals, you can almost always do better. It'd be one thing if they were saying across the board "No OS...subtract $30" like they do when you take out a modem, NIC, floppy, speakers, etc. But this is more of a "religious" thing than an actual cost-saving measure.
From TFA: "[Dell's] Dimension E510n PC... retails for US$849 and comes with a Pentium 4 processor; 512MB of advanced DDR computer memory; a 128MB ATI Radeon X300SE HyperMemory video card; an 80GB serial ATA hard drive and a one-year limited warranty."
From Dell.com: Dimension 3000, $579, 2.8GHz P4, XP Home, 512 MB, 160 GB ATA/100 7200 RPM HD, and an analog 17" LCD. $659 gets you a Dimension 4700 with a 3.2GHz HT P4 and a 160 GB SATA drive. Oh yeah, and a 17" LCD.
Yes, there are differences, chief among them the video card (onboard versus *ahem* ATI) but still... $200 less *and* an LCD? Come on.
> The point is, do you feel it is responsible for a government to give that type of power to it's citizens?
Since the government can't be everywhere at all times, yes, the government *must* give their citizens that power. Or do you think dialing 911 causes police to beam into your house?
> What have you done to show me that you can be trusted with this kind of power?
What have you done to show me that you can be trusted to drink alcohol and then not drive down my street? Maybe we need to go back to Prohibition.
Do you *realize* how much trust you've been given without "proving" anything? What--you think driving in circles around the DMV "proves" to anyone you're not going to drive through a schoolyard? Quite the opposite--if anything, it proves that you're capable of driving a car into whatever you aim at! (I got a 97 on driving test when I was 16--lost 3 points from not backing up straight. I guess they want to make sure I can bean little Suzy dead-on, even backwards, if I decide to.) But they still gave you a license. What do you think of that? Hell, if you're making nonsensical arguments like this, *I* don't trust you to drive! Quick, gimme your license!
Or better yet: go on a trip to Switzerland, where every able-bodied adult is required to serve for two years in the military *and* is then *required* to keep an assault rifle at home. And I don't mean what the media here calls "assault rifles"--semi-autos that have the misfortune to *look* like military rifles. I'm talking about an honest-to-God high-powered fully-automatic high-capacity get-some-work-done assault rifle.
My friends and I have a saying: "Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my guns have."
> If you want to carry around something that you can keep in your pocket, point at someone, pull the trigger and become judge-jury-and-executioner...
Yeah. Contrast that with the cranked-up meth freak with a knife who will play "thief" rather than "judge-jury-and-executioner" with the same result--a loss of life. God forbid we give honest citizens the chance to defend themselves from people like this. Or wait, in your world, are we supposed to just hide under our beds every hour of the day? Better hope they don't discover what "breaking in" is--you'll *really* be fucked then.
"Well, you know, that's kind of like saying that air impedes an airplane. That's true, but it also flows over the wings and provides lift."
Exactly. Very, very well put. (Bonus: air is also needed by the engines.) It's like he's saying "Ferraris are great, but they won't be popular until they're less than $10,000." You can't have it both ways. What makes a Ferrari great can't be done for less than $10,000. Yes, there are places where Linux being non-GPL would help, but Linux would not be where it is today if it weren't GPL in the first place. Everything has its pluses and minuses.
And desktop Linux is not stuck on stupid, the author is stuck on stupid:
"...Linux growth didn't slow because of competition - something else must have caused it and we need to understand what that was before we can work up a plan to do something about it."
Um, maybe Linux just got to the point where everyone who wants it, has it? There are such things as saturation and natural limits. Just because Linus jokes about world domination does not mean that Linux is a failure if it isn't the only system in use on every computer everywhere. Would he consider it a success if humans killed off every other species on the planet?
Being funded by tax dollars does not make an institution 100% open. Try bringing some friends to your local IRS office for a picnic in the lobby. Or maybe your local police station--hell, it says "to protect AND SERVE" right on the cars, right? Walk in there and as one of them to bring you a drink. Or hell, see how far you can get at a nearby military base. They've got lots of cool stuff there, and you're paying for it, right?
Uni libraries are usually restricted to those who pay $$$ to attend said uni. Some will let anyone in, but most won't let anyone but students and faculty check out materials. Those materials need to be there for the students. It wouldn't do to let someone come along and check out 10,000 volumes. And even if it were, who's gonna pay the attendant to check out all those books? And keep track of which are where? And get them back after a certain time? The world doesn't run on nothing. There are administrative costs and lots of other things involved. Just because you can check out a book for free doesn't mean you can check out a thousand at once. Things like that don't scale. Walk into a McDonalds, buy an ice tea, and put some sugar in it. Works, right? Now ask the lady at the counter for all the sugar in the place. Different result, right?
I find it funny (in an ironic way only) that the University of California is allowing its public domain books to be scanned by Yahoo. At the same time, UC libraries prohibit scanning for Project Gutenberg or other true "open" content projects unless they receive $$$$ in royalities... libraries are supposed to be public resources...
University library != public library.
They're a great group, but they've using some *really* shitty compression algos. :-)
Format - Encoding - Compression - Size
HTML - iso-8859-1 - none - - - 1.27 MB
HTML - iso-8859-1 - zip - - - 5.95 MB
Googles main business is searching..
But, in the process of becoming good at that, they've become damn good at handling tons of data quickly and efficiently, and they have got a lot of very clever people thinking up lots of cool stuff. Anything is possible. This isn't just Netscape in 1996 saying "The web is the next platform, and, um... *someone* is going to write apps for it!" Google can do everything, top to bottom. Thanks to how far various open source projects have come in the last few years, Google could release their own browser and OS, in addition to this office suite, if they wanted.
And by the way...
So either an office suite war will start.. or MS will slow down on the area of searching and let Google have that part of the market.
Don't hold your breath waiting for MS to roll over.
Aha! I've figured it out! Google *is* going to make their own browser. In normal mode, it works like any other browser. But when visiting a Google App, all of a sudden *all* keyboard shortcuts (except for the biggies--close window, print, etc.) get sent to the app! This is one part of why web apps are so hard to make now--because all the keystrokes are consumed by the browser. In the FireThunderGooglePhoenix browser, 'control-A' will select all the text in your app, *not* every word in the browser window!
Of course, the apps will also work in non-Google browsers, they will just need to use 'alternate' shortcuts or be mouse-centric.
One more note: since it's a web app, it'll have style sheets, right? Look forward to the next big use of '@media' CSS. Ever notice how when you print a Wikipedia page all the web-centric stuff (nav links, search box, etc.) disappears? Same thing here: when you print the page, all the toolbars and stuff won't print. Brilliant!
...when the government figures out how to tax a sunbeam, and we'll have effective anti-Internet-fraud laws when it becomes feasible to get an anonymous Romanian into court.
try ls -F | grep /
./*` to show how much room each file takes up, and it adds up directories also--just like 'calculate folder sizes' has done in Mac OS for a decade.
'-F' shows a slash after each entry that's a directory, an asterisk after each executable, and some other things. Read the man page for 'ls' sometime, it's like a whole freaking operating system.
NAME
ls - list directory contents
SYNOPSIS
ls [-ABCFGHLPRTWZabcdfghiklmnopqrstuwx1]
By the way, my favorite script fu is `du -sh
Worried about gas prices? Buy a used econobox. A 4-year-old Toyota Corolla can be had for $10,000, leaving you with $10,000 to spend on gas compared to buying a $20,000 Prius. Say gas is $4/gallon. That's 2,500 gallons you can buy. At 25 mpg that's 62,500 miles--and those are veeery conservative numbers. If gas is $3 a gallon and the Corolla gets 30 mpg (both closer to reality) that's 100,000 miles.
Never underestimate a PHB on a power trip.
True. But never overestimate the average PHB's ability to learn new things. Seriously--I'm not being a dick here or just parroting Dilbert. The fact is, 90% of the world just doesn't get techy stuff. Whatever format shows up in the "Save as" dialog by default is the one they will use. And God help you if there's something useful in the "Export" menu.
Because MS doesn't want anyone to have a chance. There's a difference.