So they make an income from the registration details they take? By selling them on to marketers, one assumes.
You can't assume that. There are many valid, non-evil reasons companies really want demographic information. They want to know their customer base so they know how to design their web site and products to best tailor their customers. Sure, some companies are slimy about it, and that sucks. But any company that expects to survive wants to know their customers as much as possible.
approve of a business model that is based upon supplying personal information to spammers, mass-marketers and other spies.
That's an invalid assumption. Understandable, since unfortunately it happens, but that's not always true. Not all marketing is Evil. Not all ads are Evil.
To summarise: I don't like registration screens, I am never going to like registration screens, and I shall continue to publicly disapprove of them as I see fit. Maybe you should learn to deal with it.
No problems here. I'm not saying you have to like it; heck I'm not crazy about it either, and believe me, I hate the over-marketization of our society. All I'm saying is that it's not necessarily evil, and any knee-jerk reaction that all ads/registration/marketing are Evil is naive.
Salon.com requires a soul-sucking registration link.
Oh please grow up.
It may come as a complete shock to some people here, but some companies have to make a living somehow. And some of those companies, like Salon.com, have been struggling for quite a while and are not hyper-rich media conglomerates who can afford to not try whatever they can to make an honest living.
You do not have a God-given right to free content provided at the expense of the work of others. (And no I don't care if Salon.com didn't write the original article, they provide plenty of home brewed articles and opinion which I think are totally worth it.) Deal with it.
It's amazing how people who don't RTFA get modded up. I guess the moderators don't RTFA any more than the posters or the editors.
From the article:
IBM Cloudscape(TM) V10.0 is a pure, open source-based Java relational database management system that can be embedded in Java programs and used for online transaction processing (OLTP). A platform-independent, small-footprint (2MB) database, Cloudscape V10.0 integrates tightly with any Java-based solution.
Read why IBM is open sourcing Cloudscape as Derby.
Open source code is available on the Apache Incubator Project site.
Runs on any standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM), allowing developers to "write once, deploy anywhere."
Embeddable inside Java applications on the server, desktop or in pervasive devices.
Apparently the reason to use Java is that it's geared towards Java developers and applications, especially embedded ones.
WebLogic provides several platform-specific libraries with native language calls for performance (one example is socket and file access). In addition, our particular application uses several platform specific third party libraries, both pure Java and native code. For a while I had to hunt Linux versions of these libraries, but nowadays our vendor partners are pretty good about already having Linux libs.
I work for a fairly high profile Internet commerce company that uses WebLogic and pure Java. Our production servers all run Solaris, most of our developers run Windows XP (previously Windows 2000), and I run Linux.
We have hardly ever had any issues with "Write once, run everywhere." It works. Really. Probably writing Swing/GUI apps is different, but on the server side, developing and deploying across different platforms works like a charm. Admittedly the issues you get on development vs. production can be very different, so deploying a production system on multiple operating systems might give you different results. But as far as testing and developing on two platforms, then deploying on a third, we have no complaints.
Jorge "whipirush" Castro, of Ars Technica's Linux.ARS fame, has made a level headed, informative reply to this trol^Warticle on his blog
Yeah, whatever.
I'd hardly call his reply "level headed"... it's just as passionate and inflamatory as Nick's article. (Or did you miss the part where he says "so-called OSS evangelist Nicholas Petreley should be ashamed of himself.")
Nick's article is definitely a bit over-inflammatory, and covers only one aspect of GNOME 2.6... but he does have a point. And contrary to what Jorge's blog says that "GConf is nothing like the Windows Registry", the fact is that GConf is exactly like the Windows Registry, from the point of view of the end user. I've been using GNOME for over two years, and as a non-GNOME developer, the two are identical to me.
Sigh. People, yes Nick does tend to like KDE, but he's ultimately an end user, the target audience of GNOME... and blasting your target audience instead of actually listening from their point of view isn't really productive.
Nick's right. GNOME claims to strive for making everything simple, but spatial Nautilus is anything but. I fail to see how creating a hopeless array of new windows is "easy of use". Especially when it takes a bunch of new keystroke and mouse commands to make it usable. Requiring a bizarre gconf command to toggle Nautilus between spatial mode, and the mode that every other major file browser out there uses, is ludicrous.
I'm sure many developers love spatial mode. But I'm guessing that's because they're developers. I doubt most people would be amused at the initial confusing behavior.
I'm looking to replace my 20 Gig Archos Jukebox because I filled it up. Up until today, I wasn't going with the iPod because it would "only" offer 50% more storage (30 Gig), but with these new ones I might consider it. Though I might still go with the 60 Gig Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen...
So if Joe Blow posts Windows Server 2000 (or whatever) on Kazaa, and I download it, am I free to use it in a production environment?
The difference is that copying Windows Server 2000 doesn't give you the license which you need to legally run it. If NYT posts a chapter from Harry Potter, you can read it because you don't need a license to read a book.
Why use a client that apes Outlook behavior, when better faster thinner clients exist.
Evolution is not just an email client. I don't know of any other clients that support integrated calendar and mail functionality, plus LDAP, vCard, and Palm synchronization. I also don't know any other client that supports integration with Microsoft Exchange (even if that costs extra).
Reparenting window managers are for wimps
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 4, Funny
REAL men use the console. For those forced to use those silly window gadgets by their PHBs, there's NAWM: Not a Window Manager. Non-reparenting, non-eye candy, pure window management functionality and nothing more. Check it out.
I doubt the ability to change the USER_AGENT string changes the 1% stat by very much at all. As far as I can tell, Mozilla and Netscape don't allow you to do this (neither does Galeon; don't know about Konqueror). Even if they did, nowdadays almost all sites are viewable just fine with these browsers.
Sure, there's the occasional story of Microsoft crippling their web sites for certain browsers, but that's rare, and it's only Microsoft. A recent slashdot story (which I can't find right now) confirmed that very, very few sites are IE-only. So even if possible, I doubt most people are doing this anyway.
I'm told by a Bank of America customer that BofA's site requires IE to manage your bank account.
I have a Bank of America credit card that I manage online using Mozilla without any problems. I don't know about their bank account online stuff, but I doubt it would be different.
Verizon and SoCalEdison sites were evidently only tested with IE; account management doesn't work in any version of NS or Mozilla that I tried.
Verizon Wireless' home page recently finally started rendering fine with Mozilla. Everything else on the site has always worked fine, including managing my cell phone account online. (I don't know if you meant some other branch of Verizon.)
With Verizon's home page fixed and Capital One's site finally getting a clue, I don't know of any sites that don't work perfectly with Mozilla. I'm sure there are still exceptions though.
It's probably fun to make lists of things that suck all day long, but why not use some of that talent and nervous energy to join in and help?
Because part of his point is that at this point in the history of the computer, being able to use a simple app to view video under Linux should not require one to have to do it oneself from scratch to do it right.
This gets mentioned a lot on slashdot; "if you don't like it, stop complaining and YOU do it right!" While there's a lot of validity to that, there are many times when the issue is that by now, certain basic things of using a computer have been solved 10000 times over.
I mean come on, "://", or the "MRL browser", to open a file dialog? WTF? I went through the same frustration with Xine, it took forever to figure how to do something as simple as open friggin' files.
Innovation is one thing. But coming up with a hard to use interface, ignoring some really, really basic UI guidelines that have been around for what 30 years is another. At that point, "if you don't like it, do it yourself" becomes an excuse, not a valid response.
Having a link to a web site is not providing "material" support. It's not providing anything except a link to information.
Following that logic, libraries should eliminate all books which discuss al Qaeda, even if they are just historical. Magazines and newspapers discussing any terrorist organization should be banned. Any articles discussing where to find more information on terrorist organizations would be banned.
I know exactly what you mean... their web site is the ONLY reason I ever use Netscape Navigator still. I also sent them an email, and got a smiliar response. Hopefully if enough of us keep bugging them, they might eventually change. I also like to keep visiting their site with Galeon, just so they see it in their web logs. I'm sure it won't make any difference, but hey, it's another way to try.:)
Unfortunately I'm stuck with them for now, my credit card balances are going to take some time to whittle away...
The big deal is new features like no pause between songs, mid-song resume, and other things. Archos will likely not ever support most, if not all, of those things.
From the FAQ (also on the main page):
Ok, forget about reality, what could we do with this?
All those simple mp3-play features we sometimes miss:
No pause between songs
Mid-song resume
Mid-playlist resume
No-scan playlists
Unlimited playlist size
Autobuild playlists (such as "all songs in this directory tree")
Auto-continue play in the next directory
Current folder and all sub-folder random play
Full disk random play
REAL random (if press back it goes to the previous song that was played)
Multi song queue (folder queue)
Faster scroll speed
Archos Recorder support. Most of the hardware is the same, but the display and some other things differ.
All kinds of cool features done from the wire remote control, including controlling your Archos from your car radio (req hw mod)
Ogg Vorbis support [unverified: the MAS is somewhat programmable, but enough?]
Support for megabass switch (req hw mod) [unverified: I just saw the DAC docs shows how to do it switchable. we need a free port pin to be able to switch]
Player control via USB [unverified]
Memory expansion? [doubtful: the current DRAM chip only has 10 address lines. we'd have to pull off one heck of a hw mod to expand that]
I don't think this is a valid argument from the manufacturers. If Dell or Gateway or Compaq started preloading Linux on their machines, what is microsoft going to do?
Microsoft is going to charge them more for each Windows license, or be less cooperative in giving them details the OEMs might need to make sure their hardware works well with Windows.
The counter-argument is that the real reason terrorists haven't created their own encryption is because they haven't needed to. But if the US restricted it, they would go ahead and do it. There is so much information on the subject out there, plus sample working code, that it's hard to image they wouldn't. They may have already, but we don't know it.
Worse than running something as root
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It doesn't matter if it requires root privs to run. Most programs have to be installed as root, and that's all that is needed. The make install step can do something nasty without telling you (how many people fully read & understand the Makefiles in the above scenario?), or it can install a trojan version of ls or any other program.
The Physics of Santa Claus
on
Merry Christmas
·
· Score: 5, Funny
No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, and assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of his sleigh, jump down the chimnye, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course we know to be false but for the purpose of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking aabout.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 punds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (refer to point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal load, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entereing the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per SECOND, EACH! In short, hey will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousanths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead by now.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't assume that. There are many valid, non-evil reasons companies really want demographic information. They want to know their customer base so they know how to design their web site and products to best tailor their customers. Sure, some companies are slimy about it, and that sucks. But any company that expects to survive wants to know their customers as much as possible.
approve of a business model that is based upon supplying personal information to spammers, mass-marketers and other spies.
That's an invalid assumption. Understandable, since unfortunately it happens, but that's not always true. Not all marketing is Evil. Not all ads are Evil.
To summarise: I don't like registration screens, I am never going to like registration screens, and I shall continue to publicly disapprove of them as I see fit. Maybe you should learn to deal with it.
No problems here. I'm not saying you have to like it; heck I'm not crazy about it either, and believe me, I hate the over-marketization of our society. All I'm saying is that it's not necessarily evil, and any knee-jerk reaction that all ads/registration/marketing are Evil is naive.
Oh please grow up.
It may come as a complete shock to some people here, but some companies have to make a living somehow. And some of those companies, like Salon.com, have been struggling for quite a while and are not hyper-rich media conglomerates who can afford to not try whatever they can to make an honest living.
You do not have a God-given right to free content provided at the expense of the work of others. (And no I don't care if Salon.com didn't write the original article, they provide plenty of home brewed articles and opinion which I think are totally worth it.) Deal with it.
From the article:
- IBM Cloudscape(TM) V10.0 is a pure, open source-based Java relational database management system that can be embedded in Java programs and used for online transaction processing (OLTP). A platform-independent, small-footprint (2MB) database, Cloudscape V10.0 integrates tightly with any Java-based solution.
- Read why IBM is open sourcing Cloudscape as Derby.
- Open source code is available on the Apache Incubator Project site.
- Runs on any standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM), allowing developers to "write once, deploy anywhere."
- Embeddable inside Java applications on the server, desktop or in pervasive devices.
Apparently the reason to use Java is that it's geared towards Java developers and applications, especially embedded ones.WebLogic provides several platform-specific libraries with native language calls for performance (one example is socket and file access). In addition, our particular application uses several platform specific third party libraries, both pure Java and native code. For a while I had to hunt Linux versions of these libraries, but nowadays our vendor partners are pretty good about already having Linux libs.
I work for a fairly high profile Internet commerce company that uses WebLogic and pure Java. Our production servers all run Solaris, most of our developers run Windows XP (previously Windows 2000), and I run Linux.
We have hardly ever had any issues with "Write once, run everywhere." It works. Really. Probably writing Swing/GUI apps is different, but on the server side, developing and deploying across different platforms works like a charm. Admittedly the issues you get on development vs. production can be very different, so deploying a production system on multiple operating systems might give you different results. But as far as testing and developing on two platforms, then deploying on a third, we have no complaints.
I'd hardly call his reply "level headed"... it's just as passionate and inflamatory as Nick's article. (Or did you miss the part where he says "so-called OSS evangelist Nicholas Petreley should be ashamed of himself.")
Nick's article is definitely a bit over-inflammatory, and covers only one aspect of GNOME 2.6... but he does have a point. And contrary to what Jorge's blog says that "GConf is nothing like the Windows Registry", the fact is that GConf is exactly like the Windows Registry, from the point of view of the end user. I've been using GNOME for over two years, and as a non-GNOME developer, the two are identical to me.
Sigh. People, yes Nick does tend to like KDE, but he's ultimately an end user, the target audience of GNOME... and blasting your target audience instead of actually listening from their point of view isn't really productive.
You're missing the point.
Nick's right. GNOME claims to strive for making everything simple, but spatial Nautilus is anything but. I fail to see how creating a hopeless array of new windows is "easy of use". Especially when it takes a bunch of new keystroke and mouse commands to make it usable. Requiring a bizarre gconf command to toggle Nautilus between spatial mode, and the mode that every other major file browser out there uses, is ludicrous.
I'm sure many developers love spatial mode. But I'm guessing that's because they're developers. I doubt most people would be amused at the initial confusing behavior.
I'm looking to replace my 20 Gig Archos Jukebox because I filled it up. Up until today, I wasn't going with the iPod because it would "only" offer 50% more storage (30 Gig), but with these new ones I might consider it. Though I might still go with the 60 Gig Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen...
Speaking of which... where is the source 1.4RC3??? I can't find it anywhere on the FTP site. I only see binaries...
REAL men use the console. For those forced to use those silly window gadgets by their PHBs, there's NAWM: Not a Window Manager. Non-reparenting, non-eye candy, pure window management functionality and nothing more. Check it out.
I doubt the ability to change the USER_AGENT string changes the 1% stat by very much at all. As far as I can tell, Mozilla and Netscape don't allow you to do this (neither does Galeon; don't know about Konqueror). Even if they did, nowdadays almost all sites are viewable just fine with these browsers.
Sure, there's the occasional story of Microsoft crippling their web sites for certain browsers, but that's rare, and it's only Microsoft. A recent slashdot story (which I can't find right now) confirmed that very, very few sites are IE-only. So even if possible, I doubt most people are doing this anyway.
With Verizon's home page fixed and Capital One's site finally getting a clue, I don't know of any sites that don't work perfectly with Mozilla. I'm sure there are still exceptions though.
This gets mentioned a lot on slashdot; "if you don't like it, stop complaining and YOU do it right!" While there's a lot of validity to that, there are many times when the issue is that by now, certain basic things of using a computer have been solved 10000 times over.
I mean come on, "://", or the "MRL browser", to open a file dialog? WTF? I went through the same frustration with Xine, it took forever to figure how to do something as simple as open friggin' files.
Innovation is one thing. But coming up with a hard to use interface, ignoring some really, really basic UI guidelines that have been around for what 30 years is another. At that point, "if you don't like it, do it yourself" becomes an excuse, not a valid response.
I entered MIT in 1987, and Zephyr was already a fully developed program at that point, so I'm certain that it is true prior art.
Having a link to a web site is not providing "material" support. It's not providing anything except a link to information.
Following that logic, libraries should eliminate all books which discuss al Qaeda, even if they are just historical. Magazines and newspapers discussing any terrorist organization should be banned. Any articles discussing where to find more information on terrorist organizations would be banned.
The university is being ridiculous.
With the Archos Jukebox Recorder, you can do that just fine. http://www.archos.com.
You don't need to go through the menu to adjust the volume, just press the Up and Down buttons while it's playing.
Unfortunately I'm stuck with them for now, my credit card balances are going to take some time to whittle away...
From the FAQ (also on the main page):
Ok, forget about reality, what could we do with this?
The counter-argument is that the real reason terrorists haven't created their own encryption is because they haven't needed to. But if the US restricted it, they would go ahead and do it. There is so much information on the subject out there, plus sample working code, that it's hard to image they wouldn't. They may have already, but we don't know it.
It doesn't matter if it requires root privs to run. Most programs have to be installed as root, and that's all that is needed. The make install step can do something nasty without telling you (how many people fully read & understand the Makefiles in the above scenario?), or it can install a trojan version of ls or any other program.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead by now.