No RedHat isn't better. But the point is Sun used to be so much better.
On the other hand, I rarely have to contact RedHat's tech support because their userland better, the shipped packages offer all the features I need (samba and ldap, for example). I haven't had to compile software from source in a long time. The few times I've had to contact RedHat's tech support, I did find them helpful, and my problems were resolved in just a day or so, which is a far cry from my current 2-week experience with sun, which problem today still isn't solved (waiting on another e-mail).
I'm currently struggling to implement a Solaris server right now. The user space is archaic, obscure, and seems to be difficult for the sake of being difficult. Things like updates are still done the way they were done 15 years ago, often requiring a drop to single user mode (as bad as a reboot in my opinion), and often require a system reconfigure. Solaris' kernel is cutting edge and, in some ways, way ahead of Linux. But in the ways that count, Solaris lags far behind.
Just to make the system usable requires a ton of third-party software that sun does not ship nor support. In the end my path has nearly half a dozen bin folders in it, by the time you could/usr/bin, usr/local/bin,/opt/sfw/bin,/usr/sfw/bin,/usr/ucp, etc. I frequently find that I have to compile things from source just to get basic functionality. For example, Sun ships Samba with solaris, but it doesn't support LDAP. They also ship some hacked kerberos libraries, based on MIT, but if you need to build anything that depends on kerberos, you have to compile and install a separate set of MIT Kerberos libraries. Some apps are available in package form (solaris packages) from sunfreeware.com that you can pkgadd. But PKGs don't seem to be a complete packaging system like deb or rpm is. The pkg-get utility from the aforementioned site is very useful, though.
The init system is currently in a disorganized state. Most things are migrating to svcadm, which under the hood is very much like launchd. But there are still init.d scripts, but they don't always work right. Maybe Linux should move away from init.d, but at least on redhat, they are very full-featured and quite easy to work with.
Sun's biggest strengths right now are zones, zfs, and dtrace. However, if you don't specifically need these features, Linux is a better choice in many circumstances. And Linux is gaining features in these areas. xen can do a lot of what zones do, albeit much less efficiently. dtrace functionality is coming, I hear. ZFS, well the kernel developers seem to be suffering a bad case of NIH syndrome. The only reason I'm using solaris right now is ZFS. But I'm taking a big risk deploying it on a 12 TB disk. I have yet to hear of a failure, and Sun assures me that it's enterprise-ready. Sun's assurances do carry a lot of weight; they've had a lot of experience in these things. But I'm only a silver-level support customer. It's taken two weeks and some 20 phone calls to get issues sorted out with our sunsolve account and updatemanager. Our assigned support group only wants to talk over e-mail, which is annoying. Turnaround time on trying out their suggestions is hours if not days. This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days.
Anyway, talk to any Sun jocky and he'll tell you that none of my complaints about Solaris are weaknesses. They are strengths. Cryptic commands are second nature. Besides, they separate the real sysadmins from the wannabes. Sound familiar? I think I've talked the same way about Linux to my Windows friends. I'm glad that Ian is going to work to improve Solaris' user space (which is what he means when he says make Solaris more like Linux, right?). On the other hand, Solaris reminds me not to get complacent with the state of linux. Every complaint I have about Solaris could easily be echoed by a Windows refugee trying to make sense of Linux. Both Linux and Solaris are powerful, cryptic, and archaic OSes. They both have a lot of room for improvement. We'll have to see. I told my RedHat friend the other day that his company has nothing to worry about from Solaris. Hopefully Ian will change that.
A demo of JavaFX (embedded in Java WebStart--yuck) can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/ . Seeing as flash comes up instantly in browsers, even if it takes some time to download code, etc, and that web pages with ajax also render near instantly, I don't see how JavaFX is really going to appeal to end users. The JVM plugin still takes time to load on all browsers and platforms and is quite big. And on almost all browsers and platforms I've ever used, tends to lock up the browser for 10-20 seconds at a time. Further how will JavaFX integrate with HTML? Javascript?
Flash and.NET don't have these problems, mainly because flash is a fraction of the size of the entire JVM adn runtime, and.NET is always loaded and ready to go on windows.
Anyway, given the current state of Java technology in the browser, I don't see this as being any different from WebStart, which everyone loves to hate because it is so clunky.
I dislike the idea of Silverlight entirely, particularly anything that relies on.NET (mono notwithstanding). I really want to like Java, I really do.
Please qualify you statements. You mention that XP and 95 are "very 'in your face'" compared to Vista. In what ways are they more intrusive or more "in your face"? In what ways is Vista less intrusive?
With all the emphasis on the UAC, I find it hard to believe that you can go for very long with Vista forgetting that it's even there. But I'm willing to listen to your reasoning.
I don't know of anyone who uses Gaim-Encryption these days. Instead the standard is OTR (off-the-record) which is supported by many IM clients on many platforms. Consider switching to it.
I believe that when you send your laptop into apple for repairs, the repair costs are capped at something like $500 if the warranty doesn't cover it. So it won't cost $1200. Are you still within your warranty period? Find a local Apple repair center and have them take a look. I've arranged for the repair of dozens of apple laptops, powerbooks, ibooks, and macbook pros, and I've never had Apple ever refuse to fix something because there was a dent in the case. We had one laptop with a cracked screen (obvious not covered under warranty since it came from a thumb) and we sent it off to Apple. They told us it would cost us, so we said, nevermind, send it back. When it came back Apple had replaced the screen with a used one. All for free.
Umm, not quite. NeoOffice is written in the same language as OpenOffice. Mostly C++. Java is used to implement large parts of the UI (widgets, etc). NeoOffice java code acts as a bridge between the OpenOffice UI routines and Cocoa. In my experience it loads only slightly slower than OpenOffice for X11, which is dismally slow on any PPC. It's almost tolerable on the new dual core machines. Once NeoOffice loads up, it's performance is just fine. Java isn't that slow for apps, especially on OS X where the real work is being done in Objective C cocoa libraries (drawing, button-clicking, etc). But the startup time of the JVM is poor.
Anyway, I cringe everytime I hear someone saying NeoOffice or OpenOffice is "written in Java." It's just not true. OpenOffice.org will always depend on Java for some things, like certain filters (or in the case of NeoOffice, the UI). I'm not sure if the hodge-podge of different languages used to implement different add-on components of OpenOffice.org is a strength or a weakness.
My biggest complaint about OpenOffice.org in general is that it's API is extremely complex pretty much thrown on the would-be macro programmer. Just trying to implement a simple StarBasic macro to set formatting on a table was quite an exercise. With VBA on Office, it is much much easier.
Anyway, I doubt the two guys behind NeoOffice will care that much if their project is superceded by official Sun stuff. What I mean by that is that they have devoted a lot of time and money to NeoOffice, and I doubt they've received that much support from even those of us that use NeoOffice. They worked on NeoOffice out of the goodness of their hearts. We owe them a tremendous debt. If Sun chooses to take their current work and extend it (which I hope they do), I hope Sun recognizes this and compensates them in some way.
At this present time, the answers to your questions are: yes. yes. maybe, but not necessarily.
I believe that this will not always be so, but for now it is. We can get a far better net environmental benefit by not driving as much, eliminating the older cars that account for disproportionate amounts of air pollution, and exploring organic fuels. For the foreseeable future, combustion just is so much more efficient (in the macro scheme of things) than any other form of energy production. Electricity is a great medium to use to transmit this energy. But currently solar panels have a high environmental cost, most of which is not in the end product or the disposal. Disposal we can deal with. Solar panels, batteries, etc. But it's the cost of manufacturing that's the issue. Fossil fuels drive the inputs (think mines, etc). I hope this changes. I think we've figured out how to best transmit electricity once it is generated, although batteries still leave a lot to be desired.
As for organic fuels, we always have to look at the wholistic cost. Corn ethanol, for example, is still carbon-positive, by the time you account for the planting, tillage, fertilizer, irrigation, etc. Maybe algae will work out better.
In the meantime, we need to better manage what we already have. Develop and attitude of conservation that dislikes waste. We can avoid driving our cars as much as possible. We can take public transportation. We can Recycle, etc. We can reduce our waste and encourage policies that do so. I wonder how much environmental damage is caused by our current packaging industry because we can't easily recycle. I'm not talking about Mcdonalds serving on styrofoam, but rather the stupid packaging that encases everything we buy in non-cut-able, unbreakable, anti-theft plastic.
Anyway, we can take little steps that, if done by millions, just might make a difference. In the meantime I think we should examine every idea that comes along, even it sounds a little strange, like this turbine idea.
ext3 and ext3cow are inode file systems. So if you rename the file or move it anywhere on the disk, the inodes allocated to the file stay the same. With ext3cow, the inodes that make up the versions would stay the same too.
To a certain degree, Vista allows older programs to pretend they are writing to a windows system drive, which only they can then see. So applications that formerly required administrator to run can now run just fine as a normal user.
Personally I only program windows when I have to because it is horrible to work with, especially system programming. But having working mostly with Unix, I find the transition to programming for Windows (everything from system to app programming) to be much, much easier than someone trying to transition the other way. I purposely employ good programming practices that keep my code as portable as possible. My full-blown GUI apps run quite easily on any *nix, Mac, or Windows operating system. The effort expended to achieve this portability is exceedingly minimal. To me, more important than using Linux, is to not tie myself down to *any* OS, whether it be Linux or Windows. Each OS has its time in the sun. I'd rather be as nimble as possible than to completely tie myself down to even the most dominant, lucrative OS. Plus I can explore other markets easily, as my skills are much more transferable than some of my friends who are Java programmers only, or.NET programmers. I can fairly easily work in Java, C#, C, C++, php, or python (and whatever other language is needed), whereas as they find it more difficult to do that (or at least uncomfortable). Perhaps it is because I'm an old-school, pre-Java programmer. They likely will make all the money they need, and will have no problems staying employed for life. I also have the same, but with a greater breadth of experiences that I enjoy very much.
When I'm hiring people, I look specifically for non-windows experience. The main reason is that I know that a Unix guru will work just fine with Windows or whatever OS I throw at them. But even more important, it shows they enjoy computers and actually make a hobby of it, something that's not really possible to do with Windows. They are likely the people that are tinkerers and people who try to really understand the under-the-hood things, and understand that computers are tools. Qualities that make good employees.
As for paying for trips to fiji, I know plenty of people who leverage standards and open-source technology to make a lot of money, particularly in web development. Note that this is a field that makes Vista irrelevant. It makes any OS irrelevant.
That is good to hear, as it wasn't true several years ago (say 2001ish). Given that, mentioning agriculture is a red herring in my arguments. Opportunists are having way more fun in the energy sector, as well as industry in general. There is not a lot of money to be made in farming. From what I understand the grabs were mostly done during the early Yeltsen era, but there are still problems today. My point still stands, though, about our western expectations being just a little unrealistic.
One thing we always forget about Russia is that the jump from a communist system to a western-style democracy is far far greater than we think. While Russia has made great strides in the past, there is a long ways to go. Putin may or may not be the despot you think he is. Some of my Russian friends, while they don't like the man, understand some of why he rules the way he does.
The biggest problem in Russia is that things like Agriculture have never bee privatized. Privatizing agriculture would seem to be a great idea to us in the west, but if Putin were to do it in Russia, it would destroy the country. Many industries have been privatized in Russia, with disastrous results. Basically the government divvied up the cooperatives and companies by distributing stock to citizens, hoping that citizens could take ownership and make a profit. What happened is that organized crime and other opportunists saw an ideal opportunity for a grab. They went around and offered citizens much less than the face value of the stock. Since the stock had no value to the average person, most people happily sold their stocks for pennies on the dollar. This has led to major problems with monopolies and even crime organizations. Remember, these people have never had any experience with a western-style economic system, let alone a democracy. They were just no match for the wits of the opportunists. Hence agriculture in Russia will not be privatized anytime soon. Can you imagine the massive land-grab?
Anyway, this is the major reason why Putin is reluctant to allow Russians to experience this great thing we call Liberty. It's not that he wants to be a dictator or stalin, but that he recognizes Russia can't transform herself all at once. I think it will take at least 2 generations myself. Along the way, Putin has drawn the ire of the western world and many critics at home.
I am not going to condone his actions. I just want to make sure we all understand the underlying situations and conditions that exist in Russia and the former republics of the Soviet Union. If they move to quickly to western-style economics and politics, chaos will ensue. Think 1930's mob rule in America, but only with 21st century technology, money, and power. It's a precarious situation, and very delicate. If Putin allows media too much power, and allowed them to print too many doom and gloom, down with the government stuff, not only will his government fall, but the entire country will fall into anarchy and mob rule. Is there another way? I'm sure there is. But let's make sure we have a full understanding before we spout off on this subject. Reacting prematurely is the very thing that leads to the fallacies that Bush used in justifying the Iraq war
And you are an expert in this field? Don't be so quick to discount any one idea. Rest assured (dupe notwithstanding), the obvious negatives of this proposal have not been missed by people behind this idea. Frankly the generating idea of magenn.com is not even close to what Sky WindPower is exploring. In the short term, yes mangenn.com's tethered generators are much more practical, so I'd like to see people put them to use, as they are more efficient than a conventional turbine. But in the long term they won't even make a dent in energy production. The WindPower idea aims at an entire order of magnitude more energy production from one machine than the tethered generator, which is something that could be very useful. If the idea was to pan out, and the problems addressed (moving jetstreams, hazardous tether, electricity transmission, people being scared of it falling on them), then this could be revolutionary. While we laugh at these visionaries because we know better, many strange ideas just might work out.
Myself, as a aviation enthusiast, I'm excited to see this prototype come to fruition. There are lots of hurdles to overcome (public ignorance being the biggest one), but I think the idea is sound. Whether it's practical is another story. I can assure the chicken littles out there that such a device would not accidentally plummet to the ground if it ran out of air. Even if was unable to spin electronically to maintain altitude during a calm phase, it would auto-rotate down quite gently (of course that's still a problem, though). And the aviation no-fly zone required around the thing could cause some issues. But one thing at a time.
Umm, really? Transgaming originally forked wine because the license went from the more permissible license which allowed them to have a closed version (safedisk, etc) to the LGPL (to prevent some of the games transgaming was playing). You can indeed get a source tree for transgaming, minus all the things like safedisk that are in their commercial version.
With Vista having just been released, the chances of getting even more mainstream (apple is mainstream despite its low market share) are much better. Consider people like my parents, who are finding it harder and harder to adapt to the latest features coming out for windows. The difference for them between moving from XP to Vista is at least as much as the difference in moving from XP to OS X (leopard or no leopard). They are getting increasingly frustrated with Windows and certainly don't want to be sucked into the next upgrade cycle for Windows. Having to deal with windows genuine advantage and Vista always wanting to check in with Microsoft or risk it stop functioning doesn't sit well with them. It's almost certain their next PC (as in personal computer) will be a Mac. This is not happening to just them either. Apple will likely never break 10% anytime soon, but their share will keep growing.
given that climate change is a fact, should we spend money in the hope that somehow we can reverse any human causes of climate change, or devote money to adapting to the warmer climate? If we cannot reverse the climate changing, and warming on Mars and other planetary bodies suggests there are significant non-human factors involved here, then spending significants amounts of money in "saving the environment" as it were will lead to the problems for billions of people, if the article's estimate on the impact is correct. For health reasons alone we need to spend money to fix how we treat the environment, but we need to make sure we're analyzing the full costs and benefits. To date every thing I've heard about stopping global warming involves things that could cause more environmental destruction. Corn ethanol is a prime example.
I call BS on that one. Greed alone says that if there is a market with money to be made (that's the key part), they'd do it. The problem is that given the amount of investment needed, there just is no return. Plain and simple. Now we can go ahead and create an artificial market if we want, through legislation.
But still the issue remains that a hybrid car has little to no positive impact on the environment when you look at the whole picture from beginning to end.
GM and Ford have not really done much in the hybrid market because the market just isn't there. What little of the market exists, Toyota owns handily. GM and Ford did not enter this niche because it did not (and still does not) make economic sense to enter. GM and Ford are investing in hybrid technology for the larger vehicles, where it actually makes sense and does make a difference. As far as hybrids go, they can't actually get any better mileage than a non-hybrid car. You can't get energy from nothing. If you want to drive a hybrid 800 miles it still requires constant gasoline to do that. In fact in some cases a hybrid could get worse mileage on open roads, as the mass of the electrical system has to be transported. On a freeway that's just dead weight. In an inner city, hybrids show their best promise. But don't forget that America's driving tradition is not actually based on the art and skill of "driving" but rather "cruising." Just you and the open road. And let's not forget the total environmental footprint of a vehicle over the course of its life. Last I heard the Jeep Cherokee was the most environmentally friendly vehicle on the planet when you combine manufacturing environmental costs with the sum total of its gasoline usage and carbon output over the course if its projected life span. Hybrid cars are must costlier that way. Battery components, shipping from overseas, etc.
As far as conventional cars today go, they are on average heavier and much more powerful than they were years ago, notwithstanding the big boat ideas of the late 70s and early 80s. Even mid-size cars today weigh 1000 lbs more than they did in the 60s and 70s. Yet they still manage to have much more power and still get 30 mpg. If we were to take our much more efficient conventional engine technology and apply it to a much lighter vehicle, 100 mpg would be very easy.
One last point about mileage is that the EPA recently changed the regulations on reporting mileage and that has caused the mileage advertisements to be much more realistic. However it has lowered the claimed mileage on most vehicles by several points. I haven't yet seen reports of hybrid mileage under the new set of rules, but I'd bet it doesn't look quite as good as people want to claim.
Potatoes require no fertilizer, eh? Where did you here that. Maybe they require less than corn, but they still require a lot. Even worse, pressure from the processing industry has driven Idaho to the brink of exhaustion, soil-wise. Potatoes are planted so often (cheating the rotation) that many fields are diseased, depleted, and desertified. In fact there are signs on the freeway saying, "low visibility area" due to blowing top soil. This pressure on the land has extended everywhere potatoes have gone, including Washington and Alberta. The land that potatoes grow on is heavily fertilized just to sustain the crops. Filler crops, such as wheat, are taken off completely as silage usually, preventing the return of fiber into the ground. If we put even more pressures on the land (pressures on the crop), I think everything will just get even worse. Intensive agriculture anywhere has to be done very very carefully, and you have to really think about the land (it's a living entity after all). I've been involved with intensive agriculture for 20 years and I know it can be done in a way that does treat the land as well as possible. But ironically, these "eco" demands can often cause extremely harmful environmental practices. So we need to be careful we don't cause further problems.
Several KDE 3 apps have already been ported to OS X, such as kwrite as QT3 is available under the GPL on OS X. KDE developers have said that KDE 4 will be portable to other architectures including OS X amd Win32. However this doesn't mean they intend to port port the entire desktop to, say, OS X. Rather the apps themselves will be portable. This is arguably more important than porting the entire desktop. However, Having the KDE desktop replacing explorer on win32 would be wonderful. KDE still won't make Vista any less obnoxious, though. I am looking forward to running great KDE apps like Amarok on my OS X box at some point in the future, though.
In the meantime, Gnome is coming along quite nicely too. Neither gnome nor KDE is the be-all, end-all, last word in desktop environments, though. They both will continue to evolve and develop. More and more cooperation among the two camps through the freedesktop project is happening. Major problems have now been solved, including the clipboard frustrations of years past, drag-and-drop, and removable device handling through dbus. In fact with Qt4, since the glib main event loop can be used, it's becoming possible to mix gtk and qt widgets in the same app, which is handy for plugin developers. Problems yet to be solved include a common theming subsystem, a common virtual filesystem layer (a la kioslaves), and a few other things.
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No RedHat isn't better. But the point is Sun used to be so much better.
On the other hand, I rarely have to contact RedHat's tech support because their userland better, the shipped packages offer all the features I need (samba and ldap, for example). I haven't had to compile software from source in a long time. The few times I've had to contact RedHat's tech support, I did find them helpful, and my problems were resolved in just a day or so, which is a far cry from my current 2-week experience with sun, which problem today still isn't solved (waiting on another e-mail).
I'm currently struggling to implement a Solaris server right now. The user space is archaic, obscure, and seems to be difficult for the sake of being difficult. Things like updates are still done the way they were done 15 years ago, often requiring a drop to single user mode (as bad as a reboot in my opinion), and often require a system reconfigure. Solaris' kernel is cutting edge and, in some ways, way ahead of Linux. But in the ways that count, Solaris lags far behind.
/usr/bin, usr/local/bin, /opt/sfw/bin, /usr/sfw/bin, /usr/ucp, etc. I frequently find that I have to compile things from source just to get basic functionality. For example, Sun ships Samba with solaris, but it doesn't support LDAP. They also ship some hacked kerberos libraries, based on MIT, but if you need to build anything that depends on kerberos, you have to compile and install a separate set of MIT Kerberos libraries. Some apps are available in package form (solaris packages) from sunfreeware.com that you can pkgadd. But PKGs don't seem to be a complete packaging system like deb or rpm is. The pkg-get utility from the aforementioned site is very useful, though.
Just to make the system usable requires a ton of third-party software that sun does not ship nor support. In the end my path has nearly half a dozen bin folders in it, by the time you could
The init system is currently in a disorganized state. Most things are migrating to svcadm, which under the hood is very much like launchd. But there are still init.d scripts, but they don't always work right. Maybe Linux should move away from init.d, but at least on redhat, they are very full-featured and quite easy to work with.
Sun's biggest strengths right now are zones, zfs, and dtrace. However, if you don't specifically need these features, Linux is a better choice in many circumstances. And Linux is gaining features in these areas. xen can do a lot of what zones do, albeit much less efficiently. dtrace functionality is coming, I hear. ZFS, well the kernel developers seem to be suffering a bad case of NIH syndrome. The only reason I'm using solaris right now is ZFS. But I'm taking a big risk deploying it on a 12 TB disk. I have yet to hear of a failure, and Sun assures me that it's enterprise-ready. Sun's assurances do carry a lot of weight; they've had a lot of experience in these things. But I'm only a silver-level support customer. It's taken two weeks and some 20 phone calls to get issues sorted out with our sunsolve account and updatemanager. Our assigned support group only wants to talk over e-mail, which is annoying. Turnaround time on trying out their suggestions is hours if not days. This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days.
Anyway, talk to any Sun jocky and he'll tell you that none of my complaints about Solaris are weaknesses. They are strengths. Cryptic commands are second nature. Besides, they separate the real sysadmins from the wannabes. Sound familiar? I think I've talked the same way about Linux to my Windows friends. I'm glad that Ian is going to work to improve Solaris' user space (which is what he means when he says make Solaris more like Linux, right?). On the other hand, Solaris reminds me not to get complacent with the state of linux. Every complaint I have about Solaris could easily be echoed by a Windows refugee trying to make sense of Linux. Both Linux and Solaris are powerful, cryptic, and archaic OSes. They both have a lot of room for improvement. We'll have to see. I told my RedHat friend the other day that his company has nothing to worry about from Solaris. Hopefully Ian will change that.
A demo of JavaFX (embedded in Java WebStart--yuck) can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/chrisoliver/ . Seeing as flash comes up instantly in browsers, even if it takes some time to download code, etc, and that web pages with ajax also render near instantly, I don't see how JavaFX is really going to appeal to end users. The JVM plugin still takes time to load on all browsers and platforms and is quite big. And on almost all browsers and platforms I've ever used, tends to lock up the browser for 10-20 seconds at a time. Further how will JavaFX integrate with HTML? Javascript?
.NET don't have these problems, mainly because flash is a fraction of the size of the entire JVM adn runtime, and .NET is always loaded and ready to go on windows.
.NET (mono notwithstanding). I really want to like Java, I really do.
Flash and
Anyway, given the current state of Java technology in the browser, I don't see this as being any different from WebStart, which everyone loves to hate because it is so clunky.
I dislike the idea of Silverlight entirely, particularly anything that relies on
Please qualify you statements. You mention that XP and 95 are "very 'in your face'" compared to Vista. In what ways are they more intrusive or more "in your face"? In what ways is Vista less intrusive?
With all the emphasis on the UAC, I find it hard to believe that you can go for very long with Vista forgetting that it's even there. But I'm willing to listen to your reasoning.
I don't know of anyone who uses Gaim-Encryption these days. Instead the standard is OTR (off-the-record) which is supported by many IM clients on many platforms. Consider switching to it.
I believe that when you send your laptop into apple for repairs, the repair costs are capped at something like $500 if the warranty doesn't cover it. So it won't cost $1200. Are you still within your warranty period? Find a local Apple repair center and have them take a look. I've arranged for the repair of dozens of apple laptops, powerbooks, ibooks, and macbook pros, and I've never had Apple ever refuse to fix something because there was a dent in the case. We had one laptop with a cracked screen (obvious not covered under warranty since it came from a thumb) and we sent it off to Apple. They told us it would cost us, so we said, nevermind, send it back. When it came back Apple had replaced the screen with a used one. All for free.
Umm, not quite. NeoOffice is written in the same language as OpenOffice. Mostly C++. Java is used to implement large parts of the UI (widgets, etc). NeoOffice java code acts as a bridge between the OpenOffice UI routines and Cocoa. In my experience it loads only slightly slower than OpenOffice for X11, which is dismally slow on any PPC. It's almost tolerable on the new dual core machines. Once NeoOffice loads up, it's performance is just fine. Java isn't that slow for apps, especially on OS X where the real work is being done in Objective C cocoa libraries (drawing, button-clicking, etc). But the startup time of the JVM is poor.
Anyway, I cringe everytime I hear someone saying NeoOffice or OpenOffice is "written in Java." It's just not true. OpenOffice.org will always depend on Java for some things, like certain filters (or in the case of NeoOffice, the UI). I'm not sure if the hodge-podge of different languages used to implement different add-on components of OpenOffice.org is a strength or a weakness.
My biggest complaint about OpenOffice.org in general is that it's API is extremely complex pretty much thrown on the would-be macro programmer. Just trying to implement a simple StarBasic macro to set formatting on a table was quite an exercise. With VBA on Office, it is much much easier.
Anyway, I doubt the two guys behind NeoOffice will care that much if their project is superceded by official Sun stuff. What I mean by that is that they have devoted a lot of time and money to NeoOffice, and I doubt they've received that much support from even those of us that use NeoOffice. They worked on NeoOffice out of the goodness of their hearts. We owe them a tremendous debt. If Sun chooses to take their current work and extend it (which I hope they do), I hope Sun recognizes this and compensates them in some way.
At this present time, the answers to your questions are: yes. yes. maybe, but not necessarily.
I believe that this will not always be so, but for now it is. We can get a far better net environmental benefit by not driving as much, eliminating the older cars that account for disproportionate amounts of air pollution, and exploring organic fuels. For the foreseeable future, combustion just is so much more efficient (in the macro scheme of things) than any other form of energy production. Electricity is a great medium to use to transmit this energy. But currently solar panels have a high environmental cost, most of which is not in the end product or the disposal. Disposal we can deal with. Solar panels, batteries, etc. But it's the cost of manufacturing that's the issue. Fossil fuels drive the inputs (think mines, etc). I hope this changes. I think we've figured out how to best transmit electricity once it is generated, although batteries still leave a lot to be desired.
As for organic fuels, we always have to look at the wholistic cost. Corn ethanol, for example, is still carbon-positive, by the time you account for the planting, tillage, fertilizer, irrigation, etc. Maybe algae will work out better.
In the meantime, we need to better manage what we already have. Develop and attitude of conservation that dislikes waste. We can avoid driving our cars as much as possible. We can take public transportation. We can Recycle, etc. We can reduce our waste and encourage policies that do so. I wonder how much environmental damage is caused by our current packaging industry because we can't easily recycle. I'm not talking about Mcdonalds serving on styrofoam, but rather the stupid packaging that encases everything we buy in non-cut-able, unbreakable, anti-theft plastic.
Anyway, we can take little steps that, if done by millions, just might make a difference. In the meantime I think we should examine every idea that comes along, even it sounds a little strange, like this turbine idea.
ext3 and ext3cow are inode file systems. So if you rename the file or move it anywhere on the disk, the inodes allocated to the file stay the same. With ext3cow, the inodes that make up the versions would stay the same too.
Never heard of "runas.exe" then, have you?
To a certain degree, Vista allows older programs to pretend they are writing to a windows system drive, which only they can then see. So applications that formerly required administrator to run can now run just fine as a normal user.
Personally I only program windows when I have to because it is horrible to work with, especially system programming. But having working mostly with Unix, I find the transition to programming for Windows (everything from system to app programming) to be much, much easier than someone trying to transition the other way. I purposely employ good programming practices that keep my code as portable as possible. My full-blown GUI apps run quite easily on any *nix, Mac, or Windows operating system. The effort expended to achieve this portability is exceedingly minimal. To me, more important than using Linux, is to not tie myself down to *any* OS, whether it be Linux or Windows. Each OS has its time in the sun. I'd rather be as nimble as possible than to completely tie myself down to even the most dominant, lucrative OS. Plus I can explore other markets easily, as my skills are much more transferable than some of my friends who are Java programmers only, or .NET programmers. I can fairly easily work in Java, C#, C, C++, php, or python (and whatever other language is needed), whereas as they find it more difficult to do that (or at least uncomfortable). Perhaps it is because I'm an old-school, pre-Java programmer. They likely will make all the money they need, and will have no problems staying employed for life. I also have the same, but with a greater breadth of experiences that I enjoy very much.
When I'm hiring people, I look specifically for non-windows experience. The main reason is that I know that a Unix guru will work just fine with Windows or whatever OS I throw at them. But even more important, it shows they enjoy computers and actually make a hobby of it, something that's not really possible to do with Windows. They are likely the people that are tinkerers and people who try to really understand the under-the-hood things, and understand that computers are tools. Qualities that make good employees.
As for paying for trips to fiji, I know plenty of people who leverage standards and open-source technology to make a lot of money, particularly in web development. Note that this is a field that makes Vista irrelevant. It makes any OS irrelevant.
Isn't this normal behavior on Macs? Macs use a CR as the line delimiter, not LF, or CR/LF. Why is this a problem?
That is good to hear, as it wasn't true several years ago (say 2001ish). Given that, mentioning agriculture is a red herring in my arguments. Opportunists are having way more fun in the energy sector, as well as industry in general. There is not a lot of money to be made in farming. From what I understand the grabs were mostly done during the early Yeltsen era, but there are still problems today. My point still stands, though, about our western expectations being just a little unrealistic.
One thing we always forget about Russia is that the jump from a communist system to a western-style democracy is far far greater than we think. While Russia has made great strides in the past, there is a long ways to go. Putin may or may not be the despot you think he is. Some of my Russian friends, while they don't like the man, understand some of why he rules the way he does.
The biggest problem in Russia is that things like Agriculture have never bee privatized. Privatizing agriculture would seem to be a great idea to us in the west, but if Putin were to do it in Russia, it would destroy the country. Many industries have been privatized in Russia, with disastrous results. Basically the government divvied up the cooperatives and companies by distributing stock to citizens, hoping that citizens could take ownership and make a profit. What happened is that organized crime and other opportunists saw an ideal opportunity for a grab. They went around and offered citizens much less than the face value of the stock. Since the stock had no value to the average person, most people happily sold their stocks for pennies on the dollar. This has led to major problems with monopolies and even crime organizations. Remember, these people have never had any experience with a western-style economic system, let alone a democracy. They were just no match for the wits of the opportunists. Hence agriculture in Russia will not be privatized anytime soon. Can you imagine the massive land-grab?
Anyway, this is the major reason why Putin is reluctant to allow Russians to experience this great thing we call Liberty. It's not that he wants to be a dictator or stalin, but that he recognizes Russia can't transform herself all at once. I think it will take at least 2 generations myself. Along the way, Putin has drawn the ire of the western world and many critics at home.
I am not going to condone his actions. I just want to make sure we all understand the underlying situations and conditions that exist in Russia and the former republics of the Soviet Union. If they move to quickly to western-style economics and politics, chaos will ensue. Think 1930's mob rule in America, but only with 21st century technology, money, and power. It's a precarious situation, and very delicate. If Putin allows media too much power, and allowed them to print too many doom and gloom, down with the government stuff, not only will his government fall, but the entire country will fall into anarchy and mob rule. Is there another way? I'm sure there is. But let's make sure we have a full understanding before we spout off on this subject. Reacting prematurely is the very thing that leads to the fallacies that Bush used in justifying the Iraq war
And you are an expert in this field? Don't be so quick to discount any one idea. Rest assured (dupe notwithstanding), the obvious negatives of this proposal have not been missed by people behind this idea. Frankly the generating idea of magenn.com is not even close to what Sky WindPower is exploring. In the short term, yes mangenn.com's tethered generators are much more practical, so I'd like to see people put them to use, as they are more efficient than a conventional turbine. But in the long term they won't even make a dent in energy production. The WindPower idea aims at an entire order of magnitude more energy production from one machine than the tethered generator, which is something that could be very useful. If the idea was to pan out, and the problems addressed (moving jetstreams, hazardous tether, electricity transmission, people being scared of it falling on them), then this could be revolutionary. While we laugh at these visionaries because we know better, many strange ideas just might work out.
Myself, as a aviation enthusiast, I'm excited to see this prototype come to fruition. There are lots of hurdles to overcome (public ignorance being the biggest one), but I think the idea is sound. Whether it's practical is another story. I can assure the chicken littles out there that such a device would not accidentally plummet to the ground if it ran out of air. Even if was unable to spin electronically to maintain altitude during a calm phase, it would auto-rotate down quite gently (of course that's still a problem, though). And the aviation no-fly zone required around the thing could cause some issues. But one thing at a time.
Umm, really? Transgaming originally forked wine because the license went from the more permissible license which allowed them to have a closed version (safedisk, etc) to the LGPL (to prevent some of the games transgaming was playing). You can indeed get a source tree for transgaming, minus all the things like safedisk that are in their commercial version.
There were ads on TFA page?
With Vista having just been released, the chances of getting even more mainstream (apple is mainstream despite its low market share) are much better. Consider people like my parents, who are finding it harder and harder to adapt to the latest features coming out for windows. The difference for them between moving from XP to Vista is at least as much as the difference in moving from XP to OS X (leopard or no leopard). They are getting increasingly frustrated with Windows and certainly don't want to be sucked into the next upgrade cycle for Windows. Having to deal with windows genuine advantage and Vista always wanting to check in with Microsoft or risk it stop functioning doesn't sit well with them. It's almost certain their next PC (as in personal computer) will be a Mac. This is not happening to just them either. Apple will likely never break 10% anytime soon, but their share will keep growing.
given that climate change is a fact, should we spend money in the hope that somehow we can reverse any human causes of climate change, or devote money to adapting to the warmer climate? If we cannot reverse the climate changing, and warming on Mars and other planetary bodies suggests there are significant non-human factors involved here, then spending significants amounts of money in "saving the environment" as it were will lead to the problems for billions of people, if the article's estimate on the impact is correct. For health reasons alone we need to spend money to fix how we treat the environment, but we need to make sure we're analyzing the full costs and benefits. To date every thing I've heard about stopping global warming involves things that could cause more environmental destruction. Corn ethanol is a prime example.
I call BS on that one. Greed alone says that if there is a market with money to be made (that's the key part), they'd do it. The problem is that given the amount of investment needed, there just is no return. Plain and simple. Now we can go ahead and create an artificial market if we want, through legislation.
But still the issue remains that a hybrid car has little to no positive impact on the environment when you look at the whole picture from beginning to end.
GM and Ford have not really done much in the hybrid market because the market just isn't there. What little of the market exists, Toyota owns handily. GM and Ford did not enter this niche because it did not (and still does not) make economic sense to enter. GM and Ford are investing in hybrid technology for the larger vehicles, where it actually makes sense and does make a difference. As far as hybrids go, they can't actually get any better mileage than a non-hybrid car. You can't get energy from nothing. If you want to drive a hybrid 800 miles it still requires constant gasoline to do that. In fact in some cases a hybrid could get worse mileage on open roads, as the mass of the electrical system has to be transported. On a freeway that's just dead weight. In an inner city, hybrids show their best promise. But don't forget that America's driving tradition is not actually based on the art and skill of "driving" but rather "cruising." Just you and the open road. And let's not forget the total environmental footprint of a vehicle over the course of its life. Last I heard the Jeep Cherokee was the most environmentally friendly vehicle on the planet when you combine manufacturing environmental costs with the sum total of its gasoline usage and carbon output over the course if its projected life span. Hybrid cars are must costlier that way. Battery components, shipping from overseas, etc.
As far as conventional cars today go, they are on average heavier and much more powerful than they were years ago, notwithstanding the big boat ideas of the late 70s and early 80s. Even mid-size cars today weigh 1000 lbs more than they did in the 60s and 70s. Yet they still manage to have much more power and still get 30 mpg. If we were to take our much more efficient conventional engine technology and apply it to a much lighter vehicle, 100 mpg would be very easy.
One last point about mileage is that the EPA recently changed the regulations on reporting mileage and that has caused the mileage advertisements to be much more realistic. However it has lowered the claimed mileage on most vehicles by several points. I haven't yet seen reports of hybrid mileage under the new set of rules, but I'd bet it doesn't look quite as good as people want to claim.
Potatoes require no fertilizer, eh? Where did you here that. Maybe they require less than corn, but they still require a lot. Even worse, pressure from the processing industry has driven Idaho to the brink of exhaustion, soil-wise. Potatoes are planted so often (cheating the rotation) that many fields are diseased, depleted, and desertified. In fact there are signs on the freeway saying, "low visibility area" due to blowing top soil. This pressure on the land has extended everywhere potatoes have gone, including Washington and Alberta. The land that potatoes grow on is heavily fertilized just to sustain the crops. Filler crops, such as wheat, are taken off completely as silage usually, preventing the return of fiber into the ground. If we put even more pressures on the land (pressures on the crop), I think everything will just get even worse. Intensive agriculture anywhere has to be done very very carefully, and you have to really think about the land (it's a living entity after all). I've been involved with intensive agriculture for 20 years and I know it can be done in a way that does treat the land as well as possible. But ironically, these "eco" demands can often cause extremely harmful environmental practices. So we need to be careful we don't cause further problems.
Agg! My last post has some of the worst grammar I have ever written. Sorry about the parse errors.
Several KDE 3 apps have already been ported to OS X, such as kwrite as QT3 is available under the GPL on OS X. KDE developers have said that KDE 4 will be portable to other architectures including OS X amd Win32. However this doesn't mean they intend to port port the entire desktop to, say, OS X. Rather the apps themselves will be portable. This is arguably more important than porting the entire desktop. However, Having the KDE desktop replacing explorer on win32 would be wonderful. KDE still won't make Vista any less obnoxious, though. I am looking forward to running great KDE apps like Amarok on my OS X box at some point in the future, though.
In the meantime, Gnome is coming along quite nicely too. Neither gnome nor KDE is the be-all, end-all, last word in desktop environments, though. They both will continue to evolve and develop. More and more cooperation among the two camps through the freedesktop project is happening. Major problems have now been solved, including the clipboard frustrations of years past, drag-and-drop, and removable device handling through dbus. In fact with Qt4, since the glib main event loop can be used, it's becoming possible to mix gtk and qt widgets in the same app, which is handy for plugin developers. Problems yet to be solved include a common theming subsystem, a common virtual filesystem layer (a la kioslaves), and a few other things.