Bozos still haven't got the graphics right under monochrome X. They're negative, so, for example, pictures of Tux show him with a black tummy and white wings. Every other X app I've got exhibits the proper behavior in this regard.
Two binaries with standalone? Looks like it: netscape and netscape-dynMotif. The latter won't run on my (Motifless) system, so I've bzip2'd it to save space. If everything's still working in a week, I'll rm the thing.
Speaking of space: with netscape-dynMotif compressed, df is showing that my Navigator standalone installation is taking up about 15 000 blocks.
As a registeredmember of the community, I thought I'd take a few shots at the MS "challenge."
First, in the sloppy writing department:
The Linux community has asked Mindcraft:
To configure and tune the servers themselves.
To be present to ensure that the tests weren't rigged.
...
Well, uh, no: the consesnus is that when Mindcraft configures and tunes the servers (or not, as the case may be...), things go badly for Linux. Feelings on the second point seem to be the same.
What MS mean to write, of course, is that Linux people want to configure, tune, and be present. I'm sure that the sloppy writing isn't intended to muddle the issue, since it's sort of clarified a paragraph or two down.
Looking at their comparison chart, I note that they claim Windows has turned in the "best" scores on some benchmarks, while also noting that no Linux results exist. Winner by default, I guess?
On Linux, it's "easy to gain root access...". But, they say, on NT:
System services run in a secure context providing higher levels of security for multi-user services
Here's a nearly incomprehensible complaint about Linux:
Low degree of integration increases costs and technical risk
Melissa shows what costs and technical risks come with "integrating" stuff to the extent that MS wants to, but I'm not entirely sure what they mean by the word in this context.
In the damning faint praise department, MS graciously admits that there are "hundreds" of applications available for Linux. Call me crazy, but Unix is, er, "several years" old -- I'm pretty sure there are more than hundreds of useful programs available (whether they're "applications" or not is not terribly relevant, if you ask me). Even if there are only hundreds, well, a comparison of quality, rather than quantity, would be more telling, I think.
Another Linux failing, they say:
No formalized field training
I'm sure I don't know what that means. Organizations like The Learning Tree have Linux courses, and there have been a couple of certification programs announced (if inchoate).
More Linux evil:
Need highly trained system administrators - usually require developer-level skills
Or, you could just give the job to some random person and let him/her peruse the manuals. Things wouldn't turn out any worse than they would if the person were told to run NT instead. The fact is that a Gooey WimpyWYG PointyClick screen doesn't change the fact that administering a computer well (let alone a network) requires skill, intelligence, dedication, and plenty of learning. No "Wizard" will get around this fact.
Administrators are required to re-link and reload kernel to add features to OS.
Uh, well, maybe. But you do have to "install service packs" on NT, which comes to the same thing in the end -- downtime while the admin does something that, if it doesn't work, will result in Bad Things happening until it gets straightened out.
Most configuration settings require editing of text-based files
Oddly enough, they forget the corresponding item on the NT side: "Most config. settings require editing of binary files." Or, rather, one (the Registry), and if you screw it over, God help you. At least the OS keeps a couple of backups by default.
Here's one of their Big Awesome NT Features:
Scriptable administration for automated local and remote management
Unix is Home of the Script. That's all I have to say about that.
NT feature:
OS services and applications designed to integrated and work together
Melissa. Not all rosy.
Linux liability:
End users forced to integrate...
Nope, I'd say MS is the master of forcing people to integrate. (Yes, that was an out-of-context quotation followed by a cheap shot).
NT feature:
Over $2 Billion in R&D spending by Microsoft...
And you know who's paying for that -- look at the prices of their OS and applications (particularly the proposed prices for the various Office 2000 flavours).
And then they sum up. It's crapola in the best tradition of election campaigns, such as the one I'm currently enduring here in Ontario. Some highlights:
Although the Linux community is focusing on the messenger and not the message...
Well, when you notice that the messenger is full of shit, you don't tend to pay much heed to what's being said, now do you? The test was flawed (arguably fatally), so there's little point considering the results.
Now it's time for the Linux community to demonstrate the real performance and scalability capabilities of Linux, or withdraw their criticisms of the initial Mindcraft report.
No, Beavis, it's not. Even if no Linux person steps forward with brilliant test results in response to this "challenge," the fact remains that the original tests (and thus the original report) deserve the criticism they've received. This statement is about as valid as an assertion that since we have trouble treating cancer, we musn't go around saying how bad it is.
P.S.: Yes, someone who loads a 640x480 pic to display resized in a page as 160x120 IS an idiot.
Not the point that was raised, as you well know. It is desirable to have the editor figure out the image size for you, because then you don't have to pull the image up in another tool to check it yourself.
And #RRGGBB isn't that tough to figure out either.
God almighty. Let's say you want a specific green. You're saying you'd rather find it by trial and error with hex triplets than pick from a palette or move a few sliders? Liar.
What you are pointing out is that if I want full access to the capability of a language (Yes, HTML is a language) I should use a specialized editor. That's like saying I should program apps in VB rather than C.
No, it's not like saying that at all. I can't even begin to express how far off the mark you are with that comparison.
Anything you can do in an editor, you can write the code for.
Yeah, but do you want to spend the time doing a chore that can be automated easily? I'd rather hit CTRL-Q to create a blockquote.../blockquote pair than type the tag out manually. Especially if I had, say, five quotations to deal with. In fact, in putting tt tags around that last example, I accidentally left out the/, messing things up. A proper editor would handle that pointless housekeeping chore for me.
And if you write the code in HTML, it comes out EXACTLY the way you want it, and not Macromedia's or Allaire's idea of how it SHOULD be.
Who cares how the HTML comes out? As long as it conforms to the standard and does what you want, it doesn't matter. A proper Web-making tool could help you manage your sites, write (and verify) valid HTML with less manual labour, and maybe even clean up messes made by lesser authors with imperfect knowledge of the standard (or imperfect WYSIWYG toys). Yet you pretend you'd spurn such a tool.
What, you want me to believe you write all of your stuff (perfectly, the first time, of course) with cat? Nobody's impressed...
M5 blew up on me within the first 3 minutes that I was trying it out. And no, I wasn't trying any funky pages -- only Example2 and goto.com
I've had it explode reliably and cleanly while rendering www.cbc.ca three times in a row now. There are other eccentricities -- looks like it hangs if a page I'm trying to view is already in the cache, for instance, and the handling of JavaScript mouseover twitches is incomplete.
Anyone who tells you to junk your current Win9x browser and use M5 is either delusional or malicious.
On the plus side, M4 threw three fatal-looking errors just starting up on my Win95 machine. M5 starts cleanly and lets me turn off some of the superfluous toolbars. No question that progress is being made, and some pages just fly up on the screen.
Now, if someone would just make it so that the scrollbar thumbs didn't blink. What, are they trying to remind me that I just used them?
10 INPUT "Prime number to be factored"; A 20 PRINT "The factors are:","1",A
The difficulty, as I understand it, has more to do with determining whether a given large number is prime, or the product of two primes (and if so, which ones), or something like that.
I don't really understand the math that makes the cool public key stuff work, but I do know that the special thing about prime numbers is that they don't have factors (beyond the trivial ones produced by my 2-line BASIC program above). Contrast 7 (prime) with 6 (non-prime), for example. Two times three makes six, but what, besides one times seven, makes seven?
Maybe even a Win3.x or DOS box as Win9x and NT should be able to handle.html
If I'm right about what you're trying to say, you're wrong. Windows 3.x is a shell over DOS, so it's restricted to the old 8.3 naming convention.
95 can handle extensions like.html, but the legacy of 8.3 is still with us -- I think that Netscape Composer, for instance, is by default most eager to make and edit.htm files.
Note that none of this means that a Web server hosting.htm files is running Windows -- it just suggests that the people making the pages are or recently were.
Where I get in trouble with Linux is when you take it out of the cult . . . and say "now I'm Red Hat and I'm going to make a million dollars out of selling this software people developed for free."
Yep, that is indeed where he gets in trouble, isn't it? In an oh-lordy-I'm-doomed sort of way...
If half of the people commenting on this story aren't talking through their hats, you're going to be "growing" like Scientology, soon. Sure, the hordes dropping y'all like a slimy potato may end up being just as annoyed with the competition as they are with you, but that won't help much when the layoffs come.
They can start by producing a FakeAudio player that runs from the console, so I don't have to waste n million colours that I don't have on my X display just to play a radio broadcast...
Talk about chasing a user into the arms of Nullsoft. Of course, I'm probably the only one who's using monochrome X anyway.
Give an example of speech that does not convey information, and is still meaningful.
Well, there is the famously desirable attribute of art, "purposiveness without purpose." Carefully crafted with no obvious job beyond being carefully crafted, in other words (I think...). "Jaberwocky," is, of course, a good example.
Music and the visual arts are full of meaningful things that don't convey information. It's hard to do with language because language is arguably supposed to convey information. "Jabberwocky" is a deliberate stunt that is perhaps an exception to the rule.
On the other hand, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and, say, Danielle Steel have all produced, using language, works that are in some way meaningful, but you couldn't really call them informative -- they're ficiton, after all. "Esmerelda stared into Greg's deep, soulful eyes," could be informative, but if it never happened, what then?
If you'd reply to that question that the language is expressing what the author imagined, then I have to fall back on "Jabberwocky" and ask what you think of it. Does it convey information after all? Is it meaningful?
Lots of people I don't know use QuickTime, that's for sure. And if most of them eventually have to get a new version to see some "movie" clip somewhere and thus also gain the ability to play.MP3 files, that can't be bad for the popularity of the format.
If the person were transliterating, we could try to sound it out and perhaps determine what was actually said. Unfortunately, what we've got here is an incompetent translation.
It's kind of like calling "Halt, stranger, or die!" a greeting. It's not entirely wrong to do so, but there's a great deal of important detail that's been ignored.
The version I read in the Globe and Mail was pretty terrible: it had a worrisome headline, ("Linux not quite up to snuff") six generally accurate and positive paragraphs, but its author obviously ran out of brains before column-inches, misquoting the study as has already been demonstrated.
I think this was a case of "balance": if something's good, we have to say something bad about it. Unfortunately, they said the wrong things, because they didn't understand what the study was telling them.
The Wall Street Journal ("WSJ") is a "journal" (diary) about Wall Street. It is very popular with people who trade stocks and invest -- indeed, it is more popular in some circles than the National Enquirer. Unfortunately, WSJ isn't printed in English, and doesn't offer home delivery.
If babelfish can read a page and map it to another language, it's reasonable enough to expect that the relevant topics in a page can be extracted and mapped to some kind of categorization.
Babelfish just has to look up words and phrases in a dictionary and replace them with their defined equivalents -- that's why it's not as good as a human translator.
Picking up the relevant topics in a page is a good deal harder, since it seems to require some degree of comprehension. I can't imagine a bot being able to distinguish a page about how much Bill Gates sucks from a page about how much pages about how Bill Gates sucks suck -- or even easier stuff.
Some people here seem to be gloating over the fact that they are damaging other people's property. "Woohoo, how bout we slashdot these babies!"?
Uh, sir? Causing an a computer system to fail under load doesn't actually damage it. If a crash were damage to property, Netscape Communicator would be illegal, now, wouldn't it?
I get the impression that most of the people commenting on this story haven't read Lloyd Wood's piece.
I read the talk.bizarre piece on DejaNews, since I'm a Usenet boy. I enjoyed watching Mr. Katz get kicked in the head over and over in a very thorough way.
The shots at Rob and this site were also amusing, though I don't particularly agree with them. Then, after all the carping about the unholy Katz/Malda/Amazon trinity, what's at the bottom of the post? This:
Katz's new book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679456783/ statingtheobviouA/
That wouldn't be a special URL that gives Mr. Obvious credit for hits resulting from his diatribe, would it? I can hear the justification now. "If the uneducated fools who would throw away their money on this illiterate 'work' must do so, I fail to see why I shouldn't benefit from their lack of taste. Heaven knows it tries me so to think of their very existence; I deserve compensation for sharing the Earth with them."
Actually, I don't care. I don't even really know what the URL signifies. For all I know, you have to link to Amazon like that for it to work.
If the versions are so incompatible, why can I grab packages from Caldera and Debian distributions and [...] drop them into my RedHat system?
Packages? Hell, this does the trick for me:
configure; make; make install
The occasional need for a library aside (and that's no worse than going and getting VBRUNx00.DLL, anyway), configuring and installing a complex, current piece of software on my crufty ol' Slackware '96 machine is just as easy as chatting with InstallSheild in Windows. I do both frequently, so I should know.
Often the tar.gz that I'm installing from supports Solaris and HP/UX, too. That's what you get when your OS ships with a standard C compiler and a set of system calls that people have been using for 20 years, I guess.
Actually, I'd like to have a civil chat with Mr. Bill and see what he really thinks of this stuff. Back in high school, he was, we are told, a genuine Computer Nerd. Surely in talking crap as he has, he's just playing to the glossy-magazine crowd?
The IPP spec does not know/care about any capabilities of your printer directly, i.e. color v. b&w, page size, resolution - it's all sent through metadata.
Seems reasonable enough -- the client/driver can thus easily tell the user that my printer can print in 3D. But, at print time, how can 3D printing data get to the printer if the client's never heard of such a thing?
Seems to me like you'd have to update your client/driver somehow, which is a concern you want to avoid with IPP. Otherwise you'd have to encapsulate the 3D instructions at the application level and then count on the server/driver at the other end to understand what you mean. But if you require that, you're requiring the remote user to know about the printer and have the right software to print on it, specifically -- in other words, forcing the user to worry about drivers, again.
As I believe I've already said, IPP sounds like it'll handle non-bizarre cases just fine -- mind you, so will Postscript.
The scary thing was that because the parody was not protected speech, I was flagrantly violating a ton of trademarks
What, according to the people who were threatening you? Well, of course: they'll say anything. You wouldn't expect them to say something like, "We'd never succeed in court, so we're hereby demanding that you comply with our wishes out of fear and/or the goodness of your heart," would you?
Truth defenses (and, arguably, parody or "fair comment" -- don't know as much about them) don't make your plaintiff-to-be vanish in a puff of smoke. If successful, they make the judge in a civil trial say, "Defense succeeds, case dismissed with costs."
If you're not interested in sitting through court action, your only choice is to negotiate with your opponent. If your opponent won't budge, you have to either fight after all or give up. There is no magic.
One of the major goals of the IPP projects is to eliminate the client's need for printer drivers.
Except, of course, for an IPP-friendly driver.
Similarly, you can print a Postscript file on any printer -- provided that you can translate the Postscript into something the printer likes. In this case, you have to translate your print job into something that IPP can handle. For the user, it comes to the same thing.
Doesn't the IPP impose a sort of lowest common denominator, since it is standardized, and it is what tells the client what the printer can do? How do I tell an arbitrary client that my printer can print 3D and backward if the standards designers didn't think anyone ever would?
This isn't necessarily bad, but it means that I'm unlikely to use IPP to print to my own new turbo whiz-bang printer (until a new version of the protocol fully supporting it comes out). If I had occasion to do remote printing to others' printers, or to allow others to do remote printing on my printer, IPP would become a plausible choice.
OTOH, if they wanted to print 3D and backward -- if the whole point of their wanting to print on my printer was that it could do that -- then we'd have to do the negotiate-a-file-format, send-me-the-file shuffle, as before.
Similarly, a Java binary may run anywhere a JVM can, but we can't expect it to exploit the features of a PIII and a G3 equally. The advantage is that it runs at all. The question is, how good is "at all," and is that good enough?
If IPP lets me print colour bitmaps on most common/popular printers, that'd probably do the trick in most cases.
Even truth is not a defence under our legal system in defamation cases. Canada has the same legal heritage as us ( British common law) and may have similar defamation laws.
Truth is an absolute defense against accusations of libel and slander (i.e. defamation) under Canadian civil law, and I'm 95% sure we get that from British common law.
Think about it: the offense involved in defamation is saying something bad about someone that isn't true. If it is true, the offense hasn't been committed. Otherwise, you'd never see headlines in newspapers like Multiple-Murderer Will Appeal Conviction. "Your honour, this article clearly and deliberately puts the Son of Sam in a poor light."
Now, I believe that in the U.S. you can get away with saying untrue things if you can show that you really truly did honestly believe they were true when you published them. There's not much of a history of people managing that in Canada, as I understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, actually, most of us use a compiler, so it's no struggle at all. YMMV if you're trying to produce the binary by hand...
My few cents, running on Linux, libc5:
Bozos still haven't got the graphics right under monochrome X. They're negative, so, for example, pictures of Tux show him with a black tummy and white wings. Every other X app I've got exhibits the proper behavior in this regard.
Two binaries with standalone? Looks like it: netscape and netscape-dynMotif. The latter won't run on my (Motifless) system, so I've bzip2'd it to save space. If everything's still working in a week, I'll rm the thing.
Speaking of space: with netscape-dynMotif compressed, df is showing that my Navigator standalone installation is taking up about 15 000 blocks.
As a registered member of the community, I thought I'd take a few shots at the MS "challenge."
First, in the sloppy writing department:
Well, uh, no: the consesnus is that when Mindcraft configures and tunes the servers (or not, as the case may be...), things go badly for Linux. Feelings on the second point seem to be the same.
What MS mean to write, of course, is that Linux people want to configure, tune, and be present. I'm sure that the sloppy writing isn't intended to muddle the issue, since it's sort of clarified a paragraph or two down.
Looking at their comparison chart, I note that they claim Windows has turned in the "best" scores on some benchmarks, while also noting that no Linux results exist. Winner by default, I guess?
On Linux, it's "easy to gain root access...". But, they say, on NT:
Does that mean that this exploit no longer works?
Here's a nearly incomprehensible complaint about Linux:
Melissa shows what costs and technical risks come with "integrating" stuff to the extent that MS wants to, but I'm not entirely sure what they mean by the word in this context.
In the damning faint praise department, MS graciously admits that there are "hundreds" of applications available for Linux. Call me crazy, but Unix is, er, "several years" old -- I'm pretty sure there are more than hundreds of useful programs available (whether they're "applications" or not is not terribly relevant, if you ask me). Even if there are only hundreds, well, a comparison of quality, rather than quantity, would be more telling, I think.
Another Linux failing, they say:
I'm sure I don't know what that means. Organizations like The Learning Tree have Linux courses, and there have been a couple of certification programs announced (if inchoate).
More Linux evil:
Or, you could just give the job to some random person and let him/her peruse the manuals. Things wouldn't turn out any worse than they would if the person were told to run NT instead. The fact is that a Gooey WimpyWYG PointyClick screen doesn't change the fact that administering a computer well (let alone a network) requires skill, intelligence, dedication, and plenty of learning. No "Wizard" will get around this fact.
Uh, well, maybe. But you do have to "install service packs" on NT, which comes to the same thing in the end -- downtime while the admin does something that, if it doesn't work, will result in Bad Things happening until it gets straightened out.
Oddly enough, they forget the corresponding item on the NT side: "Most config. settings require editing of binary files." Or, rather, one (the Registry), and if you screw it over, God help you. At least the OS keeps a couple of backups by default.
Here's one of their Big Awesome NT Features:
Unix is Home of the Script. That's all I have to say about that.
NT feature:
Melissa. Not all rosy.
Linux liability:
Nope, I'd say MS is the master of forcing people to integrate. (Yes, that was an out-of-context quotation followed by a cheap shot).
NT feature:
And you know who's paying for that -- look at the prices of their OS and applications (particularly the proposed prices for the various Office 2000 flavours).
And then they sum up. It's crapola in the best tradition of election campaigns, such as the one I'm currently enduring here in Ontario. Some highlights:
Well, when you notice that the messenger is full of shit, you don't tend to pay much heed to what's being said, now do you? The test was flawed (arguably fatally), so there's little point considering the results.
No, Beavis, it's not. Even if no Linux person steps forward with brilliant test results in response to this "challenge," the fact remains that the original tests (and thus the original report) deserve the criticism they've received. This statement is about as valid as an assertion that since we have trouble treating cancer, we musn't go around saying how bad it is.
That was a pre-emptive warning more than anything else, fear not. Sooner or later, some doofus posts on Slashdot advocating just about anything...
Not the point that was raised, as you well know. It is desirable to have the editor figure out the image size for you, because then you don't have to pull the image up in another tool to check it yourself.
God almighty. Let's say you want a specific green. You're saying you'd rather find it by trial and error with hex triplets than pick from a palette or move a few sliders? Liar.
No, it's not like saying that at all. I can't even begin to express how far off the mark you are with that comparison.
Yeah, but do you want to spend the time doing a chore that can be automated easily? I'd rather hit CTRL-Q to create a blockquote ... /blockquote pair than type the tag out manually. Especially if I had, say, five quotations to deal with. In fact, in putting tt tags around that last example, I accidentally left out the /, messing things up. A proper editor would handle that pointless housekeeping chore for me.
Who cares how the HTML comes out? As long as it conforms to the standard and does what you want, it doesn't matter. A proper Web-making tool could help you manage your sites, write (and verify) valid HTML with less manual labour, and maybe even clean up messes made by lesser authors with imperfect knowledge of the standard (or imperfect WYSIWYG toys). Yet you pretend you'd spurn such a tool.
What, you want me to believe you write all of your stuff (perfectly, the first time, of course) with cat? Nobody's impressed...
You know, when people can't be bothered to fix their typos, that's one thing. When they reply without reading, that's another.
That's not what was said at all. Here's the relevant snippet:
It exceeded his disk quota, it didn't trash his provider's systems.
I've had it explode reliably and cleanly while rendering www.cbc.ca three times in a row now. There are other eccentricities -- looks like it hangs if a page I'm trying to view is already in the cache, for instance, and the handling of JavaScript mouseover twitches is incomplete.
Anyone who tells you to junk your current Win9x browser and use M5 is either delusional or malicious.
On the plus side, M4 threw three fatal-looking errors just starting up on my Win95 machine. M5 starts cleanly and lets me turn off some of the superfluous toolbars. No question that progress is being made, and some pages just fly up on the screen.
Now, if someone would just make it so that the scrollbar thumbs didn't blink. What, are they trying to remind me that I just used them?
10 INPUT "Prime number to be factored"; A
20 PRINT "The factors are:","1",A
The difficulty, as I understand it, has more to do with determining whether a given large number is prime, or the product of two primes (and if so, which ones), or something like that.
I don't really understand the math that makes the cool public key stuff work, but I do know that the special thing about prime numbers is that they don't have factors (beyond the trivial ones produced by my 2-line BASIC program above). Contrast 7 (prime) with 6 (non-prime), for example. Two times three makes six, but what, besides one times seven, makes seven?
If I'm right about what you're trying to say, you're wrong. Windows 3.x is a shell over DOS, so it's restricted to the old 8.3 naming convention.
95 can handle extensions like .html, but the legacy of 8.3 is still with us -- I think that Netscape Composer, for instance, is by default most eager to make and edit .htm files.
Note that none of this means that a Web server hosting .htm files is running Windows -- it just suggests that the people making the pages are or recently were.
Quoting him from the article:
Yep, that is indeed where he gets in trouble, isn't it? In an oh-lordy-I'm-doomed sort of way...
If half of the people commenting on this story aren't talking through their hats, you're going to be "growing" like Scientology, soon. Sure, the hordes dropping y'all like a slimy potato may end up being just as annoyed with the competition as they are with you, but that won't help much when the layoffs come.
They can start by producing a FakeAudio player that runs from the console, so I don't have to waste n million colours that I don't have on my X display just to play a radio broadcast...
Talk about chasing a user into the arms of Nullsoft. Of course, I'm probably the only one who's using monochrome X anyway.
Well, there is the famously desirable attribute of art, "purposiveness without purpose." Carefully crafted with no obvious job beyond being carefully crafted, in other words (I think...). "Jaberwocky," is, of course, a good example.
Music and the visual arts are full of meaningful things that don't convey information. It's hard to do with language because language is arguably supposed to convey information. "Jabberwocky" is a deliberate stunt that is perhaps an exception to the rule.
On the other hand, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and, say, Danielle Steel have all produced, using language, works that are in some way meaningful, but you couldn't really call them informative -- they're ficiton, after all. "Esmerelda stared into Greg's deep, soulful eyes," could be informative, but if it never happened, what then?
If you'd reply to that question that the language is expressing what the author imagined, then I have to fall back on "Jabberwocky" and ask what you think of it. Does it convey information after all? Is it meaningful?
Lots of people I don't know use QuickTime, that's for sure. And if most of them eventually have to get a new version to see some "movie" clip somewhere and thus also gain the ability to play .MP3 files, that can't be bad for the popularity of the format.
Besides, I need it to watch the exploding whale.
If the person were transliterating, we could try to sound it out and perhaps determine what was actually said. Unfortunately, what we've got here is an incompetent translation.
It's kind of like calling "Halt, stranger, or die!" a greeting. It's not entirely wrong to do so, but there's a great deal of important detail that's been ignored.
The version I read in the Globe and Mail was pretty terrible: it had a worrisome headline, ("Linux not quite up to snuff") six generally accurate and positive paragraphs, but its author obviously ran out of brains before column-inches, misquoting the study as has already been demonstrated.
I think this was a case of "balance": if something's good, we have to say something bad about it. Unfortunately, they said the wrong things, because they didn't understand what the study was telling them.
The Wall Street Journal ("WSJ") is a "journal" (diary) about Wall Street. It is very popular with people who trade stocks and invest -- indeed, it is more popular in some circles than the National Enquirer. Unfortunately, WSJ isn't printed in English, and doesn't offer home delivery.
Babelfish just has to look up words and phrases in a dictionary and replace them with their defined equivalents -- that's why it's not as good as a human translator.
Picking up the relevant topics in a page is a good deal harder, since it seems to require some degree of comprehension. I can't imagine a bot being able to distinguish a page about how much Bill Gates sucks from a page about how much pages about how Bill Gates sucks suck -- or even easier stuff.
The mapping is easy; the extraction is hard.
Uh, sir? Causing an a computer system to fail under load doesn't actually damage it. If a crash were damage to property, Netscape Communicator would be illegal, now, wouldn't it?
Let's not get hysterical.
I read the talk.bizarre piece on DejaNews, since I'm a Usenet boy. I enjoyed watching Mr. Katz get kicked in the head over and over in a very thorough way.
The shots at Rob and this site were also amusing, though I don't particularly agree with them. Then, after all the carping about the unholy Katz/Malda/Amazon trinity, what's at the bottom of the post? This:
Katz's new book:/ statingtheobviouA/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679456783
That wouldn't be a special URL that gives Mr. Obvious credit for hits resulting from his diatribe, would it? I can hear the justification now. "If the uneducated fools who would throw away their money on this illiterate 'work' must do so, I fail to see why I shouldn't benefit from their lack of taste. Heaven knows it tries me so to think of their very existence; I deserve compensation for sharing the Earth with them."
Actually, I don't care. I don't even really know what the URL signifies. For all I know, you have to link to Amazon like that for it to work.
Packages? Hell, this does the trick for me:
configure; make; make install
The occasional need for a library aside (and that's no worse than going and getting VBRUNx00.DLL, anyway), configuring and installing a complex, current piece of software on my crufty ol' Slackware '96 machine is just as easy as chatting with InstallSheild in Windows. I do both frequently, so I should know.
Often the tar.gz that I'm installing from supports Solaris and HP/UX, too. That's what you get when your OS ships with a standard C compiler and a set of system calls that people have been using for 20 years, I guess.
Actually, I'd like to have a civil chat with Mr. Bill and see what he really thinks of this stuff. Back in high school, he was, we are told, a genuine Computer Nerd. Surely in talking crap as he has, he's just playing to the glossy-magazine crowd?
Seems reasonable enough -- the client/driver can thus easily tell the user that my printer can print in 3D. But, at print time, how can 3D printing data get to the printer if the client's never heard of such a thing?
Seems to me like you'd have to update your client/driver somehow, which is a concern you want to avoid with IPP. Otherwise you'd have to encapsulate the 3D instructions at the application level and then count on the server/driver at the other end to understand what you mean. But if you require that, you're requiring the remote user to know about the printer and have the right software to print on it, specifically -- in other words, forcing the user to worry about drivers, again.
As I believe I've already said, IPP sounds like it'll handle non-bizarre cases just fine -- mind you, so will Postscript.
What, according to the people who were threatening you? Well, of course: they'll say anything. You wouldn't expect them to say something like, "We'd never succeed in court, so we're hereby demanding that you comply with our wishes out of fear and/or the goodness of your heart," would you?
Truth defenses (and, arguably, parody or "fair comment" -- don't know as much about them) don't make your plaintiff-to-be vanish in a puff of smoke. If successful, they make the judge in a civil trial say, "Defense succeeds, case dismissed with costs."
If you're not interested in sitting through court action, your only choice is to negotiate with your opponent. If your opponent won't budge, you have to either fight after all or give up. There is no magic.
Except, of course, for an IPP-friendly driver.
Similarly, you can print a Postscript file on any printer -- provided that you can translate the Postscript into something the printer likes. In this case, you have to translate your print job into something that IPP can handle. For the user, it comes to the same thing.
Doesn't the IPP impose a sort of lowest common denominator, since it is standardized, and it is what tells the client what the printer can do? How do I tell an arbitrary client that my printer can print 3D and backward if the standards designers didn't think anyone ever would?
This isn't necessarily bad, but it means that I'm unlikely to use IPP to print to my own new turbo whiz-bang printer (until a new version of the protocol fully supporting it comes out). If I had occasion to do remote printing to others' printers, or to allow others to do remote printing on my printer, IPP would become a plausible choice.
OTOH, if they wanted to print 3D and backward -- if the whole point of their wanting to print on my printer was that it could do that -- then we'd have to do the negotiate-a-file-format, send-me-the-file shuffle, as before.
Similarly, a Java binary may run anywhere a JVM can, but we can't expect it to exploit the features of a PIII and a G3 equally. The advantage is that it runs at all. The question is, how good is "at all," and is that good enough?
If IPP lets me print colour bitmaps on most common/popular printers, that'd probably do the trick in most cases.
Truth is an absolute defense against accusations of libel and slander (i.e. defamation) under Canadian civil law, and I'm 95% sure we get that from British common law.
Think about it: the offense involved in defamation is saying something bad about someone that isn't true. If it is true, the offense hasn't been committed. Otherwise, you'd never see headlines in newspapers like Multiple-Murderer Will Appeal Conviction. "Your honour, this article clearly and deliberately puts the Son of Sam in a poor light."
Now, I believe that in the U.S. you can get away with saying untrue things if you can show that you really truly did honestly believe they were true when you published them. There's not much of a history of people managing that in Canada, as I understand it.
IANAL, BTW.
Quoting, roughly, a famous lawyer whose name I forget: