and Abiword. OpenOffice is not a part of gnome and nowhere near usable yet.
I think the Abiword developers would disagree with you there. Abiword is part of Gnome Office. Its a testament to abiwords interoperability and cross platform status that you dont think its a gnome app, its a shame more Gnome apps dont try as hard to be cross platform.
i dual boot
if i want to read linux files from windows i have only one tool at my disposal and its called explore2fs. this tool is very useful to me and would not choose lightly to change my linux filesystem.
for standalone linux machines this is not even an issue.
(dont suggest VMware i dont want to pay for it so i simply wont use it)
The problem with that is the people dont stay "user experience people" for very long. If you put someone who has never used a computer before in front of a *nix machine running Gnome it wont take long before the accept its idosyncracies.
The number of times i have heard MSWindows users complain about how "unusable" the Mac is just because they are used to MSWindows. Ive seen new users who dont know a damn thing about computers: "What do you mean Double-Click?". If some one has to ask what kind of computer they should get then they should probably get a Mac. (If they want my help with maintainance they had better buy a Mac or use Linux).
Studying Usability is more about being able to empathise, being able to look at things in a different way, to be self-aware. My English teacher always warned us that us that our writing had to be understood by others not just the writer, the same advice should be taken by programmers. It is also very important to be able to listen to user feedback, and give users a chance to criticise before you explain. Many interfaces are not immediately obivious but perfectly workable if you have been lead through, and had it explained once.
If you have not already read it i strongly recommend you read the Gnome Usability Study done by Sun Microsystems (its somewhere on Gnome.org under Usability or possibly recent news, and was featured on/. a few weeks ago).
This does actually make lots of sense, if you have already paid for windows (either by lack of choice or needing it for other reason). It also makes lots of sense if you dont have any choice of OS due to company policy. It will also help to get people used to open source software and make transition to linux much easier (sometimes). Embrace and Extend
You want a Cross Platform open source word processor then get Abiword. You need more power then get Star Office (and openoffice) which has all the functionality of MS Office and then some (mmm vector graphics.)
http://www.abisource.com
http://www.sun.com/staroffice
There is a graphical version of Vim availble for windows, but its a command line app so you may as well just use the copy that comes with the (full dowload of) cygwin.
Cross platform: the holy grail of software, the OS becomes irrelavant (it already is to most desktop users).
I also really like Xnview, a file viewer and thumbnail browser. It supports loads of formats (i think it uses some of the IMagick.dlls)
Use CDEX for your ripping needs, yes it supports Ogg.
Need an IDE? Try VIDE for Java or C/C++, it seems okay, have not used it myself though
http://www.objectcentral.com/vide.htm
Best of luck. Try and contribute back to open source software any way you can, most people even appreciate bug reports and criticism (try and be diplomatic).
I quite like Pingus, a lemmings clone. Its quite slow, and not yet complete but the devloper is looking for people to design more levels.
http://pingus.seul.org
Need a telnet client? No really you dont (and im not talking about the one included with windows), you need an SSH client with support for the insecure legacy protocol that is telnet. use putty.
http://www.google.com/search?q=putty
If you want realplayer support, or quicktime support your pretty much screwed. you have to at least install those apps, you could possibly get other media/video programs that use their.dlls. Is OpenDivX;) really open? I think i heard the license was not really very open.
Wish i'd thought of posting this to Slashdot. Please get your progress included in Slashback.
% Bart checks the decrepit old Spirograph[tm] factory. A lone man plays
% with a Spirograph on a slanted desk.
Bart: Yo, Dr. S: have you seen Milhouse today?
Dr. S: No.
Bart: OK, thanks. [starts to leave]
Dr. S: Wait: did you know that there's a direct correlation between the
decline of Spirograph and the rise in gang activity? Think about
it.
Bart: I will.
Dr. S: No you won't.
--
Bart visits the Spirograph factory, "Radioactive Man"
--
Correlation does not imply Causation.
Re:Advantages over Perl
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
1) RUby has much nicer OO syntax than Perl - advantage is that when you go back to read the code after a month you can tell what's going on.
Sheesh! am i the only one who actually uses comments anymore? it's hard to have too many comments, but i try.:)
bloody lazy slashdot editors.
dont you just love when they post a story about another story!
The article even tells you where to find the original story.
Use the source! that goes for news as well as code.
Is it just me or are an awful lot of MSNBC stories getting posted? Keep you friends close and your enemies closer.
But I still can't figure out why Big Brother has been beaten in Google's audience.
you dont search for stuff you have not lost. the website for big brother is very clearly advertised on the show as channel4.com/bigbrother. Even if you dont know it, it's pretty easy to guess the right address, any one who watches it will know the channel its on, the channel name is easy to remember, its a dot com, they also have the.co.uk.
Maybe more French people than Brits know how great Google is, its not as if Google ever did any advertising.
it is the second run of the show, i already have it bookmarked. Ama is definately going to get kicked out tonight. Its great, Paul keeps getting nominated and the public wont vote him out
The bookies say the gay irish one is going to win, ...wait wasn't that the last series???
The few free software programmers doing much better than the windows programmers can be easily explained by a variety of causes.
A happy employee is a productive employee.
A good programmmer can do the work of 50 crap programmers.
Get it right first time and you dont have to do as much debugging, the code will be more portable, easily added to and make sense.
Software engineering suggest/says that the actually programming itself is only a small part of the system.
Good programs need less maintainance, and are more extensible and receptive to change.
free software currently attracts more enthusiastic developers those who question a little bit more. to use free software attracts a different type of person, if Linux were mainstream you would have proportionately more crap Linux programmers.
The free software programmers need to realise that convincing the boss and the users is important too. If they cant convince their boss(es) then i hope they know when to sell their shares and jump ship.
- Caching (when achievable) of sites referenced in articles. -- Some sites WANT the huge number of hits, others can't begin to handle that type of load. So, ASK THEM, then cache as appropriate. Google does it, so can/.
Usually someone gets a copy of a site before its slashdotted and reposts it as a comment, and conveniently saves the editors the effort of having to ask permission.
Having to ask permission to mirror something that is freely on the internet is laughable, considering the local internet proxy or your browser can set to cache everything.
--
Three rings for the elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
Ive read Java Gently ( http://www.cs.up.ac.za/javagently/ ) which was very simple and also used the book by Dietel and Dietel which was vast, and had loads of code i could borrow.
As someone who has already learnt C you should already know about data stuctures and all the computer science basics, so a vast reference book would like the Dietel and Deitel would probably suit you better than books like Java Gently which are more about teaching you how to program.
Dont buy a "For Dummies" book borrow it from the library and copy any code/toy programmes that interest you but i really think they are a waste of money.
You should of course check out the resources provided by Sun ( http://java.sun.com/ )
Definately give the turorial a look
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.ht ml
java programming would be a lot harder without having the full API close to hand
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/index.html
best of luck
and remember writing portable, well documented, well structured reusable code is not a bad thing.
> Sure, it starts with the cheese worm. But then another group comes up with the mouse worm that breaks in through security holes left unpatched by the cheese worm, removing the cheese worm and installing itself. Then comes the morphing cat worm, that not only breaks in on mouse patched sites, but also downloads updated patches from servers that further increase security...
>The war of the patch-virii.
> A friend of mine suggested to me that whatever you look for on the Internet, it will seemingly spring into being simply by the fact of you looking for it. That same friend came up with this idea of patch viruses that break into and repair security holes. And **Poof**, it exists.
You suggest a mouse worm that would use security holes that the cheese worm missed, but if the cheese worm missed a hole/bug the it would be no different than if the Cheese Worm had never visited.
If these patches want to make your machine really secure then they would disconnect you from the internet. You cant get much safer than that unless the patch turns your machine OFF!
On the other hand if the Cheese Worm was not smart enough, its attempt at patching the system could expose or cause more security holes.
The suggestion of a worm to "fix" MS Windows could in fact be seen as disabling *snigger* useful features. Anyone who applied the Security patch to Microsoft Oulook last summer may remember all the features it disabled, you could barely open or save any attachments, it was way better from a security point of view but the program was essentially crippled.
(When i say "fix" i mean as you would "fix" a small puppy to stop it from breeding)
I suspect your friend may have read The Dilbert Future by Scott Adams, odds are that most things you think of have already been thought of by someone else, invention is incremental. There are theories of shared genetic memory. A a corollery to this theory it is suggested that once one person has invented something once it is more likely that some one else will independently come up with the same idea. Take the inventing of the Radio by Marconi and Tesla for example.
Aside from the waste of bandwidth, patch worms worms are not such a bad thing. Lots of bandwidth gets wasted anyway and if you accept the inevitabilty of virii then you may as well accept the patch virii.
Security is an endless battle ongoing battle.
the orinal workstation was built from cheap available components, then they needed a cheap OS and the had a product and that was the basis of Sun Microsystems
(im way oversimplifying i skim read this in an American computer business magazine)
Nevermind [was Re:You Post this at 2:47AM...]
on
To Z Or Not To Z
·
· Score: 1
In Ireland St Patricks day (/festival week) has been Postponed due to the foot and mouth disease scare in England.
St Patrick has been driven out by the snakes...
http://images.ireland.com/newspaper/front/0301/s na ke4.jpg
besides, loads of irish people think Guinness is horrible (an aquirred taste).
I always thought XP was short for Cross Platform, which make "Windows XP" the most f...ing riduculous name ever to come out of Microsoft.
*WinCE* was a pretty unfortunate name though. Of course as previous Slashdot threads have suggested they cannot copyright an Acronym only the "WindowsXP" one word combination, not that will prevent the inevitable frivoulous lawsuits.
"Windows combines CE ME NT, to provide their most solid OS yet, WARNING: May take considerable time to dry."
NYT Link (First Karma Whore)
on
Spyware
·
· Score: 3
Did a quick search through the older posts and put this together. You dont need a login with this link
http://208.48.26.217/2001/01/18/technology/18UPDA. html
And for good measure some a link about known spyware
The funny thing is if a Canadian acts like a total asshole most Europeans would make the mistake of assuming he is an American.
That is not to say that Americans do not sometimes exhibit an excess of National Pride.
There is a (racist???) joke about a man who goes into an "ethnic" resteraunt and shouts
I hate *insert_ethnic_group_here*
and the staff respond, so do we, we are
*insert_similar/neighbouring_ethnic_group*
(Ummm, you had to be there, it does not work written down, and is not for the easily offended...)
Slashdot Mirror
I think the Abiword developers would disagree with you there. Abiword is part of Gnome Office. Its a testament to abiwords interoperability and cross platform status that you dont think its a gnome app, its a shame more Gnome apps dont try as hard to be cross platform.
i dual boot
if i want to read linux files from windows i have only one tool at my disposal and its called explore2fs. this tool is very useful to me and would not choose lightly to change my linux filesystem.
for standalone linux machines this is not even an issue.
(dont suggest VMware i dont want to pay for it so i simply wont use it)
> "user experience people"
/. a few weeks ago).
The problem with that is the people dont stay "user experience people" for very long. If you put someone who has never used a computer before in front of a *nix machine running Gnome it wont take long before the accept its idosyncracies.
The number of times i have heard MSWindows users complain about how "unusable" the Mac is just because they are used to MSWindows. Ive seen new users who dont know a damn thing about computers: "What do you mean Double-Click?". If some one has to ask what kind of computer they should get then they should probably get a Mac. (If they want my help with maintainance they had better buy a Mac or use Linux).
Studying Usability is more about being able to empathise, being able to look at things in a different way, to be self-aware. My English teacher always warned us that us that our writing had to be understood by others not just the writer, the same advice should be taken by programmers. It is also very important to be able to listen to user feedback, and give users a chance to criticise before you explain. Many interfaces are not immediately obivious but perfectly workable if you have been lead through, and had it explained once.
If you have not already read it i strongly recommend you read the Gnome Usability Study done by Sun Microsystems (its somewhere on Gnome.org under Usability or possibly recent news, and was featured on
> Let me guess, you probably bootlegged BeOS, right?
how can someone bootleg an OS that is Free?
(Free for non commerial use)
Netscape 6 was a total rewrite. but Netscape 5 the first open source version was not. It was ditched apperently due to extreme bit rot.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2001- May/msg00173.html
have SOUP instead
because you cant eat SOAP
;P
Embrace and Extend
You want a Cross Platform open source word processor then get Abiword. You need more power then get Star Office (and openoffice) which has all the functionality of MS Office and then some (mmm vector graphics.)
http://www.abisource.com
http://www.sun.com/staroffice
There is a graphical version of Vim availble for windows, but its a command line app so you may as well just use the copy that comes with the (full dowload of) cygwin.
Cross platform: the holy grail of software, the OS becomes irrelavant (it already is to most desktop users).
I also really like Xnview, a file viewer and thumbnail browser. It supports loads of formats (i think it uses some of the IMagick .dlls)
Use CDEX for your ripping needs, yes it supports Ogg.
Need an IDE? Try VIDE for Java or C/C++, it seems okay, have not used it myself though
http://www.objectcentral.com/vide.htm
Best of luck. Try and contribute back to open source software any way you can, most people even appreciate bug reports and criticism (try and be diplomatic).
I quite like Pingus, a lemmings clone. Its quite slow, and not yet complete but the devloper is looking for people to design more levels.
http://pingus.seul.org
Need a telnet client? No really you dont (and im not talking about the one included with windows), you need an SSH client with support for the insecure legacy protocol that is telnet. use putty.
http://www.google.com/search?q=putty
If you want realplayer support, or quicktime support your pretty much screwed. you have to at least install those apps, you could possibly get other media/video programs that use their .dlls.
Is OpenDivX;) really open? I think i heard the license was not really very open.
Wish i'd thought of posting this to Slashdot. Please get your progress included in Slashback.
% Bart checks the decrepit old Spirograph[tm] factory. A lone man plays
% with a Spirograph on a slanted desk.
Bart: Yo, Dr. S: have you seen Milhouse today?
Dr. S: No.
Bart: OK, thanks. [starts to leave]
Dr. S: Wait: did you know that there's a direct correlation between the
decline of Spirograph and the rise in gang activity? Think about
it.
Bart: I will.
Dr. S: No you won't.
--
Bart visits the Spirograph factory, "Radioactive Man"
--
Correlation does not imply Causation.
Sheesh! am i the only one who actually uses comments anymore? it's hard to have too many comments, but i try. :)
dont you just love when they post a story about another story! The article even tells you where to find the original story.
Use the source! that goes for news as well as code.
Is it just me or are an awful lot of MSNBC stories getting posted? Keep you friends close and your enemies closer.
Exchange replacement:
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
Allegedly its dead though.
you dont search for stuff you have not lost. the website for big brother is very clearly advertised on the show as channel4.com/bigbrother. Even if you dont know it, it's pretty easy to guess the right address, any one who watches it will know the channel its on, the channel name is easy to remember, its a dot com, they also have the .co.uk.
Maybe more French people than Brits know how great Google is, its not as if Google ever did any advertising.
it is the second run of the show, i already have it bookmarked. Ama is definately going to get kicked out tonight. Its great, Paul keeps getting nominated and the public wont vote him out
The bookies say the gay irish one is going to win,
...wait wasn't that the last series???
odds 5/2 on
I prefer to call it freedom software and in my writing i often write it as Free(dom) Software to emphasize what its about.
--
I cant believe Stallman actually pronounces the slash and in Gnu/Linux.
The few free software programmers doing much better than the windows programmers can be easily explained by a variety of causes.
A happy employee is a productive employee.
A good programmmer can do the work of 50 crap programmers.
Get it right first time and you dont have to do as much debugging, the code will be more portable, easily added to and make sense.
Software engineering suggest/says that the actually programming itself is only a small part of the system.
Good programs need less maintainance, and are more extensible and receptive to change.
free software currently attracts more enthusiastic developers those who question a little bit more. to use free software attracts a different type of person, if Linux were mainstream you would have proportionately more crap Linux programmers.
The free software programmers need to realise that convincing the boss and the users is important too. If they cant convince their boss(es) then i hope they know when to sell their shares and jump ship.
but it is better known as "Karma Whoring"
Usually someone gets a copy of a site before its slashdotted and reposts it as a comment, and conveniently saves the editors the effort of having to ask permission.
--Having to ask permission to mirror something that is freely on the internet is laughable, considering the local internet proxy or your browser can set to cache everything.
Three rings for the elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
if only X CD Roast was cross platform
XP CD Roast
(XP, forever tarnished by the stupidity of Microsoft, it stands for Cross Platform dammit!)
and CD paranoia mmmm.
Ive read Java Gently ( http://www.cs.up.ac.za/javagently/ ) which was very simple and also used the book by Dietel and Dietel which was vast, and had loads of code i could borrow.
t ml
l
As someone who has already learnt C you should already know about data stuctures and all the computer science basics, so a vast reference book would like the Dietel and Deitel would probably suit you better than books like Java Gently which are more about teaching you how to program.
Dont buy a "For Dummies" book borrow it from the library and copy any code/toy programmes that interest you but i really think they are a waste of money.
You should of course check out the resources provided by Sun ( http://java.sun.com/ )
Definately give the turorial a look
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.h
java programming would be a lot harder without having the full API close to hand
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/index.htm
best of luck
and remember writing portable, well documented, well structured reusable code is not a bad thing.
there is no hyphen in K-meleon domain name
and in plain text for the paranoid: http://www.kmeleon.org/You suggest a mouse worm that would use security holes that the cheese worm missed, but if the cheese worm missed a hole/bug the it would be no different than if the Cheese Worm had never visited.
If these patches want to make your machine really secure then they would disconnect you from the internet. You cant get much safer than that unless the patch turns your machine OFF!
On the other hand if the Cheese Worm was not smart enough, its attempt at patching the system could expose or cause more security holes.
The suggestion of a worm to "fix" MS Windows could in fact be seen as disabling *snigger* useful features. Anyone who applied the Security patch to Microsoft Oulook last summer may remember all the features it disabled, you could barely open or save any attachments, it was way better from a security point of view but the program was essentially crippled. (When i say "fix" i mean as you would "fix" a small puppy to stop it from breeding)
I suspect your friend may have read The Dilbert Future by Scott Adams, odds are that most things you think of have already been thought of by someone else, invention is incremental. There are theories of shared genetic memory. A a corollery to this theory it is suggested that once one person has invented something once it is more likely that some one else will independently come up with the same idea. Take the inventing of the Radio by Marconi and Tesla for example.
Aside from the waste of bandwidth, patch worms worms are not such a bad thing. Lots of bandwidth gets wasted anyway and if you accept the inevitabilty of virii then you may as well accept the patch virii. Security is an endless battle ongoing battle.
Junkbuster can be used to block all sites except those on a specified list.
(BUT WAIT, I just looked it up and...)
Guidescope seems to be the answer to your question.
http://www.guidescope.com/home/
> SPARC is CRAPS backwards. :)
It was orginally made from SCRAPS.
the orinal workstation was built from cheap available components, then they needed a cheap OS and the had a product and that was the basis of Sun Microsystems
(im way oversimplifying i skim read this in an American computer business magazine)
In Ireland St Patricks day (/festival week) has been Postponed due to the foot and mouth disease scare in England.
s na ke4.jpg
St Patrick has been driven out by the snakes...
http://images.ireland.com/newspaper/front/0301/
besides, loads of irish people think Guinness is horrible (an aquirred taste).
(-1, Way Offtopic)
I always thought XP was short for Cross Platform, which make "Windows XP" the most f...ing riduculous name ever to come out of Microsoft.
*WinCE* was a pretty unfortunate name though. Of course as previous Slashdot threads have suggested they cannot copyright an Acronym only the "WindowsXP" one word combination, not that will prevent the inevitable frivoulous lawsuits.
"Windows combines CE ME NT, to provide their most solid OS yet, WARNING: May take considerable time to dry."
http://208.48.26.217/2001/01/18/technology/18UPDA
And for good measure some a link about known spyware
The funny thing is if a Canadian acts like a total asshole most Europeans would make the mistake of assuming he is an American.
...)
That is not to say that Americans do not sometimes exhibit an excess of National Pride.
There is a (racist???) joke about a man who goes into an "ethnic" resteraunt and shouts
I hate *insert_ethnic_group_here*
and the staff respond, so do we, we are
*insert_similar/neighbouring_ethnic_group*
(Ummm, you had to be there, it does not work written down, and is not for the easily offended