He assumes that a great UI is the one that is easy to learn, while the truth is that there's a tradeoff between UI being easy to learn or powerful(=easy to use after the learning curve is dealt with). He is absolutely right that open source programs are harder to learn than they could be. But he is wrong about the reason. It's not only that geeks don't like to make easy to learn UIs - it's that they didnt' have to until about 2 or 3 years ago. Now that they DO have to make them (as more newbies join the ranks), easy to learn UIs are developed - KDE, GNOME, etc. As a side note: it's sad that CLI has been dubbed as hard to use - it's not. It is hard to learn but that is not an inherent problem with it but rather a historical feature. CLI was here from the start which means all gurus learned it. Obviously when they started writing programs they were all meant for other gurus becuase nobody else was using computers at the time. GUIs appearance coincided with the time when many a newbies started using computers. Hence GUIs were developed with newbies in mind while CLI programs were developed with guru's in mind. As a newbie going from GUI to CLI, I found that CLI is much harder to learn primarily because there are no tutorials, documentation is usually scarce and assumes that you know alot already. For instance, when I was setting up qmail, one piece of documentation recommended "sending a HUP to qmail process". You see the problem, don't you?
First there was homm1 and it was good. Strategy was refined, no unnedeed bells and/or whistles, the only problem was that it was a bit too easy to beat. Only one campaign that took perhaps 10 hours if not less. Then there was homm2 and it was a bit better: while there were more bells and whistles that made strategy a bit messy, and there was unneeded variety of units and artifacts (they were too specialized to be useful, at least some of them - consider one that increases sea movement by 2 on a level with no sea), but it was REALLY TOUGH. homm1 fans sure had alot more fun with this one, even if only because it took much longer to beat. Exp pack was even tougher, perhaps a bit too tough: I could only beat one campaign and the last level took me longer than whole of homm1. Basically homm2 and exp pack was targeted at fans. Lo and Behold, homm3 is out and all the fans who've been reading about all the new perks, finally get to play with it. Big disappointment: it starts out so easy you get bored before getting any worthy challenge. Beleive it or not I couldn't get farther than a few levels because of that. On top of it, there's much more units, spells, artifacts, this abundance basically kills refined strategy of homm1 and 2. This might have been fun for new comers, but I'm sure most series fans were somewhat disappointed. A contributing factor might have been that the game was way too slow for a non-3d game: on my p200 it was almost unplayable at some places, like animated magic fields where you first get archangels. One more minor gripe: instead of cool black dragons that really looked impressive and powerful (no game ever gave me the feeling of having 50 black dragons... mmm) you get dorky-looking archangels. Blah. 3 my favorite game series were civ, homm and fallout. 2 out of 3 ported to linux, how about the 3d, the best of three too?
Author is quick to dismiss lynx as a browser for text-only terminals. I think he's just plain wrong. Quite a few people assume that lynx is for old 386's that can't handle X + Netscape. Not so. I have p200 64mb ram running X and stand-alone Netscape is perfectly fast and almost never crashes, and yet I choose to use lynx in 99% of cases. The reason is that lynx has a much better UI. First of all, navigation is done with keyboard - which is inherently faster than mouse. Secondly, you can use hjkl vim-style keys to respectively go back/down one link/up one link/follow link. This means you can surf while having your hands on home-row, which is the most reachable and convenient place when it comes to interfacing with the computer. Things that you use all the time while surfing are equally easy: 1. download - hit d, Enter. 2. save rendered page to disk - hit p, enter, enter 3. add current doc to bookmark - a, d, enter 4. add current link to bookmark file - a, l, enter 5. show source - \ 6. Next page - space, previous page - b, first page ctrl-A, last page ctrl-E. 7. You can set option to display a number in front of every link - so that when you want to jump to a certain link in the middle of the page, you simply type in that number and hit enter. Works faster than mouse, to be sure. few misc things - reload is ctrl-R, redraw is ctrl-L, quit is Q. w3m doesn't display page while loading, and misses some other things like vi style navigation (which can be easily hacked in the code), but can display tables/frames. Note that both have ssl (in lynx you have to apply a patch, that'll take ~5 mins). How important is all this? Well, now that I use lynx daily, I *can* use Netscape but it feels like a huge slowdown to reach for a mouse every now and then.
I'm a long time civ2 fan and I've spent way too many nights building howitzers and armors:). Anyway, I tried AC and didn't like it. It might be that there's too much new stuff and I felt disoriented, it might be that interface is too weird, but I simply had the feeling that AC lost connection with the roots: civ and civ2. Graphics are good, units are numerous, there's tons of new things to play around with.. but I couldn't get the same feeling from the gameplay. In a word, it was not fun. Take this with a grain of salt though: I only played for half an hour or so.. couldn't stand it longer. Oh yeah, it might also be that it was a bit too slow on my p200/64. Try to get it somewhere for free and check it out before buying, if you can.
> note: the author has real freedom over the code he/she has written. anyone that develops/adds on to a GPL'd program gives up his/her *freedom* to make it proprietary or do whatever he/she wants. Since
Note also that when you abide by laws of your country you give up your *freedom* to kill anybody you see on the street.
Newsflash: freedom does not automatically equate to 'good'. BSD gives you freedom to do something very nasty with your software or someone else's software. It has never happened but then BSD isn't used as widely as Windows, not to mention Linux.
False security? Never stood in court? Basically, what you are saying is "since we all gonna die eventually, why don't we just off ourselves right now with minimal hassle?"
First of all, it can be very useful to know when the program was released from the title. A few conventions would make year naming perfect: 1. If there are more than one release during the year, name it after the month: Windows 95.5; Windows 95.11. 2. No release unless there's alot of new functionality present. Bugfix does not deserve a new year version number.
Microsoft messed up this convention for all of us. They use years in product names for marketing purposes and that leads to pushing out bugfix releases named as major versions. Free programs on the other hand can use this convention responsibly.
Giving a new name to each major release is ok as long as it's accompanied by a version number. I can imagine a newbie wondering if he should get slink or potato. If you go to debian dists site you'll see 2 directories for slink and potato and also 2 links to them called current and unstable. It's entirely possible and sensible to combine this approach with year versioning.
I think year versioning is bad for companies but good for Free projects cause a company will *have* to release new version when new year begins, and this would suck. MS can pull this off cause they're a damm monopoly, and they don't have to worry about 'corel windows 2000' coming out ahead of their own. As for free projects, they can have no-bull versioning if they want.
But it won't happen cause the first Free project to have year versioning will be dubbed MS wannabe. Sigh. Thank you Microsoft.
First of all, it can be very useful to know when the program was released from the title. A few conventions would make year naming perfect:
1. If there are more than one release during the year, name it after the month: Windows 95.5; Windows 95.11.
2. No release unless there's alot of new functionality present. Bugfix does not deserve a new year version number.
Microsoft messed up this convention for all of us. They use years in product names for marketing purposes and that leads to pushing out bugfix releases named as major versions.
Free programs on the other hand can use this convention responsibly.
Giving a new name to each major release is ok as long as it's accompanied by a version number. I can imagine a newbie wondering if he should get slink or potato. If you go to debian dists site you'll see 2 directories for slink and potato and also 2 links to them called current and unstable. It's entirely possible and sensible to combine this approach with year versioning.
I think year versioning is bad for companies but good for Free projects cause a company will *have* to release new version when new year begins, and this would suck. MS can pull this off cause they're a damm monopoly, and they don't have to worry about 'corel windows 2000' coming out ahead of their own. As for free projects, they can have no-bull versioning if they want.
But it won't happen cause the first Free project to have year versioning will be dubbed MS wannabe. Sigh. Thank you Microsoft.
And for a good reason - the situation is different. MS can afford to do this sort of thing because Microsoft is a monopoly. Let's imagine for a second that qmail developers get really lazy or reckless and allow several scandalous security bugs to creep in their release. What happens next? I will switch to exim or sendmail or something else - and you will, too. This is not really a question of Open Source vs Closed Source, and I think guarantees and responsibility for your product are not important. If there's healthy competition, these issues are solved implicitly.
This is, in fact, a very common misconception.. I thought so too, at first. But the truth is, Linux is harder to learn than Windows. The learning curve is much steeper. Once it's over, it's much easier to use than Windows. I think those of us who are about 20 years old (as I am) are going to live in a society where computers play an increasingly important role. It might seem silly right now to spend several weeks getting into a new OS, but it will pay off a thousand times later on.
The guy makes great music. Listen to 'amused to death' on a good hifi system and I guarantee you'll be amazed. However, his lyrics are a step down from old PF standards, imho. It seems to me he's after making an impression at cost of deep meaning. Compare shine on with almost any song from radio kaos or even 'amused'. I can't really prove this point but I can't help but feel that Water's lyrics on his solo albums are a surrogate while old PF lyrics were very meaningful for them - perpaps more important than music itself. Let's hope this whole online forum thingy will help him somehow, although I'm pessimistic. Lyrics for songs are just not the kind of thing that are made through forums. Try to write a poem based on linux kernel traffic (mental note - should try it, if just for fun) and you'll see what I mean.
A bit unrelated, but I think Waters could try something as interesting - offer his songs online as mp3s for free and see where that leads his album sales. After all, the guy doesn't seem to be obsessed with greed and he's got alot of money to start with.. he could try it.
This article implies that there's a tendency to move all sites over onto database. That's simply not true. Vast majority of sites don't change often enough to justify that. There's a certain threshold after which it makes sense to spend money and effort on converting to database-driven site but only ~.5% or much less sites lie beyond that threshold. For the rest of them, going database would be a waste of resources.
On the other hand, you don't want to index database driven sites at all. First of all, that'd be impossible technically. Best search engines currently index something like 25% of the web if not less, and are able to re-check these pages only once in a month or so.
The practical solution is to have a database site (if necessary) that only uses database for dynamic content. IE if it's a/. FAQ page or ABOUT page or something else you want to be searchable, make it a static page, while articles/comments should be dynamic.
The answer is rather obvious. 1. If you knowingly use some software illegally, you're guilty. 2. If you're using the software in a legal manner but it's doing something illegal as a result of an honest programming error, nobody is guilty. 3. If someone codes a program that can be used both legally and illegally, programmer is not guilty as long as the illegal part naturally follows from functionality that can be used legally. IE, if you modified bo2k in a way that would make it impossible to use it illegally, this change would also prevent you from using it legally. 4. If someone codes a program that can only be used illegally or that has some illegal functionality that could be removed without affecting the rest of the program, programmer is guilty. For instance, if there was a text editor that had a menu item "DoS attack this ip: ".
On a related note, I think that Slashdot is running to many stories lately. It seems like we get 2-3 worthwhile ones per day, why not just post them and nothing else?
Re:The humans rights violations are irksome
on
China Enters Space
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Communist coalition has done some amazing progress in fields of sciense, industrial technology, space exploration and weaponry. Unfortunately, a huge price was payed for all of this: standard of living and human rights violations. Most of infrastructure in Siberia was built by prisoner workers. Your point that standard of life in USSR was higher than in pre-communist Russia needs proof. From what I heard, the standard of life actually fell considerably. It's hard to judge though, after all, 'standard of life' is a rather vague concept. Generally quasi-communist countries we've seen so far tend to be rather successful in heavy industry but suck at light industry. Stalin would rather have a new howitzer plant built than a new icecream plant, if you get my drift. Of course, i'd like to stress that neither USSR nor China had anything to do with real communism, the ideology was more of an excuse than a purpose.
1. Tim doesn't say situation in the web server market should be addressed. He meant that Judge Jackson should have included this as a sample of MS's practices. Which is a good point. 2. Tim does not say that MS shouldn't charge different price if code is all the same. He pointed out that this proves that MS changed the license for NT workstation to kill off competition. 3. You installing Win2k and having been able not to install IIS easily has absolutely nothing to do with Tim's argument. Read *all* article, not just the first sentence of every paragraph. 4. Your guess at Tim's plans to "deliberately turn workstation into NT server by modifying registry" makes absolutely no sense. To start with, this would most likely be considered illegal and he'd be sued by MS or at least MS could easily remove that extra server code or something else. 5. It's rather obvious (well, not to you I guess). MS makes some feature in the IIS that only works with IE. This feature is Real Nice (they'll have to buy it first of course) and guess what, it's patented (aw don't look so surprised). Now you got people asking their ISP "hey how come i can't use that neato bell/whistle? ISP: well, we run apache, cause its better and cheaper and all. Customer: bye. 6. Yes, that reminds me of Hitler as well. After all, he didnt' just want France or Norway, he wanted everything and he was using force to get them. 7. You are stupid. Why post long posts? Post short ones, and you'll save us and yourself some time.
I think this case is unique because Microsoft is exploiting other companies' products success. The fact that most applications people use on Windows won't work on other OSen is a huge barrier.. I think it should be illegal to hide APIs for any company because this naturally leads to an "API monopoly", so to say. What do you think?
As far as I can see: RMS _thinks_ disadvantage of some code being closed outweights advantage of additional stimuli for developers while Bill Joy _believes_ otherwise. Neither of them can prove his point so we'll just have to wait. I'm personally rooting for RMS because, well, he's not trying to get rich off me and I'm a bit of an idealist I guess. Is there anything else to add to the argument? I really don't think so, correct me if I'm wrong..
IE is not faster than any browser available for Linux. Sorry. Far from it. Lynx! The best browser I found so far. No images are loaded by default so it's lightning-fast. You can look at a certain image if you want to (* to show inline images as links and associate zgv or other viewer with *jpg and *gif). But the real advantage of Lynx is vi style navigation. Much easier and faster than clicking (after a few hours of burn-in). Bookmark system is the best I've seen in any browser, there is SSL patch for lynx, and it's tiny in both size and resource consumption. There is one problem with it: some sites don't care to put alt tags on their images (note than any HTML checker will point this out as a mistake) and some sites use JS for navigation (for instance, tvguide.com). tvguide.com also runs IIS and is almost always slower than any other site i've used at ~8pm EST. Suprprisingly, I've seen very few sites that were hard to navigate with lynx. As a side note: one of my systems is p200 and another one is p200pro at work - just to show that I'm not using lynx cause "my 486 doorstop can't handle a real browser". I use lynx in Windows as well (port is almost perfect).
It's a matter of priorities. If you're on the net to look at all the pron, graphics-centric browser is a must for you. I'm looking for information.
Hit ctrl-U in Netscape for windows. I don't remember what's the shortcut in unix version but you should be able to find it. I know this option was in 4.0+ Netscape's and most likely in 2.0 as well.
I'm an RPG fan, sort of. Two Fallouts are among my most favorite games. Unfortunately, it seems that most RPGs with first-person view have ludicruous engines, even compared with old classics like Doom. I'm talking about Daggerfall, M&M6 - 2 most notable fps RPGs. Question: have you thought about using your first-rate engines for anything other than first person shooters?
for those places that need to be up ALWAYS.. have a backup server. You still think that's not enough? Ok, 3. At any rate, price/reliability ratio will be higher than for desktops if Sun beats MS's economy of scale advantage.
Only if you're 1. 911 2. police 3. hospital 4. airport
And several other places I forgot, does a few minutes of downtime mean a disaster. In 99% of cases, the server crashing for 1 minute once a month is much more preferable than zillion of desktops randomly crashing, having problems with programs, getting corrupted, having all windows\system directory erased to free up more space for e-mail, et cetera. At least, in theory, one big server makes alot of sense. Think about it - for the most part, your computer is sitting there doing nothing while you're surfing or writing a text file. I'd say, perhaps, 95% of time it's not doing anything that'd warrant the processor, hd, ram you have. Thus, one server would be 20 times more effective, if it scales ideally and if you discount usage peaks (that shouldn't be discounted, really) and if you assume that server that is as powerful as 20 pcs will cost exactly like 20 pcs. This won't happen in real world where we have economy of scale and various psychological reasons. Still, it's quite quite possible that Sun will finally win the war and as a result we'll be alot more productive on the average. We'll see. The only thing I am concerned about is that server provider will have huge control over the marketplace. Might get much worse than Microsoft.
> _"The irrefutable and the undeniable are the two weapons that he [God] cannot use". Why? Because he wants us to freely serve him out of love for Him: not out of fear, and his precense "in anything but the most attenuated form" would overwealm us.
Excellent point. Too bad that he made this silly requirement to believe in him in order to not burn in Hell for whole eternity. I bet when some of us burn there we'll be like "hm I sometimes wish hes presense wasn't THAT attenuated back on Earth." Some UnHoly (TM) quotes: "All gods/were/ immortal" - Stanislav Ezi Lec; "God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters." - Mencken "If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflicted upon men, He would kill himself." - Alexandre Dumas; "The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist" - Stendhal; "Which is it: is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's?"; "I cannot believe in God that wants to be praised all the time." - Nietzsche; "The impotence of God is infinite" - Anatole France; "God will forgive me; that's his business." - Heine; "He seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles." - Haldane
Slashdot Mirror
What can I say? I finished it 5 times, (each time taking ~30 hours). Some people might say it's more addictive than coding...
He assumes that a great UI is the one that is easy to learn, while the truth is that there's a tradeoff between UI being easy to learn or powerful(=easy to use after the learning curve is dealt with).
He is absolutely right that open source programs are harder to learn than they could be. But he is wrong about the reason. It's not only that geeks don't like to make easy to learn UIs - it's that they didnt' have to until about 2 or 3 years ago. Now that they DO have to make them (as more newbies join the ranks), easy to learn UIs are developed - KDE, GNOME, etc.
As a side note: it's sad that CLI has been dubbed as hard to use - it's not. It is hard to learn but that is not an inherent problem with it but rather a historical feature. CLI was here from the start which means all gurus learned it. Obviously when they started writing programs they were all meant for other gurus becuase nobody else was using computers at the time. GUIs appearance coincided with the time when many a newbies started using computers. Hence GUIs were developed with newbies in mind while CLI programs were developed with guru's in mind.
As a newbie going from GUI to CLI, I found that CLI is much harder to learn primarily because there are no tutorials, documentation is usually scarce and assumes that you know alot already. For instance, when I was setting up qmail, one piece of documentation recommended "sending a HUP to qmail process". You see the problem, don't you?
First there was homm1 and it was good. Strategy was refined, no unnedeed bells and/or whistles, the only problem was that it was a bit too easy to beat. Only one campaign that took perhaps 10 hours if not less.
Then there was homm2 and it was a bit better: while there were more bells and whistles that made strategy a bit messy, and there was unneeded variety of units and artifacts (they were too specialized to be useful, at least some of them - consider one that increases sea movement by 2 on a level with no sea), but it was REALLY TOUGH. homm1 fans sure had alot more fun with this one, even if only because it took much longer to beat. Exp pack was even tougher, perhaps a bit too tough: I could only beat one campaign and the last level took me longer than whole of homm1. Basically homm2 and exp pack was targeted at fans.
Lo and Behold, homm3 is out and all the fans who've been reading about all the new perks, finally get to play with it. Big disappointment: it starts out so easy you get bored before getting any worthy challenge. Beleive it or not I couldn't get farther than a few levels because of that. On top of it, there's much more units, spells, artifacts, this abundance basically kills refined strategy of homm1 and 2.
This might have been fun for new comers, but I'm sure most series fans were somewhat disappointed. A contributing factor might have been that the game was way too slow for a non-3d game: on my p200 it was almost unplayable at some places, like animated magic fields where you first get archangels. One more minor gripe: instead of cool black dragons that really looked impressive and powerful (no game ever gave me the feeling of having 50 black dragons... mmm) you get dorky-looking archangels. Blah.
3 my favorite game series were civ, homm and fallout. 2 out of 3 ported to linux, how about the 3d, the best of three too?
Author is quick to dismiss lynx as a browser for text-only terminals. I think he's just plain wrong. Quite a few people assume that lynx is for old 386's that can't handle X + Netscape. Not so. I have p200 64mb ram running X and stand-alone Netscape is perfectly fast and almost never crashes, and yet I choose to use lynx in 99% of cases. The reason is that lynx has a much better UI. First of all, navigation is done with keyboard - which is inherently faster than mouse. Secondly, you can use hjkl vim-style keys to respectively go back/down one link/up one link/follow link. This means you can surf while having your hands on home-row, which is the most reachable and convenient place when it comes to interfacing with the computer. Things that you use all the time while surfing are equally easy:
1. download - hit d, Enter.
2. save rendered page to disk - hit p, enter, enter
3. add current doc to bookmark - a, d, enter
4. add current link to bookmark file - a, l, enter
5. show source - \
6. Next page - space, previous page - b, first page ctrl-A, last page ctrl-E.
7. You can set option to display a number in front of every link - so that when you want to jump to a certain link in the middle of the page, you simply type in that number and hit enter. Works faster than mouse, to be sure.
few misc things - reload is ctrl-R, redraw is ctrl-L, quit is Q.
w3m doesn't display page while loading, and misses some other things like vi style navigation (which can be easily hacked in the code), but can display tables/frames. Note that both have ssl (in lynx you have to apply a patch, that'll take ~5 mins).
How important is all this? Well, now that I use lynx daily, I *can* use Netscape but it feels like a huge slowdown to reach for a mouse every now and then.
I'm a long time civ2 fan and I've spent way too many nights building howitzers and armors :). Anyway, I tried AC and didn't like it. It might be that there's too much new stuff and I felt disoriented, it might be that interface is too weird, but I simply had the feeling that AC lost connection with the roots: civ and civ2. Graphics are good, units are numerous, there's tons of new things to play around with.. but I couldn't get the same feeling from the gameplay. In a word, it was not fun. Take this with a grain of salt though: I only played for half an hour or so.. couldn't stand it longer. Oh yeah, it might also be that it was a bit too slow on my p200/64. Try to get it somewhere for free and check it out before buying, if you can.
Note also that when you abide by laws of your country you give up your *freedom* to kill anybody you see on the street.
Newsflash: freedom does not automatically equate to 'good'. BSD gives you freedom to do something very nasty with your software or someone else's software. It has never happened but then BSD isn't used as widely as Windows, not to mention Linux.
False security? Never stood in court? Basically, what you are saying is "since we all gonna die eventually, why don't we just off ourselves right now with minimal hassle?"
1. If there are more than one release during the year, name it after the month: Windows 95.5; Windows 95.11.
2. No release unless there's alot of new functionality present. Bugfix does not deserve a new year version number.
Microsoft messed up this convention for all of us. They use years in product names for marketing purposes and that leads to pushing out bugfix releases named as major versions.
Free programs on the other hand can use this convention responsibly.
Giving a new name to each major release is ok as long as it's accompanied by a version number. I can imagine a newbie wondering if he should get slink or potato. If you go to debian dists site you'll see 2 directories for slink and potato and also 2 links to them called current and unstable. It's entirely possible and sensible to combine this approach with year versioning.
I think year versioning is bad for companies but good for Free projects cause a company will *have* to release new version when new year begins, and this would suck. MS can pull this off cause they're a damm monopoly, and they don't have to worry about 'corel windows 2000' coming out ahead of their own. As for free projects, they can have no-bull versioning if they want.
But it won't happen cause the first Free project to have year versioning will be dubbed MS wannabe. Sigh. Thank you Microsoft.
1. If there are more than one release during the year, name it after the month: Windows 95.5; Windows 95.11.
2. No release unless there's alot of new functionality present. Bugfix does not deserve a new year version number.
Microsoft messed up this convention for all of us. They use years in product names for marketing purposes and that leads to pushing out bugfix releases named as major versions.
Free programs on the other hand can use this convention responsibly.
Giving a new name to each major release is ok as long as it's accompanied by a version number. I can imagine a newbie wondering if he should get slink or potato. If you go to debian dists site you'll see 2 directories for slink and potato and also 2 links to them called current and unstable. It's entirely possible and sensible to combine this approach with year versioning.
I think year versioning is bad for companies but good for Free projects cause a company will *have* to release new version when new year begins, and this would suck. MS can pull this off cause they're a damm monopoly, and they don't have to worry about 'corel windows 2000' coming out ahead of their own. As for free projects, they can have no-bull versioning if they want.
But it won't happen cause the first Free project to have year versioning will be dubbed MS wannabe. Sigh. Thank you Microsoft.
And for a good reason - the situation is different. MS can afford to do this sort of thing because Microsoft is a monopoly. Let's imagine for a second that qmail developers get really lazy or reckless and allow several scandalous security bugs to creep in their release. What happens next? I will switch to exim or sendmail or something else - and you will, too. This is not really a question of Open Source vs Closed Source, and I think guarantees and responsibility for your product are not important. If there's healthy competition, these issues are solved implicitly.
This is, in fact, a very common misconception.. I thought so too, at first. But the truth is, Linux is harder to learn than Windows. The learning curve is much steeper. Once it's over, it's much easier to use than Windows. I think those of us who are about 20 years old (as I am) are going to live in a society where computers play an increasingly important role. It might seem silly right now to spend several weeks getting into a new OS, but it will pay off a thousand times later on.
A bit unrelated, but I think Waters could try something as interesting - offer his songs online as mp3s for free and see where that leads his album sales. After all, the guy doesn't seem to be
obsessed with greed and he's got alot of money to start with.. he could try it.
On the other hand, you don't want to index database driven sites at all. First of all, that'd be impossible technically. Best search engines currently index something like 25% of the web if not less, and are able to re-check these pages only once in a month or so.
The practical solution is to have a database site (if necessary) that only uses database for dynamic content. IE if it's a /. FAQ page or ABOUT page or something else you want to be searchable, make it a static page, while articles/comments should be dynamic.
The answer is rather obvious.
1. If you knowingly use some software illegally, you're guilty.
2. If you're using the software in a legal manner but it's doing something illegal as a result of an honest programming error, nobody is guilty.
3. If someone codes a program that can be used both legally and illegally, programmer is not guilty as long as the illegal part naturally follows from functionality that can be used legally. IE, if you modified bo2k in a way that would make it impossible to use it illegally, this change would also prevent you from using it legally.
4. If someone codes a program that can only be used illegally or that has some illegal functionality that could be removed without affecting the rest of the program, programmer is guilty. For instance, if there was a text editor that had a menu item "DoS attack this ip: ".
On a related note, I think that Slashdot is running to many stories lately. It seems like we get 2-3 worthwhile ones per day, why not just post them and nothing else?
Communist coalition has done some amazing progress in fields of sciense, industrial technology, space exploration and weaponry. Unfortunately, a huge price was payed for all of this: standard of living and human rights violations. Most of infrastructure in Siberia was built by prisoner workers. Your point that standard of life in USSR was higher than in pre-communist Russia needs proof. From what I heard, the standard of life actually fell considerably. It's hard to judge though, after all, 'standard of life' is a rather vague concept. Generally quasi-communist countries we've seen so far tend to be rather successful in heavy industry but suck at light industry. Stalin would rather have a new howitzer plant built than a new icecream plant, if you get my drift. Of course, i'd like to stress that neither USSR nor China had anything to do with real communism, the ideology was more of an excuse than a purpose.
.. to build gates. I mean, they're very small, right?
1. Tim doesn't say situation in the web server market should be addressed. He meant that Judge Jackson should have included this as a sample of MS's practices. Which is a good point.
2. Tim does not say that MS shouldn't charge different price if code is all the same. He pointed out that this proves that MS changed the license for NT workstation to kill off competition.
3. You installing Win2k and having been able not to install IIS easily has absolutely nothing to do with Tim's argument. Read *all* article, not just the first sentence of every paragraph.
4. Your guess at Tim's plans to "deliberately turn workstation into NT server by modifying registry" makes absolutely no sense. To start with, this would most likely be considered illegal and he'd be sued by MS or at least MS could easily remove that extra server code or something else.
5. It's rather obvious (well, not to you I guess). MS makes some feature in the IIS that only works with IE. This feature is Real Nice (they'll have to buy it first of course) and guess what, it's patented (aw don't look so surprised). Now you got people asking their ISP "hey how come i can't use that neato bell/whistle? ISP: well, we run apache, cause its better and cheaper and all. Customer: bye.
6. Yes, that reminds me of Hitler as well. After all, he didnt' just want France or Norway, he wanted everything and he was using force to get them.
7. You are stupid. Why post long posts? Post short ones, and you'll save us and yourself some time.
I think this case is unique because Microsoft is exploiting other companies' products success. The fact that most applications people use on Windows won't work on other OSen is a huge barrier.. I think it should be illegal to hide APIs for any company because this naturally leads to an "API monopoly", so to say. What do you think?
As far as I can see:
RMS _thinks_ disadvantage of some code being closed outweights advantage of additional stimuli for developers while Bill Joy _believes_ otherwise. Neither of them can prove his point so we'll just have to wait. I'm personally rooting for RMS because, well, he's not trying to get rich off me and I'm a bit of an idealist I guess. Is there anything else to add to the argument? I really don't think so, correct me if I'm wrong..
But will I be able to dodge their bullets?
And what is that cute process in red dress?
IE is not faster than any browser available for Linux. Sorry. Far from it.
Lynx! The best browser I found so far. No images are loaded by default so it's lightning-fast. You can look at a certain image if you want to (* to show inline images as links and associate zgv or other viewer with *jpg and *gif).
But the real advantage of Lynx is vi style navigation. Much easier and faster than clicking (after a few hours of burn-in). Bookmark system is the best I've seen in any browser, there is SSL patch for lynx, and it's tiny in both size and resource consumption.
There is one problem with it: some sites don't care to put alt tags on their images (note than any HTML checker will point this out as a mistake) and some sites use JS for navigation (for instance, tvguide.com). tvguide.com also runs IIS and is almost always slower than any other site i've used at ~8pm EST. Suprprisingly, I've seen very few sites that were hard to navigate with lynx.
As a side note: one of my systems is p200 and another one is p200pro at work - just to show that I'm not using lynx cause "my 486 doorstop can't handle a real browser". I use lynx in Windows as well (port is almost perfect).
It's a matter of priorities. If you're on the net to look at all the pron, graphics-centric browser is a must for you. I'm looking for information.
Hit ctrl-U in Netscape for windows. I don't remember what's the shortcut in unix version but you should be able to find it. I know this option was in 4.0+ Netscape's and most likely in 2.0 as well.
I'm an RPG fan, sort of. Two Fallouts are among my most favorite games. Unfortunately, it seems that most RPGs with first-person view have ludicruous engines, even compared with old classics like Doom. I'm talking about Daggerfall, M&M6 - 2 most notable fps RPGs. Question: have you thought about using your first-rate engines for anything other than first person shooters?
for those places that need to be up ALWAYS.. have a backup server. You still think that's not enough? Ok, 3. At any rate, price/reliability ratio will be higher than for desktops if Sun beats MS's economy of scale advantage.
Only if you're
1. 911
2. police
3. hospital
4. airport
And several other places I forgot, does a few minutes of downtime mean a disaster. In 99% of cases, the server crashing for 1 minute once a month is much more preferable than zillion of desktops randomly crashing, having problems with programs, getting corrupted, having all windows\system directory erased to free up more space for e-mail, et cetera. At least, in theory, one big server makes alot of sense. Think about it - for the most part, your computer is sitting there doing nothing while you're surfing or writing a text file. I'd say, perhaps, 95% of time it's not doing anything that'd warrant the processor, hd, ram you have. Thus, one server would be 20 times more effective, if it scales ideally and if you discount usage peaks (that shouldn't be discounted, really) and if you assume that server that is as powerful as 20 pcs will cost exactly like 20 pcs. This won't happen in real world where we have economy of scale and various psychological reasons. Still, it's quite quite possible that Sun will finally
win the war and as a result we'll be alot more productive on the average. We'll see. The only thing I am concerned about is that server provider will have huge control over the marketplace. Might get much worse than Microsoft.
> _"The irrefutable and the undeniable are the
/were/ immortal" - Stanislav Ezi Lec; "God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters." - Mencken
two weapons that he [God] cannot use". Why? Because he wants us to
freely serve him out of love for Him: not out of fear, and his
precense "in anything but the most attenuated form" would overwealm
us.
Excellent point. Too bad that he made this silly requirement to believe in him in order to not burn in Hell for whole eternity. I bet when some of us burn there we'll be like "hm I sometimes wish hes presense wasn't THAT attenuated back on Earth."
Some UnHoly (TM) quotes:
"All gods
"If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflicted upon men, He would kill himself." - Alexandre Dumas; "The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist" - Stendhal; "Which is it: is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's?"; "I cannot believe in God that wants to be praised all the time." - Nietzsche; "The impotence of God is infinite" - Anatole France; "God will forgive me; that's his business." - Heine; "He seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles." - Haldane