Personally, I sync up my iPaq with the BBC news pages, the Guardian Online, and a collection of other sites, off the Internet overnight, and can then browse them on the way to work in the morning on the bus. I'd like to see you do that with a paper notepad. (OK you could print out the entire site every morning, but that seems a bit wasteful and bulky).
Plus, I have a collection of games (chess, patience etc) to play whenever I feel like it. And a few e-books. Yes, I could carry a book, and a gameboy, and a diary, but that's starting to get a bit bulky now as well.
Plus it's easier to back up all of your addresses/appointments with a PDA than with a notebook (I've lost my notebooks more than once), and paper tends to be pretty useless at sounding an alarm to remind you of that meeting that you're meant to be at.
I know plenty of people who don't think that they would be any better off with a PDA than with a notebook, and many of them are probably right. But just because you can't think of any use for them doesn't mean that other people can't.
But they are not AFIAK, writing an entirely new app for this settlement. They are passing on copies of already existing apps/OSes. The chances are they would not have sold many copies of them to these schools, so they are not losing sales. This means that the marginal cost of giving this software away is very low.
As a response to a court case for anti-competitive practices, giving large amounts of school kids copies of their apps, so that they are all trained up on how to use Microsoft software seems exactly the wrong punishment.
The alternative? Fine them and wonder where the money disappeared into? This is better.
A more appropriate punishment would surely be for them to pay for other peoples' software to be given to school children so they don't just get the Microsoft view of computing.
I think the difference of opinion is around when a language is a general purpose programming language or not. I seem to remember one definition of a 'proper' programming language used to be whether you could write a version of either a compiler or interpreter for that language in itself (e.g., could you write a VB program that reads VB files and executes them?). These languages (C,ASM, Java, COBOL, VB etc) can be used pretty much interchangeably, in as much as any program written in one could be written in any other (it may take considerably longer, or run considerably slower, on one than the other, but the same overall task could be achieved in any of them).
Languages like HTML, TCP, modem AT commands etc, however, are rather specific protocols that do (usually) one specific thing, e.g. transmit data, display screens etc. I'm reasonably sure that you could not write a tool to display html pages in pure html, or write a data transfer interepreter in TCP.
The only true OS/Langauge that I know is Forth. The editor, OS, & language are parts of the same thing.
mine restarts when i foget to charge it up (doh this reminds me...)but you need to wait till it wont even turn on.
It wouldn't turn on all day. There was absolutely no sign of life. I discovered it dead at about 8am, and didn't get it to a power supply until about 8pm.
What they didn't fix is the fact that the iPaq still does a factory reset when power goes out.
The power died on mine today (I left it on my desk, and I think something was pressing on one of the buttons). I plugged it into a power supply, and it was still OK. No factory reset. How long does it need to be totally without power to do this?
The last time that the US decided to get ultra-paranoid about monitoring what people did, it led directly to McCarthyism. It didn't really matter whether you were a communist or not, just whether you had done something that looked as if it might have been communist. Not doing anything illegal is no defence against a paranoid government.
I know it's not quite the same, but I've seen plenty of licences for development products that say that you can't use it to develop a product that competes with anything that the company develops.
Suppose terrorists were meeting in a room to discuss this, and putting surveillance equipement in everyone's house would stop it, would you think that this was a valid sacrifice for saving LA?
Like John Negroponte, Otto Reich and John Ashcroft? All directly involved in arming CONTRA terrorists in Nicaragua that were responsible for the deaths of 35,000 innocent civilians. And all currently being pushed by Bush into important positions in his administration.
I'm not a supporter of terrorism. I abhor what happened in the US this week, but if Bush wants to weed out countries that are harbouring terrorists, he needs to make an example by starting closer to home.
Well, improving security at airports for domestic flights might be a start. At least 4 (probably several times more) people managed to get on these planes with knives, and who knows what else, without anyone noticing.
Ah, that's obviously different in the US. In the UK, most doctors are still employed by the NHS (National Health Service) which is run for the benefit of patient care, not profit (although the new Public Private Partnership is about to change all that).
And yes, the motive of ANY business is to increase shareholder value.
Any publicly run corporation, maybe. But there are plenty of businesses out there that are not run for shareholder profit (Co-operatives and Mutual Societies for example).
Many X10 customers are ever looking for new interfaces to expose their X10 control capabilities. The TuxScreen phone provides a touch screen interface to control X10 networks graphically. The application's User interface would likely be HTML based images or tags which when selected through the touch screen take action. X10 control commands would be routed out of the serial port of the TuxScreen device and could either be directly connected to an X10 controller or to a dedicated Linux box which reroutes X10 commands to the X10 controller. The latter configuration would allow for communications to be multiplexed for more uses than just X10 and a non-dedicated channel. This application would essentially extend the user interfaces available to control a home by one or many depending on how many TuxScreen units were distributed throughout a home.
When we can put software together with standard products like those at Home Depot or other do-it-yourself stores
You can. It's called Visual Basic, and products like it are responsible for people believing that they can code in the same way that tools at Home Depot make people believe they are builders or carpenters, and causes as many DIY disasters.
I agree wholeheartedly that many 'professional' developers have no appreciation of the importance of correct, maintainable code, but the comparison with house builder is rather flawed. Most houses are built to pretty standard designs. There are standard components (screws, tiles, bricks) that have standard ways of being assembled. This is not the case with software (or at least not the software this I tend to work on). Most software is custom-built to the design of the user (or possibly the programmers guess at what the user might want).
There is a program on UK TV at the moment called 'Grand Designs' which documents people as they attempt to build their own homes, usually to a very individual and inovative design that they, or an architect working with them, have produced. This is much closer to most typical software development, and almost every house that has been built is overbudget and overschedule. Many do not get finished. As for quality, have you never seen reports of cowboy builders on house extension projects. Again, these are often ad-hoc projects, not working to existing design.
Most house development is much more analogous to things like web shopping carts, that take a standard basic design and just build the new bits that customise the site. From my experience, most of these tend to be pretty smooth and successful projects (usually unlike the e-businesses that buy the sites:-) ).
I agree there is a problem with software engineering, but exactly the same problems occur in the design and build of many other things, especially when the projects are not properly managed.
In theory that's great - Almost XP, but there are a couple of problems
1) What do you do about the user that says they are too busy to check what your new prototype every week?
2) This seems to be based around GUIs. What do you do about capturing complex back-end rules - which product can be sold to which customer, what data needs to be captured for reconciliation, etc. Showing them a piece of software that correctly picks a couple of products out isn't going to convince most people that their requirements have been fully understood (and how are you going to even figure out what they want without some form of spec?), and showing them the code certainly isn't going to help.
Most governments (including the US and Japan) have signed up to WIPO (www.wipo.org), the World Intelectual Property Organisation, who's job it is expressly to manage multinational IP issues, and these kinds of issues are frequently upheld across national bounderies.
Why should they be interested in the.org site, when these are usually used by non-profit making organisations? I think most people trying to find a corporate website for a TV show would automatically go to the.com. Wasn't the point of having different tlds to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial sites?
As a Brit, I'm a little puzzled by the fact that the political preference of most people in New York seems to be public information. I typed in Smith and a random date, and got back several matches, most of which had their affiliation. Where does this information come from?
I don't know about the US, but in the UK, they've just repealed a 100 year old law which banned telephony workers from interfering with or altering messages passed over their network. I wondered why they had done that. It's all become clear now:-(
It tends to be people that weren't there and saw the news on the TV versus people who were actually there and saw what was going off.
I'm sure that some of the cops that were there were lovely peacfull people, but from my personal experience in Prague last year - we were sat peacfully having lunch (yes I do mean peacfully, at this point the most dangerous protest that was taking place was some naked guy had climbed to the top of a lamppost), and we were told over the police loudspeakers that we were participating in a riot, and would be dispersed. About 5 minutes after this we got a volley of teargas in our direction from the police.
After this, I did pass a street where there were police firing tear gas cannisters, which were being throw back by protesters. I didn't see the start of this so I can't comment on which side kicked it off.
However, later on, after I thought that the protest had died down, I headed up to the local tube station, where I found a row of police blocking the entrance, and a group of protesters mostly sat around talking. There were a group of about 5 people chanting something at the police, but nothing being thrown and no-one encroaching on them. I was so sure that there was nothing violent happening that I stopped about 5 yards from the cops and decided to take some photos. I managed one (of people sat around talking - I can send you a copy of if you don't believe me). About 10 seconds after the photo was taken, the police decided to jump off the wall that they were stood on and charge everyone who was there. We ran off under the bridge, only to be met by police heading the other way. I escaped by throwing myself over a wall and clambering down a grass bank. However, I've heard from several people since that they rounded quite a few people up and arrested them (releasing them without charge a few days later).
We then met up with a large group protesters on the road below the station, where we stood around, some people chanting and some playing music, but no-one throwing anything. We were then subjected to several volleys of teargas and percussion grenades, and were forced further down the street. This happened three times, with absolutely no retaliation by the protesters (it would have been a bit pointless, as the police we mostly situated on top of a building on the top of the grass bank, well out of range of anyone throwning anything up), until we were forced to scramble down another grass bank, and at this point I decided that it was best to leave.
I can't say for definite that none of the violence was initiated by the protesters, but from what I saw happen, and from similar stories I've heard from people that were there (and at Seattle and Nice), a lot was certainly caused by unprovoked attacks by the police.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I sync up my iPaq with the BBC news pages, the Guardian Online, and a collection of other sites, off the Internet overnight, and can then browse them on the way to work in the morning on the bus. I'd like to see you do that with a paper notepad. (OK you could print out the entire site every morning, but that seems a bit wasteful and bulky).
Plus, I have a collection of games (chess, patience etc) to play whenever I feel like it. And a few e-books. Yes, I could carry a book, and a gameboy, and a diary, but that's starting to get a bit bulky now as well.
Plus it's easier to back up all of your addresses/appointments with a PDA than with a notebook (I've lost my notebooks more than once), and paper tends to be pretty useless at sounding an alarm to remind you of that meeting that you're meant to be at.
I know plenty of people who don't think that they would be any better off with a PDA than with a notebook, and many of them are probably right. But just because you can't think of any use for them doesn't mean that other people can't.
But they are not AFIAK, writing an entirely new app for this settlement. They are passing on copies of already existing apps/OSes. The chances are they would not have sold many copies of them to these schools, so they are not losing sales. This means that the marginal cost of giving this software away is very low.
As a response to a court case for anti-competitive practices, giving large amounts of school kids copies of their apps, so that they are all trained up on how to use Microsoft software seems exactly the wrong punishment.
The alternative? Fine them and wonder where the money disappeared into? This is better.
A more appropriate punishment would surely be for them to pay for other peoples' software to be given to school children so they don't just get the Microsoft view of computing.
Every API is a langauge.
:-)?
I think the difference of opinion is around when a language is a general purpose programming language or not. I seem to remember one definition of a 'proper' programming language used to be whether you could write a version of either a compiler or interpreter for that language in itself (e.g., could you write a VB program that reads VB files and executes them?). These languages (C,ASM, Java, COBOL, VB etc) can be used pretty much interchangeably, in as much as any program written in one could be written in any other (it may take considerably longer, or run considerably slower, on one than the other, but the same overall task could be achieved in any of them).
Languages like HTML, TCP, modem AT commands etc, however, are rather specific protocols that do (usually) one specific thing, e.g. transmit data, display screens etc. I'm reasonably sure that you could not write a tool to display html pages in pure html, or write a data transfer interepreter in TCP.
The only true OS/Langauge that I know is Forth. The editor, OS, & language are parts of the same thing.
Never used Pick then
What about people? I'm neither an organisation or a company. What should I register my own site as?
mine restarts when i foget to charge it up (doh this reminds me...)but you need to wait till it wont even turn on.
It wouldn't turn on all day. There was absolutely no sign of life. I discovered it dead at about 8am, and didn't get it to a power supply until about 8pm.
Too right. Commando on Ipaq Mame is unplayable. You can't run and fire at the same time :-(
What they didn't fix is the fact that the iPaq still does a factory reset when power goes out.
The power died on mine today (I left it on my desk, and I think something was pressing on one of the buttons). I plugged it into a power supply, and it was still OK. No factory reset. How long does it need to be totally without power to do this?
The last time that the US decided to get ultra-paranoid about monitoring what people did, it led directly to McCarthyism. It didn't really matter whether you were a communist or not, just whether you had done something that looked as if it might have been communist. Not doing anything illegal is no defence against a paranoid government.
I know it's not quite the same, but I've seen plenty of licences for development products that say that you can't use it to develop a product that competes with anything that the company develops.
Suppose terrorists were meeting in a room to discuss this, and putting surveillance equipement in everyone's house would stop it, would you think that this was a valid sacrifice for saving LA?
Where do you draw the line?
Like John Negroponte, Otto Reich and John Ashcroft? All directly involved in arming CONTRA terrorists in Nicaragua that were responsible for the deaths of 35,000 innocent civilians. And all currently being pushed by Bush into important positions in his administration.
I'm not a supporter of terrorism. I abhor what happened in the US this week, but if Bush wants to weed out countries that are harbouring terrorists, he needs to make an example by starting closer to home.
They had similar certainty after Oklahoma. I'm not saying that it wasn't Bin Laden, but it's very dangerous to jump to conclusions.
Well, improving security at airports for domestic flights might be a start. At least 4 (probably several times more) people managed to get on these planes with knives, and who knows what else, without anyone noticing.
Ah, that's obviously different in the US. In the UK, most doctors are still employed by the NHS (National Health Service) which is run for the benefit of patient care, not profit (although the new Public Private Partnership is about to change all that).
Are you suggesting that doctors are corporations that are run for profit?
And yes, the motive of ANY business is to increase shareholder value.
Any publicly run corporation, maybe. But there are plenty of businesses out there that are not run for shareholder profit (Co-operatives and Mutual Societies for example).
Well, according to the apps bit of the site.
X10 Control Interface
Many X10 customers are ever looking for new interfaces to expose their X10 control capabilities. The TuxScreen phone provides a touch screen interface to control X10 networks graphically. The application's User interface would likely be HTML based images or tags which when selected through the touch screen take action. X10 control commands would be routed out of the serial port of the TuxScreen device and could either be directly connected to an X10 controller or to a dedicated Linux box which reroutes X10 commands to the X10 controller. The latter configuration would allow for communications to be multiplexed for more uses than just X10 and a non-dedicated channel. This application would essentially extend the user interfaces available to control a home by one or many depending on how many TuxScreen units were distributed throughout a home.
So I'd guess yes.
When we can put software together with standard products like those at Home Depot or other do-it-yourself stores
You can. It's called Visual Basic, and products like it are responsible for people believing that they can code in the same way that tools at Home Depot make people believe they are builders or carpenters, and causes as many DIY disasters.
I agree wholeheartedly that many 'professional' developers have no appreciation of the importance of correct, maintainable code, but the comparison with house builder is rather flawed. Most houses are built to pretty standard designs. There are standard components (screws, tiles, bricks) that have standard ways of being assembled. This is not the case with software (or at least not the software this I tend to work on). Most software is custom-built to the design of the user (or possibly the programmers guess at what the user might want).
:-) ).
There is a program on UK TV at the moment called 'Grand Designs' which documents people as they attempt to build their own homes, usually to a very individual and inovative design that they, or an architect working with them, have produced. This is much closer to most typical software development, and almost every house that has been built is overbudget and overschedule. Many do not get finished. As for quality, have you never seen reports of cowboy builders on house extension projects. Again, these are often ad-hoc projects, not working to existing design.
Most house development is much more analogous to things like web shopping carts, that take a standard basic design and just build the new bits that customise the site. From my experience, most of these tend to be pretty smooth and successful projects (usually unlike the e-businesses that buy the sites
I agree there is a problem with software engineering, but exactly the same problems occur in the design and build of many other things, especially when the projects are not properly managed.
In theory that's great - Almost XP, but there are a couple of problems
1) What do you do about the user that says they are too busy to check what your new prototype every week?
2) This seems to be based around GUIs. What do you do about capturing complex back-end rules - which product can be sold to which customer, what data needs to be captured for reconciliation, etc. Showing them a piece of software that correctly picks a couple of products out isn't going to convince most people that their requirements have been fully understood (and how are you going to even figure out what they want without some form of spec?), and showing them the code certainly isn't going to help.
Most governments (including the US and Japan) have signed up to WIPO (www.wipo.org), the World Intelectual Property Organisation, who's job it is expressly to manage multinational IP issues, and these kinds of issues are frequently upheld across national bounderies.
Why should they be interested in the .org site, when these are usually used by non-profit making organisations? I think most people trying to find a corporate website for a TV show would automatically go to the .com. Wasn't the point of having different tlds to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial sites?
As a Brit, I'm a little puzzled by the fact that the political preference of most people in New York seems to be public information. I typed in Smith and a random date, and got back several matches, most of which had their affiliation. Where does this information come from?
I don't know about the US, but in the UK, they've just repealed a 100 year old law which banned telephony workers from interfering with or altering messages passed over their network. I wondered why they had done that. It's all become clear now :-(
It tends to be people that weren't there and saw the news on the TV versus people who were actually there and saw what was going off.
I'm sure that some of the cops that were there were lovely peacfull people, but from my personal experience in Prague last year - we were sat peacfully having lunch (yes I do mean peacfully, at this point the most dangerous protest that was taking place was some naked guy had climbed to the top of a lamppost), and we were told over the police loudspeakers that we were participating in a riot, and would be dispersed. About 5 minutes after this we got a volley of teargas in our direction from the police.
After this, I did pass a street where there were police firing tear gas cannisters, which were being throw back by protesters. I didn't see the start of this so I can't comment on which side kicked it off.
However, later on, after I thought that the protest had died down, I headed up to the local tube station, where I found a row of police blocking the entrance, and a group of protesters mostly sat around talking. There were a group of about 5 people chanting something at the police, but nothing being thrown and no-one encroaching on them. I was so sure that there was nothing violent happening that I stopped about 5 yards from the cops and decided to take some photos. I managed one (of people sat around talking - I can send you a copy of if you don't believe me). About 10 seconds after the photo was taken, the police decided to jump off the wall that they were stood on and charge everyone who was there. We ran off under the bridge, only to be met by police heading the other way. I escaped by throwing myself over a wall and clambering down a grass bank. However, I've heard from several people since that they rounded quite a few people up and arrested them (releasing them without charge a few days later).
We then met up with a large group protesters on the road below the station, where we stood around, some people chanting and some playing music, but no-one throwing anything. We were then subjected to several volleys of teargas and percussion grenades, and were forced further down the street. This happened three times, with absolutely no retaliation by the protesters (it would have been a bit pointless, as the police we mostly situated on top of a building on the top of the grass bank, well out of range of anyone throwning anything up), until we were forced to scramble down another grass bank, and at this point I decided that it was best to leave.
I can't say for definite that none of the violence was initiated by the protesters, but from what I saw happen, and from similar stories I've heard from people that were there (and at Seattle and Nice), a lot was certainly caused by unprovoked attacks by the police.