As far as I know the drive letters for FAT drives are assigned starting with C:
Do you mean drive letters for FAT partitions? If they are on a separate HDD, then the FAT drives will start as expected (in order of presence). I have no experience in putting both NTFS and FAT on the same drive.
Either Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds. This has been the year for Linux,and these guys make it happen. Bob Young also comes to mind as the guy that helped bring Linux to commercial viability
In addition, if the suit is against a large company, most IP attorneys will take a case "on contingency", especially if they think they can win.
Basically, the idea is that you are going after a big "Bucket O' Money" and all the lawyer wants is his or her third of that money. Basically, if the lawsuit is worth enough money (millions) and it looks like you have adequate proof to win, many IP attorneys will take the case on contingency
However, please note that I am not a lawyer, althouh I play one on the 'Net.
I'm sure the original author's comments were quite tongue-in-cheek.
However, the Linux fdisk program is really no worse than its DOS counterpart, but I prefer cfdisk myself:) I know W2K setup is better, but still can be frustrating to a newbie (for example, it still isn't obvious that the boot NTFS partition can only be 4 GBs in size, at least with the install on the Beta copy I have. Trying to make a boot NTFS partition greater than 4 GBs will fail for no obvious reason.
I was thinking more along the lines of low-bandwidth media. Streaming MPEG for (slow) internet access exists, as you have said, but its interoperability factors aren't quite there yet. Meanwhile, Real and Micros~1 will continue to attempt to hold on to their proprietary advantages.
The reason a microkernel based OS is easier to port is that there's less there to port. Linux and the *BSD OS's have, however, become a marvel at how easy they are to port.
At least in the case of Linux (not sure about *BSD, I've never seen the source code), the reason for this is that very little is actually written in machine-dependent assembler...basically just enough to get the thing booted. Most of the rest of the kernel is written in highly-portable C code.
As a person of libertarian bent; real-time messaging poses a difficult problem.
The natural solution, for a grand public good such as this, is to let the government set the protocol, and run the server.
Somehow I suspect you're using the term "libertarian" in some sense that I am unfamiliar with. You espouse yourself as being "libertarian bent" out of one side of your mouth and out of the other you are asking the government to set a standard and run a server! Sounds like good ol' fashioned socialism to me...
If it can be made to work, Jabber would make an excellent compromise. If ISPs ran Jabber servers, interconnecting in the same way an IRC network or SMTP servers work, everyone would benefit, but nobody could get a free ride (as MS, AOL, AT&T are all trying to get on each other).
This actually sounds more plausible. An independent, third-party solution is definitely needed. Unfortunately, instant messaging is all about creating proprietary advantage in a world where there originally were none. If Jabber had been defined before the commercialization of the Internet, then everyone would adopt it. I think eventually, a standard will have to be adopted because people are just getting sick of having to have 4 or more clients running all the time.
OTOH, look at streaming video and audio. We have a standard for that (MPEG) but it isn't being used. RealNetworks' and Microsoft's proprietary RealPlayer and NetShow clients currently rule the roost despite the fact that a viable standard exists. Again, the idea is to have a proprietary advantage in an environment where none should exist at all.
I understand what you're saying but some things still don't make any sense:
Why does AOL continue to maintain the TOC server? TOC is an ASCII-based protocol for interfacing to OSCAR, the "native" AIM server. TOC was created to interface to TiK, AOL's former TCL/TK based client meant to run on Linux as an alternative to the Java client. AOL no longer has TiK available for download and FWIU no longer maintains the client. Clients on TOC (such as gAIM and TiK) don't display ads because they don't talk to OSCAR, which feeds them.
AOL bought Mirabillis, and thus ICQ. I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to add advertising to ICQ clients.
Why was AOL interested in developing Linux-based AIM clients in the first place, considering that AOL's main interest is in gaining users to their online service? Note that there is no AOL client for Linux. Yes, TCL/TK and Java are platform-independent but the obvious uses are for Linux since Windoze users will use the native clients which are MUCH faster and require no external software (JDK or TCL/TK).
If RedHat buys Corel we should get Open Source WordPerfect Suite. This could really kill MS Office. A good well known office suite that's free! Why would anyone buy MS Office for some $500 or so.
Sadly, for the same reason WPOffice sales are a mere fraction of M$Office: the network effect. If you friends, neighbors, colleagues, clients, etc all have M$ OfficePark, then you will too if only for reasons of being able to easily exchange files. Sad, but true.
Not. China has manpower, but you are overlooking the fact that China is on a whole other continent than the US.. There is litle pond called the Pacific Ocean between the two continents, and crossing that would be damn hard.
Assuming China still has good relations with Russia, and they could work out some sort of deal, they could send ground troops across the Bering Strait. I'm sure Canadian ground troops wouldn't stand a chance.
Those guys are in the business of constantly building new weapons of war.
Exactly. Which is why the Pentagon has probably already figured out a way to combat this "new" threat. (If they have they wouldn't tell us:)
This and things like this will only strengthen their case to allocate more funds for defense.
What's wrong with that? As an American and a conservative, I favor strong military spending. Its what has kept the US strong and what has kept other nations from messing with us.
Personally, I fear the deep cuts in military spending made by the Clinton administration. Those cuts are what has made the U.S. military look like complete fools in Bosnia... the constant bungling is a direct effect of these cuts (inadequate training, faulty equipment, etc.)
For the time being, it seems we must rely on the honesty and honor of humans to not foul the well water. Even given Talin's Third Law ("Politeness doesn't scale."), this approach has worked remarkably well on the Internet so far. As long as we keep developing honesty and honor in our children, I believe we should be, for the most part, just fine.
Really? We need to <*gasp*> develop honesty and honor in our children? Does this mean we will actually have to start being parents and stop using the TV/Playstation/computers/internet as babysitters? Oh my gosh! What are we going to do? Return to the 1950s model of parenting?
Speaking of Greek, traditionally "alpha" was the designation applied to something that's little past the prototype stage, and sometimes, is nothing more than that. It doesn't refer to the propensity for bugginess, but rather to whether the interface is decided or not. And in the case of alpha, it's not. The interface can change completely in later stages. Parts may be missing. Parts may be added.
From TNHD:
More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available to selected (or self-selected) customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. `Alpha Test' was the unit, module, or component test phase; `Beta Test' was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while.
Personally, even before I read this, I went with the definition described by the B-Test. For me, this means the first version of the software that functions according to the original specifications...or the first version that is basically functional. Its hard to say where to draw the line with the Bazaar-style of development, since this line could be drawn at many points in the development process.
In my experience, where this line is drawn is often more political than technical, especially if money is involved.
The implication would be that there are no Open Source projects that have "died out" for lack of continued development. This is just plain silly. Open Source project will continue as long as people are interested in the effects, but the network effect that he describes is important here. If another alternative is available and better, then the development will stop or never start. Would GIMP have started if Photoshop was free (or even dirt cheap) and available on many platforms?
Actually, just picking some nits here, but there are viable cheap alternatives to Photoshop in the closed source world...
Two are entirely commercial: Micrografx Picture Publisher used to be very very expensive, but is now a viable alternative to PS for most uses for about $50. Recent versions of Corel Photopaint ($100) are really really nice and have good features to rival Adobe's product...
Another is shareware: Paint Shop Pro is available fo a fraction of PS's $800 street price and it supports special effects, layers and masks like the other packages I mentioned...the usual features you look for in a PS replacement...
Customization: How many window managers are there for Windows? How many are there for Linux?
The term window manager really doesn't apply to Windows, at least not 9x, you'd have to totally rewrite USER, GDI, and possibly parts of KERNEL.
People get mad when their apps crash. People notice that for some reason their apps don't crash as much when they run them under Linux. Netscape seems to be an exception, at least for me.
FWIW, the glibc version seemed to crash quite a bit on my Caldera 2.2 system. I replaced it with the libc5 version and problems seemed to have been resolved...
If two things were equal in every way except that one was $90 and one was free, which one would you buy? And what if it turned out that the free one was better?
At least for corporations, Linux really isn't free (beer.) You have to pay for support, and having a CD and dead tree manual is really, really a good idea.
...and especially 'The Hard Edge', the column Alice Hill cowrites with veteran writer Bill O'Brien, I'm not especially surprised that traditional computer mags are coming to an end.
What surprises me is that this comes from the mouth...errr....keyboard of Alice Hill. She's been writing for cshopper for more than 10 years, and is certainly a product of that industry.
Magazines have gotten a LOT thinner, particularly cshopper, which used to qualify as an occupational hazard for my mail carrier. Cshopper is maybe half the size it was in the glory days.
The article poster is right: PC magazines are very self serving to the products they advertise. But,personally, i used to read them for industry trends and op-ed pieces rather than for product reviews, which were always clearly slanted. Plus, I used to learn a lot from the "Tips and Tricks" and other technical sections, at least until they became more for newbies than for technical people, like they were in the 80s/early 90s. Cshopper still has the occasional gem...
But I've found myself buying fewer and fewer magazines and getting more of this type of information online: Slashdot, ZDNet, C|Net, Wired.com.... the information tends to be more timely and less slanted in product reviews, especially on/. where you have so many wide and varied opinions...
So I have to say...out with the old and in with the new...
Right . Except that when you d/l the StarOffice source then write your own office suite and/or contribute to an exisying one (i.e., KOffice) expect to have Sun's bloodythirsty lawyers all over your ass because you have "seen" their proprietary source
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this would sound like a really good open source project to do "bazaar" style. After all, more eyes make all bugs shallow.
Anyone with any thoughts on this?
Do you mean drive letters for FAT partitions? If they are on a separate HDD, then the FAT drives will start as expected (in order of presence). I have no experience in putting both NTFS and FAT on the same drive.
Either Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds. This has been the year for Linux,and these guys make it happen. Bob Young also comes to mind as the guy that helped bring Linux to commercial viability
In addition, if the suit is against a large company, most IP attorneys will take a case "on contingency", especially if they think they can win.
Basically, the idea is that you are going after a big "Bucket O' Money" and all the lawyer wants is his or her third of that money. Basically, if the lawsuit is worth enough money (millions) and it looks like you have adequate proof to win, many IP attorneys will take the case on contingency
However, please note that I am not a lawyer, althouh I play one on the 'Net.
I'm sure the original author's comments were quite tongue-in-cheek.
:) I know W2K setup is better, but still can be frustrating to a newbie (for example, it still isn't obvious that the boot NTFS partition can only be 4 GBs in size, at least with the install on the Beta copy I have. Trying to make a boot NTFS partition greater than 4 GBs will fail for no obvious reason.
However, the Linux fdisk program is really no worse than its DOS counterpart, but I prefer cfdisk myself
Yeah, I know...didn't install on my Sun either :(
But the Java client is still primarily aimed (no pun intended) at Unix and other platforms not supported by the AOL software.
The TiK announcement is gone from AOLs servers probably for the same reason the software isn't present on AOL's servers anymore: they killed it.
I was thinking more along the lines of low-bandwidth media. Streaming MPEG for (slow) internet access exists, as you have said, but its interoperability factors aren't quite there yet. Meanwhile, Real and Micros~1 will continue to attempt to hold on to their proprietary advantages.
At least in the case of Linux (not sure about *BSD, I've never seen the source code), the reason for this is that very little is actually written in machine-dependent assembler...basically just enough to get the thing booted. Most of the rest of the kernel is written in highly-portable C code.
Somehow I suspect you're using the term "libertarian" in some sense that I am unfamiliar with. You espouse yourself as being "libertarian bent" out of one side of your mouth and out of the other you are asking the government to set a standard and run a server! Sounds like good ol' fashioned socialism to me...
This actually sounds more plausible. An independent, third-party solution is definitely needed. Unfortunately, instant messaging is all about creating proprietary advantage in a world where there originally were none. If Jabber had been defined before the commercialization of the Internet, then everyone would adopt it. I think eventually, a standard will have to be adopted because people are just getting sick of having to have 4 or more clients running all the time.
OTOH, look at streaming video and audio. We have a standard for that (MPEG) but it isn't being used. RealNetworks' and Microsoft's proprietary RealPlayer and NetShow clients currently rule the roost despite the fact that a viable standard exists. Again, the idea is to have a proprietary advantage in an environment where none should exist at all.
Why does AOL continue to maintain the TOC server? TOC is an ASCII-based protocol for interfacing to OSCAR, the "native" AIM server. TOC was created to interface to TiK, AOL's former TCL/TK based client meant to run on Linux as an alternative to the Java client. AOL no longer has TiK available for download and FWIU no longer maintains the client. Clients on TOC (such as gAIM and TiK) don't display ads because they don't talk to OSCAR, which feeds them.
AOL bought Mirabillis, and thus ICQ. I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to add advertising to ICQ clients.
Why was AOL interested in developing Linux-based AIM clients in the first place, considering that AOL's main interest is in gaining users to their online service? Note that there is no AOL client for Linux. Yes, TCL/TK and Java are platform-independent but the obvious uses are for Linux since Windoze users will use the native clients which are MUCH faster and require no external software (JDK or TCL/TK).
In case you missed it that last bit about the 50s model of parenting was quite tongue-in-cheek.
Not as a percentage of the national budget, which is the only gauge that counts when we are talking about the federal budget.
<laugh> Like I'd trust anything the Clinton News Network has to say about politics.
#include
main()
{
if can_read_source()
printf("I can!!\n");
}
I can!!
If RedHat buys Corel we should get Open Source WordPerfect Suite. This could really kill MS Office. A good well known office suite that's free! Why would anyone buy MS Office for some $500 or so.
Sadly, for the same reason WPOffice sales are a mere fraction of M$Office: the network effect. If you friends, neighbors, colleagues, clients, etc all have M$ OfficePark, then you will too if only for reasons of being able to easily exchange files. Sad, but true.
Not. China has manpower, but you are overlooking the fact that China is on a whole other continent than the US.. There is litle pond called the Pacific Ocean between the two continents, and crossing that would be damn hard.
Assuming China still has good relations with Russia, and they could work out some sort of deal, they could send ground troops across the Bering Strait. I'm sure Canadian ground troops wouldn't stand a chance.
Those guys are in the business of constantly building new weapons of war.
:)
... the constant bungling is a direct effect of these cuts (inadequate training, faulty equipment, etc.)
Exactly. Which is why the Pentagon has probably already figured out a way to combat this "new" threat. (If they have they wouldn't tell us
This and things like this will only strengthen their case to allocate more funds for defense.
What's wrong with that? As an American and a conservative, I favor strong military spending. Its what has kept the US strong and what has kept other nations from messing with us.
Personally, I fear the deep cuts in military spending made by the Clinton administration. Those cuts are what has made the U.S. military look like complete fools in Bosnia
Really? We need to <*gasp*> develop honesty and honor in our children? Does this mean we will actually have to start being parents and stop using the TV/Playstation/computers/internet as babysitters? Oh my gosh! What are we going to do? Return to the 1950s model of parenting?
As an aside: I feel that anyone with graphic arts talents should make some suggestions to the 2 projects. I will.
:)
Hint, hint, Rob Malda...
The screenshots of KDE2 look really nice, speaking as someone who was employed professionally as a graphic designer...
You really cannot make too many big, sweeping changes and still be comfortable for Windoze and Mac users...
From TNHD:
Personally, even before I read this, I went with the definition described by the B-Test. For me, this means the first version of the software that functions according to the original specifications...or the first version that is basically functional. Its hard to say where to draw the line with the Bazaar-style of development, since this line could be drawn at many points in the development process.
In my experience, where this line is drawn is often more political than technical, especially if money is involved.
The implication would be that there are no Open Source projects that have "died out" for lack of continued development. This is just plain silly. Open Source project will continue as long as people are interested in the effects, but the network effect that he describes is important here. If another alternative is available and better, then the development will stop or never start. Would GIMP have started if Photoshop was free (or even dirt cheap) and available on many platforms?
Actually, just picking some nits here, but there are viable cheap alternatives to Photoshop in the closed source world...
Two are entirely commercial: Micrografx Picture Publisher used to be very very expensive, but is now a viable alternative to PS for most uses for about $50. Recent versions of Corel Photopaint ($100) are really really nice and have good features to rival Adobe's product...
Another is shareware: Paint Shop Pro is available fo a fraction of PS's $800 street price and it supports special effects, layers and masks like the other packages I mentioned...the usual features you look for in a PS replacement...
Customization: How many window managers are there for Windows? How many are there for Linux?
The term window manager really doesn't apply to Windows, at least not 9x, you'd have to totally rewrite USER, GDI, and possibly parts of KERNEL.
People get mad when their apps crash. People notice that for some reason their apps don't crash as much when they run them under Linux. Netscape seems to be an exception, at least for me.
FWIW, the glibc version seemed to crash quite a bit on my Caldera 2.2 system. I replaced it with the libc5 version and problems seemed to have been resolved...
If two things were equal in every way except that one was $90 and one was free, which one would you buy? And what if it turned out that the free one was better?
At least for corporations, Linux really isn't free (beer.) You have to pay for support, and having a CD and dead tree manual is really, really a good idea.
"Okudagrams" (look it up if not a Star Trek:TNG fan)
PC-DOS/MS-DOS (think about it, particularly history and how Bill Gates made himself a billionaire with it)
...and especially 'The Hard Edge', the column Alice Hill cowrites with veteran writer Bill O'Brien, I'm not especially surprised that traditional computer mags are coming to an end.
.... the information tends to be more timely and less slanted in product reviews, especially on /. where you have so many wide and varied opinions...
What surprises me is that this comes from the mouth...errr....keyboard of Alice Hill. She's been writing for cshopper for more than 10 years, and is certainly a product of that industry.
Magazines have gotten a LOT thinner, particularly cshopper, which used to qualify as an occupational hazard for my mail carrier. Cshopper is maybe half the size it was in the glory days.
The article poster is right: PC magazines are very self serving to the products they advertise. But,personally, i used to read them for industry trends and op-ed pieces rather than for product reviews, which were always clearly slanted. Plus, I used to learn a lot from the "Tips and Tricks" and other technical sections, at least until they became more for newbies than for technical people, like they were in the 80s/early 90s. Cshopper still has the occasional gem...
But I've found myself buying fewer and fewer magazines and getting more of this type of information online: Slashdot, ZDNet, C|Net, Wired.com
So I have to say...out with the old and in with the new...
Right . Except that when you d/l the StarOffice source then write your own office suite and/or contribute to an exisying one (i.e., KOffice) expect to have Sun's bloodythirsty lawyers all over your ass because you have "seen" their proprietary source