Hmmmm. This type of thing sounds like it could be related to the "Taos Hum," that mysterious humming sound that many folks in Taos, NM, and a few other towns, supposedly hear on an ongoing basis.
Or, the Taos Hum could just be mass hysteria or attention mongering:-)
Incremental improvements and commercialism
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Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 1
Maybe I'm just a capitalist pig, and maybe I haven't read the finee print of all the licenses, but here's my take.
I'm against the GPL. It *restricts* the ways upon which a great public domain code base can be built. And imposing restrictions is not what code should be about, IMO. I like the BSD and X-Window licenses, because they do not impose the same restrictions (as I understand them).
If I base some *commercial* code upon BSD or X-Windows licenses, and add some incremental value, I can charge for it, without giving away the farm. (Software development, in general, *is* a business, by which people make a living, not a public foundation or a research project. It's this assumption of GPL that makes me worry it won't crawl far beyond the Universities and foundations, and into the real business world, where it must, to gain any measure of acceptance.)
Now, if everyone thinks what I did to extend the given software was so wonderful, but *should* be free, they're free to clone my *ideas* and *designs* of the extensions, to extend the free code base. Just a SMOP. (Small matter of programming; design is the hard part.) Everyone benefits. Honestly, the alternative is that I just won't bother to build upon that code base to start with. There are *many* GPL'd projects I would have otherwised taken further, but for the forceful, and yes, virus, license. Some of these would have had useful and powerful *concepts* that could have been cloned for free. (And I would undoubtedly have given back *some* portions of code, and all of the conepts, to the public domain). But not under the GPL, where I lose *all* of my competitive advantage for my creations.
Under a BSD-like or X-Window like license, I can commercial extend a good thing, bolstering Unix, Linux, X-Windows, BSD, and the power of applications on those platforms. I think that's more conducive to the success of non-Microsoft platforms in the world.
I'm guessing (and hoping) that the FreeBSD snapshot mechanism is similar to the way that Network Appliance filers do it. Basically, in addition to the current root inode, they create an alternative root inode, which shares all the same inodes and data blocks as the current file system as of the snapshot. But any modifications alter the current root inode tree (in kind of a copy-on-write kind of way), and leave the snapshot inode tree alone. Very cool stuff, efficient, and nice and low-level. (Not just a backup/restore/undo/trashcan, or whatever, but the way it should be done, at the inode level.)
In theory, the same thing should be possible with a compatible extension to the ext2 structure, (although, similar to the ext3 journaling debate, I'm not convinced building on ext2 structure is necessarily the best thing.)
Here's a white paper on the network appliance file system (WAFL):
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3002.html
Lots of other good white papers on that site, too. Interesting reading if you're into filesystems.
One very cool feature of the Network Appliance's file system (written from scratch), is that, in fact, there is *only* static snapshots, combined with a journal. There is no dynamic inode tree, just snapshots and a change journal. So snapshots are an integral part of their journaling mechanism, internally. Changes are written to a journal, and periodically those journal entries are applied to the former snapshot, creating the next snapshot. (And on the netapp hardware, journal entries are written to battery-backed up ram, etc., to add even more stability.)
Why would UPS be soooo much worse than FedEx? Poor employee treatment, so they're all pissed off and treat the packages like shit? (A few folks comments somewhat indicate that the employees don't give a damn about the packages.) I remember reading stories on FedEx in a business class I took, and they always had a great deal of employee pride and respect; I wonder if that what makes the difference? Or of it's a difference in loading gear, policies, procedures, etc.? (Or that 30' drop from the conveyor to the trucks?:-)
Weird... Amazing they can stay in business at all with that track record, and quality competition from FedEx.
I wonder how Castaway would have turned out if it revolved around UPS? Probably wouldn't have been an efficiency expert around in the first place:-) And on the plane, he would have been instantly killed by pieces spilling out of all the busted boxes. Wilson would have just been a flat, deflated lump of leather. He would have had to remove his infected tooth with a twisted mess of a skate blade. He would have had to tie together millions of little strips of video tape to make rope. Or he would have simply had nothing but a bunch of empty boxes with ripped open corners to work with. Would have been far more of a challenge.:-)
Well, my problem wasn't damage, but complete loss of the units.
Maybe the UPS employees were impressed at their inability to destroy Sun gear, no matter how hard they tried, and have since made a point of stealing them:-)
I've shipped expensive Sun gear (is there any other kind?) via UPS four times from Canada to the US. 2 of the shipments never showed up, period. Thankfully, they *were* insured (this was several years ago, but they insured internationally back then at least; I'd be surprised if they don't now). And the insurance was paid.
At least the UPS employees that stole the stuff had tastes for commercial grade gear:-)
A pretty bad arrival rate. I certainly wouldn't recommend them. Always had great luck with FedEx.
A shame one can't use it to port a commercial app without going open source with that app (as I understand its license). That kind of restricts it's utility for commercial projects. I think it's this kind of licensing which is slowing down the adoption of non-Microsoft stuff commercially, which is key to conquering the Microsoft monopoly.
-me
Pluggable Editor, Keyboard Control
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Java IDEs?
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· Score: 1
Two main reasons I won't use IDE's is that they don't have pluggable editors. If you could have vi, emacs, and a plain old window-ish editor, you'd attract a lot more folks.
Related, is the ability to do everything from the keyboard. As a developer, I type a lot, and fast. Being forced to use the mouse to develop is a significant productivity issue for me. (Same reason I like vi, is that I can do everything with my fingers in the home position; no escape-meta-alt-control-shift contortions, no reaching for the mouse to simply move around).
Oh yeah, another key feature is that any code produced by the IDE should work perfectly well outside the ide, and vice-versa. IDE's that insert their own chunks of code, and put in comments a la "don't modify this", suck, in my opinion. The IDE should be an optional tool to make your life more efficient, not something your code becomes dependant upon.
Nobody's accomplished those that I've seen, which is why it's still vi/javac for me:-)
Yup, forcing the protocols and data formats open would be the best thing the government could do. I would also add OS API interfaces should also be forced fully open (no hidden, undocumented MS-only calls) It's the main way that Microsoft's monopoly holds the industry hostage.
In the oft-used highway analogy, protocols/formats/OSAPI's are very much like the public roads and highway infrastructure. Things are clearly spec'd out from road width, traction, maximum grades, acceptable octanes of gasoline, and standardized, so any car manufacturer in the world, new or old, can create a vehicle that will work within that infrastructure, and can compete on a level playing field. In a Microsoft-owned world, the formulation of gasoline would be highly secretive (and constantly changing), so only Microsoft cars could be used (and forced into regular engine upgrades to handle the changing gasoline formulations:-). The roadways would be some strange surface that only Microsoft tires could safely grip (and again, you'd need to upgrade your tires to the latest brand, to work on the constantly "upgraded" types of surfaces; "Don't stifle our ability to innovate, dammit! That'll be another $500, please.") And so on and so forth.
If the protocols, API's, and data formats were forced open, everybody could compete just as fairly. It would need to be enforced carefully, though; Microsoft loves to embrace and "extend" (i.e. create a non-compatible version of) standards. The price of progressing with standards needs to be balanced off against openness. Tough challenge, and probably one beyond the government, but it sure would solve a lot of problems.
My Latitude CPx has had the following replaced in the past six months: two motherboards, two keyboards, a CD-ROM, a battery, a power supply; and the display hinges are getting pretty loose and sloppy, I expect them to go before too long. Best thing I ever did was get the next-business-day on-side service contract (extended warrantees normally being a ripoff, this one is essential with the flakey Dell Laptops).
I will never buy another Dell Laptop. Toshiba it is, from now on...
Sheeeesh. I'm sure I'll get marked as redundant or flameboat or whatever (wouldn't be the first time:-). But... I can't believe, espeically in the fact of all the evil going on in the world these days, that people would be against something that voluntarily helps *prove* who they really are, considering it an invasion of privacy. If people are honestly going about their business, obeying the laws of the country of which they agree to be a citizen, that they assume any identification tool will be used by "big brother" to invade their privacy.
If you want to be afraid, don't be afraid of your government, but be afraid of the likes of Microsoft's corporate strategies to eliminate competition. Having been a hard-core low-level developer in the olden days, and a consumer the whole time since, it's comical how often they do seriously anti-competitive things, and the government doesn't even understand or care about (or will willingly ignore, given the huge donations each year from M$). But instead, people are freaking out about a *voluntary* identification mechanism. Sigh. Maybe there isn't hope for this race after all...
Nobody in the real world would drive up prices through speculation, to the point of absurdity.
Maybe the "Diablo Bubble" hasn't burst yet:-) It will. It will. They all do. (Then we'll see www.fucked-diablos.com for all those crazy diablo merchants.)
-me- (A little frazzled by the past two years in the.com world)
Poking around his other PhotoPoint albums, I came across another very cool creation, Boatman! Definitely not to be missed. He looks so serene, paddling on the lake. I love the eyes.:-)
Come on... Have you ever tried Photon? QNX has it booting from a floppy in their demo disk (*small* footprint), it *flies* performancewise, and it looks better than most X window manager. It fits all my definitions of graciousness. Can the non-Linux knee-jerk reactions, okay?:-)
-me-
Re:The only chance the industry has against micros
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Linux Office Suites
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· Score: 1
Ummmm, it needs it's own start button and desktop to try and compete with Windows/Office with paradigms that work, and people are familiar with. I despite Microsoft's business practices, and am a huge Linux/BSD/Unix fan, but frankly, X, Gnome, and (to a slightly lesser degree) KDE just don't match up to a general user's ability to work efficiently, as with Windows. Yes, KDE/Gnome/etc., are more flexible. That doesn't matter. Windows is more intuitive. Anyhow, without digressing into that religious argument:
Star office's integrated environment is a strong counter move to the monopolistic anti-competitive OS/Application integration that MS is famous for. But to their implicit and explicit bundling aspects, you *can't* compete with Office with just your application; you need a desktop environment, too, to pull everything together to a greater degree.
Using StarOffice as indendant word processing/spreadsheet/presentation applications under X just wouldn't come anywhere near as close to competing with Office, as StarOffice does. If X had stronger (and non-competing) application standards, this would be far less of an issue.
I think it's important to state that both important *and* exporting are as important as each other. Being able to send word-compable documents to business colleagues is every bit as important as viewing incoming ones properly.
As far as MS changing the formats to force incompatability goes (which they will undoubtedly continue to do, as per normal course of business), the one thing the industry has working in their advantage, is that they end up creating incompatability for their earlier products, as well. That's why we see as "Save-as Word95/97" option in Office. They create their own incompatabilities in the process. That works to the advantage of the industry, against this monopolistic behaviour.
Anytime someone saves something in the latest office format, they break Word 95, 97, as much as they'd break StarOffice. And StarOffice has historically tracked the import formats closely enough (at least for Word) to keep up with the previous gen of office products. If they fall behind a couple of revs, the race will be over.
My God, is SlashDot turning into fuckedcompany.com? Let's hope not.
Let's trust the moderation system gets rid of crap like this, so we can deal with the issues.
-me-
The only chance the industry has against microsoft
on
Linux Office Suites
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· Score: 5, Informative
...is StarOffice, in my opinion. If these guys can prevent MS from having the only application suite that can properly handle their monopoly-induced standard file formats, then there is *choice* in the industry. If StarOffice fails, then it's MSWord, MSExcel, and PowerPoint, for the forseeable future that will dominate business communications.
I think StarOffice got off to a wonderful start. I'm very concerned about their progress. The next major version will really be a turning point in the industry one way or the other. If it's solid, and it rocks, with great compatability, then there is a great alternative to office. If it's buggy, or doesn't work well with office formats (especially Excel, where it's the weakest), then MS will win. And I'm going off to live on a deserted south pacific island.
Sigh... If I had to bet, it's depressing where I'd probably put my money... Sun's dropped the ball a few times lately.
Tip to the folks working on it: cool object oriented design is neat, but it's usability, stability, and compatability that will make StarOffice a success. Don't try to do things beyond MS Office, just match it on all fronts! Anything else is an esoteric waste of time.
I used to be a big VMWare fan, and still am. But mainly for getting a "pure PC", not specifically for running Windows. I used to run Windows in it a lot, but once I tried Win4Lin, I switched over completely. I still use VMWare for trying out FreeBSD and other OS's, but for running Windows apps, Win4Lin clearly wins for me. Here's why:
Win4Lin (by default) uses the native underlying Linux file system, which is faster than FAT32. It boots Windows faster than a booting Windows on a bare PC on the same hardware. If you've booted windows under Win4Lin recently (so Linux caches the files referenced), and need to restart (say, after installing any damn windows app:-), you can reboot in 10 seconds!
If Windows does blue-screen (which it does far less in Win4Lin than native), there's no scandisk required, as Linux is the one handling the file system access.
I use it on top of SGI's XFS on a laptop, which is even better. I haven't had done an fsck or a scandisk in months:-) Life is good.
There is the odd limitation, and obviously for gaming you'd want to reboot to native Windows. But in general, I don't boot windows natively any more. Oh yeah, it has sound support, too, which I find works quite well. (Seems to me VMWare didn't support sound, although I could be wrong on that point.)
So if you need a pure PC for testing or QA, or want to try different OS's, I heartily recommend VMWare. But for access to Windows apps, Win4Lin I find much better. Oh yeah, you can map any Unix directory to Win4Lin virtual drives, too. Much easier than VMWare's Samba bridging stuff (which I never could get working consistently). Win4Lin is much cheaper, too ($79 vs. $299, or something like that).
Get a good, compact, camera bag. I have a small one, that holds my camera, camcorder, wallet, leatherman, a few PCMCIA and compact flash cards, some small binoculars, and a bunch of other junk, and it's only as big as about four VHS video tapes strapped side to side. I've occasionally carried my Libretto in it, too, quite comfortably.
The stigma of a camera bag is much better than that of a "purse", even if it really serves the same purpose:-)
The one I use is by "Street and Field". Couldn't find their web site offhand, but one online store that lists all their products is here The "Utility Case" is the one I have, which is terrific, and very flexible. The back has strong velcro tabs, allowing it to be worn on the belt, or attached to other bags, or on vests they sell, for the bigger hikes, etc.:-) Highly recommended; excellent quality, very rugged, and pretty low-cost.
Why is everyone so freaked out about collection of consumer data?
Say I watch a lot of ball games and drink a lot of different types of beer. So they start targeting me with baseball merchandise and the latest kind of beer, rather than ads I could care less about. Why does everyone see this as a bad thing?
Similarly, if my grocery store tracks my purchases with some bonus points card, and from that they learn that guys who buy lots of nachos also tend to buy lots of beer, and they start putting the beer close to the nachos, fine by me.
It's only mindless robots that can't control their impulse buying that should be threatened. And those don't seem to be the ones getting their backs up. I know how to pick what I want, if they target and arrange things more effective for me to buy stuff I want anyway, more power to them!
Sometimes people are just a little to automatically paranoid about data. Kneejerk reaction whenever the topic comes up...
If anybody started linking names and anonymous consumer data, yeah, that's bad. But anybody pulling that gets called on it real quick, and pay a big price in PR damage.
Where's my boolean searches! Sniff, Sniff...
on
Google Acquires Deja
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· Score: 1
Am i the only one who isn't happy about this? Is it just me, but is "any words", "all words", or "exact phrase" not sufficient for power-searching the net or usenet.
I think AltaVista has one of the best languages for searching and finding exactly what I want (+"sony laptops" +reviews -"for sale"). As far as usenet groups go, Deja was pretty good on the power search ("sony laptops" & reviews). Now, with the google interface, I have to just search for articles with "sony", "laptops", and "reviews" in them, definitely less refined than being able to combine phrases and booleans.
This is a major step back in usability to me. Are there any reasonable alternatives to Deja that have some form of a boolean search language??? Please!!!
A bit more of a history lesson here. The Posix standard for Unix shells is basically a conservative (but reasonably thorough) definition of historical/bin/sh. That does *not* include anything like vi/emacs editing modes, which *were* a/bin/ksh invention. So bash *did* clone those (and other stuff) from/bin/ksh. Both are supersets of Posix (and thus/bin/sh), but both are a lot more than that, and the extra cool stuff that/bin/ksh added, bash got from it. (And added it's own cool stuff beyond that.)
If you are going to clone/bin/sh or/bin/ksh and extend it, Posix is a great place to start; it's probably the most detailed description of shell syntax you'll find.
Next: Last I checked, ksh typically had very poor support for arrow keys; you had to map your arrow keys Xkeysym's to be the right editing keys, which broke them for other apps. bash definitely does this better. Maybe newer ksh's have better support; the standard one on Solaris 7 has the limited support described above.
Finally, the "you young bucks" comments were meant to be a funny response to a cute historical inaccuracy by someone who obviously didn't know the full history. I'm only 30-ish myself.:-) And I consider myself to be one of the better Unix/Linux "nurterer's" around, helping a lot of folks on board with it. Definitely not l33t.:-)
There sure are a lot of sensitive and surly youngsters out there. Lighten up; go to a rave and take some Ecstacy, or whatever you young kids do for fun these days.
(For the seriously humour impaired, that was yet *another* joke.)
-me-
Come on kiddies, you're showing your youth:-) ksh existed long before bash.
"bash is the default shell on Unix?" On Linux, yes, on Unix, no.
Most of the cool bash-isms (such vi and emacs editing modes) were straight from ksh. Bash was a free clone of ksh, with a bunch of other stuff thrown in.
I get a bit of a kick out of these Unix youngers, forced to use Solaris, run out and install bash, not realizing/bin/ksh does most of the same thing. (The main reason that Unix youngers will just plain not use ksh, is lack of arrow key support. But no *real* Unix user would think of using arrow keys. Why not just find a "notepad" and Windows Explorer clone, or go back to Windows:-)
bash is to ksh as Linux is to Unix. A newer, cooler, free version of an great thing.
"Until these things are cracked"? Not quite. Cable modems are more like cell phones. Unless the network you are physically connected to registers your device, you ain't gonna get connectivity for free. So it's not a simple software/hardware hack to get your cable modem working for free. You need to sign up for their service.
That's not a bad thing. I like the fact folks want to make their money off of ongoing service, rather than up-front setup charges, which always gave me a bad taste in my mouth...
A given brand of cable modem isn't going to act as a magic router device for you; they're designed to talk to specific head-end equipment installed by the cable company (and you won't be getting that free any time soon:-)
BTW: don't listen to the myth that the DSL companies push, that the more people on cable the slower it gets. Fibre typically gets to each neighborhood, and each neithborhood typically gets the equivalent of the switch. How many corporations are successfully sharing high speed internet connectivity with hundreds of people on a 10mbps or 100mbs link successfully. A lot. It's fibre to the neighborhood, and a local high speed LAN for you and your neighbors (but more secure, as the cable modems disallow snooping). The marketing hype from DSL makes me sick. (Although DSL itself is a reasonable solution, too, at least for downloading, regardless of the misinformation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Or, the Taos Hum could just be mass hysteria or attention mongering :-)
Here's a link to a page with some info about it.
-me
Maybe I'm just a capitalist pig, and maybe I haven't read the finee print of all the licenses, but here's my take.
I'm against the GPL. It *restricts* the ways upon which a great public domain code base can be built. And imposing restrictions is not what code should be about, IMO. I like the BSD and X-Window licenses, because they do not impose the same restrictions (as I understand them).
If I base some *commercial* code upon BSD or X-Windows licenses, and add some incremental value, I can charge for it, without giving away the farm. (Software development, in general, *is* a business, by which people make a living, not a public foundation or a research project. It's this assumption of GPL that makes me worry it won't crawl far beyond the Universities and foundations, and into the real business world, where it must, to gain any measure of acceptance.)
Now, if everyone thinks what I did to extend the given software was so wonderful, but *should* be free, they're free to clone my *ideas* and *designs* of the extensions, to extend the free code base. Just a SMOP. (Small matter of programming; design is the hard part.) Everyone benefits. Honestly, the alternative is that I just won't bother to build upon that code base to start with. There are *many* GPL'd projects I would have otherwised taken further, but for the forceful, and yes, virus, license. Some of these would have had useful and powerful *concepts* that could have been cloned for free. (And I would undoubtedly have given back *some* portions of code, and all of the conepts, to the public domain). But not under the GPL, where I lose *all* of my competitive advantage for my creations.
Under a BSD-like or X-Window like license, I can commercial extend a good thing, bolstering Unix, Linux, X-Windows, BSD, and the power of applications on those platforms. I think that's more conducive to the success of non-Microsoft platforms in the world.
-me
I'm guessing (and hoping) that the FreeBSD snapshot mechanism is similar to the way that Network Appliance filers do it. Basically, in addition to the current root inode, they create an alternative root inode, which shares all the same inodes and data blocks as the current file system as of the snapshot. But any modifications alter the current root inode tree (in kind of a copy-on-write kind of way), and leave the snapshot inode tree alone. Very cool stuff, efficient, and nice and low-level. (Not just a backup/restore/undo/trashcan, or whatever, but the way it should be done, at the inode level.)
In theory, the same thing should be possible with a compatible extension to the ext2 structure, (although, similar to the ext3 journaling debate, I'm not convinced building on ext2 structure is necessarily the best thing.)
Here's a white paper on the network appliance file system (WAFL):
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3002.html
Lots of other good white papers on that site, too. Interesting reading if you're into filesystems.
One very cool feature of the Network Appliance's file system (written from scratch), is that, in fact, there is *only* static snapshots, combined with a journal. There is no dynamic inode tree, just snapshots and a change journal. So snapshots are an integral part of their journaling mechanism, internally. Changes are written to a journal, and periodically those journal entries are applied to the former snapshot, creating the next snapshot. (And on the netapp hardware, journal entries are written to battery-backed up ram, etc., to add even more stability.)
-me
Why would UPS be soooo much worse than FedEx? Poor employee treatment, so they're all pissed off and treat the packages like shit? (A few folks comments somewhat indicate that the employees don't give a damn about the packages.) I remember reading stories on FedEx in a business class I took, and they always had a great deal of employee pride and respect; I wonder if that what makes the difference? Or of it's a difference in loading gear, policies, procedures, etc.? (Or that 30' drop from the conveyor to the trucks? :-)
:-) And on the plane, he would have been instantly killed by pieces spilling out of all the busted boxes. Wilson would have just been a flat, deflated lump of leather. He would have had to remove his infected tooth with a twisted mess of a skate blade. He would have had to tie together millions of little strips of video tape to make rope. Or he would have simply had nothing but a bunch of empty boxes with ripped open corners to work with. Would have been far more of a challenge. :-)
Weird... Amazing they can stay in business at all with that track record, and quality competition from FedEx.
I wonder how Castaway would have turned out if it revolved around UPS? Probably wouldn't have been an efficiency expert around in the first place
-me
Well, my problem wasn't damage, but complete loss of the units.
:-)
Maybe the UPS employees were impressed at their inability to destroy Sun gear, no matter how hard they tried, and have since made a point of stealing them
-me
I've shipped expensive Sun gear (is there any other kind?) via UPS four times from Canada to the US. 2 of the shipments never showed up, period. Thankfully, they *were* insured (this was several years ago, but they insured internationally back then at least; I'd be surprised if they don't now). And the insurance was paid.
:-)
At least the UPS employees that stole the stuff had tastes for commercial grade gear
A pretty bad arrival rate. I certainly wouldn't recommend them. Always had great luck with FedEx.
-me
Cygwin/XFree86 looks pretty cool.
A shame one can't use it to port a commercial app without going open source with that app (as I understand its license). That kind of restricts it's utility for commercial projects. I think it's this kind of licensing which is slowing down the adoption of non-Microsoft stuff commercially, which is key to conquering the Microsoft monopoly.
-me
Two main reasons I won't use IDE's is that they don't have pluggable editors. If you could have vi, emacs, and a plain old window-ish editor, you'd attract a lot more folks.
:-)
Related, is the ability to do everything from the keyboard. As a developer, I type a lot, and fast. Being forced to use the mouse to develop is a significant productivity issue for me. (Same reason I like vi, is that I can do everything with my fingers in the home position; no escape-meta-alt-control-shift contortions, no reaching for the mouse to simply move around).
Oh yeah, another key feature is that any code produced by the IDE should work perfectly well outside the ide, and vice-versa. IDE's that insert their own chunks of code, and put in comments a la "don't modify this", suck, in my opinion. The IDE should be an optional tool to make your life more efficient, not something your code becomes dependant upon.
Nobody's accomplished those that I've seen, which is why it's still vi/javac for me
-me
Yup, forcing the protocols and data formats open would be the best thing the government could do. I would also add OS API interfaces should also be forced fully open (no hidden, undocumented MS-only calls) It's the main way that Microsoft's monopoly holds the industry hostage.
:-). The roadways would be some strange surface that only Microsoft tires could safely grip (and again, you'd need to upgrade your tires to the latest brand, to work on the constantly "upgraded" types of surfaces; "Don't stifle our ability to innovate, dammit! That'll be another $500, please.") And so on and so forth.
In the oft-used highway analogy, protocols/formats/OSAPI's are very much like the public roads and highway infrastructure. Things are clearly spec'd out from road width, traction, maximum grades, acceptable octanes of gasoline, and standardized, so any car manufacturer in the world, new or old, can create a vehicle that will work within that infrastructure, and can compete on a level playing field. In a Microsoft-owned world, the formulation of gasoline would be highly secretive (and constantly changing), so only Microsoft cars could be used (and forced into regular engine upgrades to handle the changing gasoline formulations
If the protocols, API's, and data formats were forced open, everybody could compete just as fairly. It would need to be enforced carefully, though; Microsoft loves to embrace and "extend" (i.e. create a non-compatible version of) standards. The price of progressing with standards needs to be balanced off against openness. Tough challenge, and probably one beyond the government, but it sure would solve a lot of problems.
-me
My Latitude CPx has had the following replaced in the past six months: two motherboards, two keyboards, a CD-ROM, a battery, a power supply; and the display hinges are getting pretty loose and sloppy, I expect them to go before too long. Best thing I ever did was get the next-business-day on-side service contract (extended warrantees normally being a ripoff, this one is essential with the flakey Dell Laptops).
I will never buy another Dell Laptop. Toshiba it is, from now on...
-me
Sheeeesh. I'm sure I'll get marked as redundant or flameboat or whatever (wouldn't be the first time :-). But... I can't believe, espeically in the fact of all the evil going on in the world these days, that people would be against something that voluntarily helps *prove* who they really are, considering it an invasion of privacy. If people are honestly going about their business, obeying the laws of the country of which they agree to be a citizen, that they assume any identification tool will be used by "big brother" to invade their privacy.
If you want to be afraid, don't be afraid of your government, but be afraid of the likes of Microsoft's corporate strategies to eliminate competition. Having been a hard-core low-level developer in the olden days, and a consumer the whole time since, it's comical how often they do seriously anti-competitive things, and the government doesn't even understand or care about (or will willingly ignore, given the huge donations each year from M$). But instead, people are freaking out about a *voluntary* identification mechanism. Sigh. Maybe there isn't hope for this race after all...
-me
Nobody in the real world would drive up prices through speculation, to the point of absurdity.
Maybe the "Diablo Bubble" hasn't burst yet :-) It will. It will. They all do. (Then we'll see www.fucked-diablos.com for all those crazy diablo merchants.)
-me- (A little frazzled by the past two years in the .com world)
Check his boatman in his other PhotoPoint album here.
-me
-me-
Star office's integrated environment is a strong counter move to the monopolistic anti-competitive OS/Application integration that MS is famous for. But to their implicit and explicit bundling aspects, you *can't* compete with Office with just your application; you need a desktop environment, too, to pull everything together to a greater degree.
Using StarOffice as indendant word processing/spreadsheet/presentation applications under X just wouldn't come anywhere near as close to competing with Office, as StarOffice does. If X had stronger (and non-competing) application standards, this would be far less of an issue.
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I think it's important to state that both important *and* exporting are as important as each other. Being able to send word-compable documents to business colleagues is every bit as important as viewing incoming ones properly.
As far as MS changing the formats to force incompatability goes (which they will undoubtedly continue to do, as per normal course of business), the one thing the industry has working in their advantage, is that they end up creating incompatability for their earlier products, as well. That's why we see as "Save-as Word95/97" option in Office. They create their own incompatabilities in the process. That works to the advantage of the industry, against this monopolistic behaviour.
Anytime someone saves something in the latest office format, they break Word 95, 97, as much as they'd break StarOffice. And StarOffice has historically tracked the import formats closely enough (at least for Word) to keep up with the previous gen of office products. If they fall behind a couple of revs, the race will be over.
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Let's trust the moderation system gets rid of crap like this, so we can deal with the issues.
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I think StarOffice got off to a wonderful start. I'm very concerned about their progress. The next major version will really be a turning point in the industry one way or the other. If it's solid, and it rocks, with great compatability, then there is a great alternative to office. If it's buggy, or doesn't work well with office formats (especially Excel, where it's the weakest), then MS will win. And I'm going off to live on a deserted south pacific island.
Sigh... If I had to bet, it's depressing where I'd probably put my money... Sun's dropped the ball a few times lately.
Tip to the folks working on it: cool object oriented design is neat, but it's usability, stability, and compatability that will make StarOffice a success. Don't try to do things beyond MS Office, just match it on all fronts! Anything else is an esoteric waste of time.
-me-
Win4Lin (by default) uses the native underlying Linux file system, which is faster than FAT32. It boots Windows faster than a booting Windows on a bare PC on the same hardware. If you've booted windows under Win4Lin recently (so Linux caches the files referenced), and need to restart (say, after installing any damn windows app :-), you can reboot in 10 seconds!
If Windows does blue-screen (which it does far less in Win4Lin than native), there's no scandisk required, as Linux is the one handling the file system access.
I use it on top of SGI's XFS on a laptop, which is even better. I haven't had done an fsck or a scandisk in months :-) Life is good.
There is the odd limitation, and obviously for gaming you'd want to reboot to native Windows. But in general, I don't boot windows natively any more. Oh yeah, it has sound support, too, which I find works quite well. (Seems to me VMWare didn't support sound, although I could be wrong on that point.)
So if you need a pure PC for testing or QA, or want to try different OS's, I heartily recommend VMWare. But for access to Windows apps, Win4Lin I find much better. Oh yeah, you can map any Unix directory to Win4Lin virtual drives, too. Much easier than VMWare's Samba bridging stuff (which I never could get working consistently). Win4Lin is much cheaper, too ($79 vs. $299, or something like that).
Get a good, compact, camera bag. I have a small one, that holds my camera, camcorder, wallet, leatherman, a few PCMCIA and compact flash cards, some small binoculars, and a bunch of other junk, and it's only as big as about four VHS video tapes strapped side to side. I've occasionally carried my Libretto in it, too, quite comfortably.
The stigma of a camera bag is much better than that of a "purse", even if it really serves the same purpose :-)
The one I use is by "Street and Field". Couldn't find their web site offhand, but one online store that lists all their products is here The "Utility Case" is the one I have, which is terrific, and very flexible. The back has strong velcro tabs, allowing it to be worn on the belt, or attached to other bags, or on vests they sell, for the bigger hikes, etc. :-) Highly recommended; excellent quality, very rugged, and pretty low-cost.
Hope this helps!
Say I watch a lot of ball games and drink a lot of different types of beer. So they start targeting me with baseball merchandise and the latest kind of beer, rather than ads I could care less about. Why does everyone see this as a bad thing?
Similarly, if my grocery store tracks my purchases with some bonus points card, and from that they learn that guys who buy lots of nachos also tend to buy lots of beer, and they start putting the beer close to the nachos, fine by me.
It's only mindless robots that can't control their impulse buying that should be threatened. And those don't seem to be the ones getting their backs up. I know how to pick what I want, if they target and arrange things more effective for me to buy stuff I want anyway, more power to them!
Sometimes people are just a little to automatically paranoid about data. Kneejerk reaction whenever the topic comes up...
If anybody started linking names and anonymous consumer data, yeah, that's bad. But anybody pulling that gets called on it real quick, and pay a big price in PR damage.
I think AltaVista has one of the best languages for searching and finding exactly what I want (+"sony laptops" +reviews -"for sale"). As far as usenet groups go, Deja was pretty good on the power search ("sony laptops" & reviews). Now, with the google interface, I have to just search for articles with "sony", "laptops", and "reviews" in them, definitely less refined than being able to combine phrases and booleans.
This is a major step back in usability to me. Are there any reasonable alternatives to Deja that have some form of a boolean search language??? Please!!!
-me-
Bzzzzzzt!
A bit more of a history lesson here. The Posix standard for Unix shells is basically a conservative (but reasonably thorough) definition of historical /bin/sh. That does *not* include anything like vi/emacs editing modes, which *were* a /bin/ksh invention. So bash *did* clone those (and other stuff) from /bin/ksh. Both are supersets of Posix (and thus /bin/sh), but both are a lot more than that, and the extra cool stuff that /bin/ksh added, bash got from it. (And added it's own cool stuff beyond that.)
If you are going to clone /bin/sh or /bin/ksh and extend it, Posix is a great place to start; it's probably the most detailed description of shell syntax you'll find.
Next: Last I checked, ksh typically had very poor support for arrow keys; you had to map your arrow keys Xkeysym's to be the right editing keys, which broke them for other apps. bash definitely does this better. Maybe newer ksh's have better support; the standard one on Solaris 7 has the limited support described above.
Finally, the "you young bucks" comments were meant to be a funny response to a cute historical inaccuracy by someone who obviously didn't know the full history. I'm only 30-ish myself. :-) And I consider myself to be one of the better Unix/Linux "nurterer's" around, helping a lot of folks on board with it. Definitely not l33t. :-)
There sure are a lot of sensitive and surly youngsters out there. Lighten up; go to a rave and take some Ecstacy, or whatever you young kids do for fun these days.
(For the seriously humour impaired, that was yet *another* joke.) -me-
"bash is the default shell on Unix?" On Linux, yes, on Unix, no.
Most of the cool bash-isms (such vi and emacs editing modes) were straight from ksh. Bash was a free clone of ksh, with a bunch of other stuff thrown in.
I get a bit of a kick out of these Unix youngers, forced to use Solaris, run out and install bash, not realizing /bin/ksh does most of the same thing. (The main reason that Unix youngers will just plain not use ksh, is lack of arrow key support. But no *real* Unix user would think of using arrow keys. Why not just find a "notepad" and Windows Explorer clone, or go back to Windows :-)
bash is to ksh as Linux is to Unix. A newer, cooler, free version of an great thing.
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That's not a bad thing. I like the fact folks want to make their money off of ongoing service, rather than up-front setup charges, which always gave me a bad taste in my mouth...
A given brand of cable modem isn't going to act as a magic router device for you; they're designed to talk to specific head-end equipment installed by the cable company (and you won't be getting that free any time soon :-)
BTW: don't listen to the myth that the DSL companies push, that the more people on cable the slower it gets. Fibre typically gets to each neighborhood, and each neithborhood typically gets the equivalent of the switch. How many corporations are successfully sharing high speed internet connectivity with hundreds of people on a 10mbps or 100mbs link successfully. A lot. It's fibre to the neighborhood, and a local high speed LAN for you and your neighbors (but more secure, as the cable modems disallow snooping). The marketing hype from DSL makes me sick. (Although DSL itself is a reasonable solution, too, at least for downloading, regardless of the misinformation.)
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