I think variety is the spice of life. I originally bought for Opera for linux because it rendered fonts so much better than Netscape and Konqueror. This was before Moz.
In RH linux I mainly use Opera 6, but I also use Konqueror and Mozilla for various tasks. Konq is great because (in KDE 2.2.2) it's small and pops up quickly for little tasks. Moz has good font handling now and is more compatible with some websites that were written for Netscape. Opera is tops for its handy keyboard shortcuts, easy toggle to user style (e.g. to fix a white-on-black site), and excellent tabs and bookmarks implementation.
Once in a while I export my Opera bookmarks and suck'em into Moz, just to keep things in sync. Some day I'll write a Mozilla start-up script that does this automatically.
Opera's unstable in Linux, unfortunately. Since 6, I've *NEVER* had an instance of Opera not crash eventually. 6.1 has gotten more stable but man-oh-man what is it with these segv's all over the place? I would have thought a few code reviews would have caught most of these long ago, but the Opera folks must be understaffed.
In Windows I mainly use Moz but occasionally IE when forced to. In other words, the more the merrier. It's not browser wars; it's browser orgies!
Verizon offers call intercept for $5/month, which sounds like what you have. I wonder however if it's really worth $60/year.
I've had pretty good luck by politely requesting: "Add this number to your no-call list"; so far, every telemarketer has understood this request. Some of them have read me a warning that it will take X weeks to propagate.
My 2-3 telemarketing calls per day have decreased to perhaps one or two per month, mostly these recorded pitches for satellite dish sales and Disneyland vacations. I have taken to writing down the toll free numbers, calling them up and making the no-call request.
One problem I've heard mentioned about a national no-solicitation law is that non-profits will get lumped in. Also, during election season I got a million recorded and live calls; I don't like'em but I can understand why they do them. Perhaps there should be a check-box for what kind of organizations you want excluded.
Right. Some would also argue that manned missions to the Moon were a total boondoggle. After all, what did we get for it? A bunch of rocks. All that money should have been invested in the War on Poverty instead. Think what a nice society we'd have today. No microcomputers or internet, but at least there'd be a bunch of public housing projects and a whole lot of social workers to keep their inhabitants docile.
I think the U.S. has dropped the ball on space exploration. Without such a national mission, we are reduced to such worthwhile causes as "providing affordable housing", prescription drug insurance and other European style goals that do nothing but drain the treasury.
The U.S. will sink back into the '70s morass if it drops the space ball. It's primarily through great national projects that the great technological achievements occur. I say, pour money into the ISS and damn the naysayers. Send a manned mission to Mars within 10 years. Build a permanent station on the Moon. The tech exists; all it needs now is political will.
You can also click "About G. Cooke" and learn that she is a professional reviewer who is a member of National Book Critics Circle and writes for various newspapers as well. It's not that surprising that she would publish a lot of reviews.
Correct; VSS is a legacy product, according to MS's own website. It's just in maintenance mode now. Comparing VSS to ClearCase is ridiculous. VSS is a toy. Occasionally you have to rebuild the database because it gets "corrupted". Very confidence inspiring!
I've heard that internally, MS uses Rational Rose for its CASE and source control systems; perhaps someone else can confirm this?
Microsoft is trying to replace Java with C#, its own, "improved" version. They are not going to buy Borland for several billion dollars just to prop up a "legacy" language like Java. If they wanted to do that, why not just release new versions of the old Visual J++? This would cost them a few millions and to hell with Borland.
No, Microsoft is doing this for one simple reason: to get rid of a Java powerhouse. Just as they did with Foxpro, which they bought and pretended to maintain for a few years while pushing their own products Access and Sql Server, they're going to shelve Borland and Togethersoft too. Why shouldn't they? They've got about $50 billion in cash, nothing to spend it on, and Java continues to annoy them. It's a logical move.
I run Linux in my home office. I got a low end Compaq Presario in June for $1059; it's a good basic machine: floppy, DVD, 14" screen, 256M, 2 USB. (I am finding I miss having a serial port, unfortunately.) I partitioned the hard disk and installed RH 7.3. It works but there are still a few problems such as requiring a patch to the kernel to fix the audio, and it doesn't conserve batteries the way XP does.
I plan to repartition to give XP more room, maybe try RH 8 or SuSE and just use the machine as the token Windows machine, so I can run all my old windows s/w that crossover can't handle yet (Photoshop, Pagemaker, Finale) and accommodate certain hardware that's Windows-only (digital camera, USB card reader). The extra $79 for the OS is well worth it for this purpose. However it's not the most stable OS I've seen; out of the box, IE hangs sometimes, and hybernation messes things up.
Since when has business been a "moral" activity? That's for the society as a whole to undertake. If the society as a whole develops rules of behavior which are imparted to children in school and adults in houses of worship or other community meeting places, business will tend to be more moral simply because people will tend to have more morality. Unfortunately there will always be a few immoral people who take full advantage of the system (e.g. our friend the spam king), but that's the price of a free society. With a generally moral populace, the immoral minority would be more or less controlled. For example, the spam king outrages others' sense of justice and causes them to take various kinds of action against him.
The questions you should be asking is, how can we improve our school systems to impart moral education to our children?
Exactly. The right thing is to have an open standard for communication. Wrenching control of the standard from one proprietary supplier will take tremendous effort but it will be worth it in the end.
What operating system will this thing use? The linked article didn't say, except for something about "autonomic" self-diagnosing and repair, which is intriguing as well.
Palm has had management problems; the visionary folks who founded the company split off to form Handspring, leaving Palm in the hands of bean counters. The bean counters have a cash cow, but they've been resting on their laurels a bit too long.
Meanwhile, MS poured money into research and development to come up with something much better. PPC2002 with accompanying hardware is pretty formidable now. MP3 playback, brilliant color screens, lots of business software.
I've tried to be loyal to Palm, moving from III to IIIxe to a PalmOS based Handera, but I've just about had it with Palm's lack of a clue. They kept changing the form factor, obsoleting useful and expensive accessories such as Kodak's PalmPix, modems, hip cases, etc. The Zire is a joke; no backlight, no expansion, missing two of the traditional four buttons, a weird rubber flap that won't stay flipped back. The Tungsten seems somewhat promising but it's mighty expensive and seems a little clunky compared to the slick PPC competition.
Handspring seemed to be going somewhere for a while but they've gotten sidetracked into the phone thing; they made their name on expandability, but their Treo product doesn't even have an expansion slot. Sony is stuck in their not invented here mentality with their stupid memory sticks. If the Clie had CF and/or MMC slots it would be just about ideal.
I think the field is wide open right now. MS obviously has the advantage; they can just keep pouring money into PPC and improving it year after year, and they can strike deals with vendors like Dell to saturate the market. There's nothing to stop MS from attacking Palm at the low end of the market; a Power PC Lite with a $150 platform is technically possible; if MS pushed this Palm would rapidly disapper, methinks.
Probably this is a waste of time. Did you even read the books? Harry's an orphan who was raised by mean, stupid people. Once he gets to Hogwarts, he's treated exactly like any other student, no better and no worse. It's true that some of the faculty and a lot of the students respect Harry for the role he played in Voldemort's defeat, but he doesn't get any special treatment.
He sure wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, except that his parents left him a lot of money (unusable in the non-magical world, however). As for what he deserves, Harry's got a strong sense of justice and keeps trying to help other people in various ways. He's a good kid, he picks good kids to be his friends, and accomplishes a lot sometimes against great odds. Pretty good role model, I'd say; I hope my kids will read these books someday.
I think you hit upon the key issue: cross-platform compatibility. Ant works pretty much the same across different operating systems, aside from exec'ing OS-specific commands (which should decrease in the future as mor e native ant tasks are added).
Make is super-powerful but infuriatingly incompatible even across different versions of the same product, such as GNU make.
Ant is easy to learn, after a brief period of warping your brain into their XML way of thinking, executes smoothly and quickly, and is infinitely extensible and very Java-friendly.
There's probably room for both tools in the universe but Ant is well worth learning and adding to one's bag of tricks.
"In order to find out which files should be compiled, Ant compares the timestamps of the source files to those of the resulting.class files."
I'm pretty sure ant is smart enough to do "conditional compilation", or rather the compilation of only changed sources, since I think that's what the original poster meant.
Here's how my.procmailrc filters mail that contains Asian or other unreadable characters:
# look for 4 upper ascii [probably Asian] characters in body # this searches for characters excluding space through tilde and tab) :0 B: * [^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ] ${MAILDIR}/junk.mail
I found that this stopped all Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text mail. I guess folks who have to read such mail have to parse the content, which is more complicated.
I also block mail from countries that seem to originate lots of spam; my friends and colleagues are on a "white list" that gets checked first.
# discard mail from certain spam-happy countries (optional <>) :0: * ^From:.*cn[>]*$|\ ^From:.*hk[>]*$|\ ^From:.*kr[>]*$|\ ^From:.*tw[>]*$ ${MAILDIR}/junk.mail
I'm just a beginner with procmail but already it's made a huge difference. It doesn't "solve" the spam issue; actually spam will never go away until those 0.01% of recipients stop sending their money. Oh well; I hate government intervention, but I suspect that's the only way to truly solve this mess.
Huh? Not the versions of 98 and 2000 I have used, nor XP or any other Windows OS. If you switch off a Windows PC without "shutting down" you will see at next bootup a stern message that you failed to shut down cleanly, and it will run a disk check to clean up lost clusters or whatever.
From a usability perspective, a traditional notebook computer with a touch sensitive screen would be a big improvement, and I don't understand why more manufacturers don't make them.
I've observed completely new users in their first minutes with a computer, running the first time setup program or whatever. A dialog box pops up with an "OK" button. The user has no previous training or experience to understand that you have to drag this "mouse" around on the desk, causing this little arrow to move, and once it's over the button, you press one of the mouse buttons and it causes the dialog to go away. FOR CRIPE'S SAKE! Why not just let the poor user push the OK button with their finger? a la PalmOS, etc.
Furthermore, what's all this "log off" and "shut down" crap? Why not just let the user turn off the machine the way they turn off a television? After all these years, you would think someone would design an OS that simply stores its data and sleeps upon a signal from the system's off switch. Yeah yeah, you can go out and purchase a Windows program that does something like this, but would you trust it? Even Linux doesn't do this yet.
I think the innovations of Newton, Palm, Psion, etc. should eventually migrate their way up to the notebook computer world and we will have much more powerful and usable tools. This tablet PC is nothing but a lousy gimmick. Why should anyone pay for a notebook computer that's missing a keyboard? Why not just add the touch sensitivity and handwriting recog stuff in to the existing technology?
What you're saying makes sense, and yet objects are designed and every day that contain serious flaws. Take, as a random example, the Palm III series. The glass display is extremely fragile and cracks if you look at it wrong. I've had two break on me, one from a fall of about 12 inches from my shirt pocket to a carpet-on-concrete type of floor. I wonder if plastic or a slightly thicker and stronger glass would have solved this.
Needless to say, I have little faith in Palm's engineering when it comes to durability, though I admire the elegance of the product otherwise.
The slide-out keyboard makes sense if it means a larger display area, but I'm disappointed that there's (apparently) no graffiti-style data entry. I guess graffiti is destined to be a temporary kludge from the early years of PDAs, replaced eventually by tiny, unusable keyboards with illogical QWERTY layouts. I wonder if you can at least reprogram it to dvorak.
Slashdot Mirror
"... These anti-spam nuts are beginning to act a lot like the anti-abortion nuts..."
There's no law against photographing someone's house. Leaving psychopathic-sounding threatening phone calls is a different matter.
I think variety is the spice of life. I originally bought for Opera for linux because it rendered fonts so much better than Netscape and Konqueror. This was before Moz.
In RH linux I mainly use Opera 6, but I also use Konqueror and Mozilla for various tasks. Konq is great because (in KDE 2.2.2) it's small and pops up quickly for little tasks. Moz has good font handling now and is more compatible with some websites that were written for Netscape. Opera is tops for its handy keyboard shortcuts, easy toggle to user style (e.g. to fix a white-on-black site), and excellent tabs and bookmarks implementation.
Once in a while I export my Opera bookmarks and suck'em into Moz, just to keep things in sync. Some day I'll write a Mozilla start-up script that does this automatically.
Opera's unstable in Linux, unfortunately. Since 6, I've *NEVER* had an instance of Opera not crash eventually. 6.1 has gotten more stable but man-oh-man what is it with these segv's all over the place? I would have thought a few code reviews would have caught most of these long ago, but the Opera folks must be understaffed.
In Windows I mainly use Moz but occasionally IE when forced to. In other words, the more the merrier. It's not browser wars; it's browser orgies!
Heh.
Still, it's fun to tell the telemarketer that this is precisely what you were doing, and listen to them squirm.
TM (cheerfully): Hi, Mr. Yog, I'm Fred Loser from AT&T. How are you today?
You (panting slightly): Dammit, I was just having sex with my wife!
TM: Oh, I'm sorry, sir. Is there a better time when I could call you back?
You: Well, you've already interrupted me. It's going to take a while to get worked up again.
TM (sounding uncomfortable): We'll call you back tomorrow; will you be home around this time?
You: I only answered because my great-uncle is in surgery right now; we're waiting to see if he survived the operation.
TM (running out of scripted responses): I'll call back another time.
You: No, I want to hear your entire sales pitch. (start panting heavily; in the background a woman starts moaning.)
TM: Uh...
etc.
Verizon offers call intercept for $5/month, which sounds like what you have. I wonder however if it's really worth $60/year.
I've had pretty good luck by politely requesting: "Add this number to your no-call list"; so far, every telemarketer has understood this request. Some of them have read me a warning that it will take X weeks to propagate.
My 2-3 telemarketing calls per day have decreased to perhaps one or two per month, mostly these recorded pitches for satellite dish sales and Disneyland vacations. I have taken to writing down the toll free numbers, calling them up and making the no-call request.
One problem I've heard mentioned about a national no-solicitation law is that non-profits will get lumped in. Also, during election season I got a million recorded and live calls; I don't like'em but I can understand why they do them. Perhaps there should be a check-box for what kind of organizations you want excluded.
Right. Some would also argue that manned missions to the Moon were a total boondoggle. After all, what did we get for it? A bunch of rocks. All that money should have been invested in the War on Poverty instead. Think what a nice society we'd have today. No microcomputers or internet, but at least there'd be a bunch of public housing projects and a whole lot of social workers to keep their inhabitants docile.
I think the U.S. has dropped the ball on space exploration. Without such a national mission, we are reduced to such worthwhile causes as "providing affordable housing", prescription drug insurance and other European style goals that do nothing but drain the treasury.
The U.S. will sink back into the '70s morass if it drops the space ball. It's primarily through great national projects that the great technological achievements occur. I say, pour money into the ISS and damn the naysayers. Send a manned mission to Mars within 10 years. Build a permanent station on the Moon. The tech exists; all it needs now is political will.
dare I ask, what's the name of the book?
You can also click "About G. Cooke" and learn that she is a professional reviewer who is a member of National Book Critics Circle and writes for various newspapers as well. It's not that surprising that she would publish a lot of reviews.
Correct; VSS is a legacy product, according to MS's own website. It's just in maintenance mode now. Comparing VSS to ClearCase is ridiculous. VSS is a toy. Occasionally you have to rebuild the database because it gets "corrupted". Very confidence inspiring!
I've heard that internally, MS uses Rational Rose for its CASE and source control systems; perhaps someone else can confirm this?
It also gives MS a chance to hurt Linux, which Borland has been supporting in recent years with JDeveloper and Kylix.
Microsoft is trying to replace Java with C#, its own, "improved" version. They are not going to buy Borland for several billion dollars just to prop up a "legacy" language like Java. If they wanted to do that, why not just release new versions of the old Visual J++? This would cost them a few millions and to hell with Borland.
No, Microsoft is doing this for one simple reason: to get rid of a Java powerhouse. Just as they did with Foxpro, which they bought and pretended to maintain for a few years while pushing their own products Access and Sql Server, they're going to shelve Borland and Togethersoft too. Why shouldn't they? They've got about $50 billion in cash, nothing to spend it on, and Java continues to annoy them. It's a logical move.
The space shuttle has boosted the ISS several times. e.g., http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/junk_iss_0201 07.html
Just adding a testimonial to the discussion:
I run Linux in my home office. I got a low end Compaq Presario in June for $1059; it's a good basic machine: floppy, DVD, 14" screen, 256M, 2 USB. (I am finding I miss having a serial port, unfortunately.) I partitioned the hard disk and installed RH 7.3. It works but there are still a few problems such as requiring a patch to the kernel to fix the audio, and it doesn't conserve batteries the way XP does.
I plan to repartition to give XP more room, maybe try RH 8 or SuSE and just use the machine as the token Windows machine, so I can run all my old windows s/w that crossover can't handle yet (Photoshop, Pagemaker, Finale) and accommodate certain hardware that's Windows-only (digital camera, USB card reader). The extra $79 for the OS is well worth it for this purpose. However it's not the most stable OS I've seen; out of the box, IE hangs sometimes, and hybernation messes things up.
Indeed, I really want to know why they did this - accidental or if not then why.
I want to know if they did this. It's really hard to take a class action lawyer's word for it. Is there a screen shot somewhere?
Palestinians are fighting for freedom. Immigrant Israelis are fighting for power.
To be specific, shouldn't you say "Palestinians are blowing up busloads of civilians for freedom"? What about the money? Don't forget to mention that.
>>>"We have become a totally amoral society."
Since when has business been a "moral" activity? That's for the society as a whole to undertake. If the society as a whole develops rules of behavior which are imparted to children in school and adults in houses of worship or other community meeting places, business will tend to be more moral simply because people will tend to have more morality. Unfortunately there will always be a few immoral people who take full advantage of the system (e.g. our friend the spam king), but that's the price of a free society. With a generally moral populace, the immoral minority would be more or less controlled. For example, the spam king outrages others' sense of justice and causes them to take various kinds of action against him.
The questions you should be asking is, how can we improve our school systems to impart moral education to our children?
How was the parent flamebait? unfair, unfair.
Exactly. The right thing is to have an open standard for communication. Wrenching control of the standard from one proprietary supplier will take tremendous effort but it will be worth it in the end.
What operating system will this thing use? The linked article didn't say, except for something about "autonomic" self-diagnosing and repair, which is intriguing as well.
Palm has had management problems; the visionary folks who founded the company split off to form Handspring, leaving Palm in the hands of bean counters. The bean counters have a cash cow, but they've been resting on their laurels a bit too long.
Meanwhile, MS poured money into research and development to come up with something much better. PPC2002 with accompanying hardware is pretty formidable now. MP3 playback, brilliant color screens, lots of business software.
I've tried to be loyal to Palm, moving from III to IIIxe to a PalmOS based Handera, but I've just about had it with Palm's lack of a clue. They kept changing the form factor, obsoleting useful and expensive accessories such as Kodak's PalmPix, modems, hip cases, etc. The Zire is a joke; no backlight, no expansion, missing two of the traditional four buttons, a weird rubber flap that won't stay flipped back. The Tungsten seems somewhat promising but it's mighty expensive and seems a little clunky compared to the slick PPC competition.
Handspring seemed to be going somewhere for a while but they've gotten sidetracked into the phone thing; they made their name on expandability, but their Treo product doesn't even have an expansion slot. Sony is stuck in their not invented here mentality with their stupid memory sticks. If the Clie had CF and/or MMC slots it would be just about ideal.
I think the field is wide open right now. MS obviously has the advantage; they can just keep pouring money into PPC and improving it year after year, and they can strike deals with vendors like Dell to saturate the market. There's nothing to stop MS from attacking Palm at the low end of the market; a Power PC Lite with a $150 platform is technically possible; if MS pushed this Palm would rapidly disapper, methinks.
Probably this is a waste of time. Did you even read the books? Harry's an orphan who was raised by mean, stupid people. Once he gets to Hogwarts, he's treated exactly like any other student, no better and no worse. It's true that some of the faculty and a lot of the students respect Harry for the role he played in Voldemort's defeat, but he doesn't get any special treatment.
He sure wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, except that his parents left him a lot of money (unusable in the non-magical world, however). As for what he deserves, Harry's got a strong sense of justice and keeps trying to help other people in various ways. He's a good kid, he picks good kids to be his friends, and accomplishes a lot sometimes against great odds. Pretty good role model, I'd say; I hope my kids will read these books someday.
I think you hit upon the key issue: cross-platform compatibility. Ant works pretty much the same across different operating systems, aside from exec'ing OS-specific commands (which should decrease in the future as mor e native ant tasks are added).
Make is super-powerful but infuriatingly incompatible even across different versions of the same product, such as GNU make.
Ant is easy to learn, after a brief period of warping your brain into their XML way of thinking, executes smoothly and quickly, and is infinitely extensible and very Java-friendly.
There's probably room for both tools in the universe but Ant is well worth learning and adding to one's bag of tricks.
From the FAQ:
.class files."
"In order to find out which files should be compiled, Ant compares the timestamps of the source files to those of the resulting
I'm pretty sure ant is smart enough to do "conditional compilation", or rather the compilation of only changed sources, since I think that's what the original poster meant.
Here's how my .procmailrc filters mail that contains Asian or other unreadable characters:
# look for 4 upper ascii [probably Asian] characters in body
# this searches for characters excluding space through tilde and tab)
:0 B:
* [^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ][^ -~ ]
${MAILDIR}/junk.mail
I found that this stopped all Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text mail. I guess folks who have to read such mail have to parse the content, which is more complicated.
I also block mail from countries that seem to originate lots of spam; my friends and colleagues are on a "white list" that gets checked first.
# discard mail from certain spam-happy countries (optional <>)
:0:
* ^From:.*cn[>]*$|\
^From:.*hk[>]*$|\
^From:.*kr[>]*$|\
^From:.*tw[>]*$
${MAILDIR}/junk.mail
I'm just a beginner with procmail but already it's made a huge difference. It doesn't "solve" the spam issue; actually spam will never go away until those 0.01% of recipients stop sending their money. Oh well; I hate government intervention, but I suspect that's the only way to truly solve this mess.
Huh? Not the versions of 98 and 2000 I have used, nor XP or any other Windows OS. If you switch off a Windows PC without "shutting down" you will see at next bootup a stern message that you failed to shut down cleanly, and it will run a disk check to clean up lost clusters or whatever.
From a usability perspective, a traditional notebook computer with a touch sensitive screen would be a big improvement, and I don't understand why more manufacturers don't make them.
I've observed completely new users in their first minutes with a computer, running the first time setup program or whatever. A dialog box pops up with an "OK" button. The user has no previous training or experience to understand that you have to drag this "mouse" around on the desk, causing this little arrow to move, and once it's over the button, you press one of the mouse buttons and it causes the dialog to go away. FOR CRIPE'S SAKE! Why not just let the poor user push the OK button with their finger? a la PalmOS, etc.
Furthermore, what's all this "log off" and "shut down" crap? Why not just let the user turn off the machine the way they turn off a television? After all these years, you would think someone would design an OS that simply stores its data and sleeps upon a signal from the system's off switch. Yeah yeah, you can go out and purchase a Windows program that does something like this, but would you trust it? Even Linux doesn't do this yet.
I think the innovations of Newton, Palm, Psion, etc. should eventually migrate their way up to the notebook computer world and we will have much more powerful and usable tools. This tablet PC is nothing but a lousy gimmick. Why should anyone pay for a notebook computer that's missing a keyboard? Why not just add the touch sensitivity and handwriting recog stuff in to the existing technology?
What you're saying makes sense, and yet objects are designed and every day that contain serious flaws. Take, as a random example, the Palm III series. The glass display is extremely fragile and cracks if you look at it wrong. I've had two break on me, one from a fall of about 12 inches from my shirt pocket to a carpet-on-concrete type of floor. I wonder if plastic or a slightly thicker and stronger glass would have solved this.
Needless to say, I have little faith in Palm's engineering when it comes to durability, though I admire the elegance of the product otherwise.
The slide-out keyboard makes sense if it means a larger display area, but I'm disappointed that there's (apparently) no graffiti-style data entry. I guess graffiti is destined to be a temporary kludge from the early years of PDAs, replaced eventually by tiny, unusable keyboards with illogical QWERTY layouts. I wonder if you can at least reprogram it to dvorak.