Before I had ever used any OS on the PC but MS-DOG, and all I used my XT for was dialing up Fidonet BBSes at 1200 baud with QModem and reading QWK mail with SLiMeR, I considered a system unusable if JPSoft's 4DOS wasn't installed to replace DOS 3.3's command.com. NDOS was also acceptable.
I vaguely remember a 4OS2 shell as well, and I know they've released 4NT.
There are also replacements for Windows Explorer, such as LiteStep. There were replacements (most of them sucked) for progman.exe.
Anyway, my point is that it may not be as popular as it is in the unix world, but you certainly do have the freedom to change the default shell under M$ OSes, and you always have.
An option nobody else has mentioned (which I'm probably going to be flamed for anyway:-) ) is to generate an XML document from your database (with Perl or PHP or whatever) and use Apache's XML tools (http://xml.apache.org) to generate a PDF from that. There's a lot to learn, especially if you've never used XML, but it's enormously flexible. It's certainly not as easy to use as Access reports, but it's much, much more reliable and flexible.
It's also slow as shit, but that's probably acceptable.
Re:"young Hoffman" is worried now...
on
Antitrust
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· Score: 1
Why wouldn't it? Rewriting an application based on prior experience with how it runs, usage patterns, etc., will improve the application inherently. Rewriting an application to take advantage of improved OS APIs will cause it to work better for the user. What's the problem?
I think merchandising offers a good way for artists to make quick money, but the problem then becomes that no one buys merchandise once the comic has an established base. What would I do with two Sluggy Freelance mugs, once I already have one? (See also; HDTV's failure to catch on. Everybody already has three TVs.)
Another problem is, as Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) likes to rant and rave about, is that merchandising tends to cheapen the intrinsic value of art. Obviously this is completely subjective. Scott Adams definitely has no problem with it.:-)
The irony involved in buying a Sony project because you want to avoid manufacturers who unfairly prevent interoperability for their own advantage is just sickening...
(See also: DVDs, Playstation emulators, Minidiscs... probably a dozen or so more, but those spring to mind.)
The only time I ever receive or send a fax is when someone misdials a number for a machinery shop three cities west of here... with email, why do we need fax machines again?:-)
Re:Actually, the new IE with Win2K requires http:/
on
W3 Releases Amaya 4.0
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· Score: 1
Yeah. You also need to add the http:// manually if you type in a page on a nonstandard port.
That was Ralph Bakshi's manglement of LotR... it's not spoken of in polite company.
I had a friend with a videodisk collection... you mean the analog vinyl ones, right, not laserdiscs? They were actually pretty good quality. Too bad they never took off.
Possibly not clued-in windows folks, but I find I have to show several people a week what the status bar does, what Alt-Tab does, and how (amazingly enough) it's possible to *copy* text from one program and *paste* it into another!
Seriously, most people treat 95/NT like it has the same functionality as System 6 on the Mac. Trust me, your average luser would *still* say "who needs to multitask?"
I had to maintain a web site with ODBC/Access cgi scripts written in C and they were a real bear. If nothing else, the connection times for Access tip the scales in favor of *any* database server, no matter how slow. I've since rewritten the site to use MySQL and the database connections load at perhaps 100 pages/sec instead of 5.
None of the queries are at all complex, however, so I can't say how well they compare in that regard.
Perhaps so, but it's about a thousand times faster than Access and, unlike a plain text file without large amounts of programming is able to handle multiple people writing to it at once. Access has its advantages, so do plain text files, and so does MySQL. Oracle it ain't, but it's pretty good at what it does. Why do people have this need to criticize it?
Re:Novell ain't dead, but on the back burner
on
Is Novell Doomed?
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· Score: 1
If Netware 3.11 was perfect software, then everybody would be installing it. When was the last time you heard of Netware servers being added instead of merely maintained? I suppose it must happen, but not often.
2) This would be an INTERNATIONAL treaty, with part of the intent being that it be ratified here.
where do you get that idea? I haven't seen that anywhere except that poorly written, misleading article. Certainly the U.S. is interested in such issues and will probably pass similar laws in the future, possibly including similar treaties, but
this is not that. I mean, a treaty between Mozambique and Brazil is international but that doesn't mean the U.S. is involved.
...include in the wording of article 6 that intent to commit offense must be proved.
That footnote *does* say that the burden of proof would remain with the prosecution. The implementation is left to the individual countries... I think this could go either way.
article 11...as written makes it illegal to submit patches to security software, if you did not realise that the intent of the author was black hat
Can you be aiding and abetting if you have nothing to do with a crime and are not even aware a specific crime took place? I really don't know on this one, but I don't think you can be prosecuted for aiding and abetting criminals if you sold them tools and were unaware they were going to use them to rob a bank.
...the provisions of article 9 make it illegal to *cache* transmissions including kiddie porn.
You may have a point here, but I think "intentionally" in Article 9, pp 1 would preclude caching since that's certainly not intentional. (And IMO, that's not "offering" or "distributing" either, but it would be interesting to see what the courts say about that. Have there been any rulings on whether caching counts as distribution either in the States or in Europe?)
2) You don't live in a country that this *treaty* covers. (At least, not if your email address is accurate, and Virginia Tech is still outside the E.U.)
3) The article this story links to is nothing more than a very successful troll. The draft treaty has problems, sure, but it won't do anything like outlawing bugtraq.
No, it wouldn't. Just because it says "possibly even the U.S." in the title of the article, doesn't mean that possibility is more than a figment of the author's apparently active imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Before I had ever used any OS on the PC but MS-DOG, and all I used my XT for was dialing up Fidonet BBSes at 1200 baud with QModem and reading QWK mail with SLiMeR, I considered a system unusable if JPSoft's 4DOS wasn't installed to replace DOS 3.3's command.com. NDOS was also acceptable.
I vaguely remember a 4OS2 shell as well, and I know they've released 4NT.
There are also replacements for Windows Explorer, such as LiteStep. There were replacements (most of them sucked) for progman.exe.
Anyway, my point is that it may not be as popular as it is in the unix world, but you certainly do have the freedom to change the default shell under M$ OSes, and you always have.
An option nobody else has mentioned (which I'm probably going to be flamed for anyway :-) ) is to generate an XML document from your database (with Perl or PHP or whatever) and use Apache's XML tools (http://xml.apache.org) to generate a PDF from that. There's a lot to learn, especially if you've never used XML, but it's enormously flexible. It's certainly not as easy to use as Access reports, but it's much, much more reliable and flexible.
It's also slow as shit, but that's probably acceptable.
Yeesh... movies and random people on Slashdot.
:-)
-Joel Hoffman
That's doubtful, as it would be based on the Cocoa and Aqua APIs. Unless those are ported to Linux, which is even more doubtful :-)
Why wouldn't it? Rewriting an application based on prior experience with how it runs, usage patterns, etc., will improve the application inherently. Rewriting an application to take advantage of improved OS APIs will cause it to work better for the user. What's the problem?
I'm speaking purely from my ass here :-)
:-)
I think merchandising offers a good way for artists to make quick money, but the problem then becomes that no one buys merchandise once the comic has an established base. What would I do with two Sluggy Freelance mugs, once I already have one? (See also; HDTV's failure to catch on. Everybody already has three TVs.)
Another problem is, as Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes) likes to rant and rave about, is that merchandising tends to cheapen the intrinsic value of art. Obviously this is completely subjective. Scott Adams definitely has no problem with it.
s/project/product/ :-)
The irony involved in buying a Sony project because you want to avoid manufacturers who unfairly prevent interoperability for their own advantage is just sickening...
(See also: DVDs, Playstation emulators, Minidiscs... probably a dozen or so more, but those spring to mind.)
The only time I ever receive or send a fax is when someone misdials a number for a machinery shop three cities west of here... with email, why do we need fax machines again? :-)
Yeah. You also need to add the http:// manually if you type in a page on a nonstandard port.
They are, in fact, supposed to be shaped more like the Logitech Trackman Marble (when viewed from the appropriate angle :-)
That was Ralph Bakshi's manglement of LotR... it's not spoken of in polite company.
I had a friend with a videodisk collection... you mean the analog vinyl ones, right, not laserdiscs? They were actually pretty good quality. Too bad they never took off.
Possibly not clued-in windows folks, but I find I have to show several people a week what the status bar does, what Alt-Tab does, and how (amazingly enough) it's possible to *copy* text from one program and *paste* it into another!
Seriously, most people treat 95/NT like it has the same functionality as System 6 on the Mac. Trust me, your average luser would *still* say "who needs to multitask?"
Well, there's pandering, and then there's telling Slashdot that we don't enforce software copyright laws heavily enough. :-)
er, I should say "*the pages with* database connections :-)"
I had to maintain a web site with ODBC/Access cgi scripts written in C and they were a real bear. If nothing else, the connection times for Access tip the scales in favor of *any* database server, no matter how slow. I've since rewritten the site to use MySQL and the database connections load at perhaps 100 pages/sec instead of 5.
None of the queries are at all complex, however, so I can't say how well they compare in that regard.
Well, the christian scientists aren't *quite* as fundamentalist as some other denominations :-)
Perhaps so, but it's about a thousand times faster than Access and, unlike a plain text file without large amounts of programming is able to handle multiple people writing to it at once. Access has its advantages, so do plain text files, and so does MySQL. Oracle it ain't, but it's pretty good at what it does. Why do people have this need to criticize it?
If Netware 3.11 was perfect software, then everybody would be installing it. When was the last time you heard of Netware servers being added instead of merely maintained? I suppose it must happen, but not often.
This will be nice when their FTP server comes back up... I've got 50 ms ping times to UO :-)
I wasn't going to see this movie, but you just changed my mind real quick. Thanks for pointing that out :-)
2) This would be an INTERNATIONAL treaty, with part of the intent being that it be ratified here.
where do you get that idea? I haven't seen that anywhere except that poorly written, misleading article. Certainly the U.S. is interested in such issues and will probably pass similar laws in the future, possibly including similar treaties, but
this is not that. I mean, a treaty between Mozambique and Brazil is international but that doesn't mean the U.S. is involved.
...include in the wording of article 6 that intent to commit offense must be proved.
...the provisions of article 9 make it illegal to *cache* transmissions including kiddie porn.
That footnote *does* say that the burden of proof would remain with the prosecution. The implementation is left to the individual countries... I think this could go either way.
article 11...as written makes it illegal to submit patches to security software, if you did not realise that the intent of the author was black hat
Can you be aiding and abetting if you have nothing to do with a crime and are not even aware a specific crime took place? I really don't know on this one, but I don't think you can be prosecuted for aiding and abetting criminals if you sold them tools and were unaware they were going to use them to rob a bank.
You may have a point here, but I think "intentionally" in Article 9, pp 1 would preclude caching since that's certainly not intentional. (And IMO, that's not "offering" or "distributing" either, but it would be interesting to see what the courts say about that. Have there been any rulings on whether caching counts as distribution either in the States or in Europe?)
1) It's not a law.
2) You don't live in a country that this *treaty* covers. (At least, not if your email address is accurate, and Virginia Tech is still outside the E.U.)
3) The article this story links to is nothing more than a very successful troll. The draft treaty has problems, sure, but it won't do anything like outlawing bugtraq.
No, it wouldn't. Just because it says "possibly even the U.S." in the title of the article, doesn't mean that possibility is more than a figment of the author's apparently active imagination.