I have SpeakEasy as well, and they are spectacular. You pay for the bandwidth, that's it. No port blocking, great tech support whenever you call.... I just wish they offered local phone service, so I could give them my $$$ instead of the decrepit Baby Bells.
"No one in this world... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
- H.L. Mencken
Remember, this is the general public that doesn't understand why a monopoly in general-use operating systems is a Bad Thing (tm). Yeah, that's right... I had to throw some anti-Microsoft sentiment into this, so sue me.
Well, because that wouldn't stop the suit. SCO's motivation for doing all this is something we can all speculate on (attempt to get someone else to buy them? realization that their UNIX copyright is the only valuable thing they have? etc etc). But the fact is that if IBM did copy-and-paste code into Linux, the proverbial penguin shit is going to hit Big Blue in the face.
Removing the code now wouldn't solve this problem. To view the issue from SCO's perspective, for several years IBM (and others) have been using their intellectual property to make billions of dollars, and they're not getting one red cent. This suit is to recover those lost profits, and make sure they get a chunk of the pie in the future as well.
Like most people, I sincerely doubt this ploy will work. IBM just has too much clout -- they'll fight it as long as possible & put tons of political pressure on SCO. But it is interesting to look at the issue from SCO's side instead of falling into the knee-jerk "oh bullshit" mindset.
Whatever you're smoking, can you share it with the rest of us?
First off, in essence, Java is a specification. Sun's implementation of the Java spec is the reference implementation, not the only one. And at this point it's a reasonably open specification at that. The JCP is a farce, you say? Then how do you explain the fact that the all of the new features coming out in Java 1.5 went through that process? Or that the majority of optional class libraries, such as Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE) and Java Advance Imaging (JAI), also went through that process? Have you tried participating in the process, or is bitching about it enough to satisfy you?
Other folks (most recently Redhat, as discussed in this Slashdot story) have been considering doing a completely open-source implementation for some time. I'm guessing we'll see one at some point, although realistically I don't see the need for it.
Secondly (and this provided me with my biggest laugh of the day by the way), do you actually believe that Microsoft was trying to fix the problems with Java?? In that case, I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge if you want it.... But getting back to the point here, from scores & scores of court documents it's obvious that Microsoft's purpose for "extending" Java was to fragment it & keep their desktop monopoly intact.
Believe it or not, even on Slashdot the "Just open-source it & all the problems will go away!" response is not always relevant. Sorry to rant, but stupid posts sometimes get me going.... I need a beer.
Most folks here, thus far, are reading the incredibly thin article and thinking "Sounds right -- Microsoft shouldn't be forced to carry a competitor's product. Yea for the court system." The point that they're missing is that the lower court ordered Microsoft to carry Java as a temporary measure until the Sun -vs- Microsoft case was settled. To quote from Motz's original ruling:
"Unless Sun is given a fair opportunity to compete in a market untainted by the effects of Microsoft's past antitrust violations, there is a serious risk that in the near future the market will tip in favor of [Microsoft]"
Motz reasoned that Microsoft had illegally used its monopoly position to do irreparable harm a competitor's product, and that Sun was exceedingly likely to win their suit. This temporary order was necessary to level the playing ground until that suit was carried out.
Basically, as in all Microsoft's legal troubles, their strategy is to draw out the cases indefinitely until they can leverage their desktop monopoly to the point of making the suit a moot point. Then, they can just settle out of court for chump change. Anyone heard of Netscape?
Like it or not, duplicating copyrighted information for people you will never meet, and that they will never return to you, is not fair use. IANAL, but even I know that "sharing" music like this (actually, giving copies of it away) is illegal.
Just because it's exceedingly easy to do doesn't make it any more lawful. The RIAA is just protecting their copyrighted works, in the only way that they currently can. Will it have that much of an effect? I doubt it. But, the way the laws currently work, they should do this to protect themselves.
This certainly does look interesting, and I do like the concept of "chords" replacing modifier keys. But I have to admit that, like everyone, I'm resistant to change.
How long would it take me to change over to not having the click-y feeling of mechanical keys? It's a fact that my fingers have had that feedback system beat into them for over 20 years now, and I'm not sure I'd be able to change (even if it is better for me in the long run).
It sounds like some folks here are happy users of these keyboards though -- how long did it take you to convert over? Are you a developer? Is there any place where we could test drive these suckers?
Woah... get a grip there, Mr. AC. My post was in a humorous vein... we call it mimicry:
mimicry \Mim"ic*ry\, n. 1. The act or practice of one who mimics; ludicrous imitation for sport or ridicule.
You see, by mimicing the government's logic with respect to a separate issue, I was able to show how foolish it was. Go back to the kiddie table if you don't get the joke.
Here's the way it works: anything that the terrorists can use to aid in their attack is hereby no longer supported by the US Government. Take plants, for example.
You see, plants possess the ability to produce oxygen, which terrorists use to breathe. As they are breathing, they have a tendency to attack the United States. Therefore, plants are obviously a threat to national security. This explains why the US refuses to sign the Kyoto treaty. They've also begun to burn every national forest, and are paying lesser nations (through devious trade agreements) to destroy all the rain forests in the world.
Down with plants! They are the tools of the enemy!!
--Mid
Re:New: "Open in Tabs" item in Bookmarks Bar menus
on
Safari Beta 2 Available
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The "open in tabs" feature is somewhat buggy. Any existing tabs disappear; and the "back" button after all of the new tabs show up takes the browser back to the previous tabs.
I think this is actually the desired behavior. It allows you to treat a collection of links as a single "location" you can go to, instead of treating each separate tab as a wholly separate instance. While it might take some getting used to, I kinda like it. I can open up my 'News' pages in a single click and, after browsing all the tabs, return back to whatever I was doing beforehand with another single click.
That's something I always appreciate about Apple -- their willingness to push a UI feature to its limits....
Oh my good dear lord -- I can't believe people still bring this up. Have you ever used a Mac? The fact that the UI is designed so that you don't *need* a two-button mouse does not limit you to not *using* a two-button mouse. It works, it just isn't necessary for the normal Apple customer.
why does Apple not even recognize this issue?
Well, because it isn't an issue. Believe it or not, Apple doesn't target the geek community as their core customer demographic. However, if a geek does happen to pick up a Mac (as many are doing these days), and decides that they can't live without a more complex mouse, they can go buy one of the Kensington Mice available from the Apple store, or go pick up your favorite Logitech variety at Best Buy. But please, please don't bring up the "Apples suck because they only have one mouse button" again.
From what I know, most *NIX-based systems (at least, I've seen this on various flavors of Linux & Solaris) don't report Java memory usage statistics correctly, which typically causes uninformed people to believe that "All Java Apps are RAM hogs". This really isn't the case.
The problem is that most *NIX process tables don't expect separate threads to be sharing the same memory space, as is the case in different Java threads running under a single Java VM process. So, if you have a VM that is using 20 MB of memory, but it has 10 threads, then any process table-based tools (ps, top, pmap, etc) will report that Java process is using 200 MB of memory. At least, this was the case in JRE 1.3....
Anyone else know the details of this better than me?
About the dumbest thing NASA (or the US) could do... [is] give the critical parts to the nation than can least afford to do it.
You think the ISS would be flying right now without Russian involvement? Oh yeah, I forgot, it's all about money.
For instance, it was all that money that allowed the USSR/Russian space agency to keep Mir flying for 15 years. Meanwhile, since the US had so little money during the same period, they were limited to struggling with space shuttle consistency problems, and their space research could only limp along by collaborating with the Europeans on SpaceLab missions. Yes, you might detect a little bit of sarcasm there....
Simply put, Mir is one of the most ambitious and successful off-this-world projects to date. It was continually inhabited for 10 years straight at one point, for crissake. Needless to say, the Russians know a thing or two about living in space, finances aside.
Maybe you should limit your knee-jerk reactions to Gnome vs. KDE discussions....
I think that's selling OS X a little short. It *is* a Unix OS. My history might be a little off, but Darwin is essentially the Mach micro-kernel with a FreeBSD compatibility layer on top of it. I've re-compiled all sorts of Unix apps on my 'lil laptop without any trouble. The Korn shell on my laptop works the exact same way as it does on my Solaris box.
Dual boot OS X with Gentoo PPC GNU/Linux, and you have the best of all possible worlds.
I thought I was going to do this too, but once I started using it I didn't see the reason. There are several good Linux distros for the PPC, but why would you really want to use them?
I'm sure some people out there realize this, but I wanted to point it out: having a journaling file system isn't meant for the typical user who has their laptop to check email & surf the web. Duh! No one using a graphical interface would want to sacrifice 15% of eye-candy processing power just to have a more reliable file system.
This change is meant for people who are using OS X on *servers*... possibly even (gasp!) headless servers! I'm currently running a webserver & IMAP mail server off of an OS X box, and I never actually pull up the GUI on it (why would I need to?). But I'd love to have the added assurance of JFS on it. This is the market that Elvis is meant for.
Apple is trying to edge their way into the low-end server market, which is already over-crowded. Putting this feature into their OS, even though it's turned off by default, is a big feature difference for the XServe-purchasing crowd.
So, unless you're really nervous about losing your porn, your desktop machine doesn't need this.
Hindsight being 20-20 and all, but I don't think this should surprise anyone. During the late 90's lots of techies were excited about Linux because of the freedom it gave them in twiddling the bits of modern operating system themselves. Meanwhile, lots of venture capitalists & MBA's were excited because they saw in Linux an opportunity to start up their own personal Microsoft with virtually zero resources allocated to creating a product. So, throw some marketing $$$ at it, ride the wave, and soon they'd have their own fiefdom of clients running their operating system. They could leverage that installed base to make related deals and rake in the cash.
So, between the techies & the MBA's, who do you think is still excited? (Rhetorical question)
Now, enter popular Linux-related business plan #2: selling a "solution" instead of a software product. Great plan, right? IBM Global Services does that to the tune of $35 billion in revenue! Yeah, but IBM uses their huge hardware profit margins to seed their services plans. Plus they already had Fortune 100 clients as part of their previously installed base to draw from. Oh yeah, and they also have freaking enormous economies of scale to use as well.
My point to this little ramble is that most Linux distros suffer from overly optimistic business plans that, especially in today economy, just don't work. If a Linux distribution is the shining center of your business plan, then in the end you'll be forced to sit at the children's table when it comes to dividing up the revenue pie. So, stories like TurboLinux are pretty common these days, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future.
Yes, it's expensive. No there isn't Linux support. But if you've got the cash, you won't find a better player out there. The interface is seamless, the battery life is good, and if you have 20GB of music, it'll accommodate that just fine. Oh yeah, you can also store your contacts & calendar on it just for kicks.
I've had the 5GB version for about 6 months, and am constantly impressed with just how usable it is. I just wish Apple would hurry up & put out a PDA in the same vein....
OK, this isn't necessarily a bug, but it's one of my most memorable "stupid previous programmer" rants. The code was a mess, but the variable names we horrific. Consider:
List l1 = new List();
Note the left side is "ell one", as in the first List object, not the second one. Of course, font differences could make it look exactly like eleven....
So, everyone say it with me: "Stupid previous programmer..."
Ooh! Look at the pretty Intel Marketing fluff piece! All those projected performance numbers that are "Under Embargo Until 12:01 AM EDT, May 29th, 2002". Give me a friggin break. Call me once they actually ship the processor, there's a proven MB/Backplane at a reasonable cost, and there's someone who will support me if/when it breaks.
On second thought, don't even bother to call me then either. I can currently buy a Sun Enterprise 420R right now. What was the point of the story again?
Yep -- you're pretty much on the money there that Lucas has a tendency to modify history when talking about his movie-making skills. For an excellent discussion of Lucas' "Myth-Making" adventure, have a look at The Galactic Gasbag article on Salon.
Slashdot Mirror
I have SpeakEasy as well, and they are spectacular. You pay for the bandwidth, that's it. No port blocking, great tech support whenever you call.... I just wish they offered local phone service, so I could give them my $$$ instead of the decrepit Baby Bells.
--Mid
-
"No one in this world
... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
- H.L. MenckenRemember, this is the general public that doesn't understand why a monopoly in general-use operating systems is a Bad Thing (tm). Yeah, that's right... I had to throw some anti-Microsoft sentiment into this, so sue me.
--Mid
why don't they find out the offending chunks...
Well, because that wouldn't stop the suit. SCO's motivation for doing all this is something we can all speculate on (attempt to get someone else to buy them? realization that their UNIX copyright is the only valuable thing they have? etc etc). But the fact is that if IBM did copy-and-paste code into Linux, the proverbial penguin shit is going to hit Big Blue in the face.
Removing the code now wouldn't solve this problem. To view the issue from SCO's perspective, for several years IBM (and others) have been using their intellectual property to make billions of dollars, and they're not getting one red cent. This suit is to recover those lost profits, and make sure they get a chunk of the pie in the future as well.
Like most people, I sincerely doubt this ploy will work. IBM just has too much clout -- they'll fight it as long as possible & put tons of political pressure on SCO. But it is interesting to look at the issue from SCO's side instead of falling into the knee-jerk "oh bullshit" mindset.
--Mid
Whatever you're smoking, can you share it with the rest of us?
First off, in essence, Java is a specification. Sun's implementation of the Java spec is the reference implementation, not the only one. And at this point it's a reasonably open specification at that. The JCP is a farce, you say? Then how do you explain the fact that the all of the new features coming out in Java 1.5 went through that process? Or that the majority of optional class libraries, such as Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE) and Java Advance Imaging (JAI), also went through that process? Have you tried participating in the process, or is bitching about it enough to satisfy you?
Other folks (most recently Redhat, as discussed in this Slashdot story) have been considering doing a completely open-source implementation for some time. I'm guessing we'll see one at some point, although realistically I don't see the need for it.
Secondly (and this provided me with my biggest laugh of the day by the way), do you actually believe that Microsoft was trying to fix the problems with Java?? In that case, I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge if you want it.... But getting back to the point here, from scores & scores of court documents it's obvious that Microsoft's purpose for "extending" Java was to fragment it & keep their desktop monopoly intact.
Believe it or not, even on Slashdot the "Just open-source it & all the problems will go away!" response is not always relevant. Sorry to rant, but stupid posts sometimes get me going.... I need a beer.
--Mid
"Unless Sun is given a fair opportunity to compete in a market untainted by the effects of Microsoft's past antitrust violations, there is a serious risk that in the near future the market will tip in favor of [Microsoft]"
Motz reasoned that Microsoft had illegally used its monopoly position to do irreparable harm a competitor's product, and that Sun was exceedingly likely to win their suit. This temporary order was necessary to level the playing ground until that suit was carried out.
Basically, as in all Microsoft's legal troubles, their strategy is to draw out the cases indefinitely until they can leverage their desktop monopoly to the point of making the suit a moot point. Then, they can just settle out of court for chump change. Anyone heard of Netscape?
--Mid
Like it or not, duplicating copyrighted information for people you will never meet, and that they will never return to you, is not fair use. IANAL, but even I know that "sharing" music like this (actually, giving copies of it away) is illegal.
Just because it's exceedingly easy to do doesn't make it any more lawful. The RIAA is just protecting their copyrighted works, in the only way that they currently can. Will it have that much of an effect? I doubt it. But, the way the laws currently work, they should do this to protect themselves.
Yeah, I still hate 'em too.
--Mid
However, if you believe the Sun PR newswire, they don't own Solaris.
--Mid
This certainly does look interesting, and I do like the concept of "chords" replacing modifier keys. But I have to admit that, like everyone, I'm resistant to change.
How long would it take me to change over to not having the click-y feeling of mechanical keys? It's a fact that my fingers have had that feedback system beat into them for over 20 years now, and I'm not sure I'd be able to change (even if it is better for me in the long run).
It sounds like some folks here are happy users of these keyboards though -- how long did it take you to convert over? Are you a developer? Is there any place where we could test drive these suckers?
--Mid
Woah... get a grip there, Mr. AC. My post was in a humorous vein... we call it mimicry:
mimicry \Mim"ic*ry\, n. 1. The act or practice of one who mimics; ludicrous imitation for sport or ridicule.
You see, by mimicing the government's logic with respect to a separate issue, I was able to show how foolish it was. Go back to the kiddie table if you don't get the joke.
--Mid
Here's the way it works: anything that the terrorists can use to aid in their attack is hereby no longer supported by the US Government. Take plants, for example.
You see, plants possess the ability to produce oxygen, which terrorists use to breathe. As they are breathing, they have a tendency to attack the United States. Therefore, plants are obviously a threat to national security. This explains why the US refuses to sign the Kyoto treaty. They've also begun to burn every national forest, and are paying lesser nations (through devious trade agreements) to destroy all the rain forests in the world.
Down with plants! They are the tools of the enemy!!
--Mid
The "open in tabs" feature is somewhat buggy. Any existing tabs disappear; and the "back" button after all of the new tabs show up takes the browser back to the previous tabs.
I think this is actually the desired behavior. It allows you to treat a collection of links as a single "location" you can go to, instead of treating each separate tab as a wholly separate instance. While it might take some getting used to, I kinda like it. I can open up my 'News' pages in a single click and, after browsing all the tabs, return back to whatever I was doing beforehand with another single click.
That's something I always appreciate about Apple -- their willingness to push a UI feature to its limits....
If successful, perhaps one day you could give your love a diamond engagement CPU instead of a ring!
Wow; the geek factor of that quote is off the charts!
"Professor Frink, Professor Frink, He makes you laugh, he makes you think...."
Oh my good dear lord -- I can't believe people still bring this up. Have you ever used a Mac? The fact that the UI is designed so that you don't *need* a two-button mouse does not limit you to not *using* a two-button mouse. It works, it just isn't necessary for the normal Apple customer.
why does Apple not even recognize this issue?
Well, because it isn't an issue. Believe it or not, Apple doesn't target the geek community as their core customer demographic. However, if a geek does happen to pick up a Mac (as many are doing these days), and decides that they can't live without a more complex mouse, they can go buy one of the Kensington Mice available from the Apple store, or go pick up your favorite Logitech variety at Best Buy. But please, please don't bring up the "Apples suck because they only have one mouse button" again.
--MId
From what I know, most *NIX-based systems (at least, I've seen this on various flavors of Linux & Solaris) don't report Java memory usage statistics correctly, which typically causes uninformed people to believe that "All Java Apps are RAM hogs". This really isn't the case.
The problem is that most *NIX process tables don't expect separate threads to be sharing the same memory space, as is the case in different Java threads running under a single Java VM process. So, if you have a VM that is using 20 MB of memory, but it has 10 threads, then any process table-based tools (ps, top, pmap, etc) will report that Java process is using 200 MB of memory. At least, this was the case in JRE 1.3....
Anyone else know the details of this better than me?
... some developer got so excited about what they can do, they forgot to think about if they should.
:)
Just imaging Jeff Goldblum doing his bug-eyed, the-sky-is-falling scientist bit
--Mid
About the dumbest thing NASA (or the US) could do... [is] give the critical parts to the nation than can least afford to do it.
You think the ISS would be flying right now without Russian involvement? Oh yeah, I forgot, it's all about money.
For instance, it was all that money that allowed the USSR/Russian space agency to keep Mir flying for 15 years. Meanwhile, since the US had so little money during the same period, they were limited to struggling with space shuttle consistency problems, and their space research could only limp along by collaborating with the Europeans on SpaceLab missions. Yes, you might detect a little bit of sarcasm there....
Simply put, Mir is one of the most ambitious and successful off-this-world projects to date. It was continually inhabited for 10 years straight at one point, for crissake. Needless to say, the Russians know a thing or two about living in space, finances aside.
Maybe you should limit your knee-jerk reactions to Gnome vs. KDE discussions....
--Mid
5) The OS is Unix-like
I think that's selling OS X a little short. It *is* a Unix OS. My history might be a little off, but Darwin is essentially the Mach micro-kernel with a FreeBSD compatibility layer on top of it. I've re-compiled all sorts of Unix apps on my 'lil laptop without any trouble. The Korn shell on my laptop works the exact same way as it does on my Solaris box.
Dual boot OS X with Gentoo PPC GNU/Linux, and you have the best of all possible worlds.
I thought I was going to do this too, but once I started using it I didn't see the reason. There are several good Linux distros for the PPC, but why would you really want to use them?
--Mid
Damn -- This response made my whole friggin' morning! Now, it's time for me to go get laid off....
--Mid.
I'm sure some people out there realize this, but I wanted to point it out: having a journaling file system isn't meant for the typical user who has their laptop to check email & surf the web. Duh! No one using a graphical interface would want to sacrifice 15% of eye-candy processing power just to have a more reliable file system.
This change is meant for people who are using OS X on *servers*... possibly even (gasp!) headless servers! I'm currently running a webserver & IMAP mail server off of an OS X box, and I never actually pull up the GUI on it (why would I need to?). But I'd love to have the added assurance of JFS on it. This is the market that Elvis is meant for.
Apple is trying to edge their way into the low-end server market, which is already over-crowded. Putting this feature into their OS, even though it's turned off by default, is a big feature difference for the XServe-purchasing crowd.
So, unless you're really nervous about losing your porn, your desktop machine doesn't need this.
--Mid
"Dum dum dum ... another one bites the dust."
Hindsight being 20-20 and all, but I don't think this should surprise anyone. During the late 90's lots of techies were excited about Linux because of the freedom it gave them in twiddling the bits of modern operating system themselves. Meanwhile, lots of venture capitalists & MBA's were excited because they saw in Linux an opportunity to start up their own personal Microsoft with virtually zero resources allocated to creating a product. So, throw some marketing $$$ at it, ride the wave, and soon they'd have their own fiefdom of clients running their operating system. They could leverage that installed base to make related deals and rake in the cash.
So, between the techies & the MBA's, who do you think is still excited? (Rhetorical question)
Now, enter popular Linux-related business plan #2: selling a "solution" instead of a software product. Great plan, right? IBM Global Services does that to the tune of $35 billion in revenue! Yeah, but IBM uses their huge hardware profit margins to seed their services plans. Plus they already had Fortune 100 clients as part of their previously installed base to draw from. Oh yeah, and they also have freaking enormous economies of scale to use as well.
My point to this little ramble is that most Linux distros suffer from overly optimistic business plans that, especially in today economy, just don't work. If a Linux distribution is the shining center of your business plan, then in the end you'll be forced to sit at the children's table when it comes to dividing up the revenue pie. So, stories like TurboLinux are pretty common these days, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future.
Now where'd I put that Queen CD....
--Mid
Yes, it's expensive. No there isn't Linux support. But if you've got the cash, you won't find a better player out there. The interface is seamless, the battery life is good, and if you have 20GB of music, it'll accommodate that just fine. Oh yeah, you can also store your contacts & calendar on it just for kicks.
I've had the 5GB version for about 6 months, and am constantly impressed with just how usable it is. I just wish Apple would hurry up & put out a PDA in the same vein....
--Mid
OK, this isn't necessarily a bug, but it's one of my most memorable "stupid previous programmer" rants. The code was a mess, but the variable names we horrific. Consider:
List l1 = new List();
Note the left side is "ell one", as in the first List object, not the second one. Of course, font differences could make it look exactly like eleven....
So, everyone say it with me: "Stupid previous programmer..."
--Mid
On second thought, don't even bother to call me then either. I can currently buy a Sun Enterprise 420R right now. What was the point of the story again?
--Mid
--Mid
Ah, the Slashdot police have struck, removing the post I responded to....
For those of you who didn't see it, my original post here was a response to someone who had copied & pasted the article verbatim here.
--Mid