no doubt it was submitted numerous times before it was posted on slashdot. I think slashdot should either rephrase the slogan "news for nerds, stuff that matters" to "news for nerds, stuff that mattered last week".
This is a bit harsh perhaps but it captures my general impression that it takes longer and longer before things get posted on slashdot. This doesn't mean the discussions are less interestng (moderation brought back the fun for me), but it does mean that I no longer use slashdot as a prime source of news.
I occasionally submit news to slashdot, often on days with very little postings (e.g. sunday). Invariably those submissions are rejected after 15 minutes or so. Only to be posted days later by someone else. I understand, slashdot people have to read through a lot of submissions but perhaps they could monitor some sites for new articles. E.g zdnet is a frequently referenced site on slashdot, yet it sometimes takes days before a post is made on a zdnet article.
BTW, I have a slashbox for mozillazine, so I learned about the new tool within hours after it was posted.
well, with ascii I suppose yes. But with anything else you are on your own.
Re:Desktop Religion [spelling corrected]
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2
I have one pc running windows and one running linux. I use the linux machine as a router and fileserver. Also I like to fool around with it a bit. I installed helix gnome, to check it out. It installs easy, but somewhere it fucked up because the gnome setup lists settings for both sawmill and sawfish. Both report that sawmill/sawfish is not running when I try to change anything. This became true when I finally decided to install enlightenment. I also have Icewm but I didn't like it very much. Enlightenment looks very cool and sort of gets the job done. The only thing is that it fucked up my menu structure (never asked for that) and duplicates a lot of functionality (didn't ask for that either).
I tried KDE as well (hell it comes installed with mandrake). However upgrading seems to painfull to me (you have to download 20 or so packages) so I won't give 2.0 a try.
I'm dutch but live in Sweden. I have a fast network connection in my room and I can watch some local channels on the tv. Since I don't speak swedish very well I use the tv exclusively to watch english spoken movies & david letterman (cheesy talk show but great before sleeping).
All the rest I do through internet. I get tech news, local news and international news through internet. I've become a news junky and I doubt TV could ever satisfy my craving for news. When I'm in the Netherlands I find the news shows boring, long and dumbed down. The same news is repeated over and over. If a plane crashes, you'll hear about it for weeks (which is why I hate plane crashes, hurricanes and other disasters). I like the diversity and speed of news on the internet. I like extracting the important news from a few headlines and then quickly getting to the in depth stuff that matters quickly. I like being able to skip the less interesting stuff.
A window manager is a curiosity that you need to use X. In the case of KDE it is part of the whole environment (though a replaceable part), and in Gnome you can choose from a few (though I haven't found the right one yet, you know the one that just does its thing without fucking up or being annoying).
Other operating systems come with an integrated window manager. That works fine for me. So it's not surprising that few people know the difference between a windowmanager and a desktop environment. It's because they should be integrated.
You might argue that being able to swap windowmanagers adds choice. However, it also makes testing more difficult (which is why it is so hard to get Gnome and windowmanagers to work properly, i.e. not just stable). Now we get to choose between Gnome and KDE, yay. 40% of the apps will run optimally under gnome, 40% will run optimally under KDE and the remaining 20% will run lousy on both. Great choice.
These religious battles seem to be very american. Americans like two sided conflicts and arguments. You have two presidential candidates (al & george), the other two or three can't be taken very serious. Two desktops, in a war there's the good & the bad (and serious confusion if the two change position during the war). Two browsers (yes I know there are a few others but their marketshares are very small). Open source vs closed source.
And now we are faced with two linux desktops. How boring. On one hand we have Gnome: inconsistent hacked together mess of programs (really, gnome office does not exist yet although gnumeric apparently looks nice). Integration is a dirty word in the dictionary of a Gnome developer. It offers a paper thin cover over the decades old UNIX interface.
KDE on the other hand is very promising, and has been so for years. Always nearly done but not quite so. Promises to reinvent everything including office apps, browser and filemanager.
I don't want either. I want mozilla + framemaker + a desktop that lets me use both comfortably. Gnome is too bloated for that, and KDE tries to replace both excellent tools. Perhaps the replacements are good but I don't care. I want a decent filemanager that lets me rename files for instance (bumped my head trying to do that using the latest gmc on a fat drive, doh!). I want copy paste to work with any application, not just Kedit or Kword.
And guess what, I already know that neither KDE nor Gnome will deliver on any of the above any time soon. Gnome will still be a mess in two years and KDE will still be promising but not yet finished in two years. And I'll still be running windows in two years. Not because it is so great but because it fullfills all my needs. It's bloated, it's ugly, sometimes unstable but the apps I need are available for it and work together nicely in a consistent way. I'd buy a mac if they were priced reasonably. But I wouldn't install linux for desktop usage, even though it's free (as in beer, I don't care about the speech). For me linux is a server OS (and a good one too). Did you notice that the companies backing Gnome are in the server business as well? One of them once tried to deliver a desktop and failed miserably.
What's the point of putting harddisk and cpu together if you have lightning fast communications: right! there's no point. You might as well separate them.
I think this article takes the pc today and wonders what would happen if all of the components in the PC were improved and (surprise!) you get a very fast version of the PC. What this article does not do is wonder how we would build computers if we could connect the parts more efficiently. The PC I had six years ago was more than adequate to operate the fridge, microwave, tv and light in my house. The only problem was that it couldn't communicate with those things out of the box. But what if the lightbulp was bluetooth enabled? It might someday become feasible to do so, what are we going to then? That's what's interesting. I don't think I'll ever dictate an email to my PC, typing is much faster than speaking. I don't care if my wordprocessor runs at 25 Mhz or at 25 Thz. I use my home PC for gaming, browsing and typing (in that order). Only the first type of use requires the kind of PC I have on my desk. This is not going to change. I'll probably be playing cooler games in 10 years but what else am I going to do with the PC outlined in the article?
So run it over ssh. There's always a technical solution to whatever Sony or the music industry manages to accomplish. Besides, they don't own the infrastructure and their pockets are not deep enough to buy it.
They don't realize that they've already lost. If they block napster (unlikely), something else will popup. They'll probably succeed in destroying the company napster. That will be the music industries defeat because then everybody will switch to distributed solutions like gnutella or freenet (which will have matured by then).
The music industry is not moving or thinking in internet speed. It took them months to realize napster was bad for revenue. By the time they took action it had millions of users already.
So here's what they should do: make sure that napster stays the no1 source of illegal mp3s. This way it is controlled since the users all go to central servers. They can insert adds, encrypted mp3, etc and make some money.
that's what a greek guy said when he figured something out. He was sitting in the bath, and according to the legend went outside without his toga yelling EUREKA!
In short, the volume of ice is not relevant to the discussion since the mass is constant. The whole reason Ice floats is because it has a lower density than fluid water.
It's not obvious and a lot more fuss than just left clicking on it, which was my main point. In any case, your trick doesn't work on fat drives (which is where I store my mp3). So, it is THAT useless.
Windows 95/98 lets you choose between single/multiple windows. After years of using the multiple windows setting I switched to single window a few months back. After all you can always open a second window when you need one (by double clicking on my computer). A menu option clone window would be usefull though. Also adding back/forward buttons makes life easier.
As nautilus is targeted to end users, it seems sensible they choose the single window approach. I hope this file browser is better than the current generation of file browsers on linux. I find myself using the commandline very often on linux. Not because I like working on the commandline so much but because linux filemanagers pretty much suck right now.
Example, I wanted to rename a few mp3 files the other day. As I'm a lazy bastard, I prefered not to use mv for that since that involves typing the filenames in full. So I launched gmc. Silly me, renaming a file! No can do. Of course there is a move function but I just wanted to change a few characters in the filename, not type the whole bloody thing.
Which brings right down to the real issue: there are dozens, if not hundreds of mp3 players out there, on all sorts of operating systems. Replacing those with vorbis enabled players will take years, and all this time mp3 will be the default.
The best way to get a smooth adoption for this codec is to support as many players as possible (through plugins etc.). In addition, support for encoding software is essential as well. It is dead easy for joe average to convert his cd's to mp3s now. Since he won't understand the difference between vorbis and mp3 anyway, it will be quite a challenge to get him to use it.
In any case, I can't hear the difference between a 128 kb/s mp3 file and a 196 kb/s mp3. I don't really care about bitrate anyway since I have more harddisk space than I can fill with mp3 right now.
I have used both KDE and Gnome at home. I don't consider either of them to be very mature (both seem to be a work in progress) though both of them have a lot of potential.
KDE seems to be very much a coordinated effort to put together a good enduser desktop. Things like consistent look and feel of applications seem to matter on the KDE side.
Gnome on the other hand seems to value the coolness factor a bit more, making it a logical choice for the educated geek since there's more to tweak and configure.
I never liked staroffice, mainly because it added another application framework and therefore felt rather bloated (since it duplicates stuff I already have). I can't believe that merging staroffice and Gnome will result in something consistent (what will happen to Gnumeric, Abi word, dia, etc.).
Feature wise it will put some pressure on KDE. However, competition is good and will ultimately make sure both Gnome and KDE get better. Perhaps it would be good if the KDE people started to work on interoperability with GNOME (e.g. by using the same component model rather than their own KParts).
If SUN and IBM think they can compete with MS by just slapping together some stuff, they are going to fail. The attraction of MS Office is not so much the features but the integration of the features. I like it when I can select a class diagram in visio and paste it in to word. I like it when I double click on the diagram in word I get the diagram loaded in Visio.
Both Gnome and KDE promise this kind of integration in the future, which is good. But in my opinion the KDE style of trying to provide a consistent UI will ultimately be more successfull than the Gnome style of slapping together features. Maybe I'm wrong, we'll see. I won't be using Gnome or KDE at my work for a while since in my opinion the windows UI is superior at this moment.
How often have you grabbed a Coke from the fridge right after seeing a Cola commercial? Advertisements are not about direct responses like that, they are about getting a brand name well known. If you see a certain name often enough, you will recognize it.
Remember, TV is for free as well (apart from pay TV), I can watch the X-Files, movies and loads of other shit without paying. That's because advertisements pay for these things. Now TV advertisement is far more annoying than a banner since it takes away time i Could have spent watching a nice program.
Right now this Lutris ad is flashing at me at the top of this page, thanks to this article, I bothered reading it, it features the words Free, Wireless and Java. I'm sure they get more network traffic than if they hadn't run the ad. Surely they are not interested in every slashdot visitor (can you say slashdot effect!), but one out of a 1000 would already be pretty good.
I agree, C# does not provide much new. The only nice thing I could discover in it was the delegate function. The syntactic sugar in the rest of the language may also be convenient but won't save much time since it does not fundamentally change the way you model a program.
Right now there are two things that I would like to see in a new OO language:
- templates (not the crappy C++ version)
- aspects (as in AspectJ)
Both make it significantly easier to model certain problems. Especially aspects are really cool. Unfortunately C# provides neither which dooms it as obsolete even before it is finished.
I don't think C# is a bad thing, I just think it is not a very big step forward (to small to be interesting).
People have been blindly assuming that red hat and ericsson are going to create pda style machines. However, the press release does not say much about this type of devices (other than that lots of people are going to buy them over the next few years). However, these devices will need to be connected to the (wireless) local network. With ericsson being the inventor of bluetooth and redhat being specalized in server software based on linux, it all makes sense. They are going to develop all sorts of appliances one needs to connect your phones, faxes, webpads and pcs to your home network. This has no consequences for symbian (it might actually benefit) since symbian's OS is targeted at PDA & mobile phones only.
Maybe I'm wrong, in which case I don't expect much of it since just an embedded linux kernel can't replace a platform like EPOC.
"Not much, occasionally there is a winner, but you have a much greater chance of losing."
Exactly, state regulation prevents that gambling gets too popular.In addition, the profits are a welcome addition to the state's income.
Gambling works really simple, as people are generally to stupid to realize that they are more likely to lose money than to win money when gambling running a gambling operation is really profitable. It gets more profitable when more people start to gamble. How do you get more people to gamble: you raise the possibility that they might win or you increase the amount of money that they get in the unlikely case that they win.
State regulation makes it possible to prevent that to many idiots lose their wages.
So that's the difference, or at least the underlying theory because in practice governments are to greedy to regulate in a proper way.
In either case, since I don't gamble, I prefer state regulation because that ultimately lowers the amount of tax I need to pay and maybe helps address some social problems as well. It's a win win situation either way.
True, although nothing prevents the government from providing publicly accessible voting computers.
Also the price of computers keeps dropping. Basically if you can own a TV, you can own a computer. You may not get the latest model though.
It's more a matter of education than a matter of economics. I recently read somewhere that about 15% of America actually can't read or write well enough to manage filling in forms and such. Evidently, these people are going to have problems when you put them behind a computer. Personally, I wouldn't really mind if those people didn't vote. Votes for friendly faces or empty promises never did any country any good.
Discussions about licenses always seem to center around moralism and idealism.
Here's my definition of good and bad licenses: A good license enforces what the maker of it wants and has no unwanted sideeffects.
A bad license does not enforce what the maker wnated to enforce or has unwanted sideeffects.
It is that simple, don't confuse 'good' with 'free beer'. Also be aware that good is highly subjective: what is good for you might be bad for someone else. I certainly can't blame somebody else for not delivering free labor.
Now some people on this site seem to believe that GPL is 'good' and should be enforced/envangelisized/promoted whereever possible. I'm not one of them. I don't think it is bad either, just that sometimes it is appropriate and sometimes not.
No in the case of SSH we are dealing with a bad license. It doesn't do what the originator intended (keep SSH propietary). Nor does it do what the users want, so they create their own version with a license that suit their needs. Probably, openssh will leapfrog past its original and become the default implementation in use.
We have all the technology available to make a safe electronic voting system. Voting is a really simple problem:
1 - You need to establish that the voter is who he says he is. 2 - You need to establish that the voter is allowed to vote. 3 - You need to establish that the organization taking the votes can be trusted. 4 - You need to be able to control that the all of the above is done fairly in a democratic way.
Obviously, in many countries the existing, old way of voting does not meet these criteria. In those countries the voting process would actually improve and be more fair if it were implemented properly.
So on to the solutions: 1) Authentication: this can be done in several ways. A basic start is that all the people who are allowed to vote are registered somewhere. This is currently not true in every countries. I recall several scenes of third world countries actually using paint to mark the people who had voted! Once you have a database of people allowed to vote, you can sent them an invitation to vote (in the Netherlands people receive a voting card that they have to bring when they vote). In an electronic system a public key approach could be used: each voter receives a private key and only he can use that key to vote, the public key is stored in the central registration database. 2) legal votes, if you have a central DB, it is trivial to set a flag once somebody has voted (storing the actual choice would damage integrity of the system). So only people who are allowed to vote, can vote and they can do it only once. 3) Trustworthyness. Obviously delegating the voting to a private company with a propietary system is inherently unsafe. Both the organization as the system must be open and subject to public reviews. This is however not a technical problem and applies to regular voting as well. In countries where this is not properly arranged you see dead people voting and unpopular politicians being reelected. 4) Control. In a democratic system, a democratically elected person (e.g. the president)should hold the end responsibility for the voting process. I.e. if somebody screws with the votes, he should be held responsible. Of course a president cannot personally check the system, but he can see to it that trusted organizations and people deal with the voting.
So, to conclude, a good democracy, already has the last two points taken care of and should have no problems moving towards an electronic voting system. I think it is a mistake to assume that the current traditional way of voting is safe, after all, who counts the votes? Who checks whether a vote is legal. Who checks whether the voting process is fair?
I shouldn't be answering to this but I'm bored: - There's not much point in compiling java natively, at best you get a few percents additional performance but you lose dynamic binding, which is a very usefull feature worth at least a few percentage points. Check out the benchmarks and not just those provided for towerJ. - Java servlets are deployed on servers, those servers can be anything running a java virtual machine, for instance a mainframe from IBM or linux. - Last time I checked, borland did not include a static compiler. Static java compilers are very much a niche market since they do not offer the performance boost most people expect. The reason for that is that the assumption that java performs bad because it is not compiled natively is plain wrong. It's not the bytecode but the excessive use of OO and dynamic binding that makes things slow.
So whoever moderated this guy up, please moderate it down again, it's an obvious troll or at best the response of someone who has had his head stuck in the ground for the past few years. Any of the arguments in this post have been made dozens, if not hundreds of times on this site alone.
Considering that the whole thing is 100% Java, it is more surprising that they actually have to port the thing than that they ported it. The whole aqua thing is just a free ride on Sun's announced port of jdk 1.3 to Mac OS X which will include an aqua theme for swing.
It would be nice though if they would also consider porting delphi to Mac OS. It shouldn't be to hard considering they are already porting it to linux. With support for mac OS they would have support for all major consumer desktops.
True, but at least it's a bit more controlled than right now while still working transparently for the user. Of course a long term solution for email is to build encryption into the mail protocol.
But the thing I was trying to show is that the way we currently deal with networking is unsafe. TCP deals with reliable point to point connections, but these connections are unsafe. It leaves it to applications on top of it to deal with encryption and most applications don't do this. I would like to see encryption pushed down in such a way that it works transparently for applications. E.g. if I'm chatting through ICQ with a friend, the connection used by the two clients would be automatically encrypted.
Nah, too cumbersom. I think the whole problem is that TCP connections are not private. With SSH you can scramble any connection. So, why not scramble the traffic between mailservers? While we're at it, why not compress the data as well. I think encryption has to be built in to the network and not just added on to it. Basically any trafic to and from a PC can be read right now, unless you specifically choose to encrypt it. I would like to have it the other way around. Anything from chat sessions to ftp to X sessions I want encrypted.
Slashdot Mirror
no doubt it was submitted numerous times before it was posted on slashdot. I think slashdot should either rephrase the slogan "news for nerds, stuff that matters" to "news for nerds, stuff that mattered last week".
This is a bit harsh perhaps but it captures my general impression that it takes longer and longer before things get posted on slashdot. This doesn't mean the discussions are less interestng (moderation brought back the fun for me), but it does mean that I no longer use slashdot as a prime source of news.
I occasionally submit news to slashdot, often on days with very little postings (e.g. sunday). Invariably those submissions are rejected after 15 minutes or so. Only to be posted days later by someone else. I understand, slashdot people have to read through a lot of submissions but perhaps they could monitor some sites for new articles. E.g zdnet is a frequently referenced site on slashdot, yet it sometimes takes days before a post is made on a zdnet article.
BTW, I have a slashbox for mozillazine, so I learned about the new tool within hours after it was posted.
well, with ascii I suppose yes. But with anything else you are on your own.
I have one pc running windows and one running linux. I use the linux machine as a router and fileserver. Also I like to fool around with it a bit. I installed helix gnome, to check it out. It installs easy, but somewhere it fucked up because the gnome setup lists settings for both sawmill and sawfish. Both report that sawmill/sawfish is not running when I try to change anything. This became true when I finally decided to install enlightenment. I also have Icewm but I didn't like it very much. Enlightenment looks very cool and sort of gets the job done. The only thing is that it fucked up my menu structure (never asked for that) and duplicates a lot of functionality (didn't ask for that either).
I tried KDE as well (hell it comes installed with mandrake). However upgrading seems to painfull to me (you have to download 20 or so packages) so I won't give 2.0 a try.
I'm dutch but live in Sweden. I have a fast network connection in my room and I can watch some local channels on the tv. Since I don't speak swedish very well I use the tv exclusively to watch english spoken movies & david letterman (cheesy talk show but great before sleeping).
All the rest I do through internet. I get tech news, local news and international news through internet. I've become a news junky and I doubt TV could ever satisfy my craving for news. When I'm in the Netherlands I find the news shows boring, long and dumbed down. The same news is repeated over and over. If a plane crashes, you'll hear about it for weeks (which is why I hate plane crashes, hurricanes and other disasters). I like the diversity and speed of news on the internet. I like extracting the important news from a few headlines and then quickly getting to the in depth stuff that matters quickly. I like being able to skip the less interesting stuff.
A window manager is a curiosity that you need to use X. In the case of KDE it is part of the whole environment (though a replaceable part), and in Gnome you can choose from a few (though I haven't found the right one yet, you know the one that just does its thing without fucking up or being annoying).
Other operating systems come with an integrated window manager. That works fine for me. So it's not surprising that few people know the difference between a windowmanager and a desktop environment. It's because they should be integrated.
You might argue that being able to swap windowmanagers adds choice. However, it also makes testing more difficult (which is why it is so hard to get Gnome and windowmanagers to work properly, i.e. not just stable). Now we get to choose between Gnome and KDE, yay. 40% of the apps will run optimally under gnome, 40% will run optimally under KDE and the remaining 20% will run lousy on both. Great choice.
These religious battles seem to be very american. Americans like two sided conflicts and arguments. You have two presidential candidates (al & george), the other two or three can't be taken very serious. Two desktops, in a war there's the good & the bad (and serious confusion if the two change position during the war). Two browsers (yes I know there are a few others but their marketshares are very small). Open source vs closed source.
And now we are faced with two linux desktops. How boring. On one hand we have Gnome: inconsistent hacked together mess of programs (really, gnome office does not exist yet although gnumeric apparently looks nice). Integration is a dirty word in the dictionary of a Gnome developer. It offers a paper thin cover over the decades old UNIX interface.
KDE on the other hand is very promising, and has been so for years. Always nearly done but not quite so. Promises to reinvent everything including office apps, browser and filemanager.
I don't want either. I want mozilla + framemaker + a desktop that lets me use both comfortably. Gnome is too bloated for that, and KDE tries to replace both excellent tools. Perhaps the replacements are good but I don't care. I want a decent filemanager that lets me rename files for instance (bumped my head trying to do that using the latest gmc on a fat drive, doh!). I want copy paste to work with any application, not just Kedit or Kword.
And guess what, I already know that neither KDE nor Gnome will deliver on any of the above any time soon. Gnome will still be a mess in two years and KDE will still be promising but not yet finished in two years. And I'll still be running windows in two years. Not because it is so great but because it fullfills all my needs. It's bloated, it's ugly, sometimes unstable but the apps I need are available for it and work together nicely in a consistent way. I'd buy a mac if they were priced reasonably. But I wouldn't install linux for desktop usage, even though it's free (as in beer, I don't care about the speech). For me linux is a server OS (and a good one too). Did you notice that the companies backing Gnome are in the server business as well? One of them once tried to deliver a desktop and failed miserably.
end rant.
What's the point of putting harddisk and cpu together if you have lightning fast communications: right! there's no point. You might as well separate them.
I think this article takes the pc today and wonders what would happen if all of the components in the PC were improved and (surprise!) you get a very fast version of the PC. What this article does not do is wonder how we would build computers if we could connect the parts more efficiently. The PC I had six years ago was more than adequate to operate the fridge, microwave, tv and light in my house. The only problem was that it couldn't communicate with those things out of the box. But what if the lightbulp was bluetooth enabled? It might someday become feasible to do so, what are we going to then? That's what's interesting. I don't think I'll ever dictate an email to my PC, typing is much faster than speaking. I don't care if my wordprocessor runs at 25 Mhz or at 25 Thz. I use my home PC for gaming, browsing and typing (in that order). Only the first type of use requires the kind of PC I have on my desk. This is not going to change. I'll probably be playing cooler games in 10 years but what else am I going to do with the PC outlined in the article?
So run it over ssh. There's always a technical solution to whatever Sony or the music industry manages to accomplish. Besides, they don't own the infrastructure and their pockets are not deep enough to buy it.
They don't realize that they've already lost. If they block napster (unlikely), something else will popup. They'll probably succeed in destroying the company napster. That will be the music industries defeat because then everybody will switch to distributed solutions like gnutella or freenet (which will have matured by then).
The music industry is not moving or thinking in internet speed. It took them months to realize napster was bad for revenue. By the time they took action it had millions of users already.
So here's what they should do: make sure that napster stays the no1 source of illegal mp3s. This way it is controlled since the users all go to central servers. They can insert adds, encrypted mp3, etc and make some money.
eureka,
that's what a greek guy said when he figured something out. He was sitting in the bath, and according to the legend went outside without his toga yelling EUREKA!
In short, the volume of ice is not relevant to the discussion since the mass is constant. The whole reason Ice floats is because it has a lower density than fluid water.
It's not obvious and a lot more fuss than just left clicking on it, which was my main point. In any case, your trick doesn't work on fat drives (which is where I store my mp3). So, it is THAT useless.
Thanks, I wish these undocumented features were properly documented.
Windows 95/98 lets you choose between single/multiple windows. After years of using the multiple windows setting I switched to single window a few months back. After all you can always open a second window when you need one (by double clicking on my computer). A menu option clone window would be usefull though. Also adding back/forward buttons makes life easier.
As nautilus is targeted to end users, it seems sensible they choose the single window approach. I hope this file browser is better than the current generation of file browsers on linux. I find myself using the commandline very often on linux. Not because I like working on the commandline so much but because linux filemanagers pretty much suck right now.
Example, I wanted to rename a few mp3 files the other day. As I'm a lazy bastard, I prefered not to use mv for that since that involves typing the filenames in full. So I launched gmc. Silly me, renaming a file! No can do. Of course there is a move function but I just wanted to change a few characters in the filename, not type the whole bloody thing.
Which brings right down to the real issue: there are dozens, if not hundreds of mp3 players out there, on all sorts of operating systems. Replacing those with vorbis enabled players will take years, and all this time mp3 will be the default.
The best way to get a smooth adoption for this codec is to support as many players as possible (through plugins etc.). In addition, support for encoding software is essential as well. It is dead easy for joe average to convert his cd's to mp3s now. Since he won't understand the difference between vorbis and mp3 anyway, it will be quite a challenge to get him to use it.
In any case, I can't hear the difference between a 128 kb/s mp3 file and a 196 kb/s mp3. I don't really care about bitrate anyway since I have more harddisk space than I can fill with mp3 right now.
I have used both KDE and Gnome at home. I don't consider either of them to be very mature (both seem to be a work in progress) though both of them have a lot of potential.
KDE seems to be very much a coordinated effort to put together a good enduser desktop. Things like consistent look and feel of applications seem to matter on the KDE side.
Gnome on the other hand seems to value the coolness factor a bit more, making it a logical choice for the educated geek since there's more to tweak and configure.
I never liked staroffice, mainly because it added another application framework and therefore felt rather bloated (since it duplicates stuff I already have). I can't believe that merging staroffice and Gnome will result in something consistent (what will happen to Gnumeric, Abi word, dia, etc.).
Feature wise it will put some pressure on KDE. However, competition is good and will ultimately make sure both Gnome and KDE get better. Perhaps it would be good if the KDE people started to work on interoperability with GNOME (e.g. by using the same component model rather than their own KParts).
If SUN and IBM think they can compete with MS by just slapping together some stuff, they are going to fail. The attraction of MS Office is not so much the features but the integration of the features. I like it when I can select a class diagram in visio and paste it in to word. I like it when I double click on the diagram in word I get the diagram loaded in Visio.
Both Gnome and KDE promise this kind of integration in the future, which is good. But in my opinion the KDE style of trying to provide a consistent UI will ultimately be more successfull than the Gnome style of slapping together features. Maybe I'm wrong, we'll see. I won't be using Gnome or KDE at my work for a while since in my opinion the windows UI is superior at this moment.
How often have you grabbed a Coke from the fridge right after seeing a Cola commercial? Advertisements are not about direct responses like that, they are about getting a brand name well known. If you see a certain name often enough, you will recognize it.
Remember, TV is for free as well (apart from pay TV), I can watch the X-Files, movies and loads of other shit without paying. That's because advertisements pay for these things. Now TV advertisement is far more annoying than a banner since it takes away time i Could have spent watching a nice program.
Right now this Lutris ad is flashing at me at the top of this page, thanks to this article, I bothered reading it, it features the words Free, Wireless and Java. I'm sure they get more network traffic than if they hadn't run the ad. Surely they are not interested in every slashdot visitor (can you say slashdot effect!), but one out of a 1000 would already be pretty good.
I agree, C# does not provide much new. The only nice thing I could discover in it was the delegate function. The syntactic sugar in the rest of the language may also be convenient but won't save much time since it does not fundamentally change the way you model a program.
Right now there are two things that I would like to see in a new OO language:
- templates (not the crappy C++ version)
- aspects (as in AspectJ)
Both make it significantly easier to model certain problems. Especially aspects are really cool. Unfortunately C# provides neither which dooms it as obsolete even before it is finished.
I don't think C# is a bad thing, I just think it is not a very big step forward (to small to be interesting).
People have been blindly assuming that red hat and ericsson are going to create pda style machines. However, the press release does not say much about this type of devices (other than that lots of people are going to buy them over the next few years). However, these devices will need to be connected to the (wireless) local network. With ericsson being the inventor of bluetooth and redhat being specalized in server software based on linux, it all makes sense. They are going to develop all sorts of appliances one needs to connect your phones, faxes, webpads and pcs to your home network. This has no consequences for symbian (it might actually benefit) since symbian's OS is targeted at PDA & mobile phones only.
Maybe I'm wrong, in which case I don't expect much of it since just an embedded linux kernel can't replace a platform like EPOC.
"Not much, occasionally there is a winner, but you have a much greater chance of losing."
Exactly, state regulation prevents that gambling gets too popular.In addition, the profits are a welcome addition to the state's income.
Gambling works really simple, as people are generally to stupid to realize that they are more likely to lose money than to win money when gambling running a gambling operation is really profitable. It gets more profitable when more people start to gamble. How do you get more people to gamble: you raise the possibility that they might win or you increase the amount of money that they get in the unlikely case that they win.
State regulation makes it possible to prevent that to many idiots lose their wages.
So that's the difference, or at least the underlying theory because in practice governments are to greedy to regulate in a proper way.
In either case, since I don't gamble, I prefer state regulation because that ultimately lowers the amount of tax I need to pay and maybe helps address some social problems as well. It's a win win situation either way.
True, although nothing prevents the government from providing publicly accessible voting computers.
Also the price of computers keeps dropping. Basically if you can own a TV, you can own a computer. You may not get the latest model though.
It's more a matter of education than a matter of economics. I recently read somewhere that about 15% of America actually can't read or write well enough to manage filling in forms and such. Evidently, these people are going to have problems when you put them behind a computer. Personally, I wouldn't really mind if those people didn't vote. Votes for friendly faces or empty promises never did any country any good.
Discussions about licenses always seem to center around moralism and idealism.
Here's my definition of good and bad licenses:
A good license enforces what the maker of it wants and has no unwanted sideeffects.
A bad license does not enforce what the maker wnated to enforce or has unwanted sideeffects.
It is that simple, don't confuse 'good' with 'free beer'. Also be aware that good is highly subjective: what is good for you might be bad for someone else. I certainly can't blame somebody else for not delivering free labor.
Now some people on this site seem to believe that GPL is 'good' and should be enforced/envangelisized/promoted whereever possible. I'm not one of them. I don't think it is bad either, just that sometimes it is appropriate and sometimes not.
No in the case of SSH we are dealing with a bad license. It doesn't do what the originator intended (keep SSH propietary). Nor does it do what the users want, so they create their own version with a license that suit their needs. Probably, openssh will leapfrog past its original and become the default implementation in use.
We have all the technology available to make a safe electronic voting system. Voting is a really simple problem:
1 - You need to establish that the voter is who he says he is.
2 - You need to establish that the voter is allowed to vote.
3 - You need to establish that the organization taking the votes can be trusted.
4 - You need to be able to control that the all of the above is done fairly in a democratic way.
Obviously, in many countries the existing, old way of voting does not meet these criteria. In those countries the voting process would actually improve and be more fair if it were implemented properly.
So on to the solutions:
1) Authentication: this can be done in several ways. A basic start is that all the people who are allowed to vote are registered somewhere. This is currently not true in every countries. I recall several scenes of third world countries actually using paint to mark the people who had voted! Once you have a database of people allowed to vote, you can sent them an invitation to vote (in the Netherlands people receive a voting card that they have to bring when they vote). In an electronic system a public key approach could be used: each voter receives a private key and only he can use that key to vote, the public key is stored in the central registration database.
2) legal votes, if you have a central DB, it is trivial to set a flag once somebody has voted (storing the actual choice would damage integrity of the system). So only people who are allowed to vote, can vote and they can do it only once.
3) Trustworthyness. Obviously delegating the voting to a private company with a propietary system is inherently unsafe. Both the organization as the system must be open and subject to public reviews. This is however not a technical problem and applies to regular voting as well. In countries where this is not properly arranged you see dead people voting and unpopular politicians being reelected.
4) Control. In a democratic system, a democratically elected person (e.g. the president)should hold the end responsibility for the voting process. I.e. if somebody screws with the votes, he should be held responsible. Of course a president cannot personally check the system, but he can see to it that trusted organizations and people deal with the voting.
So, to conclude, a good democracy, already has the last two points taken care of and should have no problems moving towards an electronic voting system. I think it is a mistake to assume that the current traditional way of voting is safe, after all, who counts the votes? Who checks whether a vote is legal. Who checks whether the voting process is fair?
I shouldn't be answering to this but I'm bored:
- There's not much point in compiling java natively, at best you get a few percents additional performance but you lose dynamic binding, which is a very usefull feature worth at least a few percentage points. Check out the benchmarks and not just those provided for towerJ.
- Java servlets are deployed on servers, those servers can be anything running a java virtual machine, for instance a mainframe from IBM or linux.
- Last time I checked, borland did not include a static compiler. Static java compilers are very much a niche market since they do not offer the performance boost most people expect. The reason for that is that the assumption that java performs bad because it is not compiled natively is plain wrong. It's not the bytecode but the excessive use of OO and dynamic binding that makes things slow.
So whoever moderated this guy up, please moderate it down again, it's an obvious troll or at best the response of someone who has had his head stuck in the ground for the past few years. Any of the arguments in this post have been made dozens, if not hundreds of times on this site alone.
Considering that the whole thing is 100% Java, it is more surprising that they actually have to port the thing than that they ported it. The whole aqua thing is just a free ride on Sun's announced port of jdk 1.3 to Mac OS X which will include an aqua theme for swing.
It would be nice though if they would also consider porting delphi to Mac OS. It shouldn't be to hard considering they are already porting it to linux. With support for mac OS they would have support for all major consumer desktops.
True, but at least it's a bit more controlled than right now while still working transparently for the user. Of course a long term solution for email is to build encryption into the mail protocol.
But the thing I was trying to show is that the way we currently deal with networking is unsafe. TCP deals with reliable point to point connections, but these connections are unsafe. It leaves it to applications on top of it to deal with encryption and most applications don't do this. I would like to see encryption pushed down in such a way that it works transparently for applications. E.g. if I'm chatting through ICQ with a friend, the connection used by the two clients would be automatically encrypted.
Nah, too cumbersom. I think the whole problem is that TCP connections are not private. With SSH you can scramble any connection. So, why not scramble the traffic between mailservers? While we're at it, why not compress the data as well. I think encryption has to be built in to the network and not just added on to it. Basically any trafic to and from a PC can be read right now, unless you specifically choose to encrypt it. I would like to have it the other way around. Anything from chat sessions to ftp to X sessions I want encrypted.