I just did, pretty impressive! It's a pitty that the software is not yet in a very usable state but I'll definately keep an eye on this one.
For those who don't know what freenet is about:
Freenet is a distributed filesystem. Users can insert files into the network and request for other files. Each file is mapped to a unique key. This key can be used to find the corresponding file.
Unlike napster and gnutella, the file can be anywhere. In fact the file moves through the network to where it's requested most. If necessary it is duplicated. Once inserted it is not possible to remove a file from the network. The only way a file can disappear from the network is if nobody requests it.
The latter is what makes freenet so cool: it is not possible to censor the net; it is not possible to pinpoint a file to a particular location (it's constantly on the move); both inserting and requesting a file is anonymous.
"So who do you think is going to win, Corporation or Government?"
Neither, currently there is an open source effort to create something superior to napster: gnutella. Unlike napster, gnutella does not require a central server and thus needs no big corporations providing such servers. And above all, it is very hard to monitor gnutella users. The current version of gnutella is already pretty usefull (I use it all the time). The government focussing on Napster is a good thing since that allows gnutella to develop further. Unlike napster, it will be very hard to stop gnutella or derivatives.
Lets see, - half a million LOC (that's small) - under development for 20 years - new requirements are avoided at all cost
So it is a small, long lived project with nearly unlimited budget. No wonder they can afford to have such a process in place. But now realistically, how long does it take to set up such a project from scratch. How about having a customer who does not know what he wants. How about deadlines of less than 10 years from now.
I honestly believe that this way of delivering software is optimal for nothing else but long lived, multi billion dollar projects. In any other case you'll end up with something that is delivered years to late, indeed matches the requirements of 10 years ago and is close to useless.
Unfortunately many software companies are in a situation where they can't afford to wait for perfect software. Take mobile phones as an example. Typically these things become obsolete within half a year after introduction. The software process is what determines time to market. Speed is everything. If you can deliver the software one month earlier, you can sell the phone one month longer.
Of course testing, requirementspecs and software designs are usefull for any project but it's usually not feasible to do it properly.
The real problem is much more fundamental then the outlook API. The real problem is the lack of a proper security model. You don't want to have your newly downloaded script to interact with an API that basicly lets it do anything it wants. A downloaded executable has access to the full win32 API. Just changing the outlook interface won't help preventing worms since there are other ways to retrieve the list of addresses in the addressbook.
However, it would be ok if there were some restrictions on what this script would be allowed to do. I.e. a sandbox model would be appropriate for anything opened from an email client or a browser. Anything which is not labeled as trusted should not be trusted to behave well.
This problem is not unique to windows. Most unix mail clients also leave it to the user what to open. Of course linux mail clients don't have much of an API to script. Apart from that, there's nothing stopping a virus from mailing itself to everyone in the addressbook and removing porn and mp3 on Linux (except the user of course) since it can all be done without requiring root permissions.
Epic's main reason to focus on direct 3D is, as they put it, that opengl and direct 3D are diverting too much. Basically direct 3D is still gaining features while opengl is a low level 3d standard that does not change much anymore. Therefore keeping direct 3D apps and opengl apps on a par becomes increasingly difficult.
Given this epic can do the following: - Write their own highlevel library on top of opengl - Adopt a good existing highlevel library on top of opengl - Don't reinvent the wheel and use direct 3D.
Onviously Epic is not in the business of reinventing the wheel (that kills option 1), there are no good highlevel libraries ontop of opengl (bye bye option 2). That leaves us with option 3.
How to pick this up in a positive way? Develop a highlevel, crossplatform gaming API that does not force game developers to reinvent the wheel. Apparently such a library is lacking on both the mac and linux. You can't expect epic to do that work for you since it is going to take a while before it becomes profitable (in terms of revenue) to do so. In any case, true unreal fans will probably buy the windows version anyway.
So quit whining and start coding if you want games on linux (I think there are some projects). It's the same as with GUI applications: you need highlevel libraries, being able to put things on a screen is not enough.
I like unreal, and from the techpages and tim.plan files I gather that there's some good software engineering practiced at Epic. This is visible from how the app is structure (nice usefull GUI, clever mod installation procedure, etc). This nice architecture is increasingly endangered by the apparent differences between opengl and direct 3D. So drop opengl (and in due time replace it with something higher level).
If you are secretly thinking quake 3 is better consider that UT is nothing more than incremental improvement of Unreal which used to compete with quake II. In the time ID spent on developing quake III, epic just kept improving the unreal engine. The fact that it can compete with the quake III engine proves that it must have been well designed since it is scalable and maintainable. Apart from that, quake III's UI sucks (you basically need to get a third party wrapper for it) and the way quake III deals with user mods is very primitive.
Developing 3d games is increasingly less about building a good 3d engine (I think I can quote John Carmack on that). It's about creating good content (nice levels and such). Unreal heavily depends on directX for implementing loads of features. Porting these features to other platforms is expensive and not very productive.
Broadband internet is already very suitable for streaming high quality video. I fooled around with some divx videos yesterday (matrix and starwars). I was very much impressed with both. The matrix had been ripped straight of a dvd and the starwars video was ripped from a video tape.
The matrix at some points approached dvd quality (nice sharp images and a decent framerate). It then occured to me that it only took me about 3 hours to download the thing. With a little boost in bandwidth (the download was not maxing out my connection), it would have been possible to stream the movie.
i think the conference lasts six days. We're not talking about renting a small room in the back of an obscure hotel but probably a nice and expensive hotel with good facilities. Then you also need lots of people to organize this and they're probably not all volunteers. Most likely the conference fee does not cover everything. That would explain the sponsoring link on their page. I have attended some scientific conferences. Generally those are organized by none profit organizations. The prices are comparable.
Having a well organized conference makes it possible to invite important people (which usually is essential for delivering a good conference). Keeping the price high also prevents that there will be masses of newby hackers rather than really interested people.
Exactly how much do you think it costs to rent a place for holding the conference and organize a conference? We're probably talking about a meeting of a few hundred people, so trust me nobody is getting rich here.
Then use gnutella. I tried it yesterday and it is really good. With gnutella there is no central server and you can search for other files than only mp3. There are already several alternative clients so there's no single vendor controlling things.
I never bothered with napster because I don't like registering for it. With Gnutella you just find another gnutella client, connect to it and from then on you are connected to all other gnutella clients connected to it.
The windows registry uses a tree structure to store data in. The individual nodes of that tree consist of ascii indeed. However the point is that because it is a tree it is easy to find information. A textfile has no structure.
The windows registry is actually not a smart thing either. Better is to use a directory server (novel does this). By using a remote server you can have your configuration remote (netsape uses this to implement roaming profiles).
So, no, I don't have my head up my ass and I fully realize that it is going to be impossible to convince the entire unix community that their way of working with configuration info is far from optimal (to put it mildly). Using an editor to edit configuration files seems like a very primitive way of doing configuration. It requires that you know the fileformat (and as discussed before, fileformats usually don't adhere to any standard at the moment) and makes it the user's responsibility to keep the files consistent.
The reason of my rant is that I have once spent a few days figuring out how to get my deskjet working under slackware. The HOW-TO at that time was not very helpfull and it occured to me this was the most user unfriendly way of configuring a printer i had encountered so far (mind you this was 1996). Unfortunately the whole linux system is constructed in a similar way. During boot time, the kernel wrestles itself through a enourmous spagethi of initfiles. As a newby, you can easily lose an afternoon figuring out what file to edit to set a stupid environment variable.
"A central configuration system would be neat, but on the other hand you would break compatibility with a lot of existing Unix applications which expect/etc,/proc, and so forth. I guess you could set up this database in a different directory and only new apps would know about it. Better make it flat text, though - I don't think a binary registry will fly very far."
It is this conservatism which makes it difficult to configure linux. Because of that managing a linux platform is more expensive than necessary.
I'm in favor of moving away from shellscript based config files towards a central LDAP based config system. Mixing code and configuration as is common today is a bad thing.
I'm against using text files because textfiles can be fucked up with typos and duplicate data. A good db like system protects you from making those errors. Using XML would be an improvement over the current situation but also a big misstake in my eyes since XML is just as unsuitable for permanent storage of data as a normal text file.
I think current linux distributions with all their environment variables, init scripts, shell scripts and ancient tools are far more complex than necessary to accomplish the flexibility and security they offer. In my opinion an OS is nothing more than a kernel + application packages + configuration + user data. A good principle in software engineering is separation of concern. It is not practiced enough in linux because configuration files are applications which are partially stored as user data. Not too mention that the kernel's functioning depends on a legion of scripts.
The MPEG 4 divx standard is totally unrelated to the DIVX fiasco. The name sharing is confusing but since one of them no longer exists it doesn't really hurt to reuse the name, I gues.
Anyway mpeg4 divx is a compression standard which apparently delivers good compression rates at the price of performance. Both encoding and decoding is more expensive than mpeg2. The result however is not bad. Apparently it is possible to compress a dvd to fit on one cd. Also the quality is not bad apparently although I have heard various reports about that ranging from "nearly as good as DVD" to worse than VCD. I suppose it depends very much on the type of movie you encode.
Well, I consider users and independent developers a stakeholder as well. Of course individually, it is difficult to raise their voice but when united in a lobbying organization (e.g. the FSF) they can have a meaningfull vote.
I think large companies are entitled to some vote for the simple reason they invest a lot of money into linux and opensource.
This is a myth, in fact it promotes innovation because after a good standardization process there is no need to reinvent the wheel poorly. Essential is that the standardization process is done properly (i.e. it should be done by people who know what they are doing and who represent all major stakeholders) based on existing practice.
"Arguments for: Prevents fragmentation."
And makes it easier to switch distribution and makes it easier and more worthwhile to learn the details of the system since they are less likely to change. It makes it easier to write distribution independent applications (or am I the only one who thinks it sucks that many applications come in 4 or even more distribution specific packages).
I think that standardization is good. Delaying it makes it unnecessarily hard to create applications for Linux. If the linux platform has to fragment then let it at least fragment for a good reason and not because vendor X stores programs in path A while vendor Y insists on using a different path.
"This is wrong. For the term to show up in a large general purpose dictionary, the meaning must already be (or have been) in mainstream use."
Exactly. The point here is that "hacker" can be considered mainstream english (since it is often used in the media) whereas cracker is a word used exclusively by techies and therefore should be considered jargon.
The fact that a small group chooses to use specific other meanings for the words hacker and cracker is not relevant to document in a dictionary. Should cracker ever become mainstream english, a good dictionary will provide two definitions for hacker: the current, generic one and the one distinguishing itself from the term cracker. Both would be correct to use for any mainstream media although they had better stick to the second definition if they also use the word cracker.
Hacker/cracker are only one example of ill defined terminology in computer jargon. Try to get people to agree on terms like software architecture or object orientation and you'll find that there exist widely different definitions for these terms. That doesn't stop anyone from using them. Even if respected dictionaries would provide concise definitions for these terms, many people would choose to ignore them.
This case is not about facts but about opinions. This case fully depends on the support that the states backing up the trial give to it. Two are already hesitant to accept the original proposal. MS knows that and tries to influence the public further by appearing cooperative and running expensive marketing campaigns. It's all about marketing and the proven FUD concept and that's something MS is good at.
This proposal should be seen in that light. MS already knows that they are going to have to appeal whatever will be decided by Jackson. So their goal is not to fight his decision but to negotiate a good ruling for the period until the appeal.
So, MS is doing well: - They fooled the media into believing they are cooperative now, this will definately put some pressure on Jackson. - They have a proposal which is not particularly bad for them. Though of course this proposal will never make it as an end proposal, I wouldn't be surprised if something like this becomes the intermediate ruling until the appeal.
I would have had to learn latex instead of framemaker, so it wouldn't have saved me time. BTW. the reason I was working in word is because I got sick of compiling & debugging my texts. I used TeX before and I have to admit it is usefull if you are doing math formulas. If you are not (like me), you might as well work with a decent word processor.
The problem with word is that it is not very suitable for writing stuctured documents. It has all the necessary features but the implementation is crappy. Framemaker however is all about structure. It suits all my needs and provides the comfort of a wordprocessor whereas Latex does not. In addition it has nice graphical features and you can embed objects from other programs. Latex would force me to convert all my images to eps (not supported by the programs I use).
Having experienced Latex, Framemaker and Word I can say that I consider both Word and Latex a step backwards. Latex delivers nice results but sends you back to the stoneage from a usability perspective. Word is exactly the opposite: the interface is very nice but the result sucks. Framemaker is in the middle, decent result and a fairly good UI (not perfect though).
The strength of slashdot used to be that news that matters to nerds appeared on it within minutes after publication elsewhere.
I suspect the number of submitted newsworthy items has grown too large to give every item a serious chance of proper review. I submitted something last sunday (a very quiet day, only a handfull of new items on slashdot). At least I thought it was relevant but the people at slashdot apparently thought otherwise. My item was 'declined' within minutes after submitting, as were 387 others (at least that was the number of items in the queue). And again, there was not much going on at slashdot at that time.
So the only conclusion is that slashdot is getting out of sync with what's going on. It's taking longer for relevant stuff to appear and relevant things sometimes do not appear at all. Both things are bad and need to be addressed.
One option might be to use user reviewing of item submissions similarly to the way the forums are moderated. A moderation treshold could be used to prevent from less newsworthy stuff from appearing. I know this has been suggested before so It will probably not happen this time either.
A second option is to appoint more reviewers. Rather than letting each reviewer review any incoming submission, it would be a good idea to use a sorting mechanism (for instance by letting the users pick a category when submitting e.g. linux, java, ms trial, quicky, etc.).
I had the same problem 1 1/2 year ago. I started out working on my master thesis in word 97. After a few weeks of no problems I ran into some problems with images. Since it was not the first time I looked for an alternative.
I then installed framemaker 5.5. It took me a week to convert my document and erase all traces of ms word from my thesis. It was a good move, though. Framemaker is excellent for creating structured documents (such as a thesis). I haven't looked back since. I now work as a Ph D. student and write all my papers in framemaker. I have not run into any serious problems yet.
I particularly like how framemaker forces you to work (structure your document using paragraph and character tags). This is also the way I used word in the past. Unfortunately word automagically fucks op your document structure if you don't pay attention.
I wouldn't consider any other wordprocessor at the moment than framemaker. Word is nice if you know how to work with it, however it is too buggy to do any graphics in it. Basically anybody I know who ever tried to do anything serious involving graphics and word has had to deal with all sorts of bugs in word. Framemaker doesn't have this problem. It's rock solid, available on many platforms (including Linux). It's also very suitable for scientific documents since most conferences and journals have templates for framemaker (if they haven't it's usually easy to create them yourself given a detailed description of how the document should look).
Of course you don't have much interoperability with word. You can import word, but the result is usually not pretty. You can also export word/rtf but there are some problems here as well (especially with graphics).
Nearly correct, it will be the dumbed down version of english also known as US english or even american. I'm not trying to insult people here but I'm just trying to make clear that the US population consists of immigrants from all over the world. Most of them adopted the local language (brittish english), with varying results. After 200 years of language evolution the result is a dumbed down version of brittish english (simpler spelling, smaller vocabulary). As a non native english speaker (I'm dutch) I have no problems understanding american english (spoken & written). However, brittish english is much more difficult.
So american english is perfect for the internet since it already is a language for immigrants. As such it is rather easy to learn for non native speakers (much easier than brittish english or even french with its rigid grammar).
However, I don't really believe in global cultures and other crap like that so i think an increasing portion of the content will in other languages than english.
Expert systems generally don't replace experts but only make their work easier. A judge is fully qualified to judge the output of an expertsystem. By using it he can save time by letting the expersystem figure out all the details.
Probably the expertsystem isn't coded in VB but only the userinterface. Probably the expertsystem is a COM component used in the system. Which is exactly the reason why perl is not very suitable since A) it is a pain to code GUIs in perl B) it is a pain to use com components in perl. The only two alternatives that come to mind for creating this app are delphi and Java (though com support is not optimal).
Mozilla is an opensource project with the specific goal of producing components for third party use (which is probably one of the reasons they don't use GPL). They ultimately aim to be a platform for developing web based applications.
Therefore Real embedding Gecko is a good thing. The more companies that follow Real's example the more mozilla becomes a threat for IE. People have been complaining a lot about Netscape's GUI without realizing they can just take the browser component and wrap it into whatever GUI they like.
I don't particularly like Real's GUI either (though it does improve if you disable all the non essential stuff) but that's not the point. The point is that Gecko is becoming a damn good browser component and that just about anybody can embed it in their product (and that includes MS). More people embedding it means more users, which means more pressure on MS to either comply with standards or even to start using Gecko themselves.
A little sidenote on real embedding Mozzilla: why don't they rewrite the GUI in XUL? That would make it much easier to port the damn thing.
If they open source BeOS, they also opensource most of BeIA, their main source of income. Sounds like a pretty stupid idea from their point of view.
Revolutions are very rare in the realm of operating systems. The only exception to this rule that comes to mind is MacOS X, but even that could be seen as an evolution of MacOS 9.
Existing operating systems tend to absorb the features that make new operating systems stand out. Right now BeOS is in the spotlight because of it's performance in multimedia applications. That's the only real edge it has over other operating system. True, the rest is nice too but not exceptionally nice.
Be as a company has not much future selling operating systems for the simple reason there is an ongoing trend to make operating systems free (linux and several embedded operating systems). Once the performance edge is lost (which inevitably will happen at some point), BeOS has nothing but customer loyalty to keep their revenue.
Considering that the DragonBall code base is written for a processor that runs at 50 Mhz, it should not be difficult to emulate it on a 200 Mhz processor. Probably the API won't change much, so a simple recompile will do for many apps.
The reason is simple: most software packages are far too complex to document completely on paper so why bother?
Basically there are two ways you can use a manual: - as a tutorial. - as a reference.
A tutorial should cover all major ways of using a package. Typically you don't proceed through a tutorial linearly but you pick topics that interest you in the order that is convenient for you.
A reference should be complete and easy accessible. Those requirements cannot be fullfilled by a paper manual (at least not without increasing the price of the software package significantly: thick manuals are expensive).
Both ways of using a manual can be done using online manuals. For tutorials I prefer online because it is easier to use (examples you can play with, animations, search). Also it is possible to provide references to other relevant portions of the tutorial. Take the java tutorial as an example. It is far too large to print in one book (the swing tutorial alone is hundreds of pages) yet it is very desirable to keep it complete (not to mention up to date). I don't think many people can claim to have read it completely. Given the choice I would alway prefer the online version since the best feature of the tutorial is being able to find documentation on all related issues real quick.
The same goes for references. Lets take the java API as an example. I wouldn't care for a 1000 page dump on paper of the Java API documentation. I know there are many expensive books that provide exactly that (I don't own any) so apparently there are people who think differently about this. However I wouldn't want a software company charge me for a thick (expensive) manual I won't use anyway.
An online version is so much better (links to related classes, links to relevant portions of the tutorial and vice versa, search facility).
Most software packages these days only ship with some very basic paper documentation (installation, how to get started, how to browse the online documentation). Having the installation instructions on paper can be handy but a readme file is ok for me too. Since I know how to insert a cdrom and find the readme, the dead trees are wasted on me. But I suppose it looks nice to ship some paper along with the cd.
I no longer judge a software package on the paper documentation but on the quality and accessibility of the online documentation. PDFs and postscript files are bad in my opinion (limited or no interactivity). Winhelp or HTML is much better. I mention Winhelp because that has search built into it while with HTML the searchpages have to be generated statically (limiting their usefullness).
But even the use of offline documentation is limited. In the case of Java I usually refer to the documentation at javasoft since that is the most up to date version.
Slashdot Mirror
I just did, pretty impressive! It's a pitty that the software is not yet in a very usable state but I'll definately keep an eye on this one.
For those who don't know what freenet is about:
Freenet is a distributed filesystem. Users can insert files into the network and request for other files. Each file is mapped to a unique key. This key can be used to find the corresponding file.
Unlike napster and gnutella, the file can be anywhere. In fact the file moves through the network to where it's requested most. If necessary it is duplicated. Once inserted it is not possible to remove a file from the network. The only way a file can disappear from the network is if nobody requests it.
The latter is what makes freenet so cool: it is not possible to censor the net; it is not possible to pinpoint a file to a particular location (it's constantly on the move); both inserting and requesting a file is anonymous.
"So who do you think is going to win, Corporation or Government?"
Neither, currently there is an open source effort to create something superior to napster: gnutella. Unlike napster, gnutella does not require a central server and thus needs no big corporations providing such servers. And above all, it is very hard to monitor gnutella users. The current version of gnutella is already pretty usefull (I use it all the time). The government focussing on Napster is a good thing since that allows gnutella to develop further. Unlike napster, it will be very hard to stop gnutella or derivatives.
Lets see,
- half a million LOC (that's small)
- under development for 20 years
- new requirements are avoided at all cost
So it is a small, long lived project with nearly unlimited budget. No wonder they can afford to have such a process in place. But now realistically, how long does it take to set up such a project from scratch. How about having a customer who does not know what he wants. How about deadlines of less than 10 years from now.
I honestly believe that this way of delivering software is optimal for nothing else but long lived, multi billion dollar projects. In any other case you'll end up with something that is delivered years to late, indeed matches the requirements of 10 years ago and is close to useless.
Unfortunately many software companies are in a situation where they can't afford to wait for perfect software. Take mobile phones as an example. Typically these things become obsolete within half a year after introduction. The software process is what determines time to market. Speed is everything. If you can deliver the software one month earlier, you can sell the phone one month longer.
Of course testing, requirementspecs and software designs are usefull for any project but it's usually not feasible to do it properly.
The real problem is much more fundamental then the outlook API. The real problem is the lack of a proper security model. You don't want to have your newly downloaded script to interact with an API that basicly lets it do anything it wants. A downloaded executable has access to the full win32 API. Just changing the outlook interface won't help preventing worms since there are other ways to retrieve the list of addresses in the addressbook.
However, it would be ok if there were some restrictions on what this script would be allowed to do. I.e. a sandbox model would be appropriate for anything opened from an email client or a browser. Anything which is not labeled as trusted should not be trusted to behave well.
This problem is not unique to windows. Most unix mail clients also leave it to the user what to open. Of course linux mail clients don't have much of an API to script. Apart from that, there's nothing stopping a virus from mailing itself to everyone in the addressbook and removing porn and mp3 on Linux (except the user of course) since it can all be done without requiring root permissions.
Epic's main reason to focus on direct 3D is, as they put it, that opengl and direct 3D are diverting too much. Basically direct 3D is still gaining features while opengl is a low level 3d standard that does not change much anymore. Therefore keeping direct 3D apps and opengl apps on a par becomes increasingly difficult.
.plan files I gather that there's some good software engineering practiced at Epic. This is visible from how the app is structure (nice usefull GUI, clever mod installation procedure, etc). This nice architecture is increasingly endangered by the apparent differences between opengl and direct 3D. So drop opengl (and in due time replace it with something higher level).
Given this epic can do the following:
- Write their own highlevel library on top of opengl
- Adopt a good existing highlevel library on top of opengl
- Don't reinvent the wheel and use direct 3D.
Onviously Epic is not in the business of reinventing the wheel (that kills option 1), there are no good highlevel libraries ontop of opengl (bye bye option 2). That leaves us with option 3.
How to pick this up in a positive way? Develop a highlevel, crossplatform gaming API that does not force game developers to reinvent the wheel. Apparently such a library is lacking on both the mac and linux. You can't expect epic to do that work for you since it is going to take a while before it becomes profitable (in terms of revenue) to do so. In any case, true unreal fans will probably buy the windows version anyway.
So quit whining and start coding if you want games on linux (I think there are some projects). It's the same as with GUI applications: you need highlevel libraries, being able to put things on a screen is not enough.
I like unreal, and from the techpages and tim
If you are secretly thinking quake 3 is better consider that UT is nothing more than incremental improvement of Unreal which used to compete with quake II. In the time ID spent on developing quake III, epic just kept improving the unreal engine. The fact that it can compete with the quake III engine proves that it must have been well designed since it is scalable and maintainable. Apart from that, quake III's UI sucks (you basically need to get a third party wrapper for it) and the way quake III deals with user mods is very primitive.
Developing 3d games is increasingly less about building a good 3d engine (I think I can quote John Carmack on that). It's about creating good content (nice levels and such). Unreal heavily depends on directX for implementing loads of features. Porting these features to other platforms is expensive and not very productive.
Broadband internet is already very suitable for streaming high quality video. I fooled around with some divx videos yesterday (matrix and starwars). I was very much impressed with both. The matrix had been ripped straight of a dvd and the starwars video was ripped from a video tape.
The matrix at some points approached dvd quality (nice sharp images and a decent framerate). It then occured to me that it only took me about 3 hours to download the thing. With a little boost in bandwidth (the download was not maxing out my connection), it would have been possible to stream the movie.
i think the conference lasts six days. We're not talking about renting a small room in the back of an obscure hotel but probably a nice and expensive hotel with good facilities. Then you also need lots of people to organize this and they're probably not all volunteers. Most likely the conference fee does not cover everything. That would explain the sponsoring link on their page. I have attended some scientific conferences. Generally those are organized by none profit organizations. The prices are comparable.
Having a well organized conference makes it possible to invite important people (which usually is essential for delivering a good conference). Keeping the price high also prevents that there will be masses of newby hackers rather than really interested people.
Exactly how much do you think it costs to rent a place for holding the conference and organize a conference? We're probably talking about a meeting of a few hundred people, so trust me nobody is getting rich here.
:) somebody has to pay for the free beer!
Then use gnutella. I tried it yesterday and it is really good. With gnutella there is no central server and you can search for other files than only mp3. There are already several alternative clients so there's no single vendor controlling things.
I never bothered with napster because I don't like registering for it. With Gnutella you just find another gnutella client, connect to it and from then on you are connected to all other gnutella clients connected to it.
The windows registry uses a tree structure to store data in. The individual nodes of that tree consist of ascii indeed. However the point is that because it is a tree it is easy to find information. A textfile has no structure.
The windows registry is actually not a smart thing either. Better is to use a directory server (novel does this). By using a remote server you can have your configuration remote (netsape uses this to implement roaming profiles).
So, no, I don't have my head up my ass and I fully realize that it is going to be impossible to convince the entire unix community that their way of working with configuration info is far from optimal (to put it mildly). Using an editor to edit configuration files seems like a very primitive way of doing configuration. It requires that you know the fileformat (and as discussed before, fileformats usually don't adhere to any standard at the moment) and makes it the user's responsibility to keep the files consistent.
The reason of my rant is that I have once spent a few days figuring out how to get my deskjet working under slackware. The HOW-TO at that time was not very helpfull and it occured to me this was the most user unfriendly way of configuring a printer i had encountered so far (mind you this was 1996). Unfortunately the whole linux system is constructed in a similar way. During boot time, the kernel wrestles itself through a enourmous spagethi of initfiles. As a newby, you can easily lose an afternoon figuring out what file to edit to set a stupid environment variable.
"A central configuration system would be neat, but on the other hand you would break compatibility with a lot of existing Unix applications which expect /etc, /proc, and so forth. I guess you could set up this database in a different directory and only new apps would know about it. Better make it flat text, though - I don't think a binary registry will fly very far."
It is this conservatism which makes it difficult to configure linux. Because of that managing a linux platform is more expensive than necessary.
I'm in favor of moving away from shellscript based config files towards a central LDAP based config system. Mixing code and configuration as is common today is a bad thing.
I'm against using text files because textfiles can be fucked up with typos and duplicate data. A good db like system protects you from making those errors. Using XML would be an improvement over the current situation but also a big misstake in my eyes since XML is just as unsuitable for permanent storage of data as a normal text file.
I think current linux distributions with all their environment variables, init scripts, shell scripts and ancient tools are far more complex than necessary to accomplish the flexibility and security they offer. In my opinion an OS is nothing more than a kernel + application packages + configuration + user data. A good principle in software engineering is separation of concern. It is not practiced enough in linux because configuration files are applications which are partially stored as user data. Not too mention that the kernel's functioning depends on a legion of scripts.
The MPEG 4 divx standard is totally unrelated to the DIVX fiasco. The name sharing is confusing but since one of them no longer exists it doesn't really hurt to reuse the name, I gues.
Anyway mpeg4 divx is a compression standard which apparently delivers good compression rates at the price of performance. Both encoding and decoding is more expensive than mpeg2. The result however is not bad. Apparently it is possible to compress a dvd to fit on one cd. Also the quality is not bad apparently although I have heard various reports about that ranging from "nearly as good as DVD" to worse than VCD. I suppose it depends very much on the type of movie you encode.
Well, I consider users and independent developers a stakeholder as well. Of course individually, it is difficult to raise their voice but when united in a lobbying organization (e.g. the FSF) they can have a meaningfull vote.
I think large companies are entitled to some vote for the simple reason they invest a lot of money into linux and opensource.
"Arguments against: Stifles innovation"
This is a myth, in fact it promotes innovation because after a good standardization process there is no need to reinvent the wheel poorly. Essential is that the standardization process is done properly (i.e. it should be done by people who know what they are doing and who represent all major stakeholders) based on existing practice.
"Arguments for: Prevents fragmentation."
And makes it easier to switch distribution and makes it easier and more worthwhile to learn the details of the system since they are less likely to change. It makes it easier to write distribution independent applications (or am I the only one who thinks it sucks that many applications come in 4 or even more distribution specific packages).
I think that standardization is good. Delaying it makes it unnecessarily hard to create applications for Linux. If the linux platform has to fragment then let it at least fragment for a good reason and not because vendor X stores programs in path A while vendor Y insists on using a different path.
"This is wrong. For the term to show up in a large general purpose dictionary, the meaning must already be (or have been) in mainstream use."
Exactly. The point here is that "hacker" can be considered mainstream english (since it is often used in the media) whereas cracker is a word used exclusively by techies and therefore should be considered jargon.
The fact that a small group chooses to use specific other meanings for the words hacker and cracker is not relevant to document in a dictionary. Should cracker ever become mainstream english, a good dictionary will provide two definitions for hacker: the current, generic one and the one distinguishing itself from the term cracker. Both would be correct to use for any mainstream media although they had better stick to the second definition if they also use the word cracker.
Hacker/cracker are only one example of ill defined terminology in computer jargon. Try to get people to agree on terms like software architecture or object orientation and you'll find that there exist widely different definitions for these terms. That doesn't stop anyone from using them. Even if respected dictionaries would provide concise definitions for these terms, many people would choose to ignore them.
This case is not about facts but about opinions. This case fully depends on the support that the states backing up the trial give to it. Two are already hesitant to accept the original proposal. MS knows that and tries to influence the public further by appearing cooperative and running expensive marketing campaigns. It's all about marketing and the proven FUD concept and that's something MS is good at.
This proposal should be seen in that light. MS already knows that they are going to have to appeal whatever will be decided by Jackson. So their goal is not to fight his decision but to negotiate a good ruling for the period until the appeal.
So, MS is doing well:
- They fooled the media into believing they are cooperative now, this will definately put some pressure on Jackson.
- They have a proposal which is not particularly bad for them. Though of course this proposal will never make it as an end proposal, I wouldn't be surprised if something like this becomes the intermediate ruling until the appeal.
I would have had to learn latex instead of framemaker, so it wouldn't have saved me time. BTW. the reason I was working in word is because I got sick of compiling & debugging my texts. I used TeX before and I have to admit it is usefull if you are doing math formulas. If you are not (like me), you might as well work with a decent word processor.
The problem with word is that it is not very suitable for writing stuctured documents. It has all the necessary features but the implementation is crappy. Framemaker however is all about structure. It suits all my needs and provides the comfort of a wordprocessor whereas Latex does not. In addition it has nice graphical features and you can embed objects from other programs. Latex would force me to convert all my images to eps (not supported by the programs I use).
Having experienced Latex, Framemaker and Word I can say that I consider both Word and Latex a step backwards. Latex delivers nice results but sends you back to the stoneage from a usability perspective. Word is exactly the opposite: the interface is very nice but the result sucks. Framemaker is in the middle, decent result and a fairly good UI (not perfect though).
The strength of slashdot used to be that news that matters to nerds appeared on it within minutes after publication elsewhere.
I suspect the number of submitted newsworthy items has grown too large to give every item a serious chance of proper review. I submitted something last sunday (a very quiet day, only a handfull of new items on slashdot). At least I thought it was relevant but the people at slashdot apparently thought otherwise. My item was 'declined' within minutes after submitting, as were 387 others (at least that was the number of items in the queue). And again, there was not much going on at slashdot at that time.
So the only conclusion is that slashdot is getting out of sync with what's going on. It's taking longer for relevant stuff to appear and relevant things sometimes do not appear at all. Both things are bad and need to be addressed.
One option might be to use user reviewing of item submissions similarly to the way the forums are moderated. A moderation treshold could be used to prevent from less newsworthy stuff from appearing.
I know this has been suggested before so It will probably not happen this time either.
A second option is to appoint more reviewers. Rather than letting each reviewer review any incoming submission, it would be a good idea to use a sorting mechanism (for instance by letting the users pick a category when submitting e.g. linux, java, ms trial, quicky, etc.).
I had the same problem 1 1/2 year ago. I started out working on my master thesis in word 97. After a few weeks of no problems I ran into some problems with images. Since it was not the first time I looked for an alternative.
I then installed framemaker 5.5. It took me a week to convert my document and erase all traces of ms word from my thesis. It was a good move, though. Framemaker is excellent for creating structured documents (such as a thesis). I haven't looked back since. I now work as a Ph D. student and write all my papers in framemaker. I have not run into any serious problems yet.
I particularly like how framemaker forces you to work (structure your document using paragraph and character tags). This is also the way I used word in the past. Unfortunately word automagically fucks op your document structure if you don't pay attention.
I wouldn't consider any other wordprocessor at the moment than framemaker. Word is nice if you know how to work with it, however it is too buggy to do any graphics in it. Basically anybody I know who ever tried to do anything serious involving graphics and word has had to deal with all sorts of bugs in word. Framemaker doesn't have this problem. It's rock solid, available on many platforms (including Linux). It's also very suitable for scientific documents since most conferences and journals have templates for framemaker (if they haven't it's usually easy to create them yourself given a detailed description of how the document should look).
Of course you don't have much interoperability with word. You can import word, but the result is usually not pretty. You can also export word/rtf but there are some problems here as well (especially with graphics).
Nearly correct, it will be the dumbed down version of english also known as US english or even american. I'm not trying to insult people here but I'm just trying to make clear that the US population consists of immigrants from all over the world. Most of them adopted the local language (brittish english), with varying results. After 200 years of language evolution the result is a dumbed down version of brittish english (simpler spelling, smaller vocabulary). As a non native english speaker (I'm dutch) I have no problems understanding american english (spoken & written). However, brittish english is much more difficult.
So american english is perfect for the internet since it already is a language for immigrants. As such it is rather easy to learn for non native speakers (much easier than brittish english or even french with its rigid grammar).
However, I don't really believe in global cultures and other crap like that so i think an increasing portion of the content will in other languages than english.
Expert systems generally don't replace experts but only make their work easier. A judge is fully qualified to judge the output of an expertsystem. By using it he can save time by letting the expersystem figure out all the details.
Probably the expertsystem isn't coded in VB but only the userinterface. Probably the expertsystem is a COM component used in the system. Which is exactly the reason why perl is not very suitable since A) it is a pain to code GUIs in perl B) it is a pain to use com components in perl. The only two alternatives that come to mind for creating this app are delphi and Java (though com support is not optimal).
Mozilla is an opensource project with the specific goal of producing components for third party use (which is probably one of the reasons they don't use GPL). They ultimately aim to be a platform for developing web based applications.
Therefore Real embedding Gecko is a good thing. The more companies that follow Real's example the more mozilla becomes a threat for IE. People have been complaining a lot about Netscape's GUI without realizing they can just take the browser component and wrap it into whatever GUI they like.
I don't particularly like Real's GUI either (though it does improve if you disable all the non essential stuff) but that's not the point. The point is that Gecko is becoming a damn good browser component and that just about anybody can embed it in their product (and that includes MS). More people embedding it means more users, which means more pressure on MS to either comply with standards or even to start using Gecko themselves.
A little sidenote on real embedding Mozzilla: why don't they rewrite the GUI in XUL? That would make it much easier to port the damn thing.
If they open source BeOS, they also opensource most of BeIA, their main source of income. Sounds like a pretty stupid idea from their point of view.
Revolutions are very rare in the realm of operating systems. The only exception to this rule that comes to mind is MacOS X, but even that could be seen as an evolution of MacOS 9.
Existing operating systems tend to absorb the features that make new operating systems stand out. Right now BeOS is in the spotlight because of it's performance in multimedia applications. That's the only real edge it has over other operating system. True, the rest is nice too but not exceptionally nice.
Be as a company has not much future selling operating systems for the simple reason there is an ongoing trend to make operating systems free (linux and several embedded operating systems). Once the performance edge is lost (which inevitably will happen at some point), BeOS has nothing but customer loyalty to keep their revenue.
Considering that the DragonBall code base is written for a processor that runs at 50 Mhz, it should not be difficult to emulate it on a 200 Mhz processor. Probably the API won't change much, so a simple recompile will do for many apps.
The reason is simple: most software packages are far too complex to document completely on paper so why bother?
Basically there are two ways you can use a manual:
- as a tutorial.
- as a reference.
A tutorial should cover all major ways of using a package. Typically you don't proceed through a tutorial linearly but you pick topics that interest you in the order that is convenient for you.
A reference should be complete and easy accessible. Those requirements cannot be fullfilled by a paper manual (at least not without increasing the price of the software package significantly: thick manuals are expensive).
Both ways of using a manual can be done using online manuals. For tutorials I prefer online because it is easier to use (examples you can play with, animations, search). Also it is possible to provide references to other relevant portions of the tutorial. Take the java tutorial as an example. It is far too large to print in one book (the swing tutorial alone is hundreds of pages) yet it is very desirable to keep it complete (not to mention up to date). I don't think many people can claim to have read it completely. Given the choice I would alway prefer the online version since the best feature of the tutorial is being able to find documentation on all related issues real quick.
The same goes for references. Lets take the java API as an example. I wouldn't care for a 1000 page dump on paper of the Java API documentation. I know there are many expensive books that provide exactly that (I don't own any) so apparently there are people who think differently about this. However I wouldn't want a software company charge me for a thick (expensive) manual I won't use anyway.
An online version is so much better (links to related classes, links to relevant portions of the tutorial and vice versa, search facility).
Most software packages these days only ship with some very basic paper documentation (installation, how to get started, how to browse the online documentation). Having the installation instructions on paper can be handy but a readme file is ok for me too. Since I know how to insert a cdrom and find the readme, the dead trees are wasted on me. But I suppose it looks nice to ship some paper along with the cd.
I no longer judge a software package on the paper documentation but on the quality and accessibility of the online documentation. PDFs and postscript files are bad in my opinion (limited or no interactivity). Winhelp or HTML is much better. I mention Winhelp because that has search built into it while with HTML the searchpages have to be generated statically (limiting their usefullness).
But even the use of offline documentation is limited. In the case of Java I usually refer to the documentation at javasoft since that is the most up to date version.