Exactly, it would seem this will simply emulate the behaviour for applications that expect it, sitting on a DBUS interface. Since it now seems the whole systemd mess will not go away, I would assume this is the "correct" approach to manage it.
I can only wish non-RH GNU/Linux distrost adopted the same approach.
I was honestly suprized at the lack of HTML 5 support. I not only expected it to be there, this being a Slashdot subsite, but I expected it to be the default or at least to autodetect my browser support and start working from there. Well, let's say it's early days.
Take Gled (http://www.gled.org/ - a recent CVS snapshot is preferable), a distributed C++ application builder with OpenGL/OpenAL/FLTK interfaces, object persistence and excellent extensibility.
It certainly is not pretty the first time you look at it, that is probably true for any unique project, but if you look harder, you will see a strange tangle using ROOT, CINT the C++ interpreter, built-in C++ object dictionaries, elegant and fast network stack for object streaming and synchronization, and strangely effective remote procedure call interface. But my favourite is the auto-building FLTK gui.
While remotely involved, I do enjoy this code immensely. Try building a new library for it and enjoy GUI-enabled objects in minutes... (There is even a scratch for a TA-like game in one of the demos, not yet playable.)
Awstats seems to be the modern usual answer (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/), used and recommended by many admins and groups (in my case EGEE, European Science Grid intiative http://www.eu-egee.org/) but for traditionalists with no eye-candy desires, there is a copy of Webalizer (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) lurking on most servers and almost all destribution package repositories. It's worth looking at the wikipedia page for specials, extended verions and general info on web server statistics and analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webalizer.
There is also Sherlog, an Apache Log Analyser, specialized in user experinece tracking more than statistcs - an interesting complimentary tool (http://sherlog.europeanservers.net/.
I agree completely with you - in fact, unsupported actions should be supported by people doing them, so if you installed your unsupporeted drivers, you get to be the one fixing the mess.
However, I would like to state, and in no way am I ready to back down from this, that the accepted way of expressing liability regarding unsupported actions and/or software is:
Several posters complain that they submitted a story and saw a different submiter get accepted much later. It reminds me of the opposite phenomenon, when a Slashdot story gets repeated.
Both of these problems have technological solutions and it surprises me they are not implemented on a site such as Slashdot.
All submissions could have their text, their links and event the html of the linked page stored in a database. Links could be checked for equality with a previous submitted or posted story and for a "google find similar pages" match with a submitted or posted story. Specific terms could light up similar stories and submissions in the last 15 days. Server data, "google find similar pages", archive.org and similar services could be used to check page freshness and originality.
Of course, such research would be unthinkable for each story. But if it could be implemented programmaticaly - and if an editor while considering a story to be posted could have easy overview of similar submissions and posted stories as well as other sources with similar content: his or hers choices would be much broader.
Suddenly, posting at 11pm could very well make someone's morning story be posted on Slashdot.
Re:debian-installer for etch hits beta
on
Etch Goes Beta
·
· Score: 1
Exacty, as is plainly stated on the referred page. I do understand Etch in beta makes better news, but this is just ridiculous misreporting. Could please Slashdot editor fix the article: -> Debian Installer for Etch goes beta would be much better, thank you!:-)
I am a bit surprized most replies are rather dismissive and not many tools have been suggested to actually solve the problem suggested.
If you think of it, there are actually only two wide-spread formats: rpm and deb. And all big distributions have their convoulted ways of installing these two packages even when they are not native to them. If you can cover those two formats with packages for different distributions (Fedora, Madriva, Debian, different Debian-based distros), you can reach many users.
Some tools, of course, offer more, including non-linux packages.
I can give several examples from the top of my bookmarks:
OpenPKG seems like an interesting portable packaging framework. I would be interested to hear from people that have had any exeprience with this.
PkgWrite is a perl tool that builds debian and rpm packages from a single spec file. GNU/LGLP with liberal relicensing. I suppose it will not save any dependancy issues for you.
EMP is a commercial solution, offering native packages (debian, redhat, solaris, HPUX etc.) and script-based installs. It costs $99, has a stale web site and I never tried it. But for commercial software, perhaps it can help you.
STOW is a free perl-based fancy package manager that was pushed by IBM at one time.
But at the end of the day, it is not very difficult to prepare debian and rpm package specs, build chrooted building environemnts and support several distros. Users are really happy when they can apt-get install your software, even if it is binary-only and from your own server. If you don't have nasty kernel dependencies, chrooted building environment might be easier than it seems. And you will only ever be sure in the case of binary distribution if you can build and test your package yourself.
And if you have users who want graphical installers, you can always trick Loki to install a standard package. Which should be its default behaivour anywyay, IMHO.
Exactly! It is obvious the author is comparing OpenOffice to Microsoft's Applications while he does not in fact know these applications well enough to do a comparison. Of course, one would expect, in a "hands on" comparison, that the author would be actually trying both applications in similar sitautions and usage patterns.
But there are other obvious problems with the article: the author mentions oodraw and oomath in a way that makes readers believe it appeared only in version 2.0 - which is, of course, not true. He never even mentions ooweb, the HTML editor, as if it never existed. He mentions (but does not discuss) the database interface, without realizing there was database support in OO version 1. About differences between version 1 and 2 of OpenOffice, there is very little discussion.
In general one has to say the title and Slashdot story is largely misleading - this is not a serious article, not a hands-on comparison, not worth your time. If you are using OpenOffice 1, you probably know more about the new version already.
By fat the easiest solution is the SiwtchProxy Tool, a Firefox Extension that is easy to install and manage.
SiwtchProxy Tool offers a simple status-bar interface where the user can change proxies on the fly. It comes with a pre-set anonymous setting which will change the proxy periodically (user-supplied value). For the list of proxies used, you can supply a simple text file or use a web-based dynamicaly updated list.
I am deeply convinced that porting assures portability, and portability is one aspect of clean code where bugs and wrong assumpsons are noticed, resolved and corrected.
Surely porting to platforms such as the Alpha and UltraSparc was a very good basis for porting to platforms such as AMD-64. This is a crucial advantage for free software, where we can be sure that we will be able to support new platforms and make interesting platforms mainstream.
On the other hand, the premisis that the main maintainers can not be responsible for all the porting effeorts is reasonable. Debian is thinking along the same lines, and for good reasons.
I think it is wrong and bad to assume porting is a bad thing and avoid it. Even apparently futile projects such as porting free software for closed commercial platforms gives a large amount of flexibility in design and portability and helps projects such as embedded graphical environments.
Portability is just one facet of advantages of free software and as such is a precios thing that we have to cultivate. But it sould be just another part of the free and open collaboration development process, not an obligations for the main developers.
I don't want to draw any analogies, move borders or hold specific political grudges, but even as an offtopic, this deserves an answer: surely you can not possibly assume it is right to hold on to any country or region conquered by war? In what way is that different from robbing, thievery and other more moundain acts of violence for profit?
And, incidentally, I see absolutely no excuse for leaders killing in war: people killed are just as dead in the end. It is an excuse for the soldiers in a battle - but never for the leaders who put them there.
If you are unsure about any of that, try to imagine being in the skin of the soldier, the killed and the conquered. This is called empathy and is supposed to be a basic ability of sane human individuals. It's a good test many world leaders appear to fail on regular basis, but refuse to get hospitalised nevertheless.
(Remember: it is called peace effort when we do it to others, but terrorism when they do it to us.)
There is some real mystery in the rolex spam thing: out of ~90 spams a day, I only get a rolex a day through.
Are spam assassin people biased for certain brands of watches?
Somebody please look into it and report back.
(Not all providers slip rolexes or any spam in your mail, one of them has only slipped me one (as in 1, yes, a single one) spam in 2 years, but I have a strong suspicion they must be really reading the mail.)
*tongue-in-cheek* Hey, now that is hate speak! I don't have any problem with anyone being dirty, hippies are ok with me, and being a commie is your political freedom (chasing commies, however, should be impossible in any democracy, since it prevents others from political freedom and freedom of speach by sticking them in jail for nothing. J. E. Hoover should be prosecuted, even postmortem).
But being stupid, or, even worse, consciously using money to prevent people doing good things, is evil. I don't found evil, period.
There is a very clear moral issue behind this: if you are certain SCO is blackmailing and their claims are void, then this company did not do their job and they invested their money in SCO, supporting further harrasing of free software and free software users.
So, if they think they should fund harassing GNU/Linux users, should they do that with your money?
That is a very interesting point! I missed out completely that non-free addons are not built on all architectures.
Of course, this and the whole MegaPOV thing is mostly due to the licensing of POVRay, and can't be helped easily.
On the other hand, it is quite difficult for me to make my mind up on the free/non-free issues for distributions such as Debian. I understand the logic, by being fully dependant on Pine (my fingers know the bindings) and in love with things such as POV, I give some credit to users who want non-free applications.
Debian does, of course, but if you need RPM, SUSE does it (even 64-bit). Third-party providers (mostly inidividals) ship it for Fedora, such as Matsuura Takanori; but you probably know that:) - it might still help some old hand wanting to toy with the examples once the voting is over... I wish some of the extensions (MegaPovRay, anyone) would be as quick to install on a large number of machines...
Agreed. I Europe, for example, people don't only expect to keep their job when they are temporarily disabled due to an illness, they actually do keep their job. In America most of the good social-security systems died with the end of the Aztec kingdom, I am afraid. And I do hope that parent poster never finds out why this might be important.
I think this is mostly a legal problem but I don't know americal laws well enogh to understand your position regarding a rather special and temporary engagement you seem to be describing. Grocklaw, anyone?:)
While I personally prefer GNU/Linux system for a miriad of reasons, I simply took into account the phrase Does anyone know of any complete voice activated computer control for Windows XP or Linux? in the original question.
It does look strange IBM's VivaVoice is listed as supporting Linux, but it never says so on the web page. I thought it was worth some attention since hiding GNU/Linux support in a dark corner is not so general these days as it used to be.
But since most solutions for disabled tend to be disgustingly overpriced or at least pricy, it is rather probable they would target a proprietary system and so a Microsoft platform will probably be better choice for you anyway.
There is also the problem that most X11 toolkits don't have straightforward and compatible automation interfaces and such a solution might be a lot more difficult to do for an X11 envronment. It would be a worth project, however, and perhaps this question should be rerouted directly to the FreeDesktop project, since a good set of standard and interfaces would probably produce good base for a free solution.
TBI Resources seems a like a good list of resources and information in the field, and it suggests IBM's Via Voice is an alternative. It's web site does not mention Linux and seems to be dictation-oriented, not general control.
Perhaps some of the mailing lists (such as ViaVoice User's ML) would provide more definite answers.
No souch tools are available in mainstream Linux distros, to may knowledge.
I was a bit surprised to see a typical prejudice in this article about prejudices:
It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics.
I wonder on what that statement was based if not on a fully unfounded but fashionable conviction that somehow the hard sciences are better than the human and social sciences, and the hard (sic) scentist therefore are smarter (and deserve more money and better academic treatment, academic tourism etc.).
The interesting thing about this belief is that it is shared by both the hard scientists and the human/social scientists. But to my experience, confronting a member of one camp with a textbook from the other camp will produce very similar results, just a different reaction: the hard scientist will dismiss the assumptions and terminology as "absurd", "fuzzy", "bad" or "meaningless", while the human/social scientist will be impressed by the wanderful undechiphrable meaning.
You should always try to peek and think out of the box. For that, I find it very necessary for all thinking humans to escape the narrow prejudice of their specialisation: all human/social scientists should trained themselves well in maths at the very least, and all hard scientists should train themseves in philosophy an/or linguistics at the very least.
I am biased, but I think Gled is a very network-efficient and fast GPL'd OO RPC soulution for C++.
It is in early stages of desing and development, but is fully fucntional and comes with a complete toolkit and devloping framework, including a C++ interpreter (ROOTCINT), visualisation, object collection introspection and streaming interfaces from ROOT, autogenerated GUI for system and user C++ classes, object-collection monitor, cluster infrastructure using a hierarchical OO RPC system and visualisation with a GL renderer.
It is a complex design and still not a stable target, but it is already very usable. A a development environment, it provides for a very fast development cycle with advanced introspection and monitoring abilities. Autogenerated GUI also saves a lot of time.
As a two-year user of OVH, I have only praise for their service. Their dns-managing web forms are very cool and easy to handle, all their services so far were very responsive, I have recieved no spam from them except very civil information that payment for the next year's registration is approaching and I found their free additional services (mail handling with optional virus/spam cleaning) very nice, and the pricing of their hosting services rahter interesting.
But their basic domain registration package is perfect and, as stated above, very reasonalby priced.
They also provide a French interface and are stationed in Europe, so your domain is free from troubles with american legal system.:)
I agree, omission of RuneQuest is a big mistake. Personally, I have been a game master from 1989 (with one game spawning 13 years), and most of my games and game systems had some RuneQuest influence. (The one thing I consistenty hated was melee and strike rounds, they are too mechaninc and take too much time.)
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, it would seem this will simply emulate the behaviour for applications that expect it, sitting on a DBUS interface. Since it now seems the whole systemd mess will not go away, I would assume this is the "correct" approach to manage it.
I can only wish non-RH GNU/Linux distrost adopted the same approach.
Obviously a mistake. I guess you clicked on the android tag to say "not android"?
I was honestly suprized at the lack of HTML 5 support. I not only expected it to be there, this being a Slashdot subsite, but I expected it to be the default or at least to autodetect my browser support and start working from there. Well, let's say it's early days.
Take Gled (http://www.gled.org/ - a recent CVS snapshot is preferable), a distributed C++ application builder with OpenGL/OpenAL/FLTK interfaces, object persistence and excellent extensibility.
It certainly is not pretty the first time you look at it, that is probably true for any unique project, but if you look harder, you will see a strange tangle using ROOT, CINT the C++ interpreter, built-in C++ object dictionaries, elegant and fast network stack for object streaming and synchronization, and strangely effective remote procedure call interface. But my favourite is the auto-building FLTK gui.
While remotely involved, I do enjoy this code immensely.
Try building a new library for it and enjoy GUI-enabled objects in minutes... (There is even a scratch for a TA-like game in one of the demos, not yet playable.)
Awstats seems to be the modern usual answer (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/), used and recommended by many admins and groups (in my case EGEE, European Science Grid intiative http://www.eu-egee.org/) but for traditionalists with no eye-candy desires, there is a copy of Webalizer (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) lurking on most servers and almost all destribution package repositories. It's worth looking at the wikipedia page for specials, extended verions and general info on web server statistics and analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webalizer.
Particularly, Stone Steps Webalizer is an interesting version of feature-full and candy-enabled version: http://www.stonesteps.ca/projects/webalizer/. Others can be easily found on Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=webalizer§ion=p rojects (i.e. Webalizer Extended with included Geolizer and extensive 404 analysis support, http://www.patrickfrei.ch/webalizer/ and AwFull with usability, CSS and geo-ip features, http://www.stedee.id.au/awffull etc.).
Others can be found on Freshmeat (117 hits at this time http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=web&trove_cat_id=24 5§ion=trove_cat) and Wikipedia (very short and poor stub of a list that you might want to improve after your extensive testing :-) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_web_ana lytics_software.
There is also Sherlog, an Apache Log Analyser, specialized in user experinece tracking more than statistcs - an interesting complimentary tool (http://sherlog.europeanservers.net/.
I agree completely with you - in fact, unsupported actions should be supported by people doing them, so if you installed your unsupporeted drivers, you get to be the one fixing the mess.
However, I would like to state, and in no way am I ready to back down from this, that the accepted way of expressing liability regarding unsupported actions and/or software is:
If in doubt, see the sources ... :-)
Several posters complain that they submitted a story and saw a different submiter get accepted much later. It reminds me of the opposite phenomenon, when a Slashdot story gets repeated.
Both of these problems have technological solutions and it surprises me they are not implemented on a site such as Slashdot.
All submissions could have their text, their links and event the html of the linked page stored in a database. Links could be checked for equality with a previous submitted or posted story and for a "google find similar pages" match with a submitted or posted story. Specific terms could light up similar stories and submissions in the last 15 days. Server data, "google find similar pages", archive.org and similar services could be used to check page freshness and originality.
Of course, such research would be unthinkable for each story. But if it could be implemented programmaticaly - and if an editor while considering a story to be posted could have easy overview of similar submissions and posted stories as well as other sources with similar content: his or hers choices would be much broader.
Suddenly, posting at 11pm could very well make someone's morning story be posted on Slashdot.
Exacty, as is plainly stated on the referred page. I do understand Etch in beta makes better news, but this is just ridiculous misreporting. Could please Slashdot editor fix the article: -> Debian Installer for Etch goes beta would be much better, thank you! :-)
OpenPKG seems like an interesting portable packaging framework. I would be interested to hear from people that have had any exeprience with this.
PkgWrite is a perl tool that builds debian and rpm packages from a single spec file. GNU/LGLP with liberal relicensing. I suppose it will not save any dependancy issues for you.
EMP is a commercial solution, offering native packages (debian, redhat, solaris, HPUX etc.) and script-based installs. It costs $99, has a stale web site and I never tried it. But for commercial software, perhaps it can help you.
STOW is a free perl-based fancy package manager that was pushed by IBM at one time.
But at the end of the day, it is not very difficult to prepare debian and rpm package specs, build chrooted building environemnts and support several distros. Users are really happy when they can apt-get install your software, even if it is binary-only and from your own server. If you don't have nasty kernel dependencies, chrooted building environment might be easier than it seems. And you will only ever be sure in the case of binary distribution if you can build and test your package yourself. And if you have users who want graphical installers, you can always trick Loki to install a standard package. Which should be its default behaivour anywyay, IMHO.
Exactly! It is obvious the author is comparing OpenOffice to Microsoft's Applications while he does not in fact know these applications well enough to do a comparison. Of course, one would expect, in a "hands on" comparison, that the author would be actually trying both applications in similar sitautions and usage patterns.
But there are other obvious problems with the article: the author mentions oodraw and oomath in a way that makes readers believe it appeared only in version 2.0 - which is, of course, not true. He never even mentions ooweb, the HTML editor, as if it never existed. He mentions (but does not discuss) the database interface, without realizing there was database support in OO version 1. About differences between version 1 and 2 of OpenOffice, there is very little discussion.
In general one has to say the title and Slashdot story is largely misleading - this is not a serious article, not a hands-on comparison, not worth your time. If you are using OpenOffice 1, you probably know more about the new version already.
By fat the easiest solution is the SiwtchProxy Tool, a Firefox Extension that is easy to install and manage.
r oxy or https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?application=firefox&id=125
SiwtchProxy Tool offers a simple status-bar interface where the user can change proxies on the fly. It comes with a pre-set anonymous setting which will change the proxy periodically (user-supplied value). For the list of proxies used, you can supply a simple text file or use a web-based dynamicaly updated list.
For SwitchProxy Tool homepage, see http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/switchp
(I have not observed any of the problems mentioned by the users - with the obvious exception that sites that know you by IP address won't recognize you if you use the anonymising proxy, but that can hardly be construed as a bug.)
You can find several suitable anonymising proxy lists in this forum:
http://forums.mozmonkey.com/viewtopic.php?t=19
It's really quite fast, elegant and easy.
I am deeply convinced that porting assures portability, and portability is one aspect of clean code where bugs and wrong assumpsons are noticed, resolved and corrected.
Surely porting to platforms such as the Alpha and UltraSparc was a very good basis for porting to platforms such as AMD-64. This is a crucial advantage for free software, where we can be sure that we will be able to support new platforms and make interesting platforms mainstream.
On the other hand, the premisis that the main maintainers can not be responsible for all the porting effeorts is reasonable. Debian is thinking along the same lines, and for good reasons.
I think it is wrong and bad to assume porting is a bad thing and avoid it. Even apparently futile projects such as porting free software for closed commercial platforms gives a large amount of flexibility in design and portability and helps projects such as embedded graphical environments.
Portability is just one facet of advantages of free software and as such is a precios thing that we have to cultivate. But it sould be just another part of the free and open collaboration development process, not an obligations for the main developers.
Just my 2 cents.
I don't want to draw any analogies, move borders or hold specific political grudges, but even as an offtopic, this deserves an answer: surely you can not possibly assume it is right to hold on to any country or region conquered by war? In what way is that different from robbing, thievery and other more moundain acts of violence for profit?
And, incidentally, I see absolutely no excuse for leaders killing in war: people killed are just as dead in the end. It is an excuse for the soldiers in a battle - but never for the leaders who put them there.
If you are unsure about any of that, try to imagine being in the skin of the soldier, the killed and the conquered. This is called empathy and is supposed to be a basic ability of sane human individuals. It's a good test many world leaders appear to fail on regular basis, but refuse to get hospitalised nevertheless.
(Remember: it is called peace effort when we do it to others, but terrorism when they do it to us.)
There is some real mystery in the rolex spam thing: out of ~90 spams a day, I only get a rolex a day through.
Are spam assassin people biased for certain brands of watches?
Somebody please look into it and report back.
(Not all providers slip rolexes or any spam in your mail, one of them has only slipped me one (as in 1, yes, a single one) spam in 2 years, but I have a strong suspicion they must be really reading the mail.)
*tongue-in-cheek* Hey, now that is hate speak! I don't have any problem with anyone being dirty, hippies are ok with me, and being a commie is your political freedom (chasing commies, however, should be impossible in any democracy, since it prevents others from political freedom and freedom of speach by sticking them in jail for nothing. J. E. Hoover should be prosecuted, even postmortem).
But being stupid, or, even worse, consciously using money to prevent people doing good things, is evil. I don't found evil, period.
There is a very clear moral issue behind this: if you are certain SCO is blackmailing and their claims are void, then this company did not do their job and they invested their money in SCO, supporting further harrasing of free software and free software users.
So, if they think they should fund harassing GNU/Linux users, should they do that with your money?
That is a very interesting point! I missed out completely that non-free addons are not built on all architectures.
Of course, this and the whole MegaPOV thing is mostly due to the licensing of POVRay, and can't be helped easily.
On the other hand, it is quite difficult for me to make my mind up on the free/non-free issues for distributions such as Debian. I understand the logic, by being fully dependant on Pine (my fingers know the bindings) and in love with things such as POV, I give some credit to users who want non-free applications.
Debian does, of course, but if you need RPM, SUSE does it (even 64-bit). Third-party providers (mostly inidividals) ship it for Fedora, such as Matsuura Takanori; but you probably know that :) - it might still help some old hand wanting to toy with the examples once the voting is over...
I wish some of the extensions (MegaPovRay, anyone) would be as quick to install on a large number of machines...
Agreed. I Europe, for example, people don't only expect to keep their job when they are temporarily disabled due to an illness, they actually do keep their job. In America most of the good social-security systems died with the end of the Aztec kingdom, I am afraid. And I do hope that parent poster never finds out why this might be important.
:)
I think this is mostly a legal problem but I don't know americal laws well enogh to understand your position regarding a rather special and temporary engagement you seem to be describing. Grocklaw, anyone?
While I personally prefer GNU/Linux system for a miriad of reasons, I simply took into account the phrase Does anyone know of any complete voice activated computer control for Windows XP or Linux? in the original question.
It does look strange IBM's VivaVoice is listed as supporting Linux, but it never says so on the web page. I thought it was worth some attention since hiding GNU/Linux support in a dark corner is not so general these days as it used to be.
But since most solutions for disabled tend to be disgustingly overpriced or at least pricy, it is rather probable they would target a proprietary system and so a Microsoft platform will probably be better choice for you anyway.
There is also the problem that most X11 toolkits don't have straightforward and compatible automation interfaces and such a solution might be a lot more difficult to do for an X11 envronment. It would be a worth project, however, and perhaps this question should be rerouted directly to the FreeDesktop project, since a good set of standard and interfaces would probably produce good base for a free solution.
TBI Resources seems a like a good list of resources and information in the field, and it suggests IBM's Via Voice is an alternative. It's web site does not mention Linux and seems to be dictation-oriented, not general control.
Perhaps some of the mailing lists (such as ViaVoice User's ML) would provide more definite answers.
No souch tools are available in mainstream Linux distros, to may knowledge.
I wonder on what that statement was based if not on a fully unfounded but fashionable conviction that somehow the hard sciences are better than the human and social sciences, and the hard (sic) scentist therefore are smarter (and deserve more money and better academic treatment, academic tourism etc.).
The interesting thing about this belief is that it is shared by both the hard scientists and the human/social scientists. But to my experience, confronting a member of one camp with a textbook from the other camp will produce very similar results, just a different reaction: the hard scientist will dismiss the assumptions and terminology as "absurd", "fuzzy", "bad" or "meaningless", while the human/social scientist will be impressed by the wanderful undechiphrable meaning.
You should always try to peek and think out of the box. For that, I find it very necessary for all thinking humans to escape the narrow prejudice of their specialisation: all human/social scientists should trained themselves well in maths at the very least, and all hard scientists should train themseves in philosophy an/or linguistics at the very least.
Obviously, geeks should do both!
It is in early stages of desing and development, but is fully fucntional and comes with a complete toolkit and devloping framework, including a C++ interpreter (ROOTCINT), visualisation, object collection introspection and streaming interfaces from ROOT, autogenerated GUI for system and user C++ classes, object-collection monitor, cluster infrastructure using a hierarchical OO RPC system and visualisation with a GL renderer.
It is a complex design and still not a stable target, but it is already very usable. A a development environment, it provides for a very fast development cycle with advanced introspection and monitoring abilities. Autogenerated GUI also saves a lot of time.
As a two-year user of OVH, I have only praise for their service. Their dns-managing web forms are very cool and easy to handle, all their services so far were very responsive, I have recieved no spam from them except very civil information that payment for the next year's registration is approaching and I found their free additional services (mail handling with optional virus/spam cleaning) very nice, and the pricing of their hosting services rahter interesting.
:)
But their basic domain registration package is perfect and, as stated above, very reasonalby priced.
They also provide a French interface and are stationed in Europe, so your domain is free from troubles with american legal system.
I agree, omission of RuneQuest is a big mistake. Personally, I have been a game master from 1989 (with one game spawning 13 years), and most of my games and game systems had some RuneQuest influence.
(The one thing I consistenty hated was melee and strike rounds, they are too mechaninc and take too much time.)
For a longer history of Role Playing Games with a different approach, see RPG History by Astinus">. I was very much surprised by the quality (and length!) of these articles!