Sorry, you don't qualify for coffee snob status. I'm not being judgemental here--just check out the alt.coffee.geek newsgroup and you'll see what I mean.
Some of those people are freaks--I roast and grind my own coffee, and I certainly don't qualify as a coffee snob when you check them out.
Tarpley's is fine and dandy, and I think it's great they support the Mozilla foundation. But I would recommend doing what I did: buy your organic, fair-trade, bird-friendly coffee from Birds and Beans, take the money you saved (CDN$6 a pound for green coffee in bulk--awesome prices!), and donate that to the Mozilla Foundation.
A couple of months ago I ordered 45 pounds of coffee and donated $50 to the Mozilla Foundation. I'm drinking kickbutt coffee (with only me to blame if the brew is bad), helping out third-world farmers and the environment, and supporting the makers of my favourite browser.
Well, at least one of their controllers was not garbage.
I've lived very happily with a pair of Gravis Xterminators for the past five years (gameport connector, not the more recent USB thingies by the same name), used mostly for successive generations of extended sessions of EA Sports NHL '99-'04. Exuberant, hard-gripping, sweaty sessions of that game. And they offered a passthrough on their connector so you could chain two controllers to a single gameport. Not quite as good as Microsoft's gameport connectors on the back of their original Sidewinders, but acceptable.
The Xterminators were really my ideal gamepads. They have both digital and analog D-pads, offer the usual 6 buttons on the right, plus a hat switch, right/left triggers, throttle, start & select buttons, and paddle switches perfect for pinball-style games. They remind me somewhat of Xbox controllers in form factor--but I haven't played an Xbox, so that's purely a visual connection. I can say that I was always comfortable plaing games with the Xterminators for hours on end.
I paid something like CDN$90 per controller when I bought them, but I was hapy to pay that because I had used their controllers ever since my Amiga-owning days, and they had never let me down with faulty units. (The first Gravis joystick I purchased offered customizable stiffness for the X & Y axes, which was pretty cool for late eighties technology).
The Xterminator combo has lasted extremely well, and only yesterday did the combination of tempting holiday rebates, rumblepad allure, consistently top ranking in PC Game magazine, and easy connectivity to friend's computers seduce me into purchasing a pair of Logitech Wingman Rumblepads (USB).
I had contacted Gravis months ago telling them that I was looking at purchasing new gamepads and interested in finding a Canadian distributor for their new USB Gravis Xterminator Force Feedback gamepads, but they never returned my email... and in the mean time, I did read some very negative reviews about the quality of the new units. Finally, the lack of analog input would limit my capabilities in the new EA Sports franchises--so my choice was made to abandon Gravis with this generation of gamepads.
If they had simply updated their original Xterminators to add force feedback and USB connectors, I would have been playing hockey with those last night instead of the new Wingmans. Ah well...
Augh. I promise that this is my last post on this matter.
You said:
The post by DenialS appears to be in denial about the fact that the GPL expressly permits this
(sharing Mandrake 9.2 images publically -- DenialS). This is legal.
As I stated in my original post, the issue is respect for Mandrake's approach to maintaining their existence as a company. Yes, Mandrake chose to GPL their distribution--and I'm very happy about that. That's why I have contributed money and time to their company, and hope that it continues to exist in the future. And it's one of the major reasons I contribute to Mandrake rather than SuSE.
I do find it surprising and disappointing that so many people equate legal actions with ethical actions. Perhaps, by the letter of the law, you can legally access and/or redistribute the 9.2 images right now. Be that as it may, I argue that the ethical approach is to respect Mandrake's policies by either contributing money/time to Mandrake to gain early access to those images, or to wait for Mandrake to fully and publically release those images in another couple of weeks.
I'm quite clear on the concepts of the GPL and what it stands for. Mandrake made their RPMs and source RPMs tree publically available the same day that they made their ISOs available to us--which more than meets their obligations as a distributor of GPLed code.
In particular, the clause that appears to apply to Mandrake is:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
* a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
* b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
* c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.
Now, who was it that needs some education on the GPL? I'm sorry, but I don't particularly care to allow you to try to justify your actions with sloppy, uninformed rationalization.
I admit that I'm disappointed with the evident glee that some of my peers appear to be taking in posting public torrents for Mandrake 9.2. Mandrake is a company that has contributed a great deal to the open source community, but it is a company that must pay wages to living, breathing people. They made two small changes to their release process for 9.2 to try to ensure that those people continue to be able to put food on their table and contribute more skill and knowledge to our community:
Sponsored ads during install and preset bookmarks
Delay availability of the 9.2 release to all but MandrakeClub members and Mandrake developers / translators
As a member of MandrakeClub for the past year, with a renewal for the next year, I have ponied up and contributed US$120 towards the continued survival of Mandrake the company--and by extension, those who eke out a living contributing to and pulling together this excellent product.
In addition, I have submitted bug reports, contributed to the technical support forums, and tried (unsuccessfully, alas) to contribute an rpm to the Mandrake contribs.
It bothers me that some of my peers clearly don't respect the approach that Mandrake has taken to attempt to supplement its meagre revenue. Some of the attitude, I assume, is an adoption of the "The net sees censorship as damage, and routes around it" perspective. I would argue that prematurely sharing the Mandrake 9.2 release images is a misapplication of that perspective. Delaying the release of the 9.2 images is a reward for those who contributed directly to the latest release, and the images will be made officially available to everyone else in a matter of weeks.
There is one case that merits consideration. In the same way that Red Hat chose leading Linux developers to receive shares of its IPO years back (ah the good old days), there are undoubtedly many developers whose code is being used and distributed by Mandrake. It would be nice if Mandrake also invited those developers to access the early 9.2 torrents--although with so many packages, tracking all of the developers and ensuring that they have authorized IDs might require an entire company in itself.
Some of it is pure selfishness, in the manner of a child's tantrum: "I want this free, and I want it NOW!"
I suspect some of the attitude is also a simple fascination with the ability to adopt technical measures to overcome business policy. While setting up a BitTorrent offers a bit of a gee-whiz factor, I predict that overcoming Mandrake's business policy by removing one of their two means of increasing revenues will have one of two effects, neither one particularly pleasant:
Mandrake will increase the use of sponsored ads and bookmarks, making their presence more invasive (imagine your OpenOffice assistant rendered as a Bawls Guarana beverage, offering an additional tip linking to the Bawls site every time you invoke help) and harder to overcome
Mandrake will give up trying to produce a commercial product, stop paying its developers, and one more source of open source innovation will dwindle away. Aggressive adoption of the first tactic might eventually lead to this outcome as well, as users tire of ads in their face.
So I'm asking everyone out there sharing unofficial Mandrake 9.2 ISOs: please
consider the larger ramifications of your actions. In isolation, what you're doing might not seem all that important--but when you're posting (and publicizing, and taking advantage of) torrents on Slashdot, your actions will have a detrimental effect on the company that's making the very distribution you're so keenly sharing.
And that distribution simply might not be available to share in the future...
The web site doesn't explicitly state that it is fair trade coffee, so you have to assume that it is not fair trade coffee. Well, I have to assume that, anyways, based on the following logic: you're not going to lose many sales to rabid capitalists if you quietly state 'All coffee that we sell is fair trade'--but you will gain sales from moderate liberals like me.
Instead, I'll continue to get my coffee from Merchants of Green Coffee, where you have a wide choice of green, fair-trade, organic coffees that you can roast to suit your own tastes.
Oh yeah, and I plan to donate directly to the Mozilla Foundation so 100% of my money goes there.
Don't get me wrong--the owner is trying to do the right thing, and it's a step in the right direction for the Ayn Rand-ish culture of "every ethical choice is a selfish choice"--in this case, consumers get to contribute in a small way to the Mozilla Foundation by exercising well-honed consumption skills and getting coffee as a result. It's just not a formula that suits my personal tastes.
Ahem. This ALA-accredited librarian (I just happen to work in the software industry) is offended by the summary and linked-to site's suggestion that libraries don't encourage a sense of community.
As well as making books, videos, CDs, and other media available to patrons, physical libraries tend to offer their facilities to groups (for no or nominal fees) to get together for discussion. I have attended poetry-writing sessions, mid-80's computer clubs, environmental activism sessions, and local community groups, all hosted by local public libraries. Just check the bulletin boards (physical, or online) for notification and invitation to attend the many happenings at your local library.
Here are a few stats from a March 2002 survey commissioned by the American Library Association:
66% of all respondents reported using the public library at least once in the last year in person, by phone, or by computer.
Of those respondents who reported using the public library in person in the last year, 67% said they had taken out books, 47% had consulted a librarian, 47% used reference materials, 31% read newspapers or magazines, 26% connected to the Internet, 25% took out CDs or videos, and 14% heard a speaker, saw a movie or attended a special program.
91% believe libraries are changing and dynamic places with a variety of activities for the whole family.
Those 14% sure have good opportunities for developing some sort of a community.
Maybe walking into a room without knowing anyone else there is daunting, so virtual communities like http://www.communitybooks.org offer a lower courage barrier for participating -- but at the same time, it's a little easier to melt into the background (or flame like mad) when you disagree with someone else's position.
And please--that stereotype of you'll probably get shushed is way wrong. If you get shushed, it's not going to be a librarian telling you to be quiet; they want you to be active and engaged. If you're approaching another patron who is trying to read, that patron might respond positively or negatively--but that's the risk you have to take if you really want to make contact with someone else who appears to share your interests.
IBM DB2 allows C / Java / COBOL / Fortran...
on
Can .NET Really Scale?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In DB2, you can write stored procedures and functions in many different programming languages, then call those routines through standard SQL. It's a nice way of reducing the network overhead that would be introduced if you had to send thousands of rows of data back to your client, then process the data on the client. Of course, it's also a little bit tricky to program...
It was also pretty handy in the old days if you wanted to automatically trigger an email when your dinky little online sales site recorded a whopping $500 order for Idaho potatoes, and you had to warm up the jalopy so you could make the drive to Idaho.
Hmm. Would technical knowledge be a prerequisite for being liberated from the Matrix? Or would a philosophy of sufficiently developed awareness of self and others (you must have seen the Buddhist-dressed inhabitants of Zion, who looked vaguely Asiatic) enable you to become aware of the fallacy you're living, and make you a candidate for liberation?
Or is there even any criteria for liberation, other than if some zealot believes that you're "the one"... thus far we haven't had much revealed to us about what makes a good liberation candidate.
Or the obvious reason why light-skinned people didn't dominate Zion: assuming that the 1% of anomalies came from all over the world, you would get a distribution that reflected the actual percentages of the world's population, rather than a Western-centric distribution reflecting the economic target audience of (most? all?( Hollywood films). Kudos to the Wachowskis if this was one of their design points...
You can run Xfree on cygwin either in full screen mode (that's how I run it now, using WindowMaker as my window manager) or in windowed mode (that's how it runs by default). This is well documented in the Cygwin XFree86 User's Guide.
I'm a bigtime fan. Once I started using it, I returned my Exceed license to my corporate software license managing person and suggested the Cygwin/X combination as a very reasonable alternative. I love firing up an X session on my Windows laptop, typing "ssh -X user@hostname" in my xterm, and remotely testing apps running on our UNIX boxes.
It looks like they do a fade to or from black with a picture of a tombstone marking the birth and death of Bleem, but on Mozilla, at least, you just get black. I can't really blame them; writing and testing cross-browser JavaScript probably wasn't a high priority for the remnants of any of their remaining funds.
Argh... the SlashCode still doesn't recognize URL-encoded text fields submitted by Mozilla, which is why I'm reposting this.
I ran Token Ring on my personal desktop and a server at work for over two years without any incidents requiring sysadmin intervention.
Here's how I did it:
check out the development site: http://www.linuxtr.net. This site is quite good about posting patches and information for the tr module.
get a static IP! The Linux token ring driver was not at all happy with DHCP
double-check your network settings--we had dire threats about setting our MTU right (yep, even in Windows), so I ensured that I knew what I was doing before plugging into the network
get recent linux kernels! I used Red Hat, who didn't ship token ring support, so needing to recompile the kernel anyways, I always picked up the latest kernels. For a driver that few people apparently use, there have been a lot of patches that made their way into the kernel. I ran 2.2.19 on the server, and 2.4.8 on my desktop. I don't know what Debian gives you, but I would consider recompiling your kernel.
read the docs! Unfortunately the Token Ring HOWTO appears to have forked down two paths: out of date (http://www.linuxtr.net), and further out of date (http://www.linuxdoc.org). I wrote the author of the newer version (Tom Gall), asking him to submit the updates to the LDP, but despite his assurances it never happened. Sigh.
with IBM TR cards, you have to run some program that changes the firmware settings to get it to run in Turbo 16/4 mode, or some such arcana
So, it worked for me, as I said, for a couple of years. But then I moved to a new site with pure Ethernet, and I have to admit that life is much simpler now.
IBM DB2 on Linux already runs on Intel clusters, and has for about 6 months (see DB2 UDB Enterprise Extended Edition). In fact, it also runs on Linux for the S/390 platform and Linux for the Itanium platform. I don't think that Oracle claims to be playing in either of those areas yet...
I'm looking forward to reading more details about Red Hat's database product. This article was just a teaser.
While you said you want to explore a different, cross-platform language, the examples you listed were all integrated development environments IDE, not languages. Indeed, ActiveState's Komodo IDE can actually be used to develop in many different languages:
Komodo recognizes multiple languages including JavaScript^(TM), HTML, Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, XML, and XSLT
Conspicuously missing from that list is the language once championed as the cross-platform solution: Java. And let's not forget about the cross-platform capabilities of ANSI C or C++, if you stick to cross-platform libraries (e.g. no Microsoft Foundation Classes!)
But, perhaps the real question is, what do you plan to do with this cross-platform language? Apart from being able to run on more than one platform, do you need:
speed
easy GUI development
standardized database access
standalone executables, interpreted scripts, browser-as-client, or server-side development
And exactly which platforms do you need to run this on? Just Windows and Linux? PalmOS and WinCE? Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Plan 9, and Amiga?
On the IDE side, what features are you looking for:
syntax highlighting
syntax completion
auto-formatting
debugging
integrated help and reference info
drag'n'drop GUI development
code repository/version control
IDE itself running on different platforms
free (beer or philosophically) or proprietary
If all you need is syntax highlighting and auto-formatting, then VIm could suit you just fine, with some custom scripting for goodies like debugging and version control. But you might want more than that.
As with many problems in life, you need to refine your question before you're going to be able to come up with the right answer. Putting together a good set of requirements really helps when you're trying to solve a problem. And it helps other people provide intelligent commentary.
Re:Version 0�9�9�9���, or priority problems�
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Mozilla 0.9.1 Out
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The recently OSI-approved Common Source License linked to in the main story is actually the second license IBM has had approved by the OSI. The first license was the IBM Public License.
As I understand it, one of the main differences is that the IBM Public License could only apply to files that were originally created by IBM, while the Common Public License would allow non-IBM employees to contribute new files to a project and apply the Common Public License to those files. Apparently it's pretty hard to run an
open-source project without allowing other people to contribute a new file:)
The section of the IBM Public License that details that restriction follows:
1. DEFINITIONS
"Contribution" means:
a) in the case of International Business Machines Corporation ("IBM"), the Original Program, and
b) in the case of each Contributor,
i) changes to the Program, and
ii) additions to the Program;
where such changes and/or additions to the Program originate from and are distributed by that particular Contributor.
A Contribution 'originates' from a Contributor if it was added to the Program by such Contributor itself or anyone acting on such Contributor's behalf.
Contributions do not include additions to the Program which: (i) are separate modules of software distributed in conjunction with the Program under their own license agreement, and (ii) are not derivative works of the Program.
Ultimately, though, the choice won't be made by the organizations offering the software; the choice will be made by the organizations purchasing the software (or time-limited licences for the software, as the case may be).
Make the following change and most URLs open up just fine:
Click location on bottom right corner of Notes Client window
Select Edit current...
Select Internet Browser tab.
Change Internet Browser: field to Notes to use the Lotus internal browser.
Save and close.
Browse with pleasure.
By the way, you get a half-decent document viewer for things like Word & WordPro documents, 1-2-3 spreadsheets and Freelance presentations, etc if you view them as attachments in your Notes messages.
I would contend that internet cafes are a sign of technological backwardness.
Point taken--but I'll contend even further, that given the time frame (approaching the Olympics) and the tourism industry, that the Internet cafes also served the scads of backpackers and other scum (like myself) that were roaming the beautiful land and couldn't stop themselves from staying in touch with the latest developments in Linux-land...
Any natives or recent vistors care to comment whether there are still clusters of Internet cafes alive and kicking in Australia?
What a fascinating place... this Canuck had the pleasure of travelling throughout the east coast of Australia last summer and was surprised at how technologically progressive their culture seemed, at least in comparison to Canada. Brisbane, Sydney, and Cairns were brimming with Internet cafes, and even convenience stores had Internet kiosks. (Drifting off-topic: the convenience store kiosks were expensive ($1AUS/5 min.) Win95-based compared to the UN*X-based kiosks ($1AUS/15 min) found in the foyers of public libraries--which allowed even non-residents an hour of free access to their public computers.)
So it seems like everyone gets it, until this piece of legislation comes up. Let's not tar everyone with the same brush, mind; while Southern Australia cracks down on Net obscenity, Queensland allows prosititution (didn't sample any of that--I was with my girlfriend...) and the entire east coast rakes in the bucks on pokies (electronic gambling machines, often found in the back room of a pub).
Slashdot Mirror
Some of those people are freaks--I roast and grind my own coffee, and I certainly don't qualify as a coffee snob when you check them out.
Tarpley's is fine and dandy, and I think it's great they support the Mozilla foundation. But I would recommend doing what I did: buy your organic, fair-trade, bird-friendly coffee from Birds and Beans, take the money you saved (CDN$6 a pound for green coffee in bulk--awesome prices!), and donate that to the Mozilla Foundation.
A couple of months ago I ordered 45 pounds of coffee and donated $50 to the Mozilla Foundation. I'm drinking kickbutt coffee (with only me to blame if the brew is bad), helping out third-world farmers and the environment, and supporting the makers of my favourite browser.
Trying hard not to feel holier than thou... :)
Well, at least one of their controllers was not garbage. I've lived very happily with a pair of Gravis Xterminators for the past five years (gameport connector, not the more recent USB thingies by the same name), used mostly for successive generations of extended sessions of EA Sports NHL '99-'04. Exuberant, hard-gripping, sweaty sessions of that game. And they offered a passthrough on their connector so you could chain two controllers to a single gameport. Not quite as good as Microsoft's gameport connectors on the back of their original Sidewinders, but acceptable. The Xterminators were really my ideal gamepads. They have both digital and analog D-pads, offer the usual 6 buttons on the right, plus a hat switch, right/left triggers, throttle, start & select buttons, and paddle switches perfect for pinball-style games. They remind me somewhat of Xbox controllers in form factor--but I haven't played an Xbox, so that's purely a visual connection. I can say that I was always comfortable plaing games with the Xterminators for hours on end. I paid something like CDN$90 per controller when I bought them, but I was hapy to pay that because I had used their controllers ever since my Amiga-owning days, and they had never let me down with faulty units. (The first Gravis joystick I purchased offered customizable stiffness for the X & Y axes, which was pretty cool for late eighties technology). The Xterminator combo has lasted extremely well, and only yesterday did the combination of tempting holiday rebates, rumblepad allure, consistently top ranking in PC Game magazine, and easy connectivity to friend's computers seduce me into purchasing a pair of Logitech Wingman Rumblepads (USB). I had contacted Gravis months ago telling them that I was looking at purchasing new gamepads and interested in finding a Canadian distributor for their new USB Gravis Xterminator Force Feedback gamepads, but they never returned my email... and in the mean time, I did read some very negative reviews about the quality of the new units. Finally, the lack of analog input would limit my capabilities in the new EA Sports franchises--so my choice was made to abandon Gravis with this generation of gamepads. If they had simply updated their original Xterminators to add force feedback and USB connectors, I would have been playing hockey with those last night instead of the new Wingmans. Ah well...
You said:
As I stated in my original post, the issue is respect for Mandrake's approach to maintaining their existence as a company. Yes, Mandrake chose to GPL their distribution--and I'm very happy about that. That's why I have contributed money and time to their company, and hope that it continues to exist in the future. And it's one of the major reasons I contribute to Mandrake rather than SuSE.
I do find it surprising and disappointing that so many people equate legal actions with ethical actions. Perhaps, by the letter of the law, you can legally access and/or redistribute the 9.2 images right now. Be that as it may, I argue that the ethical approach is to respect Mandrake's policies by either contributing money/time to Mandrake to gain early access to those images, or to wait for Mandrake to fully and publically release those images in another couple of weeks.
In particular, the clause that appears to apply to Mandrake is:
Now, who was it that needs some education on the GPL? I'm sorry, but I don't particularly care to allow you to try to justify your actions with sloppy, uninformed rationalization.
As a member of MandrakeClub for the past year, with a renewal for the next year, I have ponied up and contributed US$120 towards the continued survival of Mandrake the company--and by extension, those who eke out a living contributing to and pulling together this excellent product.
In addition, I have submitted bug reports, contributed to the technical support forums, and tried (unsuccessfully, alas) to contribute an rpm to the Mandrake contribs.
It bothers me that some of my peers clearly don't respect the approach that Mandrake has taken to attempt to supplement its meagre revenue. Some of the attitude, I assume, is an adoption of the "The net sees censorship as damage, and routes around it" perspective. I would argue that prematurely sharing the Mandrake 9.2 release images is a misapplication of that perspective. Delaying the release of the 9.2 images is a reward for those who contributed directly to the latest release, and the images will be made officially available to everyone else in a matter of weeks.
There is one case that merits consideration. In the same way that Red Hat chose leading Linux developers to receive shares of its IPO years back (ah the good old days), there are undoubtedly many developers whose code is being used and distributed by Mandrake. It would be nice if Mandrake also invited those developers to access the early 9.2 torrents--although with so many packages, tracking all of the developers and ensuring that they have authorized IDs might require an entire company in itself.
Some of it is pure selfishness, in the manner of a child's tantrum: "I want this free, and I want it NOW!"
I suspect some of the attitude is also a simple fascination with the ability to adopt technical measures to overcome business policy. While setting up a BitTorrent offers a bit of a gee-whiz factor, I predict that overcoming Mandrake's business policy by removing one of their two means of increasing revenues will have one of two effects, neither one particularly pleasant:
So I'm asking everyone out there sharing unofficial Mandrake 9.2 ISOs: please consider the larger ramifications of your actions. In isolation, what you're doing might not seem all that important--but when you're posting (and publicizing, and taking advantage of) torrents on Slashdot, your actions will have a detrimental effect on the company that's making the very distribution you're so keenly sharing.
And that distribution simply might not be available to share in the future...
Instead, I'll continue to get my coffee from Merchants of Green Coffee, where you have a wide choice of green, fair-trade, organic coffees that you can roast to suit your own tastes.
Oh yeah, and I plan to donate directly to the Mozilla Foundation so 100% of my money goes there.
Don't get me wrong--the owner is trying to do the right thing, and it's a step in the right direction for the Ayn Rand-ish culture of "every ethical choice is a selfish choice"--in this case, consumers get to contribute in a small way to the Mozilla Foundation by exercising well-honed consumption skills and getting coffee as a result. It's just not a formula that suits my personal tastes.
Ahem. This ALA-accredited librarian (I just happen to work in the software industry) is offended by the summary and linked-to site's suggestion that libraries don't encourage a sense of community.
As well as making books, videos, CDs, and other media available to patrons, physical libraries tend to offer their facilities to groups (for no or nominal fees) to get together for discussion. I have attended poetry-writing sessions, mid-80's computer clubs, environmental activism sessions, and local community groups, all hosted by local public libraries. Just check the bulletin boards (physical, or online) for notification and invitation to attend the many happenings at your local library.
Here are a few stats from a March 2002 survey commissioned by the American Library Association:
Those 14% sure have good opportunities for developing some sort of a community.
Maybe walking into a room without knowing anyone else there is daunting, so virtual communities like http://www.communitybooks.org offer a lower courage barrier for participating -- but at the same time, it's a little easier to melt into the background (or flame like mad) when you disagree with someone else's position.
And please--that stereotype of you'll probably get shushed is way wrong. If you get shushed, it's not going to be a librarian telling you to be quiet; they want you to be active and engaged. If you're approaching another patron who is trying to read, that patron might respond positively or negatively--but that's the risk you have to take if you really want to make contact with someone else who appears to share your interests.
In DB2, you can write stored procedures and functions in many different programming languages, then call those routines through standard SQL. It's a nice way of reducing the network overhead that would be introduced if you had to send thousands of rows of data back to your client, then process the data on the client. Of course, it's also a little bit tricky to program...
It was also pretty handy in the old days if you wanted to automatically trigger an email when your dinky little online sales site recorded a whopping $500 order for Idaho potatoes, and you had to warm up the jalopy so you could make the drive to Idaho.
Hmm. Would technical knowledge be a prerequisite for being liberated from the Matrix? Or would a philosophy of sufficiently developed awareness of self and others (you must have seen the Buddhist-dressed inhabitants of Zion, who looked vaguely Asiatic) enable you to become aware of the fallacy you're living, and make you a candidate for liberation?
Or is there even any criteria for liberation, other than if some zealot believes that you're "the one"... thus far we haven't had much revealed to us about what makes a good liberation candidate.
Dan
Or the obvious reason why light-skinned people didn't dominate Zion: assuming that the 1% of anomalies came from all over the world, you would get a distribution that reflected the actual percentages of the world's population, rather than a Western-centric distribution reflecting the economic target audience of (most? all?( Hollywood films). Kudos to the Wachowskis if this was one of their design points...
I'm a bigtime fan. Once I started using it, I returned my Exceed license to my corporate software license managing person and suggested the Cygwin/X combination as a very reasonable alternative. I love firing up an X session on my Windows laptop, typing "ssh -X user@hostname" in my xterm, and remotely testing apps running on our UNIX boxes.
Argh... the SlashCode still doesn't recognize URL-encoded text fields submitted by Mozilla, which is why I'm reposting this.
It looks like they do a fade to or from black with a picture of a tombstone marking the birth and death of Bleem, but on Mozilla, at least, you just get black© I can't really blame them; writing and testing cross-browser JavaScript probably wasn't a high priority for the remnants of any of their remaining funds©
It is the right constant. Tim Waugh has released a linux-booboo.patch that corrects the constant in ieee1284_ops.c to IEEE1284_PH_ECP_DIR_UNKNOWN.
Linux 2.4.12 compiles nicely for me now that I've integrated that patch.
I ran Token Ring on my personal desktop and a server at work for over two years without any incidents requiring sysadmin intervention.
Here's how I did it:
So, it worked for me, as I said, for a couple of years. But then I moved to a new site with pure Ethernet, and I have to admit that life is much simpler now.
IBM DB2 on Linux already runs on Intel clusters, and has for about 6 months (see DB2 UDB Enterprise Extended Edition). In fact, it also runs on Linux for the S/390 platform and Linux for the Itanium platform. I don't think that Oracle claims to be playing in either of those areas yet...
I'm looking forward to reading more details about Red Hat's database product. This article was just a teaser.
While you said you want to explore a different, cross-platform language, the examples you listed were all integrated development environments IDE, not languages. Indeed, ActiveState's Komodo IDE can actually be used to develop in many different languages:
Conspicuously missing from that list is the language once championed as the cross-platform solution: Java. And let's not forget about the cross-platform capabilities of ANSI C or C++, if you stick to cross-platform libraries (e.g. no Microsoft Foundation Classes!)But, perhaps the real question is, what do you plan to do with this cross-platform language? Apart from being able to run on more than one platform, do you need:
- speed
- easy GUI development
- standardized database access
- standalone executables, interpreted scripts, browser-as-client, or server-side development
And exactly which platforms do you need to run this on? Just Windows and Linux? PalmOS and WinCE? Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Plan 9, and Amiga?On the IDE side, what features are you looking for:
- syntax highlighting
- syntax completion
- auto-formatting
- debugging
- integrated help and reference info
- drag'n'drop GUI development
- code repository/version control
- IDE itself running on different platforms
- free (beer or philosophically) or proprietary
If all you need is syntax highlighting and auto-formatting, then VIm could suit you just fine, with some custom scripting for goodies like debugging and version control. But you might want more than that.As with many problems in life, you need to refine your question before you're going to be able to come up with the right answer. Putting together a good set of requirements really helps when you're trying to solve a problem. And it helps other people provide intelligent commentary.
People who read and write languages with bi-directional text might not consider that a feature©©©
Well, this DB2-lovin hippie thinks that a good start would be the DB2 for Linux HOWTO, at least for installation and basic configuration issues.
As I understand it, one of the main differences is that the IBM Public License could only apply to files that were originally created by IBM, while the Common Public License would allow non-IBM employees to contribute new files to a project and apply the Common Public License to those files. Apparently it's pretty hard to run an open-source project without allowing other people to contribute a new file :)
The section of the IBM Public License that details that restriction follows:
Assuming that the status quo is purchasing software = license for perpetuity, there are two major bandwagons onto which organizations can try to jump:
Ultimately, though, the choice won't be made by the organizations offering the software; the choice will be made by the organizations purchasing the software (or time-limited licences for the software, as the case may be).
- Click location on bottom right corner of Notes Client window
- Select Edit current...
- Select Internet Browser tab.
- Change Internet Browser: field to Notes to use the Lotus internal browser.
- Save and close.
- Browse with pleasure.
By the way, you get a half-decent document viewer for things like Word & WordPro documents, 1-2-3 spreadsheets and Freelance presentations, etc if you view them as attachments in your Notes messages.So by this model would all usability defects be classified as sev© 3 or sev© 4 ¥primarily sev© 4, I would imagine?
Nice© Tell that to your human factors friends©
Any natives or recent vistors care to comment whether there are still clusters of Internet cafes alive and kicking in Australia?
What a fascinating place... this Canuck had the pleasure of travelling throughout the east coast of Australia last summer and was surprised at how technologically progressive their culture seemed, at least in comparison to Canada. Brisbane, Sydney, and Cairns were brimming with Internet cafes, and even convenience stores had Internet kiosks. (Drifting off-topic: the convenience store kiosks were expensive ($1AUS/5 min.) Win95-based compared to the UN*X-based kiosks ($1AUS/15 min) found in the foyers of public libraries--which allowed even non-residents an hour of free access to their public computers.)
So it seems like everyone gets it, until this piece of legislation comes up. Let's not tar everyone with the same brush, mind; while Southern Australia cracks down on Net obscenity, Queensland allows prosititution (didn't sample any of that--I was with my girlfriend...) and the entire east coast rakes in the bucks on pokies (electronic gambling machines, often found in the back room of a pub).