The point is not whether or not the feature is in there but rather that users should never have to have the need to whip out a text editor and manually edit a config file.
How about "never". The official line is that Winamp3 development is now stopped. Shelved. At least temporarily. And here I am sitting here trying to look optimistic. It's not "soon" any more, it's "maybe".
The golden rule of customer service is: Give the customer what they want. The customer didn't want Winamp3, that much is clear. The customer didn't care about the most powerful API this side of, well, anything. They didn't care about platform independence. The average Winamp user is only vaguely aware of what Linux is, let alone how to use it. Much less than 1% of Winamp users want Linux support.
Personally I don't want Winamp 3 because every version I tried was horribly unstable and I had to end up uninstalling it. The only really cool thing about it was the media library and that ended up in 2.x. So, I never saw any need to migrate.
considering there are free alternatives that are less restrictive
Is it really an alternative? I don't mean that lightly, i mean is freevo really just as good as tivo in every single way so as to make it a prefectly viable alternative?
Or is this is a case of it'll work reasonably well, some things it'll do that Tivo can't, something won't work as well, the interface won't be quite so polished, it won't do everything you'd hope it did, it's got a few quirks here and there and above all the hardware actually costs more to purchase before you even start thinking about messing around trying to get it installed.
Or will it save you hours of pain if you just cough up the money and get something that works as soon as you plug it in?
Yes, I know there is KnoppixMyth, but can you really set that up and give it to your parents? Looking at the technical specifications for one record and one playback (1.4 GHz CPU and 384 megabytes of RAM) thats quite pricey and you haven't even considered the fact it'll be a huge box and you need a DVD drive, controller, HD and some serious soundproofing.
Why this hasn't been added to the codebase, I have no idea.
Because it's a pointless thing that is only relevant to the 0.01% of the population that a) have Mozilla and b) read that newsgroup.
Far better for it to be in a module. Then if you want it, you can install it, rather than bloating out the main application with something that the majority of people won't ever use or even understand the need for.
Your point is well taken, but consider the fact that Mozilla is very much complete. It's got tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and a boatload of other little features.
Every time someone moans about how Mozilla doesn't have something, someone else will invariably reply telling them they they should add the following line to their config file.
By that very statement, I consider Mozilla unfinished. There should be no need for a plain old user to have to go editing text files to enable, disable or configure some bit of functionality.
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
But I still use GLX. Why? Because it's FUN. I like farting around with my OS. I like installing new stuff, learning about how it works, and getting it running. I like dealing with the community of users and developers and learning new stuff from folks. And, ever so infrequently, teaching somebody how to do something I learned last week.
This is what makes you and me different. I don't like farting about with my OS, I don't care how it works and I don't like spending hours of my time fiddling with config files to get that perfect experience.
I just want to use it as an enabler for something that is more interesting to me. Such as playing a game, or doing a website, hacking a bit of perl or C etc.etc.
It is true, Windows is not fun. I don't care if it isn't fun. It allows me to do the fun things and if I were to list them, "fiddling with my OS" wouldn't be one of them.
Re:Stick with Windows and if you do...
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
In modern Linux distributions, settings can be changed by using the desktop manager's control panel, using the DM menu builder or searching for config files to edit. Guess which one sounds easier.
Definately not the last one. If there isn't a nice user interface to configure simple things that your desktop user will need (we're ignoring servers) then it's broken.
I can't think of the number of times I scream when people tell me that I can enable so and so feature in Firebird if i stick some "userprefs" line into a text file somewhere. Editing configuration text files is not the way to go.
The firebird thing is so intuiative, I've forgotten what the actual line looks like.
None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content.
.. and they were right. It isn't possible to protect digital content.
I haven't seen one "copy protection" scheme that has actually worked yet and I don't expect to see any in the future either. It's trivial to take the songs off an iPod and people are starting to unravel the DRM on the iTunes music store files - give it time...
I've always liked the way most newsreaders threaded posts - IBM's threaded model is one feature that would definately make me switch over. This is a simple yet overlooked feature that Eudora and Outlook have missed.
I can't talk about Eudora but Outlook has it:
View > Current view > By conversation topic
Doesn't work very well when the subject line is changed (or if you use the German "AW:" instead of "RE:" in your subject lines) but works well enough to help you make sense of a 800 email inbox after a week in the sun.
I use Outlook every day and I'd like it to do bayesian filtering of all my mail into various folders based on who it's from, the subject and the content.
No not spam filtering (we have a good enough filter as it is), but more "intelligent filtering" based on the project's I'm working on.
Yes, POPFile does this, but I'm on Exchange/Outlook combination and that won't work. Yes, I know POPFile will be able to do it soon (IMAP support due Q1 2004) but I'm unsure as whether I want to risk installing it and finding that it goes horribly wrong (at least if it was built into Outlook, IT support can't bitch at me for using an unsupported tool).
Forking is extremely healthy -- look, for example, at the Apache project
Whilst the Apache project was a good example - bear in mind that Apache is not indicative of every Open Source project.
I'm sure that for every good story of a fork, there have been plenty of times when a forking of a project has been destructive or at least sunstantially less productive that it could have been if it had stayed together.
I have done some work with DirectX and the biggest problem I see is that new versions come out too quickly. Do you want your project to be totally tied to DirectX version N with you know N+1 will be out next year making your huge project obsolete or requiring a rewrite.
Disclaimer: I have never looked at or written a piece of code in my life that used DirectX.
However, your comment makes no sense. All games written for one version of DirectX should work in the later versions. Otherwise you'd have games failing left right and centre and people on here bitching about how they can't update DirectX without killing their favourite game.
Hell, I have a couple of DirectX 5 and 7 requiring games and they work just fine under v8 and my recently installed 9.
The only downside to the frequent updates is when you want to take advantage of all the new wizzy things the graphics cards are doing. But I don't think thats a fault of Microsoft, more an indication of the rapid pace of development (since MS merely support the things the graphics card makes tell them their next cards can do)
I don't care about historical reasons, I don't care about different people using different measurements.
What I do care about is that if I purchase a Compact Flash that states 512 meg, I get 512 meg and not 500 meg. Goddamit, it states 512 meg on the box, the only reason they get out of it being fraudulent advertising is because they stick a tiny disclaimer at the bottom.
Sure, it's only a small thing... but they stack up.
How many of us use a fat partition on their home computers?
My non-winmodem refuses to work under Linux. I can't get my USB stick to work under Linux. In short, I either have to use floppy disks or copy files from my FAT 32 partition to Linux.
If Linux stopped supporting FAT and FAT 32 then I would reconsider the point of having a dual boot system (given that I only use Linux for perl based cgi development).
A license for removable solid state media manufacturers to preformat the media, such as compact flash memory cards, to the Microsoft FAT file system format, and to preload data onto such preformatted media using the Microsoft FAT file system format. Pricing for this license is US$0.25 per unit with a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per manufacturer.
All manufacturers will grumble (some louder than others), pay up the money and then add an additional $5-$10 on their products to compensate for this licence.
I'm wondering though, if they supplied the products unformatted, would that still mean they have to pay the licence? Upon insertion, Windows would helpfully offer to format the drive for you and then you'd be ready to go.
Wonder if they truly think about this. the RIAA and their equivalents worldwide can't all be so insanely silly and see that their distribution methods are so outdated that fewer and fewer people are using them. Could they?
Of course they're not silly and yes they know their distribution method is outdated.
But it's easier to try and kill off the alternatives than it is to change what has been your business model for the last 50+ years.
To be honest, even if the price of songs was brought down to a sensible level and if you could bundle and you didn't have DRM - you would still see mass piracy. It happened back in the days when ZX Spectrum games were less than two pounds (3 dollars) and it will continue.
You can't beat free. Even if people waste 2 hours getting something for free, they won't consider that time expended to be worth anything - rather than they saved x pounds/dollars.
What it sounds like he wants to do is integrate the functionality of PopFile inside firebird.
Indeed. What I would like to do is, in a sense, port it from POP3 to Outlook's IMAP. It could be something that you'd have sitting in your system tray that would poll your email every 30 seconds or, even better, when it arrives automatically and move the emails from one folder to another based on it's classification.
I see that POPFile has IMAP support on the roadmap for February 2004. I think I'll wait till then - or look at hacking my own solution.
I would like to see Bayesian learning for message filing.
That would be excellent - although I'm stuck with Outlook at work.
I try to sort my mail into folders based on the projects I'm working on. Something that could examine the contents of the email and suggest folders that it should go into would be very useful.
In fact, based on the sucess rate of SpamAssassin, I'd be prepared to allow it to classify them automatically.
Hmmm... I wonder if you could do something in VB that would do the filtering for you by accessing the Outlook object?
This article intends to clear up some misconceptions about open source software development practices
The biggest misconception is that Apache is indicative of all Open Source projects and that Microsoft is indicative of all Propriatory software providers. The fact is that every project is different, you can't lump them all together in one neat package and say "this is how all these work".
The second biggest is that if you don't like a feature or bit of functionality within an open application you can just literally "jump in" and hack the code. This completely ignores the fact that even if you can code, most products are insanely complex and it'll take you several months to truely understand how it works, how it's put together, how the pieces interract and how you should go about working with it.
Investigators knew where to look for the gear not because of unusually intrepid sleuthing but because Krastof allegedly used the computer to log on to an AOL account belonging to the system's owner, Peter Gascoyne.
Please remove your tin foil hats, the idiot logged onto the AOL account of the person he stole the laptop from. The police and AOL merely traced it back to his house.
I know that this will probably be modded off topic as it is a little, but I want to adapt the bayes algorithm to recommend television programs from a schedule.
The idea being that good programmes are classed as, if you like, spam and bad ones aren't. Therefore anything that gets tagged can be considered a programme that might be interesting to the user.
The problem is that I've not seen a good *basic* description of how the algorithm works (i'll be implementing it in Perl with a view to porting it to other languages). Preferably with some sample values and a step by step guide on how the final score comes out.
Can anyone point me to a resource? Paul Grahams description is good, but the formula makes no sense and there aren't any examples.
Slashdot Mirror
I've started writing a version for Windows but am interested to see if anyone knows of a port/homage to the original already out there?
The point is not whether or not the feature is in there but rather that users should never have to have the need to whip out a text editor and manually edit a config file.
Personally I don't want Winamp 3 because every version I tried was horribly unstable and I had to end up uninstalling it. The only really cool thing about it was the media library and that ended up in 2.x. So, I never saw any need to migrate.
Is it really an alternative? I don't mean that lightly, i mean is freevo really just as good as tivo in every single way so as to make it a prefectly viable alternative?
Or is this is a case of it'll work reasonably well, some things it'll do that Tivo can't, something won't work as well, the interface won't be quite so polished, it won't do everything you'd hope it did, it's got a few quirks here and there and above all the hardware actually costs more to purchase before you even start thinking about messing around trying to get it installed.
Or will it save you hours of pain if you just cough up the money and get something that works as soon as you plug it in?
Yes, I know there is KnoppixMyth, but can you really set that up and give it to your parents? Looking at the technical specifications for one record and one playback (1.4 GHz CPU and 384 megabytes of RAM) thats quite pricey and you haven't even considered the fact it'll be a huge box and you need a DVD drive, controller, HD and some serious soundproofing.
Not something that you can sit under the TV!
Because it's a pointless thing that is only relevant to the 0.01% of the population that a) have Mozilla and b) read that newsgroup.
Far better for it to be in a module. Then if you want it, you can install it, rather than bloating out the main application with something that the majority of people won't ever use or even understand the need for.
Every time someone moans about how Mozilla doesn't have something, someone else will invariably reply telling them they they should add the following line to their config file.
By that very statement, I consider Mozilla unfinished. There should be no need for a plain old user to have to go editing text files to enable, disable or configure some bit of functionality.
This is what makes you and me different. I don't like farting about with my OS, I don't care how it works and I don't like spending hours of my time fiddling with config files to get that perfect experience.
I just want to use it as an enabler for something that is more interesting to me. Such as playing a game, or doing a website, hacking a bit of perl or C etc.etc.
It is true, Windows is not fun. I don't care if it isn't fun. It allows me to do the fun things and if I were to list them, "fiddling with my OS" wouldn't be one of them.
Definately not the last one. If there isn't a nice user interface to configure simple things that your desktop user will need (we're ignoring servers) then it's broken.
I can't think of the number of times I scream when people tell me that I can enable so and so feature in Firebird if i stick some "userprefs" line into a text file somewhere. Editing configuration text files is not the way to go.
The firebird thing is so intuiative, I've forgotten what the actual line looks like.
I haven't seen one "copy protection" scheme that has actually worked yet and I don't expect to see any in the future either. It's trivial to take the songs off an iPod and people are starting to unravel the DRM on the iTunes music store files - give it time ...
I can't talk about Eudora but Outlook has it:
View > Current view > By conversation topic
Doesn't work very well when the subject line is changed (or if you use the German "AW:" instead of "RE:" in your subject lines) but works well enough to help you make sense of a 800 email inbox after a week in the sun.
I use it all the time.
No not spam filtering (we have a good enough filter as it is), but more "intelligent filtering" based on the project's I'm working on.
Yes, POPFile does this, but I'm on Exchange/Outlook combination and that won't work. Yes, I know POPFile will be able to do it soon (IMAP support due Q1 2004) but I'm unsure as whether I want to risk installing it and finding that it goes horribly wrong (at least if it was built into Outlook, IT support can't bitch at me for using an unsupported tool).
Whilst the Apache project was a good example - bear in mind that Apache is not indicative of every Open Source project.
I'm sure that for every good story of a fork, there have been plenty of times when a forking of a project has been destructive or at least sunstantially less productive that it could have been if it had stayed together.
Disclaimer: I have never looked at or written a piece of code in my life that used DirectX.
However, your comment makes no sense. All games written for one version of DirectX should work in the later versions. Otherwise you'd have games failing left right and centre and people on here bitching about how they can't update DirectX without killing their favourite game.
Hell, I have a couple of DirectX 5 and 7 requiring games and they work just fine under v8 and my recently installed 9.
The only downside to the frequent updates is when you want to take advantage of all the new wizzy things the graphics cards are doing. But I don't think thats a fault of Microsoft, more an indication of the rapid pace of development (since MS merely support the things the graphics card makes tell them their next cards can do)
What I do care about is that if I purchase a Compact Flash that states 512 meg, I get 512 meg and not 500 meg. Goddamit, it states 512 meg on the box, the only reason they get out of it being fraudulent advertising is because they stick a tiny disclaimer at the bottom.
Sure, it's only a small thing ... but they stack up.
My non-winmodem refuses to work under Linux. I can't get my USB stick to work under Linux. In short, I either have to use floppy disks or copy files from my FAT 32 partition to Linux.
If Linux stopped supporting FAT and FAT 32 then I would reconsider the point of having a dual boot system (given that I only use Linux for perl based cgi development).
All manufacturers will grumble (some louder than others), pay up the money and then add an additional $5-$10 on their products to compensate for this licence.
I'm wondering though, if they supplied the products unformatted, would that still mean they have to pay the licence? Upon insertion, Windows would helpfully offer to format the drive for you and then you'd be ready to go.
Of course they're not silly and yes they know their distribution method is outdated.
But it's easier to try and kill off the alternatives than it is to change what has been your business model for the last 50+ years.
To be honest, even if the price of songs was brought down to a sensible level and if you could bundle and you didn't have DRM - you would still see mass piracy. It happened back in the days when ZX Spectrum games were less than two pounds (3 dollars) and it will continue.
You can't beat free. Even if people waste 2 hours getting something for free, they won't consider that time expended to be worth anything - rather than they saved x pounds/dollars.
Indeed. What I would like to do is, in a sense, port it from POP3 to Outlook's IMAP. It could be something that you'd have sitting in your system tray that would poll your email every 30 seconds or, even better, when it arrives automatically and move the emails from one folder to another based on it's classification.
I see that POPFile has IMAP support on the roadmap for February 2004. I think I'll wait till then - or look at hacking my own solution.
That would be excellent - although I'm stuck with Outlook at work.
I try to sort my mail into folders based on the projects I'm working on. Something that could examine the contents of the email and suggest folders that it should go into would be very useful.
In fact, based on the sucess rate of SpamAssassin, I'd be prepared to allow it to classify them automatically.
Hmmm ... I wonder if you could do something in VB that would do the filtering for you by accessing the Outlook object?
Rumour has it, he only works one day a week :o)
The biggest misconception is that Apache is indicative of all Open Source projects and that Microsoft is indicative of all Propriatory software providers. The fact is that every project is different, you can't lump them all together in one neat package and say "this is how all these work".
The second biggest is that if you don't like a feature or bit of functionality within an open application you can just literally "jump in" and hack the code. This completely ignores the fact that even if you can code, most products are insanely complex and it'll take you several months to truely understand how it works, how it's put together, how the pieces interract and how you should go about working with it.
Most of the "Buy it" links point to http://www.qksrv.net which takes you eventually to this page.
The idea being that good programmes are classed as, if you like, spam and bad ones aren't. Therefore anything that gets tagged can be considered a programme that might be interesting to the user.
The problem is that I've not seen a good *basic* description of how the algorithm works (i'll be implementing it in Perl with a view to porting it to other languages). Preferably with some sample values and a step by step guide on how the final score comes out.
Can anyone point me to a resource? Paul Grahams description is good, but the formula makes no sense and there aren't any examples.
Use AvantSlash instead until they do.