One thing that I've been lead to believe is that these squiggy lines only active when you wave the mouse over, which then brings up a box which you then have to click to view the links to which you have to select. Plus you could have more than one link in that menu so "Scientology" could have links to both pro and anti sites.
Secondly as all coders know, if you have a feature off by default, most people don't know it ever exists. On the other hand, if you put opt-in meta tags then you run the risk of no-one using the feature. Which for a PHB, this is not a nice thought - but tends to piss people off less.
Finally, those people who complain about the site changing their design obviously never looked at it from different browsers. Every one interprets it in their own way, coupled with whatever mods the user has installed. I can make google hightlight words on the page, use junkbuster to remove adverts etc. etc.
At the end of the day, once its left the server I don't really have any control on how it is displayed. It could look how I intended or totally different (say html on avantgo or pocketie).
Finally, didn't some other company have this first? I remember using something years ago that produced a yellow line under key words that popped up a menu which would like to other "key" sites, a dictionary, the company etc.etc.
Why not buy a MD player with LP4 compression? I know this doesn't play MP3's but you get a very small and sexy machine with long playback time on only one battery and 4 albums on one MD.
Of course, it doesn't beat mp3's compression but the cd-mp3 players out there at the moment don't handle knocks very well and look very cheap and plasticy.
As soon as I've saved up, that will be what I'll be doing. Yes it would be nice to run mp3's from an ipaq but the battery life on one of those things is low enough as it is, without hammering it playing music.
The big question is why? Now I'm not disbuting that Douglas Adams is a great author but the main reason this book hasn't been released is because its unfinished.
I haven't read the book (obviously) but if its not particulary good then its only going to sour the memory of the other good books that he's done.
Live and let live. I'd hate to have any of my unfinished work thrust onto the public. The difference between finished and unfinished is that with the former I'm happy with it going for general release, the latter, i'm not.
(Anyone remember Gene Roddenberry's unfinished work? And how poor that was? Makes you realise why it was unfinished...)
Aol and Sony make a good team. They're both very good at meeting the needs of consumers, and both have a great track record when it comes to
consumer marketting. While MS are taking over the universe it makes sense for them to join forces.
Where this is also advantagous is in creating a new route into the internet for loads of people that previously couldn't afford a full on
PC.
I run a talker, uberworld.org, and I see lots of the newer people on the web on a daily basis. I reckon this will help a great deal.
I'd like to release my code under a specific licence. Does any of the current ones say this?
Its free, you can't charge for it, but you can charge for distribution, just so long as you don't charge for the code itself.
If it all screws up, its not my fault. Blame someone else
You're welcome to hack it about and redistributed it as you see fit but:
You must release the code under the same licence as this
You cannot release the code under the same name (as it won't be my "official" release) and I don't want to deal with people going "x v1.55 doesn't work!" when i'm only on 1.22 myself.
No warranty etc. etc.
Is there anything like that out there? I wouldn't say my licence is restrictive, just avoids some potential headaches.
Have I totally lost the plot? I read Mundies comments and actually found myself thinking "hmm, actually some of them are quite true".
Mundies states that GPL is bad because if you use a bit of code then you have to give away everything. This I can understand. After all, if you don't like the licence, don't use it. But were also getting to the stage where people are gpl'ing tiny snippets of code. This is almost as silly as record companies trying to copyright a couple bars of music and bill ringtone providers!
This is where I get all confused. Microsoft is essentially arguing that if I write something and release it then I can't make money from that code and, that itself is bad.
Well unless I fancy living in a dumpster for the rest of my life I think I can see where they're coming from. If I work for a company developing software (which I did) and they went open source then I can practically wave goodbye to my job. That company makes its money on the basis that its product is better than anyone elses (which for a very boring market - it kicks other competitors stuff up the arse). By opening up the source, any tom, dick and harry can view the source and the innovation.
This, for the open source crowd, is a good thing. Everyone benifits, the authors get people reporting bugs and the competitors get access to their groovy stuff. Provided of course they release their updates using that code to everyone else.
Sorry, I just can't see it taking off. The whole software industry is about coming up with something thats better than others and encouraging people to buy their product over others.
Okay, lets put this another way. There are three and only three companies (A,B and C) that produce a product called "X"). If X is GPL'ed then why on earth should A develop for it, if its only going to mean that B and C get a load of work for free? (You have to think like a corporation here)
You get this little loop where no-one will work on something because at the end of the day, its a total waste of time because your hard work will be just dropped into someone elses impementation because thats what the licence says they have to do. And for them, it'll cost a tenth of the cost.
Don't get me wrong, the GPL has opened up stuff and helped me enormiously and I'm grateful. But thats me, as in an individual entity, not a global corporation.
And thats where I'm not sure what they think about it...
I'm probably going to be told I'm trolling but is this really a surprise? Businesses have different ideas to software than the GPL. The GPL is all about sharing and helping each other, businesses are all about getting one up on each other and getting more money.
Sony obviously feels that putting out the source would help people develop code for models by those they are in competition with, so they with-held it.
This of course sucks. Question is, what can be done to force them to open up the code?
I've noticed that anyone who ever says there are too many Linux distros gets shot down in flames generally with the argument that choice is good.
I currently run Redhat 7 and after loosing some stuff on it that I liked (such as enlightenment) and general flaws and badly built stuff (missing files etc.etc) I figured I'd move to something else.
I use it mainly as a desktop OS, would like everything I possibly need already configured and if possible running, reasonably secure and dare I say it?, as close to being as friendly as Windows as possible. Ie. I don't have to piss about with config options, it does it for me and i can get on with doing fun stuff.
I use my machine for web development and socket programming (so C and perl really). I don't have a perminant connection, just a dial up which I hardly use (since the phone is miles away from the PC and we in the UK still have to pay for isp calls) so cron jobbing apt-get-whatnot isn't really useful.
I've asked about and can I get a sensible answer about what is the best desktop-come-development-come-nice-windows-style-t hing-but-running-linux distro for me? Nope, everyone comes up with totally different distros for a variety of reasons! At the end of the day its confusing me and whilst I'm by no means a linux expert, I'm not a total dunce.
I'm totally lost. Do I upgrade or not? I'm no closer to picking a distro than I was when i first started. Its times like this when I really start to wonder if maybe it would be better to have a few really good distros rather than lots that seem to do some bits well and some not.
I just know I'm going to get shot down in flames and marked as "Troll" but i'm not. I'm totally and completely lost in the maze of distributions and seem to be unable to get a sensible consistent answer from anyone.
Its better than Slashdots own effort in the following ways:
You see synopsis of each of the postings on Avantslash where you do not on/palm
It removes all the useless gubbins you don't need to see
You can read comments rated 3 or above
There are probably others but I've forgotten them now. Avantslash would have been listed on slashdots links page but I've emailed the url to them three times so far and they seem to have forgotten to do it.
At some point I'm going to completely rewrite it so that it copes with external sites and is even more customisable. However as it is, it still is IMO better than slashdots own.
Too many people are missing the point here. Whatever Microsoft does invariably becomes the de facto standard whether it is or it isn't. Why do you think that its seen as a major problem if Windows doesn't support some sort of standard? They've already said they won't support Bluetooth in the immediate future. This is bad for bluetooth because suddenly the enormous number of people who use Windows won't be using that. Sure it'll come in a later release, but what if it didn't?
Putting crappy encoding rates into Windows is a bad thing. It'll also probably work. Why? Because most users don't download alternatives. Whats the most used telnet client in the world? Windows Telnet. Its crap. Whats the most used web browser? Internet Explorer. It used to be crap. Why? Because they were in with the windows package from the beginning.
I remember when IE sucked, but people still used it over Netscape because downloading and installing Netscape was a hassle. People didn't want to do it. People didn't know they could do it.
Its all very well running around and saying "Well I'll just download a better program". Great, but the majority of people won't. They'll use what they have and if they are gently persuaded to use something else then they will.
So yes, this is going to be a problem. The savvy people will download and use something else. Those that aren't so savvy (of which there are a hell of a lot more) will use what they are given.
If what they are given encourages them to use something else that gives a better result, then they'll do that.
I was put off immediately by the spelling of "Windows" on the site.
Its "Windows", not "Windoze" or any other of the hundreds of creative offerings out there. Same as its "Microsoft" or "MS" and not "Microshaft", "Micro$oft" or "M$".
If we're going to advocate Linux, lets do it properly and not look like a bunch of 10 year old illiterate children. Stupid stuff like the above is more likely to do more harm than good.
Maybe something like Blitz Basic (old Amiga software being revived for the PC soon) would be a nice thing to have. Even AMOS. Even if it isn't all powerful, and limits people to slow 3D or 2D games.
Blitz Basic for the PC is available now from www.blitzbasic.com. Its also out in the shops in the UK but only starting to appear in the US. Its also pretty damn fast and easy to write games for.
I help run a chat service called UberWorld. Its not quite like AOL in the fact that people with just standard telnet access can use it and its a little more complicated (10 basic commands to learn and you're away, but there is a total of 400 available plus many more depending on how long you use the place).
We used to run an 18+ only rule because people were free to talk about what they wanted. However this became more and more difficult to implement. Unlike AOL we don't have any way to link back peoples online names to addresses or personal details. Only thing we take is an email address for some of the features when you register (and you don't have to if you don't want to). People just lied, and we had no way of checking.
So we stopped it. It was simply being too difficult to police. So now we have a set of rules which are in general the sort of thing you'd expect to abide by in everyday life.
Occasionally we do get idiots, racists and homophobes or general nutcases who take delight in winding up people, but they tend to find that they are ganged up on and ridiculed off the place.
Self regulation.
Its a shame that AOL have to resort to draconian measure for this sort of thing, but there are strange people out there.
Strange people tend to do it to get the attention. They like it when people make a fuss and something happens. When they're totally ignored or ridiculed then they tend to give up and go elsewhere.
Granted we're not quite as popular as AOL (only 200 hard core users, most bored administrators and coders looking for some light conversation) but I'd hate to start implementing the sort of stuff AOL does if we did grow any bigger...
Before everyone starts howling about these folks not reading your email bear in mind that:
55000 / 30 = approximately 1833 emails a day
A day!? Thats a hell of a lot of emails. I get approximately 200 a day and even then I don't have time to read them all let alone do any other work.
Sending snail mail registered or not probably won't make much of a difference to be honest, 1833 messages is too much to read on a daily basis in whatever medium you care to think of.
Right, now I've got that off my chest. Heres what I want to say.
The m505 is possibly the greatest move palm have done so far. The Vx was (and still is) one of the best organisors they've released. Yes its horribly expensive but it looks good, has good specs (for a palm) and is light.
Handsprings attempt is very nice and all that but you lose the good looks and the lightness. Now we have a colour pda thats only 0.9 oz heaver than the Vx. Bargain!
When I fist got my Vx I avoided the IIIc because it was bulkier and looked horrible. Now if I was thinking of buying again, then i'd go straight for the m505. No question. Yes the handspring is cheaper, but as Palm have found out, people are happy to pay more for something that looks good and is light.
From the US Postal Service: http://www.usps.com/websites/depart/inspect/chainl et.htm Chain Letters A chain letter is a "get rich quick" scheme that promises that your mail box will soon be stuffed full of cash if you decide to participate.
Yes but in that case what they are actually peddling is illegal. What about those adverts for laser printer toner cartridges? It isn't illegal to sell toner cartridges.
Also, when is mass emailing considered spamming?
1 unsolicited commercial email?
10?
100?
100,000?
If I send an email to someone I don't know going "hey, saw your site, why not buy my maxomatic doodah from http://doodah.com" is that considered spamming?
... there isn't a law regarding spamming. You can only start prosecuting if by the actions of them spamming they do other damage.
ie. If I spam 10,000 users with get rich quick schemes and no server falls over then what case do people have to bring me to court? Annoyance because of non-solicited email?
However if I crash two servers and cause a company a big headache and loss of business then they can get me for that and not the sending itself.
Last time i heard someone was prosecuted it was because what they were trying to get people to do was illegal not because they'd sent out 50 million emails.
Compaq - I know for a fact that QNX has been successfully run on your machine. I think I remember someone saying that BeIA could as well. So why can't we have options to buy units with these OSs on them? You're crazy.
No, you're crazy to even expect that a company such as Compaq would waste time, effort and money on providing all those options when at the end of the day they wouldn't sell enough to make it commerically viable. Plus it would confuse those people out there who were thinking of buying one who weren't geeks.
If you were to get something - anything - else, you'll sell more units and encourage more of a developer community for the unit.
The extra sales would not be worth the outlay. And last time I looked there is already a thriving development community. Simply bundling iPaqs with a variety of o/s would confuse potential buyers (as in the normal joe bloggs of which there are a hell of a lot more of) and serve to only increase sales by a fraction.
Apart from the fact that you can go "neeeer, my PS2 is more stable than yours" what would you be able to do that would make a large number of people want to run Linux?
Dammit, I'm going to stick my neck out here and probably get marked as "Troll" but please hear me out.
I think the Open Source movement is great. However I can see what Bill Gates means when he asks what programmer can afford to spend 3 years designing, developing and testing a product only to give the entire lot (include source) away for free.
Quite simply, the majority can't. Those that can, are even more simply, gods.
Open source is great, you get to release your code, people get to pick it over, learn from it and in the process they may even help you out with it or at least spawn something off that is bigger and better. Don't know how to use TCP/IP correctly or well? Download something that does and look at its code, the only condition being that should you use any part of it then you should release your code open to the masses too.
But heres the problem. Open source software as we know it works, its indesputable. But it only works fully if the project is small. Hear me out and I'll explain why I think so.
For over a year I worked on a telemetry system for my employers. It was a Visual Basic frontend to Pro*C and Oracle backend. It was big. It also took me nearly 3 months of 9-5 working for 5 days a week to understand the entire system, how it works, the concequences of changing things and to get an understanding of the beast.
This isn't something unusual. In fact my company specifically understands this and refuses to put people on for any time less because they are only truely productive after this lead time.
So, approximately 6 hours a day for 3 months (roughly 87 days) makes 522 hours of work.
Where is this leading? Well, say this was an open source project and I was doing it in my spare time then I'd need 522 hours before I was fully acquainted with the project. Thats a lot of work and based on 2 hours per night plus 8 at the weekend thats 29 weeks before I can really truely say that I'm at a level to genuinly be able to contribute to the code. Sure, I could do the odd bug fix here and there but the GPL isn't about just doing bug fixes, its about helping the code to evolve.
Thats a lot of work for something in my free time. And unfortunately for me, time I don't have. Of course, others do and I applaud them, but IMO as the scale of the project increases the tougher it is to get people to work on it. If I GPL'ed a 20 line program the chances are the flaws and bugs and oversights would/could be fixed very quickly because it doesn't take much for people to understand the code completely.
So where is this heading? The GPL is great, without it we wouldn't have had the innovation that we've had (contrary to Microsofts belief) but I believe that for the majority of people the GPL means only that they can give it to friends for free. The average Jo Public doesn't want to look at the code and doesn't care that they can modify it and give away the modifications without some law agency hammering on their door.
What we should remember above all, is that code is a mighty beast, where everyone has differing styles and ideas. If you release code under the GPL that is big and complicated don't expect hundreds of people to come crawling out of the woodwork and help you. After all, really how many true developers are there on the Mozilla project? As in the ones that really know the system.
The "many eyes" theory is great, if the many eyes can be bothered to look and understand the code.
But before you hit the reply button or go for the "Troll" option in the moderation box please note that I am a fan of open source. I see no reason why people should distribute their code and hard work to others with a licence that almost says "here you go, do what you want with it" but those that do are truely generious individuals.
Several people have said that they find the Nomad overpriced and not that great. If you're in that catagory and you have a cd-burner then you might be interested in the following cd/mp3 players:
There are others, but heres a selection. Now all we need is a company with an eye for design (like Sonys very sexy cd players) to come up with a good looking one with all the features you come to expect thesedays.
Google's deal with Yahoo has decreased the accuracy of search results, and Google's interests seem to be turning towards profit rather than accuracy
Until we find a way to employ a bunch of programmers, managers and administrators in 9-5 5 day week jobs and not pay them a penny (not forgetting the cost of the servers, connection etc) then you'll find that websites have to be profit motivated.
Ideals are great, but if they don't make business sense, you won't have a business.
> Are they planning to restore the threaded interface?
Its been there for a long while, at least 6 months. Granted it doesn't work perfectly (sometimes it gets confused and shows you a totally different posting when you select the next in the thread) and occasionally it disappears totally for a couple of days.
2001-02-12 16:30:09 Google acquires Deja's Usenet Service (articles,news) (rejected)
(bah) I'd like to say that this is definately a good thing. I use Deja a lot because I don't have decent Newgroup access at work and I've found many problems with the site over the last 6 months:
News articles that have disappeared
Huge gaps in postings (often space of several months)
Pointless "innovations" - like that annoying product link
Damaged links (where you click on message 2 of a thread and end up in a totally different thread)
Increasingly slower site access (advert overload anyone)
as well as the really annoying problem where once in a while all the postings go flat (rather than threaded) and it marks all the postings as new even when I read them 7 weeks ago.
What I hope Google don't do is just rebrand it, bolt on a little bit of additional code and be done with it. I personally think it needs a good clean up with much of the crap removed.
What I also hope is that Google do it fast, because at the moment I don't seem to be able to access anything but my my-deja email, which is only used to let me avoid the spam from the harvesters.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly as all coders know, if you have a feature off by default, most people don't know it ever exists. On the other hand, if you put opt-in meta tags then you run the risk of no-one using the feature. Which for a PHB, this is not a nice thought - but tends to piss people off less.
Finally, those people who complain about the site changing their design obviously never looked at it from different browsers. Every one interprets it in their own way, coupled with whatever mods the user has installed. I can make google hightlight words on the page, use junkbuster to remove adverts etc. etc.
At the end of the day, once its left the server I don't really have any control on how it is displayed. It could look how I intended or totally different (say html on avantgo or pocketie).
Finally, didn't some other company have this first? I remember using something years ago that produced a yellow line under key words that popped up a menu which would like to other "key" sites, a dictionary, the company etc.etc.
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Why not buy a MD player with LP4 compression? I know this doesn't play MP3's but you get a very small and sexy machine with long playback time on only one battery and 4 albums on one MD.
Of course, it doesn't beat mp3's compression but the cd-mp3 players out there at the moment don't handle knocks very well and look very cheap and plasticy.
As soon as I've saved up, that will be what I'll be doing. Yes it would be nice to run mp3's from an ipaq but the battery life on one of those things is low enough as it is, without hammering it playing music.
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I haven't read the book (obviously) but if its not particulary good then its only going to sour the memory of the other good books that he's done.
Live and let live. I'd hate to have any of my unfinished work thrust onto the public. The difference between finished and unfinished is that with the former I'm happy with it going for general release, the latter, i'm not.
(Anyone remember Gene Roddenberry's unfinished work? And how poor that was? Makes you realise why it was unfinished ...)
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Where this is also advantagous is in creating a new route into the internet for loads of people that previously couldn't afford a full on PC.
I run a talker, uberworld.org, and I see lots of the newer people on the web on a daily basis. I reckon this will help a great deal.
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Is there anything like that out there? I wouldn't say my licence is restrictive, just avoids some potential headaches.
Can anyone advise?
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Mundies states that GPL is bad because if you use a bit of code then you have to give away everything. This I can understand. After all, if you don't like the licence, don't use it. But were also getting to the stage where people are gpl'ing tiny snippets of code. This is almost as silly as record companies trying to copyright a couple bars of music and bill ringtone providers!
This is where I get all confused. Microsoft is essentially arguing that if I write something and release it then I can't make money from that code and, that itself is bad.
Well unless I fancy living in a dumpster for the rest of my life I think I can see where they're coming from. If I work for a company developing software (which I did) and they went open source then I can practically wave goodbye to my job. That company makes its money on the basis that its product is better than anyone elses (which for a very boring market - it kicks other competitors stuff up the arse). By opening up the source, any tom, dick and harry can view the source and the innovation.
This, for the open source crowd, is a good thing. Everyone benifits, the authors get people reporting bugs and the competitors get access to their groovy stuff. Provided of course they release their updates using that code to everyone else.
Sorry, I just can't see it taking off. The whole software industry is about coming up with something thats better than others and encouraging people to buy their product over others.
Okay, lets put this another way. There are three and only three companies (A,B and C) that produce a product called "X"). If X is GPL'ed then why on earth should A develop for it, if its only going to mean that B and C get a load of work for free? (You have to think like a corporation here)
You get this little loop where no-one will work on something because at the end of the day, its a total waste of time because your hard work will be just dropped into someone elses impementation because thats what the licence says they have to do. And for them, it'll cost a tenth of the cost.
Don't get me wrong, the GPL has opened up stuff and helped me enormiously and I'm grateful. But thats me, as in an individual entity, not a global corporation.
And thats where I'm not sure what they think about it ...
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Sony obviously feels that putting out the source would help people develop code for models by those they are in competition with, so they with-held it.
This of course sucks. Question is, what can be done to force them to open up the code?
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I currently run Redhat 7 and after loosing some stuff on it that I liked (such as enlightenment) and general flaws and badly built stuff (missing files etc.etc) I figured I'd move to something else.
I use it mainly as a desktop OS, would like everything I possibly need already configured and if possible running, reasonably secure and dare I say it?, as close to being as friendly as Windows as possible. Ie. I don't have to piss about with config options, it does it for me and i can get on with doing fun stuff.
I use my machine for web development and socket programming (so C and perl really). I don't have a perminant connection, just a dial up which I hardly use (since the phone is miles away from the PC and we in the UK still have to pay for isp calls) so cron jobbing apt-get-whatnot isn't really useful.
I've asked about and can I get a sensible answer about what is the best desktop-come-development-come-nice-windows-style-t hing-but-running-linux distro for me? Nope, everyone comes up with totally different distros for a variety of reasons! At the end of the day its confusing me and whilst I'm by no means a linux expert, I'm not a total dunce.
I'm totally lost. Do I upgrade or not? I'm no closer to picking a distro than I was when i first started. Its times like this when I really start to wonder if maybe it would be better to have a few really good distros rather than lots that seem to do some bits well and some not.
I just know I'm going to get shot down in flames and marked as "Troll" but i'm not. I'm totally and completely lost in the maze of distributions and seem to be unable to get a sensible consistent answer from anyone.
Am I alone?
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Its better than Slashdots own effort in the following ways:
There are probably others but I've forgotten them now. Avantslash would have been listed on slashdots links page but I've emailed the url to them three times so far and they seem to have forgotten to do it.
At some point I'm going to completely rewrite it so that it copes with external sites and is even more customisable. However as it is, it still is IMO better than slashdots own.
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Putting crappy encoding rates into Windows is a bad thing. It'll also probably work. Why? Because most users don't download alternatives. Whats the most used telnet client in the world? Windows Telnet. Its crap. Whats the most used web browser? Internet Explorer. It used to be crap. Why? Because they were in with the windows package from the beginning.
I remember when IE sucked, but people still used it over Netscape because downloading and installing Netscape was a hassle. People didn't want to do it. People didn't know they could do it.
Its all very well running around and saying "Well I'll just download a better program". Great, but the majority of people won't. They'll use what they have and if they are gently persuaded to use something else then they will.
So yes, this is going to be a problem. The savvy people will download and use something else. Those that aren't so savvy (of which there are a hell of a lot more) will use what they are given.
If what they are given encourages them to use something else that gives a better result, then they'll do that.
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Its "Windows", not "Windoze" or any other of the hundreds of creative offerings out there. Same as its "Microsoft" or "MS" and not "Microshaft", "Micro$oft" or "M$".
For gods sake, read this section in the Linux Advocacy HOWTO and apply what it says.
If we're going to advocate Linux, lets do it properly and not look like a bunch of 10 year old illiterate children. Stupid stuff like the above is more likely to do more harm than good.
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Blitz Basic for the PC is available now from www.blitzbasic.com. Its also out in the shops in the UK but only starting to appear in the US. Its also pretty damn fast and easy to write games for.
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We used to run an 18+ only rule because people were free to talk about what they wanted. However this became more and more difficult to implement. Unlike AOL we don't have any way to link back peoples online names to addresses or personal details. Only thing we take is an email address for some of the features when you register (and you don't have to if you don't want to). People just lied, and we had no way of checking.
So we stopped it. It was simply being too difficult to police. So now we have a set of rules which are in general the sort of thing you'd expect to abide by in everyday life.
Occasionally we do get idiots, racists and homophobes or general nutcases who take delight in winding up people, but they tend to find that they are ganged up on and ridiculed off the place.
Self regulation.
Its a shame that AOL have to resort to draconian measure for this sort of thing, but there are strange people out there.
Strange people tend to do it to get the attention. They like it when people make a fuss and something happens. When they're totally ignored or ridiculed then they tend to give up and go elsewhere.
Granted we're not quite as popular as AOL (only 200 hard core users, most bored administrators and coders looking for some light conversation) but I'd hate to start implementing the sort of stuff AOL does if we did grow any bigger ...
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55000 / 30 = approximately 1833 emails a day
A day!? Thats a hell of a lot of emails. I get approximately 200 a day and even then I don't have time to read them all let alone do any other work.
Sending snail mail registered or not probably won't make much of a difference to be honest, 1833 messages is too much to read on a daily basis in whatever medium you care to think of.
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Right, now I've got that off my chest. Heres what I want to say.
The m505 is possibly the greatest move palm have done so far. The Vx was (and still is) one of the best organisors they've released. Yes its horribly expensive but it looks good, has good specs (for a palm) and is light.
Handsprings attempt is very nice and all that but you lose the good looks and the lightness. Now we have a colour pda thats only 0.9 oz heaver than the Vx. Bargain!
When I fist got my Vx I avoided the IIIc because it was bulkier and looked horrible. Now if I was thinking of buying again, then i'd go straight for the m505. No question. Yes the handspring is cheaper, but as Palm have found out, people are happy to pay more for something that looks good and is light.
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Yes but in that case what they are actually peddling is illegal. What about those adverts for laser printer toner cartridges? It isn't illegal to sell toner cartridges.
Also, when is mass emailing considered spamming?
If I send an email to someone I don't know going "hey, saw your site, why not buy my maxomatic doodah from http://doodah.com" is that considered spamming?
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ie. If I spam 10,000 users with get rich quick schemes and no server falls over then what case do people have to bring me to court? Annoyance because of non-solicited email?
However if I crash two servers and cause a company a big headache and loss of business then they can get me for that and not the sending itself.
Last time i heard someone was prosecuted it was because what they were trying to get people to do was illegal not because they'd sent out 50 million emails.
Could be wrong though ...
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No, you're crazy to even expect that a company such as Compaq would waste time, effort and money on providing all those options when at the end of the day they wouldn't sell enough to make it commerically viable. Plus it would confuse those people out there who were thinking of buying one who weren't geeks.
If you were to get something - anything - else, you'll sell more units and encourage more of a developer community for the unit.
The extra sales would not be worth the outlay. And last time I looked there is already a thriving development community. Simply bundling iPaqs with a variety of o/s would confuse potential buyers (as in the normal joe bloggs of which there are a hell of a lot more of) and serve to only increase sales by a fraction.
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I think the Open Source movement is great. However I can see what Bill Gates means when he asks what programmer can afford to spend 3 years designing, developing and testing a product only to give the entire lot (include source) away for free.
Quite simply, the majority can't. Those that can, are even more simply, gods.
Open source is great, you get to release your code, people get to pick it over, learn from it and in the process they may even help you out with it or at least spawn something off that is bigger and better. Don't know how to use TCP/IP correctly or well? Download something that does and look at its code, the only condition being that should you use any part of it then you should release your code open to the masses too.
But heres the problem. Open source software as we know it works, its indesputable. But it only works fully if the project is small. Hear me out and I'll explain why I think so.
For over a year I worked on a telemetry system for my employers. It was a Visual Basic frontend to Pro*C and Oracle backend. It was big. It also took me nearly 3 months of 9-5 working for 5 days a week to understand the entire system, how it works, the concequences of changing things and to get an understanding of the beast.
This isn't something unusual. In fact my company specifically understands this and refuses to put people on for any time less because they are only truely productive after this lead time.
So, approximately 6 hours a day for 3 months (roughly 87 days) makes 522 hours of work.
Where is this leading? Well, say this was an open source project and I was doing it in my spare time then I'd need 522 hours before I was fully acquainted with the project. Thats a lot of work and based on 2 hours per night plus 8 at the weekend thats 29 weeks before I can really truely say that I'm at a level to genuinly be able to contribute to the code. Sure, I could do the odd bug fix here and there but the GPL isn't about just doing bug fixes, its about helping the code to evolve.
Thats a lot of work for something in my free time. And unfortunately for me, time I don't have. Of course, others do and I applaud them, but IMO as the scale of the project increases the tougher it is to get people to work on it. If I GPL'ed a 20 line program the chances are the flaws and bugs and oversights would/could be fixed very quickly because it doesn't take much for people to understand the code completely.
So where is this heading? The GPL is great, without it we wouldn't have had the innovation that we've had (contrary to Microsofts belief) but I believe that for the majority of people the GPL means only that they can give it to friends for free. The average Jo Public doesn't want to look at the code and doesn't care that they can modify it and give away the modifications without some law agency hammering on their door.
What we should remember above all, is that code is a mighty beast, where everyone has differing styles and ideas. If you release code under the GPL that is big and complicated don't expect hundreds of people to come crawling out of the woodwork and help you. After all, really how many true developers are there on the Mozilla project? As in the ones that really know the system.
The "many eyes" theory is great, if the many eyes can be bothered to look and understand the code.
But before you hit the reply button or go for the "Troll" option in the moderation box please note that I am a fan of open source. I see no reason why people should distribute their code and hard work to others with a licence that almost says "here you go, do what you want with it" but those that do are truely generious individuals.
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- Pine D'Music MP3CD Player
- Likko LKM012 SuperMan
- Napa Dav 309
There are others, but heres a selection. Now all we need is a company with an eye for design (like Sonys very sexy cd players) to come up with a good looking one with all the features you come to expect thesedays.--
Until we find a way to employ a bunch of programmers, managers and administrators in 9-5 5 day week jobs and not pay them a penny (not forgetting the cost of the servers, connection etc) then you'll find that websites have to be profit motivated.
Ideals are great, but if they don't make business sense, you won't have a business.
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Its been there for a long while, at least 6 months. Granted it doesn't work perfectly (sometimes it gets confused and shows you a totally different posting when you select the next in the thread) and occasionally it disappears totally for a couple of days.
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- 2001-02-12 16:30:09 Google acquires Deja's Usenet Service (articles,news) (rejected)
(bah) I'd like to say that this is definately a good thing. I use Deja a lot because I don't have decent Newgroup access at work and I've found many problems with the site over the last 6 months:- News articles that have disappeared
- Huge gaps in postings (often space of several months)
- Pointless "innovations" - like that annoying product link
- Damaged links (where you click on message 2 of a thread and end up in a totally different thread)
- Increasingly slower site access (advert overload anyone)
as well as the really annoying problem where once in a while all the postings go flat (rather than threaded) and it marks all the postings as new even when I read them 7 weeks ago.What I hope Google don't do is just rebrand it, bolt on a little bit of additional code and be done with it. I personally think it needs a good clean up with much of the crap removed.
What I also hope is that Google do it fast, because at the moment I don't seem to be able to access anything but my my-deja email, which is only used to let me avoid the spam from the harvesters.
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