My bias stated up front: I very strongly doubt that video games are giving "young Britons a level of co-ordination and powers of concentration equivalent to those observed in top-level athletes."
That said, did this study involve anything resembling real case controls? All I see is "Bryce did her research by visiting computer gamers, often during regional or national competitions around Britain, and giving nearly 100 of them a series of psychological tests and questionnaires. The results were then compared with those of similar tests applied to athletes and other groups."
It sounds to me like this study is comparing different social classes and deciding that any factors that correlate with gaming must be caused by playing games.
My favorite part, by the way, is the instance of "doesn't translate well to American" at the end:
Next page: Dyke builds fortune as property developer
So now there are some vague concerns that might affect Ximian's nonexistent implementation of a Microsoft architecture that no one is using, the development of which implementation Microsoft hasn't ruled out helping with?
I haven't been able to read the Slashdotted page, just what has been reposted here. It sounds like the sort of detective work you see on the troll sites, where loons argue over the identity of other anonymous loons as though national security is at stake.
Meanwhile, at kuro5hin, there's a dispute going as to whether the author of a piece saying Linux tech support is going to be difficult is a Microsoft employee. A few day ago, Linux Today posters on various Mono-related articles were insisting, apparently in all seriousness, that Miguel de Icaza is a Microsoft mole, and speculating that Richard Stallman is, as well. Almost every discussion there involves accusations of astroturfing, with Joe Barr, who seems to be involved here, leading the pack.
Hopefully this sort of accusation is going to go out of fashion soon. Anyone with a little experience in the adult world should have learned why it's considered bad form to wildly throw unsupported, undisprovable accusations at anyone you dislike. ("You're complaining that my cattle ate your corn? Well, I think you're a WITCH!") To my mind, shouting "Astroturf!" is like stamping "obnoxious 14 year old" on your forehead* and just gives the impression you're too boneheaded to accept the possibility that anyone might genuinely disagree with you -- let alone that you might be wrong.
Anyway, who cares? Posters say what they say and it doesn't matter who might be paying them. And does it really matter if witless attacks against Eric Raymond by "George Tirebiter" are really by an editor? How is that even "astroturfing" at all?
* As do "BWAHAHAHAHAHA!" and "Bzzzt! Wrong!" You can almost smell the Clearasil when you read stuff like that.
And Jon's attack on Senator Lieberman is completely destroys any shread of credibility he may have had. If you don't like him don't vote for him but lets not get into personal attacks.
Yeah, the words "pompous" and "gasbag" do ring a little hollow coming from Jon Katz...
Personally, I'd put a lot of it down to them nicking the Mosaic source and using it. That effectively makes the time of development something more like 6 or 7 years rather than the 2 or 3 MS worked on it.
Well. first of all, they licensed the Mosaic source from Spyglass (completely screwing them over). But the issue here is IE 3 and 4 development. Using Mosaic code got them out the door a lot faster but their blowing by Netscape was their own doing, and Netscape's.
I think where Joel is off is that he says Mozilla made a crucial error by restarting from scratch. But didn't Microsoft completely rewrite the rendering engine for IE 5?
Not all software has even close to thelifespan of the big applications this guy is talking about. Most user applications, games, web technologies, they are all projects that get used for a few years and then get replaced.
I agree about games, with the exception of low-tech stuff like Angband and other Rogue-likes. I also agree about simple utilities. (That's why I don't care whether Miguel and Ximian decide to throw their energies into chasing.NET -- the stuff I care about in Gnome, like grip and xchat, is only going to get slower and buggier if they ever really get Bonobo in place.)
But user applications like office suite components, financial applications, things like that definitely need time to mature. It took Word and Excel years to go from their original Mac-only incarnations to their usability peaks (Mac Word 5.1 and Excel 6.0, IMHO). And web browsers are far more usable than they were five years ago.
While I'm here, responding to some things in the article:
Mistake number 2. the Overhype syndrome. When you release 1.0, you might want to actually keep it kind of quiet.
A corollary of this -- don't crank up the hype before you've written anything! That way lies Eazel, Mozilla, Marimba and, I'm guessing, Mono.
Mistake number 5. The "We'll Ship It When It's Ready" syndrome. Which reminds me. What the hell is going on with Mozilla? I made fun of them more than a year ago because three years had passed and the damn thing was still not out the door.
I made fun of them, too. Until it turned out that its function at AOL was to serve as a bargaining chip with Microsoft. It did its job. And I don't think you can fault them for not releasing those horrific 0.9 versions as 1.0. You can fault them for taking so long to make it usable.
Are windows users any more polite? What about mac users?
They may not be more polite, but at least they don't have the "I'm entitled to absolutely anything I want, for free!" attitude that prevails among a lot of Linux users and hangers-on. You get these boneheads with the notion that their association with the "Open Source Movement" (not that they've contributed anything whatsoever themselves) confers sainthood on them and means the rest of the world owes them anything they want.
I really doubt that HP is subscribing to the linux-usb list, and if they are they aren't going to say "waahhh, they called us cockmasters... no drivers for j00!"
In fact, the old QuickTime evangelist wrote on a list that part of the reason he wasn't pushing for a Linux port was that the hate mail he was receiving convinced him that many Linux zealots were completely unreasonable and that providing a binary-only player would be a bigger PR loss than a gain. (A stupid decision, IMHO, but that was the way he explained his thought process.)
By the way, what's up with Taco today? KDE? Sneering at Bruce Perens? Everything spelled correctly? Hemos -- make sure he hasn't been replaced by some kind of nefarious Taco-bot!
It's very good and I tricked one of my friends into thinking it was a chat room....
There was a guy on IRC a few nights ago who I took for granted was a bot, and not a very good one. (Wild non-sequiturs, bursts of random abuse...) I thought people were putting me on when they insisted he was a real person, until the guy/bot made some reading-between-the-lines responses that could only have come from a human or a really superb AI.
Is there some kind of inverse Turing test to designate a human who is indistinguishable from a buggy Perl script?
I could swear there was at least one more Katz article posted under the Enlightenment topic, although I don't see it now. (Maybe it was recategorized.)
I think that he's referring to the concept of enlightenment, not the window manager -- either as a pun or because he's never heard of Slashdot's former darling. I'm guessing the latter. (I suppose he may have just hit the wrong line in the box but I don't see anything nearby that would make sense.)
Well, Rachel's hotter than Wilma, but I always thought Betty was pretty cute.
Yeah, Betty was quite the, well, betty. At least when not being played by Rosie O'Donnell *gag*. My ranking would be: 1st season Rachel with the "Rachel" hairdo > Betty > anorexic Rachel with the forgettable hair and the...
Oh, man -- now I'm the one confusing cartoon characters with reality!;-)
So films like shrek and a bugs life, or toy story dont intend to do this?
Errr, no. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to accept sentient Mr. Potato Heads and talking, singing ants as the real thing. (Don't they seem very different from the toys and insects where you live? The praying mantises here don't talk like Frazier's younger brother.)
Geez, I'm amazed this is such a controversial point. Don't you guys perceive a distinction between Fred and Wilma and Ross and Rachel? If you don't, I strongly urge you to turn off the PlayStation or the anime and go outside for a few hours!
Does he mean this is the first movie with animation instead of "real" photographs of "real" people?
No, he's making a distinction between traditional animation, where you're expected to think of the characters as creations, not as actors, and FF which you're expected to experience as a live-action film although the actors are generated.
Like the New York Times review said, Pearl Harbor probably also fit the bill as "human leads played by non-actors."
First, while I'm posting, note that the GeneSweep page I linked above has statistics at the bottom on how people are betting -- supporting my assertion that there are no hard-and-fast conclusions about how many genes to expect. Also, when I wrote very different, presumably very different, I meant very different, presumably very accurate.
Second, realize that the questions you ask aren't scientific questions like "What is the molecular weight of water?" They're production questions, like "When is software ready for 1.0?"
I've always wondered... what is a raw sequence? Is it just a list of all the base pairs in one person's DNA?
Basically. Sequence information comes out of the machine in blocks of 300-800 base pairs. Those pieces then need to be assembled into one contiguous sequence for each chromosome. Of course, they're actually mixing reads from different people. But for purposes of assembly, all humans are so similar that the differences are meaningless.
I'm using "raw sequence" to refer to a string of As, Gs, Cs and Ts with no additional information.
And what does "the human genome has been sequenced" mean, anyway?
The truth is that the announcement of the "completion" was purely a political development. The public project and Celera declared a truce so they could end the "race" and work at a scientifically sound pace. The second "completion" came when both sides agreed they had enough information to draw substantive conclusions about the nature of the genome. There are still a lot of gaps left to be closed, though. And even at the point where most objective observers would agree that "the human genome has been sequenced", the bulk of the work will still remain to be done: identifying genes, figuring out what they do and identifying all the variants that account for human diversity.
To add a bit to krmt's excellent points:
If you insist on thinking of DNA as C code, think of the coding sequences as printf's and such and the intervening segments as the rest of the code -- flow control and whitespace. (We're talking about C, not Python..) Humans have a huge amount of whitespace, most of which probably isn't important at all. But it's very difficult to distinguish regulatory elements ("if" statements) from junk (whitespace).
On the whole, you're right, though. The raw number of genes is more media-friendly than scientifically important. Unless your company has a business plan based on patenting genes.
The article (and the writeup here) makes it sounds like one presumably very accurate estimate has been supplanted by a very different, presumably very different, estimate. The reality is that identifying genes in raw sequence is very much a work in progress. At the annual Genome Sequencing meeting at Cold Spring Harbor in May, a bunch of groups presented different methods that resulted in widely divergent numbers. Everyone's numbers were increasing over the estimates of last year, though.
It'll sort itself out over the next couple of years as the sequence gets better assembled, more non-human sequence is available for comparison and the groups adopt one another's good ideas. In the meantime, it looks like a good PR person at Ohio State managed to make their findings seem more revolutionary than they are.
By the way, if you want to bet on the number, see the GeneSweep page. (Note that bets must be placed in person!) I put my $5 on 44,000 and change.
I assume this is going to turn into the usual exchange of IANAL-ing:
"mysql.com and mysql.org are COMPLETELY different. I don't see how could anyone could POSSIBLY confuse the two."
"If MySQL AB doesn't instantly sue NuSphere for everything they've got, they lose their right to the trademark."
"NuSphere should move to Sealand. Or Afghanistan."
...
The notion that seems really foreign around here, though, is that there are issues of respect and courtesy that go beyond what you think the law could possibly allow you to get away with. If you want to run mysql.org, clear it first with the company that makes MySql.
madmax @ 2001/07/11 21.16 irc.ins.net.uk / dianora Just incase the rumours are true and somebody's attacked all the servers dianora opers on, can I point out that Diane hasnt been opered on irc.ins.net.uk for about a week... If you're going to DOS servers because you dont like their opers, at least/stats o first;P
Since a lot of people seem to be up on this situation -- what's the story?
I know, this is pure gossip with no redeeming News For Nerds value and almost certainly involves a lot of dweebs with too much time on their hands and no sense of perspective. But since we've pretty much exhausted the community discussion possibilities of "Destructive script kiddiez are idiots!" let's get to the dirt!
Reading the comments on the LinuxToday and dot.kde.org discussions of this work, I was struck by how negative so many people were. To preempt a lot of the same complaints here:
Why is KDE relying on ActiveX? Shouldn't we be developing a better technology instead of using Micro$oft's?
Leaving aside the question of who the "we" is who is always invoked in such remarks, this is a clever, useful hack by a couple of developers that's in kdenonbeta. No one is proposing to build KDE around ActiveX, no one is telling companies to stop making native plugins and it's not like a significant drain on resources went into making it.
Isn't this a huge security risk?
On the KDE site's discussion, Malte mentioned they were working on a chroot-based sandboxing method. This is still a work in progress and they tell you not to use it on sites you don't trust. And for God's sake, don't run it as root!! It's not going into the 2.2 release and anyone who is capable of installing it today ought to have the sense to run it carefully.
Wow, it's a wonder those KDE guys can accomplish anything with their stone-knives-and-bearskins tools like "vi" and "man". Now we know why there's so much sucky code in the world - lack of IDEs to think for us.
Actually, KDE makes the best (IMHO) IDE for Linux and uses the excellent Qt RAD tool. HTML documentation is automatically generated from the source and integrated in KDevelop, along with Qt, system and other documentation.
Anyway, does the Mono plan even include an IDE? I don't see anything about that in the press release.
Boy, Taco has become quite the Konqueror enthusiast! The ability to quickly switch off pop-ups while keeping the rest of the (site-specific) JavaScript usage intact is one of my favorite features also.
Anyway, since the subject of X10 ads came up -- are those ads almost overtly recommending the use of their product for hidden-camera spying on women? Or do I just have a dirty mind? Seriously, it's hard for me to me imagine what else the message is supposed to be.
The $1 million question was "On 'The Brady Bunch,' what was Carol Brady's maiden name?" That threw even the most avid TV trivia buffs, and was pretty hard even for a jackpot-level question.
I was going to say "Carol Martin" and wonder if that was really her maiden name or just her late first husband's name. Deciding to search myself, I see "Tyler" is her maiden name and "Martin" was her name when she married Mike (as I correctly recollected from the pilot). That is pretty tough -- anyone know what show gave that name?
I may not have any idea who Barbara Schett, Loana and Vicky Botwright are but I do know a little about The Brady Bunch.
Gnumatic didn't "blow through" their "millions" in startup funding. They never got the money to start with, just a term sheet, a promise, and a firm (but meaningless) handshake from the "investors" whose name I won't give any press to by a mention.
I did not know that -- I knew they were supposed to get a lot of money but didn't know it had fallen through. My apologies to them for the misinformation. (Could somebody mod the parent up?
That's why the Linux Developers Group is trying to make a living doing financial/ebusiness consulting using the GnuCash code base as a toolset. We're going to sell and support GnuCash for end users, but IMO it will be more of a calling card and advertisement for our consulting services than an attempt to be Intuit. If the Linux desktop space takes off, GREAT! We'll already be there. If not, I'll personally be disappointed but the business doesn't hinge on it.
Good luck to all you guys with that! I'd much prefer to see free software development rely on sensible, modest schemes like this.
Well, it's a great argument for the GPL if you're only concerned about the work and not the company. I imagine the folks who invested money in Gnumatic (they had millions in VC money, IIRC) and the employees who were counting on it to pay their bills are less thrilled about the situation.
I remember when the Kompany's proprietary Kapital was mentioned here and posters were scorching Shawn Gordon for not releasing it under the GPL.* He responded with something to the effect that "Gnumatic is blowing through their startup funding to get GnuCash going but eventually they'll need to make money somehow. We're not taking VC money, we're looking to build a functional company and this isn't the kind of app you can partition into free code and paid-for add-ons."
Looks like he was pretty much on the money. You know, VC's are going to catch on sooner or later and then even free software developers with sensible business plans won't see a dime.
* Apparently, RMS sent him such an offensive letter that he's no vowed never again to use the GPL for anything and is exploring other license options.
Exactly. I would have loved to have owned one of those things and you can bet neither hairline cracks nor the flaky power switch would have deterred me. The problem was that the Cube was priced at a point that rubbed your nose in the performance and expandability you were giving up for looks. If Apple had priced it at a few hundred dollars less, I probably would have been tempted to get it instead of a G4.
At least maybe the demise of the Cube will dispel the notion that Mac owners only care about pretty cases and have no clue about performance or cost. I suspect, though, that people who have wrapped up a substantial part of their self-esteem in "My computer is beige and came with a two-button mouse!" are unlikely to be swayed.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, did this study involve anything resembling real case controls? All I see is "Bryce did her research by visiting computer gamers, often during regional or national competitions around Britain, and giving nearly 100 of them a series of psychological tests and questionnaires. The results were then compared with those of similar tests applied to athletes and other groups."
It sounds to me like this study is comparing different social classes and deciding that any factors that correlate with gaming must be caused by playing games.
My favorite part, by the way, is the instance of "doesn't translate well to American" at the end:
Next page: Dyke builds fortune as property developer
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Surely there must be some real development going on in the free software world that could be covered instead. A Linux-powered robot that recognizes human faces or Sun's study of Gnome usability?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Meanwhile, at kuro5hin, there's a dispute going as to whether the author of a piece saying Linux tech support is going to be difficult is a Microsoft employee. A few day ago, Linux Today posters on various Mono-related articles were insisting, apparently in all seriousness, that Miguel de Icaza is a Microsoft mole, and speculating that Richard Stallman is, as well. Almost every discussion there involves accusations of astroturfing, with Joe Barr, who seems to be involved here, leading the pack.
Hopefully this sort of accusation is going to go out of fashion soon. Anyone with a little experience in the adult world should have learned why it's considered bad form to wildly throw unsupported, undisprovable accusations at anyone you dislike. ("You're complaining that my cattle ate your corn? Well, I think you're a WITCH!") To my mind, shouting "Astroturf!" is like stamping "obnoxious 14 year old" on your forehead* and just gives the impression you're too boneheaded to accept the possibility that anyone might genuinely disagree with you -- let alone that you might be wrong.
Anyway, who cares? Posters say what they say and it doesn't matter who might be paying them. And does it really matter if witless attacks against Eric Raymond by "George Tirebiter" are really by an editor? How is that even "astroturfing" at all?
* As do "BWAHAHAHAHAHA!" and "Bzzzt! Wrong!" You can almost smell the Clearasil when you read stuff like that.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Yeah, the words "pompous" and "gasbag" do ring a little hollow coming from Jon Katz...
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Well. first of all, they licensed the Mosaic source from Spyglass (completely screwing them over). But the issue here is IE 3 and 4 development. Using Mosaic code got them out the door a lot faster but their blowing by Netscape was their own doing, and Netscape's.
I think where Joel is off is that he says Mozilla made a crucial error by restarting from scratch. But didn't Microsoft completely rewrite the rendering engine for IE 5?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I agree about games, with the exception of low-tech stuff like Angband and other Rogue-likes. I also agree about simple utilities. (That's why I don't care whether Miguel and Ximian decide to throw their energies into chasing .NET -- the stuff I care about in Gnome, like grip and xchat, is only going to get slower and buggier if they ever really get Bonobo in place.)
But user applications like office suite components, financial applications, things like that definitely need time to mature. It took Word and Excel years to go from their original Mac-only incarnations to their usability peaks (Mac Word 5.1 and Excel 6.0, IMHO). And web browsers are far more usable than they were five years ago.
While I'm here, responding to some things in the article:
Mistake number 2. the Overhype syndrome. When you release 1.0, you might want to actually keep it kind of quiet.
A corollary of this -- don't crank up the hype before you've written anything! That way lies Eazel, Mozilla, Marimba and, I'm guessing, Mono.
Mistake number 5. The "We'll Ship It When It's Ready" syndrome. Which reminds me. What the hell is going on with Mozilla? I made fun of them more than a year ago because three years had passed and the damn thing was still not out the door.
I made fun of them, too. Until it turned out that its function at AOL was to serve as a bargaining chip with Microsoft. It did its job. And I don't think you can fault them for not releasing those horrific 0.9 versions as 1.0. You can fault them for taking so long to make it usable.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
They may not be more polite, but at least they don't have the "I'm entitled to absolutely anything I want, for free!" attitude that prevails among a lot of Linux users and hangers-on. You get these boneheads with the notion that their association with the "Open Source Movement" (not that they've contributed anything whatsoever themselves) confers sainthood on them and means the rest of the world owes them anything they want.
I really doubt that HP is subscribing to the linux-usb list, and if they are they aren't going to say "waahhh, they called us cockmasters... no drivers for j00!"
In fact, the old QuickTime evangelist wrote on a list that part of the reason he wasn't pushing for a Linux port was that the hate mail he was receiving convinced him that many Linux zealots were completely unreasonable and that providing a binary-only player would be a bigger PR loss than a gain. (A stupid decision, IMHO, but that was the way he explained his thought process.)
By the way, what's up with Taco today? KDE? Sneering at Bruce Perens? Everything spelled correctly? Hemos -- make sure he hasn't been replaced by some kind of nefarious Taco-bot!
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
There was a guy on IRC a few nights ago who I took for granted was a bot, and not a very good one. (Wild non-sequiturs, bursts of random abuse...) I thought people were putting me on when they insisted he was a real person, until the guy/bot made some reading-between-the-lines responses that could only have come from a human or a really superb AI.
Is there some kind of inverse Turing test to designate a human who is indistinguishable from a buggy Perl script?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I think that he's referring to the concept of enlightenment, not the window manager -- either as a pun or because he's never heard of Slashdot's former darling. I'm guessing the latter. (I suppose he may have just hit the wrong line in the box but I don't see anything nearby that would make sense.)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Yeah, Betty was quite the, well, betty. At least when not being played by Rosie O'Donnell *gag*. My ranking would be:
1st season Rachel with the "Rachel" hairdo > Betty > anorexic Rachel with the forgettable hair and the...
Oh, man -- now I'm the one confusing cartoon characters with reality! ;-)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Errr, no. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to accept sentient Mr. Potato Heads and talking, singing ants as the real thing. (Don't they seem very different from the toys and insects where you live? The praying mantises here don't talk like Frazier's younger brother.)
Geez, I'm amazed this is such a controversial point. Don't you guys perceive a distinction between Fred and Wilma and Ross and Rachel? If you don't, I strongly urge you to turn off the PlayStation or the anime and go outside for a few hours!
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
No, he's making a distinction between traditional animation, where you're expected to think of the characters as creations, not as actors, and FF which you're expected to experience as a live-action film although the actors are generated.
Like the New York Times review said, Pearl Harbor probably also fit the bill as "human leads played by non-actors ."
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Second, realize that the questions you ask aren't scientific questions like "What is the molecular weight of water?" They're production questions, like "When is software ready for 1.0?"
I've always wondered... what is a raw sequence? Is it just a list of all the base pairs in one person's DNA?
Basically. Sequence information comes out of the machine in blocks of 300-800 base pairs. Those pieces then need to be assembled into one contiguous sequence for each chromosome. Of course, they're actually mixing reads from different people. But for purposes of assembly, all humans are so similar that the differences are meaningless.
I'm using "raw sequence" to refer to a string of As, Gs, Cs and Ts with no additional information.
And what does "the human genome has been sequenced" mean, anyway?
The truth is that the announcement of the "completion" was purely a political development. The public project and Celera declared a truce so they could end the "race" and work at a scientifically sound pace. The second "completion" came when both sides agreed they had enough information to draw substantive conclusions about the nature of the genome. There are still a lot of gaps left to be closed, though. And even at the point where most objective observers would agree that "the human genome has been sequenced", the bulk of the work will still remain to be done: identifying genes, figuring out what they do and identifying all the variants that account for human diversity.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
On the whole, you're right, though. The raw number of genes is more media-friendly than scientifically important. Unless your company has a business plan based on patenting genes.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
It'll sort itself out over the next couple of years as the sequence gets better assembled, more non-human sequence is available for comparison and the groups adopt one another's good ideas. In the meantime, it looks like a good PR person at Ohio State managed to make their findings seem more revolutionary than they are.
By the way, if you want to bet on the number, see the GeneSweep page. (Note that bets must be placed in person!) I put my $5 on 44,000 and change.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
- "mysql.com and mysql.org are COMPLETELY different. I don't see how could anyone could POSSIBLY confuse the two."
- "If MySQL AB doesn't instantly sue NuSphere for everything they've got, they lose their right to the trademark."
- "NuSphere should move to Sealand. Or Afghanistan."
- ...
The notion that seems really foreign around here, though, is that there are issues of respect and courtesy that go beyond what you think the law could possibly allow you to get away with. If you want to run mysql.org, clear it first with the company that makes MySql.Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Just incase the rumours are true and somebody's attacked all the servers dianora opers on, can I point out that Diane hasnt been opered on irc.ins.net.uk for about a week... If you're going to DOS servers because you dont like their opers, at least
Since a lot of people seem to be up on this situation -- what's the story?
I know, this is pure gossip with no redeeming News For Nerds value and almost certainly involves a lot of dweebs with too much time on their hands and no sense of perspective. But since we've pretty much exhausted the community discussion possibilities of "Destructive script kiddiez are idiots!" let's get to the dirt!
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Why is KDE relying on ActiveX? Shouldn't we be developing a better technology instead of using Micro$oft's?
Leaving aside the question of who the "we" is who is always invoked in such remarks, this is a clever, useful hack by a couple of developers that's in kdenonbeta. No one is proposing to build KDE around ActiveX, no one is telling companies to stop making native plugins and it's not like a significant drain on resources went into making it.
Isn't this a huge security risk?
On the KDE site's discussion, Malte mentioned they were working on a chroot-based sandboxing method. This is still a work in progress and they tell you not to use it on sites you don't trust. And for God's sake, don't run it as root!! It's not going into the 2.2 release and anyone who is capable of installing it today ought to have the sense to run it carefully.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Actually, KDE makes the best (IMHO) IDE for Linux and uses the excellent Qt RAD tool. HTML documentation is automatically generated from the source and integrated in KDevelop, along with Qt, system and other documentation.
Anyway, does the Mono plan even include an IDE? I don't see anything about that in the press release.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Anyway, since the subject of X10 ads came up -- are those ads almost overtly recommending the use of their product for hidden-camera spying on women? Or do I just have a dirty mind? Seriously, it's hard for me to me imagine what else the message is supposed to be.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I was going to say "Carol Martin" and wonder if that was really her maiden name or just her late first husband's name. Deciding to search myself, I see "Tyler" is her maiden name and "Martin" was her name when she married Mike (as I correctly recollected from the pilot). That is pretty tough -- anyone know what show gave that name?
I may not have any idea who Barbara Schett, Loana and Vicky Botwright are but I do know a little about The Brady Bunch.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I did not know that -- I knew they were supposed to get a lot of money but didn't know it had fallen through. My apologies to them for the misinformation. (Could somebody mod the parent up?
That's why the Linux Developers Group is trying to make a living doing financial/ebusiness consulting using the GnuCash code base as a toolset. We're going to sell and support GnuCash for end users, but IMO it will be more of a calling card and advertisement for our consulting services than an attempt to be Intuit. If the Linux desktop space takes off, GREAT! We'll already be there. If not, I'll personally be disappointed but the business doesn't hinge on it.
Good luck to all you guys with that! I'd much prefer to see free software development rely on sensible, modest schemes like this.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I remember when the Kompany's proprietary Kapital was mentioned here and posters were scorching Shawn Gordon for not releasing it under the GPL.* He responded with something to the effect that "Gnumatic is blowing through their startup funding to get GnuCash going but eventually they'll need to make money somehow. We're not taking VC money, we're looking to build a functional company and this isn't the kind of app you can partition into free code and paid-for add-ons."
Looks like he was pretty much on the money. You know, VC's are going to catch on sooner or later and then even free software developers with sensible business plans won't see a dime.
* Apparently, RMS sent him such an offensive letter that he's no vowed never again to use the GPL for anything and is exploring other license options.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
At least maybe the demise of the Cube will dispel the notion that Mac owners only care about pretty cases and have no clue about performance or cost. I suspect, though, that people who have wrapped up a substantial part of their self-esteem in "My computer is beige and came with a two-button mouse!" are unlikely to be swayed.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.