> The utility in question, Snapz Pro X 49.00 [vs]
> IrfanView [irfanview.com] for Win32 at zero dollars.
I don't recall IrfanView taking movies of your desktop, and the price is $40 for the full Snapz X and $29 without QuickTime capture. Nor is IrFanView real good for taking screen grabs from, say, the middle of a game of Quake 3 to run on your gaming website, etc. That's what Snapz has let you do for years.
Now compare Snapz with the ability to take desktop movies to SnagIt for Windows at $39.95 (http://snagit.com/products/snagit/order.asp) and I think that you'll see Ambrosia usually markets their software at fair prices.
Though some of your other points are well taken, the IrfanView vs. Snapz comparison is not.
> This also wipes out any chances of seeing home
> brewed software on the Playstation 2 anytime
> soon, as well.
All albinos are white; I've been called white; I'm an albino.
What the judge said was that games specificly licensed for distribution in one geographic location only should not be played in another. Said nothing about and implied nothing about games made "to be played in any geographic locale".
Net Yaroze showed me Sony's more in tune with the home hacker than most gaming companies have been in the past. Now that Linux is available for the PS2, I think that shows Sony's continuing support of the homebrewer. Now afaik the Linux distrib doesn't allow access to video hardware, and I don't know many people who want to play Quake 2 in software anymore, but for FreeCiv and relatively simple hacks? Perfect.
The question wrt homebrews is distribution, namely licensing. This article doesn't seem to step on any toes *nor* open any doors there. It's not good news, but it's not bad news. About homebrews, it's no news.
This post and some of its replies are missing one key point -- IE is much much easier to drop into an application in the Windows world than any other generic "text visualization" tool (see KaZaa and Morpheus for a prime example). And when you want to make AOL easy for web newbies/light users, you're going to want to provide an integrated browser in your app.
In Visual Basic, it quite literally takes 5 minutes to make a browser from scratch (even less if you use the browser form wizard) using IE's engine, called the "Microsoft Internet Control" in your project's references. The closest thing we have from Mozilla is the Mozilla ActiveX project (http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm). Needless to say, this is not as mature as the Microsoft Internet Control (that uses IE's engine).
The way to make this point become one about antitrust would be to say, "Because IE is already installed on everyone's OS, it's an anticompetitve market for looking at alternatives." Let's face it -- part of why the MS Internet Control is so easy to use is b/c any box with IE 4+ already has the control installed.
So at least when you're programming for Windows, don't be surprised to see 99.44% of embedded browsers use/report themselves to be IE.
Now this does make me wonder if AOL wouldn't be better off spending some time making a similar Moz control for Mac OS X and Linux versions of AOL... One of my biggest complaints about REALbasic (http://realbasic.com/), a VB-like lang for the Mac OS, Classic and X, is that it's lacking just such a component. Moz would seem to me to be the best place to start making one.
Another good idea ruined by Stallman's egocentric GNU rantings. Should.doc's be the de facto standard they seemed to be today? Absolutely not, and everyone who uses them should realize the inherent bias.doc's create.
But to "politely" call those who use.docs ignorant and to use scare tactics about how these files are in some witchy "secret" file format that can contain hidden personal information isn't educating people either. It's playing on the same naivety that made them succumb to using.docs at the outset! Furthermore, Stallman refuses to even use open source software (like the excellent aforementioned AbiWord) to read the file's content, which is hardly the way to begin a dialog.
Stallman's not worried about secret file formats (which he should drop from those silly email replies about.doc attachments), he's worried about closed standards. This is a good point. But instead of preaching that pdf is the answer (a paradigm shift for Word users), offer good alternatives.
* Write a vba script for Word that turns.docs into.rtf when.docs are opened and creates new.rtf files, not.docs, when a user creates a new file.
* Suggest that they use AbiWord, something that can read.docs and save to formats Word users still understand.
Stallman is, imo, no better than Microsoft in that he has great ideas wrung through a strange, self-serving translator that mangles the original, useful message. In MS's case, it's a profit maximization machine. In Stallman's, it's GNU. Both biases serve to dilute what could have been a well-received and useful technology or lesson, and this Word scare is another one.
From the article:
***Looking to stave off a potential video versions of services like Napster, ***
Not only is this bad grammar, isn't this called Limewire (insert app of choice or favorite videohound on IRC)?
Or to really break it down, as so many have already tried to say in great length, if it's 0s and 1s, it's going to be transmitted over the Internet and all you can do is make it a little tougher to get started.
Sorry, so my question would be, "Do you see C# becoming a more successful practical standard cross-platform (let's say that means Windows, Mac OS X, Linux x86, FreeBSD, and Solaris) than Java in the next 5 to 10 years?"
There's an interesting article at Javalobby (http://www3.usermagnet.com/nl/jlnews_20011210.htm l), admittedly from a Java pro's perspective, that talks about what.NET's submission to the ECMA really means. Here's a quote:
***This ECMA effort may be primarily symbolic, however, since only a player with enormous resources and funding could possibly implement the standard. If you use.Net you can expect to be using it only on Windows for a long time to come.***
Don't know if Mr. Ross is right, but I assume he's more connected than I am.:^) I'm intrigued by the idea of a GNU CLR or CLI or whatever it is now, but if it's going to be successful it'll have to progress quite a bit faster than GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/), as an example, before it's useful.
With respect to your comment:
>Other standards like Ethernet seem to have done
>relatively well compatability wise, while using
>Java across multiple platforms is an exercise in
>frustration.
Tried porting any C other than straight ANSI? Believe me, though toasters running weather modeling might be "goofy", Java makes some real headway into writing once and running anywhere. Limewire.com and Netbeans.org come to mind as pretty good xplat software that wouldn't be on our OS of choice without Java.
Yes, I realize Netbeans wouldn't be anywhere without Java since it's a Java IDE, but you get the point. I've seen a lot higher percentage (for x software packages, y had a Mac version) of software come to Mac Classic (which didn't have UNIX underneath) from Java than from C codebases.
I'm not against you being right about C#, and hope it does an even better job of making weather predicting toasters, but I'm not optimistic.
Quotes from "Running other OSes" thread:
>>But with VMWare you have to buy/own a Windows
>>license, which kind of nullifies the price
>>advantage.
>Use Wine [winehq.com] then.
I'm betting that's exactly what Lindows is. A friend and I were discussing Wine's license recently, specifically wrt the percieved lack of contributions from Transgaming's WineX (a DirectX centered fork from Wine -- http://www.transgaming.com/) back into the original codebase.
It appeared to us that Wine has a pretty open license much like X11's (http://winehq.com/source/LICENSE). The only real stipulation is the following:
15 The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
16 all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
So how tough would it be to wrap up Wine in a box with a $99 price tag (price from Lindows' FAQ page: http://www.lindows.com/lindows_products_faqs.php)? Real easy, and legal too. Again, note that with Wine, you can run a ton of Windows software _without_ a licensed copy of Windows.
So to sum, take open sourced but not "RMS Free" (aka, GPL'd) code, name the result something Microsoft will have a problem with for the free press (as has been mentioned about a million times already), and *poof*, you've got the makings of a 90's style IPO.:^)
Okay fellows, enough of the lessons learned from watchin' Jurassic Park III. It's really not so big a deal to introduce select foreign species on a limited basis. I did a very basic study of bamboo lemurs (http://www.duke.edu/web/primate/labamb.html) at the Duke University Primate Center (http://www.duke.edu/web/primate/) some years ago. The guys were hanging out in a fenced enclosure with a couple of other species of lemur and loving it.
I had to take readings every five minutes and record their actions, and I had several interactions with squirrels and the like. Really pretty interesting to see two disparate species like this have face-to-face "showdowns". There's no real worry that these guys are going to transmit anything.
The point, in brief, is this: Zoos do this all the time in the US, from San Diego to Asheboro, North Carolina. Believe me, they keep a very close eye on the animals. The biggest hurdle for many zoos is finding a climate that suits the animals. Australia fits the bill for many African hoofed mammals almost to a T, I'd bet. The only real concern is what happens if a large habitat is cleared of rare indigenous animals to make room -- that could potentially have some obviously bad repercussions.
This isn't a case of kudzu, African "killer" bees coming up from Mexico, or rabbits running rampant around Australia. In this case, hopefully, the goal is to breed rare animals in a land well suited to the task (stable government and good climate). The whole purpose is to breed animals that have a hard time making more, not to give range to wascally wabbits. Assuming the intentions are sound, good luck to them, and don't worry about us playing god.
One final point -- if you're worried about this guy making money, don't be unless animals are being hurt or exploited. We won't have conservation without placing worth on healthy animals, and, for better or worse, money is the way we seem to measure worth in this "first world".
Quote from the article:
There is also a possibility of the DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrive becoming available as a BTO option on this new iMac, therefore bringing DVD movie creation to the masses--a long held vision of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
...
the price of the Combo drive model, probably bringing the grand total of the loaded model to $1599
***end quote***
Two things sound fishy. One, I think iDVD is written so that it _requires_Altivec, which means forget using it with a G3. Certainly it's all 0's and 1's so there's no reason iDVD couldn't be written for the G3, but I'm betting it'd be painfully painfully slow -- especially with only 128 megs of RAM. You should try iMovie or QuickTime Pro on a G3 and then a G4 running at the same speed.
Second is the price. Sixteen hundred clams for a DVD *burning* solution? I don't think so. The external version of the drive still costs $700 all by itself (http://all4dvd.com/) and this machine would have to have more than the bare bones hardware inside to do the churning.
This isn't to say a flatscreen iMac isn't coming, but a flatscreen consumer model that burns DVDs for $1600? Unless the new G3 has some new instruction set I haven't heard about, I kinda doubt it. Least they didn't claim it would have dual processors...;^)
The Mac crowd is a very different crowd, stereotypically, than, say, the Slashdot crowd. What was the Apple Cube? It was an iMac for serious graphic designers. They hated being cut out of the "iMac coolness" b/c of the iMac's all-in-one design (which included a video chip too shoddy for serious design), and Apple tried to pitch to the "crowd that wanted cool". There weren't enough that finally bought into the idea, but when I see a Cube sitting on a desk it's invariably sitting on a desk of someone more worried about image than doing the most efficient computing.
Apple's not as much about delivering that which is most efficient (though many of their all-in-one solutions, most notably DVD burning and "music management", are just that) but about bringing aesthetics to the world once dominated by beige towers. People don't get excited by the iMac's innards (ever tried playing Quake 3 on a 400 MHz iMac with the un-upgradable 8 meg ATi card? Heck, Apple took the unsupported upgrade slot _out_ of the third revision of the iMac!) -- they get excited by the statement owning a "Dalmatian spotted" machine brings with it.
And there was a huge letdown after the last MacExpo didn't deliver a flat-screen iMac. One fellow even [reportedly] demanded to see Jobs and tore down keynote equipment (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13298&cid=762 77).
Apple sales are driven by arguably overpriced hardware that looks cool. The new iBook sent Apple's stock up quite a bit when it was released -- essentially an underpowered laptop that can barely make its way through the requirements of Mac OS X 10.1.(*) The iPod falls into at least two of these categories (overpriced and cool).
Whether or not including an LCD seems to suggest people should be buying [and Apple should be supplying] a souped-up iBook, Apple has their mark right on the money. Apple users like cool. Flat-screen, all-in-one is cool. Not exactly form over function, but form with function, and now we get to watch Sony, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft and friends play catch-up again.
(*) Ask me -- I bought a new iBook with the 500 MHz G3. It's underpowered, but I love it. With Netbeans, it's a great Java development platform, and iTunes2 with the CD-RW in the iBook make for a great "single-vendor provided solution". Crazy Mac loyalist!
Though Apple, with their new "we make solutions" attitude, probably won't care for it much, there is a commercial app that allows you to use the iPod on Windows: XPod (great names, eh?)
http://www.mediafour.com/products/xpod/
You can already use it as a hard drive with a Firewire port using some software they have for download. The "iTunes-ish" support will have to come later.
NEWFLASH! Open source projects aren't making money when commercial ventures aren't making money, therefore open source is fading!
The author of the article referenced here takes examples like VA Linux and says, "See, open source is on the way out." The point should be that times were so wild for a while there you could offer Free[dom] software and *still* make money.
Quoting a quote from the article:
"The development model of open-source software is wonderful. But let's not confuse a development model with a business model. Basic business principles were forgotten by some," said Turbolinux Chief Executive Ly-Huong Pham.
[end quote]
Mistaking open-source for a business model is exactly what this article does. The fact that open-source companies are struggling is not a good indicator that open source is "fading". That's like measuring the well-being of the Catholic Church by how much the Pope makes each year, after taxes, of course. *sigh*
I've done a little C# programming and I've done more Java programming. Heck, I've even done some J# (http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?U RL=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/7 54/msdncompositedoc.xml) programming.
The things that make these two different as a language are pretty trivial. As a Chem. Eng. professor told me when I asked if I needed to bother with FORTRAN when I already knew Pascal, "They're all different dialects of the same langauge".
The only real difference is that you'll want to use the dialect best suited to your particular programming task. If you want to leverage code written in.NET quickly and easily and build off of a Web Service on another office's server or if you have hoardes of legacy COM code, you'll use C#. If you have a giant UNIX server farm running JSP you'll use... That's right! Java. If you're a madman who likes to make Frankensteins in your spare time, you'll use J#.:^)
The biggest difference isn't syntaxical. It's the mindset of the companies behind the code. No matter how many times MS wants to claim C# isn't a Java clone, the point is it's a well-done language based on lessons learned by programmers who are familiar with Java. My only fear is that C#, an excellent language in theory by anyone's measure, is going to be wrung through Microsoft's "profit maximization machine" and be made to do things that, in practice, aren't the best.
The neat part is that people familiar with C#'s concepts will also be able to quickly learn Java! I wouldn't be too surprised to see some VB programmers turned C# developers start to think, "Hey, you know it wouldn't be that hard to run this on [Linux/OS X/etc] by implementing this idea in Java!"
The fink author should talk to Warren Robinette, the author of Adventure for the 2600. Or in a more recently example, speak to the authors of anything coming from Apple.
What these people have in common with the author of Fink is that they wrote software for which they didn't receive obvious credit (Apple recently removed credits so that people couldn't target specific Apple employees for recruitment to another software house). Just as not getting specific credit is written into Apple employees' contracts and was written into Atari programmers (one reason so many of the best worked for Activision), the "contract" your essentially "sign" when releasing GPL software doesn't have any provisions to retain who did the work.
One might take a cue from Mr. Robinette and include something in the code that gives you specific credit -- he created the first easter egg in a video game that displayed his name on the screen as the game's author (take a look at the end of the decompiled source to the game. Download the zip on this page: http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/20011 1/msg00086.html).
Or one might take an even better cue from those who worked for Activision: If it's key for you to receive credit for your work, make sure it's in the contract!
No probably. Read the FAQ, natch.:^)
http://www.apple.com/airport/faq/
Q: Why didn't AOL work with AirPort before?
A: AOL has a unique login protocol, which kept AirPort from being able to establish an AOL connection. Working together, Apple and AOL have devised a method to allow AOL customers to use AirPort. In fact, AirPort is currently the only wireless solution that works with AOL.
What makes a good IDE, aka: Netbeans is real close
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What does a Java IDE need?
* Open source -- I want a new feature, I add it. I see a bug, I fix it.
* Code completion -- As much as you might hate M$, there ain't no faster coding that Visual Basic, and most of that is due to Intellivisio -- ur, Intellisense. If the IDE finishes my lines for me, that's half the battle right there. (Thanks, Mr. Ness)
* GUI RAD -- Look, I want to program the nuts and bolts, not spend tons of times making a beautiful set of buttons. A RAD lets me WYSIWYG my way to a great UI.
* Syntax highlighting -- as stated in the post, I like to see what's a string, what's a comment, and what's code. And see it quickly.
* The exact same UI cross platform -- When I go from Windows at work to a UNIX workstation down the hall to my iBook at home, I want to use the same tool to program my "write once, test -- ur -- run everywhere" code. My code's crossplatform, why shouldn't my IDE be too?
Hey, lookit there, I just described http://www.netbeans.org !
Sun funds much of the development team, so I know I have support. But before Sun gets their hands on the code to turn it into Forte, I've got full access. Was actually reading/. waiting for Netbeans to download updates as I wrote this.
Only drawback -- I sure wish this was written in assembler.;^D Without a 1.8 GHz machine, it's still a little slow.
The protocol (unfortunately, imo) doesn't say anything about how a search should be run, however. Somewhat of a shame that proprietary search schemes might have already cropped up. If I were writing a client from scratch using only the protocol, I already wouldn't give you the same searching functionality as Limewire, which is a bummer.
Looks like the only other option is to check out the Limewire source (http://www.limewire.org/project/www/download.html ) and see what's going on? That's usually pretty definitive.:^)
I think this is part of the reason open source efforts seem to get some work. Take that seed that got you interested in CS and put it towards a deadline-free, manager-free open source project that meets a need you see. Or write some code on the side to release that meets a need that's screaming to you. Or just do something fun, like learn to program a game for the Atari 2600 (sign up at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/ for a useful listserv on that subject).
I think the trick has to be to find a different job and see if you have the compulsion to write code. If you do, and you find a need that you can fit, you won't be able to stop coding. Either your hobby will pan out, or it'll be the way towards landing a related job.
If you don't keep writing, don't bother with another major -- just go for what drives you. As an English degree holder turned dba, believe me, it's not as tough as it sounds. A 3.5 overall (regardless of degree) is enough to get you in the door at most any entry level position.
>Not true, you say? You don't think that
>Microsoft would "encourage" ISP's to only support IE?
Okay, that's going to be a tough one. Even if MS beats out TCP/IP (and I just don't see that happening), they've still got AOL to fight with.
On the other hand...
>You think any web pages created with Microsoft
>Front Page would be readable in Netscape?
That's already happened. Try looking at a site that uses ASP.NET like:
http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/
... in NS 4.7. These people have appeared on MS Developer's Network and are power players in.NET developement circles. NS 4.7 locks up for me from the start, and most pages on the site give NS 4.7 no more than black displays.
That's not a big deal to me by itself, but these [and those this site represents -- I feel this one is representative] are the guys MS wants _teaching_ newbies how to program. The less professional sites (including some of the more deeply hidden pages on dotnetjunkies) don't even render in Mozilla well. People don't test cross platform and cross browser because they're not taught to.
The problem occurs when programmers test only in IE because they know more than 90% of their clients/customers will have access to IE.* It's simply not worth the work bothering to test new.NET code in Moz/NS/OmniWeb when you're only going to net 10% or less more customers. You're going to make a new system in.NET instead.
The extension of the MS monopoly to the server-side is on the way -- not because programmers are given tools that, by definition, lock out non-MS or non-IE tools, but because it's so much easier to ignore non-MS tools and assume your clients have IE anyhow. MS even provides built-in "separate but [hardly] equal" controls that mimic on Moz what they do quite handily on IE. "Our site even works on Mozilla -- we know because MS tells us so."
MS can support standards and, as long as it's still easier to do it on Windows first, lazy programmers are still going to do Windows only.
* Think how many people have one form of IE or another -- Mac IE is a very nice browser that comes pre-installed with an icon on Mac OS X's Dock. Think of IE Mac as "mini-Windows" -- and therefore another brick in the foundation for server-side, possibly antitrust-like practices.
A friend of mine asked me why Moz couldn't see the msn beta site yesterday (I'm an ASP/MS-SQL 2k developers, so I guess it's the company I keep), and I answered him the best way I knew how. I sent him the source to the page.
Later, I was moving mail from my Sent box in NS 4.7 (we're mandated to use 4.7 as our email client here at work; it's not a bad app at all), and after deleting a few, the email I'd sent to Linuxman came up. NS 4.7 renders html attachments to emails after a quick hr tag in the window, so there it was, the MSN beta site's home page -- iamges and everything short of stylesheets.
Not a dang thing didn't work. (Going to msn.com straight from NS 4.7 locks me up so I have to force quit)
If you're a web coder, you know the difference between checking DOM (if (document.getElementById()) {) vs. checking the user-agent, as mentioned in another post. This is plain ole bad code -- and an "oversite" that shows MS is once again abusing its near monopoly status in home OS, and now its near monopoly in browsers, to try and achieve another near-monopoly in servers.
"This means that within the 15 EU member-states companies cannot resort anymore to direct marketing to sell their wares."
Woohoo! Spam is OVER from the EU! Never again will I get an email asking me to go to http://192.168.0.1/s3xy81+ch.html! Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!
Oh for crimminy sake, how many times must an article go up on/. where "Crossplatform" equals "Windows *and* Linux"? Not only is this danged IVM not Java (as http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21648&cid=2302 283 ably points out), it doesn't run on 5% of the world's computers out of the gate.
There's no alternative to Java. As others have pointed out, match your tool to your task and you'll be happy campers. If you want Java, use Java, not some generic knock-off. (If you want Java, but love Bill, use C#, etc.) If you want C, use C. Far as I care, it's already crossplatform -- even Classic Mac compiles C. (yes, that was tongue in cheek)
Ruffin "Wait until the story's cold to get KEEN mod points" Bailey
User community needs to change first...
on
Linux on the Desktop
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not so much how difficult that Linux is to install that makes it, to me, difficult to use. It's the community that feeds the perception that Linux is a geek's OS.
As long as the "more able", on-the-fence Windows users continue to get responses like, "Read the fookin esotericHOWTO, crypticHOWTO, and horriblyexcitingtoreadHOWTO, you idiot!" a la Jimmy Fallon on SNL as they take their first look at Linux and post newbie questions on usenet, the wall will never crack. Heck, when I first installed Linux I didn't even know where the HOWTOs were!
If I'm Joe Computer User and my "expert friend" says Linux is too complicated in no small part due to the "newbie flame" s/he got when trying to become part of the community, I'm not about to try out this new OS.
Slashdot Mirror
> The utility in question, Snapz Pro X 49.00 [vs]
> IrfanView [irfanview.com] for Win32 at zero dollars.
I don't recall IrfanView taking movies of your desktop, and the price is $40 for the full Snapz X and $29 without QuickTime capture. Nor is IrFanView real good for taking screen grabs from, say, the middle of a game of Quake 3 to run on your gaming website, etc. That's what Snapz has let you do for years.
Now compare Snapz with the ability to take desktop movies to SnagIt for Windows at $39.95 (http://snagit.com/products/snagit/order.asp) and I think that you'll see Ambrosia usually markets their software at fair prices.
Though some of your other points are well taken, the IrfanView vs. Snapz comparison is not.
> This also wipes out any chances of seeing home
> brewed software on the Playstation 2 anytime
> soon, as well.
All albinos are white; I've been called white; I'm an albino.
What the judge said was that games specificly licensed for distribution in one geographic location only should not be played in another. Said nothing about and implied nothing about games made "to be played in any geographic locale".
Net Yaroze showed me Sony's more in tune with the home hacker than most gaming companies have been in the past. Now that Linux is available for the PS2, I think that shows Sony's continuing support of the homebrewer. Now afaik the Linux distrib doesn't allow access to video hardware, and I don't know many people who want to play Quake 2 in software anymore, but for FreeCiv and relatively simple hacks? Perfect.
The question wrt homebrews is distribution, namely licensing. This article doesn't seem to step on any toes *nor* open any doors there. It's not good news, but it's not bad news. About homebrews, it's no news.
This post and some of its replies are missing one key point -- IE is much much easier to drop into an application in the Windows world than any other generic "text visualization" tool (see KaZaa and Morpheus for a prime example). And when you want to make AOL easy for web newbies/light users, you're going to want to provide an integrated browser in your app.
In Visual Basic, it quite literally takes 5 minutes to make a browser from scratch (even less if you use the browser form wizard) using IE's engine, called the "Microsoft Internet Control" in your project's references. The closest thing we have from Mozilla is the Mozilla ActiveX project (http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm). Needless to say, this is not as mature as the Microsoft Internet Control (that uses IE's engine).
The way to make this point become one about antitrust would be to say, "Because IE is already installed on everyone's OS, it's an anticompetitve market for looking at alternatives." Let's face it -- part of why the MS Internet Control is so easy to use is b/c any box with IE 4+ already has the control installed.
So at least when you're programming for Windows, don't be surprised to see 99.44% of embedded browsers use/report themselves to be IE.
Now this does make me wonder if AOL wouldn't be better off spending some time making a similar Moz control for Mac OS X and Linux versions of AOL... One of my biggest complaints about REALbasic (http://realbasic.com/), a VB-like lang for the Mac OS, Classic and X, is that it's lacking just such a component. Moz would seem to me to be the best place to start making one.
Another good idea ruined by Stallman's egocentric GNU rantings. Should .doc's be the de facto standard they seemed to be today? Absolutely not, and everyone who uses them should realize the inherent bias .doc's create.
.docs ignorant and to use scare tactics about how these files are in some witchy "secret" file format that can contain hidden personal information isn't educating people either. It's playing on the same naivety that made them succumb to using .docs at the outset! Furthermore, Stallman refuses to even use open source software (like the excellent aforementioned AbiWord) to read the file's content, which is hardly the way to begin a dialog.
.doc attachments), he's worried about closed standards. This is a good point. But instead of preaching that pdf is the answer (a paradigm shift for Word users), offer good alternatives.
.docs into .rtf when .docs are opened and creates new .rtf files, not .docs, when a user creates a new file.
.docs and save to formats Word users still understand.
But to "politely" call those who use
Stallman's not worried about secret file formats (which he should drop from those silly email replies about
* Write a vba script for Word that turns
* Suggest that they use AbiWord, something that can read
Stallman is, imo, no better than Microsoft in that he has great ideas wrung through a strange, self-serving translator that mangles the original, useful message. In MS's case, it's a profit maximization machine. In Stallman's, it's GNU. Both biases serve to dilute what could have been a well-received and useful technology or lesson, and this Word scare is another one.
From the article:
***Looking to stave off a potential video versions of services like Napster, ***
Not only is this bad grammar, isn't this called Limewire (insert app of choice or favorite videohound on IRC)?
Or to really break it down, as so many have already tried to say in great length, if it's 0s and 1s, it's going to be transmitted over the Internet and all you can do is make it a little tougher to get started.
Sorry, so my question would be, "Do you see C# becoming a more successful practical standard cross-platform (let's say that means Windows, Mac OS X, Linux x86, FreeBSD, and Solaris) than Java in the next 5 to 10 years?"
There's an interesting article at Javalobby (http://www3.usermagnet.com/nl/jlnews_20011210.htm l), admittedly from a Java pro's perspective, that talks about what .NET's submission to the ECMA really means. Here's a quote:
.Net you can expect to be using it only on Windows for a long time to come.***
:^) I'm intrigued by the idea of a GNU CLR or CLI or whatever it is now, but if it's going to be successful it'll have to progress quite a bit faster than GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/), as an example, before it's useful.
***This ECMA effort may be primarily symbolic, however, since only a player with enormous resources and funding could possibly implement the standard. If you use
Don't know if Mr. Ross is right, but I assume he's more connected than I am.
With respect to your comment:
>Other standards like Ethernet seem to have done
>relatively well compatability wise, while using
>Java across multiple platforms is an exercise in
>frustration.
Tried porting any C other than straight ANSI? Believe me, though toasters running weather modeling might be "goofy", Java makes some real headway into writing once and running anywhere. Limewire.com and Netbeans.org come to mind as pretty good xplat software that wouldn't be on our OS of choice without Java.
Yes, I realize Netbeans wouldn't be anywhere without Java since it's a Java IDE, but you get the point. I've seen a lot higher percentage (for x software packages, y had a Mac version) of software come to Mac Classic (which didn't have UNIX underneath) from Java than from C codebases.
I'm not against you being right about C#, and hope it does an even better job of making weather predicting toasters, but I'm not optimistic.
Quotes from "Running other OSes" thread:
? Real easy, and legal too. Again, note that with Wine, you can run a ton of Windows software _without_ a licensed copy of Windows.
:^)
>>But with VMWare you have to buy/own a Windows
>>license, which kind of nullifies the price
>>advantage.
>Use Wine [winehq.com] then.
I'm betting that's exactly what Lindows is. A friend and I were discussing Wine's license recently, specifically wrt the percieved lack of contributions from Transgaming's WineX (a DirectX centered fork from Wine -- http://www.transgaming.com/) back into the original codebase.
It appeared to us that Wine has a pretty open license much like X11's (http://winehq.com/source/LICENSE). The only real stipulation is the following:
15 The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
16 all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
So how tough would it be to wrap up Wine in a box with a $99 price tag (price from Lindows' FAQ page: http://www.lindows.com/lindows_products_faqs.php)
So to sum, take open sourced but not "RMS Free" (aka, GPL'd) code, name the result something Microsoft will have a problem with for the free press (as has been mentioned about a million times already), and *poof*, you've got the makings of a 90's style IPO.
Just to show how wild we can go with this thread, just this year somebody started trying to make Death Race for the 2600. No kidding.
0 10 8/msg00510.html
/ sc reen1_color2.gif
/ DE ATHRACESCREEN.GIF
Post to Stellalist:
http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/20
From that post...
Screengrab of 2600 mock-up:
http://www.gamedevelopers.net/deathderby/images
Screenshot of original (again, from above post):
http://www.gamedevelopers.net/deathderby/images
Ah, the boons of the internet.
Okay fellows, enough of the lessons learned from watchin' Jurassic Park III. It's really not so big a deal to introduce select foreign species on a limited basis. I did a very basic study of bamboo lemurs (http://www.duke.edu/web/primate/labamb.html) at the Duke University Primate Center (http://www.duke.edu/web/primate/) some years ago. The guys were hanging out in a fenced enclosure with a couple of other species of lemur and loving it.
I had to take readings every five minutes and record their actions, and I had several interactions with squirrels and the like. Really pretty interesting to see two disparate species like this have face-to-face "showdowns". There's no real worry that these guys are going to transmit anything.
The point, in brief, is this: Zoos do this all the time in the US, from San Diego to Asheboro, North Carolina. Believe me, they keep a very close eye on the animals. The biggest hurdle for many zoos is finding a climate that suits the animals. Australia fits the bill for many African hoofed mammals almost to a T, I'd bet. The only real concern is what happens if a large habitat is cleared of rare indigenous animals to make room -- that could potentially have some obviously bad repercussions.
This isn't a case of kudzu, African "killer" bees coming up from Mexico, or rabbits running rampant around Australia. In this case, hopefully, the goal is to breed rare animals in a land well suited to the task (stable government and good climate). The whole purpose is to breed animals that have a hard time making more, not to give range to wascally wabbits. Assuming the intentions are sound, good luck to them, and don't worry about us playing god.
One final point -- if you're worried about this guy making money, don't be unless animals are being hurt or exploited. We won't have conservation without placing worth on healthy animals, and, for better or worse, money is the way we seem to measure worth in this "first world".
Quote from the article:
;^)
There is also a possibility of the DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrive becoming available as a BTO option on this new iMac, therefore bringing DVD movie creation to the masses--a long held vision of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
...
the price of the Combo drive model, probably bringing the grand total of the loaded model to $1599
***end quote***
Two things sound fishy. One, I think iDVD is written so that it _requires_Altivec, which means forget using it with a G3. Certainly it's all 0's and 1's so there's no reason iDVD couldn't be written for the G3, but I'm betting it'd be painfully painfully slow -- especially with only 128 megs of RAM. You should try iMovie or QuickTime Pro on a G3 and then a G4 running at the same speed.
Second is the price. Sixteen hundred clams for a DVD *burning* solution? I don't think so. The external version of the drive still costs $700 all by itself (http://all4dvd.com/) and this machine would have to have more than the bare bones hardware inside to do the churning.
This isn't to say a flatscreen iMac isn't coming, but a flatscreen consumer model that burns DVDs for $1600? Unless the new G3 has some new instruction set I haven't heard about, I kinda doubt it. Least they didn't claim it would have dual processors...
The Mac crowd is a very different crowd, stereotypically, than, say, the Slashdot crowd. What was the Apple Cube? It was an iMac for serious graphic designers. They hated being cut out of the "iMac coolness" b/c of the iMac's all-in-one design (which included a video chip too shoddy for serious design), and Apple tried to pitch to the "crowd that wanted cool". There weren't enough that finally bought into the idea, but when I see a Cube sitting on a desk it's invariably sitting on a desk of someone more worried about image than doing the most efficient computing.
2 77).
Apple's not as much about delivering that which is most efficient (though many of their all-in-one solutions, most notably DVD burning and "music management", are just that) but about bringing aesthetics to the world once dominated by beige towers. People don't get excited by the iMac's innards (ever tried playing Quake 3 on a 400 MHz iMac with the un-upgradable 8 meg ATi card? Heck, Apple took the unsupported upgrade slot _out_ of the third revision of the iMac!) -- they get excited by the statement owning a "Dalmatian spotted" machine brings with it.
And there was a huge letdown after the last MacExpo didn't deliver a flat-screen iMac. One fellow even [reportedly] demanded to see Jobs and tore down keynote equipment (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13298&cid=76
Apple sales are driven by arguably overpriced hardware that looks cool. The new iBook sent Apple's stock up quite a bit when it was released -- essentially an underpowered laptop that can barely make its way through the requirements of Mac OS X 10.1.(*) The iPod falls into at least two of these categories (overpriced and cool).
Whether or not including an LCD seems to suggest people should be buying [and Apple should be supplying] a souped-up iBook, Apple has their mark right on the money. Apple users like cool. Flat-screen, all-in-one is cool. Not exactly form over function, but form with function, and now we get to watch Sony, Compaq, Dell, Microsoft and friends play catch-up again.
(*) Ask me -- I bought a new iBook with the 500 MHz G3. It's underpowered, but I love it. With Netbeans, it's a great Java development platform, and iTunes2 with the CD-RW in the iBook make for a great "single-vendor provided solution". Crazy Mac loyalist!
Though Apple, with their new "we make solutions" attitude, probably won't care for it much, there is a commercial app that allows you to use the iPod on Windows: XPod (great names, eh?)
http://www.mediafour.com/products/xpod/
You can already use it as a hard drive with a Firewire port using some software they have for download. The "iTunes-ish" support will have to come later.
NEWFLASH! Open source projects aren't making money when commercial ventures aren't making money, therefore open source is fading!
The author of the article referenced here takes examples like VA Linux and says, "See, open source is on the way out." The point should be that times were so wild for a while there you could offer Free[dom] software and *still* make money.
Quoting a quote from the article:
"The development model of open-source software is wonderful. But let's not confuse a development model with a business model. Basic business principles were forgotten by some," said Turbolinux Chief Executive Ly-Huong Pham.
[end quote]
Mistaking open-source for a business model is exactly what this article does. The fact that open-source companies are struggling is not a good indicator that open source is "fading". That's like measuring the well-being of the Catholic Church by how much the Pope makes each year, after taxes, of course. *sigh*
I've done a little C# programming and I've done more Java programming. Heck, I've even done some J# (http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?U RL=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/7 54/msdncompositedoc.xml) programming.
.NET quickly and easily and build off of a Web Service on another office's server or if you have hoardes of legacy COM code, you'll use C#. If you have a giant UNIX server farm running JSP you'll use... That's right! Java. If you're a madman who likes to make Frankensteins in your spare time, you'll use J#. :^)
The things that make these two different as a language are pretty trivial. As a Chem. Eng. professor told me when I asked if I needed to bother with FORTRAN when I already knew Pascal, "They're all different dialects of the same langauge".
The only real difference is that you'll want to use the dialect best suited to your particular programming task. If you want to leverage code written in
The biggest difference isn't syntaxical. It's the mindset of the companies behind the code. No matter how many times MS wants to claim C# isn't a Java clone, the point is it's a well-done language based on lessons learned by programmers who are familiar with Java. My only fear is that C#, an excellent language in theory by anyone's measure, is going to be wrung through Microsoft's "profit maximization machine" and be made to do things that, in practice, aren't the best.
The neat part is that people familiar with C#'s concepts will also be able to quickly learn Java! I wouldn't be too surprised to see some VB programmers turned C# developers start to think, "Hey, you know it wouldn't be that hard to run this on [Linux/OS X/etc] by implementing this idea in Java!"
The fink author should talk to Warren Robinette, the author of Adventure for the 2600. Or in a more recently example, speak to the authors of anything coming from Apple.
1 1/msg00086.html).
What these people have in common with the author of Fink is that they wrote software for which they didn't receive obvious credit (Apple recently removed credits so that people couldn't target specific Apple employees for recruitment to another software house). Just as not getting specific credit is written into Apple employees' contracts and was written into Atari programmers (one reason so many of the best worked for Activision), the "contract" your essentially "sign" when releasing GPL software doesn't have any provisions to retain who did the work.
One might take a cue from Mr. Robinette and include something in the code that gives you specific credit -- he created the first easter egg in a video game that displayed his name on the screen as the game's author (take a look at the end of the decompiled source to the game. Download the zip on this page: http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/2001
Or one might take an even better cue from those who worked for Activision: If it's key for you to receive credit for your work, make sure it's in the contract!
No probably. Read the FAQ, natch. :^)
http://www.apple.com/airport/faq/
Q: Why didn't AOL work with AirPort before?
A: AOL has a unique login protocol, which kept AirPort from being able to establish an AOL connection. Working together, Apple and AOL have devised a method to allow AOL customers to use AirPort. In fact, AirPort is currently the only wireless solution that works with AOL.
What does a Java IDE need?
/. waiting for Netbeans to download updates as I wrote this.
;^D Without a 1.8 GHz machine, it's still a little slow.
* Open source -- I want a new feature, I add it. I see a bug, I fix it.
* Code completion -- As much as you might hate M$, there ain't no faster coding that Visual Basic, and most of that is due to Intellivisio -- ur, Intellisense. If the IDE finishes my lines for me, that's half the battle right there. (Thanks, Mr. Ness)
* GUI RAD -- Look, I want to program the nuts and bolts, not spend tons of times making a beautiful set of buttons. A RAD lets me WYSIWYG my way to a great UI.
* Syntax highlighting -- as stated in the post, I like to see what's a string, what's a comment, and what's code. And see it quickly.
* The exact same UI cross platform -- When I go from Windows at work to a UNIX workstation down the hall to my iBook at home, I want to use the same tool to program my "write once, test -- ur -- run everywhere" code. My code's crossplatform, why shouldn't my IDE be too?
Hey, lookit there, I just described http://www.netbeans.org !
Sun funds much of the development team, so I know I have support. But before Sun gets their hands on the code to turn it into Forte, I've got full access. Was actually reading
Only drawback -- I sure wish this was written in assembler.
It's not in the Gnutella protocol:
t oc ol_0.4.pdf
l ) and see what's going on? That's usually pretty definitive. :^)
http://www9.limewire.com/developer/gnutella_pro
The protocol (unfortunately, imo) doesn't say anything about how a search should be run, however. Somewhat of a shame that proprietary search schemes might have already cropped up. If I were writing a client from scratch using only the protocol, I already wouldn't give you the same searching functionality as Limewire, which is a bummer.
Looks like the only other option is to check out the Limewire source (http://www.limewire.org/project/www/download.htm
I think this is part of the reason open source efforts seem to get some work. Take that seed that got you interested in CS and put it towards a deadline-free, manager-free open source project that meets a need you see. Or write some code on the side to release that meets a need that's screaming to you. Or just do something fun, like learn to program a game for the Atari 2600 (sign up at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/ for a useful listserv on that subject).
I think the trick has to be to find a different job and see if you have the compulsion to write code. If you do, and you find a need that you can fit, you won't be able to stop coding. Either your hobby will pan out, or it'll be the way towards landing a related job.
If you don't keep writing, don't bother with another major -- just go for what drives you. As an English degree holder turned dba, believe me, it's not as tough as it sounds. A 3.5 overall (regardless of degree) is enough to get you in the door at most any entry level position.
>Not true, you say? You don't think that
.NET developement circles. NS 4.7 locks up for me from the start, and most pages on the site give NS 4.7 no more than black displays.
.NET code in Moz/NS/OmniWeb when you're only going to net 10% or less more customers. You're going to make a new system in .NET instead.
>Microsoft would "encourage" ISP's to only support IE?
Okay, that's going to be a tough one. Even if MS beats out TCP/IP (and I just don't see that happening), they've still got AOL to fight with.
On the other hand...
>You think any web pages created with Microsoft
>Front Page would be readable in Netscape?
That's already happened. Try looking at a site that uses ASP.NET like:
http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/
... in NS 4.7. These people have appeared on MS Developer's Network and are power players in
That's not a big deal to me by itself, but these [and those this site represents -- I feel this one is representative] are the guys MS wants _teaching_ newbies how to program. The less professional sites (including some of the more deeply hidden pages on dotnetjunkies) don't even render in Mozilla well. People don't test cross platform and cross browser because they're not taught to.
The problem occurs when programmers test only in IE because they know more than 90% of their clients/customers will have access to IE.* It's simply not worth the work bothering to test new
The extension of the MS monopoly to the server-side is on the way -- not because programmers are given tools that, by definition, lock out non-MS or non-IE tools, but because it's so much easier to ignore non-MS tools and assume your clients have IE anyhow. MS even provides built-in "separate but [hardly] equal" controls that mimic on Moz what they do quite handily on IE. "Our site even works on Mozilla -- we know because MS tells us so."
MS can support standards and, as long as it's still easier to do it on Windows first, lazy programmers are still going to do Windows only.
* Think how many people have one form of IE or another -- Mac IE is a very nice browser that comes pre-installed with an icon on Mac OS X's Dock. Think of IE Mac as "mini-Windows" -- and therefore another brick in the foundation for server-side, possibly antitrust-like practices.
A friend of mine asked me why Moz couldn't see the msn beta site yesterday (I'm an ASP/MS-SQL 2k developers, so I guess it's the company I keep), and I answered him the best way I knew how. I sent him the source to the page.
Later, I was moving mail from my Sent box in NS 4.7 (we're mandated to use 4.7 as our email client here at work; it's not a bad app at all), and after deleting a few, the email I'd sent to Linuxman came up. NS 4.7 renders html attachments to emails after a quick hr tag in the window, so there it was, the MSN beta site's home page -- iamges and everything short of stylesheets.
Not a dang thing didn't work. (Going to msn.com straight from NS 4.7 locks me up so I have to force quit)
If you're a web coder, you know the difference between checking DOM (if (document.getElementById()) {) vs. checking the user-agent, as mentioned in another post. This is plain ole bad code -- and an "oversite" that shows MS is once again abusing its near monopoly status in home OS, and now its near monopoly in browsers, to try and achieve another near-monopoly in servers.
"This means that within the 15 EU member-states companies cannot resort anymore to direct marketing to sell their wares."
Woohoo! Spam is OVER from the EU! Never again will I get an email asking me to go to http://192.168.0.1/s3xy81+ch.html! Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!
Oh for crimminy sake, how many times must an article go up on /. where "Crossplatform" equals "Windows *and* Linux"? Not only is this danged IVM not Java (as http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21648&cid=2302 283 ably points out), it doesn't run on 5% of the world's computers out of the gate.
There's no alternative to Java. As others have pointed out, match your tool to your task and you'll be happy campers. If you want Java, use Java, not some generic knock-off. (If you want Java, but love Bill, use C#, etc.) If you want C, use C. Far as I care, it's already crossplatform -- even Classic Mac compiles C. (yes, that was tongue in cheek)
Ruffin "Wait until the story's cold to get KEEN mod points" Bailey
It's not so much how difficult that Linux is to install that makes it, to me, difficult to use. It's the community that feeds the perception that Linux is a geek's OS.
As long as the "more able", on-the-fence Windows users continue to get responses like, "Read the fookin esotericHOWTO, crypticHOWTO, and horriblyexcitingtoreadHOWTO, you idiot!" a la Jimmy Fallon on SNL as they take their first look at Linux and post newbie questions on usenet, the wall will never crack. Heck, when I first installed Linux I didn't even know where the HOWTOs were!
If I'm Joe Computer User and my "expert friend" says Linux is too complicated in no small part due to the "newbie flame" s/he got when trying to become part of the community, I'm not about to try out this new OS.
Ruffin Bailey