Having owned a variety of Palms over the years, I'm all for color with a few conditions:
a) Don't make the devices any bigger or heavier b) Don't reduce the battery life appreciable (granted, not a big issue with the V and Vx, but I always seemed to only be able to find one fresh battery when I had to replace them on my old Palm Pro.)
Other than that, I'm always for better tech just for the sake of having better tech.
Let's see private company decides to set some criteria for selling a pass to their event. Kid doesn't qualify. What's the issue? Did I miss something about life, liberty, and right to attend trade shows or something?
Gibson and Burroughs share an almost boyish fascination with technology and the glitches of human evolution
Someone ought to let the author of this article know that ol' Billy Burroughs should be refered to in the past tense these days....Although it was pretty cool that I lived in the same town as him for 5 years (Lawrence, KS)
I threw this on my Palm V yesterday, and it is definiely worth the download if you do any Synching of your data. I was able to half my synch time with this new version of the OS. Can't wait to try out synching over IR to my laptop sometime.....
Take the time to read the instructions though folks, it takes about 6 minutes to install 3.3 and your screen freaks out during this time....
The death of Britannica would be a travesty. I grew up with one, and I suspect a lot of other/.'ers did. For it to die at Microsoft's hand would be a crime against nature.
Funny, I thought evolve or die was a very natural course for things to take. Just consider MS doing a nice job of helping things along.
You can't run a business for the same way for hundreds of years and expect to survive. Hell, these people were still peddling these things door to door up to 2 years ago!
I have to agree with this one. I mean, you already paid for a copy of windows with the laptop, its it presumedly already installed and all of your components on the laptop work with it (Linux laptop support can be somewhat sketchy at times), seems like you are attempting to make things needlessly complicated here.
Of course, it would be nice if WinAmp would become free (speech) software too...
You know, that kid made like $25 million off that piece of software when he sold it to AOL. Remember that next time you think about freeing some code, kids!
So I don't understand what the problem is. Sure people get bent out of shape when you say contraversial things, but that shouldn't be unexpected. As far as the examples Katz cites in his story:
1) Buchannan and "The Body": Well, political parities have the right to kick people out, so what's the big deal? 2) Singer still has his job 3) That stupid exhibit of "art" in NY went on as planned.
If you really want to see the chilling effect of the reduction of free speech in this country, look at the silly things people get slapped with sexual harrasment lawsuits for.
Some overzealous law enforcement official nabed a guy claiming the film was child porn. The case was thrown out of court. Plus the guy got damanges for being run through the system Thats a long way from OK banning the film.
Are you guys thinking of doing a something besides first person shooters? id mades some pretty good platform games once upon a time, any thoughts of trying to go back to something like that for variety? Does it get boring just reinventing the wheel with prettier graphics each time?
Er, yes. That would have had more people really using Mozilla along side or their regular browser earlier. But can you imagine the press coverage then? It would have been no better, and probably *much* worse. Instead of having an article stating the demise of Mozilla, they'd really shoot barbs. "Mozilla released with only 10% of the functionality of IE. Open Source is a failure, because you can't develop all the features. Mozilla doesn't render complex pages. The browsers wars are over. IE supports dozens of more standards then Mozilla. Mozilla is a step backward. The latest failure of the Mozilla Project..." You get the picture.
Oh, so they're letting the media drive the development of the product? There is no use arguing about it now, but I think the alternative method would have shown much more clearly how the open source development process actually works. There are relatively few projects that leap, fully grown from the thigh of Zeus, fully formed like Athena.
This is an important point I think. A major thrust of ESR's CatB essay is that Linux violated Brooke's Law (from MMM), surprising a lot of people who thought they understood large software project management. This is what lead to the concept of a bazaar model. I believe the trick is that *when* the code is well organized and well written, new developers organize themselves and just start chipping in on corners of the code that interest them. The O(N**2) communication problem doesn't arise because not much communication is needed after some initial organizing and at patch submission times.
But isn't the initial organization time the very reason that adding more developers to a late project the reason it becomes even later? It's an interesting take, and theres a good paper in this somewhere if someone could provide a more definitive answer.
You gotta love the Mozilla for taking the Throw you First design away and implement the second one thing to heart though.
1) P/E ratios: the ratio between the valuation of a stock, or variable "P" price, and the variable "E" earnings. Economists believe that P/E ratios over 16 increase the probability of a stock market crash exponentially. The current P/E ratio for the American Stock markets is over 30.
Well, actually if you look at the numbers the are a few companies with very high P/E, and most of the market is pretty much in the 14-18 P/E range this has been close to the historical average. Worst case, a few of the high flyers will be shot down and life will go on, maybe a minor recession in there. You have to keep in mind the last 3 years have been exceptional with the markets returning 20-30% when the average return is around 8%. Sure there is going to be a correction sometime, but I wouldn't short a bunch of stock at this point.
2) Leveraging. Most US corporations are up to their eyeballs in debt. They operate under the same conglomerate ITT type model that became common practice in the 1980s. The philosophy behind this model can be likened to primitive species evolutionary behavior, specifically pack animals/fish schools travelling in larger numbers so as to be less pervious to predators. Or in this instance, acquire enough companies so that you are less susceptible to hostile takeovers. The end result of this process is massive debt, and very little actual capitol, as it takes enormous sums of money to buy another company/corporation (e.g. MCI buying Sprint for 100 Billion Dollars this week
a) Well actually US companies are leveraged less than their international counterparts. Debt is not a bad thing for a corportation, it is merely a transfer of risk to another entity in return for up front cash flows. b) Conglomeration really isn't in vogue these days with a few notable exceptions (GE comes to mind). Even ITT the poster child for conglomeration has spun off a large number of its units and I belive only holds its Gaming / Hotel business these days. c) Most of the big combinations of companies recently have been mergers which involve little if any additional debt. Equity in the companys is used to make the payment for the other company. Sprint/MCIWorldCom is a perfect example of this. MCI's outlay in cash is debt is very small, and Sprint shareholders will be "paid" in MCIWorldcom stock.
3) The mysterious Federal Reserve Note: Contrary to popular belief, only 8%, or so of the US currency is *actually* in the form of dollars. The other 92% of the US currency is in the form of electronic cash and IOUs to various foreign powers. Should there be a run on the banks due to a highly likely stock market crash, there would be a printed currency shortage, much the same as there was in the 1930s
Well, this is again technically true, but there are several measures of how much money is out there, and I'm not sure which one you are using. M1 is cash out there, M2 is things that can be converted to cash quickly and easily (checking accounts, etc..), M3 is everything that could conceivably be turned into currency (Savings accounts, etc...) By definition you can't run out of M1, M3 is hard to turn into cash, so its unlikely people will knee jerk out of these investments. You could possibly have a run on banks these days, but why would people bother? Bank accounts are insured up to $100,000 which was not the case during the depression, so you really don't have much to worry about if your bank goes under, and access to quick and easy credit (Credit cards) that did not exist at that time will get you though any short term liquidity problems an individual will have.
If despite this you still think the economy is going to collapse, would you like to give me those useless pieces of paper with dead presidents on them that you have?
Re:NSI is a private company... who had a monopoly
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I agree totally, but they aren't a monopoly so lets let the market decide.
Hey, I agree with most of what you said... I've done work in (closed-source) commercial software development and until you've worked in an environment where you have to produce a product that actually walks out the door, burned into a CD, people who have never been though the process have no idea what it is like. Mix marketing into the mix, feature creep, not enough time for QA (is there ever enough time for QA?) and all the other items that go into the mix, and its a miracle anything works as well as it does.
Having said all of that, I still wish there was a decent browser available for Linux, and I'm fustrated by the fact I don't have one. The Mozilla apoligists (sorry, I don't mean that in a bad way...) keep saying "well, this is going to be a real IE killer" when it ships. That's great, but why the emphasis on this point? It's not like MS is trying to bully its way into the Linux browser market. I would have liked to see a development cycle that ran more along the lines of the way the original Netscape devleopment cycle ended up running. For example:
v1.0 Heres a browser that's rock solid and works as a HTML 3.2 client. Thats it. v2.0 Look, we added EMEAScript functionality, still rock solid. v3.0 Neat, we can do CSS 1.0 and 2.0 now, next release integrated mail and news or whatever...
Even if this forced the development cycle to be even longer at least we (the users and maybe some developers) would have something to wrap our hands around. Instead of having something that is 100% funcational with 10% of the desired features, then 20%, then 30%, etc.. we've had something that implements 100% of the functionality we desire, but only work 10% of the time, then 20%, then 30%... I'm sure its just that I have a different development methodology than the Mozilla leaders, which is fine, its just annoying, that's all.
Oh and one more thing...
. The cars that a manufacturer releases this year weren't developed and prepared for manufacturing in 3 weeks. It takes years. For anything.
You know, some of the US based car manufacturers have their development time down to 18 months from design to car sitting in the lot? Mozilla has been up for that long (yeah, I know the first 6 months went down the tubes when the Gecko engine went in..) Is a browser that much more complicated than a car? Or is it that having a profit motive forces you to look at and improve your develoment methodologies, while when you take this away it is easy to fall into a complacent state of always adding one more feature, always crushing that one last bug?
First of all, hiring more new developers in an ad-hoc attempt to add more bodies to the project, would probably slow development down, not speed it up. This is a large complex project which requires that it's developers be knowedgable about its internal specifics; that is something one cannot buy off the street either from contractors or new employees.
I have read The Mythical Man-Month myself and I agree with you to a certain point. However, I must be missing something here, if adding paid contractors or employees will only slow the project down, doesn't allowing anyone to see the source and contribute do the same thing? Whether the person is paid or not, donesn't adding additonal developers in any form do the same thing?
Secondly, Microsoft has already proven one cannot sell browsers as they now own our "air supply"... IOW: as long as MS gives away Explorer, there's little money to be had in selling a competing browser -- I certainly don't see Opera gaining significant market share other than in the embedded market.
I wasn't aware there was a Linux version of IE... can you point me to the download site for it?:) I admit I forgot about Opera, I'll have to go and check it out. I just find it amazing that what is probably the 2nd or 3rd largest desktop operating system out there (depending on where MacOS is) donsn't have a quality browser available for it, although Konqueror is nice for the liteweight stuff (but then again, so is Lynx..)
Mozilla is "Free Software" for real. If you're unwilling to even minimally help support free software by simply running a nightly or even a Milestone build, and reporting your success or failure back, then you have nothing to complain about regarding the project pace. I've been pretty damn impressed with the quality of the Mozilla builds under Linux and fully expect a quality beta browser in the next couple of months
Like I said before, I already have a software development job, thanks. I'd me more than willing to write a check to Mozilla.org or AOL or whoever for $30 or whatever for a piece of software that worked. The point here is I could care less about the openness or the freeness of the project, I just want a damn browser... is that so wrong?
I've got an even better idea. Why don't they hire some damn developers and get the thing out the door? I would willingly pay for a decent browser for Linux and I bet tons of other people would too...
There are a number of ways to help. 1) Contribute patches and bug fixes 2) Provide testcases for bugfixes (The Gecko bugathon) 3) Rate bugs in order of importance. 4) Download builds regualrly to test them.
You know I already have a job, I don't need to do free QA for one of the largest companies in the world. I don't know why anyone else would either.
NSI is a private company...
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So don't they have the right to decide what they want to sell? If they don't want to register FOO.COM for whatever reason, they should have that right.
Slashdot Mirror
Having owned a variety of Palms over the years, I'm all for color with a few conditions:
a) Don't make the devices any bigger or heavier
b) Don't reduce the battery life appreciable (granted, not a big issue with the V and Vx, but I always seemed to only be able to find one fresh battery when I had to replace them on my old Palm Pro.)
Other than that, I'm always for better tech just for the sake of having better tech.
Hey, I agree Comdex is being stupid. I wasn't the one who put it under the YRO section on /. either.
Let's see private company decides to set some criteria for selling a pass to their event. Kid doesn't qualify. What's the issue? Did I miss something about life, liberty, and right to attend trade shows or something?
So how do you call out to a COM object from PHP?
... from the article:
Gibson and Burroughs share an almost boyish fascination with technology and the glitches of human evolution
Someone ought to let the author of this article know that ol' Billy Burroughs should be refered to in the past tense these days....Although it was pretty cool that I lived in the same town as him for 5 years (Lawrence, KS)
I threw this on my Palm V yesterday, and it is definiely worth the download if you do any Synching of your data. I was able to half my synch time with this new version of the OS. Can't wait to try out synching over IR to my laptop sometime.....
Take the time to read the instructions though folks, it takes about 6 minutes to install 3.3 and your screen freaks out during this time....
The death of Britannica would be a travesty. I grew up with one, and I suspect a lot of other /.'ers did. For it to die at Microsoft's hand would be a crime against nature.
Funny, I thought evolve or die was a very natural course for things to take. Just consider MS doing a nice job of helping things along.
You can't run a business for the same way for hundreds of years and expect to survive. Hell, these people were still peddling these things door to door up to 2 years ago!
Yeah, I would hate to be called ungenerous, I might not even be able to sleep at night.
I have to agree with this one. I mean, you already paid for a copy of windows with the laptop, its it presumedly already installed and all of your components on the laptop work with it (Linux laptop support can be somewhat sketchy at times), seems like you are attempting to make things needlessly complicated here.
Of course, it would be nice if WinAmp would become free (speech) software too...
You know, that kid made like $25 million off that piece of software when he sold it to AOL. Remember that next time you think about freeing some code, kids!
Not unthinkable, just ignorent.
Sure you can.
Use the scripted installation option and you don'thave to touch the machine after you put in the CD.
So I don't understand what the problem is. Sure people get bent out of shape when you say contraversial things, but that shouldn't be unexpected. As far as the examples Katz cites in his story:
1) Buchannan and "The Body": Well, political parities have the right to kick people out, so what's the big deal?
2) Singer still has his job
3) That stupid exhibit of "art" in NY went on as planned.
If you really want to see the chilling effect of the reduction of free speech in this country, look at the silly things people get slapped with sexual harrasment lawsuits for.
No it wasn't.
Some overzealous law enforcement official nabed a guy claiming the film was child porn. The case was thrown out of court. Plus the guy got damanges for being run through the system Thats a long way from OK banning the film.
Granted, still pretty embarassing...
Why would a company want to invest in a not-for-profit organization like Debian?
...then I'd be worried :)
Hey John,
Are you guys thinking of doing a something besides first person shooters? id mades some pretty good platform games once upon a time, any thoughts of trying to go back to something like that for variety? Does it get boring just reinventing the wheel with prettier graphics each time?
Er, yes. That would have had more people really using Mozilla along side or their regular browser earlier. But can you imagine the press coverage then? It would have been no better, and probably *much* worse. Instead of having an article stating the demise of Mozilla, they'd really shoot barbs. "Mozilla released with only 10% of the functionality of IE. Open Source is a failure, because you can't develop all the features. Mozilla doesn't render complex pages. The browsers wars are over. IE supports dozens of more standards then Mozilla. Mozilla is a step backward. The latest failure of the Mozilla Project..." You get the picture.
Oh, so they're letting the media drive the development of the product? There is no use arguing about it now, but I think the alternative method would have shown much more clearly how the open source development process actually works. There are relatively few projects that leap, fully grown from the thigh of Zeus, fully formed like Athena.
This is an important point I think. A major thrust of ESR's CatB essay is that Linux violated Brooke's Law (from MMM), surprising a lot of people who thought they understood large software project management. This is what lead to the concept of a bazaar model. I believe the trick is that *when* the code is well organized and well written, new developers organize themselves and just start chipping in on corners of the code that interest them. The O(N**2) communication problem doesn't arise because not much communication is needed after some initial organizing and at patch submission times.
But isn't the initial organization time the very reason that adding more developers to a late project the reason it becomes even later? It's an interesting take, and theres a good paper in this somewhere if someone could provide a more definitive answer.
You gotta love the Mozilla for taking the Throw you First design away and implement the second one thing to heart though.
1) P/E ratios: the ratio between the valuation of a stock, or variable "P" price, and the variable "E" earnings. Economists believe that P/E ratios over 16 increase the probability of a stock market crash exponentially. The current P/E ratio for the American Stock markets is over 30.
Well, actually if you look at the numbers the are a few companies with very high P/E, and most of the market is pretty much in the 14-18 P/E range this has been close to the historical average. Worst case, a few of the high flyers will be shot down and life will go on, maybe a minor recession in there. You have to keep in mind the last 3 years have been exceptional with the markets returning 20-30% when the average return is around 8%. Sure there is going to be a correction sometime, but I wouldn't short a bunch of stock at this point.
2) Leveraging. Most US corporations are up to their eyeballs in debt. They operate under the same conglomerate ITT type model that became common practice in the 1980s. The philosophy behind this model can be likened to primitive species evolutionary behavior, specifically pack animals/fish schools travelling in larger numbers so as to be less pervious to predators. Or in this instance, acquire enough companies so that you are less susceptible to hostile takeovers. The end result of this process is massive debt, and very little actual capitol, as it takes enormous sums of money to buy another company/corporation (e.g. MCI buying Sprint for 100 Billion Dollars this week
a) Well actually US companies are leveraged less than their international counterparts. Debt is not a bad thing for a corportation, it is merely a transfer of risk to another entity in return for up front cash flows.
b) Conglomeration really isn't in vogue these days with a few notable exceptions (GE comes to mind). Even ITT the poster child for conglomeration has spun off a large number of its units and I belive only holds its Gaming / Hotel business these days.
c) Most of the big combinations of companies recently have been mergers which involve little if any additional debt. Equity in the companys is used to make the payment for the other company. Sprint/MCIWorldCom is a perfect example of this. MCI's outlay in cash is debt is very small, and Sprint shareholders will be "paid" in MCIWorldcom stock.
3) The mysterious Federal Reserve Note: Contrary to popular belief, only 8%, or so of the US currency is *actually* in the form of dollars. The other 92% of the US currency is in the form of electronic cash and IOUs to various foreign powers. Should there be a run on the banks due to a highly likely stock market crash, there would be a printed currency shortage, much the same as there was in the 1930s
Well, this is again technically true, but there are several measures of how much money is out there, and I'm not sure which one you are using. M1 is cash out there, M2 is things that can be converted to cash quickly and easily (checking accounts, etc..), M3 is everything that could conceivably be turned into currency (Savings accounts, etc...) By definition you can't run out of M1, M3 is hard to turn into cash, so its unlikely people will knee jerk out of these investments. You could possibly have a run on banks these days, but why would people bother? Bank accounts are insured up to $100,000 which was not the case during the depression, so you really don't have much to worry about if your bank goes under, and access to quick and easy credit (Credit cards) that did not exist at that time will get you though any short term liquidity problems an individual will have.
If despite this you still think the economy is going to collapse, would you like to give me those useless pieces of paper with dead presidents on them that you have?
I agree totally, but they aren't a monopoly so lets let the market decide.
Hey, I agree with most of what you said... I've done work in (closed-source) commercial software development and until you've worked in an environment where you have to produce a product that actually walks out the door, burned into a CD, people who have never been though the process have no idea what it is like. Mix marketing into the mix, feature creep, not enough time for QA (is there ever enough time for QA?) and all the other items that go into the mix, and its a miracle anything works as well as it does.
Having said all of that, I still wish there was a decent browser available for Linux, and I'm fustrated by the fact I don't have one. The Mozilla apoligists (sorry, I don't mean that in a bad way...) keep saying "well, this is going to be a real IE killer" when it ships. That's great, but why the emphasis on this point? It's not like MS is trying to bully its way into the Linux browser market. I would have liked to see a development cycle that ran more along the lines of the way the original Netscape devleopment cycle ended up running. For example:
v1.0 Heres a browser that's rock solid and works as a HTML 3.2 client. Thats it.
v2.0 Look, we added EMEAScript functionality, still rock solid.
v3.0 Neat, we can do CSS 1.0 and 2.0 now, next release integrated mail and news or whatever...
Even if this forced the development cycle to be even longer at least we (the users and maybe some developers) would have something to wrap our hands around. Instead of having something that is 100% funcational with 10% of the desired features, then 20%, then 30%, etc.. we've had something that implements 100% of the functionality we desire, but only work 10% of the time, then 20%, then 30%... I'm sure its just that I have a different development methodology than the Mozilla leaders, which is fine, its just annoying, that's all.
Oh and one more thing...
. The cars that a manufacturer releases this year weren't developed and prepared for manufacturing in 3 weeks. It takes years. For anything.
You know, some of the US based car manufacturers have their development time down to 18 months from design to car sitting in the lot? Mozilla has been up for that long (yeah, I know the first 6 months went down the tubes when the Gecko engine went in..) Is a browser that much more complicated than a car? Or is it that having a profit motive forces you to look at and improve your develoment methodologies, while when you take this away it is easy to fall into a complacent state of always adding one more feature, always crushing that one last bug?
First of all, hiring more new developers in an ad-hoc attempt to add more bodies to the project, would probably slow development down, not speed it up. This is a large complex project which requires that it's developers be knowedgable about its internal specifics; that is something one cannot buy off the street either from contractors or new employees.
:) I admit I forgot about Opera, I'll have to go and check it out. I just find it amazing that what is probably the 2nd or 3rd largest desktop operating system out there (depending on where MacOS is) donsn't have a quality browser available for it, although Konqueror is nice for the liteweight stuff (but then again, so is Lynx..)
I have read The Mythical Man-Month myself and I agree with you to a certain point. However, I must be missing something here, if adding paid contractors or employees will only slow the project down, doesn't allowing anyone to see the source and contribute do the same thing? Whether the person is paid or not, donesn't adding additonal developers in any form do the same thing?
Secondly, Microsoft has already proven one cannot sell browsers as they now own our "air supply"... IOW: as long as MS gives away Explorer, there's little money to be had in selling a competing browser -- I certainly don't see Opera gaining significant market share other than in the embedded market.
I wasn't aware there was a Linux version of IE... can you point me to the download site for it?
Mozilla is "Free Software" for real. If you're unwilling to even minimally help support free software by simply running a nightly or even a Milestone build, and reporting your success or failure back, then you have nothing to complain about regarding the project pace. I've been pretty damn impressed with the quality of the Mozilla builds under Linux and fully expect a quality beta browser in the next couple of months
Like I said before, I already have a software development job, thanks. I'd me more than willing to write a check to Mozilla.org or AOL or whoever for $30 or whatever for a piece of software that worked. The point here is I could care less about the openness or the freeness of the project, I just want a damn browser... is that so wrong?
I've got an even better idea. Why don't they hire some damn developers and get the thing out the door? I would willingly pay for a decent browser for Linux and I bet tons of other people would too...
There are a number of ways to help.
1) Contribute patches and bug fixes
2) Provide testcases for bugfixes (The Gecko bugathon)
3) Rate bugs in order of importance.
4) Download builds regualrly to test them.
You know I already have a job, I don't need to do free QA for one of the largest companies in the world. I don't know why anyone else would either.
So don't they have the right to decide what they want to sell? If they don't want to register FOO.COM for whatever reason, they should have that right.