QT can't be the part of parrot because of the C++ compiler requirement (To be able to run on 100 different platforms, only a C compiler (and perl 5) is required to compile parrot), but an external QT module would be very useful.
I am talking about Free as in freedom. I thought everybody on Slashdot understood this.
Diversity encourages innovation. It is a fantasy that if there is a driver linux wipes shomething out. Several incredible things arise from individuals working from their bedrooms. When you let one company control Java this is not possible. MS comes one day (7-8 years later than Sun) with C# and.Net surpasses both in terms of quality and soon mindshare.
> Use it or continue to watch > MS roll over the community.
I use C# and I love it. I won't touch Java once again unless I have to.
My Answer: Why don't we have our FREE high level language/platform instead of depending C#/Java (meaning Sun/Microsoft)?
The problem is that both of these languages are non-free. It is apparent that a high level language with garbage collection and other fetures that increases efficiency is needed. Java is created by Sun and C# is created by Microsoft. I think both of them are nice, have lots of class libraries and capable of running your code as fast or faster than C/C++ (in my experience).
Now the best way would be to crete our FREE high level language (as Microoft created C# instead of using Java). We can have jc* high level language which is the best solution. Unfortunately there is not enough time, resources, etc. to decide on the language specs, implementation and testing.
If Eiffel is free (which it seems), and a nice language as C# or Java, and is available now! why not consider it. You can always embrace and extend it too.
If Microsoft is able to reduce time to market by 9 months, obviously Sun is not doing a good job. I am going with C# then. That probably reduces time to market by 18 months!!!
Music Match MX is the best. They found the correct way of providing this service. Both sound quality and pricewise. For me the sound quality is much more important though. Other than MX, I did like emusic.com but their 128 kbit Mp3's were awful for me.. I am still subscriber for them too.
Music Match MX, I think, uses MP3pro instead of Mp3. That probably explains the good quality. If you select CD quality for MX, the sound quality satisfies me. I am usually satisfied with 256kbit Mp3's minimum.
MX Gold ($3/mon) gives you something like a radio, you select an artist and listen to similar artists. You can skip songs if you want. Great for new music discovery. But MX also has a Artist on Demand feature if you buy the platinum service ($5/month). So you can only listen to songs from one or more groups. You don't get to select the songs, but you can skip to the next song if you want. Usually first songs are the popular ones.
You can create your radio stations based on artists, era, genre, and select the weighting of these. The system works great for me.
To make it realistic, you need to have strange characters (creatures) with strange moves and facial expressions etc. These are always exagerated and that is what makes it "feel" real. Consider "Tom and Jerry".
I don't know why but if you try to have a human or realistic animal character with realistic environment (gravity, phisics) and realistic facial expressions, realistic joint movement; IT DOESN'T FEEL REAL. Not with todays technology at least.
Google doen't count number of links to a page to sort the results. A link from yahoo is weighted much more than a link from mymotherssocks.com. It is diffusive in a sense that bunch (thousands) of unpopular sites cannot become popular by just linking to each other. You need some very popular sites to link to these websites (Like a source of energy).
I use Mathtype for equations and it works great. So, at least on windows, support for ole objects (embedding) should be priority. We can use our choice of equation editor.
footnotes, endnotes (references in technical papers), figures etc. should be linked to the places where they are referred, and in a very user friendly manner (something MS word is missing).
Outline view: I miss this feature from word. It is a great starting point for writing papers. I usually start brainstorming the headlines and their hierarchy.
Figures/images: It is a pain in MS Word to put these images to the exact place you want, and the way you want. You type couple of words and all the formatting is messed up. Abiword doesn't seem to handle images either. When this implemented, make sure not to copy MS word style. By the way, I think this feature is more important than tables which I rarely use and use to organize my figures:).
It is how it works in USA. Eazel did followed the path of thousands of other startups that are founded through VC money. You write a business plan explaining how you make money in the next 5 years. You need at least 10 time returns. So if you ask for $2-3 million at the first round funding (probably means you give up %40-%50 of the company based on the evaluation), your pro-forma revenue in 5 years should be $50 million. This is how VC's make money. They invest in 10 companies, only one or two of them make a break through, and rest go bankrupt. You spend your first round money to build the prototype in one year, then you ask for second-round financing. It would be good to keep some money in the bank for assurance, but finishing the prototype as soon as possible is more important than having a relatively small amount of money in the bank. In the second round financing you probably will be asking $10-$20 million anyway. Time is money. You don't want competition to catch up for example.
Obviously IDC reports did have an impact on the investors. Unfortunately times have changed. Before the dot-com-boom, investors were looking for reasons to fund projects; now they are looking (very hard) not to fund project. There simply is not investment money available in the economy. That's because most of the money was spent last 2-3 years. It will go back to normal in couple of years when things get to normal.
I aggree that Eazel's business plan wasn't very good. But investors invest in people and teams. Eazel should have adapt themselves to the changing conditions and position themselves differently. They didn't figure this out and insisted on their initial business model which as you all know failed.
Well, mozilla crashes randomly after installing some of these add-ons. Unfortunately I didn't find an easy way to uninstall them. When mozilla crashes, there is nothing indicating what crashed mozilla or what the bug is. In my case, I installed the google toolbar and mozilla started crashing constantly. How does that help anybody?
Simple example; apply to any scientific field you can think of. Open a big matrix of size 20,000x20,000. Keeping each element as 1 byte, this will take you 4GB of memory. 32 bit systems can't handle this much memory for one process. You need a 64-bit system with lots of physical memory.
Do you think he got inspired by god and changed those two lines. There must be background work where he did all the tests and research about this.
An analogy from mathematics is about how mathematicians come up with proofs to theorems. They first come up with a theorem which is a solution to a problem hoping their guess (or guesses) are correct. Then starting with the solution, step by step try to prove back to the original problem. Once they come up with a solution, it is probably 10 pages long and pretty ugly. Then they start refining the proof. At the end you have 3 lines of proof, which makes you think "How did this guy come up with this cute proof?".
For everybody who comments that this distro tries to emulate windows; note that taking the positive and useful stuff from other operating systems is a god thing. Windows has done that and became successful...
At first sight you see a windows XP look. Then the GUI widgets has Mac OSXish theme.
The network neighborhood stuff is a very good thing if it works as advertised. Yes, it is trivial if you are on a corporate network with each computer having a static IP address, etc. I am using Mandrake 8.1 at home with a cable modem. I have a router with three computers connected. I took me a long time to figure out how to see the windows computers on my home network and the only way with mandrake was to edit bunch of configuration files manually. By the way, I forgot how I did it, so if I reinstall my linux system, I would probably spend another day to set this networking thing up..
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And as far as I know there is heavy discussion about who is going to maintain the C version of ICU library.
QT can't be the part of parrot because of the C++ compiler requirement (To be able to run on 100 different platforms, only a C compiler (and perl 5) is required to compile parrot), but an external QT module would be very useful.
I am talking about Free as in freedom. I thought everybody on Slashdot understood this.
.Net surpasses both in terms of quality and soon mindshare.
Diversity encourages innovation. It is a fantasy that if there is a driver linux wipes shomething out. Several incredible things arise from individuals working from their bedrooms. When you let one company control Java this is not possible. MS comes one day (7-8 years later than Sun) with C# and
> Use it or continue to watch
> MS roll over the community.
I use C# and I love it. I won't touch Java once again unless I have to.
> C# and Java are both widely used languages
My Answer: Why don't we have our FREE high level language/platform instead of depending C#/Java (meaning Sun/Microsoft)?
The problem is that both of these languages are non-free. It is apparent that a high level language with garbage collection and other fetures that increases efficiency is needed. Java is created by Sun and C# is created by Microsoft. I think both of them are nice, have lots of class libraries and capable of running your code as fast or faster than C/C++ (in my experience).
Now the best way would be to crete our FREE high level language (as Microoft created C# instead of using Java). We can have jc* high level language which is the best solution. Unfortunately there is not enough time, resources, etc. to decide on the language specs, implementation and testing.
If Eiffel is free (which it seems), and a nice language as C# or Java, and is available now! why not consider it. You can always embrace and extend it too.
If Microsoft is able to reduce time to market by 9 months, obviously Sun is not doing a good job. I am going with C# then. That probably reduces time to market by 18 months!!!
What's the point of giving a regular expression example? C# has the exact same regex syntax, as others (uglier actually).
I assume they tried to make it easier to type text. You can use two thumbs to type text messages or contact info faster.
and the index is where? is i the index or the element?
Music Match MX is the best. They found the correct way of providing this service. Both sound quality and pricewise. For me the sound quality is much more important though. Other than MX, I did like emusic.com but their 128 kbit Mp3's were awful for me.. I am still subscriber for them too.
Music Match MX, I think, uses MP3pro instead of Mp3. That probably explains the good quality. If you select CD quality for MX, the sound quality satisfies me. I am usually satisfied with 256kbit Mp3's minimum.
MX Gold ($3/mon) gives you something like a radio, you select an artist and listen to similar artists. You can skip songs if you want. Great for new music discovery. But MX also has a Artist on Demand feature if you buy the platinum service ($5/month). So you can only listen to songs from one or more groups. You don't get to select the songs, but you can skip to the next song if you want. Usually first songs are the popular ones.
You can create your radio stations based on artists, era, genre, and select the weighting of these. The system works great for me.
iriver has better MP3-CD players, such as Chromex and slimx series.
I am listening to the same MP3's, There is audience cheering in them. Maybe not as loud as you wanted, but it is in there.
> Umm does this mean Alta Vista is going to start ignoring ROBOTS.TXT permissions?
No, i think it is similar to google phone/address finder, map finder, etc. future, which is displayed at the top of search results.
To make it realistic, you need to have strange characters (creatures) with strange moves and facial expressions etc. These are always exagerated and that is what makes it "feel" real. Consider "Tom and Jerry".
I don't know why but if you try to have a human or realistic animal character with realistic environment (gravity, phisics) and realistic facial expressions, realistic joint movement; IT DOESN'T FEEL REAL. Not with todays technology at least.
Google doen't count number of links to a page to sort the results. A link from yahoo is weighted much more than a link from mymotherssocks.com. It is diffusive in a sense that bunch (thousands) of unpopular sites cannot become popular by just linking to each other. You need some very popular sites to link to these websites (Like a source of energy).
I use Mathtype for equations and it works great. So, at least on windows, support for ole objects (embedding) should be priority. We can use our choice of equation editor.
:).
footnotes, endnotes (references in technical papers), figures etc. should be linked to the places where they are referred, and in a very user friendly manner (something MS word is missing).
Outline view: I miss this feature from word. It is a great starting point for writing papers. I usually start brainstorming the headlines and their hierarchy.
Figures/images: It is a pain in MS Word to put these images to the exact place you want, and the way you want. You type couple of words and all the formatting is messed up. Abiword doesn't seem to handle images either. When this implemented, make sure not to copy MS word style. By the way, I think this feature is more important than tables which I rarely use and use to organize my figures
It is how it works in USA. Eazel did followed the path of thousands of other startups that are founded through VC money. You write a business plan explaining how you make money in the next 5 years. You need at least 10 time returns. So if you ask for $2-3 million at the first round funding (probably means you give up %40-%50 of the company based on the evaluation), your pro-forma revenue in 5 years should be $50 million. This is how VC's make money. They invest in 10 companies, only one or two of them make a break through, and rest go bankrupt. You spend your first round money to build the prototype in one year, then you ask for second-round financing. It would be good to keep some money in the bank for assurance, but finishing the prototype as soon as possible is more important than having a relatively small amount of money in the bank. In the second round financing you probably will be asking $10-$20 million anyway. Time is money. You don't want competition to catch up for example.
Obviously IDC reports did have an impact on the investors. Unfortunately times have changed. Before the dot-com-boom, investors were looking for reasons to fund projects; now they are looking (very hard) not to fund project. There simply is not investment money available in the economy. That's because most of the money was spent last 2-3 years. It will go back to normal in couple of years when things get to normal.
I aggree that Eazel's business plan wasn't very good. But investors invest in people and teams. Eazel should have adapt themselves to the changing conditions and position themselves differently. They didn't figure this out and insisted on their initial business model which as you all know failed.
If mozilla is aiming to become a software platform in the future, a simple plugin shouldn't be able to crash the whole platform.
Well, mozilla crashes randomly after installing some of these add-ons. Unfortunately I didn't find an easy way to uninstall them. When mozilla crashes, there is nothing indicating what crashed mozilla or what the bug is. In my case, I installed the google toolbar and mozilla started crashing constantly. How does that help anybody?
Don't install alpha products. Wait for them to mature. They make whole mozilla to crash constantly. Especially the google toolbar.
After 0.98, the nightlies and the releases both started to give a lot of annoyances and crashes for me.
My mistake, it takes about 400Mb. But keep elements as 8-byte floating points, you get 3GB, which lets me draw the same conclusion
Simple example; apply to any scientific field you can think of.
Open a big matrix of size 20,000x20,000. Keeping each element as 1 byte, this will take you 4GB of memory. 32 bit systems can't handle this much memory for one process. You need a 64-bit system with lots of physical memory.
Do you think he got inspired by god and changed those two lines. There must be background work where he did all the tests and research about this.
An analogy from mathematics is about how mathematicians come up with proofs to theorems. They first come up with a theorem which is a solution to a problem hoping their guess (or guesses) are correct. Then starting with the solution, step by step try to prove back to the original problem. Once they come up with a solution, it is probably 10 pages long and pretty ugly. Then they start refining the proof. At the end you have 3 lines of proof, which makes you think "How did this guy come up with this cute proof?".
For everybody who comments that this distro tries to emulate windows; note that taking the positive and useful stuff from other operating systems is a god thing. Windows has done that and became successful...
At first sight you see a windows XP look. Then the GUI widgets has Mac OSXish theme.
The network neighborhood stuff is a very good thing if it works as advertised. Yes, it is trivial if you are on a corporate network with each computer having a static IP address, etc. I am using Mandrake 8.1 at home with a cable modem. I have a router with three computers connected. I took me a long time to figure out how to see the windows computers on my home network and the only way with mandrake was to edit bunch of configuration files manually. By the way, I forgot how I did it, so if I reinstall my linux system, I would probably spend another day to set this networking thing up..
The solution to this is a star office viewer (free) for windows. Like the MS office viewer.