First, they have X11 listed incorrectly as a PPC app. If you have an Intel based Mac then the installation CDs includes a pkg of X11 as a Universal app.
Once you have X11 installed then you can also get...
1) Inkscape (Universal)... for all of your SVG editing needs.
2) Gimp (Universal)... for all of your raster image editing needs.
... and I am surprised that they left Eclipse off of the list. While Xcode is preferred for doing OS X development, it is still worth a mention:-)
I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I use most.
Where I work the IT "support" folks are complete idiots. When my machine was running Windows they loaded it with all kinds of corporate crap-ware. I had a 1.2Mhz machine that ran like a old 486. They forced us to run Tivoli, Norton AV, Pointsec, a personal firewall, the list goes on. Now I can understand forcing the secretary to run these services on their machine, but how in the hell am I supposed to do performance benchmarks of my code when you have all of that crap running in the background. Believe me, I have a ton of horror stories about how much work I lost due to their incompetence.
Once I installed Linux I have had no problems. And now when some dolt from IT comes by to "check on my machine" they leave it alone because they have no idea what to do with Linux. Life is good.
This is in the article, so it is only slightly off topic. Did anyone else catch the following paragraph:
One notable TiVo user apparently unimpressed with the performance of Timberlake and Jackson was FCC chairman Michael Powell, who launched an investigation into the bare-breasted matter. Powell is so taken with TiVo that he once referred to it as "God's machine."
Doesn't the US government have better things to do than launch an investigation of JJ's boob?
I personally would not feel comfortable with this device. They make no mention of how your data is protected if one of the drives in it goes bad. With this device you probably have to send everything back to them to fix with no guarantee of data preservation.
Even though this device "looks cool" I'll stick to the RAID system that I built in my fileserver at home. It holds almost as much data, costs less, and if something in it breaks I can fix it quickly without any loss of data.
More good news: Perforce is free-as-in-beer for use in developing open source projects.
That sounded good, so I read their Open Source FAQ. After seeing the following...
The End User License Agreement for Open Source Software Development requires that Perforce Software be granted read-only access to the Perforce server. What do I need to do to comply?
We will assume, unless otherwise notified, that we will be able to access your server at the server's licensed IP address, port 1666, using the Perforce user name "anonymous". When this is not true, you should include information for contacting your server when you fill out the license agreement.
While I embrace Open Source, I really don't feel comfortable with anyone at Perforce being able to "browse" through my home directory. Some of my software projects are open source, however my personal life and the contents of my home directory are not.
"FYI, Indian companies already outsource to China, today. China, Eastern Europe/Russia, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. In fact, so called "daisy-chaining," where an Indian company gets a US contract due to its relationships and reputation, and promptly outsources it elsewhere, is the new buzzword. Computerworld calls this 'a trend to watch.'"
Why is "daisy-chaining" happening? If a company outsources to an Indian company and they know that it is going to be outsourced yet again, then why would the original company not just go directly to the company that does the work? Cut out the middle man?
Also, the threat of piracy is real. The company I work for used a "reputable" Indian company to build one of our products. When we turned over our source to Sun to pass the "100% Java" certification (this was a few years ago) guess what we found out... the product that they built for us was a "mangled" version of Jakarta and included "stolen" code from a competitors product (that they also built).
The Dallas event was great!
on
Urban Challenge
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I participated in the Dallas UC and it was a blast. It really gives you a chance to learn about local history.
Of course this is being fueled by the RIAA/MPAA! Look at this quote from the article:
Eder said there was no specific line crossed by these subscribers, but she added that some of those people were downloading the equivalent of 90 movies in a given month.
Why is it that when the Comcast representative described someone's bandwidth usage they instantly described it in terms of "movies downloaded per month"! Comcast has the raw data to give a number like 2Gig per day, but they chose to use a metric that made the user instantly look like a criminal.
What frightens me is that I love to listen to Internet radio. This is a legitimate use of my bandwidth, but how long is it before my ISP labels be a criminal because I use enough bandwidth as "someone downloading 90 movies a month"?
"The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus seeks triple the hotel's profits since its opening or triple the organization's damages, whichever is greater, from the hotel's owner."
"Dreitler said Saturday he and his client do not yet know the size of the hotel's profits. The center, based in Dublin, is willing to settle with the hotel's owners, he said."
If this does not scream frivolous lawsuit (or lottery ticket lawsuit) then I don't know what does. I thought if you were suing someone for "damages" that you had pick an amount, not just claim "triple whatever is going to get me the most money".
This is more proof that the legal system in the US is severely broken and abused.
What ever happened to the $9.99 sale price for new CD releases? I remember back in 1994 I could walk into a Circuit City (on a Friday in Tallahassee, FL) and get a new release for only $9.99 on sale.
And why is it that back in the 80's I could buy an album on cassette for around $7.99, but today I have to pay $18 for the same ammount of content on a CD? CDs are cheeper to manufacture than cassettes!
I'm sorry, but Universal is going to have to do better than $12.98 to get my hard earned money.
I really have a problem with the opening tone of the article:
"... I want to point out that American programmers and other IT people were outstandingly unsympathetic when factory workers' jobs started going overseas 30 or 40 years ago, and I don't recall a single peep out of anyone in the IT..."
Really... 30 years ago I was an ovum:-)
A large number of the people that I know of who are having a hard time finding a job are young. They don't remember what the factory worker's plight was like because they were simply too young or not born yet. His opening argument really turned me off. I think calling the American programmer unsympathetic is a rash judgement.
"He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade -- and then they both should burn it," said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief.
Knowledge should be used to empower. Knowledge should be passed along from generation to generation. It is our knowledge that makes this (or any country) worthy of defending.
How about finding ways to better secure our national infrastructure instead of "persecuting" researchers. What's next? The Bush administration will outlawing thinking?
This list (to me) seems useless. Did anyone notice the list of exempt businesses?
The exempt business list includes:
long-distance phone companies
airlines
banks and credit unions
the business of insurance
political organizations
charities
telephone surveyors
These are the EXACT people that I want to STOP CALLING ME with sales pitches!!!
Again I ask the question, "Why are there ANY exempt businesses on this list???"
What I really want is a law that forbids ALL telemarkerters from calling before noon on the weekends! When someone wakes me up at 8AM on a Saturday my chances of buying anything from them is ZERO!
From the article: "Record companies should start flooding the Internet with bogus MP3 files that look like songs, but that explode on contact inside the hard drives of Internet thieves. Anyone who illegally downloads an MP3 file via KaZaA or any of the myriad peer-to-peer (i.e. thief-to-thief) services would at best get a corrupted file, and at worst a ruined hard drive."
Is this guy NUTS! Why does he think destroying someone's private property (i.e. their hard drive) will make them become a customer of the RIAA? I already refuse to buy any CDs because of the whole "enhanced" non-CD garbage. And no I am not "stealing" the music I listen to... the radio provides me with all of the FREE music I can handle. And yes there are a few non-ClearChannel stations left in this country.
You have a point, but I have to disagree with you when you consider the big picture. What parentage of McD's are in populated "major downtowns"? Most of them are out in the suburbs or poor neighborhoods.
Compare this to just about any Starbucks during the day. I know the one in the West Village (Uptown in Dallas) is always busy with people who have laptops and coffee. Even the Starbucks in the suburbs (Irving, Addison, etc.) has a good population of WiFi users. Not to mention, a nice relaxing environment to hang out in.
Hell, Boston Market has a better chance of doing something like this. I just think that McD's is too low end of an environment to provide WiFi and have it be useful. The last thing I want is for other businesses to decide that WiFi is not worth it because of a poorly conceived publicity stunt by McDonalds.
WiFi in McDonalds is going to fail. There is a HUGE difference in the average customer that goes to McDonalds vs. the average customer that goes to Starbucks. Fast-food like McD's is targeted mainly towards the poor, and how many of these people have wireless devices that could utilize WiFi (digital divide anyone)??? Even ignoring that fact, when was the last time you were in a McD's and thought "cool place, I think I'll break out my laptop and work for a while"???
As someone said earlier, it is just a poorly conceived publicity gimmick!
Sun's Jonathan Schwartz claiming defeat to Microsoft as it has the market tightly controlled with the help of windows
Pardon me for being a bit cranky and harsh, but why does Sun always seem to pull this line? They are declaring defeat before the battle really begins. If they want to pull out and quit then let them, but they have no need to declare the whole project a failure.
Besides, isn't a bit early for them to start their standard "we can't do this because of Microsoft" whine.
Does anyone have any personal experience working with unions in Europe?
The company I work for is based in Europe, and I work in their US based headquarters. In the last year we have had five rounds of layoffs resulting in a massive (measured in thousands) number of US employees losing their jobs. With each round of layoffs the company had to spend tons of time negotiating with the unions in Europe before they could do anything. From the people I know overseas they tell me that (because of unions) it takes an act of god for someone to lose their job. Most of them are shocked to find out that 1) we get no vacation time compared to them, 2) we have to pay for our own education, and 3) we can get fired without any notice in most US states.
If unions can improve the quality of life and make it easier for us (in the US) to get training (for example) then what is wrong with that? I think we can learn from the mistakes of the auto industry unions and do better. After all we are talking about a totally different class of people here. How many people that worked on a car assembly line have graduate degrees? How many people that worked on a car assembly line started intellectual revolutions like open source and Linux? A majority of us are people who enjoy challenges, want to constantly improve ourselves, and want to work hard to see our employers succeed in the marketplace!
Of course all of this becomes a moot point when you consider that there are countries like India where people are willing to take our jobs and do them for something like $4 an hour.
There are many other smaller true independent theaters where local tallent can show their stuff. Think gateway to the above listed. Start by attending a local film festival or even a local video festival and see where that leads you.
If you don't know of any in your area then play around with Google for a bit, you'll be amazed at what you find.
"Piracy is not a private offense," Hilary Rosen, president of the RIAA, said in a statement. "It hurts everyone... a crime... against each of us."
Since she brought it up, lets discuss crimes "against each of us":
Price fixing, why does an audio CD still cost about as much as a DVD? Isn't an album much cheeper to produce (as in creating the content, not the physical media) than a full length movie.
Why is the market oversaturated with crappy boy bands and no-talent-big-fake-boobs-Brittany-Spears clones. The real crime against humanity is that our ears are violated daily with crappy corporate formula pop crap.
Just my $0.02
I guess that is what happened to Elvis ;-)
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
I'm convinced anyone who will time travel into the future will never return, basically they'll vanish forever and all will vanish with them
I guess that is what happened to Elvis, he discovered time travel... and all this time we though he was abducted by aliens. Silly me.
That gives me a thought. Can we nominate Brittany Spears to be the first human to travel thru time?
I have two cats, a Main Coon and a Tabby. Whenever I leave the house I have to put the radio on a "smooth jazz" station or else the twenty pound Main Coon fights with the little Tabby. Once I left an "alternative" station on and they tore stuff up while I was gone. It's the strangest thing, but instrumental "smooth jazz" really calms them down. And yes the opposite is true, stuff like the Chemical Brothers totally freak them out.
As a side note, I have a friend who has a dog who loves country music and hates anything else. Just one more reason why cats a superior to dogs;-)
Slashdot Mirror
First, they have X11 listed incorrectly as a PPC app. If you have an Intel based Mac then the installation CDs includes a pkg of X11 as a Universal app.
...
... for all of your SVG editing needs.
... for all of your raster image editing needs.
... and I am surprised that they left Eclipse off of the list. While Xcode is preferred for doing OS X development, it is still worth a mention :-)
Once you have X11 installed then you can also get
1) Inkscape (Universal)
2) Gimp (Universal)
I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I use most.
Where I work the IT "support" folks are complete idiots. When my machine was running Windows they loaded it with all kinds of corporate crap-ware. I had a 1.2Mhz machine that ran like a old 486. They forced us to run Tivoli, Norton AV, Pointsec, a personal firewall, the list goes on. Now I can understand forcing the secretary to run these services on their machine, but how in the hell am I supposed to do performance benchmarks of my code when you have all of that crap running in the background. Believe me, I have a ton of horror stories about how much work I lost due to their incompetence.
Once I installed Linux I have had no problems. And now when some dolt from IT comes by to "check on my machine" they leave it alone because they have no idea what to do with Linux. Life is good.
This is in the article, so it is only slightly off topic. Did anyone else catch the following paragraph:
One notable TiVo user apparently unimpressed with the performance of Timberlake and Jackson was FCC chairman Michael Powell, who launched an investigation into the bare-breasted matter. Powell is so taken with TiVo that he once referred to it as "God's machine."
Doesn't the US government have better things to do than launch an investigation of JJ's boob?
I personally would not feel comfortable with this device. They make no mention of how your data is protected if one of the drives in it goes bad. With this device you probably have to send everything back to them to fix with no guarantee of data preservation.
Even though this device "looks cool" I'll stick to the RAID system that I built in my fileserver at home. It holds almost as much data, costs less, and if something in it breaks I can fix it quickly without any loss of data.
More good news: Perforce is free-as-in-beer for use in developing open source projects.
...
... I immediately decided to stick with Unison.
That sounded good, so I read their Open Source FAQ. After seeing the following
The End User License Agreement for Open Source Software Development requires that Perforce Software be granted read-only access to the Perforce server. What do I need to do to comply?
We will assume, unless otherwise notified, that we will be able to access your server at the server's licensed IP address, port 1666, using the Perforce user name "anonymous". When this is not true, you should include information for contacting your server when you fill out the license agreement.
While I embrace Open Source, I really don't feel comfortable with anyone at Perforce being able to "browse" through my home directory. Some of my software projects are open source, however my personal life and the contents of my home directory are not.
Maybe slashdot could play is as a midi in the background of all the SCO articles; that would rock :)
...
:-)
Let me mention my favorite saying
"If I want your website to make noise, I'll lick my finger and rub it across my monitor"
"FYI, Indian companies already outsource to China, today. China, Eastern Europe/Russia, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. In fact, so called "daisy-chaining," where an Indian company gets a US contract due to its relationships and reputation, and promptly outsources it elsewhere, is the new buzzword. Computerworld calls this 'a trend to watch.'"
... the product that they built for us was a "mangled" version of Jakarta and included "stolen" code from a competitors product (that they also built).
Why is "daisy-chaining" happening? If a company outsources to an Indian company and they know that it is going to be outsourced yet again, then why would the original company not just go directly to the company that does the work? Cut out the middle man?
Also, the threat of piracy is real. The company I work for used a "reputable" Indian company to build one of our products. When we turned over our source to Sun to pass the "100% Java" certification (this was a few years ago) guess what we found out
I participated in the Dallas UC and it was a blast. It really gives you a chance to learn about local history.
If we judged standards by what was implemented in IE then we would all be in trouble
There are plenty of people doing things with SVG:
Of course this is being fueled by the RIAA/MPAA! Look at this quote from the article:
Eder said there was no specific line crossed by these subscribers, but she added that some of those people were downloading the equivalent of 90 movies in a given month.
Why is it that when the Comcast representative described someone's bandwidth usage they instantly described it in terms of "movies downloaded per month"! Comcast has the raw data to give a number like 2Gig per day, but they chose to use a metric that made the user instantly look like a criminal.
What frightens me is that I love to listen to Internet radio. This is a legitimate use of my bandwidth, but how long is it before my ISP labels be a criminal because I use enough bandwidth as "someone downloading 90 movies a month"?
Just a thought.
How on Earth did they pick the damages amount for this case?
...
From the CNN story
"The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus seeks triple the hotel's profits since its opening or triple the organization's damages, whichever is greater, from the hotel's owner."
"Dreitler said Saturday he and his client do not yet know the size of the hotel's profits. The center, based in Dublin, is willing to settle with the hotel's owners, he said."
If this does not scream frivolous lawsuit (or lottery ticket lawsuit) then I don't know what does. I thought if you were suing someone for "damages" that you had pick an amount, not just claim "triple whatever is going to get me the most money".
This is more proof that the legal system in the US is severely broken and abused.
What ever happened to the $9.99 sale price for new CD releases? I remember back in 1994 I could walk into a Circuit City (on a Friday in Tallahassee, FL) and get a new release for only $9.99 on sale.
And why is it that back in the 80's I could buy an album on cassette for around $7.99, but today I have to pay $18 for the same ammount of content on a CD? CDs are cheeper to manufacture than cassettes!
I'm sorry, but Universal is going to have to do better than $12.98 to get my hard earned money.
I really have a problem with the opening tone of the article:
..."
... 30 years ago I was an ovum :-)
"... I want to point out that American programmers and other IT people were outstandingly unsympathetic when factory workers' jobs started going overseas 30 or 40 years ago, and I don't recall a single peep out of anyone in the IT
Really
A large number of the people that I know of who are having a hard time finding a job are young. They don't remember what the factory worker's plight was like because they were simply too young or not born yet. His opening argument really turned me off. I think calling the American programmer unsympathetic is a rash judgement.
We need to update todays Slashdot poll to include the item:
[x] Angry Tivo user torches SCO offices
SCO will have to pry my TiVo (or the $32 license fee) from my cold dead hands
This quote really disturbs me ...
"He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade -- and then they both should burn it," said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief.
Knowledge should be used to empower. Knowledge should be passed along from generation to generation. It is our knowledge that makes this (or any country) worthy of defending.
How about finding ways to better secure our national infrastructure instead of "persecuting" researchers. What's next? The Bush administration will outlawing thinking?
Maybe I am just overreacting, but the above quote from this article reminds me of The Burning of the Library of Alexandria.
The exempt business list includes:
- long-distance phone companies
- airlines
- banks and credit unions
- the business of insurance
- political organizations
- charities
- telephone surveyors
These are the EXACT people that I want to STOP CALLING ME with sales pitches!!!Again I ask the question, "Why are there ANY exempt businesses on this list???"
What I really want is a law that forbids ALL telemarkerters from calling before noon on the weekends! When someone wakes me up at 8AM on a Saturday my chances of buying anything from them is ZERO!
From the article: "Record companies should start flooding the Internet with bogus MP3 files that look like songs, but that explode on contact inside the hard drives of Internet thieves. Anyone who illegally downloads an MP3 file via KaZaA or any of the myriad peer-to-peer (i.e. thief-to-thief) services would at best get a corrupted file, and at worst a ruined hard drive."
... the radio provides me with all of the FREE music I can handle. And yes there are a few non-ClearChannel stations left in this country.
Is this guy NUTS! Why does he think destroying someone's private property (i.e. their hard drive) will make them become a customer of the RIAA? I already refuse to buy any CDs because of the whole "enhanced" non-CD garbage. And no I am not "stealing" the music I listen to
You have a point, but I have to disagree with you when you consider the big picture. What parentage of McD's are in populated "major downtowns"? Most of them are out in the suburbs or poor neighborhoods.
Compare this to just about any Starbucks during the day. I know the one in the West Village (Uptown in Dallas) is always busy with people who have laptops and coffee. Even the Starbucks in the suburbs (Irving, Addison, etc.) has a good population of WiFi users. Not to mention, a nice relaxing environment to hang out in.
Hell, Boston Market has a better chance of doing something like this. I just think that McD's is too low end of an environment to provide WiFi and have it be useful. The last thing I want is for other businesses to decide that WiFi is not worth it because of a poorly conceived publicity stunt by McDonalds.
WiFi in McDonalds is going to fail. There is a HUGE difference in the average customer that goes to McDonalds vs. the average customer that goes to Starbucks. Fast-food like McD's is targeted mainly towards the poor, and how many of these people have wireless devices that could utilize WiFi (digital divide anyone)??? Even ignoring that fact, when was the last time you were in a McD's and thought "cool place, I think I'll break out my laptop and work for a while"???
As someone said earlier, it is just a poorly conceived publicity gimmick!
Sun's Jonathan Schwartz claiming defeat to Microsoft as it has the market tightly controlled with the help of windows
Pardon me for being a bit cranky and harsh, but why does Sun always seem to pull this line? They are declaring defeat before the battle really begins. If they want to pull out and quit then let them, but they have no need to declare the whole project a failure.
Besides, isn't a bit early for them to start their standard "we can't do this because of Microsoft" whine.
Does anyone have any personal experience working with unions in Europe?
The company I work for is based in Europe, and I work in their US based headquarters. In the last year we have had five rounds of layoffs resulting in a massive (measured in thousands) number of US employees losing their jobs. With each round of layoffs the company had to spend tons of time negotiating with the unions in Europe before they could do anything. From the people I know overseas they tell me that (because of unions) it takes an act of god for someone to lose their job. Most of them are shocked to find out that 1) we get no vacation time compared to them, 2) we have to pay for our own education, and 3) we can get fired without any notice in most US states.
If unions can improve the quality of life and make it easier for us (in the US) to get training (for example) then what is wrong with that? I think we can learn from the mistakes of the auto industry unions and do better. After all we are talking about a totally different class of people here. How many people that worked on a car assembly line have graduate degrees? How many people that worked on a car assembly line started intellectual revolutions like open source and Linux? A majority of us are people who enjoy challenges, want to constantly improve ourselves, and want to work hard to see our employers succeed in the marketplace!
Of course all of this becomes a moot point when you consider that there are countries like India where people are willing to take our jobs and do them for something like $4 an hour.
If the movie theatres are 0wned by the MPAA, then where do the truly independent filmmakers go to show their work?
... here is your answer:
Great question
Search for the indie theaters in your area. I live in ultra conservative Texas and Dallas has three well known really good ones [The Magnolia, The Angelika, and The Inwood].
There are many other smaller true independent theaters where local tallent can show their stuff. Think gateway to the above listed. Start by attending a local film festival or even a local video festival and see where that leads you.
If you don't know of any in your area then play around with Google for a bit, you'll be amazed at what you find.
Since she brought it up, lets discuss crimes "against each of us":
Just my $0.02
I'm convinced anyone who will time travel into the future will never return, basically they'll vanish forever and all will vanish with them
... and all this time we though he was abducted by aliens. Silly me.
I guess that is what happened to Elvis, he discovered time travel
That gives me a thought. Can we nominate Brittany Spears to be the first human to travel thru time?
I have two cats, a Main Coon and a Tabby. Whenever I leave the house I have to put the radio on a "smooth jazz" station or else the twenty pound Main Coon fights with the little Tabby. Once I left an "alternative" station on and they tore stuff up while I was gone. It's the strangest thing, but instrumental "smooth jazz" really calms them down. And yes the opposite is true, stuff like the Chemical Brothers totally freak them out.
;-)
As a side note, I have a friend who has a dog who loves country music and hates anything else. Just one more reason why cats a superior to dogs