While sex between two characters had been implied frequently in the past, it was never explicitly shown. This destroys an element of the StarTrek universe that I've always found charming: it's always had a childish innocence.
I agree with you on the explicit sex... I enjoy it as much as the next guy (probably more) but its betraying what ST was about. I'm hoping Gene is not somewhat up there depressed to see what they did with his show.
Anyone who has watched TOS back when Gene was running things knows that he considered Star Trek a "Space Western" and he went on-record in multiple interviews as saying that he hated the TV censors and tried to sneak past them as much material as possible. Original fans will also note Kirk's green bellydancer lovefest, and the harem girls he slept with (all of them?) and so on. TOS was violent, sexual, and campy. Gene chafed against the restrictions. I'm tired of the Johnny-come-lately's suggesting that Gene would hate foul language or sex or action scenes. Ugh.
Serious webmasters do it in Java or C anyhow, for serious speed.
Sorry, but I really dispute this.
And I'll back you up on this. Although you disputed it by talking about time-to-deployment, I dispute it on grounds of actual speed of page returns. I worked at Borland and built tons of apps using Perl (pre-JBuilder), then at Arzoo using JSP, and now at SST using PHP. PHP is by far faster than the rest. And there is another Web team at SST, and that team works on competing projects, and they used ASP at first, and now JSP, and they regularly come and ask how the hell we return pages so quickly. Because we're experiencing some real-world payoffs -- for example, our group is getting the new projects -- I'm sticking with PHP.
I think the biggest problem with PHP is that it is fast enough to allow us to be sloppy -- if we want to put 20 SQL queries on a page and have 15 included files, we can do it without much of a performance hit (though MySQL is crazy-fast on selects, so that deserves credit too). Back in the old days, I'd have to optimize, optimize, optimize. Maybe even drop some less necessary features because the slowdown was too much. If you really want to talk about super-slow Web apps, remember IntraBuilder. Anyone remember that? It was a Borland product with a LiveScript clone on the backend, and oh my God would it crumble under pressure. We had to use it at Borland, sort of a eat-your-own-dogfood kind of thing. But when your own employees start to hate your product and bristle at the mention of it, the product is doomed.
I'll be at the San Jose meeting, wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt with white stripes. Somebody say "hi" to me there, as I suck at starting conversations with strangers.
You are not the only country that has the expertise and extra money to devote to saving the world.
Saying "we have extra cash too, we coulda done that" just doesn't inspire the same respect as for the one who actually did it.
Wishing for kudos? Don't wait for the USA. The USA will take another 5 years and repeated warnings before it bothers to try to stop this destruction. And that's assuming that our two rocks actually are on a collision course in 2019. So here's your chance. Start working to save the world right now. Have your plan in place and a prototype built before the USA even gets started. You have time. Whatever country you represent has a chance to take the lead. If you leave it to the USA, you leave the bragging rights, too.
According to a story at the BBC Web site, a "free thinking" robot scheduled for repairs escaped from a holding pen and made a run for it, eventually being stopped in the Magna Science Center's parking lot. As robots become better able to understand concepts such as slavery, abuse, and loneliness, what obligations do humans have to ensure such robots are not enslaved and are afforded some level of human dignity?
"Good old Steve" is in reference to the litigation-happy days when Jobs was CEO of Apple in the 80's, suing Microsoft, Adobe, and everyone else who displeased him.
Unfortunately that's factually incorrect. Apple sued Microsoft in 1988, four years after Steve was kicked out of Apple.
Dude, shut up with all these facts and being reasonable and shit. This is slashdot and we're trying to have a gripefest here.
Geeze. We try to bullshit about the good old days and suddenly there are all these fuckin' historians getting all historic and stuff.
While you later concede that form input and input from other programs might be good reasons to use a regex, that you would even pose this question is strange. For 90% of the regex fans, form input and screen scraping is exactly what they do. For almost any Web developer, this is the day-in, day-out norm. So your point seems to downplay the very uses that have made regex's so popular.
I've ecountered many regexpr's for email addresses, all of them work on your bog standard address, none of them work when deployed
You realize this does not bolster your claim that regex's are "overrated" -- it merely points out that some developers are overrated. A bad developer does not make a language bad.
That HTML tag stripper you hacked up, did you remember to handle comments?
Same as above. You're complaining about human error and then blaming the regex system itself.
I've just come to associate use of regular expressions with flakey or hastily written software.
Of course. But the hastily written software is the other software we interact with, not our own. And that's a broad generalization for many developers, so of course you can find exceptions. But you asked for other people's views, and in my view, regex's are sorely needed -- not so bad developers can stay bad, but so that the good developers can clean up the messes left behind after the bad developers go. It's a nice bonus that good regex developers can pull in hostile data, screen scrape, and cleanse form input. That helped one of my employees get a raise last quarter.
Assuming it'll be slashdotted, for the curious, what it does is something like a graphical Alexa. It shows the main thing you searched for as a sort of you-are-here dot that you can click on, and then it shows related sites and keywords in a connect-the-dots type of image. So I entered slashdot, and got slashdot.org as the main result, but with "linux" and some other keywords around it. I clicked "linux" and got a new graphic with some linux sites, OSDN, and some other related stuff.
It does seem useful, but on Windows, I'd rather just click the "Related" button in IE and get Alexa's list. Here on my Linux box, this is a good substitute for Opera and Konq to use.
In reality, what this is about is religious fervor: don't let cloning happen because some religious fanatics believe it is "unnatural" and defies God.
Leave it to someone who is not a religious fanatic to get it wrong. As a card carrying member of the religious right, let me explain the problem. Simply put, we don't agree on what qualifies as a human being. We all -- religious or not -- agree that if it's human, you don't torture/harm/kill it in the name of science. Someone else in this thread defined being human as the capacity to "suffer." But religious people define it as having a soul -- and therefore, even that just-fertilized egg qualifies as human. So people who define human beings as those who suffer, or think, or speak, will have little problem with a 99% failure rate at cloning. But religious people see that as the torture or killing of human beings. It actually really has very little to do with God, and everything to do with where you draw the line for humans to qualify as humans.
In fact, as cloning's shortfalls become more obvious, the science of cloning humans is going to suffer from backlash from non-religious people too. The first 12 year-old girl to die on a hospital bed of a cloning-specific ailment, with her sobs of "why? why?" televised on CNN, is going to ignite all sorts of anti-cloning sentiment from atheists, agnostics, and religious freaks alike. Of course, science is so enamored with what it can do, that it hasn't stopped long enough to think about what it should do.
There was an international treaty ratified by a number of countries back in the 70s, as the race to the moon waned. Bascially, these countries agreed that none of them would be able to lay claim to the moon. Can anyone tell us the name of this treaty? It was mentioned on slashdot about 3 months ago, which is where I learned of it. It basically treats the moon like international waters.
My personal opinion is that this treaty is partly to blame for the distinct lack of interest most countries now have in the moon. What is interesting, of course, is that China never signed the treaty. So while the rest of the world sits around thinking, "why go, we can't claim it as our own and mine the resources" China is thinking "follow your treaty, while we take the moon for ourselves."
Re:The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Arguably, a patent should expire, but what about a Trademark?
That's a good question. One of the problems that Disney has inflicted on America is this: because it doesn't want Mickey Mouse to be used by competitors or pornographers or whatever, it is forcing all copyrights to be extended. But if Disney could protect something that has become so central to its identity without locking up everything else, that might be a great compromise. If you could revert copyright back to its original form -- 17 years plus an extra 17 years if requested -- and then let Disney put the "ears" (the round black Mickey Mouse ears) into a permanent trademark, you might be able to give Disney the lock it wants while at the same time freeing insane amounts of copyrighted material.
Huh? Xine 0.99 just came out 11 days ago and as Krischi noted, there have been hundreds of CVS commits in the last few weeks. Sourceforge rates it as a highly active project (it just made it into the top 100 most active projects). I don't know what Xine you're talking about, but the Xine I use has the momentum of a lot of developers throwing their weight behind it.
You could pull off $600 in savings if you did it right -- I just replaced the CPU & motherboard in a 266 mhz box, kept all the peripherals (although I did buy newer, faster RAM), total cost was $325.
But anyway, you think you'll get $400 in savings per machine. OK, how much do you make an hour (on average, if you're salaried)? Let's say you make $40/hour, roughly. OK, so if it takes you 10 extra hours to custom-build the box, then you break even. Because you'll have to do without a support contract -- which I find is rarely used, anyway -- you may want to factor in cost for that, too. OK, so let's say you'll spend 3 hours, on average, servicing each machine yourself. So if you can put together the box in less than 7 hours, it's a savings. But it's really a good savings only if you can custom assemble those boxes in something like 2 or 3 hours. Then the numbers start to show promise. If you save $100/machine, that's $2,000 a year on 20 machines. So-so.
I guess for me, if I could replace the machines for $400 in parts, that's a $600 savings. If I then could assemble the thing in just 2 hours, that's roughly $100 of "savings" that I lose. That's 20 machines/year X $500 = $10,000. Yeah, that starts to sound worth it. If I was your manager and you came to me suggesting this big plan which would save the company $2,000 a year but suck up a lot of your time, I'd say no, let's have you spend your time doing other things that might have more bang for the buck. But if you come to me with a plan to save $10,000, and you are demonstrably capable of pulling it off, it starts to sound like it might be time well-spent.
From what I can see, Star Wars was originally part of a social movement, the gradual change of geeks, if you will, from the shadows to the mainstream.
I sort of agree with this statement. However, I think you are missing the larger picture here. The awesome thing about Star Wars is that you don't/didn't have to be a geek to enjoy it.
I don't think he's missing it, I think that's exactly what "geeks to mainstream" implies.
Yes, there are some cases (ethanol, cigarettes) where there are proven harmful consequences where I don't mind their intervention, but there is no proof whatsoever that video games are going to hurt anything but the kid's thumb muscles.
Yikes. I feel like flailing my arms and shouting, "danger!" There is indeed a huge amount of evidence that violence in media -- music, games, movies, and books -- influences people. Hell, the entire advertising industry is built upon the idea that media can influence people.
I suspect you're saying what you're saying because either you personally are unaware of any evidence, or you're perfectly aware of it and reject it as hogwash. But psychologists going back to 1864 (I think, that number is off the top of my head) have documented something called the "werther's effect" which nowadays is called social proof. Wether was a writer (or the main character of a book, again, this is off the top of my head). Anyway, the main character of this moving, well-written book eventually killed himself. The book was immensely popular, and soon a wave of similar suicides began to sweep across multiple countries. By 1866, the book was banned by entire continents. Since that time, this has been studied to death -- they've studied accidents where everyone drove by without offering assistance, video games, rock music, laugh tracks, advertising, movies, you name it. It all ties in to social proof, which states: the more a person identifies with the environment, the more likely the person is to be influenced by it.
So your normal, healthy, well-adjusted slashdotter (cough) is NOT going to identify with pac man and start eating ghosts. Nor will he/she identify with doom and start shooting up everything in sight. But a young angry white boy who sees a lifelike portrayal of young angry white boys is going to be influenced. A middle-aged Asian dad who interacts with a game or movie or people who are also middle-aged, Asian, and fathers, will be influenced. There are a lot of reasons for this, and you can use Google to get some really great, really boring papers and essays about the research in this area. But the bottom line is realistic portrayals of anything will influence people of similar background.
The Xine video player has a feature set similar to MPlayer, but also comes with courteous developers and a ton of RPMs for easy installation on a variety of Linux distros. DEBs too.
Joel's rule: every barrier to implementation reduces your customer base by 50%
This was actually very literally proved out at Borland, too. While I was the Web guy there, we watched "attrition" rates for pages. It went something like this: if you have a home page with 1000 people hitting it, only 500 people will hit the subpages, and only 250 people will hit the sub-subpages. Once we realized that, we quickly moved to a very busy homepage with tons of links, trying to keep everything 2 or 3 clicks away at most. Even though I found the design to be ugly ugly ugly, I was amazed at how the numbers improved. Previously buried articles quadrupled their readership -- at the expense of nothing else. Everything benefitted from the rise.
Whether we use Java, Flash, SVG, or a mix of these for different projects, I want to do this as an open source project with, eventually, lots of volunteers involved, because I hope to use this as one of several campaigns to convince the union movement to embrace open source.
Well. Having clarified, it appears to me that Flash is definitely not what you should be using. It simply is not synonymous with Open Source. As others have mentioned, Macromedia has only offered a spec for a small, outdated part of Flash. The full, up to date spec has not been released. And it's been a few years. In addition, they certainly have not open-sourced the code to their Flash apps. About the only way to do Flash in an Open-Source manner would be to use the PHP libraries to serve it up. This would, of course, require you to abandon any kind of graphical development environment.
In addition, other slashdotters mentioned that using Flash to answer policy questions is excessive. I am of two minds about that. First, a simple search box and a neatly formatted results page is all anyone needs to explain policy. So it would appear to me that you want to make a bigger deal out of your area than it really is. If this is the case, give up on your idea and go back to something simple. However, I acknowledge that an extremely competent, genius-like group of artists, animators, audio engineers, and writers could come up with a be-all, end-all app. This app would, perhaps with cartoon-like storyboarding, run someone through policy in such a way as to make it entertaining, easy, and fast. If this were possible, it would quickly become a commercially-viable application that HR departments at every company would buy. If this is the level at which you and these volunteers perform, don't listen to naysayers. But if it's not, you need to rethink your plan.
Hey Sparkz. I haven't seen your sig in a long time. But anyway, there actually isn't anything similar on the front-end -- CSS, JavaScript, HTML, all different stuff. Even the PHP on the backend -- about 100,000 lines of code -- is different. The intranet has a budgeting app, an org chart app -- the public site can reuse very little of this. But all those PHP functions and modules need to be more rigorous. Functions for reading & sending email should be separate files that get included, just as the files to initiate a database connection are included. Multiply that by a few hundred more functions and modules that can potentially be cleaned up and put into reusable form, and now we're talking about seriously organized code. That's what I'd like to get to.
There is a game of Risk that comes with C source, and I really liked the organization of the code. It was not only modular, but included files were neatly stored into sensible folders and sub-folders. So when you look at the code, you really didn't need to know all 20,000 lines. I made a few changes by simply picking the folders I was interested in (ai, server), opening the applicable file (and thanks to the include statements, each file was only a couple hundred lines long), and tweaking. That is radically better than our 100 files all shoved into the top level of the Web directory, each about 500-10,000 lines long, with tons of redundant functions and code tweaks that made it into some of the copied functions but not others. And still, the 100 files are the result of planning, and it's much better than anything I had at the last company I worked for. But I see others doing better and I want to emulate them.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on! That was funny as hell and it's got zero mod points on it? Moderators? Shouldn't you be moderating me down and Mr. Coward up?
Anyone who has watched TOS back when Gene was running things knows that he considered Star Trek a "Space Western" and he went on-record in multiple interviews as saying that he hated the TV censors and tried to sneak past them as much material as possible. Original fans will also note Kirk's green bellydancer lovefest, and the harem girls he slept with (all of them?) and so on. TOS was violent, sexual, and campy. Gene chafed against the restrictions. I'm tired of the Johnny-come-lately's suggesting that Gene would hate foul language or sex or action scenes. Ugh.
And I'll back you up on this. Although you disputed it by talking about time-to-deployment, I dispute it on grounds of actual speed of page returns. I worked at Borland and built tons of apps using Perl (pre-JBuilder), then at Arzoo using JSP, and now at SST using PHP. PHP is by far faster than the rest. And there is another Web team at SST, and that team works on competing projects, and they used ASP at first, and now JSP, and they regularly come and ask how the hell we return pages so quickly. Because we're experiencing some real-world payoffs -- for example, our group is getting the new projects -- I'm sticking with PHP.
I think the biggest problem with PHP is that it is fast enough to allow us to be sloppy -- if we want to put 20 SQL queries on a page and have 15 included files, we can do it without much of a performance hit (though MySQL is crazy-fast on selects, so that deserves credit too). Back in the old days, I'd have to optimize, optimize, optimize. Maybe even drop some less necessary features because the slowdown was too much. If you really want to talk about super-slow Web apps, remember IntraBuilder. Anyone remember that? It was a Borland product with a LiveScript clone on the backend, and oh my God would it crumble under pressure. We had to use it at Borland, sort of a eat-your-own-dogfood kind of thing. But when your own employees start to hate your product and bristle at the mention of it, the product is doomed.
Look at the eWeek tests. MySQL is keeping pace with Oracle even when scaled to 1000 simultaneous users. Read the article.
I'll be at the San Jose meeting, wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt with white stripes. Somebody say "hi" to me there, as I suck at starting conversations with strangers.
Saying "we have extra cash too, we coulda done that" just doesn't inspire the same respect as for the one who actually did it.
Wishing for kudos? Don't wait for the USA. The USA will take another 5 years and repeated warnings before it bothers to try to stop this destruction. And that's assuming that our two rocks actually are on a collision course in 2019. So here's your chance. Start working to save the world right now. Have your plan in place and a prototype built before the USA even gets started. You have time. Whatever country you represent has a chance to take the lead. If you leave it to the USA, you leave the bragging rights, too.
According to a story at the BBC Web site, a "free thinking" robot scheduled for repairs escaped from a holding pen and made a run for it, eventually being stopped in the Magna Science Center's parking lot. As robots become better able to understand concepts such as slavery, abuse, and loneliness, what obligations do humans have to ensure such robots are not enslaved and are afforded some level of human dignity?
Dude, shut up with all these facts and being reasonable and shit. This is slashdot and we're trying to have a gripefest here.
Geeze. We try to bullshit about the good old days and suddenly there are all these fuckin' historians getting all historic and stuff.
While you later concede that form input and input from other programs might be good reasons to use a regex, that you would even pose this question is strange. For 90% of the regex fans, form input and screen scraping is exactly what they do. For almost any Web developer, this is the day-in, day-out norm. So your point seems to downplay the very uses that have made regex's so popular.
You realize this does not bolster your claim that regex's are "overrated" -- it merely points out that some developers are overrated. A bad developer does not make a language bad.
Same as above. You're complaining about human error and then blaming the regex system itself.
Of course. But the hastily written software is the other software we interact with, not our own. And that's a broad generalization for many developers, so of course you can find exceptions. But you asked for other people's views, and in my view, regex's are sorely needed -- not so bad developers can stay bad, but so that the good developers can clean up the messes left behind after the bad developers go. It's a nice bonus that good regex developers can pull in hostile data, screen scrape, and cleanse form input. That helped one of my employees get a raise last quarter.
Assuming it'll be slashdotted, for the curious, what it does is something like a graphical Alexa. It shows the main thing you searched for as a sort of you-are-here dot that you can click on, and then it shows related sites and keywords in a connect-the-dots type of image. So I entered slashdot, and got slashdot.org as the main result, but with "linux" and some other keywords around it. I clicked "linux" and got a new graphic with some linux sites, OSDN, and some other related stuff.
It does seem useful, but on Windows, I'd rather just click the "Related" button in IE and get Alexa's list. Here on my Linux box, this is a good substitute for Opera and Konq to use.
Leave it to someone who is not a religious fanatic to get it wrong. As a card carrying member of the religious right, let me explain the problem. Simply put, we don't agree on what qualifies as a human being. We all -- religious or not -- agree that if it's human, you don't torture/harm/kill it in the name of science. Someone else in this thread defined being human as the capacity to "suffer." But religious people define it as having a soul -- and therefore, even that just-fertilized egg qualifies as human. So people who define human beings as those who suffer, or think, or speak, will have little problem with a 99% failure rate at cloning. But religious people see that as the torture or killing of human beings. It actually really has very little to do with God, and everything to do with where you draw the line for humans to qualify as humans.
In fact, as cloning's shortfalls become more obvious, the science of cloning humans is going to suffer from backlash from non-religious people too. The first 12 year-old girl to die on a hospital bed of a cloning-specific ailment, with her sobs of "why? why?" televised on CNN, is going to ignite all sorts of anti-cloning sentiment from atheists, agnostics, and religious freaks alike. Of course, science is so enamored with what it can do, that it hasn't stopped long enough to think about what it should do.
There was an international treaty ratified by a number of countries back in the 70s, as the race to the moon waned. Bascially, these countries agreed that none of them would be able to lay claim to the moon. Can anyone tell us the name of this treaty? It was mentioned on slashdot about 3 months ago, which is where I learned of it. It basically treats the moon like international waters.
My personal opinion is that this treaty is partly to blame for the distinct lack of interest most countries now have in the moon. What is interesting, of course, is that China never signed the treaty. So while the rest of the world sits around thinking, "why go, we can't claim it as our own and mine the resources" China is thinking "follow your treaty, while we take the moon for ourselves."
That's a good question. One of the problems that Disney has inflicted on America is this: because it doesn't want Mickey Mouse to be used by competitors or pornographers or whatever, it is forcing all copyrights to be extended. But if Disney could protect something that has become so central to its identity without locking up everything else, that might be a great compromise. If you could revert copyright back to its original form -- 17 years plus an extra 17 years if requested -- and then let Disney put the "ears" (the round black Mickey Mouse ears) into a permanent trademark, you might be able to give Disney the lock it wants while at the same time freeing insane amounts of copyrighted material.
You can choose not to install GCC and still have a working, useful system.
lowercase letters here to get past the lameness filter: asdfssdf sfdsdfsd sdfsdfsd sdfsfsdf sfsdfsdf sfdsdfsdf sdfsdfsd fsdfs dfsd fs dfs df fsdf sdf sdf sdfslkjlkj lkj lkj ljk lkj lk j lkj ljkljk l jk lk lkjlkjlkjlkj lkj lkjkjl lkj lkj kj lkjkjl lkj lkjkjl kjlkjlkjl kjl jkl kjl kjl kjl kjljkl.
It was a fork of a beta. Double bad on RH.
Huh? Xine 0.99 just came out 11 days ago and as Krischi noted, there have been hundreds of CVS commits in the last few weeks. Sourceforge rates it as a highly active project (it just made it into the top 100 most active projects). I don't know what Xine you're talking about, but the Xine I use has the momentum of a lot of developers throwing their weight behind it.
You could pull off $600 in savings if you did it right -- I just replaced the CPU & motherboard in a 266 mhz box, kept all the peripherals (although I did buy newer, faster RAM), total cost was $325.
But anyway, you think you'll get $400 in savings per machine. OK, how much do you make an hour (on average, if you're salaried)? Let's say you make $40/hour, roughly. OK, so if it takes you 10 extra hours to custom-build the box, then you break even. Because you'll have to do without a support contract -- which I find is rarely used, anyway -- you may want to factor in cost for that, too. OK, so let's say you'll spend 3 hours, on average, servicing each machine yourself. So if you can put together the box in less than 7 hours, it's a savings. But it's really a good savings only if you can custom assemble those boxes in something like 2 or 3 hours. Then the numbers start to show promise. If you save $100/machine, that's $2,000 a year on 20 machines. So-so.
I guess for me, if I could replace the machines for $400 in parts, that's a $600 savings. If I then could assemble the thing in just 2 hours, that's roughly $100 of "savings" that I lose. That's 20 machines/year X $500 = $10,000. Yeah, that starts to sound worth it. If I was your manager and you came to me suggesting this big plan which would save the company $2,000 a year but suck up a lot of your time, I'd say no, let's have you spend your time doing other things that might have more bang for the buck. But if you come to me with a plan to save $10,000, and you are demonstrably capable of pulling it off, it starts to sound like it might be time well-spent.
I don't think he's missing it, I think that's exactly what "geeks to mainstream" implies.
Yikes. I feel like flailing my arms and shouting, "danger!" There is indeed a huge amount of evidence that violence in media -- music, games, movies, and books -- influences people. Hell, the entire advertising industry is built upon the idea that media can influence people.
I suspect you're saying what you're saying because either you personally are unaware of any evidence, or you're perfectly aware of it and reject it as hogwash. But psychologists going back to 1864 (I think, that number is off the top of my head) have documented something called the "werther's effect" which nowadays is called social proof. Wether was a writer (or the main character of a book, again, this is off the top of my head). Anyway, the main character of this moving, well-written book eventually killed himself. The book was immensely popular, and soon a wave of similar suicides began to sweep across multiple countries. By 1866, the book was banned by entire continents. Since that time, this has been studied to death -- they've studied accidents where everyone drove by without offering assistance, video games, rock music, laugh tracks, advertising, movies, you name it. It all ties in to social proof, which states: the more a person identifies with the environment, the more likely the person is to be influenced by it.
So your normal, healthy, well-adjusted slashdotter (cough) is NOT going to identify with pac man and start eating ghosts. Nor will he/she identify with doom and start shooting up everything in sight. But a young angry white boy who sees a lifelike portrayal of young angry white boys is going to be influenced. A middle-aged Asian dad who interacts with a game or movie or people who are also middle-aged, Asian, and fathers, will be influenced. There are a lot of reasons for this, and you can use Google to get some really great, really boring papers and essays about the research in this area. But the bottom line is realistic portrayals of anything will influence people of similar background.
The Xine video player has a feature set similar to MPlayer, but also comes with courteous developers and a ton of RPMs for easy installation on a variety of Linux distros. DEBs too.
Well. That's funny.
This was actually very literally proved out at Borland, too. While I was the Web guy there, we watched "attrition" rates for pages. It went something like this: if you have a home page with 1000 people hitting it, only 500 people will hit the subpages, and only 250 people will hit the sub-subpages. Once we realized that, we quickly moved to a very busy homepage with tons of links, trying to keep everything 2 or 3 clicks away at most. Even though I found the design to be ugly ugly ugly, I was amazed at how the numbers improved. Previously buried articles quadrupled their readership -- at the expense of nothing else. Everything benefitted from the rise.
Well. Having clarified, it appears to me that Flash is definitely not what you should be using. It simply is not synonymous with Open Source. As others have mentioned, Macromedia has only offered a spec for a small, outdated part of Flash. The full, up to date spec has not been released. And it's been a few years. In addition, they certainly have not open-sourced the code to their Flash apps. About the only way to do Flash in an Open-Source manner would be to use the PHP libraries to serve it up. This would, of course, require you to abandon any kind of graphical development environment.
In addition, other slashdotters mentioned that using Flash to answer policy questions is excessive. I am of two minds about that. First, a simple search box and a neatly formatted results page is all anyone needs to explain policy. So it would appear to me that you want to make a bigger deal out of your area than it really is. If this is the case, give up on your idea and go back to something simple. However, I acknowledge that an extremely competent, genius-like group of artists, animators, audio engineers, and writers could come up with a be-all, end-all app. This app would, perhaps with cartoon-like storyboarding, run someone through policy in such a way as to make it entertaining, easy, and fast. If this were possible, it would quickly become a commercially-viable application that HR departments at every company would buy. If this is the level at which you and these volunteers perform, don't listen to naysayers. But if it's not, you need to rethink your plan.
Hey Sparkz. I haven't seen your sig in a long time. But anyway, there actually isn't anything similar on the front-end -- CSS, JavaScript, HTML, all different stuff. Even the PHP on the backend -- about 100,000 lines of code -- is different. The intranet has a budgeting app, an org chart app -- the public site can reuse very little of this. But all those PHP functions and modules need to be more rigorous. Functions for reading & sending email should be separate files that get included, just as the files to initiate a database connection are included. Multiply that by a few hundred more functions and modules that can potentially be cleaned up and put into reusable form, and now we're talking about seriously organized code. That's what I'd like to get to.
There is a game of Risk that comes with C source, and I really liked the organization of the code. It was not only modular, but included files were neatly stored into sensible folders and sub-folders. So when you look at the code, you really didn't need to know all 20,000 lines. I made a few changes by simply picking the folders I was interested in (ai, server), opening the applicable file (and thanks to the include statements, each file was only a couple hundred lines long), and tweaking. That is radically better than our 100 files all shoved into the top level of the Web directory, each about 500-10,000 lines long, with tons of redundant functions and code tweaks that made it into some of the copied functions but not others. And still, the 100 files are the result of planning, and it's much better than anything I had at the last company I worked for. But I see others doing better and I want to emulate them.
</serious>
Sorry, just couldn't stand to have an unclosed tag. 8^)