Almost every EU agency seems to end up in one of a few places: Brussels, Strasbourg, Frankfurt. In Sweden, we have, as far as I know not a single EU agency. Not surprising that EU is so unpopular here when everything is centralised like this. I have been a supporter of EU , and still am, but if it continues like this, I wonder what is the point. Decentralise!!!
Spending commute time playing tetris would be a waste for sure. But I prefer reading to "hacking". Programming is what I do when I get to work. I don't need to to it on my way to it and from it.
Well, that is contrary to the social contract. It clearly states that as a user, I am a priority. So it seems you are the one that "don't get it"
It is this conflict between the stated goals in the social contract, and the attitude of developers that confuse me. If the social contract stated what you say above, then fine, ok with me. But it doesn't.
This question is not tightly related to the current topic, but I thought I could grab this opportunity to ask for a clarification. Item 4 in the Social Contract says:
Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software
We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free-software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environment. We won't object to commercial software that is intended to run on Debian systems, and we'll allow others to create value-added distributions containing both Debian and commercial software, without any fee from us. To support these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality, 100% free software, with no legal restrictions that would prevent these kinds of use.
What I wonder is, as the Debian user is not more precisly defined, Debian lacks a target group and a common vision for how the Debian OS should work and interact with the user. Different developers may have very different goals and this likely results in a inconsistent or hard to use system. Or, more likely, Debian developers equals themselves with Debian users, and then the system will have a hard time to reach outside of the hacker crowd. Without a common vision for who Debian aims for, how can decisions be made in how the system should work? Do you not see this as a shortcoming of the social contract? Or is it implict that Debian is only for people that are very knowledgable with computers?
Well, this does not have to mean what most people here seem to think.
What the article says is: WinFS will use the "querying capabilities" of SQL Server and the "data labeling capabilities" of XML. Now, put this into context. It does not neccessarily mean that everything will be stored as XML. I imagine it could mean something like this.
Think of a directory as an SQL table, where the file name for each file is the primary key. Other metadata for each file, such as size, timestamp, priviligies can be thought of as other table columns. With SQL you could imagine doing queries against this directory (think table). For example
directory filename from/home/joe where filesize > 1 MB and mtime 1 day ago
would list all filenames for recent, larger files.
Now, if you want to make more detailed queries, files could have specific metadata added to them. This metadata could be described with xml. For example, the available metadata for mp3 files could be described with an xml file that describes what metadata you can search for files of type "mp3". In a way, you extend number of columns in the table. XML can be used describe for the querying engine what kind of other columns there are, for this kind of file. It can be though of as a bridge between the quering engine and the underlying storage format (in this case, mp3 id tags). Think of it as a plugin description format (perhaps similar to how Hans Reiser talks about plugins for his future versions of ReiserFS). It does not need to be attached to every file, or be the storage format for every file.
This is just speculation, but they are not stupid. They will not store everything in xml just to be buzzword compliant
After having read both the article, and the majority of high-ranking comments here, I must say article is more objective than the majority of comments. Google is not perfect and the article points out some shortcomings. Of course, they are a logical result given how google works, but it can still be argued that some results are less than optimal. Of course, by changing the query you can get better results, but it is also possible that a different page rank algorithm can give better results.
Why not instead discuss algorithms that would give apple, the fruit, the same relevance in search results as it has in most people's lives? If a search engine appeared that added that knowledge to its result ranking, Google would not be on top any longer.
Well these may be excellent, but I refuse to buy a PDA with qwerty keyboard if the keyboard layout can not be changed to accomodate my language. And from the pictures, I doubt it since there is no room for extra keys to the right of 'L'. I wonder how many customers PDA manufacturers lose worldwide because their keyboards can not be localized according to local markets.
One manufacturer that gets it (the first one?) is Nokia. If you take a look a their 6800 phone you will see that the keyboard layout leaves room for scandinavian characters, and I am sure many others too.
Re:Soldiers aren't worth as much.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
In Sweden, id cards needs to conform to certain standards, that are set by the same authority that standardizes many other things (www.sis.se). I do not know the details of this, but I think it is good that it is under control of a government authority. There is nothing mandatory with carrying them around, or even having them. We don't call them national id cards either, but they are accepted as id-cards everywhere. In Sweden that is... since they don't have the nationality of the owner on them, they are no good for travelling within Schengen yet.
It all comes down in what ways you trust your government of course. In this regard I trust it. For example, the nationality thing was hotly debated, since the reason we don't have nationality is that it would be discriminating for non-swedish citizens to have their nationality on them. Or so it was argued. But the government had to change for public opinion because of this, being part of Schengen is not really good if you still need passport when travelling...
Does anyone here use Yahoo personal address service? It allows you to connect a personal domain that you own with your yahoo email account. You can easily choose what address you want to send from when you compose your email, and you get both email to foo@yahoo.com and foo@bar.com to your email account at Yahoo.
I use it and it is a pretty convenient way to get your _own_ email address and be independent of the email provider. If Yahoo email start to suck, I can host my email myself, but so far it is far more convenient to let Yahoo do it.
What I wonder is how this new pay service works with the personal address service.
Ok, that fee is pretty high. There is no fee for money transfer between banks here, at least not if you "do it yourself" on the internet. If you enter the office there probably is. Also, there is quite a steep fee for money transfer to foregin banks, even within the nordic countries or the EU. So there is still a long way to go.
Can someone from the US explain what the advantages of PayPal are that are not solved by your regular bank?
In Sweden you can transfer money from your bank to a friends account using the internet, even if he has another bank. This is the way I use now to "pay a pal". I think it is also possible to attach a message to this transfer so that you can say "payment for tickets" or something like that.
There are limits for the transfer amount though, but it is in the 2500 dollar range.
I agree, I have been reading this book this very week and it combines theoretical discussions about set theory combined with how to use sql to get the information you want. Great book when you have learned the basic "select from order by" statements. Actually, "SQL for Dummies" together with "SQL for Smarties" is an excellent combination. This dummies book is much more intelligent than it may appear.
The Anoto pen is not yet introduced to the market, it will be around this summer I think. But I think it is really an amazing invention. Actually, I think it has the potential to be really big. Big like Palm or Nokia even. Imagine, instead of writing your email on a screen, you write it on a special paper form, with subject, recipient and message fields, and then check the "send" box. The Anoto pen sends the message with Bluetooth to your mobile phone, which forwards it to the internet.
Or, you use your old fashioned Rolodex to keep track of appointments. The difference is, this Rolodex uses Anoto-prepared paper, so that when you write down your appointment it know not only what you wrote, but also where you wrote it. So it sends an "appointment message", via your phone, to your central calendar application somewhere on the net. When time for the appointment comes, the application will remind you, perhaps with an SMS.
Also check out the other product from the same inventor, the C-Pen: www.cpen.com.
I agree completely. I think that Stormix had the best Linux installer I ever used, and I also agree that user friendlyness is not Debian's strong side. Actually, the Debian social contract says "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software", but since they don't define who the user is, there is no target user to aim for. And since most debian developers thinks that a debian user is the same as a debian developer we will will likely not see any improvement.
I think it is fair to say that Google is one of the most popular and useful sites out there. I think more or less everyone likes it: how well it works, its features such as the cache and the usenet archive, and also how "clean" it is. Now - how much is this worth to you? I think very few (if any) sites are as liked. So - how much is this worth to you? Personally, I would never pay for Slashdot, although I spend lots of time here. However, Google's usefulness is different. I think actually it could start a subscription service that people would sign up for - IF they handled it right. I am also using Yahoo mail, together with its "Personal Address" feature that I pay for. I am getting more and more annoyed at all the ads though. If Yahoo could add a few more features I would like to have (like IMAP access), and guarantee performance and reliabilty, I would likely pay some more to see less ads. I think we should not be to sorry if many sites stop being free IF they give you good value for your money.
Agreed. The days with resuce floppys are behind us. No matter how good they are, you can only fit very little on a floppy and it is a pain to work in a limited shell and not all the commands and utilities you are used to. Superrescue on the other hand gives you more than 1 GB on a compressed file system. If you have a bootable CDROM you really have no excuse for not using superrescue the next time you have problems.
Solution to the eternal document-format-problem
on
KOffice 1.1.1 Ships
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This is maybe offtopic, but anyways...
We never will get rid of complaints that the newest free office suite can not read the newest MS Office file formats. This is quite natural, but what can be done about it?
I was thinking that maybe it is possible to write a Windows application that automates the task of converting documents by using Word itself. I don't know VB or VB for applications, but is this possible? Is it not true that scriptability is one of the major features of MS Office applications?
If this is technically possible, and Office licensing allows it, then companies could dedicate a server with this program and an Office installation to become a document-transformer. Lets say it reads.doc-files in a directory on the network and converts it do.rtf and writes it to another directory.
Then no MS Office installation is neccessary on the workstations, but converting documents to Koffice/StarOffice/whatever is still easy.
Many people here argue that it will be easy for future generations to decode JPG, CD format storage, file systems etc. And no doubt will it be possible, if you have the money and resources to do so. So a well funded research project will be able to decode the important parts of history, like the forgotten pictures of president X etc. But it is a very different matter when it comes to ordinary citizens. Lets say you take a lot of pictures of your children with your new digital camera. You burn these pictures to a CD and in time this CD ends up in a box on an attic somewhere. Your childrens grandchildren finds it in 100 years. Will they be able to see your pictures (or more correct: will they actually try to see them, given it will cost them lots of time and money?). Probably not.
Had these pictures been printed on durable paper, this would not have been an issue. When the box is found, the finder yells: "Look, some ancient pictures" and starts looking at them. I have pictures like these of my grandparents grandparents. Not that I look much at them. But I can. This is also history.
Tomcat is getting pretty good. Version 4 makes it very easy to deploy new webapps: it includes a web admin interface, and new apps can be deployed without restarting it. As a standalone webserver it is also fairly competent, at least for specialised applications with smaller user numbers.
Apache does some great things with Java. I have worked both with Tomcat (servlet container), Xerces (XML parser) and Xalan (XSLT engine). Thanks to the good work to come out from Apache, Java has become a very strong competitor to MS.NET. Actually I think it is ahead. In the future we will get the XML Binding API, that makes it possible to compile XML Schemas to java "xml manipulator" classes that can be used to manipulate XML instances of these schemas. XML parsing and manipulation will then be childs play. Define your schema, compile it and you have code that is specialised to work with these documents!
With a strong XML foundation in place, Java's future is looking really good.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
Oh yeah. Really great. Now you have 10 million refugees with complete disgust for the US and nowhere to go. I guess you can recruit plenty of suicide bombers out of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Swiss? Because of CERN? Hardly. CERN is an international project.
Almost every EU agency seems to end up in one of a few places: Brussels, Strasbourg, Frankfurt. In Sweden, we have, as far as I know not a single EU agency. Not surprising that EU is so unpopular here when everything is centralised like this. I have been a supporter of EU , and still am, but if it continues like this, I wonder what is the point. Decentralise!!!
Spending commute time playing tetris would be a waste for sure. But I prefer reading to "hacking". Programming is what I do when I get to work. I don't need to to it on my way to it and from it.
Well, that is contrary to the social contract. It clearly states that as a user, I am a priority. So it seems you are the one that "don't get it"
It is this conflict between the stated goals in the social contract, and the attitude of developers that confuse me. If the social contract stated what you say above, then fine, ok with me. But it doesn't.
This question is not tightly related to the current topic, but I thought I could grab this opportunity to ask for a clarification. Item 4 in the Social Contract says:
Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software
We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free-software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environment. We won't object to commercial software that is intended to run on Debian systems, and we'll allow others to create value-added distributions containing both Debian and commercial software, without any fee from us. To support these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality, 100% free software, with no legal restrictions that would prevent these kinds of use.
What I wonder is, as the Debian user is not more precisly defined, Debian lacks a target group and a common vision for how the Debian OS should work and interact with the user. Different developers may have very different goals and this likely results in a inconsistent or hard to use system. Or, more likely, Debian developers equals themselves with Debian users, and then the system will have a hard time to reach outside of the hacker crowd. Without a common vision for who Debian aims for, how can decisions be made in how the system should work? Do you not see this as a shortcoming of the social contract? Or is it implict that Debian is only for people that are very knowledgable with computers?
Well, this does not have to mean what most people here seem to think.
/home/joe where filesize > 1 MB and mtime 1 day ago
What the article says is: WinFS will use the "querying capabilities" of SQL Server and the "data labeling capabilities" of XML. Now, put this into context. It does not neccessarily mean that everything will be stored as XML. I imagine it could mean something like this.
Think of a directory as an SQL table, where the file name for each file is the primary key. Other metadata for each file, such as size, timestamp, priviligies can be thought of as other table columns. With SQL you could imagine doing queries against this directory (think table). For example
directory filename from
would list all filenames for recent, larger files.
Now, if you want to make more detailed queries, files could have specific metadata added to them. This metadata could be described with xml. For example, the available metadata for mp3 files could be described with an xml file that describes what metadata you can search for files of type "mp3". In a way, you extend number of columns in the table. XML can be used describe for the querying engine what kind of other columns there are, for this kind of file. It can be though of as a bridge between the quering engine and the underlying storage format (in this case, mp3 id tags). Think of it as a plugin description format (perhaps similar to how Hans Reiser talks about plugins for his future versions of ReiserFS). It does not need to be attached to every file, or be the storage format for every file.
This is just speculation, but they are not stupid. They will not store everything in xml just to be buzzword compliant
After having read both the article, and the majority of high-ranking comments here, I must say article is more objective than the majority of comments. Google is not perfect and the article points out some shortcomings. Of course, they are a logical result given how google works, but it can still be argued that some results are less than optimal. Of course, by changing the query you can get better results, but it is also possible that a different page rank algorithm can give better results.
Why not instead discuss algorithms that would give apple, the fruit, the same relevance in search results as it has in most people's lives? If a search engine appeared that added that knowledge to its result ranking, Google would not be on top any longer.
Well these may be excellent, but I refuse to buy a PDA with qwerty keyboard if the keyboard layout can not be changed to accomodate my language. And from the pictures, I doubt it since there is no room for extra keys to the right of 'L'. I wonder how many customers PDA manufacturers lose worldwide because their keyboards can not be localized according to local markets.
One manufacturer that gets it (the first one?) is Nokia. If you take a look a their 6800 phone you will see that the keyboard layout leaves room for scandinavian characters, and I am sure many others too.
Well clearly then, your job is to kill people.
In Sweden, id cards needs to conform to certain standards, that are set by the same authority that standardizes many other things (www.sis.se). I do not know the details of this, but I think it is good that it is under control of a government authority. There is nothing mandatory with carrying them around, or even having them. We don't call them national id cards either, but they are accepted as id-cards everywhere. In Sweden that is... since they don't have the nationality of the owner on them, they are no good for travelling within Schengen yet.
It all comes down in what ways you trust your government of course. In this regard I trust it. For example, the nationality thing was hotly debated, since the reason we don't have nationality is that it would be discriminating for non-swedish citizens to have their nationality on them. Or so it was argued. But the government had to change for public opinion because of this, being part of Schengen is not really good if you still need passport when travelling...
Does anyone here use Yahoo personal address service? It allows you to connect a personal domain that you own with your yahoo email account. You can easily choose what address you want to send from when you compose your email, and you get both email to foo@yahoo.com and foo@bar.com to your email account at Yahoo.
I use it and it is a pretty convenient way to get your _own_ email address and be independent of the email provider. If Yahoo email start to suck, I can host my email myself, but so far it is far more convenient to let Yahoo do it.
What I wonder is how this new pay service works with the personal address service.
Ok, that fee is pretty high. There is no fee for money transfer between banks here, at least not if you "do it yourself" on the internet. If you enter the office there probably is. Also, there is quite a steep fee for money transfer to foregin banks, even within the nordic countries or the EU. So there is still a long way to go.
Can someone from the US explain what the advantages of PayPal are that are not solved by your regular bank?
In Sweden you can transfer money from your bank to a friends account using the internet, even if he has another bank. This is the way I use now to "pay a pal". I think it is also possible to attach a message to this transfer so that you can say "payment for tickets" or something like that.
There are limits for the transfer amount though, but it is in the 2500 dollar range.
I agree, I have been reading this book this very week and it combines theoretical discussions about set theory combined with how to use sql to get the information you want. Great book when you have learned the basic "select from order by" statements. Actually, "SQL for Dummies" together with "SQL for Smarties" is an excellent combination. This dummies book is much more intelligent than it may appear.
You can do this in KDE, sort of at least. But I use Win-key + F1 to F4 instead. Simulates virtual terminals more than a 3x3 desktop, but works great.
The Anoto pen is not yet introduced to the market, it will be around this summer I think. But I think it is really an amazing invention. Actually, I think it has the potential to be really big. Big like Palm or Nokia even. Imagine, instead of writing your email on a screen, you write it on a special paper form, with subject, recipient and message fields, and then check the "send" box. The Anoto pen sends the message with Bluetooth to your mobile phone, which forwards it to the internet.
Or, you use your old fashioned Rolodex to keep track of appointments. The difference is, this Rolodex uses Anoto-prepared paper, so that when you write down your appointment it know not only what you wrote, but also where you wrote it. So it sends an "appointment message", via your phone, to your central calendar application somewhere on the net. When time for the appointment comes, the application will remind you, perhaps with an SMS.
Also check out the other product from the same inventor, the C-Pen: www.cpen.com.
I agree completely. I think that Stormix had the best Linux installer I ever used, and I also agree that user friendlyness is not Debian's strong side. Actually, the Debian social contract says "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software", but since they don't define who the user is, there is no target user to aim for. And since most debian developers thinks that a debian user is the same as a debian developer we will will likely not see any improvement.
This is somewhat offtopice, ut anyways...
I think it is fair to say that Google is one of the most popular and useful sites out there. I think more or less everyone likes it: how well it works, its features such as the cache and the usenet archive, and also how "clean" it is. Now - how much is this worth to you? I think very few (if any) sites are as liked.
So - how much is this worth to you? Personally, I would never pay for Slashdot, although I spend lots of time here. However, Google's usefulness is different. I think actually it could start a subscription service that people would sign up for - IF they handled it right.
I am also using Yahoo mail, together with its "Personal Address" feature that I pay for. I am getting more and more annoyed at all the ads though. If Yahoo could add a few more features I would like to have (like IMAP access), and guarantee performance and reliabilty, I would likely pay some more to see less ads. I think we should not be to sorry if many sites stop being free IF they give you good value for your money.
Agreed. The days with resuce floppys are behind us. No matter how good they are, you can only fit very little on a floppy and it is a pain to work in a limited shell and not all the commands and utilities you are used to. Superrescue on the other hand gives you more than 1 GB on a compressed file system. If you have a bootable CDROM you really have no excuse for not using superrescue the next time you have problems.
This is maybe offtopic, but anyways...
.doc-files in a directory on the network and converts it do .rtf and writes it to another directory.
We never will get rid of complaints that the newest free office suite can not read the newest MS Office file formats. This is quite natural, but what can be done about it?
I was thinking that maybe it is possible to write a Windows application that automates the task of converting documents by using Word itself. I don't know VB or VB for applications, but is this possible? Is it not true that scriptability is one of the major features of MS Office applications?
If this is technically possible, and Office licensing allows it, then companies could dedicate a server with this program and an Office installation to become a document-transformer. Lets say it reads
Then no MS Office installation is neccessary on the workstations, but converting documents to Koffice/StarOffice/whatever is still easy.
Yes, but can they also be freely distributed? It does not say that. Also, where is the source?
Then we could distribute x48 complete, and HP would live on forever....
Many people here argue that it will be easy for future generations to decode JPG, CD format storage, file systems etc. And no doubt will it be possible, if you have the money and resources to do so. So a well funded research project will be able to decode the important parts of history, like the forgotten pictures of president X etc. But it is a very different matter when it comes to ordinary citizens. Lets say you take a lot of pictures of your children with your new digital camera. You burn these pictures to a CD and in time this CD ends up in a box on an attic somewhere. Your childrens grandchildren finds it in 100 years. Will they be able to see your pictures (or more correct: will they actually try to see them, given it will cost them lots of time and money?). Probably not.
Had these pictures been printed on durable paper, this would not have been an issue. When the box is found, the finder yells: "Look, some ancient pictures" and starts looking at them. I have pictures like these of my grandparents grandparents. Not that I look much at them. But I can. This is also history.
Tomcat is getting pretty good. Version 4 makes it very easy to deploy new webapps: it includes a web admin interface, and new apps can be deployed without restarting it. As a standalone webserver it is also fairly competent, at least for specialised applications with smaller user numbers.
.NET. Actually I think it is ahead. In the future we will get the XML Binding API, that makes it possible to compile XML Schemas to java "xml manipulator" classes that can be used to manipulate XML instances of these schemas. XML parsing and manipulation will then be childs play. Define your schema, compile it and you have code that is specialised to work with these documents!
Apache does some great things with Java. I have worked both with Tomcat (servlet container), Xerces (XML parser) and Xalan (XSLT engine). Thanks to the good work to come out from Apache, Java has become a very strong competitor to MS
With a strong XML foundation in place, Java's future is looking really good.
Oh yeah. Really great. Now you have 10 million refugees with complete disgust for the US and nowhere to go. I guess you can recruit plenty of suicide bombers out of them.
This idea is so stupid that I have no words....