Well, the Halloween documents are over two years old now. As far as I know, MS still hasn't seriously tried to attack open source on the legal front yet. I'm not sure why: it's possible that they've looked into it and haven't found anything to attack, but I doubt that.
I think that people overestimated the importance of the Halloween documents when they were made public, and really did think this whole open source thing was another fad. [1]
I think that learning what MS is thinking today about Linux would be much more useful than overrelying on a two year old paper written by VinodV.
I reckon that two years ago, MS wasn't particularly earnest about tackling open source. They were, to use the Ghandi parlance, still in the "laugh at you" stage.
It's hard to tell where they are now; one really needs the hindsight of history to know for sure.
[1] There have been plenty of them, and we have only the pundits writing for esteemed bastions of journalism like C|Net and Zdnet to tell us which is important and which isn't. (Ha. Haha.) --
In theory, perhaps. There still remain lots of logistical problems that exist: one big one is that the width between rails is not universally standardised. In Australia, the state of Victoria uses one guage, and the rest of the country uses a narrower guage. It causes problems, but it's certainly surmountable. In the former USSR, the situation is dramatically worse, as I understand it.
At the very least, you'd have to switch trains periodically.
He was complaining about the look, not the feel, so changing themes is the correct solution here.
Not quite. As quoted below, he was talking about usability.
Just don't confuse 'pretty' with 'usable'. Those stupid radio button widgets that GTK uses are ridiculously unusable compared to those of Windows... that's NOT 'usable', though they do look nice.
Feel is nothing if not a usability issue. Was the original poster's problem a look one or a feel one? I'm still not entirely sure. However, I feel that my points on look and feel, and how they're not the same thing, stand well enough in their own right. Everyone that I've discussed the issue with agrees with me that themes buy very little, for what that's worth. --
Go to gtk.themes.org and choose a theme with radio buttons you like.
It's a sad thing, really, that so many people equate look with feel. It leads to bad interface design.
Lots of people claim that if the interface of a window manager, toolkit, desktop environment, &c is deficient, well, that's ok because they're themable.
The fact is that themability doesn't do much at all. A different theme can change the look of an application, but I've yet to come across a themable application where a theme can change the feel.
Each toolkit (or window manager) has a certain feel to it: the mousing threshhold is generally different. Themes do not change this. Consequently, gtk's radio buttons will feel like gtk's radio buttons no matter what theme you're using.
Similarly, the various Xaw hacks (Xaw-3d, Xaw-xpm) are not very useful since nearly all Xaw applications have the same (user-unfriendly) feel to them. Changing a few colours doesn't buy much.
Whether this is good or bad is certainly debatable, but claiming that a theme can modify look and feel is very misleading and ultimately damaging.
I have to admit to riding them a lot less frequently since I bought my bicycle.:(
Any idea when they're bringing the Ws back? They were supposed to be back in service in October. I think they're hoping that everyone will forget about them. --
An interactive debugger is often an excellent tool while developing. I frequently make use of gdb before I'm aware of any bugs -- obviously they exist, but at some stages, I'm not using gdb to catch them. Instead, I use gdb to run the program and step through it to make sure it really does what I think it does.
Now that I'm in that habit of using gdb early and often, I reckon that my code has fewer bugs to begin with, although obviously I don't claim to write bug-free code.
Having said that, I use gdb and printf() (actually, it's been syslog() for me lately, as I've been writing some daemon code) about 60%/40% for debugging. It's always good to use whatever tools you have at your disposal.
I'm not going to make any bad analogies, however. Nothing hampers understanding like a bad analogy. --
Yes. The request must be fulfilled or it must fail. Also, the request must take a fixed amount of time to complete. That time can indeed be rather long, although it's probably not very common. --
I try to speak and write in a manner that's compatible ("7th of December" and "7 Dec" are unambiguous).
Amazing how many Americanisms have turned into peeves in the 18 months I've been away from the US.
When I talk to my brother on the phone, he sounds so... stereotypically American, even though we're from Massachusetts. (R becomes the most impoRtant letteR in the alphabet.) At least my parents don't sound talk with that othewise nonexistant Midwestsouthern accent that politicians use.
I blame it on his going to college in DC (my parents still speak normally), and still being a Republican -- although I'm pretty confident he'll grow out of that within a year or two -- I did when I was about his age.
But really, who am I kidding? It's not the Midwestsouthern accents that really bother me -- it's the people who speak using them. --
Herbert was, well, rather notorious for being inconsistent among the Dune series.
More likely than not, however, the shape of Guild Navigators changed dramatically in the time between Dune and God Emperor. Lots of other things certainly changed a lot.
The best one that I know of is: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama! (punctuation and whitespace don't count).
In Peter van der Linden's book Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets (the butt-ugly fish book), he discusses a program to create palindromes based on a large wordlist. If you get a computer to do the dirty work for you, it's possible to come up with some very long (if nonsensical) palindromes.
I'm in a similar situation; one of my two Hotmail addresses is completely unpublished, unknown etc., yet still gets plenty of spam. (The other is three letters and
two numbers @hotmail.com, and gets spammed into the ground...)
That reminds me... I recently set up a Hotmail account for the sole purpose of getting spam: I have never used it for anything except to send mail to a few places that have spammed me, replacing getrich@spammer.com (or whatever it was) with delete@spammer.com.
Interesting experiment, although I have to admit to being a bit disappointed -- I haven't received any spam yet!
Sadly, I get plenty of it sent to my real email address thanks to a misconfigured mailing list I'm on.
I was under the impression (courtesy of some some international roaming propaganda from Telstra) that the situation in Japan isn't too dissimilar to that of the US.
Your point is valid, though: the US is screwed in the mobile telephony department.
I havent ever looked at the numbers, but I would suspect that per km, its cheeper, in the long run, to run cable underwater.
Obviously.
As Telstra is already Australia's primary telco, they already have substantial land rights and holdings. That is, they already operate most of the telephone poles and undergrond lines.
That story was somewhat misleading. That connection is 50% owned by New Zealand's largest ISP Xtra, with the Aussies owning 40% and MSI WorldCom in the
US getting the other 10%.
No Australian company owns that link. Optus owns the 40% to which you refer, but Optus is not an Australian company; it is Europe's Cable & Wireless.
Software copyrights limited to 3 years. Come on. Do i really need to explain this one here?
Interesting. It might be a good idea if there weren't some older, stable programs which don't update very frequently. For instance, what's to stop some entity from taking a three year old -- but still quite usable -- version of a free program, like GNU Emacs 20.2 and making it non-free.
I can think of at least one person (*grin*) who would be less than pleased at that.
In effect, this would have a more detrimental effect on Free Software than proprietary software, since three year old binary-only software is next to useless, while software aged the same with source could still be quite useful.
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I think that people overestimated the importance of the Halloween documents when they were made public, and really did think this whole open source thing was another fad. [1]
I think that learning what MS is thinking today about Linux would be much more useful than overrelying on a two year old paper written by VinodV.
I reckon that two years ago, MS wasn't particularly earnest about tackling open source. They were, to use the Ghandi parlance, still in the "laugh at you" stage.
It's hard to tell where they are now; one really needs the hindsight of history to know for sure.
[1] There have been plenty of them, and we have only the pundits writing for esteemed bastions of journalism like C|Net and Zdnet to tell us which is important and which isn't. (Ha. Haha.)
--
Heh.
--
FWIW, my experiences with BA have been quite positive. Compare them to United, easily the worst airline I've flown with.
--
At the very least, you'd have to switch trains periodically.
(Insert obligatory New York insult here.)
--
Not quite. As quoted below, he was talking about usability.
Just don't confuse 'pretty' with 'usable'. Those stupid radio button widgets that GTK uses are ridiculously unusable compared to those of Windows... that's NOT 'usable', though they do look nice.
Feel is nothing if not a usability issue. Was the original poster's problem a look one or a feel one? I'm still not entirely sure. However, I feel that my points on look and feel, and how they're not the same thing, stand well enough in their own right. Everyone that I've discussed the issue with agrees with me that themes buy very little, for what that's worth.
--
It's a sad thing, really, that so many people equate look with feel. It leads to bad interface design.
Lots of people claim that if the interface of a window manager, toolkit, desktop environment, &c is deficient, well, that's ok because they're themable.
The fact is that themability doesn't do much at all. A different theme can change the look of an application, but I've yet to come across a themable application where a theme can change the feel.
Each toolkit (or window manager) has a certain feel to it: the mousing threshhold is generally different. Themes do not change this. Consequently, gtk's radio buttons will feel like gtk's radio buttons no matter what theme you're using.
Similarly, the various Xaw hacks (Xaw-3d, Xaw-xpm) are not very useful since nearly all Xaw applications have the same (user-unfriendly) feel to them. Changing a few colours doesn't buy much.
Whether this is good or bad is certainly debatable, but claiming that a theme can modify look and feel is very misleading and ultimately damaging.
--
I have to admit to riding them a lot less frequently since I bought my bicycle. :(
Any idea when they're bringing the Ws back? They were supposed to be back in service in October. I think they're hoping that everyone will forget about them.
--
Now that I'm in that habit of using gdb early and often, I reckon that my code has fewer bugs to begin with, although obviously I don't claim to write bug-free code.
Having said that, I use gdb and printf() (actually, it's been syslog() for me lately, as I've been writing some daemon code) about 60%/40% for debugging. It's always good to use whatever tools you have at your disposal.
I'm not going to make any bad analogies, however. Nothing hampers understanding like a bad analogy.
--
Have a look at some Advanced You're.
--
Hahaha, yeah right, like there are any lawyers smart enough to grok C!
--
Yes. The request must be fulfilled or it must fail. Also, the request must take a fixed amount of time to complete. That time can indeed be rather long, although it's probably not very common.
--
I try to speak and write in a manner that's compatible ("7th of December" and "7 Dec" are unambiguous).
Amazing how many Americanisms have turned into peeves in the 18 months I've been away from the US.
When I talk to my brother on the phone, he sounds so... stereotypically American, even though we're from Massachusetts. (R becomes the most impoRtant letteR in the alphabet.) At least my parents don't sound talk with that othewise nonexistant Midwestsouthern accent that politicians use.
I blame it on his going to college in DC (my parents still speak normally), and still being a Republican -- although I'm pretty confident he'll grow out of that within a year or two -- I did when I was about his age.
But really, who am I kidding? It's not the Midwestsouthern accents that really bother me -- it's the people who speak using them.
--
-Working to get his karma back since 12-7-00
Is that the 12th of July or the 7th of December?
--
More likely than not, however, the shape of Guild Navigators changed dramatically in the time between Dune and God Emperor. Lots of other things certainly changed a lot.
The best one that I know of is: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama! (punctuation and whitespace don't count).
In Peter van der Linden's book Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets (the butt-ugly fish book), he discusses a program to create palindromes based on a large wordlist. If you get a computer to do the dirty work for you, it's possible to come up with some very long (if nonsensical) palindromes.
That reminds me... I recently set up a Hotmail account for the sole purpose of getting spam: I have never used it for anything except to send mail to a few places that have spammed me, replacing getrich@spammer.com (or whatever it was) with delete@spammer.com.
Interesting experiment, although I have to admit to being a bit disappointed -- I haven't received any spam yet!
Sadly, I get plenty of it sent to my real email address thanks to a misconfigured mailing list I'm on.
Your point is valid, though: the US is screwed in the mobile telephony department.
Obviously.
As Telstra is already Australia's primary telco, they already have substantial land rights and holdings. That is, they already operate most of the telephone poles and undergrond lines.
No Australian company owns that link. Optus owns the 40% to which you refer, but Optus is not an Australian company; it is Europe's Cable & Wireless.
Then again, anybody worth his salt, wherever he's from, should hate New Yorkers.
If it's not free then it is not open source.
But do realise that you can pay money for software which is open source (or free -- they're the same thing).
Interesting. It might be a good idea if there weren't some older, stable programs which don't update very frequently. For instance, what's to stop some entity from taking a three year old -- but still quite usable -- version of a free program, like GNU Emacs 20.2 and making it non-free.
I can think of at least one person (*grin*) who would be less than pleased at that.
In effect, this would have a more detrimental effect on Free Software than proprietary software, since three year old binary-only software is next to useless, while software aged the same with source could still be quite useful.
When a new Vaio breaks, we can say "Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works!"
This patent covers the latest innovation in supplying the corporate consumer with an Corporate Executive Mission Critical iPotatoGun XGenerator Powered eCommerce Syxtem (tm) (c) (pat pending).
iSection 1) The power supply for the Corporate Executive Mission Critical iPotatoGun XGenerator Powered eCommerce Syxterm (tm) (c) (pat pending) for shall consist of a large tub of water above which rests a pTurbine attached to an electrical generator.
iSection 2) Trained iOperators (preferably ones with a MSCE) shall aim their iPotatoGuns at the tub of water and repeatedly fire. Repeated bombardment shall cause the temperature of the eTub to increase. As the eTub's temperature rises high enough, steam will start to form and rise upward. This steam shall cause the pTurbine to rotate in a Mission Critical manner, causing eLectricity to be generated which can be used to power the Corporate Executive Mission Critical iPotatoGun XGenerator Powered eCommerce Syxtem (tm) (c) (pat pending).
iSection 3) The Corporate Executive Mission Critical iPotatoGun XGenerator Powered eCommerse Syxtem (tm) (c) (pat pending)'s pTurbine (situated above the eTub as stated in iSection 1) will lead directly into an e-Computer's pPower Supply.
iSection 4) The Corporate Executive Mission Critical iPotatoGun XGenerator Powered eCommerce Syxtem (tm) (c) (pat pending) shall run any iDeployment of an eCommerce web server. (Note: this patent does not cover such concepts as "Electronic Commerce", "Online Purchasing", only "eCommerce".)
iSection 5) The Corporate Executive Mission Critical iPotatoGun XGenerator Powered eCommerce Syxtem (tm) (c) (pat pending) shall utilise a unique, branded, Synergistically iDeveloped 3 CLICK eCommerce and Purchasing mEthodology, whereby any user who has clicked his or her pointing device at least 3 times within 5 mintes prior to ePurchasing (commencing in eCommerce with the iCorporation utilising the Corporate Executive Mission Critical iPotatoGun XGenerator Powered eCommerce Syxterm (tm) (c) (pat pending)) any goods or services.
iSection 6) There is no iSection 6.
The last place anyone who knows better wants to go to is RPI.