That FrameMaker won't be ported is a disappointment. As far as high end publication systems go I've not found anything that is as easy to use or that works as well. For the people that are missing the boat, FrameMaker isn't a word processor, FrameMaker is more like a publishing solution. It's overkill for letters to Aunt Sally or your resume but great when you need to produce a thesis or other large manuscript.
The UNIX ports included are Solaris, HPUX and AIX. I would be stunned if the market share for FrameMaker on AIX would be greater than the potential market share for FrameMaker on Linux. Given this I would guess that at least some of the UNIX ports are payed for by the owners of the respective operating system.
It's pretty common practice for companies to foot the bill for the development costs for pieces of software that they feel is necessary for the validity of their platform but which the software company doesn't feel it could make its development and marketing expenses back at. Since Linux doesn't have a company that really represents it (there are lots of companies that make money off of it, but no companies that represent it) the porting costs aren't payed.
The number of subscribers to the beta test program probably couldn't be extrapolated to a large enough paying user base. A large part of the blame to this probably lies on Adobe's head though, I happened across the beta program at a time when my main box was moving from a traditional UNIX platform to Linux.
I've commited a number of the sins mentioned in the article and for the most part I find the results agreeable. On a normal night I get less sleep than most people, I'm in bed a little after midnight but I awake right around 5 am. This is normal for me though, I don't use an alarm clock to wake.
I perform well with that amount of sleep, I perform less well when I sleep more (I get headaches when I sleep longer). If I start cutting into my sleep I've noticed a progressive degradation of skills.
I kind of kept records the last time I took myself out to the "brutal" level of sleep depravation. Due to circumstances I ended up working 60 hours straight. The first 24 hours were not too bad, I do that from time to time and have no apparent ill-effects.
Over the next 24 hours I became progressively more single-minded in what I was doing. Little distractions like the phone or even the paperboy dropping off the paper would shock me out of the little world that had entranced me.
The last 12 hours were interesting. Part of the work I was doing involved addition and subtraction of numbers out to four decimal places and looking for trends. Normally I can do this in my head quickly and accurately. I had to dust off the calculator and CAREFULLY enter data. I no longer had enough of an attention span to keep track of addition and subtraction, much less look for trends in reams of data.
After having somebody pick me up and drive me into work for a meeting (there was no way I'd have been able to drive the 12 miles to work safely, I wouldn't have fallen asleep I don't think, I was almost wired at that point, but I had no concentration at all) I realized I could remember almost none of the conculsions I came to, fortunately I anticipated this and scribbled everything down on a note pad.
Looking over the data later after getting some sleep was a bit shocking, the work looked alien. I knew the work was mine. I only had the fuzziest recollection of doing it.
IDE is a fairly high speed interface. The impedance between wires is controlled in order to maintain signal integrity. My instincts tell me that slicing up an IDE cable and rolling it might work, but you could easily end up with data corruption.
Trusting the word of Senior Technical Support seems a bit dangerous. It's just a nice title, if he really knew what he was doing he wouldn't be answering phones. I'd hold out for an answer from an electrical engineer who understands system electrical integrity issues.
Shouldn't be able to patent discoveries.
on
Squatting On Life
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· Score: 1
I'm not anti-patent, but this is ridiculous. I can understand and fully support them patenting any inventions or procedures they use for mapping the human gene. Genes are something that exist, its just a new frontier of human exploration. Columbus couldn't patent America and these people shouldn't be able to patent a gene.
If they patent the inventions that help them discover the genes then they can make money (license the patents) and there's enough money involved that you can bet that people will try to innovate competing schemes of gene exploration.
I'm more interested in seeing the price tag on this thing, though. Its predecessor was selling around
$5,000, last I checked.
LaCie has released a DVDR recorder for about 800 bucks with a SCSI or firewire interface. Pricey but I spent almost that much for my first CDROM...
player.
LaCie only builds cases around other peoples internals, so I'd imagine you could get it cheaper if you knew who made the internals.
I have a closet full of
worthless 386's and a drawer of token ring nics. Old monitors make great fish tanks,
I'm assuming that the insides of your monitor didn't become part of your fish tank, so they went someplace. The landfill is the wrong place.
I guess I've always managed to hand down my old equipment (thus making it somebody elses problem) and I'm too lazy to deal with tax receipts or hassles from donating to charitable organizations.
There are a few important points that need to be made here.
The school board on the surface did the right thing by trying to prevent the disclosure of these records. They screwed up massively on two counts though. They made the logs in the first place and if they were required to log them then they should've only been logged as bulk statistics.
The judge seems to have acted in accordance with the states right to know policy unfortunately. The failure in this case solely rests on the school board: They enabled the disclosure of data under the Right to Know Policy by taking the data.
If any slashdot readers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area would be interested mail me at jd0014@duct-tape.org. I actually don't have much of a clue on Minneapolis other than a couple decent places to eat (live about 100 miles away, but its the closest big city) but something reasonable could probably be figured out.
oh my. I'd be interested in knowing what level of denial resulted in that statement.
I'd wager that you're either a troll or haven't used it. It's not perfect, but it does a better job of displaying according to standards than Netscape does. For my day to day use it also is much more stable. There are some weaknesses, but there are weaknesses in Netscape (such as in order for web designers to design for it, they need to take into account Netscape's flaws, or that it seems to be primarily designed for dumping core).
I can't comment on Internet Explorer, I don't run Windows or MacOS presently.
Konqueror is good enough that its become my primary web browsing application based on its increased stability, improved performance and adherence to web standards over Netscape.
There are some flaky bits, but for the most part they don't effect me (JAVA and JavaScript support seems a bit suspect at the moment)
I don't care if an application is Open Source or commercial, so long as it works for me. Konqueror does the job admirably.
Usually this would mean a 33% increase for entry level programmers and a diminishing increase with years of seniority. The idea is to fill up the entry level positions, its less critical to make the more senior level people happy, since presumably they are at least not unhappy enough to have taken a better paying job elsewhere.
A university is not a technical college, if you parallel with any other technical discipline you'll see a break down like this:
University: Theory is emphasized over practical applications, the idea being that these will be the people to bring in new technologies or be most exposed to new technologies or be the first to require an understanding of new technologies. You're more likely to learn how a compiler and optimization work rather than how to program in C. You still learn C, but you may not learn all the languages du jour.
College: Practical expertise is emphasized over theoretical studies, how things work isn't as important as making use of them. Lot's of exposure to different languages but not as much as exposure to why things work.
There's nothing wrong with either course of study, but the distinction should be maintained. Most universities I've seen are little more than technical colleges when it comes to Computer Science or Computer Engineering. Science courses are supposed to be heavy on theory. It'd be like an electrical engineering program that teaches you how to put together a computer without teaching the theory behind it.
Slashdot needs all the critisism it can get (or a good kick in its pants) but this typo doesn't appear to be the slashdot crews. It's the property of the submitter of the story, unless the italicized stuff was typed in as opposed to cut and pasted.
American corporations are conspiring to build the uber-geek by selectively breeding male geeks with
female geeks at toystores and movie theatres across the nation in order to staff the great technological
campaigns of the future. Think about it: those long hours together in darkened parking lots, with nothing
but fastfood caffeine for sustenance, snuggling in sleeping bags to ward off the cold, basking in the glow
of the occasional palm-pilot and humming the theme to Tron to keep up morale....
Damn, and all this time I've shunned the cattle call for movies and toys and such in favour of waiting till the queue died down. Had I known I'd be having mad geek sex in theaters and toy stores (to paraphrase John Lennon: Why don't we do it in the Toy's R Us?) I'd have changed my tune. WHY DIDN't ANYBODY TELL ME??? You bastards!
I actually used the Treasure Trove on a regular basis. I also have spent a lot of money on CRC Press books such as the CRC Standard Math tables.
This is a very big loss to people that had a casual interest in mathematics or would come across terminology they weren't familiar with from time to time.
CRC is just generating bad press with little or no positive upside potential. I'd be willing to pay a small yearly fee for online access (though I still feel it should be free as a goodwill gesture) but I don't know that I'd shell out 100 bucks for material that works better on the web.
I've always considered the Trove more of a gloss than an encyclopedia. For indepth information I'd always revert to the CRC Standard Math Tables (which, despite the name, are more than a set of math tables)
I realize that actually reading something as opposed to bitching and moaning is contrary to all that is slashdot, but I've been an amazon.com customer for many years now and don't have a spam problem from them.
Why? I spent the 30 seconds it took to make sure that I turned off any check boxes for "spam me frequently" when I signed up or they added new features. As a result the only email I get from them are a) receipts for purchases b) lists of new books in the area of science since I explicitly asked for it.
Go figure.
Also expecting amazon.com to alter your wifes records on your behalf is a bit inane. They've got no way of knowing the legitimacy of your request, whether you in fact own that email address or whether you're the sole owner.
Well stated. One thing that hasn't been really stated before is that what he did was a hack. It was a social-engineering hack. Not only that, but on top of everything he revealed what he did and offered fixes. Maybe the fixes were hogwash, I can't comment on that. But by revealing the how's of what he did he fit into the definition of a 'white-hat hacker'. Yet he's still ostricized - by the same people who would would come down hard on CmdrTaco and co. if they ostricized a white-hat hacker who intruded on their systems.
In fact recently somebody did expose a back door in the slashdot code, rather than vilifying the persons responsible they referred to them as "good guys".
This is a pretty small data set but the results were suprising. I was expecting to refute Hemos' comment but obviously that isn't the case. Since Anonymous Coward comments on every article even if on average the account is moderated only slightly positive it'll amass huge amounts of karma.
Signal 11 got in trouble by manipulating the moderation system. He basically did an endeavour in social engineering or social hacking.
He discovered that there were a number of ways of increasing the probability that your posts would be moderated up. All of the methods were based on pretty sound judgements of how people think and react. I've got no idea what his karma is, but I'll bet its insanely high unless its been modified by the slashdot crew.
People learned that he was manipulating them (or perhaps he even told him, I bowed out of slashdot for a long while due to its suckiness) and got pissed off. They had been had.
Ego's got in the way. It was easier to call him a karma whore or an idiot than admit they had been bested. CmdrTaco is still perpetuating this from what I bothered to read of the chatlog.
I think Signal 11's ego bit him too, he went and bragged about CmdrTaco's off the cuff remarks or actions which further rubbed salt in CmdrTaco's wounds.
He might raise a valid point, but there's no proof. It's a cnet article though, so I wouldn't really expect them to delve into it in any great depth. There aren't very many data points either.
The basic argument is that Red Hat's and Debian's make their money from support agreements, not selling packages. This might be true, can anybody who's checked out Red Hat's financials provide any insight?
As an end user I don't really care about the distribution I'm using. I'm currently using Red Hat, sort of, because I could buy it off the shelf when I bought my computer (two years ago). I'm still using it because I know where configuration files are not any loyalty to Red Hat. RPM isn't enough of an attraction to keep me, actually at this point it gets in my way due to the number of upgrades I've done from tar balls.
When I buy my SMP machine I might play with a different distribution (possibly Debian) but again there will be no real loyalty. In fact I'll probably just get the most current Cheap Bytes CD.
The flaw I see with his assumptions is that neither Red Hat or Debian will make a dime off of me unless they sell me a distribution. I've never had a problem I couldn't solve by RTFM or modifying source code. I'm sure there are many people at this stage of the game that are in the same boat. Possibly most users.
If I was running a company I'd insist on using a distribution with a good support system. They'd get money for that, but what is the ratio of hackers to corporate installations? I'd bet that the corporate installations are buried beneath the noise.
Back? Think of the possibilities of creating
an ark ala Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Load the bubble up with politicians and other low-life and worry about the ethical considerations of unloading them into a vacuum later.
And from that day forward, little Johnny had to live with the knowledge that were it not for some quirk of fate, his parents
wouldn't have had him.
And your point is? How many kids know they were conceived because daddy's condom broke, mommy forgot her pill or mommy got knocked up during a one night stand? Does that have a positive psychological impact?
The parents were stupid and greedy for going public with the story without anonymity. The media was absolutely reprehensible (but then, how often isn't it?) if they didn't try to talk them into anonymity. The event itself was newsworthy. Knowing the people's names added absolutely nothing but potentially caused a lot of damage.
OT, but do you think the mold on MIR is from a leftover piece of Pizza Hut pizza?
Nah, the answer is simpler than that. You've got a group of males living together in a confined space, much like a university dorm. Like any such arrangement it starts off with good intentions but devolves fast: "we'll take turns doing the dishes" quickly becomes "well, the smell isn't that bad and nobodies become physically ill. Well, so seriously physicall ill that they required a hospital stay".
Heck, I've had more advanced lifeforms evolve in my fridge and I live alone. I'll clean it when they demand equal rights.
Re:Geeks who cut their teeth on it malign it?
on
KBasic
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· Score: 1
I'm not complaining about liking or not liking BASIC. What I'm complaining about are the elitist simpletons who would like to rid the planet of BASIC despite the fact its probably what introduced them to programming. I don't care if the language is BASIC, but there is a place for some simple to use language on every machine shipped. I don't know that the visual BASIC applications even qualify as that anymore.
I learned programming by hacking apart games and utilities that were written in BASIC. I learned a lot about making code run faster through efficient algorithms the same way. Eventually I moved on to assembler and some time after that to C. I did this prior to any formal training in programming, as did a lot of other people. In a large part this was because whatever computer you bought: Commodore Pet, Vic-20, 64, Apple I, II, III, TI-99/4A, PC with MS-DOS etc. came with some form of simple programming language. It happened to be BASIC. Now I'd argue that PERL would be the better choice.
Slashdot Mirror
The UNIX ports included are Solaris, HPUX and AIX. I would be stunned if the market share for FrameMaker on AIX would be greater than the potential market share for FrameMaker on Linux. Given this I would guess that at least some of the UNIX ports are payed for by the owners of the respective operating system.
It's pretty common practice for companies to foot the bill for the development costs for pieces of software that they feel is necessary for the validity of their platform but which the software company doesn't feel it could make its development and marketing expenses back at. Since Linux doesn't have a company that really represents it (there are lots of companies that make money off of it, but no companies that represent it) the porting costs aren't payed.
The number of subscribers to the beta test program probably couldn't be extrapolated to a large enough paying user base. A large part of the blame to this probably lies on Adobe's head though, I happened across the beta program at a time when my main box was moving from a traditional UNIX platform to Linux.
I perform well with that amount of sleep, I perform less well when I sleep more (I get headaches when I sleep longer). If I start cutting into my sleep I've noticed a progressive degradation of skills.
I kind of kept records the last time I took myself out to the "brutal" level of sleep depravation. Due to circumstances I ended up working 60 hours straight. The first 24 hours were not too bad, I do that from time to time and have no apparent ill-effects.
Over the next 24 hours I became progressively more single-minded in what I was doing. Little distractions like the phone or even the paperboy dropping off the paper would shock me out of the little world that had entranced me.
The last 12 hours were interesting. Part of the work I was doing involved addition and subtraction of numbers out to four decimal places and looking for trends. Normally I can do this in my head quickly and accurately. I had to dust off the calculator and CAREFULLY enter data. I no longer had enough of an attention span to keep track of addition and subtraction, much less look for trends in reams of data.
After having somebody pick me up and drive me into work for a meeting (there was no way I'd have been able to drive the 12 miles to work safely, I wouldn't have fallen asleep I don't think, I was almost wired at that point, but I had no concentration at all) I realized I could remember almost none of the conculsions I came to, fortunately I anticipated this and scribbled everything down on a note pad.
Looking over the data later after getting some sleep was a bit shocking, the work looked alien. I knew the work was mine. I only had the fuzziest recollection of doing it.
For previous comments from 07/02/00 click here.
IDE is a fairly high speed interface. The impedance between wires is controlled in order to maintain signal integrity. My instincts tell me that slicing up an IDE cable and rolling it might work, but you could easily end up with data corruption.
Trusting the word of Senior Technical Support seems a bit dangerous. It's just a nice title, if he really knew what he was doing he wouldn't be answering phones. I'd hold out for an answer from an electrical engineer who understands system electrical integrity issues.
If they patent the inventions that help them discover the genes then they can make money (license the patents) and there's enough money involved that you can bet that people will try to innovate competing schemes of gene exploration.
I guess I've always managed to hand down my old equipment (thus making it somebody elses problem) and I'm too lazy to deal with tax receipts or hassles from donating to charitable organizations.
The school board on the surface did the right thing by trying to prevent the disclosure of these records. They screwed up massively on two counts though. They made the logs in the first place and if they were required to log them then they should've only been logged as bulk statistics.
The judge seems to have acted in accordance with the states right to know policy unfortunately. The failure in this case solely rests on the school board: They enabled the disclosure of data under the Right to Know Policy by taking the data.
If any slashdot readers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area would be interested mail me at jd0014@duct-tape.org. I actually don't have much of a clue on Minneapolis other than a couple decent places to eat (live about 100 miles away, but its the closest big city) but something reasonable could probably be figured out.
I can't comment on Internet Explorer, I don't run Windows or MacOS presently.
Konqueror is good enough that its become my primary web browsing application based on its increased stability, improved performance and adherence to web standards over Netscape.
There are some flaky bits, but for the most part they don't effect me (JAVA and JavaScript support seems a bit suspect at the moment)
I don't care if an application is Open Source or commercial, so long as it works for me. Konqueror does the job admirably.
Usually this would mean a 33% increase for entry level programmers and a diminishing increase with years of seniority. The idea is to fill up the entry level positions, its less critical to make the more senior level people happy, since presumably they are at least not unhappy enough to have taken a better paying job elsewhere.
University: Theory is emphasized over practical applications, the idea being that these will be the people to bring in new technologies or be most exposed to new technologies or be the first to require an understanding of new technologies. You're more likely to learn how a compiler and optimization work rather than how to program in C. You still learn C, but you may not learn all the languages du jour.
College: Practical expertise is emphasized over theoretical studies, how things work isn't as important as making use of them. Lot's of exposure to different languages but not as much as exposure to why things work.
There's nothing wrong with either course of study, but the distinction should be maintained. Most universities I've seen are little more than technical colleges when it comes to Computer Science or Computer Engineering. Science courses are supposed to be heavy on theory. It'd be like an electrical engineering program that teaches you how to put together a computer without teaching the theory behind it.
Slashdot needs all the critisism it can get (or a good kick in its pants) but this typo doesn't appear to be the slashdot crews. It's the property of the submitter of the story, unless the italicized stuff was typed in as opposed to cut and pasted.
CRC is just generating bad press with little or no positive upside potential. I'd be willing to pay a small yearly fee for online access (though I still feel it should be free as a goodwill gesture) but I don't know that I'd shell out 100 bucks for material that works better on the web.
I've always considered the Trove more of a gloss than an encyclopedia. For indepth information I'd always revert to the CRC Standard Math Tables (which, despite the name, are more than a set of math tables)
Why? I spent the 30 seconds it took to make sure that I turned off any check boxes for "spam me frequently" when I signed up or they added new features. As a result the only email I get from them are a) receipts for purchases b) lists of new books in the area of science since I explicitly asked for it.
Go figure.
Also expecting amazon.com to alter your wifes records on your behalf is a bit inane. They've got no way of knowing the legitimacy of your request, whether you in fact own that email address or whether you're the sole owner.
In fact recently somebody did expose a back door in the slashdot code, rather than vilifying the persons responsible they referred to them as "good guys".
Debian on Compaq's iPaq Handheld: +1
GCC's Response To Red Hat: +1
This is a pretty small data set but the results were suprising. I was expecting to refute Hemos' comment but obviously that isn't the case. Since Anonymous Coward comments on every article even if on average the account is moderated only slightly positive it'll amass huge amounts of karma.
He discovered that there were a number of ways of increasing the probability that your posts would be moderated up. All of the methods were based on pretty sound judgements of how people think and react. I've got no idea what his karma is, but I'll bet its insanely high unless its been modified by the slashdot crew.
People learned that he was manipulating them (or perhaps he even told him, I bowed out of slashdot for a long while due to its suckiness) and got pissed off. They had been had.
Ego's got in the way. It was easier to call him a karma whore or an idiot than admit they had been bested. CmdrTaco is still perpetuating this from what I bothered to read of the chatlog.
I think Signal 11's ego bit him too, he went and bragged about CmdrTaco's off the cuff remarks or actions which further rubbed salt in CmdrTaco's wounds.
The basic argument is that Red Hat's and Debian's make their money from support agreements, not selling packages. This might be true, can anybody who's checked out Red Hat's financials provide any insight?
As an end user I don't really care about the distribution I'm using. I'm currently using Red Hat, sort of, because I could buy it off the shelf when I bought my computer (two years ago). I'm still using it because I know where configuration files are not any loyalty to Red Hat. RPM isn't enough of an attraction to keep me, actually at this point it gets in my way due to the number of upgrades I've done from tar balls.
When I buy my SMP machine I might play with a different distribution (possibly Debian) but again there will be no real loyalty. In fact I'll probably just get the most current Cheap Bytes CD.
The flaw I see with his assumptions is that neither Red Hat or Debian will make a dime off of me unless they sell me a distribution. I've never had a problem I couldn't solve by RTFM or modifying source code. I'm sure there are many people at this stage of the game that are in the same boat. Possibly most users.
If I was running a company I'd insist on using a distribution with a good support system. They'd get money for that, but what is the ratio of hackers to corporate installations? I'd bet that the corporate installations are buried beneath the noise.
I've seen reports that Tyan said they'd have one released by Summer 2000, which has passed. Do any vendors sell a dual Athlon motherboard?
I'm going to be building a new computer, one of the things I want is SMP. I'm hoping I don't have to buy Intel.
Back? Think of the possibilities of creating an ark ala Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Load the bubble up with politicians and other low-life and worry about the ethical considerations of unloading them into a vacuum later.
The parents were stupid and greedy for going public with the story without anonymity. The media was absolutely reprehensible (but then, how often isn't it?) if they didn't try to talk them into anonymity. The event itself was newsworthy. Knowing the people's names added absolutely nothing but potentially caused a lot of damage.
Heck, I've had more advanced lifeforms evolve in my fridge and I live alone. I'll clean it when they demand equal rights.
I learned programming by hacking apart games and utilities that were written in BASIC. I learned a lot about making code run faster through efficient algorithms the same way. Eventually I moved on to assembler and some time after that to C. I did this prior to any formal training in programming, as did a lot of other people. In a large part this was because whatever computer you bought: Commodore Pet, Vic-20, 64, Apple I, II, III, TI-99/4A, PC with MS-DOS etc. came with some form of simple programming language. It happened to be BASIC. Now I'd argue that PERL would be the better choice.