I would be willing to bank on the fact that Linux in an easy-to-use state will never happen. It is made by nerds, for nerds. Every time there's an attempt to make it "easy to use", failure is the result. What was the name of the last company trying to make it easy to use?
Redhat. I think they're still around, they have a little site here where you can find out more!
The Nokia 3410 emulator is pretty terrible. Not only due to the crashes etc, but mostly because it doesn't actually have the same display bugs as the actual phone! So anyone developing just using the emulator is in for a big surprise when they see their work screwing up on the real hardware...
The worst thing in all this (and something I meant to say in my post above but forgot) is that the phone manufacturers are harming themselves by splintering Java in this way. The obvious reason to use J2ME is that theoretically the app/game should run on any J2ME device. By splintering off in all directions, the phone makers are forcing developers to code for many smaller markets.
At the moment, Microsoft is a very small part of that market with its own non-java API. If developers are having to rewrite an app for different devices anyway (with little if any manufacturer support) they may well migrate to the MS platform, whereas a standard Java platform would make such extra development for a non-Java platform a waste of resources. This is one case where the phone companies could benefit by working together - rather than letting MS into yet another market.
Somehow though, I doubt they will...
Phone makers worse than MS...
on
Sega + Nokia = True
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Having developed a number of J2ME games for mobile phones, I find myself frustrated at companies such as Nokia, Siemens and co breaking standards to force developers to release separate versions of software for each manufacturer/device. This is no doubt holding up development of games and other useful apps for the mobile devices, and I'm sure that there's a case to be made against many of these manufacturers claiming to have J2ME compliancy.
I realise there's often a need for additional classes for features specific to a phone (vibration, backlights etc), but there are inexplicable deviations. For instance, the Siemens M50 has a rather "unusual" approach to creating an image object from a PNG file. Due to the limitations on file size and download speed, games tend to store all graphics in binary format, or more frequently all on a single PNG canvas - to be masked/chopped up as required. This is fine and works great, but Siemens decided that every external image should be resized to the phone's display - which kind of screws everything up. But wait, you can actually use their custom createImage method to emulate the standard method! Of course, this means it won't work on any other device though...
Nokia are as bad - the 3410 has a bug that means image clipping is 1 pixel out in each axis compared to other phones, so that's another "special" version. The list is huge, and totally defeats the purpose of using Java in the first place. "Run anywhere" is not the case here...
A couple of years ago I spent an enjoyable couple of days driving the graphic designer mad at a web-dev house where we worked. She used an Apple G4 which was positioned directly across the desk from me (so our monitors backed onto eachother). I sneakily plugged a spare mouse into one of the unused USB ports on the monitor and let the fun ensue;-)
A few times a day I'd listen for frantic clicking, and hold down the left button, whilst listening to the enraged artist screaming "THIS F*CKING BUTTON KEEPS STICKING!!!" etc. I eventually moved on to ever so slowly moving the mouse around, to more curses. Every so often, colleagues would be invited to try and work out what the problem was (at which point I obviously stopped messing about). I was eventually found-out after failing to supress my laughter at a particularly violent tirade after drawing a big black line all over an image (unknowingly).
I suppose a quick fix would be to either physically adjust the monitor controls to make them overscan by a couple of inches in each axis, or set up the X servers to do this. Probably wouldn't help the lifespan of the monitors though I guess...
Debian, through its use of package dependencies, is particularly good about telling you which set of packages need to be upgraded whenever you upgrade a package or add a new package to your system. This helps prevent random system breakage that can be caused by inadvertantly changing something that other packages rely on. This is perhaps the biggest advantage the Debian package system has over an RPM-based system.
Erm, RPM does this too. If you attempt to install/remove a package it'll warn you about dependency problems. Of course, you can just ignore these and --force it to comply, but unless you're sure you need to do this it usually leads to serious problems later.
I tend to use RH's up2date now too, which runs in the background checking for new packages and security fixes, downloads and installs them (if I wish), and hasn't caused a single problem.
I think the biggest problem Debian has is that the "stable" version is absolutely ancient! I gave it a try a month or so back, and after taking alook through the ftp site, though it best to pick up the stable ISOs.
Needless to say, I reformatted the result and resinstalled RH8 after about 5 seconds of finishing the install, after watching the 2.2.x kernel boot in Debian. I mean, how old is it; 2 years?? That's a 100 years in tech-time!
I'm not a nooby by quite a long way, and I'm guessing a lot of other people trying Debian out will make the same mistake and pick up that old build. I mean, it's not going to attract users when they essentially have to upgrade every single package on the machine after the install to get a reasonably modern version up and running...
When I'm feeling bored, I'll take a look through some of the crap procmail catches, and visit a site being advertised (if it's still up). But I don't just visit once! No! I leave lynx visiting the biggest page I can find by starting a script on my server, then forgetting about it for a day or so.
If only a few hundred more people started doing this - absolutely flooding these spammed Pr0n sites, and get-a-big-dick-quick scams they would have HUGE bandwidth bills, and think twice about using the same marketting technique again.
It's no use trying to email abuse depts, or reason with this scum, you have to hit them where it hurts, in the wallet. The only way to do this (for us at least) is to suck their bandwidth dry;-) If you have a DSL connection at home (and you're not capped), why not use it to do some good when it would otherwise sit idle?
To be fair, it's probably not the Banks etc that set the terms to limit the browsers that access their sites. It's lazy developers, which are almost certainly web-dev companies trying to complete a project that they've managed to land by bidding low.
I've been guilty of it in the past - having to rush out a project, and not taking the time to test on every browser across every platform. The "IE only" disclaimer is an excuse for the most part.
It's worth complaining to the company though, especially if you mention they're being ridiculed on a number of extremely popular tech news sites;-)
This is a weird subject, really. GPL is good, but when you really think about it, source code for government software isn't really something that should fall into the wrong hands...
Security through obscurity doesn't work. Ask Microsoft.
Istop.com (my ISP) $30 monthly fee $0 excess quota if downloaded off-peak $45 excess quota otherwise Total = $30-$45 (£12.5-£19)
That's a 1.2mbs connection. How much are you paying? I'm pretty sure I'm paying less, even with quotas.
Well I pay £25 a month, with no quotas at any time. Also have a fixed IP, and no port blocking. In fact demon don't filter anything, even incoming mail which is both good and bad, since it allows a huge amount of spam through, but their policy has always been "hands off".
You might remember this thread about demon being sued by Laurence Godfrey for refusing to censor articles on their news servers.
Seems a bit stingy - after you've downloaded the latest RedHat ISOs, and read your spam, you're left twiddling your fingers each month.
Actually, this will at least help in the fight against spam, as it eats away at a subscribers monthly allowance it would probably help make the scumbags pay through the courts.
Glad my ISP basically allow you to do anything - I've served >30GB from the web server on my DSL line in a month before now! I'm pretty sure I've downloaded close to that figure too, leaving ftp sessions to run overnight for ISO's...
As a previous poster stated, I also use windows mostly as a means to develop software on *nix servers. I spend much more time on my XP machine than on my Linux workstation sat next to it, but it's mostly due to the fact I need a lot of tools/apps that aren't available for Linux (yet). I usually have several PuTTy windows open, Web browsers pointing at pages on the servers, and smb shares open from the servers though.
I despise MS, but they're currently the only option that allows me to do everything without rebooting. (I also own a Mac with OS-X but I absolutely hate it, which is why I can't remember the last time I booted it up).
I'll have to drag my camera up into my attic to take a picture of the mess up there one day. I've 3 machines that run 24/7 up there, covered in dust, various other crap and spiders (and boy do those spiders grow big up there!)
I put them up there as I got sick of the noise, then ran ethernet cabling down to sockets around the place. My main web server (see sig) has been happily running up there for about 1 1/2 years now - barring the odd upgrade. It's not pleasant to open up a case full of dust and cobwebs, BTW!
From what I've read and seen in the world press most of the world wants the US to mind their own business.
From what I've read in the press there are bat people in California, Elvis is alive and living well in Idaho, and the pyramids were built be aliens. What's your point?
Well here's some news live from the UK - we do want you to mind your own business - and if your media weren't all being "steered" by your govt, you'd know that, since evey other country has been screaming it at the US for several years now. You think the "axis of evil" just decided to attack the US for no reason? Could it be more obvious?
Now no-one is condoning what happened on 9/11 (at least not the non-arab nations, and maybe China, Japan and some parts of Russia, and Palestine) but retaliation, such as that was not completely unexpected given the US' behaviour across the World.
Another way of putting that is that the US gives food and medicine to starving nations.
Are you actually objecting to that policy?
I was hoping someone would try this argument. Yes I do object when the pharmaceutical companies use war, famine and death as an excuse to push up their stock prices. The drugs and other garbage these companies "dump" are of absolutely no use to the people in the countries they're sending it to.
A guy called Mark Thomas here in the UK presents a programme where he tries to uncover government corruption, corporate corruption etc each week (he also has a pretty wicked sense of humour, whire really makes the show). One of these shows dealt with this issue. Here are a few quotes that you might find interesting...
During the civil war in Bosnia so much unwanted drugs were dumped that the government were forced to pay $34 million to build an incinerator just to dispose of them. One charity we spoke to, Pharmaciens Sans Frontieres, said that they had to spend £100,000 in the town of Mostar alone disposing of these drugs in lime filled buckets. [...] Since then, the situation has not improved. We spoke to a woman who was involved in sorting out drugs in Albania in 1999. She told us of a hospital in Tirana which had received tonnes of drugs, shown below.
[picture of tonnes of drugs]
However in sorting them out she found some nitrous oxide canisters which had an expiry date of 1989 or 1990 - ten years before they reached Albania. She also discovered sadly that of all the tonnes of drugs donated, only a small proportion could actually be termed useful, shown below.
[picture of about 150 small bottles]
There were also other companies sending sex aids, diet pills and other completely useless crap to starving nations simply to make money while leaving the huge cleanup job to those with nothing. Nice, huh?
Yep, yet another example of the US policy of telling everyone else "don't do as we do, do as we say". It's not enough they seem to want to police the entire planet, whilst taking no notice of anyone elses laws, seek to destroy net-radio by allowing the RIAA to dictate terms, continue to protect a criminal organisation (MSFT) which pays half it's politicians. No, now the US is preaching the word of IP, patents and general stifling of inovation to 3rd World countries.
These are the same countries US (and EU to a lesser extent) corporations dump out-of-date food and medical supplies on to claim tax breaks - use for slave labour to make "designer" trainers and generally exploit however they can.
The sad thing is, the US govt can't see why the rest of the World (except our pathetic lapdog PM) takes offence at this...
Try using the NVidia drivers with a GF2 sometime, it may not crash today, or tomorrow, but eventually... The only time I've seen linux crash has been through driver/hardware problems...
I use two Apple iBook's for music, not because I think the hardware is superior, but because my software [cycling74.com] isn't available for Windows yet
I was always under the impression musicians used to use Apples BECAUSE the OS was so bad. Before I'm marked a troll, what I mean is that the "cooperative multitasking" OS9 and earlier used meant a single app could keep 100% CPU all to itself, which is an advantage when low-latency is a factor.
I used to use sequencer software on my old Amiga 500 + green monochrome monitor up until about 5 years ago, and never really saw the need to switch until I got into Reason in a big way on PC. That app alone is worth the switch I think - if you haven't tried it - DO!
Slashdot Mirror
I would be willing to bank on the fact that Linux in an easy-to-use state will never happen. It is made by nerds, for nerds. Every time there's an attempt to make it "easy to use", failure is the result. What was the name of the last company trying to make it easy to use?
Redhat. I think they're still around, they have a little site here where you can find out more!
The Nokia 3410 emulator is pretty terrible. Not only due to the crashes etc, but mostly because it doesn't actually have the same display bugs as the actual phone! So anyone developing just using the emulator is in for a big surprise when they see their work screwing up on the real hardware...
The worst thing in all this (and something I meant to say in my post above but forgot) is that the phone manufacturers are harming themselves by splintering Java in this way. The obvious reason to use J2ME is that theoretically the app/game should run on any J2ME device. By splintering off in all directions, the phone makers are forcing developers to code for many smaller markets.
At the moment, Microsoft is a very small part of that market with its own non-java API. If developers are having to rewrite an app for different devices anyway (with little if any manufacturer support) they may well migrate to the MS platform, whereas a standard Java platform would make such extra development for a non-Java platform a waste of resources. This is one case where the phone companies could benefit by working together - rather than letting MS into yet another market.
Somehow though, I doubt they will...
Having developed a number of J2ME games for mobile phones, I find myself frustrated at companies such as Nokia, Siemens and co breaking standards to force developers to release separate versions of software for each manufacturer/device. This is no doubt holding up development of games and other useful apps for the mobile devices, and I'm sure that there's a case to be made against many of these manufacturers claiming to have J2ME compliancy.
I realise there's often a need for additional classes for features specific to a phone (vibration, backlights etc), but there are inexplicable deviations. For instance, the Siemens M50 has a rather "unusual" approach to creating an image object from a PNG file. Due to the limitations on file size and download speed, games tend to store all graphics in binary format, or more frequently all on a single PNG canvas - to be masked/chopped up as required. This is fine and works great, but Siemens decided that every external image should be resized to the phone's display - which kind of screws everything up. But wait, you can actually use their custom createImage method to emulate the standard method! Of course, this means it won't work on any other device though...
Nokia are as bad - the 3410 has a bug that means image clipping is 1 pixel out in each axis compared to other phones, so that's another "special" version. The list is huge, and totally defeats the purpose of using Java in the first place. "Run anywhere" is not the case here...
</Rant>
Just search the text for "your first born", "RIAA" or "pass your email address on to third parties". If no matches, it's probably alright...
A couple of years ago I spent an enjoyable couple of days driving the graphic designer mad at a web-dev house where we worked. She used an Apple G4 which was positioned directly across the desk from me (so our monitors backed onto eachother). I sneakily plugged a spare mouse into one of the unused USB ports on the monitor and let the fun ensue ;-)
A few times a day I'd listen for frantic clicking, and hold down the left button, whilst listening to the enraged artist screaming "THIS F*CKING BUTTON KEEPS STICKING!!!" etc. I eventually moved on to ever so slowly moving the mouse around, to more curses. Every so often, colleagues would be invited to try and work out what the problem was (at which point I obviously stopped messing about). I was eventually found-out after failing to supress my laughter at a particularly violent tirade after drawing a big black line all over an image (unknowingly).
I don't work there any more...
Ok, what if they used a cluster of 16 projectors? ;-)
I suppose a quick fix would be to either physically adjust the monitor controls to make them overscan by a couple of inches in each axis, or set up the X servers to do this. Probably wouldn't help the lifespan of the monitors though I guess...
Debian, through its use of package dependencies, is particularly good about telling you which set of packages need to be upgraded whenever you upgrade a package or add a new package to your system. This helps prevent random system breakage that can be caused by inadvertantly changing something that other packages rely on. This is perhaps the biggest advantage the Debian package system has over an RPM-based system.
Erm, RPM does this too. If you attempt to install/remove a package it'll warn you about dependency problems. Of course, you can just ignore these and --force it to comply, but unless you're sure you need to do this it usually leads to serious problems later.
I tend to use RH's up2date now too, which runs in the background checking for new packages and security fixes, downloads and installs them (if I wish), and hasn't caused a single problem.
I think the biggest problem Debian has is that the "stable" version is absolutely ancient! I gave it a try a month or so back, and after taking alook through the ftp site, though it best to pick up the stable ISOs.
Needless to say, I reformatted the result and resinstalled RH8 after about 5 seconds of finishing the install, after watching the 2.2.x kernel boot in Debian. I mean, how old is it; 2 years?? That's a 100 years in tech-time!
I'm not a nooby by quite a long way, and I'm guessing a lot of other people trying Debian out will make the same mistake and pick up that old build. I mean, it's not going to attract users when they essentially have to upgrade every single package on the machine after the install to get a reasonably modern version up and running...
When I'm feeling bored, I'll take a look through some of the crap procmail catches, and visit a site being advertised (if it's still up). But I don't just visit once! No! I leave lynx visiting the biggest page I can find by starting a script on my server, then forgetting about it for a day or so.
;-) If you have a DSL connection at home (and you're not capped), why not use it to do some good when it would otherwise sit idle?
If only a few hundred more people started doing this - absolutely flooding these spammed Pr0n sites, and get-a-big-dick-quick scams they would have HUGE bandwidth bills, and think twice about using the same marketting technique again.
It's no use trying to email abuse depts, or reason with this scum, you have to hit them where it hurts, in the wallet. The only way to do this (for us at least) is to suck their bandwidth dry
To be fair, it's probably not the Banks etc that set the terms to limit the browsers that access their sites. It's lazy developers, which are almost certainly web-dev companies trying to complete a project that they've managed to land by bidding low.
;-)
I've been guilty of it in the past - having to rush out a project, and not taking the time to test on every browser across every platform. The "IE only" disclaimer is an excuse for the most part.
It's worth complaining to the company though, especially if you mention they're being ridiculed on a number of extremely popular tech news sites
This is a weird subject, really. GPL is good, but when you really think about it, source code for government software isn't really something that should fall into the wrong hands...
Security through obscurity doesn't work. Ask Microsoft.
...because it's an important public policy question: it shouldn't be decided by a backroom push from business lobbyists...
Where the hell have you been for the past 50 years?! This is how all policy is decided by governments. Pretty simple equasion:
BribeH^H^H^H^H^Corporate funding + politician = new policy.
Istop.com (my ISP)
;-)
$30 monthly fee
$0 excess quota if downloaded off-peak
$45 excess quota otherwise
Total = $30-$45 (£12.5-£19)
That's a 1.2mbs connection. How much are you paying? I'm pretty sure I'm paying less, even with quotas.
Well I pay £25 a month, with no quotas at any time. Also have a fixed IP, and no port blocking. In fact demon don't filter anything, even incoming mail which is both good and bad, since it allows a huge amount of spam through, but their policy has always been "hands off".
You might remember this thread about demon being sued by Laurence Godfrey for refusing to censor articles on their news servers.
Laurence Godfrey is a wanker, by the way
Seems a bit stingy - after you've downloaded the latest RedHat ISOs, and read your spam, you're left twiddling your fingers each month.
Actually, this will at least help in the fight against spam, as it eats away at a subscribers monthly allowance it would probably help make the scumbags pay through the courts.
Glad my ISP basically allow you to do anything - I've served >30GB from the web server on my DSL line in a month before now! I'm pretty sure I've downloaded close to that figure too, leaving ftp sessions to run overnight for ISO's...
As a previous poster stated, I also use windows mostly as a means to develop software on *nix servers. I spend much more time on my XP machine than on my Linux workstation sat next to it, but it's mostly due to the fact I need a lot of tools/apps that aren't available for Linux (yet). I usually have several PuTTy windows open, Web browsers pointing at pages on the servers, and smb shares open from the servers though.
I despise MS, but they're currently the only option that allows me to do everything without rebooting. (I also own a Mac with OS-X but I absolutely hate it, which is why I can't remember the last time I booted it up).
I'll have to drag my camera up into my attic to take a picture of the mess up there one day. I've 3 machines that run 24/7 up there, covered in dust, various other crap and spiders (and boy do those spiders grow big up there!)
I put them up there as I got sick of the noise, then ran ethernet cabling down to sockets around the place. My main web server (see sig) has been happily running up there for about 1 1/2 years now - barring the odd upgrade. It's not pleasant to open up a case full of dust and cobwebs, BTW!
Apparently I made a mistake in my named.conf file...
hung upside down in a cool damp dark cell, being fed only breadcrusts and water, and being flogged morning and evening for the rest of their lives???
So do you think that maybe this "rape spam" is affecting you at all?
From what I've read and seen in the world press most of the world wants the US to mind their own business.
From what I've read in the press there are bat people in California, Elvis is alive and living well in Idaho, and the pyramids were built be aliens. What's your point?
Well here's some news live from the UK - we do want you to mind your own business - and if your media weren't all being "steered" by your govt, you'd know that, since evey other country has been screaming it at the US for several years now. You think the "axis of evil" just decided to attack the US for no reason? Could it be more obvious?
Now no-one is condoning what happened on 9/11 (at least not the non-arab nations, and maybe China, Japan and some parts of Russia, and Palestine) but retaliation, such as that was not completely unexpected given the US' behaviour across the World.
Another way of putting that is that the US gives food and medicine to starving nations.
Are you actually objecting to that policy?
I was hoping someone would try this argument. Yes I do object when the pharmaceutical companies use war, famine and death as an excuse to push up their stock prices. The drugs and other garbage these companies "dump" are of absolutely no use to the people in the countries they're sending it to.
A guy called Mark Thomas here in the UK presents a programme where he tries to uncover government corruption, corporate corruption etc each week (he also has a pretty wicked sense of humour, whire really makes the show). One of these shows dealt with this issue. Here are a few quotes that you might find interesting...
During the civil war in Bosnia so much unwanted drugs were dumped that the government were forced to pay $34 million to build an incinerator just to dispose of them. One charity we spoke to, Pharmaciens Sans Frontieres, said that they had to spend £100,000 in the town of Mostar alone disposing of these drugs in lime filled buckets.
[...]
Since then, the situation has not improved. We spoke to a woman who was involved in sorting out drugs in Albania in 1999. She told us of a hospital in Tirana which had received tonnes of drugs, shown below.
[picture of tonnes of drugs]
However in sorting them out she found some nitrous oxide canisters which had an expiry date of 1989 or 1990 - ten years before they reached Albania. She also discovered sadly that of all the tonnes of drugs donated, only a small proportion could actually be termed useful, shown below.
[picture of about 150 small bottles]
There were also other companies sending sex aids, diet pills and other completely useless crap to starving nations simply to make money while leaving the huge cleanup job to those with nothing. Nice, huh?
Yep, yet another example of the US policy of telling everyone else "don't do as we do, do as we say". It's not enough they seem to want to police the entire planet, whilst taking no notice of anyone elses laws, seek to destroy net-radio by allowing the RIAA to dictate terms, continue to protect a criminal organisation (MSFT) which pays half it's politicians. No, now the US is preaching the word of IP, patents and general stifling of inovation to 3rd World countries.
These are the same countries US (and EU to a lesser extent) corporations dump out-of-date food and medical supplies on to claim tax breaks - use for slave labour to make "designer" trainers and generally exploit however they can.
The sad thing is, the US govt can't see why the rest of the World (except our pathetic lapdog PM) takes offence at this...
Mod me down if you like, it needed saying...
Try using the NVidia drivers with a GF2 sometime, it may not crash today, or tomorrow, but eventually... The only time I've seen linux crash has been through driver/hardware problems...
I think I'd rather have the pain than be ginger, to be honest...
I use two Apple iBook's for music, not because I think the hardware is superior, but because my software [cycling74.com] isn't available for Windows yet
I was always under the impression musicians used to use Apples BECAUSE the OS was so bad. Before I'm marked a troll, what I mean is that the "cooperative multitasking" OS9 and earlier used meant a single app could keep 100% CPU all to itself, which is an advantage when low-latency is a factor.
I used to use sequencer software on my old Amiga 500 + green monochrome monitor up until about 5 years ago, and never really saw the need to switch until I got into Reason in a big way on PC. That app alone is worth the switch I think - if you haven't tried it - DO!