Back in 1968, when DARPA was creating the internet, Paul Baran pointed out that there are potentially 3 different kinds of networks, a centralized 'star' type network, a distributed network (basically what the internet is today), and a decentralized network (p2p).
Please click the link and look at the diagram. It's one of the single most important concepts vital to understanding the structure of the internet.
This is nothing new. The decentralized design was chosen to maximize the price to redundancy ratio. A distributed network is too prone to failure and was not feasable back in 1968 (and still isn't today because of the basic economic structure in America. The internet will remain decentralized as long as the telcos own the phone lines.)
wow, I completely forgot about the PHP docs when I was writing that post.
PHP would never had made it as a language if it didn't have such excellent documentation. Granted, it's a very user-friendly language, but without that documentation, it would have NEVER gotten off the ground.
It seems like more complicated/difficult projects require good documentation in order to be successful. Look at gentoo -- would anyone have thought that people would actually be able to setup a linux distro without an installer? Thanks to one of the best pieces of documentation i've ever come across, this has proven to be true.
In the end, it all comes down to usability. Which product allows me to be the most productive? A lot of the time, this is directly proportional to the ease-of-use of the product and the quality (not necessarily quanity) of the documentation. These rules apply to both developers and end users.
Of course, also remember that the best product is one which doesn't need documentation... of course, something as complex as the windows API is going to need pretty thorough documentation no matter how well the code is designed/written/commented. I particilarly like the old apple commercial that showed the Mac next to an IBM PC. The gigantic user manual for the PC was dropped down ontop of the keyboard while the thin mac manual fluttered down next to it.
I'm pretty sure he's being serious. Visual Studio is higly acclaimed by windows programmers not biased against Microsoft.
Linux lacks a true "good" IDE. I don't think I'm nearly as productive in vi/EMACS as I am in visual studio. Why can't the UNIX world learn to accapt the GUI?
Microsoft is very nice to its developers (I mean -- what CAN'T VBScript do?;-) ). The developer documentation microsoft supplies is unmatched. Visual Studio is a well-written and well-supported product. Other companies have caught on to this; Apple's XCode is evolving into an awesome application. If anybody saw the OPENStep application building demo posted here a few months ago, remember that XCode is basically a highly-evolved version of the same thing.
the only IDE which I feel comes close to matching the strength of VS is Eclipse (which is Java-only).
The funniest IDE i've ever used was Borland's C++BuilderX ---- which was written in Java. Were they admitting defeat from the start?
Any word on if this includes fixes for the massive memory leaks in the OS X port? I know they were on track for 1.1, but it's possible they could have made their way into 1.0.1......
Apple's iCal does pretty much what you're asking. a breif introduction on how the program works:
events are placed on a 'calendar' which is basically a topic or category for the event. events from each calendar are overlaid on top of each other as long as you've got the little box checked next to the name of the calendar. evnts are color-coded by calendar.
you can choose to publish any of these calendars on.mac or a WebDAV server (someone wrote a small PHP script which emulates the function of a WebDAV server, so you can do this on just about any server. the script also includes a frontend for parsing and viewing the calendars through a web browser). Other users can then 'subscribe' to that calendar, and it appears just as another calendar on the list. updates are sent and retrieved automatically in the background.
best of all, iCalendar (formerly vCal) is an open standard, the same which was used by outlook until version 2000, and the same as is being used by the upcoming mozilla sunbird project, so in a year or so, we'll have the same functionality on all platforms
all in all, it's my favorite of the iApps and definitely the most underused and underrated
4 years ago slashdot posted a story introducing the first Dual-processor athlon system and used the linux kernel compilation time as a benchmark.
A little over 4 years ago, a Dual Processor Athlon System compiled the kernel in 2 minutes flat. The kernel was version 2.4.0ac12.
I'm no software/hardware developer, so I'm not going to comment on the significance of this result, but nonetheless I find it interesting that the kernel took less time to compile on a much more modest system 4 years ago. Has the kernel really grown THAT much?
Think about it --- they were using two 1.2ghz 32-bit processors with 256mb of ram opposed to the four 64-bit processors with 8gb of ram in this test, and it still took 20% longer to compile!!!
Reminds me of a quote from terry pratchett & neil gaiman's Good Omens (a book which depicts a very British apocolypse, including satan's admiraton the london beltway among other englandisms)
- "Surely you have considered terrorist activity?" - There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."
-- The BBC interviews a nuclear spokesperson (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
a very funny read by the way. drop by your library and check it out.
First off, I think you're better off setting up a simple FTP server and letting your clients use the FTP client built into Windows Explorer. ftp://user:password@server and you're done. You can even do the 'Add Network Place' which should be even easier. The FTP server goes right to that user's home directory which windows see as just another folder. Drag, drop, open, and save just as you would to a floppy disk. It's not open-source on the client end, but every OS imaginable has an FTP client.
If this isn't exactly the solution you're looking for, there's an excellent PHP application called ByteHoard. Go download it and give it a shot. Very simple to use and administer.
Please don't go by their website or the screenshots there -- they must have gotten a bad webmaster or something -- the site and screenshots don't look a thing like the actual application.
If you're stylesheet doesn't load in an old version of konqueror, don't take your screenshots with an old version of konqueror.
parent is wrong. the US is NOT polluting more than any other nation on earth. Don't make claims without cold hard facts
First, let's start with the obvious facts. The US is one of the largest industrialized nations on earth. Larger countries pollute more -- arguing otherwise contradicts common sense.
Secondly, developing nations pollute far more than modern countries like the US. Dirty industry is far more prevalent in countries like china, mexico, and india. Simply put, they can't practically afford cleaner technologies. Over time, they will develop, but every country needs to go through this 'dirty' phase before they develop cleaner technology.
The early releases of IE were rushed to allow microsoft to bundle their own browser with their OS. Let's ignore the whole DOJ thing though...
The first versions of IE sucked. There's absolutely no way around saying that. They were horribly written, barely standards-compliant, and buggy as hell. Unfortunately, once Microsoft realized that the web browser would become an integral and vital part of the OS, it was already too late.
You see, Microsoft prides itself upon backward compatibility. And they're damn good at it too. I can still run programs compiled for Win95/3.1 on my XP box. No other OS today will run a program designed for an Operating System 10 years old while still having the features one would expect from a modern operating system.
Same thing goes for their web browser. They have customers using ActiveX that they ARE OBLIGED TO SUPPORT. The absolute worse move a company can make is to alienate its customers (SCO and the RIAA have learned this the hard way). And, to be frank, Microsoft is pretty nice to its users compared to other software vendors. Let's not forget that a lot of corporations are using ActiveX for much of their in-house development. They can't just rip it out; IE would lose most of its features that way. Netscape Plugins / Firefox Extentions are not necessarily any more secure.
Now that Microsoft has their woefully buggy ActiveX implementation, it has certain quirks that programmers have grown used to. If microsoft squashes a bug, they risk breaking compatibility. Same thing goes for standards compliance -- back when HTML4 and CSS were in their infancy, Microsoft chose to support them, but did a crappy job at it. This set the precedent that now since developers had designed sites around these quirks, THEY COULDN'T FIX THEM. Some legitimate programs may inadvertently use security holes in the browser. Closing them up will break compatibility.
That's one reason why this beta concerns me. If it has its own quirks, developers will start coding around them, and microsoft will once again have dug itself into a hole.
that's what was easy for apple when it made OS X and Mozilla when they rewrote their browser. They were starting fresh and had virtually no expectations and were able to COMPLETELY break compatibility with older versions for the sake of standards compliance. NT could have been just as fast and secure as OS X or Linux had Microsoft chosen to dump compatibility for Win9x apps. NT started out as a lean, fast, secure operating system. It has the capability to do Unix-style file-permissions which would close up 99% of the security holes present. Implementing a system like that would, however, break compatibility for older programs which expect the operating system to allow them to write to any portion of the drive. Instead, microsoft had to maintain backward compatibility and painstakingly close up every tiny security hole.
Microsoft's not stupid. I would be VERY surprised if IE 7 wasn't a huge improvement over 6. They've been working a long time on this release, and they're well aware of the competition from firefox. If it's secure and standards compliant, the reasons to use firefox become far less compelling.
In short, IE sucks today because the first betas sucked, and that's what the developers based their apps off of.
There's a product called XPLite which allows you to remove Windows Media Player, IE, and virtually any other component of XP without causing severe harm to the system. You can seriously remove ANY component: COM+, Active Directory, Indexing Service, DirectX, or even remove ALL of XP's networking services. Cool stuff.
They've also got versions for win2k, ME (shudders), and 98. You can pull off a working 98SE installation in 41mb.
I'm in no way affiliated with these guys. they just make a cool product that's very applicable to this topic
Mod parent as Informative --- this is one of Firefox's best kept secrets. The optimized builds can yield a NOTICABLE performance difference in terms of startup page-loading times
For the mac users out there, links for mac-optimized firefox builds are below
I'm using the g4 build right now and it works like a charm! (Note that these are built from the nightlies, so you might get a 'bad' one. Backup your profile before installing it over an old firefox build)
he's not turning it into a republican/democrat debate. the organization making the scientific claims has a political bias, and therefore politics have gotten involved.
just like the bush administration alledgedly has the motivation to alter the data to further their goals. UCS ALSO has the SAME EXACT motivation to modify the report linked to in the article to further their goals. Science and polotics CANNOT be allowed to mix
Does this mean that the bush adminstration didn't do these things they were accused of? No. It simply means that the report cannot be trusted on its own. It may be true, it may be false.
face it, we're inclined to blame our adversaries for any problems we face weather it is republican or democrat. the amount of political mudslinging in the comments on this post is astounding. has anyone thought that this may have been the original intent of the article?
UCS and Bush both have their political agendas -- I wouldn't trust either on a report on the enviornment.
please moderate the parent as troll and flamebait, partisan bickering aside.
"retarded red-vs-blud idocy" --- you post is no better than the grandparent post you're criticizing, and you don't make a single factual argument.
the post is little more than an emotionally-charged rant. If you don't like the progress of the US in the past 20 years, please provide some factual evidence. You've got to have the facts before you make a judgement of any sort.
the grandparent poster wasn't necessarily promoting Bush (a heinous crime on/. if there ever was one), but, rather, was pointing out the context of the article. I'd like to know about the organization making these claims -- knowing that they have been an extreme-leftist organization changes my perspective upon the article.
In order to make a judgement call upon any sort of data, it's crucial to know the source of that data, and the reputibility of that source. Based upon the organization's history, I wouldn't trust the report any more than I'd trust a tabacco company's paper on the health benefits of smoking.
And since it seems like the popular trend to bring up Bush and the WMDs, you've got to remember -- if you're outraged over the WMD claims, it's because you believed them. Any left-wing activist should take any information coming out of the white house with a grain of salt -- after all, if you claim that he's a liar, why do you believe him? Past experience is also crucial for making a judgement call. I'm pretty sure that Bush will be very careful about what he says over the next four years becuase of all of the skepticism surrounding his administration. people are now more apt to question his authority due to his colossal screw-up.
So, please. If you're going to make an argument, please provide factual evidence and reasons for your argument. (emotion + rage) != (+5, Insightful)
yes, but I think the point is that Microsoft sees that embedded electronics are taking off at a rapid pace. if home automation/convergence ever takes off, the embedded OS market will be HUGE.
consumers only have one pc (usually. maybe two)
however, I've also got a cell phone music player (iPod) radio router stereo gaming console tv coffee maker fridge + other kitchen appliances digital camera
You see, even if Microsoft charges $5 per license to run CE on some embedded device which has a $10 microcontroller, they're still making the same profit per person as they would otherwise be making. sure, the profit per product is lower, but their total revenue stays positive.
the real question is if hardware developers will want to pay the $5 to gain access to all of the nice APIs CE will provide them with. By not having to write firmware code from scratch, companies save a bundle on R&D. Advanced chips for embedded devices have been available for quite some time now at a not-unreasonable cost (especially considering the tiny demand) -- the big problem is spending the R&D money to actually develop software for these chips.
my wireless router has more processing power than my PC did 5 years ago -- it runs embedded linux. and I can guarruntee that the CPU didn't make up a huge portion of the router's $50 MSRP pricetag.
really the only big tech company that ISN'T jumping on the embedded bandwagon is Apple. They seem pretty focused upon turning the PC into a 'true' multimedia hub, and they've been doing a damn amazing job at it. even embedded linux has a huge following -- I can almost promise however, that CE is easier to develop for than linux, as CE was designed for tiny underpowered machines and has the appropriate APIs to deal with that.
another library to suck up more RAM/CPU cycles on my windows box.
Lets see what I've got running
Standard win32 controls / libraries GTK+ controls for GAIM/GIMP Whatever the heck iTunes uses Java windowing stuff... Firefox's XUL and XPCOM..... and now QT -- all to provide the exact same functions.
nice! Has it ever occured to anybody here that this is a little excessive? Personally, I'd lean twoard an OpenSTEP like implementation as shown in the demo posted to/. a few days ago. Apple's already proven it to be successful/easy to the point that most developers choose to rewrite their frontends using cocoa instead of using a ported windowing toolkit.
I don't want an inconsistent user experience. I want my dialogs / menus / print box / file manager to be the EXACT SAME IN EVERY APPLICATION I RUN. I don't care if Linux or MacOS look a bit different than windows. All I care is that Windows looks like Windows, Linux looks the same all around, and Mac Looks like Mac. It's really not a hard concept.
it would seem that blogging was an open-source idea. most popular blogging software is OSS, including livejournal (they've got some other crazy memory-caching stuff they wrote too. neat stuff)
RSS/Atom though not really open-source was born in the OSS community.
musicbrainz is a cool project to match songs to data based upon acoustic modeling -- not well-known but definitely innovative
reiserFS is OSS, and though I'm not the authority on the subject, it's supposedly got some really neat stuff goin on for it. perhaps a more knowledgable person could comment on this?
but they've definitely got a point. there's a profound lack of innovation going on. seems like everyone's in a rush to copy apple/microsoft. GNUStep was a good effort that might have been innovative had apple decided not to ressurect nextSTEP as OS X. I'll take a rimshot and say that 95% of useful software innovations are coming from apple at the moment. Rendevous comes to mind, as do Quartz and Aqua.
BeOS also had a lot of innovation. I still regard BeOS's failure as a major setback for the software industry. It was so wildly ahead of its time that modern operating systems are still struggling to catch up. If only it could print:-)
Slashdot Mirror
a well-composed photograph to be sure
:-)
It sure is nice to see breaking-news photographs which are also visually appealing. I like how the smoke plume follows the rule of thirds
PARC was dangerous in its own respect.
they patented tons of extremely novel research and never brought any of it to the market.
Back in 1968, when DARPA was creating the internet, Paul Baran pointed out that there are potentially 3 different kinds of networks, a centralized 'star' type network, a distributed network (basically what the internet is today), and a decentralized network (p2p).
Please click the link and look at the diagram. It's one of the single most important concepts vital to understanding the structure of the internet.
This is nothing new. The decentralized design was chosen to maximize the price to redundancy ratio. A distributed network is too prone to failure and was not feasable back in 1968 (and still isn't today because of the basic economic structure in America. The internet will remain decentralized as long as the telcos own the phone lines.)
wow, I completely forgot about the PHP docs when I was writing that post.
PHP would never had made it as a language if it didn't have such excellent documentation. Granted, it's a very user-friendly language, but without that documentation, it would have NEVER gotten off the ground.
It seems like more complicated/difficult projects require good documentation in order to be successful. Look at gentoo -- would anyone have thought that people would actually be able to setup a linux distro without an installer? Thanks to one of the best pieces of documentation i've ever come across, this has proven to be true.
In the end, it all comes down to usability. Which product allows me to be the most productive? A lot of the time, this is directly proportional to the ease-of-use of the product and the quality (not necessarily quanity) of the documentation. These rules apply to both developers and end users.
Of course, also remember that the best product is one which doesn't need documentation... of course, something as complex as the windows API is going to need pretty thorough documentation no matter how well the code is designed/written/commented. I particilarly like the old apple commercial that showed the Mac next to an IBM PC. The gigantic user manual for the PC was dropped down ontop of the keyboard while the thin mac manual fluttered down next to it.
(Score:5, Ironic)
;-) ). The developer documentation microsoft supplies is unmatched. Visual Studio is a well-written and well-supported product. Other companies have caught on to this; Apple's XCode is evolving into an awesome application. If anybody saw the OPENStep application building demo posted here a few months ago, remember that XCode is basically a highly-evolved version of the same thing.
I'm pretty sure he's being serious. Visual Studio is higly acclaimed by windows programmers not biased against Microsoft.
Linux lacks a true "good" IDE. I don't think I'm nearly as productive in vi/EMACS as I am in visual studio. Why can't the UNIX world learn to accapt the GUI?
Microsoft is very nice to its developers (I mean -- what CAN'T VBScript do?
the only IDE which I feel comes close to matching the strength of VS is Eclipse (which is Java-only).
The funniest IDE i've ever used was Borland's C++BuilderX ---- which was written in Java. Were they admitting defeat from the start?
KDE update: features which should've been there to begin with. plus hundreds of potentially useless features intruducing new bugs
Windows updates: patches for a flawed architecture.
Any word on if this includes fixes for the massive memory leaks in the OS X port? I know they were on track for 1.1, but it's possible they could have made their way into 1.0.1......
Apple's iCal does pretty much what you're asking. a breif introduction on how the program works:
.mac or a WebDAV server (someone wrote a small PHP script which emulates the function of a WebDAV server, so you can do this on just about any server. the script also includes a frontend for parsing and viewing the calendars through a web browser). Other users can then 'subscribe' to that calendar, and it appears just as another calendar on the list. updates are sent and retrieved automatically in the background.
events are placed on a 'calendar' which is basically a topic or category for the event. events from each calendar are overlaid on top of each other as long as you've got the little box checked next to the name of the calendar. evnts are color-coded by calendar.
you can choose to publish any of these calendars on
best of all, iCalendar (formerly vCal) is an open standard, the same which was used by outlook until version 2000, and the same as is being used by the upcoming mozilla sunbird project, so in a year or so, we'll have the same functionality on all platforms
all in all, it's my favorite of the iApps and definitely the most underused and underrated
4 years ago slashdot posted a story introducing the first Dual-processor athlon system and used the linux kernel compilation time as a benchmark.
A little over 4 years ago, a Dual Processor Athlon System compiled the kernel in 2 minutes flat. The kernel was version 2.4.0ac12.
I'm no software/hardware developer, so I'm not going to comment on the significance of this result, but nonetheless I find it interesting that the kernel took less time to compile on a much more modest system 4 years ago. Has the kernel really grown THAT much?
Think about it --- they were using two 1.2ghz 32-bit processors with 256mb of ram opposed to the four 64-bit processors with 8gb of ram in this test, and it still took 20% longer to compile!!!
Reminds me of a quote from terry pratchett & neil gaiman's Good Omens (a book which depicts a very British apocolypse, including satan's admiraton the london beltway among other englandisms)
- "Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"
- There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."
-- The BBC interviews a nuclear spokesperson (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
a very funny read by the way. drop by your library and check it out.
First off, I think you're better off setting up a simple FTP server and letting your clients use the FTP client built into Windows Explorer. ftp://user:password@server and you're done. You can even do the 'Add Network Place' which should be even easier. The FTP server goes right to that user's home directory which windows see as just another folder. Drag, drop, open, and save just as you would to a floppy disk. It's not open-source on the client end, but every OS imaginable has an FTP client.
If this isn't exactly the solution you're looking for, there's an excellent PHP application called ByteHoard. Go download it and give it a shot. Very simple to use and administer.
Please don't go by their website or the screenshots there -- they must have gotten a bad webmaster or something -- the site and screenshots don't look a thing like the actual application.
If you're stylesheet doesn't load in an old version of konqueror, don't take your screenshots with an old version of konqueror.
parent is wrong. the US is NOT polluting more than any other nation on earth. Don't make claims without cold hard facts
First, let's start with the obvious facts. The US is one of the largest industrialized nations on earth. Larger countries pollute more -- arguing otherwise contradicts common sense.
Secondly, developing nations pollute far more than modern countries like the US. Dirty industry is far more prevalent in countries like china, mexico, and india. Simply put, they can't practically afford cleaner technologies. Over time, they will develop, but every country needs to go through this 'dirty' phase before they develop cleaner technology.
Finally, I point you to this chart from the World Bank's 1995 pollution survey of 25 of the world's largest cities. The 3 US cities listed are among the cleanest. This chart was one of the first google results for
air pollution statistics by country' -- I could find more, but the results are pretty much in line with other data i've seen. If anyone else has scientifically tested data which they can use to disprove me, please let me know.
Mod parent as insightful.
The early releases of IE were rushed to allow microsoft to bundle their own browser with their OS. Let's ignore the whole DOJ thing though...
The first versions of IE sucked. There's absolutely no way around saying that. They were horribly written, barely standards-compliant, and buggy as hell. Unfortunately, once Microsoft realized that the web browser would become an integral and vital part of the OS, it was already too late.
You see, Microsoft prides itself upon backward compatibility. And they're damn good at it too. I can still run programs compiled for Win95/3.1 on my XP box. No other OS today will run a program designed for an Operating System 10 years old while still having the features one would expect from a modern operating system.
Same thing goes for their web browser. They have customers using ActiveX that they ARE OBLIGED TO SUPPORT. The absolute worse move a company can make is to alienate its customers (SCO and the RIAA have learned this the hard way). And, to be frank, Microsoft is pretty nice to its users compared to other software vendors. Let's not forget that a lot of corporations are using ActiveX for much of their in-house development. They can't just rip it out; IE would lose most of its features that way. Netscape Plugins / Firefox Extentions are not necessarily any more secure.
Now that Microsoft has their woefully buggy ActiveX implementation, it has certain quirks that programmers have grown used to. If microsoft squashes a bug, they risk breaking compatibility. Same thing goes for standards compliance -- back when HTML4 and CSS were in their infancy, Microsoft chose to support them, but did a crappy job at it. This set the precedent that now since developers had designed sites around these quirks, THEY COULDN'T FIX THEM. Some legitimate programs may inadvertently use security holes in the browser. Closing them up will break compatibility.
That's one reason why this beta concerns me. If it has its own quirks, developers will start coding around them, and microsoft will once again have dug itself into a hole.
that's what was easy for apple when it made OS X and Mozilla when they rewrote their browser. They were starting fresh and had virtually no expectations and were able to COMPLETELY break compatibility with older versions for the sake of standards compliance. NT could have been just as fast and secure as OS X or Linux had Microsoft chosen to dump compatibility for Win9x apps. NT started out as a lean, fast, secure operating system. It has the capability to do Unix-style file-permissions which would close up 99% of the security holes present. Implementing a system like that would, however, break compatibility for older programs which expect the operating system to allow them to write to any portion of the drive. Instead, microsoft had to maintain backward compatibility and painstakingly close up every tiny security hole.
Microsoft's not stupid. I would be VERY surprised if IE 7 wasn't a huge improvement over 6. They've been working a long time on this release, and they're well aware of the competition from firefox. If it's secure and standards compliant, the reasons to use firefox become far less compelling.
In short, IE sucks today because the first betas sucked, and that's what the developers based their apps off of.
There's a product called XPLite which allows you to remove Windows Media Player, IE, and virtually any other component of XP without causing severe harm to the system. You can seriously remove ANY component: COM+, Active Directory, Indexing Service, DirectX, or even remove ALL of XP's networking services. Cool stuff.
They've also got versions for win2k, ME (shudders), and 98. You can pull off a working 98SE installation in 41mb.
I'm in no way affiliated with these guys. they just make a cool product that's very applicable to this topic
Mod parent as Informative --- this is one of Firefox's best kept secrets. The optimized builds can yield a NOTICABLE performance difference in terms of startup page-loading times
For the mac users out there, links for mac-optimized firefox builds are below
G4 Optimized
G5 Optimized
I'm using the g4 build right now and it works like a charm! (Note that these are built from the nightlies, so you might get a 'bad' one. Backup your profile before installing it over an old firefox build)
he's not turning it into a republican/democrat debate. the organization making the scientific claims has a political bias, and therefore politics have gotten involved.
just like the bush administration alledgedly has the motivation to alter the data to further their goals. UCS ALSO has the SAME EXACT motivation to modify the report linked to in the article to further their goals. Science and polotics CANNOT be allowed to mix
Does this mean that the bush adminstration didn't do these things they were accused of? No. It simply means that the report cannot be trusted on its own. It may be true, it may be false.
face it, we're inclined to blame our adversaries for any problems we face weather it is republican or democrat. the amount of political mudslinging in the comments on this post is astounding. has anyone thought that this may have been the original intent of the article?
UCS and Bush both have their political agendas -- I wouldn't trust either on a report on the enviornment.
please moderate the parent as troll and flamebait, partisan bickering aside.
/. if there ever was one), but, rather, was pointing out the context of the article. I'd like to know about the organization making these claims -- knowing that they have been an extreme-leftist organization changes my perspective upon the article.
"retarded red-vs-blud idocy" --- you post is no better than the grandparent post you're criticizing, and you don't make a single factual argument.
the post is little more than an emotionally-charged rant. If you don't like the progress of the US in the past 20 years, please provide some factual evidence. You've got to have the facts before you make a judgement of any sort.
the grandparent poster wasn't necessarily promoting Bush (a heinous crime on
In order to make a judgement call upon any sort of data, it's crucial to know the source of that data, and the reputibility of that source. Based upon the organization's history, I wouldn't trust the report any more than I'd trust a tabacco company's paper on the health benefits of smoking.
And since it seems like the popular trend to bring up Bush and the WMDs, you've got to remember -- if you're outraged over the WMD claims, it's because you believed them. Any left-wing activist should take any information coming out of the white house with a grain of salt -- after all, if you claim that he's a liar, why do you believe him? Past experience is also crucial for making a judgement call. I'm pretty sure that Bush will be very careful about what he says over the next four years becuase of all of the skepticism surrounding his administration. people are now more apt to question his authority due to his colossal screw-up.
So, please. If you're going to make an argument, please provide factual evidence and reasons for your argument. (emotion + rage) != (+5, Insightful)
knowledge is a delicate thing. use it carefully.
no. there's only one semi-serious reply which suggests a PDA-based recording app, but still mentions the absurdity of the situation.
please stop making posts to prove a point. yes, the grandparent post was funny, but your point's completely invalid
yes, but I think the point is that Microsoft sees that embedded electronics are taking off at a rapid pace. if home automation/convergence ever takes off, the embedded OS market will be HUGE.
consumers only have one pc (usually. maybe two)
however, I've also got a
cell phone
music player (iPod)
radio
router
stereo
gaming console
tv
coffee maker
fridge + other kitchen appliances
digital camera
You see, even if Microsoft charges $5 per license to run CE on some embedded device which has a $10 microcontroller, they're still making the same profit per person as they would otherwise be making. sure, the profit per product is lower, but their total revenue stays positive.
the real question is if hardware developers will want to pay the $5 to gain access to all of the nice APIs CE will provide them with. By not having to write firmware code from scratch, companies save a bundle on R&D. Advanced chips for embedded devices have been available for quite some time now at a not-unreasonable cost (especially considering the tiny demand) -- the big problem is spending the R&D money to actually develop software for these chips.
my wireless router has more processing power than my PC did 5 years ago -- it runs embedded linux. and I can guarruntee that the CPU didn't make up a huge portion of the router's $50 MSRP pricetag.
really the only big tech company that ISN'T jumping on the embedded bandwagon is Apple. They seem pretty focused upon turning the PC into a 'true' multimedia hub, and they've been doing a damn amazing job at it. even embedded linux has a huge following -- I can almost promise however, that CE is easier to develop for than linux, as CE was designed for tiny underpowered machines and has the appropriate APIs to deal with that.
well, gosh, I want to remove this symlink to
let's look up how to do that in the manpages hmm. okay. that sounds about right. shit
Errrm. I'm pretty sure it's bad karma to claim to be related to the Kennedys.
oh great.
/. a few days ago. Apple's already proven it to be successful/easy to the point that most developers choose to rewrite their frontends using cocoa instead of using a ported windowing toolkit.
another library to suck up more RAM/CPU cycles on my windows box.
Lets see what I've got running
Standard win32 controls / libraries
GTK+ controls for GAIM/GIMP
Whatever the heck iTunes uses
Java windowing stuff...
Firefox's XUL and XPCOM.....
and now QT -- all to provide the exact same functions.
nice! Has it ever occured to anybody here that this is a little excessive? Personally, I'd lean twoard an OpenSTEP like implementation as shown in the demo posted to
I don't want an inconsistent user experience. I want my dialogs / menus / print box / file manager to be the EXACT SAME IN EVERY APPLICATION I RUN. I don't care if Linux or MacOS look a bit different than windows. All I care is that Windows looks like Windows, Linux looks the same all around, and Mac Looks like Mac. It's really not a hard concept.
it would seem that blogging was an open-source idea. most popular blogging software is OSS, including livejournal (they've got some other crazy memory-caching stuff they wrote too. neat stuff)
:-)
RSS/Atom though not really open-source was born in the OSS community.
musicbrainz is a cool project to match songs to data based upon acoustic modeling -- not well-known but definitely innovative
reiserFS is OSS, and though I'm not the authority on the subject, it's supposedly got some really neat stuff goin on for it. perhaps a more knowledgable person could comment on this?
but they've definitely got a point. there's a profound lack of innovation going on. seems like everyone's in a rush to copy apple/microsoft. GNUStep was a good effort that might have been innovative had apple decided not to ressurect nextSTEP as OS X. I'll take a rimshot and say that 95% of useful software innovations are coming from apple at the moment. Rendevous comes to mind, as do Quartz and Aqua.
BeOS also had a lot of innovation. I still regard BeOS's failure as a major setback for the software industry. It was so wildly ahead of its time that modern operating systems are still struggling to catch up. If only it could print
A few years ago I realized that my brand new Dell laptop had XT as the last two characters in the model number.
I chuckled silently to myself and then realized how damn geeky I was.
but, wow. what a great machine....IBM XT was my first computer (in 1995 nonetheless). good times good times
Not sure if you were joking there, but yes, BMW uses WinCE