While I can usually catch a ride from friends, sometimes it is difficult to do so when they aren't going the same way as me.
If you've ever read Jack Kerouac, you probably remember how he recounted the travels of his protagonists across the U.S. They relied mostly on buses, hitching, and occasionally the ride-share program. This type of thing benefits everyone, really. By encouraging people to ride-share rather than drive individually, the road is freed up from congestion quite a bit. Also, riding in a car is usually a more pleasant experience than riding on a dingy bus.
Less cars on the road, less air pollution from exhaust. Less wear and tear on the highways, less taxes to pay for them.
I'm glad to see they actually read my little email note about adding this kind of service. If it works out, I think this could be a real benefit to those of us of meager means.
I do blame the vendor wholeheartedly. But I also blame CA for their networking software that seems prone to failing in the least graceful ways possible.
Changed vendors, changed software.
But in this day and age, networking software should be a standard feature, not a third-party add-on.
If there's anything I can't stand more than a badly run network, it's "professional" networking software.
At a previous office, our vendor decided to put a throttle on network clients by sticking some kind of network management software on the main server which could only have clients added by certified technicians (namely, them). So what happens when someone decides to bring an 802.11 laptop to the office to do some work? Well, the server software barfs and starts spewing error messages all over the place until finally the server locks up because the disk is full.
I now loathe networking software that is not configurable or expandable without "specialists" to do it for a fee. I just want to plug in my new computer and have it work with the least amount of fuss.
Novell is dead, not because it's software sucks, but because it does what other (better) Free software does and charges outrageous sums. The user pays for the privilege of having Novell run roughshod over the internal network.
I don't think he's on our side... Take a look at this comment:
GM: You say that software doesn't steal content, people steal content. So what do you think of the RIAA's strategy of suing individual file-sharers?
MC: I have no problem with it at all. If you steal, you are wrong. You should have to deal with the consequences. We have plenty of laws on the book to make sure that happens.
Frankly, strong copyright and enforceable contracts are Free Software's biggest friends. Without those two, Free Software would just be BSD software without any sort of legal control over the copying and distributing of derived works.
I think it is more like a MUD or a MOO except played out in a completely different format. What it has in common is that features can be added by participants with relative ease and everyone benefits if they wish to use those features.
Obviously it lacks the dungeon crawling and killing people, but it still retains much of the social interaction. And as a benefit, it emphasizes socially beneficial activities such as sharing and openness rather than grouping and attacking.
It's a bad analogy because the two things being compared are fairly dissimilar, however this kind of "Social bookmarking" is very new and innovative without precedent.
Whether it can turn up something good is another story, but as far as a technology goes, it is pretty neat.
I resent that remark
on
Inside the PSP
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· Score: 0, Troll
I find this attitude that "if someone is complaining about lack of system freedom it means they are a pirate" highly offensive and ignorant. As a law-abiding citizen, I have never downloaded any copyrighted work illegally. All games that I own I have acquired legally.
There are many uses of computers and media which come under Fair Use, not the least of which is copying for the sake of backing up.
I ought not be responding to anonymous trolls, but when I see it modded up Insightful, I have to wonder what the hell is going through the moderator's mind.
Why I don't like the PSP
on
Inside the PSP
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· Score: 0, Troll
The main problem that I've had with the PSP is that games which I already own are not playable on the PSP. The disks are different sizes. There is no current easy way to get a hold of blank PSP disks and copy my current games to it for play.
That and the PSP disks look just like birth contol pill disks.
Anyway, these things have been out forever, just not in the U.S., I guess.
Here's a link to the whole article without having to click Next every 5 paragraphs.
The problem with this kind of naming scheme is that no valuable information can be quickly gleaned from the name itself. Neither the function nor form of the amino acid can be determined or inferred easily without resorting to computer-aided decryption of the name itself.
Something easier to remember (not an acronym of this long-ass acronym) that clearly explained the form and function of the amino acid would be much more useful.
In programmer terms, this IUPAC nomenclature is like Hungarian notation, putting too much information about the data into the name without sufficiently ascribing useful information to it.
But it seems to me that a country ought to be able to determine what it imports, especially from possible hostile nations such as the U.S.
If Europe doesn't want the normal Windows operating system, then they are free to mandate that another version be provided. The alternative for Microsoft is to simply abandon the European market altogether, but Europe's a big country and not a market they are loath to give up so easily.
And I disagree with your assertion that this will cause problems down the road. As Microsoft separates the two operating systems into two branches, one Windows Normal edition and one Windows Media-Free edition, they can actually increase jobs in Europe as the local Windows MF version will need to be updated and can most easily be done so within the borders of Europe.
Of course, that is only one possible scenario. The other scenario is that Windows MF shrivels up and dies because no one is interested in the crippled OS. But that's not for Microsoft to decide. As the laws of national sovereignty lay out (though Americans are likely to disagree), each country should be able to decide how it will interact with its neighbors without pressure from external forces. Thus, if Europe wants to have a special version of Windows for themselves, then it is their right. For Microsoft, it's an all or nothing proposition.
I'm just sad that they had to do such a blatant act of nose spiting in the face of the European government. They could have handled this much better.
But this time I really think they've gone too far with their attempts to cripple their own operating system. They are cutting off their nose to spite their face, and it's not like they are going to turn from Mayim Bialik into Jenna von Oy by doing so.
Rather, they submit a broken operating system as their means of working around the EU legal system. What really irks me is that this isn't the first time they've done this kind of thing either. When instructed to remove the IE application, they ripped out all the IE guts and crippled the OS. Now they are ripping out the MP guts and crippling it all over again.
I mean I like Joseph Lawrence as much as the next guy, but when it comes to ability, Michael Stoyanov is what really sold the show. This is how it is with Windows as well. The glitzy application isn't what keeps us coming back. It's the solid foundation underneath that's important.
And shame on the EU for accepting this as anything but contempt of court.
I realize that the preferred technique of debate here is a flurry of ad hominems followed by a couple slippery slope arguments and wrapped up with a huge leap of logic. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Well, yes, actually there is something wrong with it. By automatically labelling anyone who doesn't agree with you as "a knob" or "astroturfer" or some other epithet, you automatically end any rational debate. Maybe after several dozen posts it may be useful to end a debate with a well-formed insult, but to start off the debate by denigrating anyone who doesn't agree with you is hardly a recipe for enlightenment.
This kind of thing happens so much on Slashdot that I guess it's just considered the norm. How sad it is that this chance for rational discussion of WM merits (and your post actually does have some good points about the merits or lack thereof of Blackbox) into a name calling match.
So I went over to the screenshot site (second one from the bottom) and was under-impressed with what they had displayed. I said to myself, "Self, this looks like any other WM." To which I replied, "Yep."
I guess you could say I was crazy, but maybe I'm missing something here. What does this offer that other WMs don't offer?
And it just occurred to me that "small size" is not really a big selling point. Maybe if this was on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM, memory footprint would become a big deal, but if I'm running a system with an actual window manager, not to mention a window server like X, the least of my worries is lack of memory.
I was over on Google-owned Blogger.com the other day and reading a few of the blogs they've got listed there. It dawned on me as I read those blogs that what we are seeing here in the blogging format is a new form of media being created. Whereas the "old media" is a top-down information source where the few media portals (AP, UPI, etc) provide content, blogging provides a bottom-up method of providing very personal interpretations of events from many different sources.
Obviously, the quality and content level of blogs is open to criticism, however because there are simply so many of them out there, there are bound to be gems among the rough. Even Slashdot, which is a type of blog-precursor, is considered by some to be a valid news source. I know I come here when I want to know the latest "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
Now with Yahoo opening up blogging portals, I see this less as a challenge to Google than a win-win for all of us out here in the real world. No longer do we have to live in a world where media is filtered before reaching us, rather WE can decide what we want to know and understand. It's a miracle of current technology, akin to perhaps the printing press or radio in its scope to expand the worlds of each and every one of us.
I think the major problem with Gnome is that it relies on C as a base rather than an object-oriented language like C++ (like KDE). With an OO framework, a single behavioral modification can propagate to all window or widget classes without having to update any other existing code. The ramifications of this are that 1) code reuse is very high so LOC can remain very low and 2) features like skinning become a simple matter of loading an XML config file.
But in a procedural language like C, this kind of action results in reams of code being changed. It's no wonder it's such a difficult project to adapt for release.
While more powerful at a basic functional level than it's successors, C lacks the powerful language features that more mature languages like VC++ and Java provide, which for developers is a double edged sword.
Basically there are two opposing parties in any cellphone you see on the market. The first is the obvious one, the handset maker. The other is the operator (Vodafone, Sprint, etc). While it may seem like these two would normally be a happy bunch. But they aren't.
Handset makers want to stylize their phone as much as possible. Adding features and making their phone stand out from the rest of the pack. Operators want all the phones to support a certain set of basic functionality and fit into a certain form factor. They don't want to allow the handset maker's trademarks overshadow their own. On the other hand, the makers want it to be obvious to the user who the maker of that phone is.
Apple, and to a large extent Microsoft too, have very strong brands. They love branding. That's why we're talking about an iPhone and not an Apple-produced cell phone. But operators don't want that kind of power shifted into the hands of the makers.
So you get what we have here, which is the way he wants it.
If there was nothing to push against, what would cause something to be held back and "ripple" as if there were some sort of repulsive force?
Let's say we've reached the edge of the universe, what happens when we step beyond that boundary? What is out there that would possibly hold back further expansion of our universe?
I must be missing something, but what reason could a nationalized television station possibly have to generate buzz? They've already got a captive audience that is required to pay up front whether they watch the channel or not. Who would think this was some sort of conspiracy to get viewers?
I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. Dr. Who is good TV, and "lost episodes" are as legitimate as mainline stories in my book. It's kind of like the Star Wars books, sure they may not hold as steadfast to the primary memes of the movies, but in some respects that just makes them more intriguing and more related to the Star Wars universe than if they had followed the script rote.
I don't know what Steve's got up his sleeve, but I know that Business 2.0 doesn't like giving out their stuff for free.
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I guess that's kind of what Steve Jobs meant when he said they "just don't get it." Steve isn't the type of guy to go around giving stuff away for free willy nilly. In fact, he's built up Apple from relative obscurity to the powerhouse PC juggernaut it is today. But when he sees an opportunity, he goes for it. And sometimes that opportunity is to build a stronger brand through giving stuff away for free. He seems to be criticizing the RIAA's tactics of suing their customers, when they should be kissing their asses.
I'm not saying that Steve Jobs should be on his knees kissing anyone's ass, but it is quite obvious that he has a knack for reading the market and "knowing" what people instinctively want.
But something like the life or death matter of Terry Schiavo is not even looked at.
I'm all for an "activist court", but I'd rather see them take on the important decisions rather than having them decide whether I can get the local high school basketball game rather than the network broadcast.
Mentifex. The name alone conjures up flamewars of years past on Usenet.
The big question in AI is whether an AI "mind" is more likely to spring up from a handful of rules, or whether a top-down design will bring it about. Mentifex was always in the latter camp.
Those in the former camp, including the Palm founders in the article, always seemed to be on the verge of something, but never seemed to really get any closer to a "mind" than some fuzzy logic.
Slashdot Mirror
While I can usually catch a ride from friends, sometimes it is difficult to do so when they aren't going the same way as me.
If you've ever read Jack Kerouac, you probably remember how he recounted the travels of his protagonists across the U.S. They relied mostly on buses, hitching, and occasionally the ride-share program. This type of thing benefits everyone, really. By encouraging people to ride-share rather than drive individually, the road is freed up from congestion quite a bit. Also, riding in a car is usually a more pleasant experience than riding on a dingy bus.
Less cars on the road, less air pollution from exhaust. Less wear and tear on the highways, less taxes to pay for them.
I'm glad to see they actually read my little email note about adding this kind of service. If it works out, I think this could be a real benefit to those of us of meager means.
I do blame the vendor wholeheartedly. But I also blame CA for their networking software that seems prone to failing in the least graceful ways possible.
Changed vendors, changed software.
But in this day and age, networking software should be a standard feature, not a third-party add-on.
If there's anything I can't stand more than a badly run network, it's "professional" networking software.
At a previous office, our vendor decided to put a throttle on network clients by sticking some kind of network management software on the main server which could only have clients added by certified technicians (namely, them). So what happens when someone decides to bring an 802.11 laptop to the office to do some work? Well, the server software barfs and starts spewing error messages all over the place until finally the server locks up because the disk is full.
I now loathe networking software that is not configurable or expandable without "specialists" to do it for a fee. I just want to plug in my new computer and have it work with the least amount of fuss.
Novell is dead, not because it's software sucks, but because it does what other (better) Free software does and charges outrageous sums. The user pays for the privilege of having Novell run roughshod over the internal network.
Thanks, but no thanks.
I don't think he's on our side... Take a look at this comment:
GM: You say that software doesn't steal content, people steal content. So what do you think of the RIAA's strategy of suing individual file-sharers?
MC: I have no problem with it at all. If you steal, you are wrong. You should have to deal with the consequences. We have plenty of laws on the book to make sure that happens.
Frankly, strong copyright and enforceable contracts are Free Software's biggest friends. Without those two, Free Software would just be BSD software without any sort of legal control over the copying and distributing of derived works.
I think it is more like a MUD or a MOO except played out in a completely different format. What it has in common is that features can be added by participants with relative ease and everyone benefits if they wish to use those features.
Obviously it lacks the dungeon crawling and killing people, but it still retains much of the social interaction. And as a benefit, it emphasizes socially beneficial activities such as sharing and openness rather than grouping and attacking.
It's a bad analogy because the two things being compared are fairly dissimilar, however this kind of "Social bookmarking" is very new and innovative without precedent.
Whether it can turn up something good is another story, but as far as a technology goes, it is pretty neat.
I find this attitude that "if someone is complaining about lack of system freedom it means they are a pirate" highly offensive and ignorant. As a law-abiding citizen, I have never downloaded any copyrighted work illegally. All games that I own I have acquired legally.
There are many uses of computers and media which come under Fair Use, not the least of which is copying for the sake of backing up.
I ought not be responding to anonymous trolls, but when I see it modded up Insightful, I have to wonder what the hell is going through the moderator's mind.
The main problem that I've had with the PSP is that games which I already own are not playable on the PSP. The disks are different sizes. There is no current easy way to get a hold of blank PSP disks and copy my current games to it for play.
That and the PSP disks look just like birth contol pill disks.
Anyway, these things have been out forever, just not in the U.S., I guess.
Here's a link to the whole article without having to click Next every 5 paragraphs.
The problem with this kind of naming scheme is that no valuable information can be quickly gleaned from the name itself. Neither the function nor form of the amino acid can be determined or inferred easily without resorting to computer-aided decryption of the name itself.
Something easier to remember (not an acronym of this long-ass acronym) that clearly explained the form and function of the amino acid would be much more useful.
In programmer terms, this IUPAC nomenclature is like Hungarian notation, putting too much information about the data into the name without sufficiently ascribing useful information to it.
But it mostly just a couple of wires hooked up to a car battery which we held against the battery socket.
Filled the battery in about 5 seconds, IIRC. Much faster than those "drip chargers" which took all night.
But it seems to me that a country ought to be able to determine what it imports, especially from possible hostile nations such as the U.S.
If Europe doesn't want the normal Windows operating system, then they are free to mandate that another version be provided. The alternative for Microsoft is to simply abandon the European market altogether, but Europe's a big country and not a market they are loath to give up so easily.
And I disagree with your assertion that this will cause problems down the road. As Microsoft separates the two operating systems into two branches, one Windows Normal edition and one Windows Media-Free edition, they can actually increase jobs in Europe as the local Windows MF version will need to be updated and can most easily be done so within the borders of Europe.
Of course, that is only one possible scenario. The other scenario is that Windows MF shrivels up and dies because no one is interested in the crippled OS. But that's not for Microsoft to decide. As the laws of national sovereignty lay out (though Americans are likely to disagree), each country should be able to decide how it will interact with its neighbors without pressure from external forces. Thus, if Europe wants to have a special version of Windows for themselves, then it is their right. For Microsoft, it's an all or nothing proposition.
I'm just sad that they had to do such a blatant act of nose spiting in the face of the European government. They could have handled this much better.
But this time I really think they've gone too far with their attempts to cripple their own operating system. They are cutting off their nose to spite their face, and it's not like they are going to turn from Mayim Bialik into Jenna von Oy by doing so.
Rather, they submit a broken operating system as their means of working around the EU legal system. What really irks me is that this isn't the first time they've done this kind of thing either. When instructed to remove the IE application, they ripped out all the IE guts and crippled the OS. Now they are ripping out the MP guts and crippling it all over again.
I mean I like Joseph Lawrence as much as the next guy, but when it comes to ability, Michael Stoyanov is what really sold the show. This is how it is with Windows as well. The glitzy application isn't what keeps us coming back. It's the solid foundation underneath that's important.
And shame on the EU for accepting this as anything but contempt of court.
I realize that the preferred technique of debate here is a flurry of ad hominems followed by a couple slippery slope arguments and wrapped up with a huge leap of logic. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Well, yes, actually there is something wrong with it. By automatically labelling anyone who doesn't agree with you as "a knob" or "astroturfer" or some other epithet, you automatically end any rational debate. Maybe after several dozen posts it may be useful to end a debate with a well-formed insult, but to start off the debate by denigrating anyone who doesn't agree with you is hardly a recipe for enlightenment.
This kind of thing happens so much on Slashdot that I guess it's just considered the norm. How sad it is that this chance for rational discussion of WM merits (and your post actually does have some good points about the merits or lack thereof of Blackbox) into a name calling match.
So I went over to the screenshot site (second one from the bottom) and was under-impressed with what they had displayed. I said to myself, "Self, this looks like any other WM." To which I replied, "Yep."
I guess you could say I was crazy, but maybe I'm missing something here. What does this offer that other WMs don't offer?
And it just occurred to me that "small size" is not really a big selling point. Maybe if this was on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM, memory footprint would become a big deal, but if I'm running a system with an actual window manager, not to mention a window server like X, the least of my worries is lack of memory.
I was over on Google-owned Blogger.com the other day and reading a few of the blogs they've got listed there. It dawned on me as I read those blogs that what we are seeing here in the blogging format is a new form of media being created. Whereas the "old media" is a top-down information source where the few media portals (AP, UPI, etc) provide content, blogging provides a bottom-up method of providing very personal interpretations of events from many different sources.
Obviously, the quality and content level of blogs is open to criticism, however because there are simply so many of them out there, there are bound to be gems among the rough. Even Slashdot, which is a type of blog-precursor, is considered by some to be a valid news source. I know I come here when I want to know the latest "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
Now with Yahoo opening up blogging portals, I see this less as a challenge to Google than a win-win for all of us out here in the real world. No longer do we have to live in a world where media is filtered before reaching us, rather WE can decide what we want to know and understand. It's a miracle of current technology, akin to perhaps the printing press or radio in its scope to expand the worlds of each and every one of us.
Anyone ever thought of putting Gentoo into LiveCD-type format, ala Knoppix?
You could have custom-tailored Linux installation on any hardware with little more than swapping in a CD.
As they say in Robocop, I'd buy that for a dollar.
I think the major problem with Gnome is that it relies on C as a base rather than an object-oriented language like C++ (like KDE). With an OO framework, a single behavioral modification can propagate to all window or widget classes without having to update any other existing code. The ramifications of this are that 1) code reuse is very high so LOC can remain very low and 2) features like skinning become a simple matter of loading an XML config file.
But in a procedural language like C, this kind of action results in reams of code being changed. It's no wonder it's such a difficult project to adapt for release.
While more powerful at a basic functional level than it's successors, C lacks the powerful language features that more mature languages like VC++ and Java provide, which for developers is a double edged sword.
Basically there are two opposing parties in any cellphone you see on the market. The first is the obvious one, the handset maker. The other is the operator (Vodafone, Sprint, etc). While it may seem like these two would normally be a happy bunch. But they aren't.
Handset makers want to stylize their phone as much as possible. Adding features and making their phone stand out from the rest of the pack. Operators want all the phones to support a certain set of basic functionality and fit into a certain form factor. They don't want to allow the handset maker's trademarks overshadow their own. On the other hand, the makers want it to be obvious to the user who the maker of that phone is.
Apple, and to a large extent Microsoft too, have very strong brands. They love branding. That's why we're talking about an iPhone and not an Apple-produced cell phone. But operators don't want that kind of power shifted into the hands of the makers.
So you get what we have here, which is the way he wants it.
If there was nothing to push against, what would cause something to be held back and "ripple" as if there were some sort of repulsive force?
Let's say we've reached the edge of the universe, what happens when we step beyond that boundary? What is out there that would possibly hold back further expansion of our universe?
I must be missing something, but what reason could a nationalized television station possibly have to generate buzz? They've already got a captive audience that is required to pay up front whether they watch the channel or not. Who would think this was some sort of conspiracy to get viewers?
I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. Dr. Who is good TV, and "lost episodes" are as legitimate as mainline stories in my book. It's kind of like the Star Wars books, sure they may not hold as steadfast to the primary memes of the movies, but in some respects that just makes them more intriguing and more related to the Star Wars universe than if they had followed the script rote.
I don't know what Steve's got up his sleeve, but I know that Business 2.0 doesn't like giving out their stuff for free.
The page you requested is available only to magazine customers and AOL members. Subscribe now and you're in...
I guess that's kind of what Steve Jobs meant when he said they "just don't get it." Steve isn't the type of guy to go around giving stuff away for free willy nilly. In fact, he's built up Apple from relative obscurity to the powerhouse PC juggernaut it is today. But when he sees an opportunity, he goes for it. And sometimes that opportunity is to build a stronger brand through giving stuff away for free. He seems to be criticizing the RIAA's tactics of suing their customers, when they should be kissing their asses.
I'm not saying that Steve Jobs should be on his knees kissing anyone's ass, but it is quite obvious that he has a knack for reading the market and "knowing" what people instinctively want.
But something like the life or death matter of Terry Schiavo is not even looked at.
I'm all for an "activist court", but I'd rather see them take on the important decisions rather than having them decide whether I can get the local high school basketball game rather than the network broadcast.
He advertises it on his blog page, but does anyone know where I can download it?
I tried to find it on the Yahoo! CC search page, but just found his blog page.
Mentifex. The name alone conjures up flamewars of years past on Usenet.
The big question in AI is whether an AI "mind" is more likely to spring up from a handful of rules, or whether a top-down design will bring it about. Mentifex was always in the latter camp.
Those in the former camp, including the Palm founders in the article, always seemed to be on the verge of something, but never seemed to really get any closer to a "mind" than some fuzzy logic.
We're still a long way off from Number 5 Alive.
Who wants to be first to post the completely irrelevant "Right to Read" story by fellow bearded person RMS?
Look, you can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might just find that you get what you need.