Why not just focus on existing stuff and forget innovating through new ideas in new software?
I agree with what you're saying completely. I just
didn't see any new ideas here... Innovation doesn't
come from rehashing old ideas just for the sake of
it. It comes from writing something new because the
old system didn't do what you wanted.
If you're a networking guy Packet Filter (PF) is a cool toy to play with.
Calling it a cool toy is underselling it somewhat.
It wipes the floor with any other networking tool
I've ever come across. Quite simply, it's awesome.
Back in the day, I used to be quite impressed with
ipf. But pf just takes things to a whole new level,
and combined with CARP and pfsync, it's pretty
untouchable. After using it for a while, you'll
never want to touch IOS again:-)
a project to create an operating system whose security relied on capabilities rather than the traditional Unix model of root or non-root.
This has been possible in Linux (and some
proprietary Unices) for some time now.
Why the need for a separate OS? But mechanism
alone won't solve your problems. You need to have
suitable policies that make use of those
mechanisms. And as the Fedora guys have found out
with their SELinux adventures, getting the policies
right for any non-trivial system is a bitch.
Technologically, yes. Legally, no. Which is why
Fedora ships with an xmms without MP3 playback.
I assume Debian is the same. IIRC, SuSE are
choosing to take the risk and ship it illegally,
hoping they won't be sued.
What's this talk of Real Player on Linux? I thought Linux didn't suffer from adware!
In many years of exposure to Real Player under
Linux, I've never seen a single ad from it.
Apparently, it's been a problem on Windows, but
it never has been under Linux. Indeed,
Real Player 10 seems to be quite a reasonable
product on Linux. No more proprietary GUI, it
now just looks like any other application, it
loads quickly, and runs well. Looks
like the Helix community stuff might actually be
paying dividends. Now if only they'd open up the
Real codecs...
That said, nothing has really changed. There is
still no legal way for distributions to include
open source
MP3 playback. It's not a major issue for me, since
all of my music is in Ogg Vorbis and/or FLAC
format, but it's annoying when I want to download
a sampler from a band's website and have to go
and grab a separate player before I can hear it.
We have clusters of 2 identical databases in separate cabinets, separate switches, separate Internap power feeds...
What bothers me is that you don't have separate
data centres. I run a reasonably large web
site, but
it's nowhere near the size of LJ. Yet we have multiple geographic sites, so even if the (N+1)
power fails completely in one hosting centre,
we're only down on capacity, not out completely.
I can't believe a site the size of LJ doesn't
do the same...
It has been for the last 2 decades, and I see no
reason to change it now. How the current generation
lives with black on white text on a display screen
is beyond me...
The only things CRTs have over LCDs are [...] resolution/image quality.
See those last two words? Better image quality leads
to less squinting and less eyestrain and/or headaches. That's why I'll stick with CRT. I'm not
going to dispute that a cheap low-end CRT looks
awful. But with the price of CRT screens, there's
zero excuse to use one of those. Quality CRTs are
still the best way to view your computer's graphical
output.
Not to mention the eye strain I get from CRTs, its annoying.
I've never understood why this FUD is perpetuated
so frequently. Empirical evidence shows that LCD
screens give far worse eye strain than CRT screens
(except for the case where your alignment is out --
in which case, fix it!). It's one of the reasons
why I'm sticking with CRT for the forseeable future.
Flat screens just aren't there yet.
ahmen, my father is a statistician of 20+ years and had the same problem. but open office on linux isn't much better so i can't really give him a better suggestion.
Gnumeric is better. As a statistician, he should be avoiding Excel
anyway due to its known innacuracies in calculations. Gnumeric is
better on that front, too.
I can't help but wonder if BitTorrent is the application that finally
pushes people towards Freenet.
That would appear to be the obvious way of decentralizing it, without
requiring platform specific software, and providing anonymity for both
producers and consumers in the process.
You have no midi for the C64.
What you have there is a genuine SIDplayer file.
Almost certainly, yes, but not necessarily.
MIDI interfaces
were available for the C64, and Commodore themselves even made a MIDI keyboard, the MK10.
I still have one.
Look at windows: you clearly specify the installatino directory, and then *all* the files go there.
I can't work out if you're trolling or just
genuinely ignorant. Under Windows, everything goes
in your selected installation directory... except
for the bits that don't. Some
have to go in the system
directories and there are usually
registry entries made. In contrast, if you tell a
Unix application to install in a given directory,
it generally does, and doesn't pollute the file
heirarchy outside of your chosen location. If
you're installing it from an RPM or dpkg, then
it usually does the same, but it's effectively
using a shared install directory between multiple
apps. But
why do you care where it puts the files? Use the
package manager to tell you which files came with
which package, and to remove the package if you're
done with it.
I think I'd add some VMS stuff. Like a Delete attribute.
VMS you can set people to have read/write/execute and delete.
Why? If you have write access, then you can
completely trash the file anyway. The ability
to delete the reference to the file isn't really
relevant if you can alter the contents. I never
understood why VMS had a separate delete attribute.
I just can't see what you gain by having it.
Errrr... me? Serious Sam is probably the best
designed and thought out game in terms of
playability that's been released in the last
5 years, and is the epitome of everything I'm
arguing for. Yes, I'm still playing it. Serious
Sam 2 is the only game I'm aware of that I'm
actively looking forward to.
Marathon was unique for its story. It went beyond the trick novelty of being a first person shooter and actually had pretty decent (for its time) story line.
Does anyone care? I mean really? Sure,
gaming magazines write about the story all
the
time because that's the line that
publishers have fed them.
But gamers simply aren't interested.
All they want to do is
sit down and play the game.
You only have to look at the success of
Doom. It was just a high adreneline gore fest.
Sure, there was a story tacked on as afterthought,
in the great traditions of Llamasoft et al. But
no one really cared. It was the gameplay
that counted, not the story. Or indeed, the
graphics, which at the time were amazing, but
served as little more than a hook to get you
involved with the game. Once there, it was the
gameplay that kept you coming back for more. A
lesson that modern publishers would do well to
remember.
When you absolutely, positively have to
be 1320 feet away,
it's the only way to be sure. As the saying goes,
gasoline is for washing parts, alcohol is for
drinking, nitro is for racing...
OK, so I've looked at the replies to my original post, and given Firefox another go. Here are my observations:
What I like:
The search box can be removed, which recovers my screen real estate. This is good.
Bookmark keywords are a nice idea. I like them
a lot. Enough to consider switching to Firefox
entirely, actually.
The world's most essential extension, the
Mozilla PrefBar, works just as well as it does
in Mozilla.
What I don't like:
It's slow. Despite all the claims to the
contrary, I find it slower than Mozilla. Sure,
the page rendering speed is about the same (as
you'd expect). But the UI elements are noticably
more sluggish.
It's less efficient. Even with keyword searches, I still can't search with as few
keystrokes as I can under Mozilla. A caveat to
that is that if I configure Firefox's default
action to be a normal search rather than an "I'm
feeling lucky" search, then it's actually less
keystrokes (but see my next point). However,
I lose the ability to search individual sites ("site:slashdot.org goatse.cx").
I can do those with a bookmark keyword, with its
extra keystroke hit, which is probably a
reasonable compromise, given the small proportion
of my searches that are done like that.
It's horribly unintuitive. How would
I find out about bookmark keywords? There's no
mention of it in the user preferences, under the
bookmark menu, the tools menu, or in the help
pages. Unless I happened to right click on an
input box, notice the "add a keyword" menu item,
and then search Google to find out what it was
referring to, there is no way for me to find
out about it. Similarly, how do I know that
Firefox will assume that something in the location
bar that doesn't look like a URL will be considered
search terms? How do I change where and how it searches for them? Yes, you can do all of these
things and more, but you need to know about them
first.
The wonderful mozex extension installs, but
can't be configured. Under Mozilla, it appears
as a category in my preferences dialog. Not so
under Firefox. I conceed that this could be a
bug in the extension
itself rather than in Firefox itself.
Firefox doesn't appear to support proper cookie
management. Under Mozilla, I have a default
"ask me first" before a site can set cookies.
Normally I select no. Once I've banned a site
from setting cookies, I can easily revert back
to the default "ask me" via the Tools -> Cookie
Manager -> Use Default Cookie Permissions menu
for those sites that won't work without cookies.
I can't see any way of achieving the same under
Firefox.
In summary, then, Firefox has come on a long way
since I last looked at it. Armed with the extra
knowledge I know have, it can be beaten into
shape to be quite a usable browser. But
Mozilla gives me all I need out of the box, where
under Firefox I need to wade through obscure,
undocumented configuration options to achieve the
same thing, and in places I can't see how to do
it at all.
I'll be sticking with Mozilla, then, at least
for now. Keyword searches are awfully tempting,
though, so I'll keep an eye on Firefox, and if
they ever replace half of the features they
removed from Mozilla, then maybe I'll switch.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with what you're saying completely. I just didn't see any new ideas here... Innovation doesn't come from rehashing old ideas just for the sake of it. It comes from writing something new because the old system didn't do what you wanted.
Calling it a cool toy is underselling it somewhat. It wipes the floor with any other networking tool I've ever come across. Quite simply, it's awesome. Back in the day, I used to be quite impressed with ipf. But pf just takes things to a whole new level, and combined with CARP and pfsync, it's pretty untouchable. After using it for a while, you'll never want to touch IOS again :-)
This has been possible in Linux (and some proprietary Unices) for some time now. Why the need for a separate OS? But mechanism alone won't solve your problems. You need to have suitable policies that make use of those mechanisms. And as the Fedora guys have found out with their SELinux adventures, getting the policies right for any non-trivial system is a bitch.
Technologically, yes. Legally, no. Which is why Fedora ships with an xmms without MP3 playback. I assume Debian is the same. IIRC, SuSE are choosing to take the risk and ship it illegally, hoping they won't be sued.
In many years of exposure to Real Player under Linux, I've never seen a single ad from it. Apparently, it's been a problem on Windows, but it never has been under Linux. Indeed, Real Player 10 seems to be quite a reasonable product on Linux. No more proprietary GUI, it now just looks like any other application, it loads quickly, and runs well. Looks like the Helix community stuff might actually be paying dividends. Now if only they'd open up the Real codecs...
That said, nothing has really changed. There is still no legal way for distributions to include open source MP3 playback. It's not a major issue for me, since all of my music is in Ogg Vorbis and/or FLAC format, but it's annoying when I want to download a sampler from a band's website and have to go and grab a separate player before I can hear it.
What about your customers on non-Windows platforms?
What bothers me is that you don't have separate data centres. I run a reasonably large web site, but it's nowhere near the size of LJ. Yet we have multiple geographic sites, so even if the (N+1) power fails completely in one hosting centre, we're only down on capacity, not out completely. I can't believe a site the size of LJ doesn't do the same...
Gnumeric already works on OS X, and if Apple had any sense, they'd bundle a rebranded version of that.
It has been for the last 2 decades, and I see no reason to change it now. How the current generation lives with black on white text on a display screen is beyond me...
See those last two words? Better image quality leads to less squinting and less eyestrain and/or headaches. That's why I'll stick with CRT. I'm not going to dispute that a cheap low-end CRT looks awful. But with the price of CRT screens, there's zero excuse to use one of those. Quality CRTs are still the best way to view your computer's graphical output.
Oh for a -1 Inarticulate Rambling modifier...
I've never understood why this FUD is perpetuated so frequently. Empirical evidence shows that LCD screens give far worse eye strain than CRT screens (except for the case where your alignment is out -- in which case, fix it!). It's one of the reasons why I'm sticking with CRT for the forseeable future. Flat screens just aren't there yet.
Gnumeric is better. As a statistician, he should be avoiding Excel anyway due to its known innacuracies in calculations. Gnumeric is better on that front, too.
Only in the US. Everywhere else, when you take a degree in science, you study... science!
Judging by the article, there would appear to be at least 1,500,000 very good reasons...
I can't help but wonder if BitTorrent is the application that finally pushes people towards Freenet. That would appear to be the obvious way of decentralizing it, without requiring platform specific software, and providing anonymity for both producers and consumers in the process.
Almost certainly, yes, but not necessarily. MIDI interfaces were available for the C64, and Commodore themselves even made a MIDI keyboard, the MK10. I still have one.
I can't work out if you're trolling or just genuinely ignorant. Under Windows, everything goes in your selected installation directory... except for the bits that don't. Some have to go in the system directories and there are usually registry entries made. In contrast, if you tell a Unix application to install in a given directory, it generally does, and doesn't pollute the file heirarchy outside of your chosen location. If you're installing it from an RPM or dpkg, then it usually does the same, but it's effectively using a shared install directory between multiple apps. But why do you care where it puts the files? Use the package manager to tell you which files came with which package, and to remove the package if you're done with it.
Why? If you have write access, then you can completely trash the file anyway. The ability to delete the reference to the file isn't really relevant if you can alter the contents. I never understood why VMS had a separate delete attribute. I just can't see what you gain by having it.
Antennae is correct when talking biology.
Actually, "antennae" is correct for both, but "antennas" is only correct for electronics. Source: The OED.
Errrr... me? Serious Sam is probably the best designed and thought out game in terms of playability that's been released in the last 5 years, and is the epitome of everything I'm arguing for. Yes, I'm still playing it. Serious Sam 2 is the only game I'm aware of that I'm actively looking forward to.
Does anyone care? I mean really? Sure, gaming magazines write about the story all the time because that's the line that publishers have fed them. But gamers simply aren't interested. All they want to do is sit down and play the game. You only have to look at the success of Doom. It was just a high adreneline gore fest. Sure, there was a story tacked on as afterthought, in the great traditions of Llamasoft et al. But no one really cared. It was the gameplay that counted, not the story. Or indeed, the graphics, which at the time were amazing, but served as little more than a hook to get you involved with the game. Once there, it was the gameplay that kept you coming back for more. A lesson that modern publishers would do well to remember.
When you absolutely, positively have to be 1320 feet away, it's the only way to be sure. As the saying goes, gasoline is for washing parts, alcohol is for drinking, nitro is for racing...
Who?
What I like:
What I don't like:
In summary, then, Firefox has come on a long way since I last looked at it. Armed with the extra knowledge I know have, it can be beaten into shape to be quite a usable browser. But Mozilla gives me all I need out of the box, where under Firefox I need to wade through obscure, undocumented configuration options to achieve the same thing, and in places I can't see how to do it at all.
I'll be sticking with Mozilla, then, at least for now. Keyword searches are awfully tempting, though, so I'll keep an eye on Firefox, and if they ever replace half of the features they removed from Mozilla, then maybe I'll switch.