You aren't in any position to lecture us on bad government.
Sure we are. Your government sucks. Yes, so does ours, but I think yours is probably worse.
What we lack is a) a consititution that documents our rights, and b) an organisation like
the ACLU which keeps an eye on the government to try and ensure they don't step out of line
too much. So we just tend to roll over and do whatever the government says is a good idea.
On that front, we're even more a nation of sheep than you are. Sigh.
Good to see you put both assets to use on astradyne.co.uk
Errr... yes. Welcome to web page design, circa 1998:-) Yeah, it sucks, and I've been meaning to
get around to doing something with it. But, well, I haven't yet! Yes, it's a hideous
example. Fortunately, I don't use it as a means of attracting business, or showcasing
my skills to potential clients.
Surely the choice of font ought to be something individuals can set up in their web browser.
Indeed. The article makes some reasonable points, but falls over by using
http://www.jaredigital.com and
http://www.coudal.com as sample sites.
Both of those make schoolboy errors when it comes to web typography. They
override the user's default font, and they specify explicit font sizes in
pixels. Which might work fine for them, but not everyone has the same size
or resolution display that they do. Font sizes should always be
given as a percentage of the user's preferred height, and never specified
explicitly. Sigh.
(Yes, in addition to being a web page designer, I'm a typography freak)
I don't own a single BT device. I don't really know anyone who does.
And I can't think of many people I know that
don't own a bluetooth device. I have a
laptop, a mobile phone, a PDA, and a hands free
headset, all with bluetooth. In particular, it's
virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone without
bluetooth these days. Yeah, I'd say bluetooth is
definitely a success.
No, no, no, no NO. We don't want hardware vendors to write drivers. [...]
All a vendor needs to do is to make good, solid interface documentation, and make it available without NDAs and other childish restrictions
I don't have any mod points, otherwise they'd be winging their way to
you right now. The best I can do is repeat the salient points of your
post here in the hopes that people get to see it.
I'm 100% in agreement with you.
To gain momentum Linux needs a central installation architecture
that all applications must use to properly install and run. The OS
should ensure that applications are installed before they can be
executed.
Perhaps there's some truth to this. If Linux is to gain more widespread
adoption, then maybe that would help. If so, then I personally hope Linux
remains a niche OS. What he doesn't seem to grasp is that some of us would
rather remain true to the Unix ideals and philosophy than to chase mass
market popularity. I want to just be able to extract an archive
and run a binary contained within. I don't want to have to inform the OS
that I've done so, and have to "install" the software. I want to be able
to compile an app and run it from my home directory. Why should I have
to register it with the OS in order to do so?
I more or less agree with the review above, although it does seem a bit too harsh in places.
Agreed. I installed a Windwos partition on my machine for the first time in
3 years or so specifically so I could play SS2. I was a bit disappointed, in
that it seems a bit watered down. The violence is a bit more cartoon like
than before, and there's less of a feeling of utter terror as you're
overwhelmed by hordes of enemies. But that said, I still enjoy the game, and
felt the review was overly harsh. I'd have given it an 8/10 (as opposed to the
original which gets an 11).
And nobody at Sony bothered to vet a piece of software that was destined to be shipped with millions of CDs?
How? If you've ever worked in a software engineering team, you'd know that the
chances of a software tester even knowing what to look for are slim at best.
They'd test that it performed as it was supposed to do ("Does it let me copy the CD? No. Looks good to me"). They won't have checked for unexpected side effects,
and even had they done so, they almost certainly wouldn't have know the inner
workings of Windows well enough to detect software like this. There's an
argument for Sony's purchasing guys not doing sufficient due diligence before
buying the product, but blaming the testers? That's just not really reasonable.
Seriously folks, when was the last time you heard yourself say, "It's a good thing I had that camera in my phone, or I would have missed that!".
Actually, quite often. It's handy to know that wherever you are, you have a camera
with you. OK, so it's not great quality, but it's good enough for a lot of uses.
If you've never installed OpenBSD before, it's going to take you some time to familiarize yourself with the OpenBSD install process.
It's not all nice and pretty and nice like Linux, Windows or OSX.
It requires some practice, I'd say.
From personal experience, I can say that from never having installed OpenBSD (or indeed, any of the BSDs) before
to a fully working, secure internet facing server took me
about 2 hours. The only slightly non-intuitive bit is the
disk partitioning.
Most linux people use a browser string to look like windows so sites wont reject them.
Errr... no. Most Linux users will use the default setting for their browser, which for
most people will not identify them at using Windows or IE. Yes, a very small number of
people will do this, but to claim that it's "most" is just laughable.
Of course, all this assumes that HitMovie has already been released to DVD - HitMovie.avi is typically available before the movie's first shown in theaters.
You say that like it's a good thing. Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies
cost money to make. A lot of money. Yet you're proposing that the best way to view those
movies is to download an unauthorised copy from the net before it's even hit the cinemas.
That brings in precisely zero revenue to recoup the cost of making the film. I hate to
break it to you, but there won't be a HitMovie.avi for you to download in a
few years if this becomes the norm.
For those of us with gmail accouts. Start moving to googlemail now, whether it's required in the future or not.
Nope. I'll stick with gmail.com for now. I suspect I'm about to
immediately start accessing it through a proxy in Canada, too,
just to be on the safe side.
Even if Google lose this case, they're going to be hard pushed
to implement any technological solution that prevents existing
gmail.com addresses from working in the UK but not elsewhere.
My money is on me being able to keep the gmail.com address.
Ha ha ha ha ha. I used to work for them until a couple of months ago,
and you will never find a more useless bunch of beaurocratic fools.
They are anything but on the ball. They are, however, running scared.
LTSB has suffered abnormally high losses due to fraud last year, and they're flailing
around clutching at straws to try and find a solution. I told them that the "memorable
phrase" thing wouldn't work for long, and wouldn't provide much extra security, but they
went ahead with it anyway.
It'll be interesting to see if a widescale rollout of tokens
(IIRC, they're rebadged SecurID) leads to a more sustained attack on the token generation
algorithm. It's rumoured to have already been cracked, but there's precious little information available about it if it has been.
A friend in the industry tells me he's converted at least a dozen pro audio editors to ardour
Indeed. I'm surprised the article didn't cover Sweep,
which has also been making inroads into some professional studios, and has some high profile supporters (Pixar being the obvious one).
It would have been nice if it supported header rows locked for scrolling like the other two (Calc, Excel), but it doesn't. That, I can live with.
Sure it does. Position your cursor in the top left cell of the
section you wish to scroll. Then View->Freeze Panes and everything
above and to the left of that cell will be locked.
I believe one of the factors slowing acceptance of OpenOffice in many departments and small businesses is that Calc doesn't have a stable sort
And you're using OO Calc why? Gnumeric is far and away the better spreadsheet.
Many shops use spreadsheets as a kind of quick-and-dirty database, and they rely on the ability to sort on 4 or more columns. Calc can only support sorting on 3.
Again, see Gnumeric. Now available for Windows, too.
I don't see how you can call any of these Bluetooth features "cutting edge".
That was going to be my comment. OBEX is hardly a new protocol,
and it's been fully implemented on every bluetooth phone I've
seen in the last few years. Indeed, even on pre-bluetooth phones,
OBEX was supported over IR. Bluetooth just speeds up the transfer somewhat.
I still chose to spend money on Photoshop because I can at leats get things done in Photoshop. I don't have the time or energy to try and figure out what the hell The Gimp wants me to do in order to get it to do common tasks.
That's funny... I feel exactly the opposite. I use GIMP because it lets me achieve
what I'm trying to achieve. I don't have the time or energy to try and work out the
combination of mystic runes needed to persude Photoshop to do what I want. I appreciate
that I'm in the minority here, but the fact remains that I find GIMP to be obvious
and easy to use, while I find Photoshop to be awkward and unintuitive.
And of course, none of this has any relevance to the discussion. GIMP and Xara/Inkscape/Sodipodi
serve two different markets, and to say that one diverts development effort away from
the other is just ridiculous.
The only cluster that is different is the Tru64 cluster which has a clustered file-system.
Really? While DEC were
certainly at the bleeding edge as far as clustering was concerned,
there are now plenty of options for clustered filesytems. Vertias
are making big money on their clustered storage management offerings.
You could also look at GFS or OCFS. IIRC, DG/UX had a clustered
filesystem, too.
Don't get me wrong, TruCluster had some nice features, and is
still probably the easier cluster software
I've met to work with. But it
sucked in some ways, too (use of rsh was hardcoded, for example --
to the point where Compaq provided a patch to turn/bin/rsh into
a wrapper around ssh because it was easier than fixing TruCluster
to remove all the hardcoded references to rsh).
Blueyonder are rolling out a 10Mbit service, and they are one of the biggest uk broadband isps.
My ISP does 2Mb/s pretty much everywhere throughout the UK, 8Mb/s for those exchanges that can handle it (for the same
price as 2Mb/s, too!), and they
announced a
24Mb/s service back in June, but again that's restricted to those exchanges that support it. My exchange is
due for an 8Mb/s upgrade in the next couple of months, so I suspect it'll be a while before I get to see 24Mb/s:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Sure we are. Your government sucks. Yes, so does ours, but I think yours is probably worse. What we lack is a) a consititution that documents our rights, and b) an organisation like the ACLU which keeps an eye on the government to try and ensure they don't step out of line too much. So we just tend to roll over and do whatever the government says is a good idea. On that front, we're even more a nation of sheep than you are. Sigh.
Errr... yes. Welcome to web page design, circa 1998 :-) Yeah, it sucks, and I've been meaning to
get around to doing something with it. But, well, I haven't yet! Yes, it's a hideous
example. Fortunately, I don't use it as a means of attracting business, or showcasing
my skills to potential clients.
Indeed. The article makes some reasonable points, but falls over by using http://www.jaredigital.com and http://www.coudal.com as sample sites. Both of those make schoolboy errors when it comes to web typography. They override the user's default font, and they specify explicit font sizes in pixels. Which might work fine for them, but not everyone has the same size or resolution display that they do. Font sizes should always be given as a percentage of the user's preferred height, and never specified explicitly. Sigh.
(Yes, in addition to being a web page designer, I'm a typography freak)
And I can't think of many people I know that don't own a bluetooth device. I have a laptop, a mobile phone, a PDA, and a hands free headset, all with bluetooth. In particular, it's virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone without bluetooth these days. Yeah, I'd say bluetooth is definitely a success.
Ha ha ha ha. You're a very funny man.
I don't have any mod points, otherwise they'd be winging their way to you right now. The best I can do is repeat the salient points of your post here in the hopes that people get to see it. I'm 100% in agreement with you.
Perhaps there's some truth to this. If Linux is to gain more widespread adoption, then maybe that would help. If so, then I personally hope Linux remains a niche OS. What he doesn't seem to grasp is that some of us would rather remain true to the Unix ideals and philosophy than to chase mass market popularity. I want to just be able to extract an archive and run a binary contained within. I don't want to have to inform the OS that I've done so, and have to "install" the software. I want to be able to compile an app and run it from my home directory. Why should I have to register it with the OS in order to do so?
That's a strange definition of "mostly" you have there. Admittedly, it's some important components, but "partly" would be far more accurate.
Not even close. Prior to that came:
Plus, the myriad flight sims throughout the mid '80s, space games like Elite, and I'm sure many others.
Agreed. I installed a Windwos partition on my machine for the first time in 3 years or so specifically so I could play SS2. I was a bit disappointed, in that it seems a bit watered down. The violence is a bit more cartoon like than before, and there's less of a feeling of utter terror as you're overwhelmed by hordes of enemies. But that said, I still enjoy the game, and felt the review was overly harsh. I'd have given it an 8/10 (as opposed to the original which gets an 11).
How? If you've ever worked in a software engineering team, you'd know that the chances of a software tester even knowing what to look for are slim at best. They'd test that it performed as it was supposed to do ("Does it let me copy the CD? No. Looks good to me"). They won't have checked for unexpected side effects, and even had they done so, they almost certainly wouldn't have know the inner workings of Windows well enough to detect software like this. There's an argument for Sony's purchasing guys not doing sufficient due diligence before buying the product, but blaming the testers? That's just not really reasonable.
I've been Tet for nearly 20 years. I liked the name so much, I even changed my name in the real world...
Actually, quite often. It's handy to know that wherever you are, you have a camera with you. OK, so it's not great quality, but it's good enough for a lot of uses.
From personal experience, I can say that from never having installed OpenBSD (or indeed, any of the BSDs) before to a fully working, secure internet facing server took me about 2 hours. The only slightly non-intuitive bit is the disk partitioning.
Errr... no. Most Linux users will use the default setting for their browser, which for most people will not identify them at using Windows or IE. Yes, a very small number of people will do this, but to claim that it's "most" is just laughable.
You say that like it's a good thing. Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies cost money to make. A lot of money. Yet you're proposing that the best way to view those movies is to download an unauthorised copy from the net before it's even hit the cinemas. That brings in precisely zero revenue to recoup the cost of making the film. I hate to break it to you, but there won't be a HitMovie.avi for you to download in a few years if this becomes the norm.
Nope. I'll stick with gmail.com for now. I suspect I'm about to immediately start accessing it through a proxy in Canada, too, just to be on the safe side. Even if Google lose this case, they're going to be hard pushed to implement any technological solution that prevents existing gmail.com addresses from working in the UK but not elsewhere. My money is on me being able to keep the gmail.com address.
BTW, hello! How's life back in Scotland?
Ha ha ha ha ha. I used to work for them until a couple of months ago, and you will never find a more useless bunch of beaurocratic fools. They are anything but on the ball. They are, however, running scared. LTSB has suffered abnormally high losses due to fraud last year, and they're flailing around clutching at straws to try and find a solution. I told them that the "memorable phrase" thing wouldn't work for long, and wouldn't provide much extra security, but they went ahead with it anyway.
It'll be interesting to see if a widescale rollout of tokens (IIRC, they're rebadged SecurID) leads to a more sustained attack on the token generation algorithm. It's rumoured to have already been cracked, but there's precious little information available about it if it has been.
Indeed. I'm surprised the article didn't cover Sweep, which has also been making inroads into some professional studios, and has some high profile supporters (Pixar being the obvious one).
Sure it does. Position your cursor in the top left cell of the section you wish to scroll. Then View->Freeze Panes and everything above and to the left of that cell will be locked.
And you're using OO Calc why? Gnumeric is far and away the better spreadsheet.
Many shops use spreadsheets as a kind of quick-and-dirty database, and they rely on the ability to sort on 4 or more columns. Calc can only support sorting on 3.
Again, see Gnumeric. Now available for Windows, too.
That was going to be my comment. OBEX is hardly a new protocol, and it's been fully implemented on every bluetooth phone I've seen in the last few years. Indeed, even on pre-bluetooth phones, OBEX was supported over IR. Bluetooth just speeds up the transfer somewhat.
That's funny... I feel exactly the opposite. I use GIMP because it lets me achieve what I'm trying to achieve. I don't have the time or energy to try and work out the combination of mystic runes needed to persude Photoshop to do what I want. I appreciate that I'm in the minority here, but the fact remains that I find GIMP to be obvious and easy to use, while I find Photoshop to be awkward and unintuitive.
And of course, none of this has any relevance to the discussion. GIMP and Xara/Inkscape/Sodipodi serve two different markets, and to say that one diverts development effort away from the other is just ridiculous.
Really? While DEC were certainly at the bleeding edge as far as clustering was concerned, there are now plenty of options for clustered filesytems. Vertias are making big money on their clustered storage management offerings. You could also look at GFS or OCFS. IIRC, DG/UX had a clustered filesystem, too.
Don't get me wrong, TruCluster had some nice features, and is still probably the easier cluster software I've met to work with. But it sucked in some ways, too (use of rsh was hardcoded, for example -- to the point where Compaq provided a patch to turn /bin/rsh into
a wrapper around ssh because it was easier than fixing TruCluster
to remove all the hardcoded references to rsh).
My ISP does 2Mb/s pretty much everywhere throughout the UK, 8Mb/s for those exchanges that can handle it (for the same price as 2Mb/s, too!), and they announced a 24Mb/s service back in June, but again that's restricted to those exchanges that support it. My exchange is due for an 8Mb/s upgrade in the next couple of months, so I suspect it'll be a while before I get to see 24Mb/s :-(