Unfortunately here in the US, the patent office has actually stated that they do not have the technical skills or resources to evaluate even a small percentage of patent applications. They just accept them, and let people deal with it in court.
Sort of makes the concept of patents silly huh?
Put enough techno-jargon in the application, and you probably could patent a biological waste disposal system (to paraphrase another comment) and sue everyone's ass. In fact not only could you, but that's what the patent office recommends you do.
The real problem is that it costs an average of a million US dollars to fight a parent through the courts. The trick is, then, to patent something that lots of companies need, and make sure the license cost is under that amount for any individual company. You'll never get sued over it, because its not worth it to the companies, and AFAIK you can't file class-action patent challanges.
In my book the three killer apps for me under Linux would be Lightwave, Cool Edit Pro, and Eudora.
Lightwave is on a bunch of platforms, and seems to generate its own UI widgets, I wonder what would be involved in Newtek actually doing a Linux port? Eudora is probably pretty portable too.
E-mail campaign anyone?
Cool Edit Pro seems very tied to the Windows system, so there's not much chance there. Its a shame there's not anything comparable that actually works right now.
Suns in another interesting pickle where they have invested a lot of time and effort and money into Java, and it hasn't taken off and become the defacto standard the way they assumed it would. I'd guess the powers-that-be at Sun behind the iPlanet stuff and the powers-that-be at Sun behind Java probably don't see eye-to-eye on this one.
Sun's contributions to Apache and other opensource packages competing with Netscape... er... iPlanet products only serves to hurt the needs of AOL as a company to have their iPlanet products more widely used. I'd be wary of the intentions of a company that has a vested interest in their proprietary systems being more robust and higher performing than the systems they're "contributing" to. If upper management keep their fingers out of it, it'll probably be a good thing, but until the code from Sun is Open Source with a non-revokable license, its all still up in the air.
The Jakarta site says that the referance code from Sun has not yet been delivered to the Jakarta team. Has that in fact changed?
Mozilla is a more respectable corporate opensource contribution, because they gave the code from the start, and continue to spend a lot of money developing it. AOL has stated plainly that they're doing it because they want the rendering engine and other components for Navigator 5/AOL 5. But everyone else makes out too, and they've never tried to make Navigator commercial-only. Any contributions from Netscape and Sun to other opensource projects are being done for different reasons -- because they can't use the progress made in them in their closed-source applications.
Throwing $$$ around to unseat Microsoft (a lot of the motivation, I'd guess) will only go so far. I feel uneasy about Sun's motivations in the iPlanet/AOL/Netscape arrangement, particularly given their contributions to supporting Linux, Apache, etc. They're a company that has built a business model out of changing directions faster than the earlier poor decisions can sink the company.
This mozilla bashing going on in the media is so tiring! It comes from two-bit reporters who likely have never seen Mozilla, and are just quoting FUD generated by other two-bit reporters. Mozilla is a fantastic piece of software. Considering the current incarnation has only been in development for eight or nine months, its make remarkable progress.
I think this is a knee-jerk reaction pushed by Sun to combat the fact that Netscape's name only has consumer value, not developer value which is the target of the "iPlant" marketing program.
I think Sun and AOL/Netscape are trying to take their existing products that aren't necessarily so highly regarded and brand them under another moniker to hide their roots. I'd expect product names to start changing too, so less clue-full developers who aren't watching these things may end up not realizing what the packages they're looking at actually are.
Sun's also in a tough position, as operating systems like Linux are becoming more capable of mission critical applications on Intel, Alpha, and other lower cost hardware. They're losing their monopoly on high-performance fault-tolerant systems.
I think there's also a growing trend (not growing fast enough, however) for companies developing major eApplications (can I coin that term?) to start utilizing network application architects to properly design the software, hardware, and network to provide better reliability, scalability and fault tolerance through intellegent system design rather than purchasing bigger iron. That trend, as it continues, will only serve to hurt Sun/Netscape more, because they're not going to be able to justify their extremely high hardware costs, and can't keep up with the pace of development in packages like Apache and JServ where high-performance fault-tolerant network application architecture is concerned.
I think its going to end up like all the other iProducts, like the iMac, iBook, etc. Marketing, marketing, marketing. With the real value of the product fairly low on technical merits when compared to price of competing products. Management types will like it...
Unless the card is a standard PC-Card... then it may not matter what system its plugged into, particularly once Linux drivers are around for it, since the drivers can be ported to other architectures...
That's a rather tasty lookin' fruit, especially if it'll run Linux. Screen's kinda small, but if the LinuxPPC folks can get Linux running on there and the Sheepshaver people ever finish the Linux port of Sheepshaver, that'd be a nice little toy to have...
Wonder how quick Linux support will be on it, and if the airbridge will work too?
Could be worse, get one of those new dual 750 mhz Alpha systems... at 750mgz, those suckers are practically radiating microwaves... how about two of those warmin' the boys?
Wasn't this chair on here a few months ago? Or did I actually see something somewhere else before it showed up on Slashdot?
Telco's do NOT have a monopoly over DSL. Half the country that has DSL wouldn't have it if they did. For example here in Connecticut, SNET/SBC have been dragging their feet for years with DSL. We've had (and probably still have) the highest ISDN prices in the country.
In the last six months here, and the last year or two nationwide, some companies have choosen to bypass the telco and purchase alarm circuits between their facility and their clients, and provide DSL that way. Some times it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Kind of silly that joe-blow ISP can get DSL working and a telco monopoly can't.
Its like a train wreck. Stuck PHP4 on one of my testing servers, virtually none of the existing base of PHP3 code seems to work properly.
Has anyone had much luck with it?
Some code elements are obvious enough why they don't work. I'm not clear exactly why they would no longer allow non-static defaults to parameters in class constructors. Much of my code doesn't work because of that, but that can be (much less elegantly) fixed. They claim there's not very many situations where you'd want to do that, but I can think of dozens of them.
Also, PHP4 doesn't seem to like returning instantiated objects from methods in a class. I'm not clear why it wouldn't allow that, but it craps out with a parse error. Its possible that error messages in PHP4/Zend suck, as well, since that particular one isn't a documented incompatability, and perhaps its saying the error is on that line when the error is in the parsing of constructor for the object being returned.
(if that wasn't clear, code like this doesn't seem to work:)
function my_function($var = "") { return new OtherObject ($this, $var); }
Worked fine in PHP3. The error message sucks, so its not clear if the error is in the returning of the object, in the passing of my current object to the new object, or possibly in the constructor for the object.
Has anyone done any serious OO coding in PHP3 and had it work cleanly in PHP4? I recognize that a lot of the OO functionality wasn't documented, and should've known it could be changed, but some of this stuff isn't rocket science, and works in most other OO languages.
Anyway, good in concept, but looks like I'll be sticking to PHP3. I wonder how long development will continue on the PHP3 code base...
I'm a bit concerned about this passage in the QPL license they're using:
6. You may develop application programs, reusable components and other software items that link with the original or modified versions of the Software. These items, when distributed, are subject to the following requirements:
a. You must ensure that all recipients of machine-executable forms of these items are also able to receive and use the complete machine-readable source code to the items without any charge beyond the costs of data transfer.
b. You must explicitly license all recipients of your items to use and re-distribute original and modified versions of the items in both machine-executable and source code forms. The recipients must be able to do so without any charges whatsoever, and they must be able to re-distribute to anyone they choose.
c. If the items are not available to the general public, and the initial developer of the Software requests a copy of the items, then you must supply one.
This seems like total B.S. to me, and such a radical departure from how PHP3 was licensed, to render PHP4/Zend completely useless in a commercial environment. It makes it seem like there may potentially be a liability if an ISP is using Zend on their server, and a customer develops extensions for their website and doesn't make them freely available. There also isn't a clear distinction made between binary extensions, and external libraries of functions written in PHP.
Anyone else see this as a concern? Maybe its time to fork the PHP development, and get a similar engine to Zend distributed where that's not as significant an issue.
Its my understanding with GPL I've got every right to code a commercial non-opensource package that utilizes its functionality, as long as I either do not distribute the GPL'd software, or use it embedded into the binary form of my program? (Like the new CodeWarrior for GNU package...)
Just because its in "The Science of Star Trek" or whatever that silly book is, doesn't mean its scientific fact.
There is no good quantum theory of gravity, at least there wasn't a few years ago, and I'd think I would've read something about that. Gravity still isn't well understood.
Either way the original premise of this thread was just plain wrong too, that the size of a black hole would affect its ability to "suck" in matter. AFAIK there's no theory that they'd be charged entities, so you'd have gravity pulling stuff towards it, and nothing pushing it away. The only hope in that case was that it for some unknown reason passed out of the range of the matter in the earth quickly, or it evaporated faster than it was initially able to suck in the energy.
I mentioned in another post the book Cosm, which is a fictional story on this exact topic. One idea in there was that the mass of the object in question kept growing because they didn't realize it was there and shut the collider down immediately. There's no reason that wouldn't be the case.
The point, however, is that the science that predicts that a black hole could occur is the bad science.
This story has been reported over and over and over in the last few years, all having to do with the accellerator on Long Island. Its bad science, no better than other bad science like the breast implant issues, cancer from high-tension power lines or any other anti-science drivel that seems to be produced in such mass quantities. Reactions more powerful than the ones they're talking about happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If the possibility was anything more than infintesimal, we wouldn't exist. The fact that we DO exist is proof that even should such a reaction happen, its probably not stable, or is quickly counteracted by some other reaction.
On a side note though, there was a book that came out a year or two ago, Cosm that dealt specifically with these issues at that specific accellerator I think. Its sci-fi, but I thought it was entertaining. Worth reading if you can get it at the library. Hell, its Gregory Benford, so you can't go THAT wrong.
God, this pro-tech-union crap is getting so old. Are people really that dense? Does any of the people who think a union would be any good at all have any concept of labor relations or what a problem unions are when they're in industries like the high-tech ones today -- where the best vote people have is with their feet.
The problem here isn't the businesses. The businesses can't control the cost of housing or the fact that there is a shortage, just as they can't control the fact that there are far few qualified workers for the positions they've got than there are positions open. The latter pushes salaries up, the former pushes housing up, neither are the fault of the corporations, and neither can be controlled by a union!
I just can't figure out what that's so unclear to some people. What do you want, a union to force salaries to be even higher? Get real. They're too high as it is. (Not that I'm complaining!) But companies are being crushed under the pressure of extremely high IT salaries. Its common in companies for mid-level IT workers to be making as much as upper management, which causes a lot of friction in the companies. The only companies not feeling the crunch are the ones with billions of virtual dollars from over-priced stock valuations, which have a suprise coming to them when (not if) the market crashes. (Which it will, any second year economics student knows the economy is in a non-sustainable pattern, and none of the internet companies can justify 1/100th their stock value!)
This is just like the B.S. in that story about 60 and 80 hour weeks that was posted on slashdot a week ago. IF YOU"RE NOT HAPPY WITH YOUR SITUATION, YOUR FEET TALK LOUDER THAN YOU CAN! Leave your job. Take another. Unless you're fooling yourself about your skill level, you should have no problem. You'll probably get a raise. And if you've got a family and are concerned about being able to provide for them, there's quite a few technology hot spots in the mid-west, Dallas, or places like North Carolina where the pay is less, the cost of living is a lot less, and you won't be griping about being poor making $60,000 a year.
If YOU Seumas, are making low wages, working double hours or living in low income housing, I'd suggest another career or a serious rethinking of your strategy in planning your career. Because its not hard these days to make a very comfortable living working the hours you want and living in a rather nice house. If you (or anyone else on Slashdot) isn't, than you're making bad choices, and that's not anything a union can fix. Unions make bad choices for everyone. At least bad choices you make don't affect me or anyone else right now.
High property rates (you meantioned $600 for a small studio) are nothing new, and not IT-related. Apartments in central Boston have always been more expensive than even that -- I know people spending $1600 a month on a one bedroom... NYC is high, I almost spent $1300 on a studio. If you choose to work in any job in a city, you're choosing the higher cost of living for a shorter commute, or other benefits of city life. Can't hack that? Bad choice on your part, yet again.
Sounds very interesting. Interesting enough to make me think twice about spending $2k on a new PC until I know more about when and how these are going to be released...
Presuming they're running Transmeta's new processor (and I'm sure that's what everyone is thinking... in fact they hinted enough at it, I'm suprised if Transmeta is the chip maker, that they're not flipping out about it right now...), and the rumors about the ability of the processor to switch microcode on-the fly (running various instruction sets during various timeslices), this could be a true industry killer if they get good multimedia application support for native Amiga apps, run Linux apps, and have the ability to emulate other processors well enough that something like Sheepshaver and VMWare allow you to run Mac or Windows applications. Maybe not on the stock system, but if I can but a reasonably priced multimedia powerhouse, with even the option of running Mac and Windows software, that's something that would be hard to not buy.
Hardware Java is pretty slick too... sure beats running them interpreted or even JIT. Hopefully they'll (and I can't believe I'm saying this) be like Microsoft and extend Java so you're not stuck with the horrid AWT for your UI.
I think this is awfully exciting. Wonder if they're looking to hire people?:)
You didn't say what platform you're running, but one reason the Linux version is both less of a memory hog now, and less prone to crashing is, I believe, because there was a bunch of shared libraries actually being loaded a bunch of times each up until very recently, and for whatever reason I guess they were chewing up RAM, and causing problems with particularly shutting down Mozilla, causing coredumps.
At least that was the explanation I read, I never actually noticed the problem myself.:)
I think proxy support (and basic things like a cache) are coming with the Necko code drop this week, which hopefully will be stable by M9.
Necko is the new networking code, replacing the current networking code. Promises to be more efficient, blah blah blah. I just hope it doesn't block on DNS lookups like Navigator does under Linux. That'd go a long ways towards making the program "feel" faster.
M8 actually slipped a few days. I think its been progressing at a pretty steady state. I've built it from tree pulls probably a hundred different times this year, and its making pretty steady progress. Some milestones are closer together I think, because there are different goals for each milestone.
If there are things you'd like to see in Mozilla, suggest them to the module owners, or better yet, talk to them and start coding them.
Personally I think a great feature would be a toggle for font smoothing ala Gimp in Mozilla for the (of course superior;-) ) X users who don't have the option of it. Its one of those things I wanted to tackle but the code is in too much of a state of flux as of yet, and I know I don't have time to keep fixing it as things change.
I'm also hoping (and I believe its happening) that the e-mail system works with multiple accounts more like Eudora does than Communicator 4.0, where it remembers which account the e-mail came in from, and replying to it sets the correct "From" address.
I don't know if its different fonts being used or what the deal is, but I think most sites look *much* better under Mozilla than Navigator.
There have been glitches in building on libc5 systems. In fact right now the configure process pretty much sucks, and misses a lot of requirements that it actually has but isn't programmed to look for. YMMV in compiling it yourself. Some people have had good luck with libc5 builds, as I seem to recall reading a while back in some of the mozilla newsgroups, others haven't. Personally, I haven't had much luck on anything but a pretty clean RedHat 5.2 or higher install.
I build the new client every morning, automagically. Some days it works great, other days it doesn't. If you want to try building your own copy with libc5, I'd suggest two things -- if its not your first time building it, wipe the sources and repull them if you're using CVS. The configure process misses dependancies some times, and things don't always get built right. If everyone else seems to be able to get it to work but you, starting from a fresh pull is a good first start.
Personally I think the CVS method of building it using client.mk is the way to go, any idiot can do it without any problems. Make sure you actually grab the M8 branch if you do though, because they're starting to drop the Necko code into the tree today (I believe), and the whole thing is likely to be horked for a while. I've heard its going to be even faster with the Necko code. I haven't even gotten close to having a Necko build work though.:)
Either way, the i686 build will run fine on a i586.
If you read the actual text of the patent, the full 18 claims cover a suprisingly large area, including the concept of downloading content to the player via direct connection, modem, LAN, or wireless connection, the methods of interfacing to it to do that, or play back, the use of a computer to manage it, the use of such a device for e-commerce application (pay-per-listen), and a way of transmitting data to the unit via cable TV signals.
They pretty much cover the whole gamut. This is a bogus patent though, because the prior art of MD players covers those concepts, since early this decade there were MD players that had digital inputs. The stuff about PC's being prior art in this case doesnt' seem to hold up, since this is fairly specific about it being a portable device for this purpose specifically.
I've read the average cost to get a bogus patent struck down is about a million and a half dollars. This company probably knows it too, and will keep their licenses inexpensive enough that it won't be worth the money for a company to sue about it. $1 per player or some such B.S, or $1 million for a corporate license. Do that, and no one is going to challange the patent. Its not worth it. They probably know that.
Its no different than companies like Walker Digital snapping up patents on business concepts that are completely obvious in order to extort patent license fees when anyone else comes up with an idea (most of which aren't rocket science, and are pretty common sense).
If you can't get rich because of any skills, get rich on an Internet IPO. Not clever enough to do that, get rich practicing extortion by patenting obvious products and business practices and keep the licenses cheap enough that no one will waste the $$$ to fight them. Ah America. Makes you proud, huh?
That's the rule, in my experience, not the exception.
I've virtually stopped making any contributions to any opensource projects for that reason. Still bugtest mozilla all the time though.
Examples of things I've had happen:
1) Feature X is missing from program Q. Implement it, send implementation to author. Author says no to including it in the source, then the code *verbatim* shows up in the next version sans any mention who wrote it. I no longer use said program.
2) Program F has a feature, feature sucks the way its written, chewing up processing cycles. For the sake of argument, lets say its an ICQ program blinking its icons, and causing a 1.0+ load while running as written. Recode part of the guts of the program to allow it to not be so crappy. Author rejects code, then puts virtually identical fix in two versions later. No credit given.
There are a lot of people out there that talk the talk with opensource projects, but certainly don't walk the walk. I hate the concept of forking a codebase, but there's a lot of real pricks out there, and a lot of projects that would be a lot better if someone forked the development.
No idea what program the author of that essay is talking about, but without knowing that information, and knowing the other side of the story, there's no way of knowing if that same situation didn't happen. There are too many opensource projects that reject contributions and changes for ego reasons rather than technical merit. People like Linus Torvalds are quite the rarity.
I meant its not a good deal as a starter set, you can't do much with it. I bought the ActiveHome set with like 12 modules, the multi-remote, motion sensor, etc... about a year ago. This is a good deal at $6, because the handheld unit is a good deal for $6 since I've got all the stuff on it. Not such a good deal if you're just turning on your lava lamp...
I'm shifting most of my home automation crap over to custom Dallas Semiconductor 1-wire networking... X10 is a nice gimmick, but not being able to query the status of a module sort of limits its use. Plus after replacing the control panel on my window A/C with a bunch of the Dallas 1-wire "transistor"-type devices and a handful of relays, now instead of just turning the A/C on via my voicemail system I can turn it up or down.:)
Once I get some software able to talk to those nifty Java iButtons, I'll be able to do even more cool stuff. GOtta love 1-wire.:)
Need it be said that this is not a special offer? That this deal has been available every day since it was posted on here two weeks ago? That their deals NEVER end "TODAY" as they like to proclaim? That this particular deal isn't any good anyway, because you only get one free X10 module, and more are going to cost you $15 a piece?
Does it really need to be asked if Slashdot and Freshmeat are getting kickbacks from these obvious advertisements in the guise of stories? Need it be pointed out that articles that have been paid for in magazines are typically identified as such with "PAID ADVERTISEMENT" printed on the page?
So run, fellow lemmings. Run fast and buy these, because this time they really do mean today's the last day. Yup. Bet the deal won't be there tommorrow.
I ordered a kit three weeks ago because $6 is a good deal for the handheld controller that comes with it, and I've already got piles of X10 units. Three weeks, haven't seen the item, haven't been able to get anyone on the phone that knows if its been sent, or why it hasn't if it hasn't been sent.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately here in the US, the patent office has actually stated that they do not have the technical skills or resources to evaluate even a small percentage of patent applications. They just accept them, and let people deal with it in court.
Sort of makes the concept of patents silly huh?
Put enough techno-jargon in the application, and you probably could patent a biological waste disposal system (to paraphrase another comment) and sue everyone's ass. In fact not only could you, but that's what the patent office recommends you do.
The real problem is that it costs an average of a million US dollars to fight a parent through the courts. The trick is, then, to patent something that lots of companies need, and make sure the license cost is under that amount for any individual company. You'll never get sued over it, because its not worth it to the companies, and AFAIK you can't file class-action patent challanges.
Ah, land of the free, home of the brave.
In my book the three killer apps for me under Linux would be Lightwave, Cool Edit Pro, and Eudora.
Lightwave is on a bunch of platforms, and seems to generate its own UI widgets, I wonder what would be involved in Newtek actually doing a Linux port? Eudora is probably pretty portable too.
E-mail campaign anyone?
Cool Edit Pro seems very tied to the Windows system, so there's not much chance there. Its a shame there's not anything comparable that actually works right now.
Suns in another interesting pickle where they have invested a lot of time and effort and money into Java, and it hasn't taken off and become the defacto standard the way they assumed it would. I'd guess the powers-that-be at Sun behind the iPlanet stuff and the powers-that-be at Sun behind Java probably don't see eye-to-eye on this one.
Sun's contributions to Apache and other opensource packages competing with Netscape... er... iPlanet products only serves to hurt the needs of AOL as a company to have their iPlanet products more widely used. I'd be wary of the intentions of a company that has a vested interest in their proprietary systems being more robust and higher performing than the systems they're "contributing" to. If upper management keep their fingers out of it, it'll probably be a good thing, but until the code from Sun is Open Source with a non-revokable license, its all still up in the air.
The Jakarta site says that the referance code from Sun has not yet been delivered to the Jakarta team. Has that in fact changed?
Mozilla is a more respectable corporate opensource contribution, because they gave the code from the start, and continue to spend a lot of money developing it. AOL has stated plainly that they're doing it because they want the rendering engine and other components for Navigator 5/AOL 5. But everyone else makes out too, and they've never tried to make Navigator commercial-only. Any contributions from Netscape and Sun to other opensource projects are being done for different reasons -- because they can't use the progress made in them in their closed-source applications.
Throwing $$$ around to unseat Microsoft (a lot of the motivation, I'd guess) will only go so far. I feel uneasy about Sun's motivations in the iPlanet/AOL/Netscape arrangement, particularly given their contributions to supporting Linux, Apache, etc. They're a company that has built a business model out of changing directions faster than the earlier poor decisions can sink the company.
This mozilla bashing going on in the media is so tiring! It comes from two-bit reporters who likely have never seen Mozilla, and are just quoting FUD generated by other two-bit reporters. Mozilla is a fantastic piece of software. Considering the current incarnation has only been in development for eight or nine months, its make remarkable progress.
I think this is a knee-jerk reaction pushed by Sun to combat the fact that Netscape's name only has consumer value, not developer value which is the target of the "iPlant" marketing program.
I think Sun and AOL/Netscape are trying to take their existing products that aren't necessarily so highly regarded and brand them under another moniker to hide their roots. I'd expect product names to start changing too, so less clue-full developers who aren't watching these things may end up not realizing what the packages they're looking at actually are.
Sun's also in a tough position, as operating systems like Linux are becoming more capable of mission critical applications on Intel, Alpha, and other lower cost hardware. They're losing their monopoly on high-performance fault-tolerant systems.
I think there's also a growing trend (not growing fast enough, however) for companies developing major eApplications (can I coin that term?) to start utilizing network application architects to properly design the software, hardware, and network to provide better reliability, scalability and fault tolerance through intellegent system design rather than purchasing bigger iron. That trend, as it continues, will only serve to hurt Sun/Netscape more, because they're not going to be able to justify their extremely high hardware costs, and can't keep up with the pace of development in packages like Apache and JServ where high-performance fault-tolerant network application architecture is concerned.
I think its going to end up like all the other iProducts, like the iMac, iBook, etc. Marketing, marketing, marketing. With the real value of the product fairly low on technical merits when compared to price of competing products. Management types will like it...
Unless the card is a standard PC-Card... then it may not matter what system its plugged into, particularly once Linux drivers are around for it, since the drivers can be ported to other architectures...
That's a rather tasty lookin' fruit, especially if it'll run Linux. Screen's kinda small, but if the LinuxPPC folks can get Linux running on there and the Sheepshaver people ever finish the Linux port of Sheepshaver, that'd be a nice little toy to have...
:)
Wonder how quick Linux support will be on it, and if the airbridge will work too?
Hmmmm...
Could be worse, get one of those new dual 750 mhz Alpha systems... at 750mgz, those suckers are practically radiating microwaves... how about two of those warmin' the boys?
Wasn't this chair on here a few months ago? Or did I actually see something somewhere else before it showed up on Slashdot?
Telco's do NOT have a monopoly over DSL. Half the country that has DSL wouldn't have it if they did. For example here in Connecticut, SNET/SBC have been dragging their feet for years with DSL. We've had (and probably still have) the highest ISDN prices in the country.
In the last six months here, and the last year or two nationwide, some companies have choosen to bypass the telco and purchase alarm circuits between their facility and their clients, and provide DSL that way. Some times it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Kind of silly that joe-blow ISP can get DSL working and a telco monopoly can't.
Its like a train wreck. Stuck PHP4 on one of my testing servers, virtually none of the existing base of PHP3 code seems to work properly.
Has anyone had much luck with it?
Some code elements are obvious enough why they don't work. I'm not clear exactly why they would no longer allow non-static defaults to parameters in class constructors. Much of my code doesn't work because of that, but that can be (much less elegantly) fixed. They claim there's not very many situations where you'd want to do that, but I can think of dozens of them.
Also, PHP4 doesn't seem to like returning instantiated objects from methods in a class. I'm not clear why it wouldn't allow that, but it craps out with a parse error. Its possible that error messages in PHP4/Zend suck, as well, since that particular one isn't a documented incompatability, and perhaps its saying the error is on that line when the error is in the parsing of constructor for the object being returned.
(if that wasn't clear, code like this doesn't seem to work:)
function my_function($var = "") {
return new OtherObject ($this, $var);
}
Worked fine in PHP3. The error message sucks, so its not clear if the error is in the returning of the object, in the passing of my current object to the new object, or possibly in the constructor for the object.
Has anyone done any serious OO coding in PHP3 and had it work cleanly in PHP4? I recognize that a lot of the OO functionality wasn't documented, and should've known it could be changed, but some of this stuff isn't rocket science, and works in most other OO languages.
Anyway, good in concept, but looks like I'll be sticking to PHP3. I wonder how long development will continue on the PHP3 code base...
I'm a bit concerned about this passage in the QPL license they're using:
6. You may develop application programs, reusable components and other
software items that link with the original or modified versions of the
Software. These items, when distributed, are subject to the following
requirements:
a. You must ensure that all recipients of machine-executable forms of
these items are also able to receive and use the complete
machine-readable source code to the items without any charge
beyond the costs of data transfer.
b. You must explicitly license all recipients of your items to use
and re-distribute original and modified versions of the items in
both machine-executable and source code forms. The recipients must
be able to do so without any charges whatsoever, and they must be
able to re-distribute to anyone they choose.
c. If the items are not available to the general public, and the
initial developer of the Software requests a copy of the items,
then you must supply one.
This seems like total B.S. to me, and such a radical departure from how PHP3 was licensed, to render PHP4/Zend completely useless in a commercial environment. It makes it seem like there may potentially be a liability if an ISP is using Zend on their server, and a customer develops extensions for their website and doesn't make them freely available. There also isn't a clear distinction made between binary extensions, and external libraries of functions written in PHP.
Anyone else see this as a concern? Maybe its time to fork the PHP development, and get a similar engine to Zend distributed where that's not as significant an issue.
Its my understanding with GPL I've got every right to code a commercial non-opensource package that utilizes its functionality, as long as I either do not distribute the GPL'd software, or use it embedded into the binary form of my program? (Like the new CodeWarrior for GNU package...)
Just because its in "The Science of Star Trek" or whatever that silly book is, doesn't mean its scientific fact.
There is no good quantum theory of gravity, at least there wasn't a few years ago, and I'd think I would've read something about that. Gravity still isn't well understood.
Either way the original premise of this thread was just plain wrong too, that the size of a black hole would affect its ability to "suck" in matter. AFAIK there's no theory that they'd be charged entities, so you'd have gravity pulling stuff towards it, and nothing pushing it away. The only hope in that case was that it for some unknown reason passed out of the range of the matter in the earth quickly, or it evaporated faster than it was initially able to suck in the energy.
I mentioned in another post the book Cosm, which is a fictional story on this exact topic. One idea in there was that the mass of the object in question kept growing because they didn't realize it was there and shut the collider down immediately. There's no reason that wouldn't be the case.
The point, however, is that the science that predicts that a black hole could occur is the bad science.
This story has been reported over and over and over in the last few years, all having to do with the accellerator on Long Island. Its bad science, no better than other bad science like the breast implant issues, cancer from high-tension power lines or any other anti-science drivel that seems to be produced in such mass quantities. Reactions more powerful than the ones they're talking about happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If the possibility was anything more than infintesimal, we wouldn't exist. The fact that we DO exist is proof that even should such a reaction happen, its probably not stable, or is quickly counteracted by some other reaction.
On a side note though, there was a book that came out a year or two ago, Cosm that dealt specifically with these issues at that specific accellerator I think. Its sci-fi, but I thought it was entertaining. Worth reading if you can get it at the library. Hell, its Gregory Benford, so you can't go THAT wrong.
God, this pro-tech-union crap is getting so old. Are people really that dense? Does any of the people who think a union would be any good at all have any concept of labor relations or what a problem unions are when they're in industries like the high-tech ones today -- where the best vote people have is with their feet.
The problem here isn't the businesses. The businesses can't control the cost of housing or the fact that there is a shortage, just as they can't control the fact that there are far few qualified workers for the positions they've got than there are positions open. The latter pushes salaries up, the former pushes housing up, neither are the fault of the corporations, and neither can be controlled by a union!
I just can't figure out what that's so unclear to some people. What do you want, a union to force salaries to be even higher? Get real. They're too high as it is. (Not that I'm complaining!) But companies are being crushed under the pressure of extremely high IT salaries. Its common in companies for mid-level IT workers to be making as much as upper management, which causes a lot of friction in the companies. The only companies not feeling the crunch are the ones with billions of virtual dollars from over-priced stock valuations, which have a suprise coming to them when (not if) the market crashes. (Which it will, any second year economics student knows the economy is in a non-sustainable pattern, and none of the internet companies can justify 1/100th their stock value!)
This is just like the B.S. in that story about 60 and 80 hour weeks that was posted on slashdot a week ago. IF YOU"RE NOT HAPPY WITH YOUR SITUATION, YOUR FEET TALK LOUDER THAN YOU CAN! Leave your job. Take another. Unless you're fooling yourself about your skill level, you should have no problem. You'll probably get a raise. And if you've got a family and are concerned about being able to provide for them, there's quite a few technology hot spots in the mid-west, Dallas, or places like North Carolina where the pay is less, the cost of living is a lot less, and you won't be griping about being poor making $60,000 a year.
If YOU Seumas, are making low wages, working double hours or living in low income housing, I'd suggest another career or a serious rethinking of your strategy in planning your career. Because its not hard these days to make a very comfortable living working the hours you want and living in a rather nice house. If you (or anyone else on Slashdot) isn't, than you're making bad choices, and that's not anything a union can fix. Unions make bad choices for everyone. At least bad choices you make don't affect me or anyone else right now.
High property rates (you meantioned $600 for a small studio) are nothing new, and not IT-related. Apartments in central Boston have always been more expensive than even that -- I know people spending $1600 a month on a one bedroom... NYC is high, I almost spent $1300 on a studio. If you choose to work in any job in a city, you're choosing the higher cost of living for a shorter commute, or other benefits of city life. Can't hack that? Bad choice on your part, yet again.
Actually I'd just like to see Eudora Pro for Linux, but I can't see Qualcomm being that progressive... still the best mailreader I've used.
Toshiba makes 'em in the US.
Sounds very interesting. Interesting enough to make me think twice about spending $2k on a new PC until I know more about when and how these are going to be released...
:)
Presuming they're running Transmeta's new processor (and I'm sure that's what everyone is thinking... in fact they hinted enough at it, I'm suprised if Transmeta is the chip maker, that they're not flipping out about it right now...), and the rumors about the ability of the processor to switch microcode on-the fly (running various instruction sets during various timeslices), this could be a true industry killer if they get good multimedia application support for native Amiga apps, run Linux apps, and have the ability to emulate other processors well enough that something like Sheepshaver and VMWare allow you to run Mac or Windows applications. Maybe not on the stock system, but if I can but a reasonably priced multimedia powerhouse, with even the option of running Mac and Windows software, that's something that would be hard to not buy.
Hardware Java is pretty slick too... sure beats running them interpreted or even JIT. Hopefully they'll (and I can't believe I'm saying this) be like Microsoft and extend Java so you're not stuck with the horrid AWT for your UI.
I think this is awfully exciting. Wonder if they're looking to hire people?
You didn't say what platform you're running, but one reason the Linux version is both less of a memory hog now, and less prone to crashing is, I believe, because there was a bunch of shared libraries actually being loaded a bunch of times each up until very recently, and for whatever reason I guess they were chewing up RAM, and causing problems with particularly shutting down Mozilla, causing coredumps.
:)
At least that was the explanation I read, I never actually noticed the problem myself.
I think proxy support (and basic things like a cache) are coming with the Necko code drop this week, which hopefully will be stable by M9.
Necko is the new networking code, replacing the current networking code. Promises to be more efficient, blah blah blah. I just hope it doesn't block on DNS lookups like Navigator does under Linux. That'd go a long ways towards making the program "feel" faster.
M8 actually slipped a few days. I think its been progressing at a pretty steady state. I've built it from tree pulls probably a hundred different times this year, and its making pretty steady progress. Some milestones are closer together I think, because there are different goals for each milestone.
;-) ) X users who don't have the option of it. Its one of those things I wanted to tackle but the code is in too much of a state of flux as of yet, and I know I don't have time to keep fixing it as things change.
If there are things you'd like to see in Mozilla, suggest them to the module owners, or better yet, talk to them and start coding them.
Personally I think a great feature would be a toggle for font smoothing ala Gimp in Mozilla for the (of course superior
I'm also hoping (and I believe its happening) that the e-mail system works with multiple accounts more like Eudora does than Communicator 4.0, where it remembers which account the e-mail came in from, and replying to it sets the correct "From" address.
I don't know if its different fonts being used or what the deal is, but I think most sites look *much* better under Mozilla than Navigator.
There have been glitches in building on libc5 systems. In fact right now the configure process pretty much sucks, and misses a lot of requirements that it actually has but isn't programmed to look for. YMMV in compiling it yourself. Some people have had good luck with libc5 builds, as I seem to recall reading a while back in some of the mozilla newsgroups, others haven't. Personally, I haven't had much luck on anything but a pretty clean RedHat 5.2 or higher install.
:)
I build the new client every morning, automagically. Some days it works great, other days it doesn't. If you want to try building your own copy with libc5, I'd suggest two things -- if its not your first time building it, wipe the sources and repull them if you're using CVS. The configure process misses dependancies some times, and things don't always get built right. If everyone else seems to be able to get it to work but you, starting from a fresh pull is a good first start.
Personally I think the CVS method of building it using client.mk is the way to go, any idiot can do it without any problems. Make sure you actually grab the M8 branch if you do though, because they're starting to drop the Necko code into the tree today (I believe), and the whole thing is likely to be horked for a while. I've heard its going to be even faster with the Necko code. I haven't even gotten close to having a Necko build work though.
Either way, the i686 build will run fine on a i586.
If you read the actual text of the patent, the full 18 claims cover a suprisingly large area, including the concept of downloading content to the player via direct connection, modem, LAN, or wireless connection, the methods of interfacing to it to do that, or play back, the use of a computer to manage it, the use of such a device for e-commerce application (pay-per-listen), and a way of transmitting data to the unit via cable TV signals.
They pretty much cover the whole gamut. This is a bogus patent though, because the prior art of MD players covers those concepts, since early this decade there were MD players that had digital inputs. The stuff about PC's being prior art in this case doesnt' seem to hold up, since this is fairly specific about it being a portable device for this purpose specifically.
I've read the average cost to get a bogus patent struck down is about a million and a half dollars. This company probably knows it too, and will keep their licenses inexpensive enough that it won't be worth the money for a company to sue about it. $1 per player or some such B.S, or $1 million for a corporate license. Do that, and no one is going to challange the patent. Its not worth it. They probably know that.
Its no different than companies like Walker Digital snapping up patents on business concepts that are completely obvious in order to extort patent license fees when anyone else comes up with an idea (most of which aren't rocket science, and are pretty common sense).
If you can't get rich because of any skills, get rich on an Internet IPO. Not clever enough to do that, get rich practicing extortion by patenting obvious products and business practices and keep the licenses cheap enough that no one will waste the $$$ to fight them. Ah America. Makes you proud, huh?
That's the rule, in my experience, not the exception.
I've virtually stopped making any contributions to any opensource projects for that reason. Still bugtest mozilla all the time though.
Examples of things I've had happen:
1) Feature X is missing from program Q. Implement it, send implementation to author. Author says no to including it in the source, then the code *verbatim* shows up in the next version sans any mention who wrote it. I no longer use said program.
2) Program F has a feature, feature sucks the way its written, chewing up processing cycles. For the sake of argument, lets say its an ICQ program blinking its icons, and causing a 1.0+ load while running as written. Recode part of the guts of the program to allow it to not be so crappy. Author rejects code, then puts virtually identical fix in two versions later. No credit given.
There are a lot of people out there that talk the talk with opensource projects, but certainly don't walk the walk. I hate the concept of forking a codebase, but there's a lot of real pricks out there, and a lot of projects that would be a lot better if someone forked the development.
No idea what program the author of that essay is talking about, but without knowing that information, and knowing the other side of the story, there's no way of knowing if that same situation didn't happen. There are too many opensource projects that reject contributions and changes for ego reasons rather than technical merit. People like Linus Torvalds are quite the rarity.
This kid is obviously Slashdot material!
I think we need a new poll:
How old are you?
1) 0-6
2) 6-12
3) 12-18
4) 18-22
5) 22-30
6) 30-40
7) Old fart
Make up my mind? Maybe state it better. :)
:)
:)
I meant its not a good deal as a starter set, you can't do much with it. I bought the ActiveHome set with like 12 modules, the multi-remote, motion sensor, etc... about a year ago. This is a good deal at $6, because the handheld unit is a good deal for $6 since I've got all the stuff on it. Not such a good deal if you're just turning on your lava lamp...
I'm shifting most of my home automation crap over to custom Dallas Semiconductor 1-wire networking... X10 is a nice gimmick, but not being able to query the status of a module sort of limits its use. Plus after replacing the control panel on my window A/C with a bunch of the Dallas 1-wire "transistor"-type devices and a handful of relays, now instead of just turning the A/C on via my voicemail system I can turn it up or down.
Once I get some software able to talk to those nifty Java iButtons, I'll be able to do even more cool stuff. GOtta love 1-wire.
Need it be said that this is not a special offer? That this deal has been available every day since it was posted on here two weeks ago? That their deals NEVER end "TODAY" as they like to proclaim? That this particular deal isn't any good anyway, because you only get one free X10 module, and more are going to cost you $15 a piece?
Does it really need to be asked if Slashdot and Freshmeat are getting kickbacks from these obvious advertisements in the guise of stories? Need it be pointed out that articles that have been paid for in magazines are typically identified as such with "PAID ADVERTISEMENT" printed on the page?
So run, fellow lemmings. Run fast and buy these, because this time they really do mean today's the last day. Yup. Bet the deal won't be there tommorrow.
I ordered a kit three weeks ago because $6 is a good deal for the handheld controller that comes with it, and I've already got piles of X10 units. Three weeks, haven't seen the item, haven't been able to get anyone on the phone that knows if its been sent, or why it hasn't if it hasn't been sent.