First, color-correction has very little to do with alpha channeling, or anti-aliased fonts. Some things like gamma correction and black-value adjustment should be very easy to add to X... although they may require an extra back-buffer in the X server. The "real" color correction technologies that are found in commercial OSes aren't going to be found in (at least free) X servers, unfortunately, because this technology is very heavily patent-protected. This is part of why professional packages like Adobe Photoshop are so expensive.
As far as alpha-channeling and anti-aliasing (both fonts and primitives), you are correct in indicating that (with current protocols) these are impossible for X to support natively. (Maybe in X11R7, or in X12.) Many programs have worked around these limitations, however, by rendering primitives and fonts independantly of X's basic drawing capibilities. If I am not mistaken, the newest versions of GTK (a very commonly used GUI tool-kit in open-sourced applications) will render fonts this way using freetype, as an option, if not the default.
I have to say, I'm planning to vote on Tuesday, but since I registered to vote for my new apartment, I haven't recieved any voter registration information to tell me where to vote!
Admittedly, I could ask my neighbors, but the packet (that I did not receive) also contains information on the major issues. (Here in California we have "propisitions"... and numbers like 34, 35, and 38 don't tell me alot about them.)
Now to my question: Does anyone know of an online resource similar to an "interactive" online registration packet?
I think what we need to point out is that they are making "Due Diligence" illegal... Maybe if we put it in their terms, they'll see the problems with the treaty...
FYI, Loki abandoned Sim City 3000 in favor of Sim City 3000 Unlimited!... SC3KU shipped for windows less than 2 months ago... As a beta-tester, I can say that the Linux version of SC3K looks really good!
No one has seemed to mention releasing this as a "source-availible" product. Especially in a 5-9s environment I would expect consumers to demand source-code so that they can verify what they're getting, but that doesn't mean that you need to give them the right to freely redistribute it if your livelyhood is on the line. There is no reason a traditional copyright can't cover source-code. You can even adopt a licence or policy that encorages people to submit patches to you, and maybe even defaults to GPL after a particular version of the product hits a certain age. I think this would provide a happy medium between people who want source-code, and your desires to make your product profitable.
No... You are absolutely correct. Dividing 32 by 3 sounds like an accurate way to compute the average (mean) distance... I'm going to trust your calculus here... I haven't looked at a calc book in 2 years. You can also look at the median distance:
The proper way to compute this (still assuming, incorrectly uniform distribution) is to split the 63x63 sq. mi. square into 4 32 mile high isosolese triangles, and finding the point split them where the top triangle's area is equal to the bottom trapazoid's area, or (going back to the grid) finding the distance to an inner square where it's area is 1/2 the area of the 63x63 mile square:
The inner square would be about 44 miles on each side... 63/sqrt(2)
This would make the average distance about 9 miles from the track... (63-44)/2
If most rail in India is perpendicular (i.e. either North-South or East-West), and this is split pretty much evenly, then there is about 19,000 miles of rail parallel to each axis. Since railroad tracks are contiguous, you can estimate the average distance between parallel tracks to be 1,200,000/19,000 miles apart, or about 63 miles apart. Doing this you can then extrapolate that the average Indian homeowner lives about 32 miles from the nearest train-track.
In my opinion, that's still a large amount of cable to run... Especially when, in the states, we're so worryed about "the last mile" bottleneck.
I took a (admittedly very quick) look on their website, and couldn't find reference to how the other versions of MySQL are licensed. What is their current licensing scheme for these other versions?
I may be wrong, but I remember something like this as one of the demos for userfs when it first came out (at least 2 years ago)... I may be wrong. Can anyone back this up?
As a former member of the Berlin Consortium I wanted to comment on Jordy's remarks, and add a few of my own...
<OFFTOPIC>First, I did not leave the Berlin Consortium for any political reason, and am still very in-favor of what they are doing. Basically (to make a long story short) I significantly over-extended myself. For example, right now I am:
I am working "full-time" as a software developer for a commercial software firm. (No... not M$)
I am going to be beta testing Railroad Tycoon 2 from Loki Software
and... I'm trying to get back into school to finish my BS
So, basically, I was just too busy to put in any more time... </OFFTOPIC>
In response to Jordy's remarks:
1) To develop for X you have to be an X Consortium member which costs about $50k/year to do any real work. This is why so much work is being done on layers above X, because no one can actually submit the kind of radical modifications to X that are needed to bring it into the 90's.
Yeh... But I don't see this so much as an issue. X is still (and always has been) "source-code availible" even if it wasn't always necessarily "Open-Source", so the code has always been availible for peer review. As a software developer, I feel if X was designed right, I shouldn't have to modify X in order to make it suit my needs.
2) The X consortium maintains full control over X itself... meaning they can (and have at least once) change the licensing to kill off any free implementations such as xfree86.
Yes... but (at least up until now) they have always made it "source-code availible". I really have no desire to modify X itself, (as a developer) so I see this as slightly irrelivant. (How many Windoze/Mac users have the source-code for their respective GUI?)
3) The software is extremely dated with over a decade of backwards compatibility which no one even uses any more bloating the code base.
I don't see the backward compatibility as a major problem, The big problem is limitations of the X protocol because of how people thought about GUIs 10 years ago...
4) C... Object Oriented environment.. please. I'm sure a lot of people will bash this, but writing GUI programs in an OO language is simply easier. And before you start on the OO toolkits out there, read the next point.
This is really an issue with TK, the standard X toolkit, and really isn't related to the X protocol itself.
5) Of course there are C++ and Java toolkits out there, but until they are standard within X, it's a big war. I have roughly 15 X toolkits on my machine to run a total of 8 programs and a window manager. Doesn't anyone else think this is silly?
There doesn't need to necessarily be a standard way of looking at GUIs and widgets, which is what different toolkits really provide... They problem is that they need to be consistant with each other in how they behave, and how they are user-configurable...
6) Sluggish. I have AccelX and I have to admit the entire experience is still very slow. Netscape flickers gray every time I scroll up and down, windows take ages to redraw when switching between them, etc. I multiboot to Windows and don't have any of these problems, everything is quite snappy... even if it crashes every 8 hours:)
Here I totally agree, but I think I'm looking at it from a different point-of-view. I see this as a problem because how the X-protocol "quantifies" the "world". (see below where I discuss server-side GUI widgets.)
7) Inconsistant. With all the toolkits out there, it is so very hard to get a nice consistant desktop. I wouldn't even claim that Windows is consistant, but it is pretty close. MacOS is better.. but at least both environments are intuitive.
Once you understand the basics, you can switch between different applications and automatically pickup that the scisors in the toolbar means cut or that the file menu will have an 'exit' entry or even that ctrl-c will copy the selected text (most of the time at least:)
Here I also agree, but I'm looking at this from a different point-of-view than most of the people who responded to this point... In X, I have one window manager (running at a time) that governs how the window borders are displayed. The user has (for the most part) alot of control with this, but the remainder of each window is decorated according to the GUI toolkit that the software developer (not the user) used to create the GUI. Generally the user has little or no control over this. GNOME (or more specifically GTK) is starting to work around this with theming capibilities, but it is implemented at a level well above the X protocol, and consiquently, it only affects GTK applications.
So in short, I'm not saying that there should be one "true interface" that all GUIs should be modeled after, but rather that the user should be able to select a style of GUI that (s)he is comfortable with, and have all the apps reflect that. (i.e. I could want all the "File" menu text to be in red... in all my programs.)
Additionally, a few things that Jordy didn't mention include:
X only supports black-and-white (or more specifially "two-tone") fonts... This might sound fine to someone who doesn't know alot about graphics rendering, but this totally precludes the possibility of anti-aliasing, which can make text much more readable... especially with smaller fonts.
Besides the concept of a "window" X has no concept of GUI "widgets" (like buttons, scroll-bars, edit boxes, etc. ) Whenever you press on a "button" (that, lets say, depresses when you press the mouse on it) the server sends the press event accross the "network" to the client, who has to send back instructions over the "network" for how it should be redrawn to look depressed. For something as trivial as a button press, this is a terribly in-efficient use of network bandwidth. With something like Berlin, the logic of how these buttons respond can be sent to the server, so all the GUI look-and-feel issues can be handeled on the server, then it simply needs to tell the client: "I've been clicked on... do whatever you are supposed to when I'm clicked on..."
X lacks real support for any 3D, video rendering... esspecially WRT hardware accelleration... the typical X way to do this to hand off a chunk of the screen for rendering to a program who knows how to handel the acceleration itself, not only is this a cludge, but it may tend to introduce security issues.
no support for alpha channels (semi-transparency)... or other similar effects.
(I may be wrong on this last point but...) There doesn't seem to be any global color-correction settings in X... for people in the publishing industry, this could prove a real headache.
I'm sure there are other issues, but this should get you started...
Thanks again to Jordy (and Graydon, and all of the gang) who are helping with Berlin,
Here's what I'm sending to my State Senetor
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 2
The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws ( http://www.nccusl.org/) has just approved the UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act: http://www.nccusl.org/pressrel/2brel.html ). As I understand it, the NCCUSL recommends legislation to the law making bodies in each of the 50 states. I am very concerned about the ramifications of this legislation if it were to become law. This law gives undue power to software publishers and stips many consumer rights. Attorneys Generals from 25 states wrote the NCCUSL voicing their opposition to the UCITA, as well as many from the software industry and consumer advocasy groups ( http://www.badsoftware.com/oppose.htm). Some of the specific provisions in this bill that most concern me are:
Allows prohibition against "reverse engineering". This is akin to saying I can buy a car, but opening the hood to see how the engine worked would make me a criminal.
Allows remotely disabeling software when publisher suspects violation of the terms of the license, without needing a search-warrant. This is akin to saying that if I buy a car that, in the fine print says I'm only allowed to use gasoline from a particular company, and if the car company suspects I used gasoline from a competitor, they could make the car stop working, even in mission-critical situations (like while being on a busy freeway).
The user isn't necessarily entitled to see the software license contract before agreeing to it. This is like saying that for a car you bought with a "bumper to bumper" warrenty... The warrenty can cover only the paint job (from one bumper to the other), and that you many not find out until you take the car in for repair.
It is legal for software publishers to prohibit sale or transfer of a software license... Something like saying when you're ready for a new car you need to throw out the old one, because you aren't alowed to sell it.
The software publisher can limit thier liability to the cost of the software, even if the user has paid for additional services over and above the price of the software. This would be like if (God fobid) if you drove your new car off the auto lot with your family and the car exploded killing everyone except yourself, that the car company would owe you no more than the price of the car, and to collect that, you may be required to call a special refund service that could charge you twice the value of the car for just the phone call... and that even after the car exploded you would still be obligated to pay for the 5-year service contract.
I hope this helps you put this proposed legislation into some perspective.
I think that this would still help everyone if widely deployed.
The people who go to porn search engines are looking for porn. This would help them find "relevant content"
The big (legitimate) search engines have long been looking for ways to make their search queries more focused. This would allow them to let users filter out such sites from a searches results, giving users less irrelivant muck to wade through, making them feel better about the relevance of the site's search results, leading to more customer loyalty. (You have to admit, on a search engine 80+% of the time all the porn sites just get in the way of what you're looking for.)
This may even help the porn sites get a more targeted audience, and less hate-mail from users who ended up at their site by accident... (although this might not be the case, because many porn sites are only conserned with number of hits, so they get $$ from their advertisers.)
So I think this (if widely deployed... which is unlikely at this point) would be quite usefull... You have to admit, if you're looking for porn, you're going to find it. Why not make it easier to tell what is/isn't porn so everyone's not bombarded (as much) by information overload?
Just for the record, I had to mine the majority of this message out of/proc/kcore because netscape hung on me just before I was about to submit it. Thanks to jeff on #slashdot (slashNET) for help on that.
See what I mean about closed-source software... (in this case Netscape...) You can't trust it.
Sure, I don't mind using (and paying good money for) commercial software... as long as it comes with source-code. I strongly prefer an open-source licence, but I do understand there are buisness constrainst that come into play. I'm happy as long as the terms of the licence are flexible enough to allow posting small chuncks of questionable code for review, discuss possible changes with other users/developers, post patches to the code to fix probelms and add features, and to be able to (at my discression) submit those patches to the company for possible inclusion. Buisness don't seem to see that there is demand for commercial applications with source code.
If you don't let me see the source code, you don't trust me. If you don't trust me, why should I trust you. If I don't trust you, why should I trust that the code you write does what you say it does, and doesn't (by design or by accident) reek havock on my machine. If I don't have confidence that your software won't trash my system why should I pay you money for it.
I was listening to an audio coulmn on KNX radio yesterday by Michael Josephson called "Character Counts". In yestedays column (which is not on his website yet) he reported (unhappily) about a buisnessman at one of his seminars who (when he brought up the topic of keeping promises) described the decision whether a buisness should keep a promise (such as what a software package will do... and not do) as purely a cost-benifit analysis of the costs of keeping the promise vs. the cost of breaching it. With ethics like this floating around the buisness world, it is not reasonable for me to trust that what a software company says it's products do is, in fact what they do. According to this buisnessman's arguemnt, if his company deemed that it would make them more money to have their software cause a problem on my system (unbeknownst to me) so that I would need to buy another of thier products to fix it, then they would do this.
I spend alot of money on my machine each year, but it's not worth my time to spend any of my money on commercial software if it doesn't come with source code, although I'm more than willing to spend good money on commercial software, that I believe I would find useful, if it includes source-code.
Software isn't software without source code. -- NASA
It looks like you're right. I found the original slashdot article where this was announced... It was just over a year ago, and that was a beta announcement. But (also from the article) PowerQuest said it was going to release the source-code "soon".
If memory serves, when PowerQuest first announced that they were going to support resizing of ext2 partitions in Partition Magic 4.0 they promised to (eventualy) release the source code for the ext2 resizing modules under a GPL-like licence. Partition Magic 4.0 has now been out over 2 years, and I have yet to hear of any source-code release announcement from PowerQuest...
Could you imagine that? Just like every house comes with a mailbox, every house would come with some sort of network appliance, and a net connection... That's when you know the USPS is obsolete.
I'm afraid that by the time a net connection is considered part of the house a T4 to your house would be considered a "slow connection". (Now that would be cool... at leaset a T4 to every house... and could you immagine the bandwidth of the backbones?) Oh, and by then that network appliance might include a "replicator", so that you could recieve packages too... Maybe I'll live to see that. (Maybe not.)
In the general case, yes, but I have a situation that makes this a bit trickey. On either end of this wireless network I have:
A Mac Performa 631CD (w/ 10-base-T LC-com NIC)... which is all but impossible to get cards for and
a small LAN centered around a small Linux Server ('486 40MHZ) that currently has no free slots connected via an 8-port hub (w/ many ports unused)
If I could just stick a card in either end, that would be great, but I'm close to positive that I won't be able to find a LC-com 802.11 NIC for the Mac, and I don't have a slot necessarily availible on the server, so Ideally I would like to just plug in RJ-45 at either end and be done with it. I am open to other possibilities, but the above would be the ideal case.
Given that, the only products listed that claim 10-base-T connections, are the base units (at $300 a pop) which I would want at either end of this point-to-point connection.
I actually hadn't thought of using the serial port (It definitely has one)... In my house only 2 wires are hooked up to each jack, but we have 3 phone wire pairs and are only using 2 (for our two lines). I would really like some more info on this if you have some... Right now I have a Performa 631CD (w/ 2 serial, 2 adb, scsi, etc.) with a 10-base-T LCcom NIC that I want to (ideally) connect to a 10-base-T hub, but could connect directly to my Linux server ('486 DX 40MHZ, which currently has no free slots, but some cards can be done away with [8-bit sound card comes to mind]) on it's own subnet... I would REALLY appreciate any suggestions you could give me.
I could really use a pair of those base units to connect my (10-base-T) LAN to my mother's (obsolete - a.k.a. not supported) Mac, since she insists that the cabel dissapear into the walls (without me tearing up the walls to do this)... Just that $600 for a wireless 10-base-T Point-to-Point connection is too rich for my blood... Any suggestions?
Yep... I was going to comment on this (send them email), but I decided "Why bother"...
For the record, technically multi-line phones (which could support a modem) often use RJ-45, but (although technically possible because RJ-11 can have 4 conductors) I have never seen Ethernet run with RJ-11 connectors.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as alpha-channeling and anti-aliasing (both fonts and primitives), you are correct in indicating that (with current protocols) these are impossible for X to support natively. (Maybe in X11R7, or in X12.) Many programs have worked around these limitations, however, by rendering primitives and fonts independantly of X's basic drawing capibilities. If I am not mistaken, the newest versions of GTK (a very commonly used GUI tool-kit in open-sourced applications) will render fonts this way using freetype, as an option, if not the default.
Admittedly, I could ask my neighbors, but the packet (that I did not receive) also contains information on the major issues. (Here in California we have "propisitions"... and numbers like 34, 35, and 38 don't tell me alot about them.)
Now to my question:
Does anyone know of an online resource similar to an "interactive" online registration packet?
Probably just wishfull thinking though...
Groan... I meant SC3KU looked really good on Linux... (And yes I did use preview)...
FYI, Loki abandoned Sim City 3000 in favor of Sim City 3000 Unlimited!... SC3KU shipped for windows less than 2 months ago... As a beta-tester, I can say that the Linux version of SC3K looks really good!
No one has seemed to mention releasing this as a "source-availible" product. Especially in a 5-9s environment I would expect consumers to demand source-code so that they can verify what they're getting, but that doesn't mean that you need to give them the right to freely redistribute it if your livelyhood is on the line. There is no reason a traditional copyright can't cover source-code. You can even adopt a licence or policy that encorages people to submit patches to you, and maybe even defaults to GPL after a particular version of the product hits a certain age. I think this would provide a happy medium between people who want source-code, and your desires to make your product profitable.
The proper way to compute this (still assuming, incorrectly uniform distribution) is to split the 63x63 sq. mi. square into 4 32 mile high isosolese triangles, and finding the point split them where the top triangle's area is equal to the bottom trapazoid's area, or (going back to the grid) finding the distance to an inner square where it's area is 1/2 the area of the 63x63 mile square:
The inner square would be about 44 miles on each side... 63/sqrt(2)
This would make the average distance about 9 miles from the track... (63-44)/2
Regards,
I started with the following:
- India has 38000 linear miles of rail
- India is 1.2 million square miles in size
If most rail in India is perpendicular (i.e. either North-South or East-West), and this is split pretty much evenly, then there is about 19,000 miles of rail parallel to each axis. Since railroad tracks are contiguous, you can estimate the average distance between parallel tracks to be 1,200,000/19,000 miles apart, or about 63 miles apart. Doing this you can then extrapolate that the average Indian homeowner lives about 32 miles from the nearest train-track.In my opinion, that's still a large amount of cable to run... Especially when, in the states, we're so worryed about "the last mile" bottleneck.
Comments?
Any suggestions?
I took a (admittedly very quick) look on their website, and couldn't find reference to how the other versions of MySQL are licensed. What is their current licensing scheme for these other versions?
I may be wrong, but I remember something like this as one of the demos for userfs when it first came out (at least 2 years ago)... I may be wrong. Can anyone back this up?
<OFFTOPIC>First, I did not leave the Berlin Consortium for any political reason, and am still very in-favor of what they are doing. Basically (to make a long story short) I significantly over-extended myself. For example, right now I am:
- I am working "full-time" as a software developer for a commercial software firm. (No... not M$)
- I am involved in three theatrical productions:
- I am playing Constable Loche in "The Music Man"
- I am playing Herr Sessman in "Heidi"
- I am runnig audio tracks for "Bye Bye Birdie"
- I am involved in 3 Linux related computer clubs:
- I am marginally involved in Orange County Linux User Group
- I am (or at least was) reasonablly active in Unix User's Association of Southern California
- I am supposed to be in charge of the Linux/Unix SIG for North Orange County Computer Club (If anyone is interested in taking over this group, please let me know)
- I am going to be beta testing Railroad Tycoon 2 from Loki Software
- and... I'm trying to get back into school to finish my BS
So, basically, I was just too busy to put in any more time... </OFFTOPIC>In response to Jordy's remarks:
Yeh... But I don't see this so much as an issue. X is still (and always has been) "source-code availible" even if it wasn't always necessarily "Open-Source", so the code has always been availible for peer review. As a software developer, I feel if X was designed right, I shouldn't have to modify X in order to make it suit my needs. Yes... but (at least up until now) they have always made it "source-code availible". I really have no desire to modify X itself, (as a developer) so I see this as slightly irrelivant. (How many Windoze/Mac users have the source-code for their respective GUI?) I don't see the backward compatibility as a major problem, The big problem is limitations of the X protocol because of how people thought about GUIs 10 years ago... This is really an issue with TK, the standard X toolkit, and really isn't related to the X protocol itself. There doesn't need to necessarily be a standard way of looking at GUIs and widgets, which is what different toolkits really provide... They problem is that they need to be consistant with each other in how they behave, and how they are user-configurable... Here I totally agree, but I think I'm looking at it from a different point-of-view. I see this as a problem because how the X-protocol "quantifies" the "world". (see below where I discuss server-side GUI widgets.) Here I also agree, but I'm looking at this from a different point-of-view than most of the people who responded to this point... In X, I have one window manager (running at a time) that governs how the window borders are displayed. The user has (for the most part) alot of control with this, but the remainder of each window is decorated according to the GUI toolkit that the software developer (not the user) used to create the GUI. Generally the user has little or no control over this. GNOME (or more specifically GTK) is starting to work around this with theming capibilities, but it is implemented at a level well above the X protocol, and consiquently, it only affects GTK applications.So in short, I'm not saying that there should be one "true interface" that all GUIs should be modeled after, but rather that the user should be able to select a style of GUI that (s)he is comfortable with, and have all the apps reflect that. (i.e. I could want all the "File" menu text to be in red... in all my programs.)
Additionally, a few things that Jordy didn't mention include:
- X only supports black-and-white (or more specifially "two-tone") fonts... This might sound fine to someone who doesn't know alot about graphics rendering, but this totally precludes the possibility of anti-aliasing, which can make text much more readable... especially with smaller fonts.
- Besides the concept of a "window" X has no concept of GUI "widgets" (like buttons, scroll-bars, edit boxes, etc. ) Whenever you press on a "button" (that, lets say, depresses when you press the mouse on it) the server sends the press event accross the "network" to the client, who has to send back instructions over the "network" for how it should be redrawn to look depressed. For something as trivial as a button press, this is a terribly in-efficient use of network bandwidth. With something like Berlin, the logic of how these buttons respond can be sent to the server, so all the GUI look-and-feel issues can be handeled on the server, then it simply needs to tell the client: "I've been clicked on... do whatever you are supposed to when I'm clicked on..."
- X lacks real support for any 3D, video rendering... esspecially WRT hardware accelleration... the typical X way to do this to hand off a chunk of the screen for rendering to a program who knows how to handel the acceleration itself, not only is this a cludge, but it may tend to introduce security issues.
- no support for alpha channels (semi-transparency)... or other similar effects.
- (I may be wrong on this last point but...) There doesn't seem to be any global color-correction settings in X... for people in the publishing industry, this could prove a real headache.
I'm sure there are other issues, but this should get you started...Thanks again to Jordy (and Graydon, and all of the gang) who are helping with Berlin,
- Allows prohibition against "reverse engineering". This is akin to saying I can buy a car, but opening the hood to see how the engine worked would make me a criminal.
- Allows remotely disabeling software when publisher suspects violation of the terms of the license, without needing a search-warrant. This is akin to saying that if I buy a car that, in the fine print says I'm only allowed to use gasoline from a particular company, and if the car company suspects I used gasoline from a competitor, they could make the car stop working, even in mission-critical situations (like while being on a busy freeway).
- The user isn't necessarily entitled to see the software license contract before agreeing to it. This is like saying that for a car you bought with a "bumper to bumper" warrenty... The warrenty can cover only the paint job (from one bumper to the other), and that you many not find out until you take the car in for repair.
- It is legal for software publishers to prohibit sale or transfer of a software license... Something like saying when you're ready for a new car you need to throw out the old one, because you aren't alowed to sell it.
- The software publisher can limit thier liability to the cost of the software, even if the user has paid for additional services over and above the price of the software. This would be like if (God fobid) if you drove your new car off the auto lot with your family and the car exploded killing everyone except yourself, that the car company would owe you no more than the price of the car, and to collect that, you may be required to call a special refund service that could charge you twice the value of the car for just the phone call... and that even after the car exploded you would still be obligated to pay for the 5-year service contract.
I hope this helps you put this proposed legislation into some perspective.- The people who go to porn search engines are looking for porn. This would help them find "relevant content"
- The big (legitimate) search engines have long been looking for ways to make their search queries more focused. This would allow them to let users filter out such sites from a searches results, giving users less irrelivant muck to wade through, making them feel better about the relevance of the site's search results, leading to more customer loyalty. (You have to admit, on a search engine 80+% of the time all the porn sites just get in the way of what you're looking for.)
- This may even help the porn sites get a more targeted audience, and less hate-mail from users who ended up at their site by accident... (although this might not be the case, because many porn sites are only conserned with number of hits, so they get $$ from their advertisers.)
So I think this (if widely deployed... which is unlikely at this point) would be quite usefull... You have to admit, if you're looking for porn, you're going to find it. Why not make it easier to tell what is/isn't porn so everyone's not bombarded (as much) by information overload?See what I mean about closed-source software... (in this case Netscape...) You can't trust it.
Sure, I don't mind using (and paying good money for) commercial software... as long as it comes with source-code. I strongly prefer an open-source licence, but I do understand there are buisness constrainst that come into play. I'm happy as long as the terms of the licence are flexible enough to allow posting small chuncks of questionable code for review, discuss possible changes with other users/developers, post patches to the code to fix probelms and add features, and to be able to (at my discression) submit those patches to the company for possible inclusion. Buisness don't seem to see that there is demand for commercial applications with source code.
If you don't let me see the source code, you don't trust me. If you don't trust me, why should I trust you. If I don't trust you, why should I trust that the code you write does what you say it does, and doesn't (by design or by accident) reek havock on my machine. If I don't have confidence that your software won't trash my system why should I pay you money for it.
I was listening to an audio coulmn on KNX radio yesterday by Michael Josephson called "Character Counts" . In yestedays column (which is not on his website yet) he reported (unhappily) about a buisnessman at one of his seminars who (when he brought up the topic of keeping promises) described the decision whether a buisness should keep a promise (such as what a software package will do... and not do) as purely a cost-benifit analysis of the costs of keeping the promise vs. the cost of breaching it. With ethics like this floating around the buisness world, it is not reasonable for me to trust that what a software company says it's products do is, in fact what they do. According to this buisnessman's arguemnt, if his company deemed that it would make them more money to have their software cause a problem on my system (unbeknownst to me) so that I would need to buy another of thier products to fix it, then they would do this.
I spend alot of money on my machine each year, but it's not worth my time to spend any of my money on commercial software if it doesn't come with source code, although I'm more than willing to spend good money on commercial software, that I believe I would find useful, if it includes source-code.
It looks like you're right. I found the original slashdot article where this was announced... It was just over a year ago, and that was a beta announcement. But (also from the article) PowerQuest said it was going to release the source-code "soon".
I forgot to mention that ext2 resizing code (like PowerQuest had promised to release) would be a great addition to something like DiskDrake.
So... Where's the code?
I'm afraid that by the time a net connection is considered part of the house a T4 to your house would be considered a "slow connection". (Now that would be cool... at leaset a T4 to every house... and could you immagine the bandwidth of the backbones?) Oh, and by then that network appliance might include a "replicator", so that you could recieve packages too... Maybe I'll live to see that. (Maybe not.)
- A Mac Performa 631CD (w/ 10-base-T LC-com NIC)... which is all but impossible to get cards for and
- a small LAN centered around a small Linux Server ('486 40MHZ) that currently has no free slots connected via an 8-port hub (w/ many ports unused)
If I could just stick a card in either end, that would be great, but I'm close to positive that I won't be able to find a LC-com 802.11 NIC for the Mac, and I don't have a slot necessarily availible on the server, so Ideally I would like to just plug in RJ-45 at either end and be done with it. I am open to other possibilities, but the above would be the ideal case.Given that, the only products listed that claim 10-base-T connections, are the base units (at $300 a pop) which I would want at either end of this point-to-point connection.
Thanks,
I could really use a pair of those base units to connect my (10-base-T) LAN to my mother's (obsolete - a.k.a. not supported) Mac, since she insists that the cabel dissapear into the walls (without me tearing up the walls to do this)... Just that $600 for a wireless 10-base-T Point-to-Point connection is too rich for my blood... Any suggestions?
For the record, technically multi-line phones (which could support a modem) often use RJ-45, but (although technically possible because RJ-11 can have 4 conductors) I have never seen Ethernet run with RJ-11 connectors.