As Linux entered the eye of the mass media, misinformation rapidly became one of its worst enemies. If you gathered 100 random computer using people, I promise you'll here 100 different descriptions of what Linux is, what Open Source is, and so forth. This is because they were told what Linux and Open Source were by 100 different ignorant mass media outlets like our pal at ABCNews.com.
They don't get it, and they're spreading that ignorance to all their readers. This is bad.:) It means any person who wants to introduce Linux into their company will have to start out by undoing all that misinformation before they can even begin to be taken seriously. It means schools that don't have any better source of information will take the mass media at its word and just ignore Linux. Misinformation needs to be countered, very carefully.
There's a major learning curve involved in using Linux, and until the public at large is ready and willing to take that step, no amount of GUifying or desktop building will remove the underlying need for Linux users to understand how Linux works. Additionally, Linux in the mainstream won't benefit the average user until it has something to offer that they don't already have. Normal people don't care if their programs are open source, they just want to browse the web, write their docs, and play their games.
Gnome and KDE are great, and I'm sure StarOffice and KOffice will be great too. But they don't take away from the need to understand that there are fundamental differences between Unix and Windows. Linux will not be ready for the mainstream until you can hand it to a neophyte and they can succeed without having a friend or relative that is a guru that can field hundreds of questions.
If you've ever been within earshot of the Debian developers when the release cycle is running, you know that no Debian release is a minor undertaking. Countless people put in a huge amount of work; not just developers, but QA people, testers, documenters, translators..
I can't think of a Debian release as long as I've been using it (Since 0.9x) that wasn't a big deal, in all honesty. (Well.. 1.3 wasn't a huge deal, but it was still significant:) )
Perhaps after funding the launch of the latest ISS rocket, Pizza Hut will start funding planetary body searches, on the condition that they get to name whatever they find..
Dateline October, 2015: Jupiter's 18th and 19th moons, named for the company that funded their discovery, are known as Meat Lovers and Big Foot.
Certainly they demonstrated their cluebie level long ago. As with the RIAA, they don't get it, and there's no reason to expect them to become enlightened.
Technology and big agencies like this do not mix. Change only happens quickly when it's done willingly or with resignation. Agencies and businesses that stubbornly cling to their notions of how the world works won't be changing any time soon.
Not keeping up on Palms at all, I suppose this is as good a time to ask as any. What are the chances of there being 802.11 Palms in the forseeable future? A wireless modem is nice, but I'd much rather be able to use a Palm anywhere on my home network.
I mean, since cell phone users are predominantly white, middle to upper class males, of course this gets investigated.
Uh-huh. And what countries are Nokia, Sony, Samsung, etc. based in again? Do you have any idea how widespread cel phone use is in Europe and Asia? Cellular tech has exploded in areas of China and India because there was essentially no prior infrastructure. So why not build up the current thing, cellular, instead of waste time evolving an infrastructure like the US has done? It's a classic leap-frogging in technology.
Rich white males indeed. Hell, even if we were to assume it was an American thing, wander through an assortment of high schools sometime and show me the rich people based only on if they have a cel phone glued to their ear. Sheesh.
Dead serious, I was standing outside with a coworker one day who was taking a smoke break, I answered a cel phone call, and the smoking coworker told me how those cel phones will kill me someday.
He realized, of course, of the pot and the kettle situation. But still, it happened.:)
So I was watching Discovery Wings a few weeks ago, and started seeing advertisements for little oval-shaped "filters" that you put over the earpiece of your cellular phone to block the radiation. I just about fell out of my chair.
These people are serious! They actually think a patch the size of an elongated quarter placed over the earpiece of a cel phone will save you. They had it all. Everything from a generic American mother saying, in a deadpan face and a concerned voice "I'd never let my teenager use an unprotected celluar phone!" to a really scientific test where they held a cel phone up to a monitor and showed how it made the monitor shake. Then they put one of their magical filters on the phone, and showed how the monitor didn't shake anymore. Riiiiiiight. They must have that special Gauss-model phone that wasn't available when I went shopping for my PCS phone (Which doesn't, for the record, make my monitor shake)
I certainly hope nobody is taking that product seriously. As if the only radiation in a phone comes directly out the earpiece in a unidirectional fashion. They even suggested you can use their filters on standard wireless phones. I suppose they're just feeding on the classic fear (And in many cases, paranoia) of the unknown that seems to be an all-too-constant aspect of humanity. Even if cel phones are harmful, these filter-making folks definitely don't have the solution.
Right, as if health risk ever stopped a person from doing something. Please. Cel phones have permeated societies across the world, and their use will not stop just because they may have some silly little fatality issue.
And they certainly won't stop using them while driving.
Galeon follows some very similar lines as a project a friend had done called MozGlade. Both projects address a problem with Mozilla that he stated quite well at one point, and it's a point that's been brought up here on Slashdot.
Mozilla is much more than a web browser, it's literally a complete application development framework. It's extremely powerful, extensible, and all those other nifty development buzzwords. This is all well and good, but some people don't want to surf the web with an application framework. The answer is simple. Take out the rendering widget (Gecko) and stick it in a good, old-fashioned web browser. That's what we have here, and since it uses the same core as Mozilla, calling it "Yet another web browser" doesn't completely fit. It's simply another way to use Mozilla, and it fills a much-needed void.
Actually.. Gecko follows the HTML spec much closer than Netscape 4 ever has, which could be part of the problem. See, Gecko is so strict on being standards complaint, it often makes pages look bad, because they've been written for years to worh with the half-assed compliance of NS4 or IE3.
As you'll notice, Gecko and IE5 look very similar in rendering, whereas Netscape 4 looks quite different. There's a reason for this.:)
Oh, please. You can't tell me the reason SUV's are popular is because they're useful utility vehicles. I commute 15 miles to work every day, and I always see at least 20 massive SUV's with exactly one person in them, a middle aged guy in a suit, usually talking on a cel phone. I assure you, that man's SUV will never see a spot of road that isn't paved or outside the metropolitan area. And it certainly won't be hauling drywall or bathtubs any time soon, as Ford would like you to believe.
And it always cracks me up to see a Ford Excursion parked on the side of the road downtown, taking up two parking spots. I'm just glad they don't fit in the parking garages.
I bet, Japan will be the place you see more fuel cell / bybrid first, then Europe, then North America. Not to be soon.
And America will be a very distant third. Nobody in the US wants to drive fuel-efficient cars, they want to drive hideouslyoversizedSUV's. Until those things can run on electricy, roar a loud, obnoxious engine, and take up more space than two normal vehicles, nobody will give up their SUV's.
It probably wouldn't be a standard size/capacity/shape between car manufacturers. It'd be like trying to offer a central place to replace everybody's cel phone battery.
The relationship between the US and Russia on this project is quite complex, and politics is playing a much larger role than it should be. Russia needs to be given a fairly important role in the project, and Zvezda is evidence of that.
Even though Zvezda being late pushed back many US components, the US wouldn't have been able to replace it without a lot of R&D money, because the US simply isn't as far along in this area as Russia.
The money makes things interesting too. Russia needs to be a big part of the project, but can't afford to be. So what I imagine we'll see happening is the US will contribute a fair amount of money to keep the Russian space program afloat.l
You're right, Russia has had over a decade of experience with space stations, whereas Nasa has more or less none. This is one of the critical reasons Russia has to play a large part in ISS. They actually know how to make a space station work. The problem is, they're broke.
I've seen some suggestions that the project would go a lot better if Russia was put into a contractor position (Which is what happened to get the first Russian module up there), where they're doing the work, but the US is financing it. That way you get Russian experience without worrying about them scrounging up the cash. Unfortunately that isn't a very viable option because of politics and pride.
The international teamwork is a nice ideal, but in the end, the US is funding the vast majority of ISS. Other countries such as the EU members, Canada, and so forth are putting in pieces here and there, but it doesn't add up to much, I'm afraid. What would be nice is to see the burden spread evenly, but it just doesn't work that way, because most countries don't have the space program the US does. Perhaps that will change in the future. China is working ardently on getting a man into space, iirc, and the UK has designs on putting a probe on Mars. So, who knows.
One way or another, it should be an interesting decade.
So Honda's got a walking robot (Honda Germany, I'll note) and Volkswagen has a car-driving robot. How long before we see robots driving taxis a la Total Recall?
And, just to throw in some eco-geekiness, it'll be a fuel cell-powered taxi, to boot.
Children Under 13 The ICQ service, software, network, system, Web site, servers, various directories and listings, various message and news boards, tools, information and databases, are NOT FOR USE BY CHILDREN UNDER 13 YEARS OF AGE. Please note that if it comes to ICQ's attention through reliable means that a registered user is a child under 13 years of age, ICQ will cancel that user's account.
So, yes, you can lie to them, and they don't have to care about it until they have good reason to beleive you to be under 13. Yes, this isn't very specific, but that's all the grounds they need. And if they kick you out for being under 13 when you're actually not, your civil liberties have not been violated. It's a service they're letting you use, and they always, regardless of age, have the right to kick you off.
Well, it's a good thing this post didn't actually mention censorship anywhere, aside from michael's update which pointed out the distinction between the COPA and the COPPA.
PHP vs. Perl: I've seen both types of projects go to pieces. The problem with PHP is that you start with a lot of HTML and a little code, which makes PHP seem perfect, but over time you wind up with lots of code that isn't organized at all because it's embedded in all your HTML pages, which makes the code very hard to maintain.
This is, of course, not a shortcoming of PHP. This is what happens when a project is started with no preconception of scope, design, or modularity. In any web application, regardless of language, content and code should never be mixed beyond what is necessary for connecting the data with the layout. PHP can be very good at this. Java Servlets can't, which is why we have JSP. ColdFusion can't, because it's nothing but markup (In other words, CF is like JSP without servlets to back it up. But CF is going to become a set of custom JSP tags in the near future, so it's all good.)
If you've written a handful of PHP scripts that are mostly HTML, and later become mostly PHP, you didn't think ahead (Or your bosses didn't think ahead..:) ) The bulk of the PHP code should've been seperated out into objects, functions, or utility scripts from the very beginning. A good habit is to always do this, regardless of how small a project starts out as. Even if the project is small, the code can be reused much easier if it's seperate to begin with (Which you noted as a reason you were moving away from PHP towards Perl. Again, this isn't a shortcoming of PHP, it's a lack of planning).
Slashdot Mirror
As Linux entered the eye of the mass media, misinformation rapidly became one of its worst enemies. If you gathered 100 random computer using people, I promise you'll here 100 different descriptions of what Linux is, what Open Source is, and so forth. This is because they were told what Linux and Open Source were by 100 different ignorant mass media outlets like our pal at ABCNews.com.
:) It means any person who wants to introduce Linux into their company will have to start out by undoing all that misinformation before they can even begin to be taken seriously. It means schools that don't have any better source of information will take the mass media at its word and just ignore Linux. Misinformation needs to be countered, very carefully.
They don't get it, and they're spreading that ignorance to all their readers. This is bad.
There's a major learning curve involved in using Linux, and until the public at large is ready and willing to take that step, no amount of GUifying or desktop building will remove the underlying need for Linux users to understand how Linux works. Additionally, Linux in the mainstream won't benefit the average user until it has something to offer that they don't already have. Normal people don't care if their programs are open source, they just want to browse the web, write their docs, and play their games.
Gnome and KDE are great, and I'm sure StarOffice and KOffice will be great too. But they don't take away from the need to understand that there are fundamental differences between Unix and Windows. Linux will not be ready for the mainstream until you can hand it to a neophyte and they can succeed without having a friend or relative that is a guru that can field hundreds of questions.
Sprint Wireless Web fails, so my guess is your system grabbed it as text.
There'd be no way I'd use it for more than the occasional novelty, considering what WAP costs with Sprint, but.. How about it?
If you've ever been within earshot of the Debian developers when the release cycle is running, you know that no Debian release is a minor undertaking. Countless people put in a huge amount of work; not just developers, but QA people, testers, documenters, translators..
:) )
I can't think of a Debian release as long as I've been using it (Since 0.9x) that wasn't a big deal, in all honesty. (Well.. 1.3 wasn't a huge deal, but it was still significant
Perhaps after funding the launch of the latest ISS rocket, Pizza Hut will start funding planetary body searches, on the condition that they get to name whatever they find..
Dateline October, 2015: Jupiter's 18th and 19th moons, named for the company that funded their discovery, are known as Meat Lovers and Big Foot.
Certainly they demonstrated their cluebie level long ago. As with the RIAA, they don't get it, and there's no reason to expect them to become enlightened.
Technology and big agencies like this do not mix. Change only happens quickly when it's done willingly or with resignation. Agencies and businesses that stubbornly cling to their notions of how the world works won't be changing any time soon.
Not keeping up on Palms at all, I suppose this is as good a time to ask as any. What are the chances of there being 802.11 Palms in the forseeable future? A wireless modem is nice, but I'd much rather be able to use a Palm anywhere on my home network.
I mean, since cell phone users are predominantly white, middle to upper class males, of course this gets investigated.
Uh-huh. And what countries are Nokia, Sony, Samsung, etc. based in again? Do you have any idea how widespread cel phone use is in Europe and Asia? Cellular tech has exploded in areas of China and India because there was essentially no prior infrastructure. So why not build up the current thing, cellular, instead of waste time evolving an infrastructure like the US has done? It's a classic leap-frogging in technology.
Rich white males indeed. Hell, even if we were to assume it was an American thing, wander through an assortment of high schools sometime and show me the rich people based only on if they have a cel phone glued to their ear. Sheesh.
Dead serious, I was standing outside with a coworker one day who was taking a smoke break, I answered a cel phone call, and the smoking coworker told me how those cel phones will kill me someday.
:)
He realized, of course, of the pot and the kettle situation. But still, it happened.
So I was watching Discovery Wings a few weeks ago, and started seeing advertisements for little oval-shaped "filters" that you put over the earpiece of your cellular phone to block the radiation. I just about fell out of my chair.
These people are serious! They actually think a patch the size of an elongated quarter placed over the earpiece of a cel phone will save you. They had it all. Everything from a generic American mother saying, in a deadpan face and a concerned voice "I'd never let my teenager use an unprotected celluar phone!" to a really scientific test where they held a cel phone up to a monitor and showed how it made the monitor shake. Then they put one of their magical filters on the phone, and showed how the monitor didn't shake anymore. Riiiiiiight. They must have that special Gauss-model phone that wasn't available when I went shopping for my PCS phone (Which doesn't, for the record, make my monitor shake)
I certainly hope nobody is taking that product seriously. As if the only radiation in a phone comes directly out the earpiece in a unidirectional fashion. They even suggested you can use their filters on standard wireless phones.
I suppose they're just feeding on the classic fear (And in many cases, paranoia) of the unknown that seems to be an all-too-constant aspect of humanity. Even if cel phones are harmful, these filter-making folks definitely don't have the solution.
Right, as if health risk ever stopped a person from doing something. Please. Cel phones have permeated societies across the world, and their use will not stop just because they may have some silly little fatality issue.
And they certainly won't stop using them while driving.
Galeon follows some very similar lines as a project a friend had done called MozGlade. Both projects address a problem with Mozilla that he stated quite well at one point, and it's a point that's been brought up here on Slashdot.
Mozilla is much more than a web browser, it's literally a complete application development framework. It's extremely powerful, extensible, and all those other nifty development buzzwords. This is all well and good, but some people don't want to surf the web with an application framework. The answer is simple. Take out the rendering widget (Gecko) and stick it in a good, old-fashioned web browser. That's what we have here, and since it uses the same core as Mozilla, calling it "Yet another web browser" doesn't completely fit. It's simply another way to use Mozilla, and it fills a much-needed void.
Actually.. Gecko follows the HTML spec much closer than Netscape 4 ever has, which could be part of the problem. See, Gecko is so strict on being standards complaint, it often makes pages look bad, because they've been written for years to worh with the half-assed compliance of NS4 or IE3.
:)
As you'll notice, Gecko and IE5 look very similar in rendering, whereas Netscape 4 looks quite different. There's a reason for this.
Oh, please. You can't tell me the reason SUV's are popular is because they're useful utility vehicles. I commute 15 miles to work every day, and I always see at least 20 massive SUV's with exactly one person in them, a middle aged guy in a suit, usually talking on a cel phone. I assure you, that man's SUV will never see a spot of road that isn't paved or outside the metropolitan area. And it certainly won't be hauling drywall or bathtubs any time soon, as Ford would like you to believe.
And it always cracks me up to see a Ford Excursion parked on the side of the road downtown, taking up two parking spots. I'm just glad they don't fit in the parking garages.
I bet, Japan will be the place you see more fuel cell / bybrid first, then Europe, then North America. Not to be soon.
And America will be a very distant third. Nobody in the US wants to drive fuel-efficient cars, they want to drive hideously oversized SUV's. Until those things can run on electricy, roar a loud, obnoxious engine, and take up more space than two normal vehicles, nobody will give up their SUV's.
It probably wouldn't be a standard size/capacity/shape between car manufacturers. It'd be like trying to offer a central place to replace everybody's cel phone battery.
The relationship between the US and Russia on this project is quite complex, and politics is playing a much larger role than it should be. Russia needs to be given a fairly important role in the project, and Zvezda is evidence of that.
Even though Zvezda being late pushed back many US components, the US wouldn't have been able to replace it without a lot of R&D money, because the US simply isn't as far along in this area as Russia.
The money makes things interesting too. Russia needs to be a big part of the project, but can't afford to be. So what I imagine we'll see happening is the US will contribute a fair amount of money to keep the Russian space program afloat.l
You're right, Russia has had over a decade of experience with space stations, whereas Nasa has more or less none. This is one of the critical reasons Russia has to play a large part in ISS. They actually know how to make a space station work. The problem is, they're broke.
I've seen some suggestions that the project would go a lot better if Russia was put into a contractor position (Which is what happened to get the first Russian module up there), where they're doing the work, but the US is financing it. That way you get Russian experience without worrying about them scrounging up the cash. Unfortunately that isn't a very viable option because of politics and pride.
The international teamwork is a nice ideal, but in the end, the US is funding the vast majority of ISS. Other countries such as the EU members, Canada, and so forth are putting in pieces here and there, but it doesn't add up to much, I'm afraid. What would be nice is to see the burden spread evenly, but it just doesn't work that way, because most countries don't have the space program the US does. Perhaps that will change in the future. China is working ardently on getting a man into space, iirc, and the UK has designs on putting a probe on Mars. So, who knows.
One way or another, it should be an interesting decade.
Well, how does that compare to when MS was selling CD's of Win2k betas?
So Honda's got a walking robot (Honda Germany, I'll note) and Volkswagen has a car-driving robot. How long before we see robots driving taxis a la Total Recall?
And, just to throw in some eco-geekiness, it'll be a fuel cell-powered taxi, to boot.
From the Usage Notices
Children Under 13
The ICQ service, software, network, system, Web site, servers, various directories and listings,
various message and news boards, tools, information and databases, are NOT FOR USE BY CHILDREN UNDER 13 YEARS OF AGE. Please note that if it comes to ICQ's attention through reliable means that a registered user is a child under 13 years of age, ICQ will cancel that user's account.
So, yes, you can lie to them, and they don't have to care about it until they have good reason to beleive you to be under 13. Yes, this isn't very specific, but that's all the grounds they need. And if they kick you out for being under 13 when you're actually not, your civil liberties have not been violated. It's a service they're letting you use, and they always, regardless of age, have the right to kick you off.
Well, it's a good thing this post didn't actually mention censorship anywhere, aside from michael's update which pointed out the distinction between the COPA and the COPPA.
Read before you react.
PHP vs. Perl: I've seen both types of projects go to pieces. The problem with PHP is that you start with a lot of HTML and a little code, which makes PHP seem perfect, but over time you wind up with lots of code that isn't organized at all because it's embedded in all your HTML pages, which makes the code very hard to maintain.
:) ) The bulk of the PHP code should've been seperated out into objects, functions, or utility scripts from the very beginning. A good habit is to always do this, regardless of how small a project starts out as. Even if the project is small, the code can be reused much easier if it's seperate to begin with (Which you noted as a reason you were moving away from PHP towards Perl. Again, this isn't a shortcoming of PHP, it's a lack of planning).
This is, of course, not a shortcoming of PHP. This is what happens when a project is started with no preconception of scope, design, or modularity. In any web application, regardless of language, content and code should never be mixed beyond what is necessary for connecting the data with the layout. PHP can be very good at this. Java Servlets can't, which is why we have JSP. ColdFusion can't, because it's nothing but markup (In other words, CF is like JSP without servlets to back it up. But CF is going to become a set of custom JSP tags in the near future, so it's all good.)
If you've written a handful of PHP scripts that are mostly HTML, and later become mostly PHP, you didn't think ahead (Or your bosses didn't think ahead..
Granted, I was pretty annoyed when one of our sales reps sent three large slapstick mpegs to every employee of a small office I consult IT work for.
:)
He doesn't get to use that mail server anymore, though, so it's all good.