Gosh I speak out against open source and Linux and I get marked a troll. How dare I question the one true religion! I better keep my location quiet lest you come and try and burn me!
I was not trolling. I was speaking my mind. But I should know by now the heretical talk on Slashdot is not tolerated. Oh well time to return to the grown up world.
And why would you want to do that? This is the whole problem with open source. People tinker.
My job is 'tinkering' with linux. Linux is not finished. It's buggy, There's no documentation. It's a pain in the arse. There's no glory in doing that last 20% which actually completes a project. Everyone wants to add functionality rather than finish debugging what's there. Or they feel that what is there doesn't do what they want it to do and so reinvents the wheel and develops a subtly different application to do basically the same thing. So I get paid to finish it. Make it good enough for consumer products. Fix bugs that no one wants to fix because they are not interested in fixing boring obscure bugs.
Generally open source software is not managed or professionally developed. There are exceptions but they are exceptions. The quality control is rather lacking. I've had enough. I get paid respectably to 'do' linux at work. I want an easy life at home and so have a Mac. The software may not be the best in the world but it is developed in a comercial environment with the quality controls that go with that. That's what appeals to me about OS-X (and IRIX before that). People haven't tinkered with the software. Those applications you list do what I want them to do. Why should I want to change them. More importantly, if I had the source to them, why should I think that my changes will improve them? That's arrogance!
The technology is usually either invented here or implemented here first
What like television, or the electric light, or the computer...
Yes PAL is designed knowing the deficiencies of NTSC but for both digital television technology and digital cell phones Europe actually got there first. The advantage we had was that cable and satelite TV networks and analogue mobile phones were very slow to take off and so we jumped straight in to the digital forms of these allowing us to leap frog intermediate technology.
There are, however, technologies where "not invented here" does hold true. DAB for example is well established but the US picked an alternate standard. Or COFDM vs US digital terrestrial broadcasting for example. COFDM plus DVB-T has resulted in the UK becoming the country with the highest adoption of digital television (per cent of population) due to the popularity of free multi-channel digital terrestrial (down an antenna) broadcasting.
I develop digital television set top boxes for a living. We basically have two divisions. One for US products and one for the rest of the world. It's easy to use the same basic design of PVR in the UK, Europe and Australasia but we need a different one for the US.
The problem with that view of the world is that you want people to stay away from sex until marriage but also defines marriage to be a subset of the combinations that exist in the world. I have two partners. They are my life partners. I live with both of them. I want to stay with them for the rest of my life. I can't get married! For biological reasons I am unable to reproduce so should I not have sex? What happens for two people of the same gender? Which brings me on to another thing. People talk about the sanctity of marriage. My cousin had a totally non-religious civil wedding. How is that sanctified?
Marriage should be an indication of the love and commitment the interested parties have for one another, and agreement that should it break down things are handled amicably, and legal protection should that not happen. If you're religious then you can have it recognised in the church, synagogue, temple, mosque, wood, stone circle or what ever, but that is separate.
Have sex before hand if you want but like everything else, mind your manners. Be thoughtful, considerate, safe and use your common sense.
Why is it the cure to 'sleeping around' is monogamy. What about long term polygamy or polyamory? Exactly the same principles apply. Trust, love, long tem commitment etc. it's just that there's more than one partner. I know triples who has been together, living in the same house, for years.
I agree somewhat. The problem with iTunes is that Apple are trying to minimise the variances between the Windows and OS-X and so there's a lot of stuff in iTunes which shouldn't really be there on the Mac. 'Proper' iTunes should use the music folder for music, the video folder for video, and sync everything via sync services. I.e. an iPod is just another syncable device.
Up to about 1996 my regular computer was one that booted virtually instantaniously. It's just that it didn't run Windows, Mac OS or Linux. RISC OS (as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) was/is in ROM/FLASH and was there the moment the machine started. I held off moving over to a PC/Linux basically because of boot times. Admittedly with linux you just leave the machine on so it's not an issue but Windows was/is a real pain.
Bravo! Applause! You've got it spot on. This isn't a *video* iPod. It's an iPod that just happens to play video. 99% of the use cases will be the same as before. It's a hard disk music player and useable as such. In the car, walking, at work, whatever. It's just that if you happen to find yourself with some time to kill on a train, or in a plane say, you *can* watch something.
The real problem with *any* video player is the use case. You can listen to music anywhere and while you're doing other things. Usually watching TV or films requires your attention. It's less flexible. If it was as good as anyone says then the miniature portable TVs would be everywhere.
There's also the adoption of some of the Welsh language by Native Americans in Canada. It is pretty strong evidence that first millennium Celts travelled there.
But it wont be RISC OS, as Castle own the name. Also whether or not the source is the same, the API will be the same, and that is still owned by Castle and will need licencing. If RISC OS ltd are just going completely new then it's definitely not RISC OS and you have to ask, what's the point.
RISC OS was developed by Acorn Computers, who also developed the ARM (The Acorn RISC Machine - It was renamed to Advanced RISC Machines when its development was spun off in to a separate company, ARM Plc.).
When Acorn was asset stripped at the end of the nineties, some of the assets were purchased by Pace Micro Technology. Pace had started life developing hardware for Acorn's BBC Microcomputer but had moved on to, firstly analogue TV set top boxes, and then digital ones.
Pace took ownership of RISC OS as part of the deal with Acorn's dismantlers. It also took ownership of Online Media and its development (Online Media was Acorn's own set top development arm which was researching digital television over IP in the mid nineties. It was an extension of the work they did on the NC. Acorn designed and built the reference platform for Oracle's NC). The product that came out of these purchases was the DSL4000, an IPTV box which is in use all over the world.
Pace licenced RISC OS development 'for the desktop' to RISC OS ltd but retained ownership. This became RISC OS 4. Castle Technologies, who got the rights to sell Acorn RISC PCs on Acorn's demise, independently licenced RISC OS development for X-Scale on their Ionix machine. That is RISC OS 5.
More recently Pace has undergone some rationalisation and it eventually closed the Pace Cambridge office (which is what Acorn's office became). During that rationalisation Pace sold RISC OS to Castle whilst retaining the rights to continue to use it in their own products. This caused a ruckus as RISC OS ltd and Castle fell out. Eventually they made friends and development continues.
RISC OS remains in the ownership of Castle with RISC OS ltd doing the development for all machine's except Castle's and except embedded which is still linked with Pace. So I don't know who's in trouble here but while RISC OS is still in use as an embedded operating system I don't see it becoming open source.
At an Acorn show, I once followed a talk by Paul Middleton about RISC OS, by talking about ARM Linux, which was amusing. Also from what I remember of Paul Middleton (about ten years ago when we cross paths at the local users group and when he was my local Acorn dealer) he doesn't give things away that he can sell so I can't see him being very pro open sourcing RISC OS.
You seem to have completely ignored all the embedded devices that use it. Okay as a desktop operating system it is dated. But because it is small, fast, robust and the like it makes a damn good OS for consumer devices. As a result the 21st century has resulted in more copies of RISC OS actually being used than there were in the whole of Acorn's life.
Historical evidence shows that most people have known the world is round for thousands of years. That everyone thought it was 'flat' until Columbus is a combination of promotion by himself and the Spanish royal family who sponsored him and the Roman Catholic church. In fact the route taken by Columbus was not the most obvious one. Its more like the route that would be taken by someone who *knows* there's a large landmass in the north Atlantic and wants to go under it to go around to the far east. Northern Europeans had been sailing the north Atlantic all the way to Canada for hundreds of years by then.
The UK store doesn't have the TV shows. Not surprising since two of them, Lost and Desperate Housewives are both behind the US schedule and ABC would not want to lose potential broadcast revenue. It would be interesting to see whether I can purchase from the US store.
I use ADSL so I already have a phone line. The phone line comes in to the house and in to it are plugged an ADSL router modem and a DECT base station. There are no phone lines beyond that point. A single network cable goes to the servers and WiFi router. Three people live in this house at at their desks they each have a DECT handset and charger next to their computers. There's also a common one downstairs. It cost us about $100 for the full four handset DECT package. After line rental (which we have to pay because of the ADSL) our call charges on the landline are just a few dollars a month since we all have cells too.
I can't see the point of VOIP yet for the home user who inevitably either gets their phone with their cable, or gets their internet down their phone.
If the internet is considered child of milnet then yes it did originate in the US. But the UK for example had its own equivalent for accademic purposes which was independent (although a gateway existed). The UK's internet is child of Janet.
Interestingly the.uk TLD is actually wrong. The TLD names come from the country codes that are used on planes and cars etc. The UK one should actually be.gb and that is open to us too. It's just that we went and set up a.uk (which should be Ukraine) before that was all decided and since the UK was already using it we kept it and the Ukrainians got.ukr instead.
Of course the internet uses technology from all around the world. No one country invented it.
Is there any kind of equivalent to Gibson's Law which is "when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have 'saved the Europeans arses'"?
If there's not, then I propose one.
Melanie's law states:
That when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have saved the Europeans arses.
Anyone who uses such an argument in a thread is invoking Melanie's law and like Gibson's law, loses the argument by defaulting.
P.S. The Brits prevented the invasion of the UK by themselves before the US was in the fight and the Russians saved our collective arses by bogging down the German army so much that it gave the Allies a chance to fight back.
And that comment is typically of your insecurity.:-) A. It is countering a post that, goddess forbid, suggests that the US is not best at everything. And B. it's completely factually wrong.
Even one hundred years ago scientists were collaborating internationally, or at least thinking a long the same lines. An awful lot was driven by UK/US collaboration during WW2.
If I look at my desk at the gadgets I would think that Northern Europe and Japan was fuelling the current technological age. On it there is a Scandinavian cell phone (SonyEricsson), Japanese monitors (Iiyama), a swiss watch (Tag Heuer), a japanese PDA (Sharp Zaurus - which has a British processor - ARM), a couple of British digital settop boxes (Pace - well mine actually) running an open source operating system (Linux) first developed by a scandinavian (Linus Torsvald) with a Welsh man as his right hand man. I'm listening to German goth (ASP) on my German headphones (Sennheiser). When I drive home it will be in my Scandinavian car (Volvo). I will cook this evenings meal on my German hob, watch TV on a French TV (Thomson) receiving signals from my British Satellite system (Pace/Sky) I will may be vacuum my room with my British designer vacuum cleaner (Dyson).
The *only* American technology I own are my Apple and SGI computers and the wonderful design from Apple is thanks to a British designer.
Add perhaps you missed the bit about the water butts (barrels, tanks whatever). A lot of the US gets a lot of rain at certain times. When it rains you collect the water which means you're not wasting water. I agree about lawns in the desert, but in Colorado you should have some rain.
What's fake grass made of? Plastic uses oil. How's it made? Manufacturing most things uses energy, usually electricity or oil. Why the fuck do you want to use fertiliser on it or bug spray? If it needs pepping up, go find a stable and get some horse manure. And that bug spray? Not clinical clean enough for you? Bugs are good for the environment, leave them be. Finally you can use water butts to collect rain water and use that to water the grass in dry periods.
That whole post seems to highlight the throw away culture of the US. You do something which is bad, but just not as bad as something else which is also bad, but is done because you can't be arsed to do things properly.
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Gosh I speak out against open source and Linux and I get marked a troll. How dare I question the one true religion! I better keep my location quiet lest you come and try and burn me!
I was not trolling. I was speaking my mind. But I should know by now the heretical talk on Slashdot is not tolerated. Oh well time to return to the grown up world.
And why would you want to do that? This is the whole problem with open source. People tinker.
My job is 'tinkering' with linux. Linux is not finished. It's buggy, There's no documentation. It's a pain in the arse. There's no glory in doing that last 20% which actually completes a project. Everyone wants to add functionality rather than finish debugging what's there. Or they feel that what is there doesn't do what they want it to do and so reinvents the wheel and develops a subtly different application to do basically the same thing. So I get paid to finish it. Make it good enough for consumer products. Fix bugs that no one wants to fix because they are not interested in fixing boring obscure bugs.
Generally open source software is not managed or professionally developed. There are exceptions but they are exceptions. The quality control is rather lacking. I've had enough. I get paid respectably to 'do' linux at work. I want an easy life at home and so have a Mac. The software may not be the best in the world but it is developed in a comercial environment with the quality controls that go with that. That's what appeals to me about OS-X (and IRIX before that). People haven't tinkered with the software. Those applications you list do what I want them to do. Why should I want to change them. More importantly, if I had the source to them, why should I think that my changes will improve them? That's arrogance!
The technology is usually either invented here or implemented here first
What like television, or the electric light, or the computer...
Yes PAL is designed knowing the deficiencies of NTSC but for both digital television technology and digital cell phones Europe actually got there first. The advantage we had was that cable and satelite TV networks and analogue mobile phones were very slow to take off and so we jumped straight in to the digital forms of these allowing us to leap frog intermediate technology.
There are, however, technologies where "not invented here" does hold true. DAB for example is well established but the US picked an alternate standard. Or COFDM vs US digital terrestrial broadcasting for example. COFDM plus DVB-T has resulted in the UK becoming the country with the highest adoption of digital television (per cent of population) due to the popularity of free multi-channel digital terrestrial (down an antenna) broadcasting.
I develop digital television set top boxes for a living. We basically have two divisions. One for US products and one for the rest of the world. It's easy to use the same basic design of PVR in the UK, Europe and Australasia but we need a different one for the US.
The problem with that view of the world is that you want people to stay away from sex until marriage but also defines marriage to be a subset of the combinations that exist in the world. I have two partners. They are my life partners. I live with both of them. I want to stay with them for the rest of my life. I can't get married! For biological reasons I am unable to reproduce so should I not have sex? What happens for two people of the same gender? Which brings me on to another thing. People talk about the sanctity of marriage. My cousin had a totally non-religious civil wedding. How is that sanctified?
Marriage should be an indication of the love and commitment the interested parties have for one another, and agreement that should it break down things are handled amicably, and legal protection should that not happen. If you're religious then you can have it recognised in the church, synagogue, temple, mosque, wood, stone circle or what ever, but that is separate.
Have sex before hand if you want but like everything else, mind your manners. Be thoughtful, considerate, safe and use your common sense.
Why is it the cure to 'sleeping around' is monogamy. What about long term polygamy or polyamory? Exactly the same principles apply. Trust, love, long tem commitment etc. it's just that there's more than one partner. I know triples who has been together, living in the same house, for years.
I agree somewhat. The problem with iTunes is that Apple are trying to minimise the variances between the Windows and OS-X and so there's a lot of stuff in iTunes which shouldn't really be there on the Mac. 'Proper' iTunes should use the music folder for music, the video folder for video, and sync everything via sync services. I.e. an iPod is just another syncable device.
Up to about 1996 my regular computer was one that booted virtually instantaniously. It's just that it didn't run Windows, Mac OS or Linux. RISC OS (as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) was/is in ROM/FLASH and was there the moment the machine started. I held off moving over to a PC/Linux basically because of boot times. Admittedly with linux you just leave the machine on so it's not an issue but Windows was/is a real pain.
Bravo! Applause! You've got it spot on. This isn't a *video* iPod. It's an iPod that just happens to play video. 99% of the use cases will be the same as before. It's a hard disk music player and useable as such. In the car, walking, at work, whatever. It's just that if you happen to find yourself with some time to kill on a train, or in a plane say, you *can* watch something.
The real problem with *any* video player is the use case. You can listen to music anywhere and while you're doing other things. Usually watching TV or films requires your attention. It's less flexible. If it was as good as anyone says then the miniature portable TVs would be everywhere.
There's also the adoption of some of the Welsh language by Native Americans in Canada. It is pretty strong evidence that first millennium Celts travelled there.
But it wont be RISC OS, as Castle own the name. Also whether or not the source is the same, the API will be the same, and that is still owned by Castle and will need licencing. If RISC OS ltd are just going completely new then it's definitely not RISC OS and you have to ask, what's the point.
RISC OS was developed by Acorn Computers, who also developed the ARM (The Acorn RISC Machine - It was renamed to Advanced RISC Machines when its development was spun off in to a separate company, ARM Plc.).
When Acorn was asset stripped at the end of the nineties, some of the assets were purchased by Pace Micro Technology. Pace had started life developing hardware for Acorn's BBC Microcomputer but had moved on to, firstly analogue TV set top boxes, and then digital ones.
Pace took ownership of RISC OS as part of the deal with Acorn's dismantlers. It also took ownership of Online Media and its development (Online Media was Acorn's own set top development arm which was researching digital television over IP in the mid nineties. It was an extension of the work they did on the NC. Acorn designed and built the reference platform for Oracle's NC). The product that came out of these purchases was the DSL4000, an IPTV box which is in use all over the world.
Pace licenced RISC OS development 'for the desktop' to RISC OS ltd but retained ownership. This became RISC OS 4. Castle Technologies, who got the rights to sell Acorn RISC PCs on Acorn's demise, independently licenced RISC OS development for X-Scale on their Ionix machine. That is RISC OS 5.
More recently Pace has undergone some rationalisation and it eventually closed the Pace Cambridge office (which is what Acorn's office became). During that rationalisation Pace sold RISC OS to Castle whilst retaining the rights to continue to use it in their own products. This caused a ruckus as RISC OS ltd and Castle fell out. Eventually they made friends and development continues.
RISC OS remains in the ownership of Castle with RISC OS ltd doing the development for all machine's except Castle's and except embedded which is still linked with Pace. So I don't know who's in trouble here but while RISC OS is still in use as an embedded operating system I don't see it becoming open source.
At an Acorn show, I once followed a talk by Paul Middleton about RISC OS, by talking about ARM Linux, which was amusing. Also from what I remember of Paul Middleton (about ten years ago when we cross paths at the local users group and when he was my local Acorn dealer) he doesn't give things away that he can sell so I can't see him being very pro open sourcing RISC OS.
Yes, the embedded world.
You seem to have completely ignored all the embedded devices that use it. Okay as a desktop operating system it is dated. But because it is small, fast, robust and the like it makes a damn good OS for consumer devices. As a result the 21st century has resulted in more copies of RISC OS actually being used than there were in the whole of Acorn's life.
Actually no because a hell of a lot of it is written in ARM assembler. It would be a bastard to port.
The world is round.
Historical evidence shows that most people have known the world is round for thousands of years. That everyone thought it was 'flat' until Columbus is a combination of promotion by himself and the Spanish royal family who sponsored him and the Roman Catholic church. In fact the route taken by Columbus was not the most obvious one. Its more like the route that would be taken by someone who *knows* there's a large landmass in the north Atlantic and wants to go under it to go around to the far east. Northern Europeans had been sailing the north Atlantic all the way to Canada for hundreds of years by then.
The UK store doesn't have the TV shows. Not surprising since two of them, Lost and Desperate Housewives are both behind the US schedule and ABC would not want to lose potential broadcast revenue. It would be interesting to see whether I can purchase from the US store.
I do (Florida and India) but most calls are using company phones. I use voice enabled instant messaging for talking to my American friends.
Mobile video devices.
I use ADSL so I already have a phone line. The phone line comes in to the house and in to it are plugged an ADSL router modem and a DECT base station. There are no phone lines beyond that point. A single network cable goes to the servers and WiFi router. Three people live in this house at at their desks they each have a DECT handset and charger next to their computers. There's also a common one downstairs. It cost us about $100 for the full four handset DECT package. After line rental (which we have to pay because of the ADSL) our call charges on the landline are just a few dollars a month since we all have cells too.
I can't see the point of VOIP yet for the home user who inevitably either gets their phone with their cable, or gets their internet down their phone.
If the internet is considered child of milnet then yes it did originate in the US. But the UK for example had its own equivalent for accademic purposes which was independent (although a gateway existed). The UK's internet is child of Janet.
.uk TLD is actually wrong. The TLD names come from the country codes that are used on planes and cars etc. The UK one should actually be .gb and that is open to us too. It's just that we went and set up a .uk (which should be Ukraine) before that was all decided and since the UK was already using it we kept it and the Ukrainians got .ukr instead.
Interestingly the
Of course the internet uses technology from all around the world. No one country invented it.
Is there any kind of equivalent to Gibson's Law which is "when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have 'saved the Europeans arses'"?
If there's not, then I propose one.
Melanie's law states:
That when ever Americans get in an argument with Europeans they will bring up WW2 and claim to have saved the Europeans arses.
Anyone who uses such an argument in a thread is invoking Melanie's law and like Gibson's law, loses the argument by defaulting.
P.S. The Brits prevented the invasion of the UK by themselves before the US was in the fight and the Russians saved our collective arses by bogging down the German army so much that it gave the Allies a chance to fight back.
And that comment is typically of your insecurity. :-) A. It is countering a post that, goddess forbid, suggests that the US is not best at everything. And B. it's completely factually wrong.
Even one hundred years ago scientists were collaborating internationally, or at least thinking a long the same lines. An awful lot was driven by UK/US collaboration during WW2.
If I look at my desk at the gadgets I would think that Northern Europe and Japan was fuelling the current technological age. On it there is a Scandinavian cell phone (SonyEricsson), Japanese monitors (Iiyama), a swiss watch (Tag Heuer), a japanese PDA (Sharp Zaurus - which has a British processor - ARM), a couple of British digital settop boxes (Pace - well mine actually) running an open source operating system (Linux) first developed by a scandinavian (Linus Torsvald) with a Welsh man as his right hand man. I'm listening to German goth (ASP) on my German headphones (Sennheiser). When I drive home it will be in my Scandinavian car (Volvo). I will cook this evenings meal on my German hob, watch TV on a French TV (Thomson) receiving signals from my British Satellite system (Pace/Sky) I will may be vacuum my room with my British designer vacuum cleaner (Dyson).
The *only* American technology I own are my Apple and SGI computers and the wonderful design from Apple is thanks to a British designer.
Add perhaps you missed the bit about the water butts (barrels, tanks whatever). A lot of the US gets a lot of rain at certain times. When it rains you collect the water which means you're not wasting water. I agree about lawns in the desert, but in Colorado you should have some rain.
Evidence suggests the Welsh were over there, not murdering people, in the first millenium. Bloody young Norman upstarts.
What's fake grass made of? Plastic uses oil. How's it made? Manufacturing most things uses energy, usually electricity or oil. Why the fuck do you want to use fertiliser on it or bug spray? If it needs pepping up, go find a stable and get some horse manure. And that bug spray? Not clinical clean enough for you? Bugs are good for the environment, leave them be. Finally you can use water butts to collect rain water and use that to water the grass in dry periods.
That whole post seems to highlight the throw away culture of the US. You do something which is bad, but just not as bad as something else which is also bad, but is done because you can't be arsed to do things properly.