What if one of the requirements is for it to be open source?
Give africa a windows laptop and they will play solitare or party poker for a day... Give africa an open source laptop and they will develop their own unencumbered software... The OLPC's system is just the starting point, not the ending point.
If microsoft can open source the o/s then they would be empowering the users of the system instead of limiting them.
Wow, not only from someone knowing gnome, which is famous for breaking all of Unix philisophy wherever it meets it (I personaly especially hate glib for ignoring my setting of $HOME), but even from NetworkManager, the tool you use when you want a non-working network configurable by graphic means between not-working, currently non-working and permanently non-working.
Well, I must agree with you there. Perhaps he has good internal knowledge but in my opinion the NetworkManager tool user interface is poorly thought out. What does the check box mean? Why does it change settings repeatedly? Why doesn't network-manager-vpnc not accept my existing conf file? Why is Location blank on my system, I click on the combobox and it changes to the one location that I do have defined and doesn't change back to blank. How can I export settings? Where are the settings stored? Why doesn't it show the dhcp progress?
My original point (way up the list) is that microsoft has apparently already committed to shipping activated XP installs to Asus for their yet unreleased 8.9" eeepc. How can they say XP is dead when they keep on shipping it? They are in a big situation - they want to force people to upgrade to vista but they also don't want asus shipping linux - but vista is too power hungry for the eeepc.
Asus just announced that a computer that they will release in a few months will have Windows XP preinstalled.
Why XP? Because the eeepc doesn't run Vista very well. The only other option for Asus is to ship the computer with linux - And they already have sold many eeepc's with linux.
Microsoft was put into a position where they HAD to continue shipping XP for Asus's eeepc otherwise they lose market share to linux on the laptop.
Now, Microsoft agreed to keep shipping XP for Asus, how can they tell everyone else that XP is not available?
Depressing for me, I had such high hopes for Apple as a computer company. Now as a media distribution company their priorities have changed... Only a little of the effect is visible now but big changes are in the pipeline.
The interesting thing is that pretty soon microsoft won't even sell you an XP disk anymore. see the petitions at www.savexp.com and www.savexp.ca - So microsoft is positioning themselves out of the market for these devices since they aren't even close to the minimum requirements for Vista! Their alternative to remain being an option for consumers is to keep XP alive!
I am typing this on a 4G eeepc with 2g ram and eeeXubuntu on a 8 gig SD card and I love it (emacs, vim, netbeans, eclipse, snavigator-ng, wxglade, etc).
My fingers are used to the keyboard - all other keyboards feel like I'm playing with Duplo.
Best of all, at this price the computer is disposable. My files are encrypted with encfs so even if someone steals it I DON'T CARE. I'd hate for my Mac laptop to get stolen, I paid much more for it!
I'm sorry my message was too indirect for you. To clarify, the previous message said "I think apple is missing the bandwagon"... And my response says that they are not missing any bandwagon as there is so much interest in it that their servers melted. ("I think that this will work out just fine for apple")... And then I threw in the jab about them needing bigger servers. I guess you only read the jab...
I'm surprised that apple's servers just melted down:
Safari can't open the page "http://developer.apple.com/" because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection, which sometimes occurs when the server is busy. You might be able to open the page later
So I think perhaps that this will work out just fine for Apple. Once they figure out how to make a high bandwidth server survive a slashdotting....
For more information on what I was referring to, I ran into a specific example of internet explorer 5 handling HTTP POST differently if it knew that the server was an IIS server. If IE was communicating via a proxy it acted differently. I only noticed this because I was monitoring the protocol via a iptables re-routing the packets through a simple transparent proxy. The result was that IE 5 was not able to upload attachments to hotmail because hotmail was using IIS and was messing with the POST data length. It was interesting because when I explicitly set IE to use the proxy, the broken protocol would not happen and the system would work fine.
I also wasn't referring to Content-type - It's more about the WebDAV extensions (rfc2518) and the 'unnecessary complexity' that they add (rfc3253) and their non-orthogonality with other HTTP methods.
At least now the implementations have settled down as users are no longer required to have the webdav dll from a specific version of microsoft office installed in order for webdav to work properly in IE!
But to get here from there was a long involved process of many people running broken software and complaining. When it SHOULD have been something that was verifiable before they even shipped the software to any customers, and it wasn't...
So according to you, there should^H^H^H^H^H^Hmust not be any kind of deprecation in standards? Nothing to warn developers "This is bad usage, we tolerate it for the moment but it will probably be outlawed in the next version"? SHOULD and SHOULD NOT rules are a good thing. They allow for quick adoption of a standard while still showing the optimal way to implement a standard for those who want to do everything right and have unlimited resources. Omitting the SHOULD parts would make standards much less useful.
Right; If communication is done with protocol X, version Y, then it is specified what things must be allowed. If they want to change it and deprecate something, then bump the version number and make it so that the new version has a "MUST NOT" for this. Allow for version negotiations so a client or server can fall back to lower numbered version if they need to. But the features of each version are clear-cut and non-optional.
This simplifies implementations and makes it more likely that implementations will be compliant.
Okay, relative is the wrong term then. The issue I have is that sometimes specifications are not written with testability of compliance in mind. All combinations must be tested, and if this is not easy or automate-able then you will be guaranteed to have systems out there not compliant but 'usually seem to work'.
Programmers (including me) complain a lot about microsoft HTML rendering or HTTP quirks or non-compliance issues in corner cases but these things are very much non-trivial to implement and test.
IMHO for a non-trivial sytem, a proper specification MUST include the tools that can be used to verify an implementation, and it MUST be possible to make a verified implementation!
The C++ standard is a good example - there does not exist a single fully verified standards compliant c++ compiler. Some are close. But this is not really the implementor's fault if the specification is not even internally consistent and no tools are given to perform validation.
I guess my point is just that some specifications are better than others, and some invite half-assed implementations.
While I agree with your basic points the real problem here is the ability to test all possible combinations of should/optional features of a specification implemented in a specific client in combination with all the should/optional features of the specification implemented in a specific server. In the HTTP case, there are no formal test suites for clients and servers because the specification has too many combinations of options, and as a result, many servers are broken and require workarounds are required by clients and many clients are broken and require workarounds by servers - and we still had cases where IIS would infer that a client is IE and would automatically modify its protocol in an unexpected way in order to do these workarounds.'
With respect to the http 1.1 standard, it _is_ relative...
From the standard:
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [34].
When the people writing the standards write standards with the words "SHOULD" or "SHOULD NOT" or "RECOMMENDED" or "MAY" or "OPTIONAL" you now have a standard which can have many different faces, or compliance levels. IMHO, this is poor standards writing. They MUST make the specs using the terms "MUST" and "MUST NOT" and bump the version number. Then you can easily have automated unit tests which show absolute compliance. But we don't, and must rely on what developers "THINK" or "MAY NOT THINK" is correct about the spec.
16 gig SDHC card, 2 gig ram, vmware with xp for visual studio 2005, netbeans for java and c++ browsing, sourcenav-ng, postgresql pgadmin3, emacs, cross with mingw32, powerpc ELDK, opengl dev tools, opengrok, external vga in dual head mode, gimp, f-spot for photos, mplayer for videos, anything else lives on my servers...
Yes, compiling with visual studio under xp under vmware is slow, but I spend most of my time typing code, not compiling it.
The eeepc is a great tool - I would have paid $200 more for it as the small size is desired for me. My 15 " mac laptop is too big - it feels like I'm playing with duplo instead of lego;-) My 12" mac laptop was my favourite and I would have bought a mac book air if it was 12" or smaller. But instead I could buy 5 eeepc's!
The funny thing is that the eeepc is now available is a whole bunch of colours, including the new blush pink that they released for valentines! My favourite is black, that's what I bought. With 2 gigs of ram and a 16 gig SDHC card, it is now officially my 'main computer' - I even run vmware on it for my xp development. With the price so low it is effectively disposable.
But if the information that I posted were true, then it would open me up to burglars taking advantage of me. Releasing this type of information about me enables criminals against me.
People who do this to themselves deserve what they get.
A fool and his/her money is best parted, for the last thing you want are fools with economic power!
I don't have anything to hide! I live at #4-1131 burnaby st in vancouver, I own 3 macintosh computers, 2 linux servers, a video camera, MIDI equipment, a large screen plasma tv, a ps3 and an xbox 360.
I have loads of dvd's and I blog about all of my favourites.
On wednesday I will be going on a trip for a few weeks and although I don't have an alarm system I have a pet cat. I'm getting my friend Kim to come over every day at noon to feed my cat.
I am a trusting person and I'm SURE that no one would take advantage of this information and break in and rob me while I'm gone!
Slashdot Mirror
I use linux on powerpc systems. Is there a linux-ppc runtime?
--jeffk++
How many companies who currently violate the GPL and LGPL can these new laws be used against?
--jeffk++
What if one of the requirements is for it to be open source?
Give africa a windows laptop and they will play solitare or party poker for a day... Give africa an open source laptop and they will develop their own unencumbered software... The OLPC's system is just the starting point, not the ending point.
If microsoft can open source the o/s then they would be empowering the users of the system instead of limiting them.
--jeffk++
Well, I must agree with you there. Perhaps he has good internal knowledge but in my opinion the NetworkManager tool user interface is poorly thought out. What does the check box mean? Why does it change settings repeatedly? Why doesn't network-manager-vpnc not accept my existing conf file? Why is Location blank on my system, I click on the combobox and it changes to the one location that I do have defined and doesn't change back to blank. How can I export settings? Where are the settings stored? Why doesn't it show the dhcp progress?
--jeffk++
My original point (way up the list) is that microsoft has apparently already committed to shipping activated XP installs to Asus for their yet unreleased 8.9" eeepc. How can they say XP is dead when they keep on shipping it? They are in a big situation - they want to force people to upgrade to vista but they also don't want asus shipping linux - but vista is too power hungry for the eeepc.
--jeffk++
XP is not going anywhere.
Asus just announced that a computer that they will release in a few months will have Windows XP preinstalled.
Why XP? Because the eeepc doesn't run Vista very well. The only other option for Asus is to ship the computer with linux - And they already have sold many eeepc's with linux.
Microsoft was put into a position where they HAD to continue shipping XP for Asus's eeepc otherwise they lose market share to linux on the laptop.
Now, Microsoft agreed to keep shipping XP for Asus, how can they tell everyone else that XP is not available?
--jeffk++
Apple is the new microsoft...
Depressing for me, I had such high hopes for Apple as a computer company. Now as a media distribution company their priorities have changed... Only a little of the effect is visible now but big changes are in the pipeline.
--jeffk++
The interesting thing is that pretty soon microsoft won't even sell you an XP disk anymore. see the petitions at www.savexp.com and www.savexp.ca - So microsoft is positioning themselves out of the market for these devices since they aren't even close to the minimum requirements for Vista! Their alternative to remain being an option for consumers is to keep XP alive!
I am typing this on a 4G eeepc with 2g ram and eeeXubuntu on a 8 gig SD card and I love it (emacs, vim, netbeans, eclipse, snavigator-ng, wxglade, etc).
My fingers are used to the keyboard - all other keyboards feel like I'm playing with Duplo.
Best of all, at this price the computer is disposable. My files are encrypted with encfs so even if someone steals it I DON'T CARE. I'd hate for my Mac laptop to get stolen, I paid much more for it!
--jeffk++
I'm sorry my message was too indirect for you. To clarify, the previous message said "I think apple is missing the bandwagon"... And my response says that they are not missing any bandwagon as there is so much interest in it that their servers melted. ("I think that this will work out just fine for apple")... And then I threw in the jab about them needing bigger servers. I guess you only read the jab...
--jeffk++
So I think perhaps that this will work out just fine for Apple. Once they figure out how to make a high bandwidth server survive a slashdotting....
--jeffk++
For more information on what I was referring to, I ran into a specific example of internet explorer 5 handling HTTP POST differently if it knew that the server was an IIS server. If IE was communicating via a proxy it acted differently. I only noticed this because I was monitoring the protocol via a iptables re-routing the packets through a simple transparent proxy. The result was that IE 5 was not able to upload attachments to hotmail because hotmail was using IIS and was messing with the POST data length. It was interesting because when I explicitly set IE to use the proxy, the broken protocol would not happen and the system would work fine.
I also wasn't referring to Content-type - It's more about the WebDAV extensions (rfc2518) and the 'unnecessary complexity' that they add (rfc3253) and their non-orthogonality with other HTTP methods.
At least now the implementations have settled down as users are no longer required to have the webdav dll from a specific version of microsoft office installed in order for webdav to work properly in IE!
But to get here from there was a long involved process of many people running broken software and complaining. When it SHOULD have been something that was verifiable before they even shipped the software to any customers, and it wasn't...
--jeffk++
Right; If communication is done with protocol X, version Y, then it is specified what things must be allowed. If they want to change it and deprecate something, then bump the version number and make it so that the new version has a "MUST NOT" for this. Allow for version negotiations so a client or server can fall back to lower numbered version if they need to. But the features of each version are clear-cut and non-optional.
This simplifies implementations and makes it more likely that implementations will be compliant.
--jeffk++
Okay, relative is the wrong term then. The issue I have is that sometimes specifications are not written with testability of compliance in mind. All combinations must be tested, and if this is not easy or automate-able then you will be guaranteed to have systems out there not compliant but 'usually seem to work'.
Programmers (including me) complain a lot about microsoft HTML rendering or HTTP quirks or non-compliance issues in corner cases but these things are very much non-trivial to implement and test.
IMHO for a non-trivial sytem, a proper specification MUST include the tools that can be used to verify an implementation, and it MUST be possible to make a verified implementation!
The C++ standard is a good example - there does not exist a single fully verified standards compliant c++ compiler. Some are close. But this is not really the implementor's fault if the specification is not even internally consistent and no tools are given to perform validation.
I guess my point is just that some specifications are better than others, and some invite half-assed implementations.
--jeffk++
While I agree with your basic points the real problem here is the ability to test all possible combinations of should/optional features of a specification implemented in a specific client in combination with all the should/optional features of the specification implemented in a specific server. In the HTTP case, there are no formal test suites for clients and servers because the specification has too many combinations of options, and as a result, many servers are broken and require workarounds are required by clients and many clients are broken and require workarounds by servers - and we still had cases where IIS would infer that a client is IE and would automatically modify its protocol in an unexpected way in order to do these workarounds.'
--jeffk++
With respect to the http 1.1 standard, it _is_ relative...
From the standard:
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [34].
When the people writing the standards write standards with the words "SHOULD" or "SHOULD NOT" or "RECOMMENDED" or "MAY" or "OPTIONAL" you now have a standard which can have many different faces, or compliance levels. IMHO, this is poor standards writing. They MUST make the specs using the terms "MUST" and "MUST NOT" and bump the version number. Then you can easily have automated unit tests which show absolute compliance. But we don't, and must rely on what developers "THINK" or "MAY NOT THINK" is correct about the spec.
--jeffk++
my eeepc is my main computer now.
;-) My 12" mac laptop was my favourite and I would have bought a mac book air if it was 12" or smaller. But instead I could buy 5 eeepc's!
16 gig SDHC card, 2 gig ram, vmware with xp for visual studio 2005, netbeans for java and c++ browsing, sourcenav-ng, postgresql pgadmin3, emacs, cross with mingw32, powerpc ELDK, opengl dev tools, opengrok, external vga in dual head mode, gimp, f-spot for photos, mplayer for videos, anything else lives on my servers...
Yes, compiling with visual studio under xp under vmware is slow, but I spend most of my time typing code, not compiling it.
The eeepc is a great tool - I would have paid $200 more for it as the small size is desired for me. My 15 " mac laptop is too big - it feels like I'm playing with duplo instead of lego
--jeffk++
The funny thing is that the eeepc is now available is a whole bunch of colours, including the new blush pink that they released for valentines! My favourite is black, that's what I bought. With 2 gigs of ram and a 16 gig SDHC card, it is now officially my 'main computer' - I even run vmware on it for my xp development. With the price so low it is effectively disposable.
--jeffk++
pretty good.
I've lived in many places, that was just one of them... So it was a double-trick...
I have no xbox.
Many things are in vmware machines now.
There is more than one Jeff Koftinoff around, and we are not related.
I did have a blog but only updated it once a year or so. It is still online.
--jeffk++
Wow, small world!
How are the new russian landlords there?
Did you know the person who jumped from the highrise across the street to his death? Do you know the person who first dialed 911 and why?
--jeffk++
Good job!
You are right, the person in #4 had been a problem for me. I was hoping for some moron to believe that #4 was my address.
You are on the trail but not there just yet!
What did I say that was/is true? and what is/will not be true? Who is Kim? What colour is my cat and why?
Am I just an agent for the CIA now? Maybe the real jeff has been replaced?
Perhaps this is all just a clever ruse to promote some product? Perhaps some special church was involved but was censored??
--jeffk++
But if the information that I posted were true, then it would open me up to burglars taking advantage of me. Releasing this type of information about me enables criminals against me.
People who do this to themselves deserve what they get.
A fool and his/her money is best parted, for the last thing you want are fools with economic power!
--jeffk++
---- Whoosh ----
Someone didn't get the joke.
Do you really think I'd be so stupid as to post real information?
I thought people would get the hint that it was a joke by saying "I'm sure no one would rob me -- look at all the stuff I have!"....
In my opinion, people who violate their own privacy deserve what they get (or lose, as it may be).
--jeffk++
I don't have anything to hide! I live at #4-1131 burnaby st in vancouver, I own 3 macintosh computers, 2 linux servers, a video camera, MIDI equipment, a large screen plasma tv, a ps3 and an xbox 360.
I have loads of dvd's and I blog about all of my favourites.
On wednesday I will be going on a trip for a few weeks and although I don't have an alarm system I have a pet cat. I'm getting my friend Kim to come over every day at noon to feed my cat.
I am a trusting person and I'm SURE that no one would take advantage of this information and break in and rob me while I'm gone!
Once again, I have nothing to hide!
--jeffk++
So my friend should have no problems installing moonlight on his iPhone or iPod touch then?
--jeffk++
If microsoft DID buy yahoo for more than it was worth, could the microsoft shareholders sue microsoft for wasting money?
--jeffk++