When they're doing everything known to man in order to jack up their IM marketshare. "Jabber, you bring 50,000 more users? Come on in, the water's fine!"
Just wait until they start to get numbers like AOL and watch how picky they get about who they play with.
The more games I see various corporations play, the more thankful I am that there are open source alternatives. -----
If I understand correctly, AOL is the one that is keeping Jabber from connecting. It's not any lack of capability in Jabber. AOL is afraid of a distributed open-source, ad-free alternative to their IM dominance.
Jabber clients are quite good. The fact that O'Reilly has a book on it means that it's probably robust enough for a production environment.
Jabber could be right for you if:
You're on an Intranet (why send your chat out to the big bad internet),
If you have any concerns about a giant corporation monitoring your chat ("All Your Bytes Are Belong To Us"),
You want to prevent 'extra-curricular chat' (you can close off the server to just your staff),
or if you're paranoid about security (it does SSL).
Strom Thurmond was a Democrat and he and his southern democrats pulled out of the Democratic convention because Harry Truman refused to turn over on the Civil Rights platform.
Thurmond ran as a 3rd party candidate called the Dixiecrats and almost gave the election to republican Thomas Dewey.
My computer store always asks for my name and address, even when I buy with cash. I usually tell them "No thanks" but one woman kept at it, so I gave her the address for Wrigley Field, heh heh.
Radio Shack was the original offender in this 'collecting your address to serve you better' BS, but it seems to be picking up steam as 'the thing to do'.
So, pay cash, and remember "3600 N. Clark Street, Chicago Illinois, 60657". -----
Your comments about failed economic models and furthering society have reminded me of two books written by Daniel Quinn: 'Ishmael' and 'My Ishmael'.
Quinn argues that instead of the Make Products to Get Products cycle that permeates our culture, pre-agricultural societies followed a Give Support to Get Support cycle.
It's interesting to see that a lot of the free as in liberty examples you named tend to follow that 'other' model. We attach ourselves to projects and products we want. We give our support for free, and we get our support for free. That's probably why the GPL upsets some folks. It is challenging a very old, ingrained cycle.
You could get Nethack running by installing XDarwin (thereby getting an X Windows Server on yer machine) and then using fink to install Nethack. It's a long download (mainly because you have to download all the dependencies), but all the compiling is done for you.
It's overkill to install XDarwin just for Nethack, but if you have any interest in theGimp or Civilization then it's purdy durned cool.
Then there is the warm feeling of being a Linux Weenie everytime you start up an X Windows session: priceless.
I'm usually never bothered by using the feminine pronouns for the general gender. I can certainly see that some people (especially women) care enough to make pronoun choice an issue. For example, 30 years ago, nobody used "Ms." as a title, now if I see a "Mrs." or a "Miss" on a letter it's usually a sign that somebody's grandmother is mailing letters.
Using 'their' for a the general singular pronoun is apparently much more common and accepted in England. However, that seems more awkward (to me) than using 'her'.
Michael Spivak, famed mathematician and TeXpert, created an option called Spivak Pronouns which address the issue too:
The spivak pronouns are
E - subjective
Em - objective
Eir - possessive (adjective)
Eirs - possessive (noun)
Emself - reflexive
These seem very awkward to me, but who knows what will be in common use in 30 years...
According to X.org, the first commercial release of the X-windows system was back in 1986. This was part of MIT's Project Athena which began in May 1983.
According to this page, Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released November 1985. It was announced in November 1983, clearly as a response to Apple's Macintosh OS.
However, according to the Wikipedia, Xerox Parc codified the WIMP paradigm (where the W stands for Windows) for their Xerox Star system released in 1981.
So, depending on how you slice it, the concept of 'windows' clearly predates MS's work on Windows and the term X-Windows refers to a product which was virtually the same age as the MS product.
That's all I got from googling around for 20 minutes. I Am Not A Historian.
Apple is famous for putting a load of stuff on the CDs that never make the main install. IIRC, AppleWorks is usually tucked onto one of the CDs that came with the computer. Sherlock the CDs and you'll eventually find it. My old iMac came with a sheet of paper that described all the software that came with it. There was all kinds of stuff that was included, most of it I never needed (the WorldBook Encyclopedia?! Sonoma Valley Guide to Whine [sic] -- bleah).
The internet's so big that sometimes I don't even realize I need to know about a site until I read about it somewhere else.
I've been looking for a quality Mac OS X/Darwin site for a while now and apple.slashdot.org and macslash.com are the two places I go to find links to quality sites. Beats googling for hours...
Imagine all the noise that would dissapear (like this post. He's an Anonymous Coward, why should I care if he sticks around?).
Anyone who can't stand an ad now and then isn't comfortable dealing with the Internet reality. I shudder to think about what other ideas are bouncing around that brainpan.
Bring on the ads. If I can't stand 'em, and if I'm too lazy to use Mozilla to block images from this site, I'll cough up the $5.
I like it a lot already. As much as I love mozilla's composer, I do not need another mail and news reader, and as far as that goes, I don't need an integrated IRC client either.
I will certainly follow this one closely. I'm using it now, and except for some minor MINOR bugs, it seems pretty good. Muche better than a 0.1 version would indicate.
Is it just me, or is Mac OS X really starting to get some pretty cool open-source apps? (I mean besides the ports of the linux stuff)
Get your own server and run your 'hosting company' for 10-20 people. Make some small cash on the side hosting personal sites (just enough to cover the expenses maybe). Nobody can get too mad about no customer service or less than stellar uptime because they're paying like $5 or less a month, plus they're mostly your buddies.
With the little extra cash you could probably afford a commercial DSL with the money you clear.
My host is doing this, and it's the best of both worlds. He gets my $6/month and I get a shell account and enough space and bandwidth to amuse myself. Except for some cgi startup woes (my bad) I've had no problems and he's been great. In fact, he's a heckuva lot more helpful than customer service from my ISP.
The Google Search Appliance isn't a drab beige rackmount. I suppose Apple could do something along that line, of course it would have a neon tube in the front that changed color as server load changed, or something.
The one thing Uncle Steve won't do is build something noone will buy. Sure, it has to be 'cool', but it also has to sell. Since Darwin's cli is so similar to Linux, I think Apple-branded servers won't have any perceived benefit to the unwashed masses (who always complained that Mac hardware was too expensive).
He did the animated Christmas Special that we all grew up on. When you think about _that_ show: Dr. Seuss, Chuch Jones, Boris Karloff, and Therm Ravenscroft (the voice of Tony the Tiger who sang "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch") and you realize just what a classic that is (especially cf: the Grinch Movie with Opie Cunningham and Ace Ventura -- bleagh).
Yes but how many OSX users are there that actually know that BSD is there and/or take advantage of OSX's *NIX comapatibility?
The early adopters (those who used the beta or bought Mac OS X right when it came out) all started using it because it had BSD behind it. It certainly wasn't because of the apps. When I first got Mac OS X, IE Explorer was about the only one that was 'carbon-based', and half of the programs I kept started up with OS 9.
As time goes by, I expect more 'normal people' (ie, those who wouldn't know a daemon from a zombie) to be using OS X.
Apple was very bright to support both 9 and X this past year. My mother and wife are still using OS 9 and are very happy. By the time they're ready to upgrade, OS X will be at 10.2 or even 10.3 and there will be all sorts of native apps and performance will be good and bugs will be squashed.
They won't have to use the Terminal app, but they will probably learn how to do a few things. Learning how to use the command line isn't impossible, and open source software is a powerful motivator (for instance, if the choice is waiting for and buying Photoshop or learning how to download/install XDarwin and the Gimp, guess what I'm going to do?)
What can Zope do that PHP cannot? Or Perl for that matter? Or even ASP?
It's not a matter of what it can't do, it's a matter of how it is done. Zope helps me (the solo programmer) by enforceing separation of presentation and logic. It would also be good for teams where duties are split between content, design, and logic.
About a week ago I started a new web project using python scripts for its cgi. I wasn't spending a lot of time writing the business logic because I was spending a lot of time writing the code that displays HTML.
Now, I'm a one-man operation, not a professional programmer, and also a pathetically poor coder, so progress was painful and slow.
I investigated Zope and discovered that someone else had done the boring part and made a pretty robust platform for me to develop my application.
After a brief intermission where I read the on-line Zope Book, called strangely enough "The Zope Book" I managed to get my ideas working.
It's a benefit for me, because I can write smaller, more modular logic code (which I might actually get right), and I don't have to worry about writing a bunch of HTML-generating code that (a) would be boring, and (b) would be buggy.
Teams will be able to use Zope effectively too, since you can separate logic, design, and content and enforce it by only giving certain users access to their parts.
Zope is a server, and the files and directory you store data in is not part of the regular filesystem. I have some problems with the web interface, especially over the Internet, but most of my concerns go away when I run it on the localhost. You can ftp to the server using emacs and edit the files remotely in the usual way.
Also, I find that the documentation is pretty good, but they are in desperate need of a Zope Cookbook.
...is Apple packaging Darwin and selling it, ala Linux distros. Apple branding would be a huge selling point, and they could set up XDarwin with a default Aqua-lite windowmanager.
I'm guessing an Apple-branded Darwin distro would double the number of desktops uning *nix.
Meanwhile, intel architecture gets Darwin, Apple accelerates porting for Darwin, and Joe and Jane Average get introduces to weird Uncle Linus and his pet penguin.
All the while, Apple keeps the good stuff (Aqua, Cocoa) for their own hardware.
Love it or loathe it, Mac Hardware has consistently been the most interesting consumer products in computing. To wit:
the Original all-in-one Mac.
the iMac
the new iMac
the clamshell iBook
the TiBook
Heck, let's throw in the Newton while we're at it. It didn't win any size awards, but it was a main influence on Palm.
Last time Apple licensed their OS and made beige boxes like everyone else they almost went out of business.
As far as anyone complaining that Apple hardware is too expensive, go on eBay and buy any slot-loading iMac, max out it's ram, and install OS X. It runs OS X great, and you can get these darn things for, oh about $300 dollars. If they're anything like my Macs, they will last 6 years without a blip.
Slashdot Mirror
When they're doing everything known to man in order to jack up their IM marketshare. "Jabber, you bring 50,000 more users? Come on in, the water's fine!"
Just wait until they start to get numbers like AOL and watch how picky they get about who they play with.
The more games I see various corporations play, the more thankful I am that there are open source alternatives.
-----
In fact, I don't blame AOL. They're top dog because they got there first. I don't have a problem with that.
I just thought I'd correct the impression that "Jabber sux because it can't do AIM" when the truth is something different.
FWIW, I don't use AIM, but it's not because I don't like the ads: I don't use AIM because I don't have any friends. =(
-----
It also contains the NYC Phonebook...
In 18-pt type.
to go around breaking legs...
Jabber clients are quite good. The fact that O'Reilly has a book on it means that it's probably robust enough for a production environment.
Jabber could be right for you if:
Plus, no ads.
---------
But why is this man smiling?
Strom Thurmond was a Democrat and he and his southern democrats pulled out of the Democratic convention because Harry Truman refused to turn over on the Civil Rights platform.
Thurmond ran as a 3rd party candidate called the Dixiecrats and almost gave the election to republican Thomas Dewey.
My computer store always asks for my name and address, even when I buy with cash. I usually tell them "No thanks" but one woman kept at it, so I gave her the address for Wrigley Field, heh heh.
Radio Shack was the original offender in this 'collecting your address to serve you better' BS, but it seems to be picking up steam as 'the thing to do'.
So, pay cash, and remember "3600 N. Clark Street, Chicago Illinois, 60657".
-----
Your comments about failed economic models and furthering society have reminded me of two books written by Daniel Quinn: 'Ishmael' and 'My Ishmael'.
Quinn argues that instead of the Make Products to Get Products cycle that permeates our culture, pre-agricultural societies followed a Give Support to Get Support cycle.
It's interesting to see that a lot of the free as in liberty examples you named tend to follow that 'other' model. We attach ourselves to projects and products we want. We give our support for free, and we get our support for free. That's probably why the GPL upsets some folks. It is challenging a very old, ingrained cycle.
-----
You could get Nethack running by installing XDarwin (thereby getting an X Windows Server on yer machine) and then using fink to install Nethack. It's a long download (mainly because you have to download all the dependencies), but all the compiling is done for you.
It's overkill to install XDarwin just for Nethack, but if you have any interest in theGimp or Civilization then it's purdy durned cool.
Then there is the warm feeling of being a Linux Weenie everytime you start up an X Windows session: priceless.
-----
I'm usually never bothered by using the feminine pronouns for the general gender. I can certainly see that some people (especially women) care enough to make pronoun choice an issue. For example, 30 years ago, nobody used "Ms." as a title, now if I see a "Mrs." or a "Miss" on a letter it's usually a sign that somebody's grandmother is mailing letters.
Using 'their' for a the general singular pronoun is apparently much more common and accepted in England. However, that seems more awkward (to me) than using 'her'.
Michael Spivak, famed mathematician and TeXpert, created an option called Spivak Pronouns which address the issue too:
The spivak pronouns are
E - subjective
Em - objective
Eir - possessive (adjective)
Eirs - possessive (noun)
Emself - reflexive
These seem very awkward to me, but who knows what will be in common use in 30 years...
---------
According to X.org, the first commercial release of the X-windows system was back in 1986. This was part of MIT's Project Athena which began in May 1983.
According to this page, Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released November 1985. It was announced in November 1983, clearly as a response to Apple's Macintosh OS.
However, according to the Wikipedia, Xerox Parc codified the WIMP paradigm (where the W stands for Windows) for their Xerox Star system released in 1981.
So, depending on how you slice it, the concept of 'windows' clearly predates MS's work on Windows and the term X-Windows refers to a product which was virtually the same age as the MS product.
That's all I got from googling around for 20 minutes. I Am Not A Historian.
Apple is famous for putting a load of stuff on the CDs that never make the main install. IIRC, AppleWorks is usually tucked onto one of the CDs that came with the computer. Sherlock the CDs and you'll eventually find it. My old iMac came with a sheet of paper that described all the software that came with it. There was all kinds of stuff that was included, most of it I never needed (the WorldBook Encyclopedia?! Sonoma Valley Guide to Whine [sic] -- bleah).
Animated crap on the screen got you down? Look at the source for the .swf url.
Add /episodes/1.swf to the url and you just get the episode, scaled to the whole browser window to boot.
Can't do anything about the intro trailer. Sheesh, after about 3 of them I was sick of looking at Uma/Natalie...
then I would have never found darwinfo.org.
The internet's so big that sometimes I don't even realize I need to know about a site until I read about it somewhere else.
I've been looking for a quality Mac OS X/Darwin site for a while now and apple.slashdot.org and macslash.com are the two places I go to find links to quality sites. Beats googling for hours...
Imagine all the noise that would dissapear (like this post. He's an Anonymous Coward, why should I care if he sticks around?).
Anyone who can't stand an ad now and then isn't comfortable dealing with the Internet reality. I shudder to think about what other ideas are bouncing around that brainpan.
Bring on the ads. If I can't stand 'em, and if I'm too lazy to use Mozilla to block images from this site, I'll cough up the $5.
I like it a lot already. As much as I love mozilla's composer, I do not need another mail and news reader, and as far as that goes, I don't need an integrated IRC client either.
I will certainly follow this one closely. I'm using it now, and except for some minor MINOR bugs, it seems pretty good. Muche better than a 0.1 version would indicate.
Is it just me, or is Mac OS X really starting to get some pretty cool open-source apps? (I mean besides the ports of the linux stuff)
I do now...
Thank you.
Get your own server and run your 'hosting company' for 10-20 people. Make some small cash on the side hosting personal sites (just enough to cover the expenses maybe). Nobody can get too mad about no customer service or less than stellar uptime because they're paying like $5 or less a month, plus they're mostly your buddies.
With the little extra cash you could probably afford a commercial DSL with the money you clear.
My host is doing this, and it's the best of both worlds. He gets my $6/month and I get a shell account and enough space and bandwidth to amuse myself. Except for some cgi startup woes (my bad) I've had no problems and he's been great. In fact, he's a heckuva lot more helpful than customer service from my ISP.
The Google Search Appliance isn't a drab beige rackmount. I suppose Apple could do something along that line, of course it would have a neon tube in the front that changed color as server load changed, or something.
The one thing Uncle Steve won't do is build something noone will buy. Sure, it has to be 'cool', but it also has to sell. Since Darwin's cli is so similar to Linux, I think Apple-branded servers won't have any perceived benefit to the unwashed masses (who always complained that Mac hardware was too expensive).
He did the animated Christmas Special that we all grew up on. When you think about _that_ show: Dr. Seuss, Chuch Jones, Boris Karloff, and Therm Ravenscroft (the voice of Tony the Tiger who sang "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch") and you realize just what a classic that is (especially cf: the Grinch Movie with Opie Cunningham and Ace Ventura -- bleagh).
Yes but how many OSX users are there that actually know that BSD is there and/or take advantage of OSX's *NIX comapatibility?
The early adopters (those who used the beta or bought Mac OS X right when it came out) all started using it because it had BSD behind it. It certainly wasn't because of the apps. When I first got Mac OS X, IE Explorer was about the only one that was 'carbon-based', and half of the programs I kept started up with OS 9.
As time goes by, I expect more 'normal people' (ie, those who wouldn't know a daemon from a zombie) to be using OS X.
Apple was very bright to support both 9 and X this past year. My mother and wife are still using OS 9 and are very happy. By the time they're ready to upgrade, OS X will be at 10.2 or even 10.3 and there will be all sorts of native apps and performance will be good and bugs will be squashed.
They won't have to use the Terminal app, but they will probably learn how to do a few things. Learning how to use the command line isn't impossible, and open source software is a powerful motivator (for instance, if the choice is waiting for and buying Photoshop or learning how to download/install XDarwin and the Gimp, guess what I'm going to do?)
It's not a matter of what it can't do, it's a matter of how it is done. Zope helps me (the solo programmer) by enforceing separation of presentation and logic. It would also be good for teams where duties are split between content, design, and logic.
About a week ago I started a new web project using python scripts for its cgi. I wasn't spending a lot of time writing the business logic because I was spending a lot of time writing the code that displays HTML.
Now, I'm a one-man operation, not a professional programmer, and also a pathetically poor coder, so progress was painful and slow.
I investigated Zope and discovered that someone else had done the boring part and made a pretty robust platform for me to develop my application.
After a brief intermission where I read the on-line Zope Book, called strangely enough "The Zope Book" I managed to get my ideas working.
It's a benefit for me, because I can write smaller, more modular logic code (which I might actually get right), and I don't have to worry about writing a bunch of HTML-generating code that (a) would be boring, and (b) would be buggy.
Teams will be able to use Zope effectively too, since you can separate logic, design, and content and enforce it by only giving certain users access to their parts.
Zope is a server, and the files and directory you store data in is not part of the regular filesystem. I have some problems with the web interface, especially over the Internet, but most of my concerns go away when I run it on the localhost. You can ftp to the server using emacs and edit the files remotely in the usual way.
Also, I find that the documentation is pretty good, but they are in desperate need of a Zope Cookbook.
...is Apple packaging Darwin and selling it, ala Linux distros. Apple branding would be a huge selling point, and they could set up XDarwin with a default Aqua-lite windowmanager.
I'm guessing an Apple-branded Darwin distro would double the number of desktops uning *nix.
Meanwhile, intel architecture gets Darwin, Apple accelerates porting for Darwin, and Joe and Jane Average get introduces to weird Uncle Linus and his pet penguin.
All the while, Apple keeps the good stuff (Aqua, Cocoa) for their own hardware.
Love it or loathe it, Mac Hardware has consistently been the most interesting consumer products in computing. To wit:
Last time Apple licensed their OS and made beige boxes like everyone else they almost went out of business.
As far as anyone complaining that Apple hardware is too expensive, go on eBay and buy any slot-loading iMac, max out it's ram, and install OS X. It runs OS X great, and you can get these darn things for, oh about $300 dollars. If they're anything like my Macs, they will last 6 years without a blip.