An awful lot of code is purely for in-house applications. This kind of stuff simply isn't threatened by open source, in fact I think it is helped.
Commoditise all the building blocks you want. Operating systems? Fine. Office applications? Yep - alright. Development tools? Yes please, we like that. When you're finished, you still left with a ton of tools that need plugging together to do useful work for a business.
Now, if your business just needs Office to write letters and send invoices, plus a database to track stock, then you were never in the kind of software market I'm talking about anyway. If, however, you happen to be a multi-national bank needing realtime market data information feeding to custom databases, with their own trading front ends etc. - this kind of stuff is only helped by Open Source. Give us the middleware (in this set-up, the OS and database is almost immaterial) and we'll carry on building the final product thank you. Always plenty of work for developers here.
I submitted the original Domesday story (the old one referred to), and I noticed this new bit of news yesterday.
The first thing that struck me when I went over was...where's my copy? This was put together as an educational tool using public money, but now there's only one copy of it in Kew Gardens, London? Why can't I just download it? All the data's public domain anyway.
As it happens, I don't live that far from Kew Gardens and so will probably go to see this. But what I'd really like to do is download the lot and use it as a referece tool at home. Or perhaps accessible online.
Incidently, no word on the formats used to rescue it. It now has a Windows interface - good news, but what about people running other things? That's not a trite statement - they already came close to losing it once in just fifteen years, and in fifteen more years' time I'll guarantee you that it won't be XP on people's desktop. Need to have the formats available so that people can write their own interfaces to it.
the shorter the duration of wars, the less people killed by them.
Not really, no.
The Hundred Years War, whilst not actually lasting a hundred years, did last rather longer than World War II. However, the number of people dying was somewhat less.
The marketing hype surrounding.Net evaporated, true. However as a means of developing for Windows in virtual machine which supports multiple languages, the actually technology is still going strong.
And so it should - it's better than the alternatives which preceded it. It's just important to divorce the.Net marketing cloud from the actual technology on the ground.
6305 incoming emails and not one of them contained an order or anything else positive.
You know, I was just putting together a response that said this too. Then it dawned on me - of course there weren't any positive responses via email, all the reply addresses on spam are faked anyway.
Sadly, this encouraging count of zero doesn't actually reflect the number of potential respondants to spam. For that, we'd need to know if anyone called any of the telephone or fax numbers they list.
Space films normally date very well. Star Wars has aged gracefully, even allowing for Lucas' tweaks in 1997. The space scenes in Kubrick's "2001", which is *ancient*, still look good.
That's precisely my point - they're both model-based, not CGI.
"The nightmare of nuclear destruction in the original was rendered without CG effects, but I'll remember the skeleton clutching the chain-link fence long after I've forgotten this week's pixel-perfect explosions."
If only more people thought like that. And if only some of the people that did think like that were film directors.
I've posted before to this board that I dislike the increasing reliance on CGI in films. A fair point to make is that once upon a time The Last Starfighter was considered pixel-perfect, but now look. CGI dates a film really fast, because graphics improve all the time.
Still the best I've ever used. Cost me £124 in about 1992/93, and worth every penny. That last point is relevant - so many people take a keyboard for granted that they're unwilling to spend extra on better quality. Thus they end up sticking with whatever rubbish arrived with their machine (don't they, IBM Netstation customers...?)
I've used many keyboards since of course, and whilst I seem to have settled on Microsoft keyboards these days I still haven't found anything nicer than the ancient Apple. Co-incidently (or not, as the case may be...) the keyboard on the 12" Powerbook is also extremely nice.
So, what kind of "innovations" has been created by Microsoft?
Just the one that I can think of - use-based dynamic menus. Perhaps someone can point me to earlier cases of this, but I still like it and still find them useful.
There appears to be a religious objection to them in the Linux world, I suspect primarily because the idea came from Microsoft. OK - so some people hate them, meaning that the feature should be configurable. Despite that, I'd like to see dynamic menus start making their way outside of the Windows world.
I'm a fairly recent Powerbook owner (~1 month), and one thing I've noticed since using Safari is that brushed metal can be quite unreadable on a laptop screen.
Specifically, unless your screen is fairly far forward, you can't read the metal tab title names in Safari. Those titles are just the system font on top of the metal look, so this hassle is not limited to Safari.
Given that, I think this brushed metal is an odd direction to be moving in for a company proclaiming this their year of the laptop.
The fax feature did not integrate well with the address book.
Interesting - could you elaborate on that please? Being a new user coming over from XP I'm missing fax and user switching at the moment and looking forward to getting them back.
s a consultant, I've seen MORE than my share of crappy code written by client IT staff over the years.
It exists. I've worked on some. I'd like to think I haven't produced any, but then - everyone likes to think they're perfect, don't they? Probably I have.
However, a large amount of the open source stuff is frankly crap as well. Just compile the kernel for example - watch the warnings come pouring out.
I believe bug reporting to be more important than philosophical origin. For example, a while ago I wrote some Mac freeware for System 7 (over here if you're interested). v1.0 was purely for me, it worked on my environment and sticking it out on the web for download was purely an afterthought on my part.
It was taken up enthusiastically, to my utter shock, and then the bug reports and feature requests started rolling in. I decided to clean things up immensely, stuck out v2.0 (extra funcionality justified the major rev. number). Although drastically better than v1.0, funnily enough this wasn't software nirvana either and so the bug reports started arriving for that too. Obscure stuff - "it doesn't work on a Mac Plus in Japan? Huh?...ahh, yes. Sorry about that - fixed now.". And so v2.0.1 and so on.
Note that at no stage was the source open. It still isn't, and never will be as annoyingly I've lost a rather crucial file (TRandomFile.cpp...for a file randomiser. Oops.). However, it improved in leaps and bounds due to the amount of feedback received. I don't then believe the closed source/open source-better thing. I believe it depends on interest, feedback and attitude of the person or group doing the coding.
From the article: "Those guys know what is going to come out in discovery, and you hear a lot of rumours on the street that they are going to buy us out."
A more blatant attempt to plug the share price could not be found. If IBM were to try and buy, the share price would shoot up. Here's our friend Mr. McBride making that even more explicit to his current stockholders (don't sell) and potential buyers (buy us, we're going to go skywards).
Besides, I hear no rumours on the street (what a marvellous phrase, unattributable yet pseudo-meaningful...) that IBM are interested. In fact, everything IBM has done so far has shown a complete lack of interest in that outcome.
...as far as I know, because of the special media and format and stuff, software for the Gamecube has to be approved by Nintendo before it can be published, and they allowed Freeloader to come out...
Freeloader is the exception that proves the rule. The reason Freeloader was so long coming out is because Nintendo explicitly -dis-approve of it, and refused permission for manufacture. Datel had to go elsewhere, hence the huge delay.
I am told (by newsgroup posters, admittedly unverified by me) that the latest 1st party Gamecube titles are not bootable by the current Freeloader, so it looks as if Nintendo are trying to work around its existence.
At least Nintendo is setting a better example in this respect
Nintendo sets an appalling example with the Gamecube however. Heavily region-locked, and the majority of releases are never ported to other regions. Even their most popular stuff, such as Animal Crossing, often never gets a European or Australian release. And the lag is enormous - there was a huge gap between the release of Metroid Prime and Zelda in the US before their eventual appearance in Europe.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:XP catch-up release (flamesuit on...)
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
I suggest a little benefit of the doubt for a company that has been playing a brilliant game of catch up for the past couple of years.
Oh absolutely, please don't misread my post. I bought a 12" Powerbook a few weeks ago and am extremely happy with it. I also used to own a Mac in the System 7 days (have a look at Startupfrills for a bit of fossilised freeware I wrote back then), and I'm definitely pro-Apple.
It's just that the comments so far have been a bit too gushing in my opinion, and a little more realism might be nice. There were features from XP that I missed when using the Powerbook, user switching being the main one, and it would be remiss of me to claim otherwise. I think that the features being added are solid, worthwhile additions and I welcome them. However, from what I've read so far I regard this as workman-like progression rather than a new leap into a wonderful world.
That's fine. Sometimes, workman-like progressions are what's needed. Now on the new hardware front however, I'll gush with the rest of 'em.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:XP catch-up release (flamesuit on...)
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
You haven't been able to network fax in Windows since 2000.
I don't know about that - I use the fax feature with a directly connected serial-port external modem. That, at least, has been there since Win95.
Nice try.
Look - don't take operating system choices as territory to be defended at all costs. They're just tools. I use a combination of OS X and XP for home and home office, NT4 and Solaris at work, Symbian on my phone and Linux on my co-lo server box. Each OS has its plus and minus points - defending one or the other to the death is just ludicrous.
Cheers,
Ian
XP catch-up release (flamesuit on...)
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
OK, I'm wearing my flame-retardant attitude now...
I hate to say this, but it looks like a bit of a Windows XP-catch up release to me. As a regular and happy user of both operating systems, I say there are definitely useful things missing in OS X that XP has by default. Faxing for one - news in the developers conference, but Windows has had that as standard since 1995. Fast user switching - an absolute god-send to me, and extremely welcome. But again, it's an XP catch-up feature. Video conferencing? Snap - a catch-up with Netmeeting.
Now, that's not to say I'm disappointed with things. Personally, I think a pause to fill in the missing gaps is welcome, and I'll definitely appreciate not having to remote desktop to my PC to send off a fax. There are also some nice new Mac-only features to go coo at, but on the whole I'll stick by my opinion that in terms of functionality at least, this is a catch-up with XP.
One thing I am disappointed in is Safari 1.0 however. Using it at the moment, and I went back to all the sites I'd reported as being rendered incorrectly - they're still rendered incorrectly. Not one bug fixed. You also can't block images coming from a particular server - a feature I use a lot in Firebird, can't tab onto drop-downs and you can't set your homepage to be a group of tabs. A massive let down. It hasn't done nearly enough to become my default browser yet.
Also disappointed not to see an iSync update - Symbian-based phones aren't properly supported at the moment, and since most of the smart-phones sold in the UK at least are Symbian-based then that's an itch that needs scratching.
Overall happy then, but I still think this is a bit of a catch-up rather than anything revolutionary.
I could send you an email prohibiting you from eating ice cream for the rest of your life. Until there's some binding agreement between us, rather than just a one way message from me, the correct response to such a prohibition is "ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha..."
Slashdot Mirror
Commoditise all the building blocks you want. Operating systems? Fine. Office applications? Yep - alright. Development tools? Yes please, we like that. When you're finished, you still left with a ton of tools that need plugging together to do useful work for a business.
Now, if your business just needs Office to write letters and send invoices, plus a database to track stock, then you were never in the kind of software market I'm talking about anyway. If, however, you happen to be a multi-national bank needing realtime market data information feeding to custom databases, with their own trading front ends etc. - this kind of stuff is only helped by Open Source. Give us the middleware (in this set-up, the OS and database is almost immaterial) and we'll carry on building the final product thank you. Always plenty of work for developers here.
Cheers,
Ian
No probem - answered in parent:
"...now there's only one copy of it in Kew Gardens, London?"
Cheers,
Ian
The first thing that struck me when I went over was...where's my copy? This was put together as an educational tool using public money, but now there's only one copy of it in Kew Gardens, London? Why can't I just download it? All the data's public domain anyway.
As it happens, I don't live that far from Kew Gardens and so will probably go to see this. But what I'd really like to do is download the lot and use it as a referece tool at home. Or perhaps accessible online.
Incidently, no word on the formats used to rescue it. It now has a Windows interface - good news, but what about people running other things? That's not a trite statement - they already came close to losing it once in just fifteen years, and in fifteen more years' time I'll guarantee you that it won't be XP on people's desktop. Need to have the formats available so that people can write their own interfaces to it.
Cheers,
Ian
Not really, no.
The Hundred Years War, whilst not actually lasting a hundred years, did last rather longer than World War II. However, the number of people dying was somewhat less.
Cheers
Ian
And so it should - it's better than the alternatives which preceded it. It's just important to divorce the .Net marketing cloud from the actual technology on the ground.
Cheers,
Ian
You know, I was just putting together a response that said this too. Then it dawned on me - of course there weren't any positive responses via email, all the reply addresses on spam are faked anyway.
Sadly, this encouraging count of zero doesn't actually reflect the number of potential respondants to spam. For that, we'd need to know if anyone called any of the telephone or fax numbers they list.
Cheers,
Ian
That's precisely my point - they're both model-based, not CGI.
Cheers,
Ian
Not having an offsite backup is what defines a company as being on the bleeding edge...
Cheers,
Ian
If only more people thought like that. And if only some of the people that did think like that were film directors.
I've posted before to this board that I dislike the increasing reliance on CGI in films. A fair point to make is that once upon a time The Last Starfighter was considered pixel-perfect, but now look. CGI dates a film really fast, because graphics improve all the time.
Cheers,
Ian
I've used many keyboards since of course, and whilst I seem to have settled on Microsoft keyboards these days I still haven't found anything nicer than the ancient Apple. Co-incidently (or not, as the case may be...) the keyboard on the 12" Powerbook is also extremely nice.
Cheers,
Ian
My wife is an optician... :-)
Cheers,
Ian
Just the one that I can think of - use-based dynamic menus. Perhaps someone can point me to earlier cases of this, but I still like it and still find them useful.
There appears to be a religious objection to them in the Linux world, I suspect primarily because the idea came from Microsoft. OK - so some people hate them, meaning that the feature should be configurable. Despite that, I'd like to see dynamic menus start making their way outside of the Windows world.
Cheers,
Ian
Specifically, unless your screen is fairly far forward, you can't read the metal tab title names in Safari. Those titles are just the system font on top of the metal look, so this hassle is not limited to Safari.
Given that, I think this brushed metal is an odd direction to be moving in for a company proclaiming this their year of the laptop.
Cheers,
Ian
Interesting - could you elaborate on that please? Being a new user coming over from XP I'm missing fax and user switching at the moment and looking forward to getting them back.
Cheers,
Ian
No.
void main(void) is invalid ANSI C. The return type of main must be int.
Cheers,
Ian
It exists. I've worked on some. I'd like to think I haven't produced any, but then - everyone likes to think they're perfect, don't they? Probably I have.
However, a large amount of the open source stuff is frankly crap as well. Just compile the kernel for example - watch the warnings come pouring out.
I believe bug reporting to be more important than philosophical origin. For example, a while ago I wrote some Mac freeware for System 7 (over here if you're interested). v1.0 was purely for me, it worked on my environment and sticking it out on the web for download was purely an afterthought on my part.
It was taken up enthusiastically, to my utter shock, and then the bug reports and feature requests started rolling in. I decided to clean things up immensely, stuck out v2.0 (extra funcionality justified the major rev. number). Although drastically better than v1.0, funnily enough this wasn't software nirvana either and so the bug reports started arriving for that too. Obscure stuff - "it doesn't work on a Mac Plus in Japan? Huh? ...ahh, yes. Sorry about that - fixed now.". And so v2.0.1 and so on.
Note that at no stage was the source open. It still isn't, and never will be as annoyingly I've lost a rather crucial file (TRandomFile.cpp...for a file randomiser. Oops.). However, it improved in leaps and bounds due to the amount of feedback received. I don't then believe the closed source/open source-better thing. I believe it depends on interest, feedback and attitude of the person or group doing the coding.
Cheers,
Ian
So then, did they act in the spirit of things and report these back to Apache?
Cheers,
Ian
A more blatant attempt to plug the share price could not be found. If IBM were to try and buy, the share price would shoot up. Here's our friend Mr. McBride making that even more explicit to his current stockholders (don't sell) and potential buyers (buy us, we're going to go skywards).
Besides, I hear no rumours on the street (what a marvellous phrase, unattributable yet pseudo-meaningful...) that IBM are interested. In fact, everything IBM has done so far has shown a complete lack of interest in that outcome.
Cheers,
Ian
Freeloader is the exception that proves the rule. The reason Freeloader was so long coming out is because Nintendo explicitly -dis-approve of it, and refused permission for manufacture. Datel had to go elsewhere, hence the huge delay.
I am told (by newsgroup posters, admittedly unverified by me) that the latest 1st party Gamecube titles are not bootable by the current Freeloader, so it looks as if Nintendo are trying to work around its existence.
Cheers,
Ian
Nintendo sets an appalling example with the Gamecube however. Heavily region-locked, and the majority of releases are never ported to other regions. Even their most popular stuff, such as Animal Crossing, often never gets a European or Australian release. And the lag is enormous - there was a huge gap between the release of Metroid Prime and Zelda in the US before their eventual appearance in Europe.
Cheers,
Ian
Oh absolutely, please don't misread my post. I bought a 12" Powerbook a few weeks ago and am extremely happy with it. I also used to own a Mac in the System 7 days (have a look at Startupfrills for a bit of fossilised freeware I wrote back then), and I'm definitely pro-Apple.
It's just that the comments so far have been a bit too gushing in my opinion, and a little more realism might be nice. There were features from XP that I missed when using the Powerbook, user switching being the main one, and it would be remiss of me to claim otherwise. I think that the features being added are solid, worthwhile additions and I welcome them. However, from what I've read so far I regard this as workman-like progression rather than a new leap into a wonderful world.
That's fine. Sometimes, workman-like progressions are what's needed. Now on the new hardware front however, I'll gush with the rest of 'em.
Cheers,
Ian
I don't know about that - I use the fax feature with a directly connected serial-port external modem. That, at least, has been there since Win95.
Nice try.
Look - don't take operating system choices as territory to be defended at all costs. They're just tools. I use a combination of OS X and XP for home and home office, NT4 and Solaris at work, Symbian on my phone and Linux on my co-lo server box. Each OS has its plus and minus points - defending one or the other to the death is just ludicrous.
Cheers,
Ian
I hate to say this, but it looks like a bit of a Windows XP-catch up release to me. As a regular and happy user of both operating systems, I say there are definitely useful things missing in OS X that XP has by default. Faxing for one - news in the developers conference, but Windows has had that as standard since 1995. Fast user switching - an absolute god-send to me, and extremely welcome. But again, it's an XP catch-up feature. Video conferencing? Snap - a catch-up with Netmeeting.
Now, that's not to say I'm disappointed with things. Personally, I think a pause to fill in the missing gaps is welcome, and I'll definitely appreciate not having to remote desktop to my PC to send off a fax. There are also some nice new Mac-only features to go coo at, but on the whole I'll stick by my opinion that in terms of functionality at least, this is a catch-up with XP.
One thing I am disappointed in is Safari 1.0 however. Using it at the moment, and I went back to all the sites I'd reported as being rendered incorrectly - they're still rendered incorrectly. Not one bug fixed. You also can't block images coming from a particular server - a feature I use a lot in Firebird, can't tab onto drop-downs and you can't set your homepage to be a group of tabs. A massive let down. It hasn't done nearly enough to become my default browser yet.
Also disappointed not to see an iSync update - Symbian-based phones aren't properly supported at the moment, and since most of the smart-phones sold in the UK at least are Symbian-based then that's an itch that needs scratching.
Overall happy then, but I still think this is a bit of a catch-up rather than anything revolutionary.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian