I just spent much of my free time over the past 2 years writing a landscape generator/modeller (see terraform.sourceforge.net) and I used Gtk-- for it. As such, I think I have some experience dealing with it.
At the time I started writing it, QT was not free enough for me to contribute (application) code for it and plain Gtk programming (in C) required such an insane amount of pointer casts that it was pretty obvious to me that I wanted to avoid it. I think Gtk-- is a very nice toolkit although it requires some discipline as (like Guillaume said), it lets you shoot yourself in the foot in a variety of ways.
That said, I really think Gtk needs a well supported and clean C++ wrapper. I dont care which one it is but I dont want to be faced with the task of rewriting the GUI part of my application every 2 years. This kind of stuff makes me consider using QT, even though I prefer Gtk.
Oh well, this might just be a case where the beauty of open source (lots of options and development in many directions) has come back to haunt me. I dont care what the solution is, but we need something that is the official Gtk C++ wrapper and is guaranteed to be around a few years from now.
I must say that I find the widespread adoption of Linux in Countries like China and India interesting (to say the least). If it's true that open source really does enable the un-guided cross-breeding and sharing of (software) ideas, thereby transforming a centrally run engineering process to the sort of creative/fruitful chaso that we see in organic systes (and I for the most part believe it is), then the long term impact of two countries with together 2 billion people joing the computing scene will be enourmous.
Between the two of them (or even by themselves), they have numbers to (statistically speaking) produce a quite few geniouses and quite a large number of superbly intelligent people. Open Source, being software without secrets that can be understood and analyzed if one is determined to spend the time, enables these people (and anybody else who cares to) to join the programming feast of Linux, Apache, BSD, etc. I would think that over in many ways we will be starting to see the center of gravity of the software world shift away from silicon valley...
Sure... but wouldn't it make even more sense if all those countries (India, Pakistan and to a degree China) would worry about feeding their people before spending billions of dollars on their version of the nuclear arms and space race?
It's often ironic to see how countries which are at the brink of insolvency, always manage to find the funds necessary to build an army, wage war, engage in space programs or other huge projects (witness Pakistan and their missile program as well as Russia waging war in the Kaukasus...
While it is nice that it looks like we're starting to get DVD players for Linux, does anybody really think that the proposed solution is satisfactory? Let's see:
closed source, binary only player
still only 1 player for Linux, not much choice
we're still stuck with region codes
So while the situation seems to be improving, we're still a long way from home. I would hope that Sony's action of recalling the PS2 because it ignores region codes is too late: The Genie is out of the bottle and won't go back in. It seems that many/most DVD players will allow you to circumvent the region codes, so I sincerely hope that the powers that be are fighting a loosing battle. Given their resources though, it will be a long war. The best we can probably do, is to alert our friends to the situation in the hope that they end up buying a player which lets them get around the region coding, thus basically voting with their wallets; the only form of voting big business actually cares about. If enough people state that they simply will not buy a device where the region coding limitation is active, business will (eventually) listen. You own your freedom: don't surrender it easily; fight for it (with your wallet).
While there's probably no definitive answer to this question, I would suggest that a loose definition of UNIX would include the following:
POSIX compliant system API
Availability of traditional UNIX shell tools
Ability to run without a windowing system
Modular design
The question is like asking "What's a car?" BMW, Mercedes, Honda, GM and lots of others fit the mold without there being a 'definitive' car. I think the same applies to UNIX: there's lots of variants, based on the same basic (and time-tested) design. I've done some software porting across different UNIX systems and in my opinion, the differences between these systems were blown out of proportion by the marketing machine from Redmond (and others). There are differnces, but they're manageable...
Also, while this is not as true anymore as it was a few years ago, I would say that an important part of the UNIX philosophy is the fact that most configuration parameters (and other useful stuff) are stored in plain text files (yes, Solaris and AIX don't do this anymore, but the basic idea is still there). You could port all the shell utilities to NT only to find out that they're basically useless as everything is stored in some binary file that you can't really process with your trusted text tools. ASCII is portable and accessible; a fact that UNIX really drives (or at least should drive) home...
the more we look out into space, the more it seems that objects which were once considered extraordinary/rare, are acutally pretty common (quasars, black holes, neutron stars, etc.).
What are the implications of supermassive black holes in an open ended universe? Does that not suggest that eventually (in 10s of billions of years), everything will eventually be sucked into one of these black holes. Will we eventually have a universe populated by a few (or one) supermassive black hole(s) or am I being overly dramatic here? Are there any models on what the eventual state of such a universe would be? Inquiring minds want to know...
I think it's good that a judge determined that Iran is guilty; however does anybody here really think that Iran cares?
Iran is currently embroiled in a bitter power struggle as the reformist forces fight the entrenched funamentalist/conservative clergy which has ruled the country since the revolution. Mind you, this is a country where numerous intellectuals, publishes and otherwise dissenting people have been killed, imprisoned or simply disappeared. I don't think they care about a verdict handed down by the 'great satan' (although that's a qualification that isn't heard much anymore these days).
Any spare money Iran has probably goes towards their efforts at acquiring nuclear capability. I've read rumors that the only way Pakistan was able to finance it's nuclear program was by selling (nuclear) know-how to Iran. I don't really think anybody should have nukes, but those two countries certainly shouldn't. Why is it that 3rd world countries rather have nukes than well fed people?
Though I don't know Jason (actually I've never heard of him before (I've never dabbled with Linux PPC)), I wish him well and hope he recovers fully.
What strikes me about the articles are 3 things:
1) Cassie seems to holding up very well under the circumstances. Congratulations on handling what must be a very difficult situation remarkably well. I was amazed that Cassie still has the power to have some humor as she descibes her/Jason's situation.
2) Things like this should remind all of us how fragile our existance is. One second you're busy building cool software (or whatever else it is you're doing), caring for your familily, enjoying the good things in life, and the next you're in the hospital, your body and mind rearranged in very unpleasant ways. I think it's good to step back from time to time and realize how empty life would be without the people you care about (and how care about/for you). I'm as much as a computer geek as the next guy (maybe even more so), but it's things like this which from time to time makes me step back and look at my life, trying to figure out what's essential and what's not. Most the time it seems my software/technical side is essential and define who/what I am, but events like this one have a remarkable ability to make me doubt that. I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter how fascinated with technology you are, don't loose sight of the fact that it's just one part of your existance. In the end, life is about (sharing it) with (other) people (and even animals).
3) I can't help but feel a dark fascination with the fact that such an accident can leave you seemingly lucid (ie: intact speech and vocabulary) but yet somehow detachted from reality. I think this in one way or another says something (interesting) about our cognitive processes.
Finally, this servers as an example what drunk driving can lead to. Just don't do it. Get on a bike or bus instead...
GNOME is also in C (AFAIK), so I wonder if they have C++ wrappers for it. (or do they already)?
Yes. There's several. I've been using Gtk-- (available on soureforce) for a year now and like it a alot; it's nice to be able to use real inheritance rather than the casting madness Gtk+ makes you go through.
The problem that I see is that eventually even if you are wealthy these little fees could start to add up rather rapidly and no one would ever notice until you actually add them up
This is exactly the pattern I see with my mobile/cell phone. Yes it's nice to use the thing and call your friends all the time, but on the other hand, when the bill arrives, I really wonder if it's worth it.
I udnerstand that the MPAA is trying to secure the rights to it's content. Unfortunateley, I don't think their content is worth much. Take my situation: I live in Europe, have 25+ cable channels, most of which are filled with b-grade movies most of the day. Every once in a while someone schedules a decent movie (this is seldom enough that I'm almost convinced that this only happens by accident) but most the time it's bad movies mixed with Jerry Springer and game shows. The MPAA can control this stuff as much as it wants because I don't really want it.
Of course they are fighting a loosing battle: just look at what technology did to music. You can today, at a reasonable expense (that is, if you're on a decent computer geek salary) buy recording equipment which will allow you to put your music on CD with a decent sound. Not professional studio-quality sound, but good enough. Well the same thing will happen to the movie business and once it does, their monopoly on the means of productions (my, I sound socialist today:-) ) will evaporate. And once that happens, their content will dramatically decrease in value.
I think the internet could well have the effect of splintering society and removing the dominance of the current media mogules. Once that happens, there will be nothing left for them to control because the market will be too fragmented. Now if we could only make this concept clear to the 99% of the population who are not geeks...
Hmm... it seems that not a day goes by without some sort of hacking/DOS incident making the news. Given the somewhat crazy valuation of internet/e-commerce companies, one must wonder how stable the current boom is. Most of these companies don't have much in terms of sales revenue or profit (especially when compared to the traditional brick and mortar business companies), so their valuation (and to some degree their success) depends on the image they evoke. As such, their valuation is really determined by the public believing the great future these companies hope for. How much would it take to shake this confidence? Is 1 incident a day enough to make Joe Public loose confidence? Because once that happens, they money that has been pumped into the.coms might just evaporate very quickly...
The high-tech industry has known since August 1998, he said, that Solaris and Linux systems were vulnerable to having foreign, unwanted code placed on them by outsiders.
I just love the fact that this guys blatantly says that Unix/Solaris/Linux systems are vulnerable to having unwanted code placed on them. I really doubt there's much truth to this.
Windows- based systems are not subject to this problem. Sure. I'll believe it when I see it. If the last few years have proved anything, it is that Windows (with it's executable macros, activeX programs and other integrated offerings) is much worse when it comes to security and stability. And now all of a sudden, Windows machines are immune and Unix type machines are vlunerable? Yeah, right. Next he's gonna try to convince us that the BSoD is really just a feature which secures the box by disabling (amongst other things) net accees.
I had the pleasure to administer a SCO UNIX box which was used to run an Oracle server for our in house testing. Admittedly, this was a few years ago, but I never in my entire life, have come across another UNIX install so unstable and broken as SCO UNIX. I was running Linux kernel 1.0 back then and found myself wishing every evening that the machine at work would work half as well as my home box and be set up 1/4 as intelligently.
SCO UNIX might have had it's place in the market 10 years ago, but the steamtrain that we call Linux robbed it of it's right-to-existance many years ago.
After my experiences with the above mentioned SCO UNIX box, I can only hope that their services are better than their software. SCO UNIX felt like a car at the crash derby, with bits and pieces falling off to the left and to the right constantly. In my mind, there's not real justification to their (continued) corporate existance.
Hmm, my experience with Mandrake has been quite positive. I started using them with verion 6.0 because they were Pentium optimized and have not regretted it.
Right now I have 2 machines running Mandrake 6.1: my development machine were I surf the net and code as well as my web server, which also doubles as a firewall for my cable modem connection. Uptime on the 2nd machine just recently jumped the 100 day mark and the system is rock solid.
Of course your milage may vary, but I have found Mandrake to be a very nice/good distribution for my needs (which is basically surfing the net, hacking code and producing some documentation in various formats from time to time (as well as playing Civ:CTP from time to time)).
Bowie and his partners hope fans will want to use the bank to express their loyalty to the ever-changing brand that is David Bowie, Roy said. "You've got a passion for something, you want to show your passion."
Excuse me, but this may just be one of the more ridiculus things I've heard in a while. OK, I (grudingly) accept the fact that we live in a society where we have Michael Jordan Sneakers, Spice Girls play dolls, 100 different Star Wars items, Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd endorsed cars (VW), and a lot of other bullshit.
Now we have David Bowie opening a bank. Come on! And there's a press release claiming that he has a passion for something. Well yes: His passion is milking his fans (or people who just happen to recognize his name/face) for even more of their money than they already gave him.
You want to be an artist? Stay an artist and try to produce something worthwhile. You want to be commercial whore? Fine, be that but don't pretend you're an artist. You can't be both. Stick to something you know, something you're good at. No, marketing your name does not count. Producing great art might. I guess the great irony of our age is that this bullshit actually seems to work: Why else would companies be doing it? Which in turn doesn't say much good about the average person's (the part of the population that goes for these items) intelligence.
Since I've stopped playing games other than nibbles, tetris and such gems, the mhz-race is something I watch and giggle somewhat at.
Try compiling some serious C++ code... I'm running on a Celeron running at 540Mhz and sometimes it feels pretty slow... for me (I spend most my time coding/re-compiling), CPU speed is definitely the limiting factor...
You said: I'm pretty much sure that most of the Russian soldiers will not fight in a war with the West - they will simply see no reason for it. Communism in Russia is dead. The ideology does not matter any more
Really? I think the story is a bit simpler: You fight and follow the orders you are given or they throw you in jail for a long time (or just shoot your right away). I don't think the average soldier in Chechenya (spelling??) knows why he's there, risking his life. Yes, idiology doesn't matter but as a solder you are not asked to fight but told to do so. Refusal to follow those orders is usually not taken very kindly.
I really do sympathise with the Russians (along with the other former USSR republics) but the current (political & economic) climate in Russia is scary. In many (rural) areas government has retreated, wages & pensions are not being paid on time (if they're being payed at all), corruption is widespread and much of the former communist oligarchy has transformed itself into the owners of (hastily) privatized businesses and enjoy excellent ties to the organized crime syndicates. Rumors have it that corruption reaches up into the highest levels of government and it's a fact that many crimes along these lines are never investigated earnestly if at all.
Much of their nuclear fleet is rotting in the harbors because there is no money to either fix/maintain the fleet, much less so to properly dismantle it. Weapons from low to high caliber can be bought if you have the right amount of cash and know the right people. All of this is happening in a country which still is a nuclear power and has lots of other stuff that should be kept under tight control by a powerful/competent government. The safety of nuclear materials, be it in the civilan or military sector, can not be guaranteed anymore; factories and nuclear power plants run for years without proper servicing. Once of the major fears currently seems to be that countries like Irak, Iran, N. Korea and others will be able to use the current climate (ie: breakdown of authority) to appropriate materials and technology for their own nuclear programs; those are countries that I'd rather not see developing nuclear arms; yet this is a real danger.
Not a pretty place, and from what I have gathered Jetsin's replacement (Putin), who used to be head of the KGB, never really voiced clear political opinions which went farther than the default rethorics of law and order. Jeltsin was (at the time of the coup against Gorbachev) an icon of hope for the democratic forces. Unfortunateley nothing of that idealism remains and Russias future is in doubt. Yet we refinance their bankrupt government/economy (and thus help pay for the current operation in the Caucasus) because we can't really afford to have things get even worse than they are. In the meantime, things don't seem to be evolving towards a better (more stable) state of affairs. We're afraid of making Russia into an Enemy, yet at the current pace of development, there may not be a Russia (or a proper government which does what a government is expected to do) much longer...
Isn't the world a wonderful place as we close the books on the 20th century?:-)
While I don't know enough about chip design (and also don't really care) to judge the chips on their technical merits, the bottom line seems to be that it doesn't matter how good a chip you make if you can't ship/sell it in decent volumes. We all know that the early Intel chips were pretty much garbage, yet Intel today is the king of the chip world. Why? Because most (99+%) of the machines sold feature intel compatible chips.
As long as you can't go to an average computer store and pick up a PPC, Alpha or Sparc chip and build your own computer from it, the general population will not even know they exist. Don't get me wrong: I would like it if all of a sudden the availability of these chips were equal to the Intel chips, but that's just not the reality of the marketplace. With the switch to the 64-bit architecture there may be an opening in the market which will allow these chips to become a more available product in the eyes of the average consumer. But as long as the Intel/MS duopoly (which is showing signs of fracturing) is as dominant as it is now, that's just not going to happen.
Wow, this is pretty cool. I downloaded it, installed it and pointed it at slashdot. Yes, it's obviously beta with some things to fix (and a somewhat odd UI) but it's fast. Starts up within 1/2 second or so and seems to render pages fast...
I think we have another (serious) entry in the Linux browser market with Opera. I've obviously just played with it for a few minutes now, but for a 1.5M download, it's pretty cool. The important question now is: how come it's so small? What features doesn't it have that Mozilla does have? All in all, I welcome the Opera people/browser to the Linux world. The more the merrier. Competition is good and will force any other browser makers out there to keep on their toes.
I still prefer Mozilla as it's open source, but this seems to be a nice addition to the Linux software world. What I'm wondering is: with Mozilla and (the rapidly aging) Netscape out there for free, what kind of market penetration do these guys hope for? This might be a good browser though for low end machines that don't have the RAM/CPU that mozilla seems to eat... although Mozilla seems to have 'shrunk' (in terms of bloat) over the last few releases... still, the Linux space should be large enough to allow them to continue development/support of Opera under Linux... I wish them well even if they're not open sourcing Opera...
would be the one(s) he caught during his visit(s) to the prosititutes... the man is an idiot and even seems to have outlived his use as a gatherer of protest votes... I think we have better things to worry about than him...
OK, fair enough. You look at this from a different perspective. I basically see an asset where you see a detriment. I would hate for me to work on some piece of software for a year or two only to have it wrapped into some closed source product. I prefer the GPL as it ensures that the source code will remain accessible for all to see/use/study as they wish. I do think this encourages contributions to GPLed software... I'm not saying the BSD licences are wrong or evil, but I would think long and hard before publishing anything non-trivial under their licence for the very simple reason that it allows someone to take the source and do with it what they want without contributing back to the community that created the software in the first place... given the fact that I don't ask for monetary compensation for my software, I think that's only fair... if you consider this to be limiting (and I can see your point of view), you are more than welcome to write your own version of whatever software it is you need/want (I hope this doesn't come over negatively/flaming as that's definitely not my intent)...
You said: but linux is only free as in money, not as in speech
I may be just plain stupid, deluded or otherwise insane, but I always thought that one of the main atractions of Linux (OSS in general) was that it was free, as in free speech. Did I miss something rather fundamental here?
As for your argument about the price of Linux developers: lets say you have 1000 (full time) developers and pay them $60K/year. That would be $60 Million. For companies like IBM, Sun or MS that's peanuts. So it's not just a matter of money although I agree that in principle Linux gets and incredible amount of development work for free...
Slashdot Mirror
I just spent much of my free time over the past 2 years writing a landscape generator/modeller (see terraform.sourceforge.net) and I used Gtk-- for it. As such, I think I have some experience dealing with it.
At the time I started writing it, QT was not free enough for me to contribute (application) code for it and plain Gtk programming (in C) required such an insane amount of pointer casts that it was pretty obvious to me that I wanted to avoid it. I think Gtk-- is a very nice toolkit although it requires some discipline as (like Guillaume said), it lets you shoot yourself in the foot in a variety of ways.
That said, I really think Gtk needs a well supported and clean C++ wrapper. I dont care which one it is but I dont want to be faced with the task of rewriting the GUI part of my application every 2 years. This kind of stuff makes me consider using QT, even though I prefer Gtk.
Oh well, this might just be a case where the beauty of open source (lots of options and development in many directions) has come back to haunt me. I dont care what the solution is, but we need something that is the official Gtk C++ wrapper and is guaranteed to be around a few years from now.
I must say that I find the widespread adoption of Linux in Countries like China and India interesting (to say the least). If it's true that open source really does enable the un-guided cross-breeding and sharing of (software) ideas, thereby transforming a centrally run engineering process to the sort of creative/fruitful chaso that we see in organic systes (and I for the most part believe it is), then the long term impact of two countries with together 2 billion people joing the computing scene will be enourmous.
...
Between the two of them (or even by themselves), they have numbers to (statistically speaking) produce a quite few geniouses and quite a large number of superbly intelligent people. Open Source, being software without secrets that can be understood and analyzed if one is determined to spend the time, enables these people (and anybody else who cares to) to join the programming feast of Linux, Apache, BSD, etc. I would think that over in many ways we will be starting to see the center of gravity of the software world shift away from silicon valley
Sure ... but wouldn't it make even more sense if all those countries (India, Pakistan and to a degree China) would worry about feeding their people before spending billions of dollars on their version of the nuclear arms and space race?
...
It's often ironic to see how countries which are at the brink of insolvency, always manage to find the funds necessary to build an army, wage war, engage in space programs or other huge projects (witness Pakistan and their missile program as well as Russia waging war in the Kaukasus
So while the situation seems to be improving, we're still a long way from home. I would hope that Sony's action of recalling the PS2 because it ignores region codes is too late: The Genie is out of the bottle and won't go back in. It seems that many/most DVD players will allow you to circumvent the region codes, so I sincerely hope that the powers that be are fighting a loosing battle. Given their resources though, it will be a long war. The best we can probably do, is to alert our friends to the situation in the hope that they end up buying a player which lets them get around the region coding, thus basically voting with their wallets; the only form of voting big business actually cares about. If enough people state that they simply will not buy a device where the region coding limitation is active, business will (eventually) listen. You own your freedom: don't surrender it easily; fight for it (with your wallet).
There must be a joke in there somewhere to call this whole line of work the 'intelligence business' :-)
- POSIX compliant system API
- Availability of traditional UNIX shell tools
- Ability to run without a windowing system
- Modular design
The question is like asking "What's a car?" BMW, Mercedes, Honda, GM and lots of others fit the mold without there being a 'definitive' car. I think the same applies to UNIX: there's lots of variants, based on the same basic (and time-tested) design. I've done some software porting across different UNIX systems and in my opinion, the differences between these systems were blown out of proportion by the marketing machine from Redmond (and others). There are differnces, but they're manageableAlso, while this is not as true anymore as it was a few years ago, I would say that an important part of the UNIX philosophy is the fact that most configuration parameters (and other useful stuff) are stored in plain text files (yes, Solaris and AIX don't do this anymore, but the basic idea is still there). You could port all the shell utilities to NT only to find out that they're basically useless as everything is stored in some binary file that you can't really process with your trusted text tools. ASCII is portable and accessible; a fact that UNIX really drives (or at least should drive) home ...
Hmm,
...
the more we look out into space, the more it seems that objects which were once considered extraordinary/rare, are acutally pretty common (quasars, black holes, neutron stars, etc.).
What are the implications of supermassive black holes in an open ended universe? Does that not suggest that eventually (in 10s of billions of years), everything will eventually be sucked into one of these black holes. Will we eventually have a universe populated by a few (or one) supermassive black hole(s) or am I being overly dramatic here? Are there any models on what the eventual state of such a universe would be? Inquiring minds want to know
I think it's good that a judge determined that Iran is guilty; however does anybody here really think that Iran cares?
... :-) , :-(
Iran is currently embroiled in a bitter power struggle as the reformist forces fight the entrenched funamentalist/conservative clergy which has ruled the country since the revolution. Mind you, this is a country where numerous intellectuals, publishes and otherwise dissenting people have been killed, imprisoned or simply disappeared. I don't think they care about a verdict handed down by the 'great satan' (although that's a qualification that isn't heard much anymore these days).
Any spare money Iran has probably goes towards their efforts at acquiring nuclear capability. I've read rumors that the only way Pakistan was able to finance it's nuclear program was by selling (nuclear) know-how to Iran. I don't really think anybody should have nukes, but those two countries certainly shouldn't. Why is it that 3rd world countries rather have nukes than well fed people?
Boy, we live in a wonderful world
Though I don't know Jason (actually I've never heard of him before (I've never dabbled with Linux PPC)), I wish him well and hope he recovers fully.
...
...
What strikes me about the articles are 3 things:
1) Cassie seems to holding up very well under the circumstances. Congratulations on handling what must be a very difficult situation remarkably well. I was amazed that Cassie still has the power to have some humor as she descibes her/Jason's situation.
2) Things like this should remind all of us how fragile our existance is. One second you're busy building cool software (or whatever else it is you're doing), caring for your familily, enjoying the good things in life, and the next you're in the hospital, your body and mind rearranged in very unpleasant ways. I think it's good to step back from time to time and realize how empty life would be without the people you care about (and how care about/for you). I'm as much as a computer geek as the next guy (maybe even more so), but it's things like this which from time to time makes me step back and look at my life, trying to figure out what's essential and what's not. Most the time it seems my software/technical side is essential and define who/what I am, but events like this one have a remarkable ability to make me doubt that. I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter how fascinated with technology you are, don't loose sight of the fact that it's just one part of your existance. In the end, life is about (sharing it) with (other) people (and even animals).
3) I can't help but feel a dark fascination with the fact that such an accident can leave you seemingly lucid (ie: intact speech and vocabulary) but yet somehow detachted from reality. I think this in one way or another says something (interesting) about our cognitive processes.
Finally, this servers as an example what drunk driving can lead to. Just don't do it. Get on a bike or bus instead
Good luck, Jason; get well
Yes. There's several. I've been using Gtk-- (available on soureforce) for a year now and like it a alot; it's nice to be able to use real inheritance rather than the casting madness Gtk+ makes you go through.
This is exactly the pattern I see with my mobile/cell phone. Yes it's nice to use the thing and call your friends all the time, but on the other hand, when the bill arrives, I really wonder if it's worth it.
I udnerstand that the MPAA is trying to secure the rights to it's content. Unfortunateley, I don't think their content is worth much. Take my situation: I live in Europe, have 25+ cable channels, most of which are filled with b-grade movies most of the day. Every once in a while someone schedules a decent movie (this is seldom enough that I'm almost convinced that this only happens by accident) but most the time it's bad movies mixed with Jerry Springer and game shows. The MPAA can control this stuff as much as it wants because I don't really want it.
:-) ) will evaporate. And once that happens, their content will dramatically decrease in value.
...
Of course they are fighting a loosing battle: just look at what technology did to music. You can today, at a reasonable expense (that is, if you're on a decent computer geek salary) buy recording equipment which will allow you to put your music on CD with a decent sound. Not professional studio-quality sound, but good enough. Well the same thing will happen to the movie business and once it does, their monopoly on the means of productions (my, I sound socialist today
I think the internet could well have the effect of splintering society and removing the dominance of the current media mogules. Once that happens, there will be nothing left for them to control because the market will be too fragmented. Now if we could only make this concept clear to the 99% of the population who are not geeks
Hmm ... it seems that not a day goes by without some sort of hacking/DOS incident making the news. Given the somewhat crazy valuation of internet/e-commerce companies, one must wonder how stable the current boom is. Most of these companies don't have much in terms of sales revenue or profit (especially when compared to the traditional brick and mortar business companies), so their valuation (and to some degree their success) depends on the image they evoke. As such, their valuation is really determined by the public believing the great future these companies hope for. How much would it take to shake this confidence? Is 1 incident a day enough to make Joe Public loose confidence? Because once that happens, they money that has been pumped into the .coms might just evaporate very quickly ...
I just love the fact that this guys blatantly says that Unix/Solaris/Linux systems are vulnerable to having unwanted code placed on them. I really doubt there's much truth to this.
Windows- based systems are not subject to this problem. Sure. I'll believe it when I see it. If the last few years have proved anything, it is that Windows (with it's executable macros, activeX programs and other integrated offerings) is much worse when it comes to security and stability. And now all of a sudden, Windows machines are immune and Unix type machines are vlunerable? Yeah, right. Next he's gonna try to convince us that the BSoD is really just a feature which secures the box by disabling (amongst other things) net accees.
SCO UNIX might have had it's place in the market 10 years ago, but the steamtrain that we call Linux robbed it of it's right-to-existance many years ago.
After my experiences with the above mentioned SCO UNIX box, I can only hope that their services are better than their software. SCO UNIX felt like a car at the crash derby, with bits and pieces falling off to the left and to the right constantly. In my mind, there's not real justification to their (continued) corporate existance.
Hmm, my experience with Mandrake has been quite positive. I started using them with verion 6.0 because they were Pentium optimized and have not regretted it.
Right now I have 2 machines running Mandrake 6.1: my development machine were I surf the net and code as well as my web server, which also doubles as a firewall for my cable modem connection. Uptime on the 2nd machine just recently jumped the 100 day mark and the system is rock solid.
Of course your milage may vary, but I have found Mandrake to be a very nice/good distribution for my needs (which is basically surfing the net, hacking code and producing some documentation in various formats from time to time (as well as playing Civ:CTP from time to time)).
Excuse me, but this may just be one of the more ridiculus things I've heard in a while. OK, I (grudingly) accept the fact that we live in a society where we have Michael Jordan Sneakers, Spice Girls play dolls, 100 different Star Wars items, Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd endorsed cars (VW), and a lot of other bullshit.
Now we have David Bowie opening a bank. Come on! And there's a press release claiming that he has a passion for something. Well yes: His passion is milking his fans (or people who just happen to recognize his name/face) for even more of their money than they already gave him.
You want to be an artist? Stay an artist and try to produce something worthwhile. You want to be commercial whore? Fine, be that but don't pretend you're an artist. You can't be both. Stick to something you know, something you're good at. No, marketing your name does not count. Producing great art might. I guess the great irony of our age is that this bullshit actually seems to work: Why else would companies be doing it? Which in turn doesn't say much good about the average person's (the part of the population that goes for these items) intelligence.
I'm ranting; I'll stop now
Try compiling some serious C++ code
Really? I think the story is a bit simpler: You fight and follow the orders you are given or they throw you in jail for a long time (or just shoot your right away). I don't think the average soldier in Chechenya (spelling??) knows why he's there, risking his life. Yes, idiology doesn't matter but as a solder you are not asked to fight but told to do so. Refusal to follow those orders is usually not taken very kindly.
I really do sympathise with the Russians (along with the other former USSR republics) but the current (political & economic) climate in Russia is scary. In many (rural) areas government has retreated, wages & pensions are not being paid on time (if they're being payed at all), corruption is widespread and much of the former communist oligarchy has transformed itself into the owners of (hastily) privatized businesses and enjoy excellent ties to the organized crime syndicates. Rumors have it that corruption reaches up into the highest levels of government and it's a fact that many crimes along these lines are never investigated earnestly if at all.
...
:-)
Much of their nuclear fleet is rotting in the harbors because there is no money to either fix/maintain the fleet, much less so to properly dismantle it. Weapons from low to high caliber can be bought if you have the right amount of cash and know the right people. All of this is happening in a country which still is a nuclear power and has lots of other stuff that should be kept under tight control by a powerful/competent government. The safety of nuclear materials, be it in the civilan or military sector, can not be guaranteed anymore; factories and nuclear power plants run for years without proper servicing. Once of the major fears currently seems to be that countries like Irak, Iran, N. Korea and others will be able to use the current climate (ie: breakdown of authority) to appropriate materials and technology for their own nuclear programs; those are countries that I'd rather not see developing nuclear arms; yet this is a real danger.
Not a pretty place, and from what I have gathered Jetsin's replacement (Putin), who used to be head of the KGB, never really voiced clear political opinions which went farther than the default rethorics of law and order. Jeltsin was (at the time of the coup against Gorbachev) an icon of hope for the democratic forces. Unfortunateley nothing of that idealism remains and Russias future is in doubt. Yet we refinance their bankrupt government/economy (and thus help pay for the current operation in the Caucasus) because we can't really afford to have things get even worse than they are. In the meantime, things don't seem to be evolving towards a better (more stable) state of affairs. We're afraid of making Russia into an Enemy, yet at the current pace of development, there may not be a Russia (or a proper government which does what a government is expected to do) much longer
Isn't the world a wonderful place as we close the books on the 20th century?
While I don't know enough about chip design (and also don't really care) to judge the chips on their technical merits, the bottom line seems to be that it doesn't matter how good a chip you make if you can't ship/sell it in decent volumes. We all know that the early Intel chips were pretty much garbage, yet Intel today is the king of the chip world. Why? Because most (99+%) of the machines sold feature intel compatible chips.
As long as you can't go to an average computer store and pick up a PPC, Alpha or Sparc chip and build your own computer from it, the general population will not even know they exist. Don't get me wrong: I would like it if all of a sudden the availability of these chips were equal to the Intel chips, but that's just not the reality of the marketplace. With the switch to the 64-bit architecture there may be an opening in the market which will allow these chips to become a more available product in the eyes of the average consumer. But as long as the Intel/MS duopoly (which is showing signs of fracturing) is as dominant as it is now, that's just not going to happen.
Wow, this is pretty cool. I downloaded it, installed it and pointed it at slashdot. Yes, it's obviously beta with some things to fix (and a somewhat odd UI) but it's fast. Starts up within 1/2 second or so and seems to render pages fast ...
... although Mozilla seems to have 'shrunk' (in terms of bloat) over the last few releases ... still, the Linux space should be large enough to allow them to continue development/support of Opera under Linux ... I wish them well even if they're not open sourcing Opera ...
I think we have another (serious) entry in the Linux browser market with Opera. I've obviously just played with it for a few minutes now, but for a 1.5M download, it's pretty cool. The important question now is: how come it's so small? What features doesn't it have that Mozilla does have? All in all, I welcome the Opera people/browser to the Linux world. The more the merrier. Competition is good and will force any other browser makers out there to keep on their toes.
I still prefer Mozilla as it's open source, but this seems to be a nice addition to the Linux software world. What I'm wondering is: with Mozilla and (the rapidly aging) Netscape out there for free, what kind of market penetration do these guys hope for? This might be a good browser though for low end machines that don't have the RAM/CPU that mozilla seems to eat
would be the one(s) he caught during his visit(s) to the prosititutes ... the man is an idiot and even seems to have outlived his use as a gatherer of protest votes ... I think we have better things to worry about than him ...
OK, fair enough. You look at this from a different perspective. I basically see an asset where you see a detriment. I would hate for me to work on some piece of software for a year or two only to have it wrapped into some closed source product. I prefer the GPL as it ensures that the source code will remain accessible for all to see/use/study as they wish. I do think this encourages contributions to GPLed software ... I'm not saying the BSD licences are wrong or evil, but I would think long and hard before publishing anything non-trivial under their licence for the very simple reason that it allows someone to take the source and do with it what they want without contributing back to the community that created the software in the first place ... given the fact that I don't ask for monetary compensation for my software, I think that's only fair ... if you consider this to be limiting (and I can see your point of view), you are more than welcome to write your own version of whatever software it is you need/want (I hope this doesn't come over negatively/flaming as that's definitely not my intent) ...
but linux is only free as in money, not as in speech
I may be just plain stupid, deluded or otherwise insane, but I always thought that one of the main atractions of Linux (OSS in general) was that it was free, as in free speech. Did I miss something rather fundamental here?
As for your argument about the price of Linux developers: lets say you have 1000 (full time) developers and pay them $60K/year. That would be $60 Million. For companies like IBM, Sun or MS that's peanuts. So it's not just a matter of money although I agree that in principle Linux gets and incredible amount of development work for free