Actually, when I suggest there probably would be a dummies book, I mean one meant for "end users" (the same way there are books for AOL users on how to use all the features of AOL) with "end users" being anyone who isn't actually involved with installing or maintaining the backend of the site, but who (like me) has access to the web-interface as user or author. There are a lot of people who could be putting their company's bulletin board on Slash (or, as you mention one of the many similar systems) who don't need to know / use much Deep Magic.
You're right about not convincing the bad ones, maybe, but just once I'd like to have a chain of evidence stretch taut, seize, and throttle a spammer, who will then hang for all to see over a pit fuming with fire and brimstone.
The apathy you describe, Yes, is the usual reaction, but having boilerplate (which I meant in the second sense you name) to fire off saves me a lot of angry typing:)
the other part being that I like Ogg Vorbis both as a concept (good license etc, smart people doing shoestring-budget research / implementation with good results) and in practice (I never turned my CD collection into MP3s, but I am turning them into Ogg Vorbis files). It doesn't get enough attention, and this (KT-Tech's codec) is precisely the sort of product which invites a comparison, even though KTech's is really a different market, at least unless ogg gets a whole lot skinnier. The availability of free software alternatives, though, (depending on how broad the universe of 'alternatives' is allowed to be) is one factor that does drive down licensing fees for the payware.
[The comment about the licensing cost actually came from a different submission on the same topic, but I didn't feel like just glibly including their claim of 'easy' licensing -- easy compared to what? I just supplied one 'what.':)]
Well, my response above is honest / sincere -- I don't mean to sound flippant about it. We did try to 'think twice' about it, asked our reviewers to please speak as frankly as they could, just because we didn't want any kind of softball review. Once we told the reviewers they had the go-ahead, they could have panned as hard as they wanted to:)
The circularity of a book on Slash running on Slashdot really isn't that strange when you think about it... everyone here *is* a Slash user in some sense:)
I hear that VA has an office in Fremont, California. Once in a while they send me some money, and some people I know say they have been there, so I guess it's true.
Other than that, I have a VA Linux T-shirt that says "Open Source -- It's the Difference Between Trust and Antitrust," and a VA mousepad that an ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend gave me, when his employer bought several servers.
there probably *will* be a book called Slash for Dummies!:)
Smiley, but I'm serious. And if it's not in the For Dummies lineup, probably in one of the similar ("we're even stupider!") lines, Idiots or whichever.
And frankly, I like that idea. I think the Dummies books and similar are much kinder introductions to certain topics than the "you must be this tall to enter" typical computer book is. No one has to *stay* with the novice-level books, but novice-level is where most people start out, no matter what the subject:) (There's a good german saying which nearly applies here, I hope spelling is correct. "Alle Menschen sind Auslaender, fast ueberall" -- "All men are foreigners, nearly everywhere.")
Sounds like you've identified a market niche that I hope someone fills -- maybe there will even be a volume II to this one.
I bet when "Running Slashsites for Encephalitics" comes out that the O'Reilly book will prove to have a more interesting writing style:)
As far as I know, Slashdot / AndOSDVerANLinux^h^h^h^h^h^hSoftware gets no special benefit by running this review besides the small amount from an affiliated link to Fatbrain.
Would you really prefer we not run a review of a book (still the only one as far as I or these reviewers can tell) about running Slash sites?
Obviously, I think it's good to run this (hey, I put it on the page:)) and I know one of the authors slightly in person, another even more slightly by email (so am happy to see them get their book in print), but that has nothing with whether I would post this review anyhow.
So, Yes -- it's convenient, because Slashdot is a site running on Slash, which is supposed to be a convenient means of disseminating and discussing just such things:)
That certainly makes sense, but I didn't know it, simply because GIMP is the only program that I've ever wanted to do that in, and never really thought about it with any other gtk program -- good to know.
Better than a 3-button mouse would be an interchangeable module there in the "trackpad" space -- a space for whatever pointing device the user preferred. (And Apple could tell hardware manus: here are the specs, free. Go make things.) I would greatly prefer my iBook to have a trackpoint-type pointer, because I think they're millions of times nicer than touchpads. The other advantages (it was a good deal, and the battery is better than most laptops) ended up winning out, but I do curse the silly touchpad. Would be great to be swap out the touchpad for a trackpoint.
I haven't used a trackball on a laptop lately, but current optical desktop trackballsare great, and I didn't mind it on my powerbook in 1993, so maybe that would be another option.
is the ability to add your own keyboard commands to any menu item, but holding down the menu and pressing the key combination you want to associate with it. Bam!
I wish more software would pick up on this clever, simple, why-dinna-thinka-that idea.
Window Cloning is one of the reasons I find IE annoying and presumptuous -- I agree with the poster who said (paraphrasing) "I hit cntrl-N when I want a new window, not a clone."
I would not mind Window cloning as an *option* (control-option-N, say, if that's not a taken combination) but I've never understood this as a default
Could you provide a thought transcript that makes Window Cloning sound desireable? "I'm browsing Website X. Suddenly, I want to have the same page open in a new window..."
Of course, some people aren't tab fans like I am, and I have trouble explaining why, so probably I'm just missing something with Window Cloning. I just think it's an annoying, inexplicable default setting.
Tabs are worth switching, no other feature need apply, though pop-up blocking is nice too.
Yes, there are some people (insane people;)) who don't like them, and they have a right to their wrongheaded opinion, but as for the rest of us, tabs are worth some crashes. I don't have any machines with windows at the moment, but I have a pair of PCs running Mozilla and Galeon, and an iMac with System 9 most of the time on which Mozilla is the 90% browser, the other 10% spent experimentally in opera, IE, netscape 4.somethin' etc. Mozilla (various nightly builds) *does* crash sometimes as has been duly noted, but I find the tradeoff easy. Opera under the Mac is not the alluring adware temptress is it on Linux, but I am just fine with galeon there, thanks.
So tabs, yes, but I also have become as fond as one can be fond of Chatzilla. It may not be xchat, but does a credible job (a web interface, irc, and mail client are what I need all day) and gets better with each release. I have yet to find a free / Free irc client for the Mac that tops it, suggestions welcomed.
I bet the next major IE has tabs (or does it already?), but once you try them, it's hard not to love 'em.
More important than naked PCs is that they sell a boxed distribution, in the form of Mandrake-Linux, actually in stores throughout the country. (The naked PCs appear only to be on their website.)
It would be nice if they also sold Red Hat or some other distribution (along with FreeBSD, etc, too), but if I were running a Walmart, had limited shelfspace, and wanted to (or was willing to at least test) selling *some* version of The GNU/Linux/XF86/ Operating System, Mandrake would probably be my choice, too, because it's the distro that has so far worked best with various and varying systems. As it happens, Mandrake and HP are also somewhat buddy-buddy, and HP and Walmart likewise. Would be nice to get a peanut butter / chocolate magic combination by selling some HP machine bundles pre-configured with Mandrake and working with *everything* (CD-RW, DVD, printer).
In the meantime (am I the only one not boycotting Walmart?), when I stop in for the random oddments of life, I tend to creatively re-arrange the Mandrake boxes in Walmart to take up more space / look larger.
I was with you right up until: "And tailoring software does not mix well with the ideology behind open source."
Why do you say that?
Most programmers (something between 80 and 90%, if the Smart People I've heard are to be trusted) work on custom, in-house software (whether working full-time or as consultants, one-off programmers, etc), just the sort of tailoring you're talking about.
I don't know what percentage, but certainly some number in the several thousands of programmers just in the U.S. program with open source tools. They're free to modify GPL or similarly licensed software to do whatever the heck they want, and if there's no redistribution (that is, if it truly remains in-house), they have no obligation to release source to anyone else, either, though they might if they wanted to take part in some cross pollination:)
(Or do I completely misinterpret your point, which is possible:) ?)
There's a middle way between "support all and sundry Intel-type hardware" and "Apple must make it."
For instance, make a deal with the Dell;) with terms like "We will pledge to make OS X work on your OptiPlex and Latitude lines, as long as we can be assured the hardware is stable enough for it." (Those are the lines of Dell which are *supposed* to be stable anyhow, for business purchasing / IT consistency, etc.)
If they did that, I bet people would climb the walls to buy a new Dell with OS X installed, or at least known-to-run.
I actually think that dongles for MS software would be a good thing (for me), for a simple, greedy reason, which is that the more annoying it is to buy / use software, the better alternatives start to look.
There will always be a catch-up game of copy-hassle vs. cracking, and avg. everday folks are probably not ever going to be actively using software cracking tools to run the newest version of Word.
[And as has been pointed out many times, companies benefit hugely from certain types of unauthorized use -- Adobe, for instance, probably would not *really* like to restrict PS to legal users, because it would hurt them especially in a world with lots of low-priced mostly-workalikes.]
In a company (shorthand here for any organization, whatever its purpose), there could be all kinds of information that you don't quite know the categorizations work for every part of the company, or if someone else has a document you might need...
Being able to search for keywords within your organization might find you a lot of useful things. Have we dealt with Client X before? Is there anything on the company mailing list about a problem I'm having with remote access? Do we still have a specific report around? It doesn't mean you can't ask coworkers or send a company wide email looking for things you need, but it offers another first option that puts the time / effort burden on inanimate objects instead of people with better things to do.
Specialized boxes are what really show off what nice things commodity hardware and malleable source code are capable of.
I'd like to see a lot more companies sell products analogous to the video-editing stations offered by Linux Media Arts; offer a known-to-work combination of hardware and software so that people at least have the opportunity to flock to it.
Audio workstations, please? I'd pay a thousand bucks for a $500-in-parts workstation (which these days can be quite a powerhouse in absolute terms), if I could hook a few pre-amps or a portable Mackie mixer up to it and start multitracking.
(I'm aware of a lot of all-in-one recording consoles, and even own one, but a) screen real-estate is nice b) there are a lot of things which a "real computer" could do as an audio workstation which would be fun to experiment with and c) ever tried to enter in text labels with the insane rotating-knob method of an Akai DPS1200?)
OTOH, the people who most care about this sort of benchmark often *are* the people who want them for servers, or who are themselves developers trying to benchmark raw performance to help them make programming / design choices, so it's not that surprising. For a lot of specialized uses (TiVo, say), adequate performance to do their job doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment...
I don't think the prices you name are all that outrageous neccessarily (if they are worth that much to you, they are, and no one else can make that judgement I guess), but paying 6 small fees like that is a whole lot.
Aside from more free and open-source software, I'd like to see more shareware that is at least partly pre-paid from sales royalties. Nothing could stop you from sending *more* to the respective programmers, but it would be a lot more valuable if you could pay (say) $100 for a collection of 20 favorite shareware programs, and have the authors actually *get* that money, they pay the game-theory prices they want for them now:) (Hey, the more people paying, the less each can pay and still have happy authors...)
I've seen a lot of shareware collections, but never any where they were actually paid for in advance at a discount, so your shareware fee has already been taken care of to at least a minimum level agreed to by the authors.
I ought to put in a slashcode feature request to make those curlies more obvious; that mozilla makes them look fine for me obviously isn't exactly a help.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, when I suggest there probably would be a dummies book, I mean one meant for "end users" (the same way there are books for AOL users on how to use all the features of AOL) with "end users" being anyone who isn't actually involved with installing or maintaining the backend of the site, but who (like me) has access to the web-interface as user or author. There are a lot of people who could be putting their company's bulletin board on Slash (or, as you mention one of the many similar systems) who don't need to know / use much Deep Magic.
timothy
You're right about not convincing the bad ones, maybe, but just once I'd like to have a chain of evidence stretch taut, seize, and throttle a spammer, who will then hang for all to see over a pit fuming with fire and brimstone.
:)
The apathy you describe, Yes, is the usual reaction, but having boilerplate (which I meant in the second sense you name) to fire off saves me a lot of angry typing
timothy
the other part being that I like Ogg Vorbis both as a concept (good license etc, smart people doing shoestring-budget research / implementation with good results) and in practice (I never turned my CD collection into MP3s, but I am turning them into Ogg Vorbis files). It doesn't get enough attention, and this (KT-Tech's codec) is precisely the sort of product which invites a comparison, even though KTech's is really a different market, at least unless ogg gets a whole lot skinnier. The availability of free software alternatives, though, (depending on how broad the universe of 'alternatives' is allowed to be) is one factor that does drive down licensing fees for the payware.
:)]
[The comment about the licensing cost actually came from a different submission on the same topic, but I didn't feel like just glibly including their claim of 'easy' licensing -- easy compared to what? I just supplied one 'what.'
timothy
If you don't mind, I'd like to condense most of what you said here and use it in my stock spam-reporting boilerplate. Well-said, and righteous.
timothy
Well, my response above is honest / sincere -- I don't mean to sound flippant about it. We did try to 'think twice' about it, asked our reviewers to please speak as frankly as they could, just because we didn't want any kind of softball review. Once we told the reviewers they had the go-ahead, they could have panned as hard as they wanted to :)
... everyone here *is* a Slash user in some sense :)
The circularity of a book on Slash running on Slashdot really isn't that strange when you think about it
Anyhow, my last word too.
Cheers,
timothy
Mr. Knox:
I hear that VA has an office in Fremont, California. Once in a while they send me some money, and some people I know say they have been there, so I guess it's true.
Other than that, I have a VA Linux T-shirt that says "Open Source -- It's the Difference Between Trust and Antitrust," and a VA mousepad that an ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend gave me, when his employer bought several servers.
:)
there probably *will* be a book called Slash for Dummies! :)
:) (There's a good german saying which nearly applies here, I hope spelling is correct. "Alle Menschen sind Auslaender, fast ueberall" -- "All men are foreigners, nearly everywhere.")
:)
Smiley, but I'm serious. And if it's not in the For Dummies lineup, probably in one of the similar ("we're even stupider!") lines, Idiots or whichever.
And frankly, I like that idea. I think the Dummies books and similar are much kinder introductions to certain topics than the "you must be this tall to enter" typical computer book is. No one has to *stay* with the novice-level books, but novice-level is where most people start out, no matter what the subject
Sounds like you've identified a market niche that I hope someone fills -- maybe there will even be a volume II to this one.
I bet when "Running Slashsites for Encephalitics" comes out that the O'Reilly book will prove to have a more interesting writing style
timothy
As far as I know, Slashdot / AndOSDVerANLinux^h^h^h^h^h^hSoftware gets no special benefit by running this review besides the small amount from an affiliated link to Fatbrain.
:)) and I know one of the authors slightly in person, another even more slightly by email (so am happy to see them get their book in print), but that has nothing with whether I would post this review anyhow.
:)
Would you really prefer we not run a review of a book (still the only one as far as I or these reviewers can tell) about running Slash sites?
Obviously, I think it's good to run this (hey, I put it on the page
So, Yes -- it's convenient, because Slashdot is a site running on Slash, which is supposed to be a convenient means of disseminating and discussing just such things
timothy
thanks.
That certainly makes sense, but I didn't know it, simply because GIMP is the only program that I've ever wanted to do that in, and never really thought about it with any other gtk program -- good to know.
timothy
Better than a 3-button mouse would be an interchangeable module there in the "trackpad" space -- a space for whatever pointing device the user preferred. (And Apple could tell hardware manus: here are the specs, free. Go make things.) I would greatly prefer my iBook to have a trackpoint-type pointer, because I think they're millions of times nicer than touchpads. The other advantages (it was a good deal, and the battery is better than most laptops) ended up winning out, but I do curse the silly touchpad. Would be great to be swap out the touchpad for a trackpoint.
I haven't used a trackball on a laptop lately, but current optical desktop trackballsare great, and I didn't mind it on my powerbook in 1993, so maybe that would be another option.
timothy
is the ability to add your own keyboard commands to any menu item, but holding down the menu and pressing the key combination you want to associate with it. Bam!
I wish more software would pick up on this clever, simple, why-dinna-thinka-that idea.
timothy
Window Cloning is one of the reasons I find IE annoying and presumptuous -- I agree with the poster who said (paraphrasing) "I hit cntrl-N when I want a new window, not a clone."
..."
I would not mind Window cloning as an *option* (control-option-N, say, if that's not a taken combination) but I've never understood this as a default
Could you provide a thought transcript that makes Window Cloning sound desireable? "I'm browsing Website X. Suddenly, I want to have the same page open in a new window
Of course, some people aren't tab fans like I am, and I have trouble explaining why, so probably I'm just missing something with Window Cloning. I just think it's an annoying, inexplicable default setting.
timothy
Tabs.
;)) who don't like them, and they have a right to their wrongheaded opinion, but as for the rest of us, tabs are worth some crashes. I don't have any machines with windows at the moment, but I have a pair of PCs running Mozilla and Galeon, and an iMac with System 9 most of the time on which Mozilla is the 90% browser, the other 10% spent experimentally in opera, IE, netscape 4.somethin' etc. Mozilla (various nightly builds) *does* crash sometimes as has been duly noted, but I find the tradeoff easy. Opera under the Mac is not the alluring adware temptress is it on Linux, but I am just fine with galeon there, thanks.
Tabs are worth switching, no other feature need apply, though pop-up blocking is nice too.
Yes, there are some people (insane people
So tabs, yes, but I also have become as fond as one can be fond of Chatzilla. It may not be xchat, but does a credible job (a web interface, irc, and mail client are what I need all day) and gets better with each release. I have yet to find a free / Free irc client for the Mac that tops it, suggestions welcomed.
I bet the next major IE has tabs (or does it already?), but once you try them, it's hard not to love 'em.
timothy
More important than naked PCs is that they sell a boxed distribution, in the form of Mandrake-Linux, actually in stores throughout the country. (The naked PCs appear only to be on their website.)
It would be nice if they also sold Red Hat or some other distribution (along with FreeBSD, etc, too), but if I were running a Walmart, had limited shelfspace, and wanted to (or was willing to at least test) selling *some* version of The GNU/Linux/XF86/ Operating System, Mandrake would probably be my choice, too, because it's the distro that has so far worked best with various and varying systems. As it happens, Mandrake and HP are also somewhat buddy-buddy, and HP and Walmart likewise. Would be nice to get a peanut butter / chocolate magic combination by selling some HP machine bundles pre-configured with Mandrake and working with *everything* (CD-RW, DVD, printer).
In the meantime (am I the only one not boycotting Walmart?), when I stop in for the random oddments of life, I tend to creatively re-arrange the Mandrake boxes in Walmart to take up more space / look larger.
timothy
I was with you right up until: "And tailoring software does not mix well with the ideology behind open source."
:)
:) ?)
Why do you say that?
Most programmers (something between 80 and 90%, if the Smart People I've heard are to be trusted) work on custom, in-house software (whether working full-time or as consultants, one-off programmers, etc), just the sort of tailoring you're talking about.
I don't know what percentage, but certainly some number in the several thousands of programmers just in the U.S. program with open source tools. They're free to modify GPL or similarly licensed software to do whatever the heck they want, and if there's no redistribution (that is, if it truly remains in-house), they have no obligation to release source to anyone else, either, though they might if they wanted to take part in some cross pollination
(Or do I completely misinterpret your point, which is possible
timothy
There's a middle way between "support all and sundry Intel-type hardware" and "Apple must make it."
;) with terms like "We will pledge to make OS X work on your OptiPlex and Latitude lines, as long as we can be assured the hardware is stable enough for it." (Those are the lines of Dell which are *supposed* to be stable anyhow, for business purchasing / IT consistency, etc.)
For instance, make a deal with the Dell
If they did that, I bet people would climb the walls to buy a new Dell with OS X installed, or at least known-to-run.
Michael? Michael? Meet Steve. Steve? Meet Michael. Michael?
timothy
You're right. I fixed it ...
:)
On the other hand, it wouldn't be *all* that far off to think of the possessive as referring to a casually implied subject
timothy
I actually think that dongles for MS software would be a good thing (for me), for a simple, greedy reason, which is that the more annoying it is to buy / use software, the better alternatives start to look.
There will always be a catch-up game of copy-hassle vs. cracking, and avg. everday folks are probably not ever going to be actively using software cracking tools to run the newest version of Word.
[And as has been pointed out many times, companies benefit hugely from certain types of unauthorized use -- Adobe, for instance, probably would not *really* like to restrict PS to legal users, because it would hurt them especially in a world with lots of low-priced mostly-workalikes.]
timothy
1) the Royal Tenenbaums
2) FotR
3) A Beautiful Mind
not a crappy year for movies, even discounting everything else that happens in the world.
:)
timothy
As long as they start by killing the people who generate electricity, I think the planet will be OK after a brief science fiction interlude.
timothy
In a company (shorthand here for any organization, whatever its purpose), there could be all kinds of information that you don't quite know the categorizations work for every part of the company, or if someone else has a document you might need ...
Being able to search for keywords within your organization might find you a lot of useful things. Have we dealt with Client X before? Is there anything on the company mailing list about a problem I'm having with remote access? Do we still have a specific report around? It doesn't mean you can't ask coworkers or send a company wide email looking for things you need, but it offers another first option that puts the time / effort burden on inanimate objects instead of people with better things to do.
timothy
Yes!
...
Specialized boxes are what really show off what nice things commodity hardware and malleable source code are capable of.
I'd like to see a lot more companies sell products analogous to the video-editing stations offered by Linux Media Arts; offer a known-to-work combination of hardware and software so that people at least have the opportunity to flock to it.
Audio workstations, please? I'd pay a thousand bucks for a $500-in-parts workstation (which these days can be quite a powerhouse in absolute terms), if I could hook a few pre-amps or a portable Mackie mixer up to it and start multitracking.
(I'm aware of a lot of all-in-one recording consoles, and even own one, but a) screen real-estate is nice b) there are a lot of things which a "real computer" could do as an audio workstation which would be fun to experiment with and c) ever tried to enter in text labels with the insane rotating-knob method of an Akai DPS1200?)
OTOH, the people who most care about this sort of benchmark often *are* the people who want them for servers, or who are themselves developers trying to benchmark raw performance to help them make programming / design choices, so it's not that surprising. For a lot of specialized uses (TiVo, say), adequate performance to do their job doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment
timothy
I don't think the prices you name are all that outrageous neccessarily (if they are worth that much to you, they are, and no one else can make that judgement I guess), but paying 6 small fees like that is a whole lot.
:) (Hey, the more people paying, the less each can pay and still have happy authors ...)
Aside from more free and open-source software, I'd like to see more shareware that is at least partly pre-paid from sales royalties. Nothing could stop you from sending *more* to the respective programmers, but it would be a lot more valuable if you could pay (say) $100 for a collection of 20 favorite shareware programs, and have the authors actually *get* that money, they pay the game-theory prices they want for them now
I've seen a lot of shareware collections, but never any where they were actually paid for in advance at a discount, so your shareware fee has already been taken care of to at least a minimum level agreed to by the authors.
timothy
No, it's
"Is Apple On Its Last Legs?"
and (hopeful journalists)
"Peace Talks Fail In Middle East."
;)
timothy
Hope it reads better for you now! :)
I ought to put in a slashcode feature request to make those curlies more obvious; that mozilla makes them look fine for me obviously isn't exactly a help.
timothy