1. Swedish id cards (identitetskort) are issued by third parties (banks, the Post Office) but must conform to a national standard.
2. They *do* have a "nationality" field, which is left blank for foreigners (so it is possible to discriminate against foreigners just by looking at their card).
3. They are not, as far as I know, considered by the EU as a sufficient proof of identity, but many people don't know that. I have used my Swedish id several times to travel throughout the Schengen zone by plane. (Obviously, you don't need any id whatsoever to cross Schengen borders by car, foot, or any other means).
I do it mostly for philosophical reasons, as I don't see why I should disclose my nationality in the Schengen zone; the fact that I am a legal resident in one Schengen country should be enough. (I'm not Swedish, hence my Swedish id's nationality field is blank).
4. For US readers: the Schengen zone is a subset of the European Union where border controls have been removed (so that driving from Belgium to Germany is no more difficult then driving from New York to New Jersey).
I haven't got any hard data, but I'd be very surprised if Java didn't represent a large chunk of those 40% of developers. Basically it means that whenever developers get the choice of platform (not for deployment, but for the actual development) 40% will choose a Linux environment.
And there are huge swathes of commercial Java apps. Most if not all have been made to work on Linux.
At least, that's what I use Linux for; and most of the other people I know who use Linux on their workstations do it because they program in Java.
5. Mouse, 5 buttons. For games or applications, having a button there makes a task quicker. (I know its not UI, but its input related..)
When UI means User Interface, it is...
S.
Re:A Cash-Free France with the Moneo Smart Card? D
on
Cashless Society
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· Score: 1
Personally, I don't think Moneo will be successful except if it's free
Actually, it is. My debit card was replaced a few months ago (because the previous one had run out), and I have Moneo on the new one -- for free.
What I'd have to pay for, I guess, would be the "basic" Moneo card (not linked to credit/debit card).
BTW, the article is wrong: France isn't alone in having e-cash "on top of" ordinary credit/debit cards. Sweden has had it (under the name "Cash") for a while. My Swedish credit card had Cash on it without me asking for anything, much as my French debit. Cash is widely accepted in Stockholm at least, much as Moneo is in Lyon (South-Eastern France).
On the other hand, is Wales underwater now? How about Scotland? (gasp) England? When can we start visiting London underwater (and if not London, Cardiff will do)?
... before faster-than-light travel, positronic robots, and time travel?
On the other hand, I suppose if we are supposed to have time travel in the future, I guess we'd have learned that already. Or something. My head hurts.
PS. It's "cliquez". "Cliquetez" means "make clicking sounds":-)
Well, it's been showing in France for a while (under the name of "Le Voyage de Chihiro" -- Chihiro's Journey), so I kind of assumed it had been released more or less throughout Europe. Seems I was wrong.
Anyway, it's a pretty good film, although I disagree with it being on par with Princess Mononoke; basically, this is a film for kids, while Mononoke isn't. All the adult undertones in Mononoke are gone here. For me, an adult, it made the film a lot less enjoyable; no doubt that a kid would find it a lot less complex and a lot more appealing.
For the record, I make a damn sight less than $100k a year (closer to $40k, really). But of course that doesn't mean anything since it's a different continent:-) I don't have to pay for a private health insurance for instance.
Work doesn't have to be competitive, sorry. The guy who performs best gets the raise and / or promotion. That has been the case in both companies I've worked for (one being Alcatel and the other a startup).
I don't work for the money, either. I like being paid at the end of the month, being able to go out whenever I want, being able to buy myself stuff when I think it's necessary; but if the tradeoff for that is to live in hell 13 hours a day, sorry bud, not for me. The workplace is the one location I am most often at. I'd rather try and make it a place I like being in rather than a place I really hate. That includes at least cordial relationships with the colleagues.
By the way: most of the time, I *do* choose who I work with. That is partly because I'm team leader (and hence can decide who does what up to a certain point) but also partly because a sensible boss won't put two guys who hate each other's guts on a common project.
If you work in a man-eat-man, constant backstabbing environment, I think it's more because you chose the wrong environment than because of something more general about the nature of work.
Oh well. I'm not going to teach you how to live your life. Just don't presume to tell me how to live mine.
I think that, again, shows the major differences between the way you think of your worklife in the States and in Europe.
I would never consider a workmate as competition. I would never consider working with someone I don't feel I could like on a personal basis.
Now what you say about dating at work is true, but that's usually because emotional entanglements can end up ugly, and that would create useless tensions with someone you have to meet all day long.
Only one comment, in the end: if I had the same outlook on life as you do, I might as well kill myself there and then. I'm very happy I'm not you.
Actually, I moved from France to Sweden to work, a year and a half ago. Basically, I've almost only met people from work since then, and "people from the office" are 95% of the people I hang out with, during evenings or week-ends.
We go and repaint each other's flats, help moving, go for drinks, etc, etc.
The big upside of this is that you end up really liking your work environment and the people you work with.
The big downside is that when your company goes bust, so does a big chunk of your social life.
From my personal experience, I'd say the IT business is one of the best for socialising outside work -- mind you, that may be because of the relatively low median age.
Funny, that. I studied all of these as part of the compulsory section of my engineering studies.
Note that it's engineering taken globally -- not software engineering (though I did a compulsory optional semester in computer science) or mechanical engineering or electrical engineering or anything.
As a result? I'm one of the best coders in my company because I can learn things fast, and with just a year's worth of experience I was already promoted to team leadership.
By the way, in most French engineering courses you have to take three practical work experience sessions: the first as bottom of the hierarchy worker (I spent a month moving car parts around and shipping them to various dealers), the second as technician (I worked four months implementing low-level memory access for a telecom equipment manufacturer, playing around with Unix system calls, that kind of thing), and the third as engineer (six months spent designing and implementing complete applications at my current company). That usually takes care of the "learning from experience" angle.
(I'm not advocating the French system, which I think is fundamentally flawed as based on competition, with a side effect that people good at maths will graduate as engineers when they don't necessarily -- and often don't -- have any practical skills. I merely advocate the "let's not specialize; engineers will change jobs and job descriptions a lot, so teaching them to learn and adapt is more important than teaching them specialist knowledge" philosophy).
The speed of a typist is pretty inversly related to the distance between keys. If the keys are far apart, then you hit them slower. So, yeah, designing a layout to move the keys farther apart is designing a layout to slow you down.
Says who? I don't know for you, but I'm faster typing two keys in sequence if they're on different hands (= on different ends of the keyboard). Typing two keys in sequence with the same hand is slower.
Of course, if you don't touch-type, it might be different.
What happened to fixing the problem where it originated from?
Nothing. It's just that people don't necessarily (ah!) have access to Windows' source code to fix the problem where it originated. You've got to wait for the MS official patch.
including support for various phone functions, such as clicking a link to dial a phone number
Except that the state of the art is such that "clicking a link to dial a phone number" is a browser-specific function, which nobody really wants to use. No-one really wants to go back to the days of the IE-Netscape wars.
the extra funtions that are planned for WAP such as location based services, phone functionality etc.
Once again, you're more or less right, erring on finer points of detail. Let me put it this way:
- WAP is a protocol. It should be compared to HTTP. Purists will go as far as saying that WAP goes further than HTTP (and that is where the real criticism of WAP is, technically speaking), but let's keep things simple.
- WML is the language used for describing content (pages) in WAP. It can be compared to HTML.
WML does not support positioning services. That is just not where positioning fits in.
About positioning, by the way: again, the implementations are pretty dependant on phones and operators. There are at least two "standards" (LAS and MPS). Support is very vague at this time. As far as I know, it isn't defined as part of WAP -- it fits more into the GSM / GPRS / UMTS space since you position phones whether they are on a WAP session or not.
The real point of WML, language-wise, is to fit in phone-specific functionality, such as programmable function keys, contextual menus, and limited interaction. Phones usually have very small screens? WML uses a card-and-deck metaphor to optimize information presentation to the user.
A lot of thought has been put in designing WML1.x, and it is IMO a shame to let it go to waste... for what it's worth, I'd prefer for the web to be written in WML rather than HTML, since the language is designed to put the focus on the actual information and user interaction rather than on presentation. Typically, the WML equivalent of HTML forms (WML variables) is much more flexible and powerful...
However, the consensus among the public is that "HTML is better". So WAP goes HTML (XHTML, actually). It's a shame; but so long it pays my salary...
By the way, the real problem about WML is that the specification does not dict browser rendition. For instance, the <p> tag defines a "paragraph" as in HTML; it is left to the browser to decide whether to put a blank line before it or not (to the best of my knowledge, only the Microsoft Pocket Explorer browser does this, which is the reason why so many sites are ugly on phones using this browser -- Sony springs to mind). This is a very serious problem since WAP developers have to extensively test their code on as many mobile devices as they can... and getting a WAP phone is slightly more expensive than downloading a web browser.
I got a stupid question about DivX;-). Which is, exactly, what's the point of it?
It doesn't provide such excellent quality -- some friends and I have played around a lot with videos, making films, that kind of thing. Through trial and error, we found out that DivX;-) is a hell of a lot slower than the Sorenson codec used in Quicktime, for no better quality and less functionality (I'm thinking about subtitles here). My laptop's a 266MHz Pentium, which is good for everything I want to do (coding, surfing, mailing) including watching Quicktime videos. The same video encoded in DivX;-) won't display -- computer too slow. Quality's the same though.
There are legal issues regarding the "openness" of DivX;-), as well. So don't go telling me that it's better than QT on purely philosophical grounds.
Yet DivX;-) is the preferred codec in the i386 world (which I'm sorry to say basically means Windows -- I reboot under w2k to watch videos since the quality is much higher). People will complain if we give them a Quicktime file, but not if we give them a DivX;-) file. Personally, I put it down to pure anti-Apple bigotry...
So: what is the point of DivX;-)? Souldn't the free software / open source communities ditch the thing and actually work on a really open codec free of legal issues? If it could also perform decently (similarly to the Sorenson codec for instance) it would be a good point.
I'm sorry to say, but so long such a codec doesn't exist I'll keep a w2k partition and Quicktime around.
I havent heard much of the EPoc/Psion-base Symbian platform, too...
Hmmm?
Nokia 9210. Colour, keyboard, everything. Pretty bulky though.
Ericsson R380. B&W with a smallish touchscreen (for a PDA. Huge screen for a phone), no handwriting recognition (you type on a virtual keyboard), but hardly bigger than a "normal" modern phone. Extremely cool toy, pretty fast (much faster than many conventional phones, like the Nokia 7110).
The Nokia's come out fairly recently, but the R380 has been around for a while. As far as I know both are built on Symbian. You can certainly recognise some Psion-isms in the R380.
Really, though, my observation is that there are some damn clever 15-year-olds out there on the Net. There are, however, some damn stupid ones as well. The Net's not a different place, fundamentally speaking, from the real world: you can't really categorize people. The "supersmart 15-year-old bringing corporate behemoths to their knees" myth is, well, a myth. Or at best, a statistical anomaly.
Hmmm... Bar what I just wrote. There is a big difference between the Net and the real world: anonymity. So you tend to categorize people anyway... If I come across an inarticulate, insulting, brainless troll who hasn't heard of the concept of grammar, I'll mentally put him or her into the "15-yo" category. It may happen that he or she is actually 40... or 12. I don't know. And sometimes I'll be surprised at learning that a particularly smart, cultured person is actually only 14 or 15.
The big truth is: the Net isn't a place for empowerment of the 15-year-olds. Nor is it a place for their systematic denigration; it is, really, a place where anyone can develop their potential regardless or their age.
... and sometimes 15-year-olds have a big potential, and sometimes not.
Yes, it seems there is another time when public transport can work well -- when the city is well designed. That didn't happen in a LOT of North America, sad to say.
Ah... but the funny thing is, these cities by and large just evolved by themselves over the centuries, and weren't planned until very recently (urbanism is, broadly speaking, something the Europeans imported from their colonist cousins).
So I'd say all hope for North American cities is not lost:-)
As a Canadian who has been to the states often enough to understand mass transit in both countries, I quickly realised that mass transit ONLY works in huge cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Atlanta, Detriot, New York, for example.
Or (on the other side of the pond) Stockholm (1.6 million inhabitants including all the suburbs), Nantes (West coast of France, circa 200 000 inhabitants), Rennes (West of France, circa 100 or 150 000). Plenty of other examples as well, I just don't have any personal experience of those...
Hardly huge cities. Yet public transport works a treat there.
Subway: Not unless your city population is in the millions. The price is just way too high.
Rennes has a subway.
You forgot the tramway, by the way. Oh, and of course you totally forgot these nice things called "city planning" and "urbanism".
I'm getting fed up with "reviews" that only talk about installing the system. Yeah, OK, Slack doesn't have a graphical installation, and you may be asked to compile some things yourself, or edit some config files by hand. Right.
But... I don't know about you, but I tend to install an OS *once* (and usually, because I have never met an OS that installed exactly as I want, devote an afternoon to it) and use it *every day*.
Reviewers... install the OS. Play with it. Use it as you would use your normal environment, at work and at home, for a couple of weeks. Then tell us your gut feeling.
Typical use cases:
- at work. I want a quickly-setup, rock-solid system that I can forget about to get on with the task at hand and earn my salary. Setting up extra services and altering the configuration must be very fast, no-nonsense.
- at home / play. I want a fun distribution which I can spend hours trying to discover. Stability isn't that crucial since I switch off my computer every day (hey, it's a laptop which I lug around everywhere I go). "Cleanliness" is very important since I want to be able to install and remove new gizmos (often in alpha or pre-alpha versions, often requiring newer versions of libraries, often before a.rpm exists) at a whim.
How does Slack cater for either of these needs? I haven't read that in the review. I am severly disappointed.
It's a myth popular among francophobic, but it's just a myth
Well, it's the version of history taught in French schools, as well. So I wouldn't say it's specially "popular among francophobic" (unless we French are francophobic)
And... where did you read that the Versailles treaty was only France's doing? As far as I remember, it was all of the allies (including the UK, at least) ganging up against Germany, which had as you say been the only "ennemy" still in existence at that point.
Something else... Putting the blame for WWI on Austria (technically, the Austro-Hungarian empire) and Russia is about as wrong as putting it on Germany alone. WWI would never have started if it weren't for France wanting to reclaim Alsace and Lorraine, the UK wanting a fight, Southern Slavs wanting a country of their own, the Ottoman empire wanting to kick some Austro-Hungarian butt, and so on and so forth. Early 20th century Europe was a continent-wide barrel of gunpowder similar to today's Balkans; it had to go burst at one point. Nobody and everybody is, really, responsible.
Brute fact: AMD pulled out its first good processors (in a competitive sense), the K6 and Athlon, after buying out NexGen. Which was, more or less, in Transmeta's current position: getting ever less media coverage for a product that most people agreed was good (or at least, not bad), but that performed badly, commercially speaking.
Transmeta's got a bit more cash than NexGen had at that point, though; that's why we see a "strategic alliance" and not a simple buyout.
AMD has good technology and excellent strategy people. I'm not going to question their business sense unless I'm very sure of what ground I stand on.
Hmmm... If I understand Mundie's statements, his basic thesis is that the GPL doesn't allow companies (or, in general, programmers) to earn much money and be successful in that sense.
I think he's perfectly right. The GPL, as I understand it, is a way for "code to be free". It wasn't designed to make programmers rich. It was designed for quality software to be used by many, in short to make the world a slightly happier place. The GNU Manifesto is quite clear about it: when free software is the norm, programmers won't be quite as rich as they now are.
I can't find a flaw in Mundie's argument. Now, whether his view of the world (software exists only to make programmers rich) is right or wrong remains to be ascertained.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no.
Theo de Raadt made comments in his own name. That is his right and prerogative as a citizen of a free country.
OpenBSD did not make any comments, because OpenBSD is an OS and a research project -- it is not fitting for such a one to make political comments.
The fact that Theo heads OpenBSD is coincidental.
Couple of points to clarify.
1. Swedish id cards (identitetskort) are issued by third parties (banks, the Post Office) but must conform to a national standard.
2. They *do* have a "nationality" field, which is left blank for foreigners (so it is possible to discriminate against foreigners just by looking at their card).
3. They are not, as far as I know, considered by the EU as a sufficient proof of identity, but many people don't know that. I have used my Swedish id several times to travel throughout the Schengen zone by plane. (Obviously, you don't need any id whatsoever to cross Schengen borders by car, foot, or any other means).
I do it mostly for philosophical reasons, as I don't see why I should disclose my nationality in the Schengen zone; the fact that I am a legal resident in one Schengen country should be enough. (I'm not Swedish, hence my Swedish id's nationality field is blank).
4. For US readers: the Schengen zone is a subset of the European Union where border controls have been removed (so that driving from Belgium to Germany is no more difficult then driving from New York to New Jersey).
One word: Java.
I haven't got any hard data, but I'd be very surprised if Java didn't represent a large chunk of those 40% of developers. Basically it means that whenever developers get the choice of platform (not for deployment, but for the actual development) 40% will choose a Linux environment.
And there are huge swathes of commercial Java apps. Most if not all have been made to work on Linux.
At least, that's what I use Linux for; and most of the other people I know who use Linux on their workstations do it because they program in Java.
-S
5. Mouse, 5 buttons. For games or applications, having a button there makes a task quicker. (I know its not UI, but its input related..)
When UI means User Interface, it is...
S.
Personally, I don't think Moneo will be successful except if it's free
Actually, it is. My debit card was replaced a few months ago (because the previous one had run out), and I have Moneo on the new one -- for free.
What I'd have to pay for, I guess, would be the "basic" Moneo card (not linked to credit/debit card).
BTW, the article is wrong: France isn't alone in having e-cash "on top of" ordinary credit/debit cards. Sweden has had it (under the name "Cash") for a while. My Swedish credit card had Cash on it without me asking for anything, much as my French debit. Cash is widely accepted in Stockholm at least, much as Moneo is in Lyon (South-Eastern France).
Poor dolphins, yeah...
On the other hand, is Wales underwater now? How about Scotland? (gasp) England? When can we start visiting London underwater (and if not London, Cardiff will do)?
Imagine: "The UK - the New Atlantis!"
S.
... before faster-than-light travel, positronic robots, and time travel?
:-)
On the other hand, I suppose if we are supposed to have time travel in the future, I guess we'd have learned that already. Or something. My head hurts.
PS. It's "cliquez". "Cliquetez" means "make clicking sounds"
-S.
Well, it's been showing in France for a while (under the name of "Le Voyage de Chihiro" -- Chihiro's Journey), so I kind of assumed it had been released more or less throughout Europe. Seems I was wrong.
Anyway, it's a pretty good film, although I disagree with it being on par with Princess Mononoke; basically, this is a film for kids, while Mononoke isn't. All the adult undertones in Mononoke are gone here. For me, an adult, it made the film a lot less enjoyable; no doubt that a kid would find it a lot less complex and a lot more appealing.
Just my two eurocents.
For the record, I make a damn sight less than $100k a year (closer to $40k, really). But of course that doesn't mean anything since it's a different continent :-) I don't have to pay for a private health insurance for instance.
Work doesn't have to be competitive, sorry. The guy who performs best gets the raise and / or promotion. That has been the case in both companies I've worked for (one being Alcatel and the other a startup).
I don't work for the money, either. I like being paid at the end of the month, being able to go out whenever I want, being able to buy myself stuff when I think it's necessary; but if the tradeoff for that is to live in hell 13 hours a day, sorry bud, not for me. The workplace is the one location I am most often at. I'd rather try and make it a place I like being in rather than a place I really hate. That includes at least cordial relationships with the colleagues.
By the way: most of the time, I *do* choose who I work with. That is partly because I'm team leader (and hence can decide who does what up to a certain point) but also partly because a sensible boss won't put two guys who hate each other's guts on a common project.
If you work in a man-eat-man, constant backstabbing environment, I think it's more because you chose the wrong environment than because of something more general about the nature of work.
Oh well. I'm not going to teach you how to live your life. Just don't presume to tell me how to live mine.
I think that, again, shows the major differences between the way you think of your worklife in the States and in Europe.
I would never consider a workmate as competition. I would never consider working with someone I don't feel I could like on a personal basis.
Now what you say about dating at work is true, but that's usually because emotional entanglements can end up ugly, and that would create useless tensions with someone you have to meet all day long.
Only one comment, in the end: if I had the same outlook on life as you do, I might as well kill myself there and then. I'm very happy I'm not you.
Huh, yes.
Actually, I moved from France to Sweden to work, a year and a half ago. Basically, I've almost only met people from work since then, and "people from the office" are 95% of the people I hang out with, during evenings or week-ends.
We go and repaint each other's flats, help moving, go for drinks, etc, etc.
The big upside of this is that you end up really liking your work environment and the people you work with.
The big downside is that when your company goes bust, so does a big chunk of your social life.
From my personal experience, I'd say the IT business is one of the best for socialising outside work -- mind you, that may be because of the relatively low median age.
Funny, that. I studied all of these as part of the compulsory section of my engineering studies.
Note that it's engineering taken globally -- not software engineering (though I did a compulsory optional semester in computer science) or mechanical engineering or electrical engineering or anything.
As a result? I'm one of the best coders in my company because I can learn things fast, and with just a year's worth of experience I was already promoted to team leadership.
By the way, in most French engineering courses you have to take three practical work experience sessions: the first as bottom of the hierarchy worker (I spent a month moving car parts around and shipping them to various dealers), the second as technician (I worked four months implementing low-level memory access for a telecom equipment manufacturer, playing around with Unix system calls, that kind of thing), and the third as engineer (six months spent designing and implementing complete applications at my current company). That usually takes care of the "learning from experience" angle.
(I'm not advocating the French system, which I think is fundamentally flawed as based on competition, with a side effect that people good at maths will graduate as engineers when they don't necessarily -- and often don't -- have any practical skills. I merely advocate the "let's not specialize; engineers will change jobs and job descriptions a lot, so teaching them to learn and adapt is more important than teaching them specialist knowledge" philosophy).
The speed of a typist is pretty inversly related to the distance between keys. If the keys are far apart, then you hit them slower. So, yeah, designing a layout to move the keys farther apart is designing a layout to slow you down.
Says who? I don't know for you, but I'm faster typing two keys in sequence if they're on different hands (= on different ends of the keyboard). Typing two keys in sequence with the same hand is slower.
Of course, if you don't touch-type, it might be different.
What happened to fixing the problem where it originated from?
Nothing. It's just that people don't necessarily (ah!) have access to Windows' source code to fix the problem where it originated. You've got to wait for the MS official patch.
Every little helps...
including support for various phone functions, such as clicking a link to dial a phone number
Except that the state of the art is such that "clicking a link to dial a phone number" is a browser-specific function, which nobody really wants to use. No-one really wants to go back to the days of the IE-Netscape wars.
the extra funtions that are planned for WAP such as location based services, phone functionality etc.
Once again, you're more or less right, erring on finer points of detail. Let me put it this way:
- WAP is a protocol. It should be compared to HTTP. Purists will go as far as saying that WAP goes further than HTTP (and that is where the real criticism of WAP is, technically speaking), but let's keep things simple.
- WML is the language used for describing content (pages) in WAP. It can be compared to HTML.
WML does not support positioning services. That is just not where positioning fits in.
About positioning, by the way: again, the implementations are pretty dependant on phones and operators. There are at least two "standards" (LAS and MPS). Support is very vague at this time. As far as I know, it isn't defined as part of WAP -- it fits more into the GSM / GPRS / UMTS space since you position phones whether they are on a WAP session or not.
The real point of WML, language-wise, is to fit in phone-specific functionality, such as programmable function keys, contextual menus, and limited interaction. Phones usually have very small screens? WML uses a card-and-deck metaphor to optimize information presentation to the user.
A lot of thought has been put in designing WML1.x, and it is IMO a shame to let it go to waste... for what it's worth, I'd prefer for the web to be written in WML rather than HTML, since the language is designed to put the focus on the actual information and user interaction rather than on presentation. Typically, the WML equivalent of HTML forms (WML variables) is much more flexible and powerful...
However, the consensus among the public is that "HTML is better". So WAP goes HTML (XHTML, actually). It's a shame; but so long it pays my salary...
By the way, the real problem about WML is that the specification does not dict browser rendition. For instance, the <p> tag defines a "paragraph" as in HTML; it is left to the browser to decide whether to put a blank line before it or not (to the best of my knowledge, only the Microsoft Pocket Explorer browser does this, which is the reason why so many sites are ugly on phones using this browser -- Sony springs to mind). This is a very serious problem since WAP developers have to extensively test their code on as many mobile devices as they can... and getting a WAP phone is slightly more expensive than downloading a web browser.
Just my SEK0.02...
I got a stupid question about DivX ;-). Which is, exactly, what's the point of it?
;-) is a hell of a lot slower than the Sorenson codec used in Quicktime, for no better quality and less functionality (I'm thinking about subtitles here). My laptop's a 266MHz Pentium, which is good for everything I want to do (coding, surfing, mailing) including watching Quicktime videos. The same video encoded in DivX ;-) won't display -- computer too slow. Quality's the same though.
;-), as well. So don't go telling me that it's better than QT on purely philosophical grounds.
;-) is the preferred codec in the i386 world (which I'm sorry to say basically means Windows -- I reboot under w2k to watch videos since the quality is much higher). People will complain if we give them a Quicktime file, but not if we give them a DivX ;-) file. Personally, I put it down to pure anti-Apple bigotry...
;-)? Souldn't the free software / open source communities ditch the thing and actually work on a really open codec free of legal issues? If it could also perform decently (similarly to the Sorenson codec for instance) it would be a good point.
It doesn't provide such excellent quality -- some friends and I have played around a lot with videos, making films, that kind of thing. Through trial and error, we found out that DivX
There are legal issues regarding the "openness" of DivX
Yet DivX
So: what is the point of DivX
I'm sorry to say, but so long such a codec doesn't exist I'll keep a w2k partition and Quicktime around.
Just my two penny worth.
I havent heard much of the EPoc/Psion-base Symbian platform, too...
Hmmm?
The Nokia's come out fairly recently, but the R380 has been around for a while. As far as I know both are built on Symbian. You can certainly recognise some Psion-isms in the R380.
Huh, well, like the subject says.
Really, though, my observation is that there are some damn clever 15-year-olds out there on the Net. There are, however, some damn stupid ones as well. The Net's not a different place, fundamentally speaking, from the real world: you can't really categorize people. The "supersmart 15-year-old bringing corporate behemoths to their knees" myth is, well, a myth. Or at best, a statistical anomaly.
Hmmm... Bar what I just wrote. There is a big difference between the Net and the real world: anonymity. So you tend to categorize people anyway... If I come across an inarticulate, insulting, brainless troll who hasn't heard of the concept of grammar, I'll mentally put him or her into the "15-yo" category. It may happen that he or she is actually 40... or 12. I don't know. And sometimes I'll be surprised at learning that a particularly smart, cultured person is actually only 14 or 15.
The big truth is: the Net isn't a place for empowerment of the 15-year-olds. Nor is it a place for their systematic denigration; it is, really, a place where anyone can develop their potential regardless or their age.
... and sometimes 15-year-olds have a big potential, and sometimes not.
Yes, it seems there is another time when public transport can work well -- when the city is well designed. That didn't happen in a LOT of North America, sad to say.
Ah... but the funny thing is, these cities by and large just evolved by themselves over the centuries, and weren't planned until very recently (urbanism is, broadly speaking, something the Europeans imported from their colonist cousins).
So I'd say all hope for North American cities is not lost :-)
Sylvain.
As a Canadian who has been to the states often enough to understand mass transit in both countries, I quickly realised that mass transit ONLY works in huge cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Atlanta, Detriot, New York, for example.
Or (on the other side of the pond) Stockholm (1.6 million inhabitants including all the suburbs), Nantes (West coast of France, circa 200 000 inhabitants), Rennes (West of France, circa 100 or 150 000). Plenty of other examples as well, I just don't have any personal experience of those...
Hardly huge cities. Yet public transport works a treat there.
Subway: Not unless your city population is in the millions. The price is just way too high.
Rennes has a subway.
You forgot the tramway, by the way. Oh, and of course you totally forgot these nice things called "city planning" and "urbanism".
Sylvain.
I'm getting fed up with "reviews" that only talk about installing the system. Yeah, OK, Slack doesn't have a graphical installation, and you may be asked to compile some things yourself, or edit some config files by hand. Right.
But... I don't know about you, but I tend to install an OS *once* (and usually, because I have never met an OS that installed exactly as I want, devote an afternoon to it) and use it *every day*.
Reviewers... install the OS. Play with it. Use it as you would use your normal environment, at work and at home, for a couple of weeks. Then tell us your gut feeling.
Typical use cases:- at work. I want a quickly-setup, rock-solid system that I can forget about to get on with the task at hand and earn my salary. Setting up extra services and altering the configuration must be very fast, no-nonsense.
- at home / play. I want a fun distribution which I can spend hours trying to discover. Stability isn't that crucial since I switch off my computer every day (hey, it's a laptop which I lug around everywhere I go). "Cleanliness" is very important since I want to be able to install and remove new gizmos (often in alpha or pre-alpha versions, often requiring newer versions of libraries, often before a .rpm exists) at a whim.
How does Slack cater for either of these needs? I haven't read that in the review. I am severly disappointed.
Sylvain.
It's a myth popular among francophobic, but it's just a myth
Well, it's the version of history taught in French schools, as well. So I wouldn't say it's specially "popular among francophobic" (unless we French are francophobic)
And... where did you read that the Versailles treaty was only France's doing? As far as I remember, it was all of the allies (including the UK, at least) ganging up against Germany, which had as you say been the only "ennemy" still in existence at that point.
Something else... Putting the blame for WWI on Austria (technically, the Austro-Hungarian empire) and Russia is about as wrong as putting it on Germany alone. WWI would never have started if it weren't for France wanting to reclaim Alsace and Lorraine, the UK wanting a fight, Southern Slavs wanting a country of their own, the Ottoman empire wanting to kick some Austro-Hungarian butt, and so on and so forth. Early 20th century Europe was a continent-wide barrel of gunpowder similar to today's Balkans; it had to go burst at one point. Nobody and everybody is, really, responsible.
Brute fact: AMD pulled out its first good processors (in a competitive sense), the K6 and Athlon, after buying out NexGen. Which was, more or less, in Transmeta's current position: getting ever less media coverage for a product that most people agreed was good (or at least, not bad), but that performed badly, commercially speaking.
Transmeta's got a bit more cash than NexGen had at that point, though; that's why we see a "strategic alliance" and not a simple buyout.
AMD has good technology and excellent strategy people. I'm not going to question their business sense unless I'm very sure of what ground I stand on.
-Sylvain.
Nonono!
There is a very big difference between a putative monopoly and an oligopoly in the making.
On the one hand, you've got a company that has all of the market and can set its own prices, harming the consumer.
On the other hand, you've got a very reduced number of companies that have all the market and can set their own price, harming the consumer.
Very big difference, see?
-Sylvain.
Hmmm... If I understand Mundie's statements, his basic thesis is that the GPL doesn't allow companies (or, in general, programmers) to earn much money and be successful in that sense.
I think he's perfectly right. The GPL, as I understand it, is a way for "code to be free". It wasn't designed to make programmers rich. It was designed for quality software to be used by many, in short to make the world a slightly happier place. The GNU Manifesto is quite clear about it: when free software is the norm, programmers won't be quite as rich as they now are.
I can't find a flaw in Mundie's argument. Now, whether his view of the world (software exists only to make programmers rich) is right or wrong remains to be ascertained.
Sylvain.