Yes, but... the concern would be that as scholarship becomes open again that free services such as google would replace closed non-free services. Why would a library pay a fee to get the same service they already have free access to? They wouldn't. The real question is, then, do these middlemen provide added value? Or are they parasitic in nature?
Yes, actually I was a jock. Full ride offers from every major university in CA including Harvey Mudd (for swimming for Claremont Men's swim team). I did 255lb freebar benchpress reps as a junior in HS with the football team at lunch. So what's your point?
They all take time, just time in different areas. Some linux distros aren't as good at others at autoprobing hardware. Linux software installation seems to vary widely, but the best is better than windows. Windows stability has improved but still has crapped on me with Win2k and XP. Linux has *never* done that. I don't count running adaware on windows because I can be sleeping while that happens.
So the bottomline is Time=Money, but at least in my life having dualbooted both and used both at school, Linux takes less overall time. If they cost the same, I'd have to say availability of software and easy installation (having set sources.list to point to an http site) tips the scale generally, and the occasional reinstall after real windows problems tips the scale specificly.
I think the real question to ask here, is how do MS Windows, OS X, and KDE compare once they are setup and working. At that point I'd rate them as KDE first (prettier and more functional), OS X (it is pretty, and works once you get used to doing it "the way Jobs intended"), and MS Windows is only on the list because Marketing is a real force so lets be pragmatic and include it.
But regardless of my, or your own GUI bias, let's compare configured systems and see what can be said about the way they work.
Actually that is what most of our OS class thought, too. We have a lab where we are graded on our installations of Fedora & Win2k. The surprise at how easy linux was to install was shocking. Likewise, getting everything working with an advanced Win2k setup is *not* as easy as it should be. So for mostly Windows using students at a University that teaches Visual Studio based classes, Linux was easier. Of course, after dealing with Windows in a work environment for years, I can see how people would be more comfortable with that which they are most familiar.
Just a thought, but if they provide images rather than OCRed text, what is to stop us from applying OCR to their images? Of course, what you want is *all* the images OCRed, so you can do global searching. If only their existed somewhere a company that excelled at search technology with the gumption to take on a project as large as OCRing such an immense Public Domain repository.
*cough* google *cough*
So you have backups. The media format doesn't matter, as History has shown when court records get lost in fires. What matters is multiple backups at different physical locations, and preferably under the control of different authorities. Let a government rewrite, so long as blogs note the changes and link to diffs. The material changed would be even an indicator;-)
Actually the question is: since we *are* moving towards ubiquitous computer access, whether we should *also* being printing on paper. It isn't an either/or question because computers do excel at some tasks, and so the real question becomes whether there is ecological value in using them for everything after they already are everywhere.
Ah, but Porsche and Audi do OK even though GM turns out "generic" cars at a fraction of the price. It isn't as though there is no market for style and distinction. It might not be my market, but the Mac users I know on campus *love* their computers.
I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science.
There is, and always will be, a cost to entering the tome of science. The valid cost is the effort exerted to raise one's ability to comprehend and understand. The question is should the cost be the effort to understand, or said effort plus the marketing fee associated with making a publisher a little bit richer. If publishers aren't bringing anything to the party, they are parasites.
Interestingly enough (at first blush), Python seems to be the preferred KDE scripting language to embed. Ruby appears to have the next best support. KParts is sweet. I'm currently being seduced to the KDark KSide:-)
I just installed KDevelop and was reading through their online documentation. Points of interest relevant to your query:
Most KDE applications do not provide their own scripting facilities, which leads many to believe that KDE is not easily scriptable. However, every KDE application is scriptable due to the pervasive use of the DCOP techonology.
Whilst KDE and most KDE applications are implemented using the C++ programming language, that doesn't mean you don't have a choice. A number of bindings to other languages are available, these include scripting languages like Perl, Python and Ruby, and systems programming languages like Java and C#.
The level of functionality provided by the bindings vary, from those that only allow you to access a small subset of KDE to bindings that almost rival C++ native code in scope.
In (apparent) order of level of functionality:
Python: PyQt/PyKDE provide powerful python bindings to the Qt and KDE libraries.
Ruby: bindings for Qt and kdelibs.
Perl: object-oriented bindings for Qt-3. Qt-2 and KDE-2 bindings can be found on CPAN.
Java
Information about KDE support for Java applets, the QtAWT project, the Java Qt/kdelibs bindings and other ongoing KDE-Java development efforts.
JavaScript (ECMAScript)
KDE interaction tools: There are a few utilities provided as part of the KDE distribution that allow scripts etc. to access some of the functionality of KDE.
C#: Qt# binds the Qt toolkit with Mono, an open source implementation of the.NET Development Framework.
Smoke: interface library designed to ease the development of new language bindings.
Especially interesting is Kommander: "..a simplified and modified version of Qt Designer which lets you add scripting abilities to the dialogues it makes. It saves the result as a designer UI file which can be run with Kommander Executer. It is the easiest way to make simple programmes, I like to think of it as graphical shell scripting."
Bill Gates has got to love this. The open source community builds a product to compete against his products. Then instead of unifying to make the project better, they split up to make a competing copy of the competing product.
Actually it is Sun that is leveraging their commercial IP. Can you say, "bait and switch"? I knew you could;-)
This isn't surprising. Sun is squeezed by the market, and conflicted with respect to Free Software and Open Source. It takes time to "get it", and change is evolutionary. Sun is moving towards an openess, but can't let go because their property interests dictates their actions. (Which might not be bad for their stockholders, if Sun has the muscle to leverage their Java.) It's hard to compete with Free, though, and merely free isn't enough for the slashdot crowd.
A Free implementation of Java would be an optimum solution, yes? IBM? Novell?
Well here on campus I know of no students who use Access when writing papers. In fact, I don't know of any students using Access for any purpose, other than CIS homework involving Access.
Outlook is allowed but discouraged due to security issues on this campus. No one needs the "groupware" aspects, so any email, calendaring combo is fully sufficient.
The bottomline is really what gets the job done with the least amount of pain. MS Word fails the ease of use test. It is a royal PIA if you needs must match spec.s on formating to an instructor's requirements. MS Word works if you stay on the MS "it-should-look-like-we-want-it-to-look" path. Stray, and the ditch is steep and full of broken shards of glass. I know people who use Adobe PageMaker to turn in some pages in an essay because they can't do it with just Word without losing formating points. That is a sad indictment.
The more informed among you may have known that the editors of the print edition of LinuxWorld Magazine have been having a bit of a running firefight with the management of Sys-Con (who publish the magazine and run a number of other magazines and web presences) in regard to Maureen O'Gara's "coverage" of the industry. Sys-Con pays Ms. O'Gara for her commentary, which to us has frequently resembled repackaged press releases and poorly researched attacks intended to incite rather than inform.
She also evidently has a dislike of Pamela Jones, who has maintained the Groklaw site and in general has done nothing worse than provide insightful discourse in regards to Open Source legal issues. O'Gara has taken every opportunity to cast disrepect on Jones, and has now outdone herself with a hatchet job in which she publishes personal information about Jones, including her religious affiliation (which she insults) and her home address and description of her living arrangements.
This is the worst kind of yellow journalism, a pure ad hominem attack intended to portray Jones as a senile religious kook not to be taken seriously. In fact, O'Gara's track record of biased and incomplete reporting shows that she is the kook, and I for one am no longer willing to affiliate myself with an organization that will pay for this type of character assasination. The editorial staff of LinuxWorld Magazine has been calling for Sys-Con to sever their affiliations with O'Gara for at least half a year, with mixed results. This is the final straw, and although I can not speak for the rest of the editorial board, I am not going to further sully my reputation by affiliation with a sleazy sensationalist such as O'Gara. I call on Sys-Con to immediate terminate all business dealings with Ms. O'Gara, or I will find another outlet for my work.
James Turner
Senior Editor, LinuxWorld Magazine
Also from yesterday's post is this little informative tidbit from this link: James isn't the only one either , which takes you to Dee-Ann LeBlanc: Linux at Work and at Play
SYS-CON, the parent of LinuxWorld Magazine, which unfortunately pays O'Gara for her spewings even though they don't pay the editors and authors for their magazines
The grandparent post suggested there was no "organized effort" to contact the advertisers. If you read the groklaw response's comments you'll see many people who wrote, emailed, and even phoned people they personally knew within the advertiser's companies. It isn't necessary anymore to rent an office, phonelines, cabinets, secretaries, etc..., in order to formally organize to achieve a mutual goal. What we have perhaps seen is an emergent form of organization that responds incredibly swiftly, with a good percentage of shots fired directly into the target at the belly of the beast. It is indeed an interesting time to be alive;-)
Don't let appearances fool you, the patterns have mutated.
"... SYS-CON, the parent of LinuxWorld Magazine, which unfortunately pays O'Gara for her spewings even though they don't pay the editors and authors for their magazines"
If O'Gara is being paid to flame, and no one else is being paid at all, then something is really, really wrong.
Not only do the article links result in blank pages, but searching for James Turner from the front page resulted in "Search has been disabled for the time being."
Wouldn't eatting insects make sense, though? Could we design beef flavored roaches? Assumed, since most everything tastes like chicken, that chicken flavor would be too easy.
Would wild wolves and domestic dogs interbreed without human intervention? I question the rate of occurrence of this in the wild, but have no training in biology.
http://addict3d.org/index.php?page=viewarticle&t ype=news&ID=6671
(Includes a link to a timeline)
"For an unknown reason, Google had a DNS problem that caused all of their online services not to loading by writing their URL in your web browser.br>
It's funny that most people thought their ISP gone mad, before even thinking that the problem might be at Google.br>
Anyway the almighty machine returned to life after 1 hour of being down, the rumors regarding how they were hacked or hijacked seems to be false."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but... the concern would be that as scholarship becomes open again that free services such as google would replace closed non-free services. Why would a library pay a fee to get the same service they already have free access to? They wouldn't. The real question is, then, do these middlemen provide added value? Or are they parasitic in nature?
Uh oh. Can you work on any other OSS codebase now? Or have you polluted yourself? Can you prove you didn't look at the Solaris code you searched?
Yes, actually I was a jock. Full ride offers from every major university in CA including Harvey Mudd (for swimming for Claremont Men's swim team). I did 255lb freebar benchpress reps as a junior in HS with the football team at lunch. So what's your point?
They all take time, just time in different areas. Some linux distros aren't as good at others at autoprobing hardware. Linux software installation seems to vary widely, but the best is better than windows. Windows stability has improved but still has crapped on me with Win2k and XP. Linux has *never* done that. I don't count running adaware on windows because I can be sleeping while that happens.
So the bottomline is Time=Money, but at least in my life having dualbooted both and used both at school, Linux takes less overall time. If they cost the same, I'd have to say availability of software and easy installation (having set sources.list to point to an http site) tips the scale generally, and the occasional reinstall after real windows problems tips the scale specificly.
I think the real question to ask here, is how do MS Windows, OS X, and KDE compare once they are setup and working. At that point I'd rate them as KDE first (prettier and more functional), OS X (it is pretty, and works once you get used to doing it "the way Jobs intended"), and MS Windows is only on the list because Marketing is a real force so lets be pragmatic and include it.
But regardless of my, or your own GUI bias, let's compare configured systems and see what can be said about the way they work.
Actually that is what most of our OS class thought, too. We have a lab where we are graded on our installations of Fedora & Win2k. The surprise at how easy linux was to install was shocking. Likewise, getting everything working with an advanced Win2k setup is *not* as easy as it should be. So for mostly Windows using students at a University that teaches Visual Studio based classes, Linux was easier. Of course, after dealing with Windows in a work environment for years, I can see how people would be more comfortable with that which they are most familiar.
"I also got to see Han shoot first."
'nuff said.
Just a thought, but if they provide images rather than OCRed text, what is to stop us from applying OCR to their images? Of course, what you want is *all* the images OCRed, so you can do global searching. If only their existed somewhere a company that excelled at search technology with the gumption to take on a project as large as OCRing such an immense Public Domain repository. *cough* google *cough*
So you have backups. The media format doesn't matter, as History has shown when court records get lost in fires. What matters is multiple backups at different physical locations, and preferably under the control of different authorities. Let a government rewrite, so long as blogs note the changes and link to diffs. The material changed would be even an indicator ;-)
Actually the question is: since we *are* moving towards ubiquitous computer access, whether we should *also* being printing on paper. It isn't an either/or question because computers do excel at some tasks, and so the real question becomes whether there is ecological value in using them for everything after they already are everywhere.
Ah, but Porsche and Audi do OK even though GM turns out "generic" cars at a fraction of the price. It isn't as though there is no market for style and distinction. It might not be my market, but the Mac users I know on campus *love* their computers.
I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science.
There is, and always will be, a cost to entering the tome of science. The valid cost is the effort exerted to raise one's ability to comprehend and understand. The question is should the cost be the effort to understand, or said effort plus the marketing fee associated with making a publisher a little bit richer. If publishers aren't bringing anything to the party, they are parasites.
Interestingly enough (at first blush), Python seems to be the preferred KDE scripting language to embed. Ruby appears to have the next best support. KParts is sweet. I'm currently being seduced to the KDark KSide :-)
I just installed KDevelop and was reading through their online documentation. Points of interest relevant to your query:
Especially interesting is Kommander: "..a simplified and modified version of Qt Designer which lets you add scripting abilities to the dialogues it makes. It saves the result as a designer UI file which can be run with Kommander Executer. It is the easiest way to make simple programmes, I like to think of it as graphical shell scripting."
Bill Gates has got to love this. The open source community builds a product to compete against his products. Then instead of unifying to make the project better, they split up to make a competing copy of the competing product.
;-)
Actually it is Sun that is leveraging their commercial IP. Can you say, "bait and switch"? I knew you could
This isn't surprising. Sun is squeezed by the market, and conflicted with respect to Free Software and Open Source. It takes time to "get it", and change is evolutionary. Sun is moving towards an openess, but can't let go because their property interests dictates their actions. (Which might not be bad for their stockholders, if Sun has the muscle to leverage their Java.) It's hard to compete with Free, though, and merely free isn't enough for the slashdot crowd.
A Free implementation of Java would be an optimum solution, yes? IBM? Novell?
Well here on campus I know of no students who use Access when writing papers. In fact, I don't know of any students using Access for any purpose, other than CIS homework involving Access.
Outlook is allowed but discouraged due to security issues on this campus. No one needs the "groupware" aspects, so any email, calendaring combo is fully sufficient.
The bottomline is really what gets the job done with the least amount of pain. MS Word fails the ease of use test. It is a royal PIA if you needs must match spec.s on formating to an instructor's requirements. MS Word works if you stay on the MS "it-should-look-like-we-want-it-to-look" path. Stray, and the ditch is steep and full of broken shards of glass. I know people who use Adobe PageMaker to turn in some pages in an essay because they can't do it with just Word without losing formating points. That is a sad indictment.
Follow the link: yesterday's article about unrest at LinuxWorld to get to this: Also from yesterday's post is this little informative tidbit from this link: James isn't the only one either , which takes you to Dee-Ann LeBlanc: Linux at Work and at Play
"I honestly thought that the new servers at Ibiblio could handle a Slashdotting..."
;-)
Once again demonstrating what a mighty force is at work here.
The grandparent post suggested there was no "organized effort" to contact the advertisers. If you read the groklaw response's comments you'll see many people who wrote, emailed, and even phoned people they personally knew within the advertiser's companies. It isn't necessary anymore to rent an office, phonelines, cabinets, secretaries, etc..., in order to formally organize to achieve a mutual goal. What we have perhaps seen is an emergent form of organization that responds incredibly swiftly, with a good percentage of shots fired directly into the target at the belly of the beast. It is indeed an interesting time to be alive ;-)
Don't let appearances fool you, the patterns have mutated.
"... SYS-CON, the parent of LinuxWorld Magazine, which unfortunately pays O'Gara for her spewings even though they don't pay the editors and authors for their magazines"
If O'Gara is being paid to flame, and no one else is being paid at all, then something is really, really wrong.
The FA was /.ed at the time...
Not only do the article links result in blank pages, but searching for James Turner from the front page resulted in "Search has been disabled for the time being."
Wouldn't eatting insects make sense, though? Could we design beef flavored roaches? Assumed, since most everything tastes like chicken, that chicken flavor would be too easy.
Would wild wolves and domestic dogs interbreed without human intervention? I question the rate of occurrence of this in the wild, but have no training in biology.
While Novell's purchase means SuSE isn't "European" anymore, in terms of corporate acceptance I'd expect SuSE to be doing better.
We dropped RedHat for Fedora in my University's CIS school (and also for our mail server). I agree RedHat is no longer for the masses.
Mandrake shipped WindowMaker. I suspect most Linux distros ship WindowMaker.
Following up on an offtopic post, but:
t ype=news&ID=6671
http://addict3d.org/index.php?page=viewarticle&
(Includes a link to a timeline)
"For an unknown reason, Google had a DNS problem that caused all of their online services not to loading by writing their URL in your web browser.br> It's funny that most people thought their ISP gone mad, before even thinking that the problem might be at Google.br> Anyway the almighty machine returned to life after 1 hour of being down, the rumors regarding how they were hacked or hijacked seems to be false."