Bang on. I think if the person you replied to did any programming, he/she'd not ask such questions. And, damn it, if anybody's using Visual Basic for their enterprise's number-crunching, they'd better get their heads checked.
It surprises me that there actually is an accounting product available under the GPL license. What sets SQL-Ledger apart from a product like Broadcast 2000, which recently halted their updates for legal reasons? Too many people were using the product for big-bucks work and were failing. Could this not happen with an account app?
In any case, I am absolutely against the kind of legal mumbo-jumbo that could put a legitimate, free product on the lawyer's chopping block, just because some people who are using it complain that it doesn't do what it's supposed to (late in the project by the sounds of it), when there were no guarantees in the first place - clearly stated in the license agreement. Try a new product (or version of a product) out thoroughly before using it for mission critical applications, for crying out loud!
Depends on your uses... Mandrake makes a pretty fine desktop distro, in my humble opinion.
Sounds like not including the docs will make Debian even more a barebones distro. That's good, isn't it?;) Hehehe...
Let's be a little more creative before we give up.
I'm wagering that he has a window that doesn't have a slider on it - so he has to open the window the whole way or have it fully closed. He could for a lesser price than a cooling system replace the window altogether with one that has a sliding window and a screen. No snow will come in (okay, maybe a few crystals). Also, he would then be able to adjust how open the sliding window is so it only lets in a bit of that -20C air at a time.
Trust me on this one... spent half my life living in basements in Canada.
That goes for me, too. Actually, I'll hopefully be Windows-free by the time they come out with it anyway. Linux is rockin' pretty solid these days.
Sounds from their patent that it would be dog slow . Remember Windows NT on a Pentium 200? Want to go back to those days? Didn't think so.;)
Give us an OS with decent performance already. Make it run smoothly on y2k hardware in 2005 and it'll fly. And get rid of that awful eye candy, bloat, and anti-competitive nature. Hell, if Microsoft was a "nice guy", I'd be pretty unlikely to switch to another OS permanently. But that will never be.
I think Peter Coffee made a quote recently saying what he wants is an OS he doesn't have to keep upgrading. Isn't that reasonable, too? One that can automate your tasks so you're not repeating the same dreary click-click-drag-click-etc... paradigm; rather, getting on with the better things that life has to offer. I think that's a great idea. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft does anything about it.
This is the coolest fucking thing to happen in years on the Internet. I love Google.
It's extremely refreshing to see real inventiveness in a company for a change. People want this (I know I do at least)... and they're given it free of charge. I can't believe it!
That sounds kinda cool for lightweight backups, but for 100GB? If my math is correct, that would take about 94 HOURS to back up 100GB of data. And that's not including the time it takes for you to notice the tape is full, swap it, go to work/school, and sleep once in awhile. You're talking a week and a half easy I'd say.
With a hard drive - start it (or at/cron it) and forget about it till you wake up or till you get back from work/school. No problemo.
Making Linux more accessible to non-disabled people would be the logical first step, no? Then we'll have available 80% of the people to work on making it more accessible to the disabled.
Microsoft has done a good job in this area. You know, I even like switching to large fonts or icons sometimes, or using the magnifier... even though I don't consider myself to be disabled. It seems helpful to relax or just goof off.:)
Make no mistake - Microsoft has spent a boatload of money making their OS usable by as many people as possible with the lowest learning curve. Don't take that to mean it's superior by any means. But the more people who can use it, the more people Microsoft can sell to. Wouldn't you agree?
That brings me to my point - some people say "just because Microsoft did it that way, doesn't mean it's the right way to do it." (often referring to changing display resolution from within Xwindows). Hey, it makes total sense to do it that way, it's intuitive to most people, and they did usability research on it. Why don't we leverage some of that research; let them spend the money on it. This is the way Microsoft used to be anyway (say, Win95 days) - XP just blows my mind thinking about what they were thinking when they created it.
Of course, an alternative would be to listen to the "blathering idiots" and "newbies" on the newsgroups who are also giving the open source community feedback - for free - which can be used to improve open source software.
After reading most of the article on kerneltrap, I find your posting very interesting.
I have a few thoughts I wanted to post up:
- Linus' thinking might be similar to how the government thinks. Mini-changes cause macro changes, really. And, they go mostly unnoticed. And, we don't even know where we're going (being brought to) ultimately.
- The US is a good place as any, since there are over 50 states passing different laws - natural selection of laws if you will. How much will people take? Easy, pass it in Texas first and wait and see.:) (j/k)
- If the situation gets bad enough, people can flock to the border and go to another country. But wait! If every other country is just like the US (the UN), well sonny boy, go ahead and leave and see how different it is elsewhere.
Well, I'm way off topic and full of shit as usual, hehe... just pondering the world we live in.
You make a good point, but it's not a proof, and it's no less stupid than what I wrote.
The reason goes deeper than smoking, exercise, or polluted air and water.
Not everyone is affected the same way by "contamination". Some people can smoke 3 packs a day and live 80 years, and some will, as you say, live till they're 30.
Genes and inheritance play a large role.
What makes you think we aren't all affected by pollutants? Maybe we'd all be happy, outgoing and friendly people if we had a clean atmosphere. Who the hell knows? Do you want to wait until something's proven before doing anything about it? And let me remind you, it may not be proven within your lifetime.
Excuse me for having an open mind. It's rare these days.
EXACTLY.
Once it's destroyed, it's not coming back. Safe storage would be a MUCH more acceptable solution!
I wonder how far this is going to go - you know, it would be POSSIBLE for someone who has access to this information to become sinister and then use it against us. Or even sell the information. Maybe we should monitor those people 24x7?
Because of one terrible terrorist act, WE THE PEOPLE will be the ones paying the price for generations to come it looks like. I would rather live in a society that's not as "safe" but have more freedoms. Our freedom is being limited day by day. Some day we'll just hook up to a Borg regenerator at birth and spend our 70 or 80 years there till we die. Safe! Not fulfilling.
Funny, there's been a cure for cancer around for centuries. It's called CLEAN AIR AND WATER and HEALTHY FOOD. Too bad we'll probably never see this cure produced.
Good one. I wonder if the guys who bought the stuff had to give their address? And if so, are they being bombarded with Radio Shack flyers now??
Maybe they used the flyers for electro-thermo-dynamic anti-radiation heat shielding. Or ass wipe...
That sucks, dude. Thought I had a zinger myself, "technologies to aid in working from home".... but alas, I was rejected like another wretched poster
Well anyway, back on topic... Ellison is just another fuckin' idiot who is on a power trip, just like Gates. I'm sure we've all heard stories about Oracle trying to suck America's companies dry. Come to think of it, this national ID thing smacks of a retaliation against his arch enemy, Bill Gates. Bill wants to house everyone's _personal_ information... sounds like Larry wants to as well. Funny how it seems he's either admitting Bill had a good idea, or he's just trying to see if he can beat Bill at something since for these two money has no meaning anyway.
Haha! Don't worry... they'll have nice disclaimers in the future, too. And Beta testers will be encouraged to donate their bodies to compute farms... er.. science.
You know, whoever did the study must have used the same users Microsoft does for usability testing.
"Why yes! I do like splashy colours and animations and crap that uses up my cpu and wastes my time!"
"Ok, hit F1"
"Umm... there it is... ok." (2 seconds)
Here's the PROOF AGAINST YOUR ARGUMENT anyway:
How do good touch typists key in 80-120 words per minute? Say the average word is 5 letter long. At 80 wpm, that's ~400 keystrokes per minute (not even including the Shift key). If it were to take 2 seconds per keystroke, that would take over 13 minutes to type the eighty words. Definitely, most definitely, not a power user typing at that speed, sorry. Not by my definition, anyway.
I totally agree with you. Anyone who's ever seen me type knows that it takes less than 2 seconds for me to remember a shortcut. In fact, I don't have to "remember" it, it just happens, much like the act of driving or walking.
In my opinion, using a _combination_ of mouse and keyboard input is the most effective. Of course, that depends on what your task is. If you're doing RAD development, it's true. If you're editing a word processing document, you might not even need the mouse. If you're working with a paint program, you could do without the keyboard (although for repetitive tasks using both would still be better).
I think computer technology can only be incrementalized so far. Instead of huge screens, we'll have holographic displays. Instead of hard disk storage, it could even be holographic, too. Then, we could have biostorage in our brains with a human/machine interface between. That would do away with display technology because we could see it with our mind's eye. Similarly, current input devices would become obsolete. In fact, in the next ten years I think they _will_ be obsolete. Devices have already been created to optimize how we input data into the computer.
Yes... and that is all that matters. Besides, installer code isn't known to be the most efficient code ever written anyway. Who gives a shit.
Save your talent for the kernel... lol.
The sad part is, the users end up being the beta testers here. Companies can put out crappy products and let the end users find the problems. It saves a lot of money in QA. Plus, a lot of people seem to think this is acceptable.
Having used open source and commercial software, I'd have to say there's no clear distinction between which is more or less buggy. It comes down to companies or individuals. But, with open source, you CAN fix the bugs if you want, and you WILL get more frequent fixes. In the meantime, in either case, you're left sitting there with an unusable product until the fix comes in. Plenty of time to look for alternatives.
I'd also add that real coders probably have a certain type of upbringing... need to have an inquisitive mind, want to find out how things work, want to do things better, and only want to be limited by their imagination.
> And anybody who got into computers for the money, and not the thrill of writing code -- well -- they're worse than lame. And they probably use AOL.
Hell, I think I'd be tired of playing after getting hit with 50 or more rounds from some jackass with a gatling gun. Not to mention, a heart condition probably wouldn't do well for an opponent to have.
I'd have to say this is in a league of its own. You need some kind of protection, and everyone should have comparably destructive weapons.
Of course, for the underdogs (or crazy), it would be cool to fight against someone with this kind of firepower. The description reminds me of the HW Guy in Half-Life/Team Fortress.:)
Funny you should mention old crappy hardware... man I started off with a 12" black and white TV for a computer monitor. No wonder I need glasses now. I remember hating black on white, and now I'm used to it for some reason. Probably monitors are a little easier on the eyes, but it still is annoying sometimes.
I'm going to play with my refresh rate and colour scheme now that my interest is peaked.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Bang on. I think if the person you replied to did any programming, he/she'd not ask such questions. And, damn it, if anybody's using Visual Basic for their enterprise's number-crunching, they'd better get their heads checked.
It surprises me that there actually is an accounting product available under the GPL license. What sets SQL-Ledger apart from a product like Broadcast 2000, which recently halted their updates for legal reasons? Too many people were using the product for big-bucks work and were failing. Could this not happen with an account app?
In any case, I am absolutely against the kind of legal mumbo-jumbo that could put a legitimate, free product on the lawyer's chopping block, just because some people who are using it complain that it doesn't do what it's supposed to (late in the project by the sounds of it), when there were no guarantees in the first place - clearly stated in the license agreement. Try a new product (or version of a product) out thoroughly before using it for mission critical applications, for crying out loud!
Depends on your uses... Mandrake makes a pretty fine desktop distro, in my humble opinion. ;) Hehehe...
Sounds like not including the docs will make Debian even more a barebones distro. That's good, isn't it?
Let's be a little more creative before we give up.
I'm wagering that he has a window that doesn't have a slider on it - so he has to open the window the whole way or have it fully closed. He could for a lesser price than a cooling system replace the window altogether with one that has a sliding window and a screen. No snow will come in (okay, maybe a few crystals). Also, he would then be able to adjust how open the sliding window is so it only lets in a bit of that -20C air at a time.
Trust me on this one... spent half my life living in basements in Canada.
Well unless they get their website back up, I doubt it'll meet with any success at all.
"Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Apache/1.3.19 Server at www.introversion.co.uk Port 80" as of 10:31PST, Dec 15
> "If Windows is the answer, it must have been a stupid question." -Unknown
Ha! That's the funniest tagline I've read all day.
That goes for me, too. Actually, I'll hopefully be Windows-free by the time they come out with it anyway. Linux is rockin' pretty solid these days.
;)
Sounds from their patent that it would be dog slow . Remember Windows NT on a Pentium 200? Want to go back to those days? Didn't think so.
Give us an OS with decent performance already. Make it run smoothly on y2k hardware in 2005 and it'll fly. And get rid of that awful eye candy, bloat, and anti-competitive nature. Hell, if Microsoft was a "nice guy", I'd be pretty unlikely to switch to another OS permanently. But that will never be.
I think Peter Coffee made a quote recently saying what he wants is an OS he doesn't have to keep upgrading. Isn't that reasonable, too? One that can automate your tasks so you're not repeating the same dreary click-click-drag-click-etc... paradigm; rather, getting on with the better things that life has to offer. I think that's a great idea. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft does anything about it.
This is the coolest fucking thing to happen in years on the Internet. I love Google.
It's extremely refreshing to see real inventiveness in a company for a change. People want this (I know I do at least)... and they're given it free of charge. I can't believe it!
WAY TO GO, GOOGLE!!!
That sounds kinda cool for lightweight backups, but for 100GB? If my math is correct, that would take about 94 HOURS to back up 100GB of data. And that's not including the time it takes for you to notice the tape is full, swap it, go to work/school, and sleep once in awhile. You're talking a week and a half easy I'd say.
With a hard drive - start it (or at/cron it) and forget about it till you wake up or till you get back from work/school. No problemo.
Making Linux more accessible to non-disabled people would be the logical first step, no? Then we'll have available 80% of the people to work on making it more accessible to the disabled.
:)
Microsoft has done a good job in this area. You know, I even like switching to large fonts or icons sometimes, or using the magnifier... even though I don't consider myself to be disabled. It seems helpful to relax or just goof off.
Make no mistake - Microsoft has spent a boatload of money making their OS usable by as many people as possible with the lowest learning curve. Don't take that to mean it's superior by any means. But the more people who can use it, the more people Microsoft can sell to. Wouldn't you agree?
That brings me to my point - some people say "just because Microsoft did it that way, doesn't mean it's the right way to do it." (often referring to changing display resolution from within Xwindows). Hey, it makes total sense to do it that way, it's intuitive to most people, and they did usability research on it. Why don't we leverage some of that research; let them spend the money on it. This is the way Microsoft used to be anyway (say, Win95 days) - XP just blows my mind thinking about what they were thinking when they created it.
Of course, an alternative would be to listen to the "blathering idiots" and "newbies" on the newsgroups who are also giving the open source community feedback - for free - which can be used to improve open source software.
After reading most of the article on kerneltrap, I find your posting very interesting.
:) (j/k)
I have a few thoughts I wanted to post up:
- Linus' thinking might be similar to how the government thinks. Mini-changes cause macro changes, really. And, they go mostly unnoticed. And, we don't even know where we're going (being brought to) ultimately.
- The US is a good place as any, since there are over 50 states passing different laws - natural selection of laws if you will. How much will people take? Easy, pass it in Texas first and wait and see.
- If the situation gets bad enough, people can flock to the border and go to another country. But wait! If every other country is just like the US (the UN), well sonny boy, go ahead and leave and see how different it is elsewhere.
Well, I'm way off topic and full of shit as usual, hehe... just pondering the world we live in.
You make a good point, but it's not a proof, and it's no less stupid than what I wrote.
The reason goes deeper than smoking, exercise, or polluted air and water.
Not everyone is affected the same way by "contamination". Some people can smoke 3 packs a day and live 80 years, and some will, as you say, live till they're 30.
Genes and inheritance play a large role.
What makes you think we aren't all affected by pollutants? Maybe we'd all be happy, outgoing and friendly people if we had a clean atmosphere. Who the hell knows? Do you want to wait until something's proven before doing anything about it? And let me remind you, it may not be proven within your lifetime.
Excuse me for having an open mind. It's rare these days.
EXACTLY.
Once it's destroyed, it's not coming back. Safe storage would be a MUCH more acceptable solution!
I wonder how far this is going to go - you know, it would be POSSIBLE for someone who has access to this information to become sinister and then use it against us. Or even sell the information. Maybe we should monitor those people 24x7?
Because of one terrible terrorist act, WE THE PEOPLE will be the ones paying the price for generations to come it looks like. I would rather live in a society that's not as "safe" but have more freedoms. Our freedom is being limited day by day. Some day we'll just hook up to a Borg regenerator at birth and spend our 70 or 80 years there till we die. Safe! Not fulfilling.
Funny, there's been a cure for cancer around for centuries. It's called CLEAN AIR AND WATER and HEALTHY FOOD. Too bad we'll probably never see this cure produced.
Good one. I wonder if the guys who bought the stuff had to give their address? And if so, are they being bombarded with Radio Shack flyers now??
Maybe they used the flyers for electro-thermo-dynamic anti-radiation heat shielding. Or ass wipe...
That sucks, dude. Thought I had a zinger myself, "technologies to aid in working from home".... but alas, I was rejected like another wretched poster
Well anyway, back on topic... Ellison is just another fuckin' idiot who is on a power trip, just like Gates. I'm sure we've all heard stories about Oracle trying to suck America's companies dry. Come to think of it, this national ID thing smacks of a retaliation against his arch enemy, Bill Gates. Bill wants to house everyone's _personal_ information... sounds like Larry wants to as well. Funny how it seems he's either admitting Bill had a good idea, or he's just trying to see if he can beat Bill at something since for these two money has no meaning anyway.
Haha! Don't worry... they'll have nice disclaimers in the future, too. And Beta testers will be encouraged to donate their bodies to compute farms... er.. science.
You know, whoever did the study must have used the same users Microsoft does for usability testing.
"Why yes! I do like splashy colours and animations and crap that uses up my cpu and wastes my time!"
"Ok, hit F1"
"Umm... there it is... ok." (2 seconds)
Here's the PROOF AGAINST YOUR ARGUMENT anyway:
How do good touch typists key in 80-120 words per minute? Say the average word is 5 letter long. At 80 wpm, that's ~400 keystrokes per minute (not even including the Shift key). If it were to take 2 seconds per keystroke, that would take over 13 minutes to type the eighty words. Definitely, most definitely, not a power user typing at that speed, sorry. Not by my definition, anyway.
I totally agree with you. Anyone who's ever seen me type knows that it takes less than 2 seconds for me to remember a shortcut. In fact, I don't have to "remember" it, it just happens, much like the act of driving or walking.
In my opinion, using a _combination_ of mouse and keyboard input is the most effective. Of course, that depends on what your task is. If you're doing RAD development, it's true. If you're editing a word processing document, you might not even need the mouse. If you're working with a paint program, you could do without the keyboard (although for repetitive tasks using both would still be better).
I think computer technology can only be incrementalized so far. Instead of huge screens, we'll have holographic displays. Instead of hard disk storage, it could even be holographic, too. Then, we could have biostorage in our brains with a human/machine interface between. That would do away with display technology because we could see it with our mind's eye. Similarly, current input devices would become obsolete. In fact, in the next ten years I think they _will_ be obsolete. Devices have already been created to optimize how we input data into the computer.
IMO, this is a basic problem with the justice system we are using.
Money = Power > Justice
Too bad the scales of justice can be made heavier on the side with the most money and power.
Yes... and that is all that matters. Besides, installer code isn't known to be the most efficient code ever written anyway. Who gives a shit.
Save your talent for the kernel... lol.
The sad part is, the users end up being the beta testers here. Companies can put out crappy products and let the end users find the problems. It saves a lot of money in QA. Plus, a lot of people seem to think this is acceptable.
Having used open source and commercial software, I'd have to say there's no clear distinction between which is more or less buggy. It comes down to companies or individuals. But, with open source, you CAN fix the bugs if you want, and you WILL get more frequent fixes. In the meantime, in either case, you're left sitting there with an unusable product until the fix comes in. Plenty of time to look for alternatives.
> Real coders are born, not made.
I'd also add that real coders probably have a certain type of upbringing... need to have an inquisitive mind, want to find out how things work, want to do things better, and only want to be limited by their imagination.
> And anybody who got into computers for the money, and not the thrill of writing code -- well -- they're worse than lame. And they probably use AOL.
Yeah! You said it, man.
Hell, I think I'd be tired of playing after getting hit with 50 or more rounds from some jackass with a gatling gun. Not to mention, a heart condition probably wouldn't do well for an opponent to have. :)
I'd have to say this is in a league of its own. You need some kind of protection, and everyone should have comparably destructive weapons.
Of course, for the underdogs (or crazy), it would be cool to fight against someone with this kind of firepower. The description reminds me of the HW Guy in Half-Life/Team Fortress.
Funny you should mention old crappy hardware... man I started off with a 12" black and white TV for a computer monitor. No wonder I need glasses now. I remember hating black on white, and now I'm used to it for some reason. Probably monitors are a little easier on the eyes, but it still is annoying sometimes. :)
I'm going to play with my refresh rate and colour scheme now that my interest is peaked.