Those 5 employees are too busy licking envelopes with threatening letters, selling their stock, surfing monster.com when Darl's not looking. No time for this.
Anyone else wonder what happened to their OS/2 development team? Maybe they're long-since disbanded, but it seems a team like this could make a decent contribution to a Linux desktop system, at least from a usability perspective.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Okay, now my heresy for the evening:
I actually believe that African-Americans using "nigger" to refer to each other is a good thing. Why? By using this word themselves in a different context they are (intentionally or not) helping to neutralize an extremely emotionally charged word, slowly but surely. This is similar to the gay community's deliberately using the word "queer" to refer to themselves. I don't know about you, but the first time I heard a gay person refer to himself as "queer" I was put off, but that word has obviously been successfully neutralized, look at "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
Maybe not in our lifetime, but trust me, one day this word will have no evoke no stronger reaction than does the word "anglo" today.
...The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
I mostly agree with this, but I would revise the last sentence above slightly: I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be trueor those that they are certain are not true but will be believed by others.
I believe we're all striving towards greater truth, but the proud person (in the seven deadly sins sense) will reject a statement of truth regardless of its validity if it contradicts his/her own beliefs/practices (i.e. damages pride). Likewise a corrupt person of authority will reject a statement of truth if it jeopardizes that authority. This is essentially what the author is saying here, but more explicitly, a person will worry about something being true only if it is perceived to be harmful to his/her well-being.
On the flipside, a "statement of truth" which is made while knowing it is not true is often made to try to influence others, usually to preserve one's own pride or authority. If we are all striving for greater truth, statements such as this are understandably distressing if you know they are not true, or at the very least will not benefit from the outcome of such statements.
I intend to give this suite a try regardless, but just curious: is there an automated system a la Mozilla to provide bug info back to the development team when an application crashes? I'd like to help further this development along, but this is about the extent of what I could provide right now.
...with that kind of money you could get a new nuclear sub, a B2 bomber, AND an aircraft carrier (sans aircraft)!
You're right, that's a much better use for that money, a great way to benefit everyone, or at least the armed forces for the next war that we step in.
Seriously though, we need to realize that quality of life has an economic value/cost. Of course, it can be tricky to calculate quality of life because it is subjective and not readily quantifiable (what is the economic value of preserving old buildings vs. tearing them down, etc.?), but these are things we should consider as more cars get on the road, historic buildings get older and require renovation, and so on.
Back to the Big Dig, I'm not necessarily saying that it didn't cost too much, maybe it did, but you'd need to ask how long-term this investment is, i.e. how long will it be before the next Big Dig is required?
Interesting that the restrictions you highlighted are *very* similar to iTunes' restrictions for playing the downloaded songs on multiple computers (Apple: play on up to three authorized machines) and burning CDs (Apple: playlists can be burned up to ten times). For a split second I actually wondered if Apple had some secret licensing deal with Walmart, but then I realized
these are WMA files, not AAC
an Apple / Walmart is probably one of the most improbable alliances ever imagined
The reason we (Americans) won't have decent public transportation systems (any systems, not just maglev) for the foreseeable future is that we are too individualistic. We love our cars because they represent our individual freedom, but at the same time we isolate ourselves from others, and we suffer from road rage because of all of the traffic.
We'll have to reach the breaking point in this country - I guess this means the point where the majority understands the inverse relationship between number of cars on the road and quality of life - before good public transportation will become a reality, and by then we'll be angrily clamoring for it.
Someone please enlighten me, I can't decide whether this is a good or bad thing for open source long-term. On the one hand, open source would seem to benefit everyone in that it provides quality, affordable (free) software to anyone who chooses to use it. No negatives here that I can see. On the other hand, at least part of the motivation for developing open source software is recognition, and the possibility that this recognition could lead to career advancement as a programmer's skills are recognized. If an American programmer has no hope of competing based on salary, does this destroy the motivation for contributing or only dampen it slightly (or maybe not at all)?
PHP, the new "Camel"
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 2, Funny
If PHP had an official mascot the way that Perl has the camel, I'd recommend they swap since PHP looks more like a "horse designed by committee" every day.
Maybe it's just me, but I see Linux and OS X competing for the title of Next Killer OS, while simultaneously complementing each other -- both are Unix, but they differ/compete on price, ease-of-use, available applications, etc. (Apple's stylish and now superior-performance hardware is also a big carrot for going with Mac). Anyway, I don't see how this competition can be a bad thing for either, but it could spell trouble for Microsoft:
Existing Mac users will not switch. Ever. (This has already been pointed out ad nauseum.) So, no decrease in market share for Apple.
This leaves primarily Windows users to switch. Those who are budget-conscious and/or ubergeeks will choose Linux, those who can afford to spend more and/or want a stylish, easy-to-use, "just works" system will be drawn to Mac.
Of the Windows user who will switch it seems likely that more will choose Linux than Mac, especially as KDE and GNOME become friendlier, but some will choose Mac, so it really seems that Apple and Linux only gain.
I've seen some comments that say (paraphrasing) "For real SPAM filtering use <POPFile|Spamassassin|...>", but these missed the point (or perhaps didn't read the paper?). This method is a "first-pass" filter, getting rid of e-mails for which no redelivery attempt will be made. The second-pass filter should still be implemented for everything that gets through the first pass. From the paper:
"The Greylisting method proposed in this paper is a complimentary method to other existing and yet-to-be-designed spam control systems, and is not intended as a replacement for those other methods. In fact, it is expected that spammers will eventually try to minimise the effectiveness of this method of blocking, and Greylisting is designed to limit options available to the spammer when attempting to do so."
I haven't read the book, but from what I can tell it seems to be missing an important topic: management of global (multilingual, multicultural, etc.) content, which has many unique considerations. Of course not every company has a need to manage content for more than one language, but it would seem that the target audience for this book would include people who are helping to define a content management strategy for companies with an international presence, companies that often have a lot of content to manage.
Develop a backup plan to migrate servers to Free-/Open-/NetBSD, and perhaps have a small pilot where several servers are migrated/integrated. There should never be a need to implement the plan, but its existence will help to put the business managers' minds at ease, and thus reduces the FUD impact dramatically, and perhaps if this action were taken on a large scale and publicized it would take the steam out MS/SCO recent actions. Sure, some will say this is allowing ourselves to be intimidated, but I would choose to view this as a preemptive strike against a potential threat, something which is popular these days.;-)
Whether the browser is set to UTF-8 is a human decision, not the browser's, so this is not a fault of the browser, although I would definitely agree that this should be the default now for i18n purposes. Unfortunately, all of the browsers I have worked with default to the most common encoding for the language of the target os, Latin-1 encodings for Western European languages, Shift-JIS for Japanese, etc.
The accented characters used for demonstration above will only display correctly if your browser display encoding is set to UTF-8. For Latin-1 encodings they look like this:
é -- e with acute accent (option+e e) è -- e with grave accent (option+` e) ê -- e with circumflex (option+i e) ñ -- n with tilde (option+n n) å -- a with ring above (option+a) ü -- u with umlaut/diaresis (option+u u) ç -- c with cedilla (option+c)
I downloaded this but never installed it because it installs to the/opt directory. I was really hoping for a package that would replace the the perl integrated into OS X (/usr/bin,/Library/Perl, etc.)
This is more than just desire, this is economic supply and demand under monopolistic circumstances. Any vendor will determine what the market will bear in terms of price. In a monopoly this price can be much higher because demand is much less elastic to changes in price.
There is only one force which can push the price of Windows down: real competition, i.e. a viable alternative which is competitively priced. It appears Linux may have this effect.
One point that I've failed to see mentioned is that the relative popularity of a distribution also depends on where it came from, for various reasons such as
loyalty to the locally-produced product
language/region specific features
I've seen various predictions of SuSE and Mandrake headed for the dust bin, but last I heard both of these distributions exceed Redhat in popularity in Europe (SuSE from Germany, Mandrake from France). And Turbolinux might be sputtering here, but I think the Japanese are quite happy with it.
As for most popular distro in the future, if we're talking sheer numbers I'd say it'll have to be Red Star Linux as soon as there's a PC in every home in China!;-)
Anyone know what multilingual capabilities the new OS will have, i.e. character encoding support, fonts, locale-specific formatting, bidi, etc.? As far as encodings go, it would be great to see some Unicode support built in (UTF-8 or UCS-2, depending on available memory and language priorities).
I know that older versions of the OS were 8-bit (for European languages), which is fine except that you can't mix languages supported by different encoding families (can't build that killer multilingual dictionary for the Palm!).
works nicely in my experience. You could also use the Shift-JIS encoding if you plan to store only Japanese (and English), but I use UTF-8 to store multilingual data in MySQL.
Slashdot Mirror
Those 5 employees are too busy licking envelopes with threatening letters, selling their stock, surfing monster.com when Darl's not looking. No time for this.
Anyone else wonder what happened to their OS/2 development team? Maybe they're long-since disbanded, but it seems a team like this could make a decent contribution to a Linux desktop system, at least from a usability perspective.
Okay, now my heresy for the evening:
I actually believe that African-Americans using "nigger" to refer to each other is a good thing. Why? By using this word themselves in a different context they are (intentionally or not) helping to neutralize an extremely emotionally charged word, slowly but surely. This is similar to the gay community's deliberately using the word "queer" to refer to themselves. I don't know about you, but the first time I heard a gay person refer to himself as "queer" I was put off, but that word has obviously been successfully neutralized, look at "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
Maybe not in our lifetime, but trust me, one day this word will have no evoke no stronger reaction than does the word "anglo" today.
I mostly agree with this, but I would revise the last sentence above slightly: I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true or those that they are certain are not true but will be believed by others.
I believe we're all striving towards greater truth, but the proud person (in the seven deadly sins sense) will reject a statement of truth regardless of its validity if it contradicts his/her own beliefs/practices (i.e. damages pride). Likewise a corrupt person of authority will reject a statement of truth if it jeopardizes that authority. This is essentially what the author is saying here, but more explicitly, a person will worry about something being true only if it is perceived to be harmful to his/her well-being.
On the flipside, a "statement of truth" which is made while knowing it is not true is often made to try to influence others, usually to preserve one's own pride or authority. If we are all striving for greater truth, statements such as this are understandably distressing if you know they are not true, or at the very least will not benefit from the outcome of such statements.
I intend to give this suite a try regardless, but just curious: is there an automated system a la Mozilla to provide bug info back to the development team when an application crashes? I'd like to help further this development along, but this is about the extent of what I could provide right now.
You're right, that's a much better use for that money, a great way to benefit everyone, or at least the armed forces for the next war that we step in.
Seriously though, we need to realize that quality of life has an economic value/cost. Of course, it can be tricky to calculate quality of life because it is subjective and not readily quantifiable (what is the economic value of preserving old buildings vs. tearing them down, etc.?), but these are things we should consider as more cars get on the road, historic buildings get older and require renovation, and so on.
Back to the Big Dig, I'm not necessarily saying that it didn't cost too much, maybe it did, but you'd need to ask how long-term this investment is, i.e. how long will it be before the next Big Dig is required?
Interesting that the restrictions you highlighted are *very* similar to iTunes' restrictions for playing the downloaded songs on multiple computers (Apple: play on up to three authorized machines) and burning CDs (Apple: playlists can be burned up to ten times). For a split second I actually wondered if Apple had some secret licensing deal with Walmart, but then I realized
The reason we (Americans) won't have decent public transportation systems (any systems, not just maglev) for the foreseeable future is that we are too individualistic. We love our cars because they represent our individual freedom, but at the same time we isolate ourselves from others, and we suffer from road rage because of all of the traffic.
We'll have to reach the breaking point in this country - I guess this means the point where the majority understands the inverse relationship between number of cars on the road and quality of life - before good public transportation will become a reality, and by then we'll be angrily clamoring for it.
I second that. By far the best bookstore I have ever seen. Has it's own map, which you will actually need to find your way around.
Someone please enlighten me, I can't decide whether this is a good or bad thing for open source long-term. On the one hand, open source would seem to benefit everyone in that it provides quality, affordable (free) software to anyone who chooses to use it. No negatives here that I can see. On the other hand, at least part of the motivation for developing open source software is recognition, and the possibility that this recognition could lead to career advancement as a programmer's skills are recognized. If an American programmer has no hope of competing based on salary, does this destroy the motivation for contributing or only dampen it slightly (or maybe not at all)?
See this recent article ("The Right Stuff") on Wired from their current issue.
If PHP had an official mascot the way that Perl has the camel, I'd recommend they swap since PHP looks more like a "horse designed by committee" every day.
Maybe it's just me, but I see Linux and OS X competing for the title of Next Killer OS, while simultaneously complementing each other -- both are Unix, but they differ/compete on price, ease-of-use, available applications, etc. (Apple's stylish and now superior-performance hardware is also a big carrot for going with Mac). Anyway, I don't see how this competition can be a bad thing for either, but it could spell trouble for Microsoft:
Of the Windows user who will switch it seems likely that more will choose Linux than Mac, especially as KDE and GNOME become friendlier, but some will choose Mac, so it really seems that Apple and Linux only gain.
I've seen some comments that say (paraphrasing) "For real SPAM filtering use <POPFile|Spamassassin|...>", but these missed the point (or perhaps didn't read the paper?). This method is a "first-pass" filter, getting rid of e-mails for which no redelivery attempt will be made. The second-pass filter should still be implemented for everything that gets through the first pass. From the paper:
"The Greylisting method proposed in this paper is a complimentary method to other existing and yet-to-be-designed spam control systems, and is not intended as a replacement for those other methods. In fact, it is expected that spammers will eventually try to minimise the effectiveness of this method of blocking, and Greylisting is designed to limit options available to the spammer when attempting to do so."
I haven't read the book, but from what I can tell it seems to be missing an important topic: management of global (multilingual, multicultural, etc.) content, which has many unique considerations. Of course not every company has a need to manage content for more than one language, but it would seem that the target audience for this book would include people who are helping to define a content management strategy for companies with an international presence, companies that often have a lot of content to manage.
Develop a backup plan to migrate servers to Free-/Open-/NetBSD, and perhaps have a small pilot where several servers are migrated/integrated. There should never be a need to implement the plan, but its existence will help to put the business managers' minds at ease, and thus reduces the FUD impact dramatically, and perhaps if this action were taken on a large scale and publicized it would take the steam out MS/SCO recent actions. Sure, some will say this is allowing ourselves to be intimidated, but I would choose to view this as a preemptive strike against a potential threat, something which is popular these days. ;-)
Whether the browser is set to UTF-8 is a human decision, not the browser's, so this is not a fault of the browser, although I would definitely agree that this should be the default now for i18n purposes. Unfortunately, all of the browsers I have worked with default to the most common encoding for the language of the target os, Latin-1 encodings for Western European languages, Shift-JIS for Japanese, etc.
I haven't seen any open source project currently in development that's even close to Visual Studio.
You might want to have a look at Eclipse.
The accented characters used for demonstration above will only display correctly if your browser display encoding is set to UTF-8. For Latin-1 encodings they look like this:
é -- e with acute accent (option+e e)
è -- e with grave accent (option+` e)
ê -- e with circumflex (option+i e)
ñ -- n with tilde (option+n n)
å -- a with ring above (option+a)
ü -- u with umlaut/diaresis (option+u u)
ç -- c with cedilla (option+c)
Almost, but not quite right. You have your grave and acute mixed up.
I downloaded this but never installed it because it installs to the /opt directory. I was really hoping for a package that would replace the the perl integrated into OS X (/usr/bin, /Library/Perl, etc.)
This is more than just desire, this is economic supply and demand under monopolistic circumstances. Any vendor will determine what the market will bear in terms of price. In a monopoly this price can be much higher because demand is much less elastic to changes in price.
There is only one force which can push the price of Windows down: real competition, i.e. a viable alternative which is competitively priced. It appears Linux may have this effect.
- loyalty to the locally-produced product
- language/region specific features
I've seen various predictions of SuSE and Mandrake headed for the dust bin, but last I heard both of these distributions exceed Redhat in popularity in Europe (SuSE from Germany, Mandrake from France). And Turbolinux might be sputtering here, but I think the Japanese are quite happy with it.As for most popular distro in the future, if we're talking sheer numbers I'd say it'll have to be Red Star Linux as soon as there's a PC in every home in China! ;-)
Anyone know what multilingual capabilities the new OS will have, i.e. character encoding support, fonts, locale-specific formatting, bidi, etc.? As far as encodings go, it would be great to see some Unicode support built in (UTF-8 or UCS-2, depending on available memory and language priorities).
I know that older versions of the OS were 8-bit (for European languages), which is fine except that you can't mix languages supported by different encoding families (can't build that killer multilingual dictionary for the Palm!).
works nicely in my experience. You could also use the Shift-JIS encoding if you plan to store only Japanese (and English), but I use UTF-8 to store multilingual data in MySQL.