Reputable german geek magazine c't has an great comparison of 7 word processing programs this month.
Surprising result: The biggest commercial text processors cannot produce a diploma thesis with 120 imgages and 240 footnotes. They all died at different stages of image insertion.
Word 2003 managed to add about just over 40 images before dying a horrible death. WordPerfect didn't fare much better.
OpenOffice.org stood out in that it imported all graphics and footnotes without problems.
You couldn't even do this in Java. There are no buffer overflow exploits. The JVM will throw an exception, and that will be it.
But is that really true? Java has range checking, yes, and even a security model..
But in the end, Java will only be as secure as the native JVM implementation. If the JVM has a bug, then people will be able to compromise applications written in java... it then becomes a question of extent.
(vi) you agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts and/or expenses (including attorneys' fees) incurred in connection with any claim, lawsuit or action by any third party that arises or results from the use or distribution of any and all Programs and/or Software.
sounds like standard fare in the world of free software to me.
you get some software for free. you can distribute it, use it, whatever. but you cannot turn around and sue the owner of the software if something goes wrong. i have never seen a piece of free software that doesn't have such a clause.
Sun's phrasing might be a litte harsh since it seems to imply that you have to take over legal costs - but an easy way to defend and indemnify Sun in this case would be to include a license that says, in legalese, "neither Sun nor ourselves is responsible for any problems with this software. if your house burns down and your wife leaves you because of Java, you cannot sue us or Sun".
Sun does not make good GUIs. In fact, they seem genuinely unable to, even more so than the average linux programmer. My pet theory is that it has to do with the history of Sun being a unix-CLI kind of company. All of Sun's GUIs look like hard-core CLI hackers made them - and they made them in the knowledge that this was useless eye candy.
3D is very cool, but what's the use of a hammer if you have no hands. What's the use of the coolest tech if Sun is doing the GUI?
competence in user interface design is something that Sun does not possess.
you might say: But... Sun can change! sure. but there are severe counter-indications at work here: - the demos complete lack of elegance - the demos complete lack of useful things to do with the new tech (the hard-core CLI hacker will create an excellent 3D environment, but he won't know how to use it to make an easier to use GUI) - past experience (witness Java apps / demos... )
last couple of times i was flying, over 50% of all travellers had laptops with them. definitely 95% of all business-looking guys.
there is no way customs could want to check them all. so as long as you look like a biz guy, i can't imagine you would have any trouble.
i have personally never been checked either, despite travelling between europe and the U.S. quite frequently. and even if they do - i carry my companys laptop, so what are they going to do? i suppose if they _want_ they can always give you trouble, but my guess is chances are very, very slim.
just don't greet the customs agent ("hi"), that's a surefire way to get checked.
shout DAMNIT even louder when you try to type something and discover that the punctuation keys are completely different on a US keyboard to a UK keyboard.
if you think US / UK is different, try german. we actually order all computers specifically with US-english keyboards here (we are in germany). the "native" german varieties have all the useful programming keys (/,;, [, {, even @! ) hidden behind weird shift and/or alt-gr key combinations... their place taken by umlauts. and there are other, seemingly random changes - like switching z and y which provides endless entertainment when trying to type a password...
i will have to bite. and to make a case for Java / desktop.
to get that out of the way: yes, java memory use is ridiculous, and Sun needs to do something about it. 16M overhead for _any_ app is not going to cut it. memory use is on top of the list for requests for enhancement, so i expect significant movement there soon.
I'll say _you_, then, haven't spent days debugging a Java memory leak.
i have. yes, the garbage collector does not free you of all worries. and especially with the listener model you will run into gc issues quick. unless you use WeakReference and simply _never_ have that problem (WeakReferences are references that do not prevent garbage collection - it's a way to make Java behave like C, exept that you don't have to dealloc - the garbage collector takes care of that for you) using WeakReference where appropriate, you can have the cake and eat it, too. Sun should really emphasize this more in the docs. But i wonder what the alternative is? No garbage collector? Surely, that's worse.
4. It also has horrible startup time - i think that has to do with RAM usage. it takes a while to fill 25M... so if the RAM problem goes away, this one will go away, too.
5 Swing is slow... Not true. Swing (caveat: on windows!) is hardware accelerated. E.g. it takes advantage of the graphics card, just like native apps do. That it hand-paints everything is java mythology. It was true a long time ago. [caveat: i think it might still be true on non-windows platforms]
6. It also requires quite a bit of clue to use well.... Point taken. Swing is a relatively weak framework, some call it over-engineered, i just think it was done by people with little experience in designing GUI frameworks. On the upside, it does have a lot of things built-in.
Bottom line is, Swing is a memory hog, and the architecture (or at least the tutorials) could be better, but it is fast, and it works very well.
Both memory usage and startup time are not inherent to Java/Swing, and i am convinced that both can be improved and will be improved in the near future (1.5).
Not to mention it's cross-platform:) The latter means that all apps i write for my company will also run on Linux. Even though that is not a requirement for any of them (and i certainly would not get any resources allocated to do a port).
The main, almost the only consideration for any desktop app is productivity.
Discussions about speed are childish. Java - the programming language - has always been fast, and if there are bindings to GUI libraries like GTK etc, the GUI will be fast, too.
Java/Swing is fast enough nowadays, too, but - having programmed many a Swing app - it's simply not a good framework. No one will be sad to see it go, especially if its replaced something better.
In order to achieve maximum productivity, one needs to have:
1) a decent programming language that follows the obvious principle that anything that can be automated should be automated. Java / C# (the Java clone) provide some of this nowadays, whereas c/c++ definitely don't. 2) a visual, well designed IDE. the productivity gains from features such as refactoring and auto-expansion / fixing etc are just huge. enormous.
side-note: For GUI design, i think the Linux community should just outright steal OS X interface builder. the genius of that application is that it does not just take care of the widgets, but that it also tells you where those widgets will look nice, following the HI guidelines. e.g. it supports the programmer in the design department as well as in programming. which is probably most needed in the linux community. It's there. Borrow from it.
>>I mean, we all like java, but have you ever seen a normal user application (with a GUI) written in java that is even a bit fast?
yes, i have even written several myself...
how fast? hmm.... fast enough to not annoy me. and i regularly shoot down programs that stall for even a few seconds. let's put it this way: they are faster than windows Explorer.exe, which i have to kill about once every day. Explorer may not be a brilliant piece of work, but it's certainly as native as they come...
i can bet you a dollar that you can't distinguish them from native c apps, except for startup time and memory use (which are related of course: it takes some time to fill up 25M of memory). but Sun is working on it - memory use is one of the top 25 RFEs.
in terms of speed, Java has come a long way. the slow apps you see today are 1) applets - those are abysmal, and i have Java turned off in all browsers. there is something seriously wrong with them. 2) badly programmed. it is very easy to create functioning apps with Java, so people who have absolutely no clue what they are doing are producing apps. in C++, those would not even run. but in Java, they run, and are slow, and look bad. simple example is the garbage collector: you can leak and leak memory and the java app will just get slower, whereas c++ would crash and burn.
there are several studies that convincingly show that Java with a hotspot compiler is just as efficient as c++ - give and take, but it's faster in some cases, slower in others.
Java has also come a very long way and i would call the GUI performant only since 1.4.x and later. it used to be awfully slow, and ppl still have this perception.
i just wish Sun would give in and make Java open source, fair and square. the potential is enormous.
this is my experience with driving an autonomous robot in a competition some years back:
we had a little Lego MindStorms robot and were supposed to have it go over lego street tracks, which, to make recognition easier, had a large thick black stripe in the middle. the cars were to create a complete map of the course and were then to find an obstacle (using front bumper sensors) and route the fastest track around it.
you would think that in autonomous driving, nothing is easier than staying centered over a large black stripe (using optical sensors).
however, in doing this, the most difficult part was to stay on track. the engines behaved somewhat uncontrollably, the sensors were sometimes erroneous, and, if you think about it, the robot really perceives almost nothing about its environment. in other words: the sensors are so limited that the robot is extremely dumb.
of all the entries at this competition (Visual Programming Challenge at VL Conference 97 in Capri), our car was the only one to complete the entire challenge. we won because the others didn't even finish.
if i extrapolate this experience to the DARPA challenge: GPS / desert / no roads / rocks on the way / sudden dropoffs, then i would say it's close to impossible.
definitely with car-type solutions, those are just not going to work. i like the motorcycle the best though it sounds like it's not going to work, either.
does anyone else think it's scary how many military sponsors are on _all_ entrant's web pages?
You seem to believe that the US legal system is fair and objective. That they only consider the fact and are otherwise completely isolated from society / reality.
that this is not so should be obvious. It follows directly that the courts and the legal system are influenced by a companies previous behavior, history, "character" if you like.
it should be understood by everybody that the courts strive for maximum objectivity and impartial-ness, but it should also be understood that they can never attain that goal.
define TRUTH - that's the beginning of the problem. and it goes downhill from there: pretty soon you have he-said-she-said, doubtful evidence, questionable witnesses and the morass of opinions and beliefs that is called reality. this is where the courts operate.
to answer the parent post: of course the courts will look at a companies ideology. of course that is a factor.
yes! my first thought was: that's because Germany does not have a strong tradition of free speech rights. and/. is celebrating it?
in germany, if the government thinks something you say is not true, they can make you shut up. generally, this power is used relatively sensibly (neo-nazis, mostly).
but i still feel uneasy about it, and i wish we had a first amendment and people would just realize that the right to free speech is fundamental to democracy. the US handles that one pretty well... (e.g. there are always exceptions to the happy free speech world, like when others are restricted in their life because of what you said... say whatever you want to say as long as you do not cause harm to others...)
ignorance is when you have well designed guidelines on how to do it, guidelines that have worked very well over the last 20 years, and you decide to ignore them and instead re-invent the wheel. you may or may not like Apple, but these guys are the leading experts on usability & computers, period.
i had no idea the card skimmers look that professional. scary.
i routinely place my entire hand on the number pad, fingers moving only minutely, so that an occasional observer could never tell which number i typed. they might be able to guess a certain range of keys, but they don't know the sequence (fingers don't move while typing).
now i guess i will cover the keypad with my other hand while doing this...
not only does this book explain how to organize a guerilla network to overthrow an entrenched power.
it also explains how you can easily terrorize earth by launching simple rocks from Moon's surface. you don't need much power to overcome Moon's gravity... so just build a (large) launcher, calculate the exact path it will take, and launch it... so it comes down on your enemy as a nice meteorite.
i didn't do the math, but i do have a feeling that Henlein did when he came up with the idea.. any physics students here?
"...or have maintained a second Windows boot and are willing to purchase Windows versions of their games"
i would say this is the main reason. everybody (save zealots) has a spare version of Windows lying around (probably came with the box as OEM, or from friends, etc). and it happens to easily run on exactly the same hardware! bingo, there is your emulator.
this is not true for the mac (Virtual PC is so slow as to be unusable for games unless you are talking about solitaire and minesweeper).
so, if i am a game company, and 99% of my linux customers can just fire up windows and play our game there, i would not port to linux, either. there is this 1% (or whatever) market, and 99% of them have windows...
i fully agree. "code" - e.g. some ascii files - is generally highly overrated.
what is valuable about code is the knowledge that went into generating it. coding is the process of understanding the problem - as much as everybody would just wish it weren't so. therein lies the value.
once you have a sufficiently deep understanding of the subject matter, and an adequate architecure, the rest is trivial: code monkeys can do it.
when you see a pile of source code, however, the value is not easy to see. the reasons for design decisions are not mentioned so you can never know if something is a certain way because A) somebody came up with a good design, B) somebody came up with a bad design, or C) somebody simply pulled this piece out of their behinds.
e.g. raw source code is great for reverse engineering, but not for basing development efforts on it. closed source therefore does not impede innovation.
Hopper's speech to associates: ""The ants outnumber us 100 to 1. What if they figure that out?" "It's not about food; it's about keeping them in line."
Applied to billg/steve ballmer: "... These customers get tied in for life in an ever-increasing dependency cycle with our products. What if they figure that out?" "It's not about Linux. It's about keeping them in line."
The German govnernment, no doubt with the helpful advice of a certain very large Linux distributor, is beginning to figure it out...
Its interesting that they only have it during business hours. I suppose they are full on evenings anyway, so no need to attract more customers (or disturb the coolness of the place with laptop-toting geeks)
I think that as more and more people have WiFi laptops (and more and more will as more and more public hotspots develop), more and more who go to the cafe anyway bring their laptop anyway.
=> in the end, the Cafes without WiFi will simply be at a disadvantage.
BTW, there are several other Cafes in SF which also have free WiFi, like Cup of Joe on Hayes and some crummy place on Haight.
I think it is Microsoft who wants to call it "crippled". They want you to think, pay less, get less (inverse logic: there must be some reason ppl in the US pay more, right?).
For us, less is more, so you pay less, get the same - without all the annoying and useless feature bloat. Great news, actually:)
Even better: M$ knows that the light version needs to be able to play all games. Which is perfect for people who run linux and just use win for games.
that is the beginning and the end of the argument for 64 bit. who cares if it's faster? of course it will be, for some things, and it will be on par for others.
but the big thing is selling a box. this is where the $ is. and this is where i can say: i will sell you double for almost the same price! 64 instead of 32 for just a small premium. it's justifiably "more advanced" technology. and that will sell it.
who needs 64? servers and large apps may or may not need it. marketing most definitely needs it.
Microsoft, Intel, and AMD do not care about making ssl faster, or mp3 encoding. they couldn't care less. what they do care about is selling boxes. that is what it's all about. who will benefit the most if everybody upgrades to 64? games have been the sole reason to upgrade your system for the last couple of years, and that is just a pretty weak argument (e.g. capturing only a very small portion of the market). 64, on the other hand, could be huge.
This is a good opportunity for Windows users to migrate to a free desktop
i wonder if that is true. all windows users use windows for a variety of reasons - and none of them are "we love windows".
for instance, here is what i need in order to switch:
[x] web browser. [x] email program that works. [x] java. [x] Eclipse running. [x] Word substitute. OOo is nice. [-] support for my hardware (Centrino Laptop). problem: networking doesn't work, basically rendering the entire machine useless (tested with Knoppix 3.3) [-] graphical interface for WiFi. [-] point and click install of software. (general feeling that that doesn't really work)
Ad point and click: i always read about different installs for different linux distributions, which sounds kind of scary. sounds like "just post the question to a newsgroup, and 4 hours later, you are there". same goes for kernel recompiles / patches. sounds like "waste lots of time getting the system to run".
is this a good time to switch from windows? i have no idea. maybe? it depends on individual needs.
what is needed is a general windows-to-linux switching guide and FAQ where all these questions are answered.
What *I* think will be interesting is...
on
Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 1
When will people learn to think ahead more than 5 minutes?
M$ wants to own everything, dominate all markets, and have you pay a monthly fee to use a computer. If they could, they would stop all innovation right now and concentrate on money-making and monopolizing. That is a fact.
Once you realize this, technical matters become irrelevant. Not using M$ is not some grand ideological battle, it's simple self-defense.
Assume M$ gives you a better search engine. But then, when you use it, there will be no search engines in 5 years. So how, exactly, is that a better search engine?
Slashdot Mirror
Reputable german geek magazine c't has an great comparison of 7 word processing programs this month.
Surprising result: The biggest commercial text processors cannot produce a diploma thesis with 120 imgages and 240 footnotes. They all died at different stages of image insertion.
Word 2003 managed to add about just over 40 images before dying a horrible death. WordPerfect didn't fare much better.
OpenOffice.org stood out in that it imported all graphics and footnotes without problems.
I agree with the parent post.
You couldn't even do this in Java. There are no buffer overflow exploits. The JVM will throw an exception, and that will be it.
But is that really true? Java has range checking, yes, and even a security model..
But in the end, Java will only be as secure as the native JVM implementation. If the JVM has a bug, then people will be able to compromise applications written in java... it then becomes a question of extent.
(vi) you agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts and/or expenses (including attorneys' fees) incurred in connection with any claim, lawsuit or action by any third party that arises or results from the use or distribution of any and all Programs and/or Software.
sounds like standard fare in the world of free software to me.
you get some software for free. you can distribute it, use it, whatever. but you cannot turn around and sue the owner of the software if something goes wrong. i have never seen a piece of free software that doesn't have such a clause.
Sun's phrasing might be a litte harsh since it seems to imply that you have to take over legal costs - but an easy way to defend and indemnify Sun in this case would be to include a license that says, in legalese, "neither Sun nor ourselves is responsible for any problems with this software. if your house burns down and your wife leaves you because of Java, you cannot sue us or Sun".
1) Sun
2) Sun
Sun does not make good GUIs. In fact, they seem genuinely unable to, even more so than the average linux programmer. My pet theory is that it has to do with the history of Sun being a unix-CLI kind of company. All of Sun's GUIs look like hard-core CLI hackers made them - and they made them in the knowledge that this was useless eye candy.
3D is very cool, but what's the use of a hammer if you have no hands. What's the use of the coolest tech if Sun is doing the GUI?
competence in user interface design is something that Sun does not possess.
you might say: But... Sun can change! sure. but there are severe counter-indications at work here:
- the demos complete lack of elegance
- the demos complete lack of useful things to do with the new tech (the hard-core CLI hacker will create an excellent 3D environment, but he won't know how to use it to make an easier to use GUI)
- past experience (witness Java apps / demos... )
last couple of times i was flying, over 50% of all travellers had laptops with them. definitely 95% of all business-looking guys.
there is no way customs could want to check them all. so as long as you look like a biz guy, i can't imagine you would have any trouble.
i have personally never been checked either, despite travelling between europe and the U.S. quite frequently. and even if they do - i carry my companys laptop, so what are they going to do? i suppose if they _want_ they can always give you trouble, but my guess is chances are very, very slim.
just don't greet the customs agent ("hi"), that's a surefire way to get checked.
shout DAMNIT even louder when you try to type something and discover that the punctuation keys are completely different on a US keyboard to a UK keyboard.
/, ;, [, {, even @! ) hidden behind weird shift and/or alt-gr key combinations ... their place taken by umlauts. and there are other, seemingly random changes - like switching z and y which provides endless entertainment when trying to type a password...
if you think US / UK is different, try german. we actually order all computers specifically with US-english keyboards here (we are in germany).
the "native" german varieties have all the useful programming keys (
i would consider the US keyboard a free bonus.
Correction: "... raking in unheard of profit margins on one product and are losing money on just about anything else..."
insanely profitable: windows OS
pretty profitable: Office
losing money: just about anything else the company does.
i will have to bite. and to make a case for Java / desktop.
:)
to get that out of the way: yes, java memory use is ridiculous, and Sun needs to do something about it. 16M overhead for _any_ app is not going to cut it. memory use is on top of the list for requests for enhancement, so i expect significant movement there soon.
I'll say _you_, then, haven't spent days debugging a Java memory leak.
i have. yes, the garbage collector does not free you of all worries. and especially with the listener model you will run into gc issues quick. unless you use WeakReference and simply _never_ have that problem (WeakReferences are references that do not prevent garbage collection - it's a way to make Java behave like C, exept that you don't have to dealloc - the garbage collector takes care of that for you)
using WeakReference where appropriate, you can have the cake and eat it, too.
Sun should really emphasize this more in the docs. But i wonder what the alternative is? No garbage collector? Surely, that's worse.
4. It also has horrible startup time - i think that has to do with RAM usage. it takes a while to fill 25M... so if the RAM problem goes away, this one will go away, too.
5 Swing is slow... Not true. Swing (caveat: on windows!) is hardware accelerated. E.g. it takes advantage of the graphics card, just like native apps do. That it hand-paints everything is java mythology. It was true a long time ago. [caveat: i think it might still be true on non-windows platforms]
6. It also requires quite a bit of clue to use well....
Point taken.
Swing is a relatively weak framework, some call it over-engineered, i just think it was done by people with little experience in designing GUI frameworks. On the upside, it does have a lot of things built-in.
Bottom line is, Swing is a memory hog, and the architecture (or at least the tutorials) could be better, but it is fast, and it works very well.
Both memory usage and startup time are not inherent to Java/Swing, and i am convinced that both can be improved and will be improved in the near future (1.5).
Not to mention it's cross-platform
The latter means that all apps i write for my company will also run on Linux. Even though that is not a requirement for any of them (and i certainly would not get any resources allocated to do a port).
I completely agree with this.
The main, almost the only consideration for any desktop app is productivity.
Discussions about speed are childish. Java - the programming language - has always been fast, and if there are bindings to GUI libraries like GTK etc, the GUI will be fast, too.
Java/Swing is fast enough nowadays, too, but - having programmed many a Swing app - it's simply not a good framework. No one will be sad to see it go, especially if its replaced something better.
In order to achieve maximum productivity, one needs to have:
1) a decent programming language that follows the obvious principle that anything that can be automated should be automated. Java / C# (the Java clone) provide some of this nowadays, whereas c/c++ definitely don't.
2) a visual, well designed IDE. the productivity gains from features such as refactoring and auto-expansion / fixing etc are just huge. enormous.
side-note: For GUI design, i think the Linux community should just outright steal OS X interface builder. the genius of that application is that it does not just take care of the widgets, but that it also tells you where those widgets will look nice, following the HI guidelines. e.g. it supports the programmer in the design department as well as in programming. which is probably most needed in the linux community. It's there. Borrow from it.
>>I mean, we all like java, but have you ever seen a normal user application (with a GUI) written in java that is even a bit fast?
yes, i have even written several myself...
how fast? hmm.... fast enough to not annoy me. and i regularly shoot down programs that stall for even a few seconds.
let's put it this way: they are faster than windows Explorer.exe, which i have to kill about once every day. Explorer may not be a brilliant piece of work, but it's certainly as native as they come...
i can bet you a dollar that you can't distinguish them from native c apps, except for startup time and memory use (which are related of course: it takes some time to fill up 25M of memory). but Sun is working on it - memory use is one of the top 25 RFEs.
in terms of speed, Java has come a long way. the slow apps you see today are
1) applets - those are abysmal, and i have Java turned off in all browsers. there is something seriously wrong with them.
2) badly programmed. it is very easy to create functioning apps with Java, so people who have absolutely no clue what they are doing are producing apps. in C++, those would not even run. but in Java, they run, and are slow, and look bad. simple example is the garbage collector: you can leak and leak memory and the java app will just get slower, whereas c++ would crash and burn.
there are several studies that convincingly show that Java with a hotspot compiler is just as efficient as c++ - give and take, but it's faster in some cases, slower in others.
Java has also come a very long way and i would call the GUI performant only since 1.4.x and later. it used to be awfully slow, and ppl still have this perception.
i just wish Sun would give in and make Java open source, fair and square. the potential is enormous.
this is my experience with driving an autonomous robot in a competition some years back:
we had a little Lego MindStorms robot and were supposed to have it go over lego street tracks, which, to make recognition easier, had a large thick black stripe in the middle. the cars were to create a complete map of the course and were then to find an obstacle (using front bumper sensors) and route the fastest track around it.
you would think that in autonomous driving, nothing is easier than staying centered over a large black stripe (using optical sensors).
however, in doing this, the most difficult part was to stay on track. the engines behaved somewhat uncontrollably, the sensors were sometimes erroneous, and, if you think about it, the robot really perceives almost nothing about its environment.
in other words: the sensors are so limited that the robot is extremely dumb.
of all the entries at this competition (Visual Programming Challenge at VL Conference 97 in Capri), our car was the only one to complete the entire challenge. we won because the others didn't even finish.
if i extrapolate this experience to the DARPA challenge: GPS / desert / no roads / rocks on the way / sudden dropoffs, then i would say it's close to impossible.
definitely with car-type solutions, those are just not going to work. i like the motorcycle the best though it sounds like it's not going to work, either.
does anyone else think it's scary how many military sponsors are on _all_ entrant's web pages?
You seem to believe that the US legal system is fair and objective. That they only consider the fact and are otherwise completely isolated from society / reality.
that this is not so should be obvious. It follows directly that the courts and the legal system are influenced by a companies previous behavior, history, "character" if you like.
it should be understood by everybody that the courts strive for maximum objectivity and impartial-ness, but it should also be understood that they can never attain that goal.
define TRUTH - that's the beginning of the problem. and it goes downhill from there: pretty soon you have he-said-she-said, doubtful evidence, questionable witnesses and the morass of opinions and beliefs that is called reality. this is where the courts operate.to answer the parent post: of course the courts will look at a companies ideology. of course that is a factor.
As the US Dept. of Treasury informs us here, they no longer produce $5,000 and $10,000 bills. but they do accept them as legal currency.
yes! my first thought was: that's because Germany does not have a strong tradition of free speech rights. and /. is celebrating it?
in germany, if the government thinks something you say is not true, they can make you shut up. generally, this power is used relatively sensibly (neo-nazis, mostly).
but i still feel uneasy about it, and i wish we had a first amendment and people would just realize that the right to free speech is fundamental to democracy. the US handles that one pretty well... (e.g. there are always exceptions to the happy free speech world, like when others are restricted in their life because of what you said... say whatever you want to say as long as you do not cause harm to others...)
OSX Apple Human Interface Guidelines
ignorance is when you have well designed guidelines on how to do it, guidelines that have worked very well over the last 20 years, and you decide to ignore them and instead re-invent the wheel. you may or may not like Apple, but these guys are the leading experts on usability & computers, period.i had no idea the card skimmers look that professional. scary.
i routinely place my entire hand on the number pad, fingers moving only minutely, so that an occasional observer could never tell which number i typed. they might be able to guess a certain range of keys, but they don't know the sequence (fingers don't move while typing).
now i guess i will cover the keypad with my other hand while doing this...
... the all-time classic by Robert A. Henlein
not only does this book explain how to organize a guerilla network to overthrow an entrenched power.
it also explains how you can easily terrorize earth by launching simple rocks from Moon's surface. you don't need much power to overcome Moon's gravity... so just build a (large) launcher, calculate the exact path it will take, and launch it... so it comes down on your enemy as a nice meteorite.
i didn't do the math, but i do have a feeling that Henlein did when he came up with the idea.. any physics students here?
"...or have maintained a second Windows boot and are willing to purchase Windows versions of their games"
i would say this is the main reason. everybody (save zealots) has a spare version of Windows lying around (probably came with the box as OEM, or from friends, etc). and it happens to easily run on exactly the same hardware! bingo, there is your emulator.
this is not true for the mac (Virtual PC is so slow as to be unusable for games unless you are talking about solitaire and minesweeper).
so, if i am a game company, and 99% of my linux customers can just fire up windows and play our game there, i would not port to linux, either. there is this 1% (or whatever) market, and 99% of them have windows...
i fully agree. "code" - e.g. some ascii files - is generally highly overrated.
what is valuable about code is the knowledge that went into generating it. coding is the process of understanding the problem - as much as everybody would just wish it weren't so. therein lies the value.
once you have a sufficiently deep understanding of the subject matter, and an adequate architecure, the rest is trivial: code monkeys can do it.
when you see a pile of source code, however, the value is not easy to see. the reasons for design decisions are not mentioned so you can never know if something is a certain way because A) somebody came up with a good design, B) somebody came up with a bad design, or C) somebody simply pulled this piece out of their behinds.
e.g. raw source code is great for reverse engineering, but not for basing development efforts on it. closed source therefore does not impede innovation.
Hopper's speech to associates: ""The ants outnumber us 100 to 1. What if they figure that out?" "It's not about food; it's about keeping them in line."
Applied to billg/steve ballmer: "... These customers get tied in for life in an ever-increasing dependency cycle with our products. What if they figure that out?" "It's not about Linux. It's about keeping them in line."
The German govnernment, no doubt with the helpful advice of a certain very large Linux distributor, is beginning to figure it out...
Its interesting that they only have it during business hours. I suppose they are full on evenings anyway, so no need to attract more customers (or disturb the coolness of the place with laptop-toting geeks)
I think that as more and more people have WiFi laptops (and more and more will as more and more public hotspots develop), more and more who go to the cafe anyway bring their laptop anyway.
=> in the end, the Cafes without WiFi will simply be at a disadvantage.
BTW, there are several other Cafes in SF which also have free WiFi, like Cup of Joe on Hayes and some crummy place on Haight.
I think it is Microsoft who wants to call it "crippled". They want you to think, pay less, get less (inverse logic: there must be some reason ppl in the US pay more, right?).
:)
For us, less is more, so you pay less, get the same - without all the annoying and useless feature bloat. Great news, actually
Even better: M$ knows that the light version needs to be able to play all games. Which is perfect for people who run linux and just use win for games.
"Oh, no! They took out Clippy!"
that is the beginning and the end of the argument for 64 bit. who cares if it's faster? of course it will be, for some things, and it will be on par for others.
but the big thing is selling a box. this is where the $ is. and this is where i can say: i will sell you double for almost the same price! 64 instead of 32 for just a small premium. it's justifiably "more advanced" technology. and that will sell it.
who needs 64? servers and large apps may or may not need it. marketing most definitely needs it.
Microsoft, Intel, and AMD do not care about making ssl faster, or mp3 encoding. they couldn't care less. what they do care about is selling boxes. that is what it's all about. who will benefit the most if everybody upgrades to 64? games have been the sole reason to upgrade your system for the last couple of years, and that is just a pretty weak argument (e.g. capturing only a very small portion of the market). 64, on the other hand, could be huge.
This is a good opportunity for Windows users to migrate to a free desktop
i wonder if that is true. all windows users use windows for a variety of reasons - and none of them are "we love windows".
for instance, here is what i need in order to switch:
[x] web browser.
[x] email program that works.
[x] java.
[x] Eclipse running.
[x] Word substitute. OOo is nice.
[-] support for my hardware (Centrino Laptop). problem: networking doesn't work, basically rendering the entire machine useless (tested with Knoppix 3.3)
[-] graphical interface for WiFi.
[-] point and click install of software. (general feeling that that doesn't really work)
Ad point and click: i always read about different installs for different linux distributions, which sounds kind of scary. sounds like "just post the question to a newsgroup, and 4 hours later, you are there". same goes for kernel recompiles / patches. sounds like "waste lots of time getting the system to run".
is this a good time to switch from windows? i have no idea. maybe? it depends on individual needs.
what is needed is a general windows-to-linux switching guide and FAQ where all these questions are answered.
When will people learn to think ahead more than 5 minutes?
M$ wants to own everything, dominate all markets, and have you pay a monthly fee to use a computer. If they could, they would stop all innovation right now and concentrate on money-making and monopolizing. That is a fact.
Once you realize this, technical matters become irrelevant. Not using M$ is not some grand ideological battle, it's simple self-defense.
Assume M$ gives you a better search engine. But then, when you use it, there will be no search engines in 5 years. So how, exactly, is that a better search engine?
It's a sucker deal.