I don't have a lot of experience using word processors, but I have switched people over to Linux, and the number one complaint is OpenOffice. Here are the complaints:
- It's slow, reaaaalllly slow (yes, OO 1.1 is slower than MS Office 2000). - Where is Times New Roman? (Windows font, not installed by default) - These fonts look weird, and strain my eyes. (OK, turn off anti-aliased fonts) - It doesn't do lists easily. Do this in OpenOffice 1.1:
1. item one (enter) It may number the next line 2. but if you hit the increase indent button, it does not go to 1.1, and it's not easy to figure out how to make it do this. It took me 20 minutes to figure out for my wife how to do this. - It doesn't remember the last font you told it to use. Choose a font, do stuff, close OO, open OO, back to Nimbus Roman.
Some complaints were just vague. I had a girl who had done some secretarial temping, and told me that she felt OpenOffice was "written yesterday" and that it was not nearly sophisticated enough for her day-to-day use. This frustrated me, because I wanted to know what specifically was deficient, but I didn't press it, as converting people to Linux is a delicate operation, and I just try to give people what they want. So I just said, fine, we'll put MS Office on it for you.
Who cares if they use it for anything useful? The more Americans (or Canadians, in my case) that are using the internet, the more companies are going to decide providing internet service is lucrative, the cheaper my internet service is going to get. "Useful" is a pretty loaded term anyway. Chatting and emailing frivolous messages can be useful, just to stay connected to people we wouldn't talk to otherwise. Downloading pornography is useful in that it provides a much more discreet way to obtain it, thereby reducing seedy looking porn shops that, typically, aren't adding much the city landscape. The downloading of music is insanely useful to me (at least it was, until EMusic effectively shut down). I also use the internet to read news and teach myself how to code in various languages, but I don't think these are the things that define "usefulness". If indeed our kids' test scores are dropping along with our standards (which I don't see happening, but maybe you have some insight that I don't), maybe it has more to do with their home situation, as opposed to the 9 hours a week or so that they spend online.
How many times per week do you masturbate? a) 0: Too busy getting laid. b) 0: Too busy playing NetHack. c) 1: Every Sunday during Alias. d) >= 2: My Mom says it's natural.
Results: 68% answered a). 31% answered b). 1% wrote in to ask where the CowboyNeal option was.
The levy on CD media actually stayed the same, and will remain the same through 2004 (link). Only mp3 players with non-removable storage media are charged. Removable storage devices, and also recordable DVDs, are exempt. I believe the act covers only music, not all content.
This uploading/downloading part is what I don't get. Where do they think the downloads come from? Under the analogy that downloading is the 'borrowing', wouldn't me sharing my files just be the 'allowing you to borrow', as opposed to the 'distribution'? It's not like I drag and drop my mp3 files onto your desktop. Anyway, the 'downloading legal, uploading illegal' is the position of the Copyright Board of Canada, not the Canadian legal system (yet).
Another good one is cantus, although I don't think it's active anymore. Cantus does batch retagging based on filenames, or batch renaming based on tags. Also has great controls for stripping leading/trailing spaces, fixing buggy tags, etc.
Can't someone please integrate cantus or easytag with a library management system, along with an mp3 player?!? It can be a gnome or kde app, I don't care. I want an (xmms | noatun | juk) & (madman | rhythmbox) & (easytag | cantus) combo.
You mean it now has most of the functionality of MusicMatch? I'm still looking for a Linux player that can do what MusicMatch does (not that winamp is a linux player, I'm just saying).
Darl says: "GPL is exactly opposite in its effect from the 'copyright' laws adopted by the US Congress and the European Union" because, with copyright, you give out your idea, and get something (usually money) in return. With GPL, you give out your idea and get nothing in return. Furthermore, you require anyone who uses your idea to get nothing in return.
Linus says: Wrong, you do get something in return, it's just not money, it's other people's ideas. If those ideas are GPL'd, they're copyrighted (is this right?), and the copyright law expressly states that copyrighted material is fair exchange.
I think the argument is a bit flaky, though, as it's mainly semantic. Darl says 'financial gain' means 'money or something that can be exchanged for money', and Linus says 'financial gain' means 'anything of value, including other copyrighted works'. I think the author of this part probably expected that you could then sell said copyrighted works for money, and this is why it's included.
Also, what about if I just want to give away my copyrighted work, and don't necessarily want others' copyrighted works in return? I like Lessig's rebuttal better. He says that copyright owners get to do whatever they want with their work (with a few exceptions), and that's what copyright law is about. Therefore if they want to give it away, they should be able to.
why choose GNOME to do this? Is there no Bengali support in KDE? I'm just wondering if there was a prevailing reason. On a side note, I like the Totem screen shot in the pictures. Why isn't there a KDE media player based on Xine, dammit?!?
This is a common interpretation of part of the Canadian Copyright Act (as another poster in this thread already linked to). However, this act protects the private copying of audio recordings. It is meant to protect someone who borrows a cd from a friend, and copies it onto a cdr, but the wording can be interpreted to mean any form of copying, as long as the person who owns the original is NOT the person doing the copying (I can copy my buddy's cd, but my buddy can't copy it for me).
What this act does not cover is the distribution of copyrighted material. Radio and television stations pay SOCAN for broadcasting SOCAN's copyrighted material. I realize that p2p copying can be seen as a mechanism of distribution, such that the Canadian Copyright Act and this SOCAN act have overlap, but I think the intended distinction is CCA covers private copying, SOCAN act covers public distribution.
So, is SOCAN completely retarded and evil? I don't think so, I think they see the ISP as "distibuting" in the same sense as the radio stations. Are they mislead? Yes, because the ISPs are the equivalent of the radio tower builders, the equipment providers, and the other people who provide infrastructure that enables radio communication, and not the equivalent of content broadcasters. I think they may know this, and just see the ISPs as easier targets than file-sharers/website owners.
and the internet service provider's position was at least represented by an eloquent speaker. I was surprised, however, that the segment noted that Canadian radio stations pay SOCAN a chunk of money, but nobody made the obvious (to me, anyway) observation that the people who enable radio communications are not paying SOCAN. The ISPs are saying, "don't go after us, go after the people who are distributing your material, like website owners, internet radio djs, etc." To drive the point home, they should be saying, "you don't get a check from the guy who builds the radio tower, or the guy who puts up the antannae, do you? then leave us alone for providing an infrastructure"
Where's the "gaping wound"? Let me check... hmmm... Holy Christ, my Mandrake Update still works! Surely this black hole that RedHat has created has caused SuSE's auto-update feature to break down! What's that, SuSE users? YaST still works? Oh...
We were using RedHat 8.0 in my lab, and now we have to switch distros. Not a big deal, we've got choices. I don't like RedHat's Gnome-y desktop anyway. Users who want what RedHat no longer provides will get along fine.
I realize that rural areas still suffer from lack of broadband options, but I wonder if power line broadband is really the solution. Just because power lines reach out to rural areas doesn't mean power line internet will, just as phone lines reach out to rural areas, but DSL might not. Anyway, 3 years is a long time ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the rural area you lived in before now has lots of providers.
then you probably have cheap enough DSL. There are 66 DSL providers, according to Canadian ISP. I don't know how much cheaper than $20 CDN (that's about $15 USD) you can expect. You can expect to pay $30 CDN for higher-than-average speeds (1700kb/s down, 300kb/s up), and/or no caps. Let's see power line internet beat that.
The connection he's trying to make is that when KaZaA spreads spyware to 10s of millions of people, it is largely ignored by the/. crowd. Most comments come to KaZaA's defence, saying Sharman Networks is the white knight trumpeting P2P legitimacy in the face of the 800lb gorilla (RIAA/MPAA), and could do no wrong. Then when an article comes up about Spyware distribution, which usually occurs through less-than-obvious installation on the back of programs like KaZaA,/. comments latch on to the less-common mechanism of email exploitation and are quick to blame Microsoft.
Compare the earlier thread about KaZaA with this one. There is very little critism of KaZaA's spyware distribution (if any), and more just back and forth with the same tired arguments about P2P legitimacy (I'm not saying they're not valid, I've just heard them all a million times). This thread has little or no mention of KaZaA (except for the parent post and subsequent replies), and more talk about poor email client design.
WinXP still has the curses-like insterface as well. I get this all the time from friends I'm trying to convert, "why doesn't Linux have a nice installer like Windows XP?" I tell them that the Windows XP SETUP is not the Windows XP INSTALLER.
True enough. I wonder if the other online music stores use WMA partly to lock out the iPod? I realize that they're not about to offer AAC files, and mp3 files perhaps do not have the DRM wrapper, but perhaps it's a nice side-effect.
How was it FUD? Don't just claim it's crap without addressing his points:
- Short battery life: TRUE. Apple's website claims that the battery life is 8 hours, whereas the author at CNet claims "six-plus". Seems about right, given variation from manufacturers' claims and user's experience. This is a valid complaint! I use a compactflash-based player for partly this reason (and cost, more on this in a second)
- Jogging enthusiasts need not apply: NOT SURE. I don't like his reasoning here, especially the line "Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that". Whatever... I'm more willing to believe the player is too bulky for joggers.
- High Cost: TRUE. Hugely true, in fact. You might find an old 10GB for $300 or less, but the newer ones are over $400. That's $520 Canadian, and for my money, I prefer to get a little Nex IIe for $70 ($90 CDN) and a 512MB CF card for $100 ($130 CDN) or so. Others would prefer a CD-mp3 player for $50-100.
- High Quality Recording: Probably TRUE. Musician friends of mine right now are still using their minidisc players to do recordings of their gigs. Probably a niche, but still a valid point.
- Choice of online store: CRAP. This is the weakest point of the article. I love his line that he doesn't "like being hemmed in". Yeah, the freedom of "secure" WMA files has all the liberation of a gulag... Since the death of EMusic, there hasn't been an online music store worth paying for, and I'm not going to base my choice of player on the current landscape. In fact, I've found that popular CDs are coming down in price. There have been CDs I've seen at $12 and $13 CDN (this is under $10 USD) in popular record stores around Toronto. It's only a few select new releases, but it's a step. Another year or two of competition from online music stores, I may find myself going back to CDs.
Aside from all this, from your logic CNet is disparaging the use of the iPod, because... what, they think mp3 players are detrimental to their mp3 downloading services? That's fantastic reasoning. If they were disparaging iTunes, maybe, but even then I don't think the markets are overlapping.
I'm assuming with ICQ they just run through all numbers from about 5 digits to 9 digits (or whatever ICQ's up to these days). With MSN IM most people use their hotmail address as identifier (because you don't have to go through the process of registering another email with MSN, IIRC). Hotmail addresses are easily obtained, through a variety of methods (guessed, harvested, purchased...). I'm not sure how hard it is to obtain AIM or Yahoo screen names. I don't think it has to do with the protocol being open or not, though. I think the people at Trillian and Gaim have basically opened all the protocols. I think the "spim"ers aren't using protocol exploits (although I could be wrong), I think they're just obtaining screen names.
I find that my 1950 mAh NiMH rechargeables last longer on each charge (> 10 hours) than brand-name alkalines, let alone the Sorny versions that choke after a few hours in my mp3 player. You can probably pick up a charger and 4-8 battaries for $30-40. For me it paid for itself in a matter of weeks, and I don't constantly find myself without batteries for my walk home.
When a linux distro has that slick of an install ("Just click "next""...), along with *all* the device drivers, it'll really take off on the desktop.
I am soooo tired of the assumption that the Windows SETUP is the Windows INSTALLER. Have you ever installed WinXP from scratch? It's still the ugly yellow text on blue TEXT INTERFACE. You can't just click next, next, next. You have to hit, like Shift-F8 to agree with the license, and partition/format the harddrive (I'm not complaining about the ability to partition/format here, I'm just pointing out it's not as easy as people think), and then install the OS. You are not guaranteed that everything will "just work" when you boot up. It will boot (assuming you haven't made the egregious mistake of trying to install Windows second, assuming it knows how to properly overwrite the MBR), and there will be GUI, and sound, and maybe networking, but you still probably need the disks a lot of your hardware came with.
Now, Mandrake, RedHat, and SuSE all have very nice graphical installers. I haven't tried all these installers, but I know Mandrake (my favourite) has an installer where you can click next, next, next, except for the choice of root password, and a single user/pass, and the rest is taken care of for you. Even the part where it partitions for you, and, IIRC, shrinks any Windows partition you have without formating it, and installs Linux in a dual boot configuration with Windows automaticlally mounted at/mnt/windows. I had no problem with any of my hardware, nor have I had any problems with putting it on my friends' computers.
Granted, you do have a point with the USB devices. I have yet to plug in a usb mouse and have it "just work", but general usb storage devices "just work" in Mandrake. USB printers still have to be configured, AFAIK. Anyway, just my Canadian 2 cents...
Jess in action somewhat fustrating...
on
Jess in Action
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Jess is very handy, don't get me wrong, and the Java API is great except for one large omission:
Right now the jess.Defrule class does not expose enough public methods to properly create one outside of the jess package.
That's straight out of the latest Jess documentation. You can't construct rules from Java! Well, you can pass a text string to Rete.executeCommand, but this is hardly elegant. Grrr... Am I missing something here? If not, then PLEASE give me a constructor for Defrules, Mr. Friedman-Hill.
It's getting frustrating enough that I've been interested in an open-source alternative to Jess (academic license is no charge, but you have to pay for it for commercial use): drools. This has to be the dumbest project name ever, and I haven't even looked at much of the code yet, but it looks promising. Anybody have any experience with it? Please hold back your drool jokes for now...
I believe that you are attempting to boost sales of your video cards and operating systems by associating yourselves with our acclaimed film. Please desist or we will be forced send naked robots to kill you.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a lot of experience using word processors, but I have switched people over to Linux, and the number one complaint is OpenOffice. Here are the complaints:
- It's slow, reaaaalllly slow (yes, OO 1.1 is slower than MS Office 2000).
- Where is Times New Roman? (Windows font, not installed by default)
- These fonts look weird, and strain my eyes. (OK, turn off anti-aliased fonts)
- It doesn't do lists easily. Do this in OpenOffice 1.1:
1. item one (enter)
It may number the next line 2. but if you hit the increase indent button, it does not go to 1.1, and it's not easy to figure out how to make it do this. It took me 20 minutes to figure out for my wife how to do this.
- It doesn't remember the last font you told it to use. Choose a font, do stuff, close OO, open OO, back to Nimbus Roman.
Some complaints were just vague. I had a girl who had done some secretarial temping, and told me that she felt OpenOffice was "written yesterday" and that it was not nearly sophisticated enough for her day-to-day use. This frustrated me, because I wanted to know what specifically was deficient, but I didn't press it, as converting people to Linux is a delicate operation, and I just try to give people what they want. So I just said, fine, we'll put MS Office on it for you.
But they need someone to DDoS IBM before they can figure out what code...
I bet it really bugged the RIAA to see 128.210.99.156 on the list.
Who cares if they use it for anything useful? The more Americans (or Canadians, in my case) that are using the internet, the more companies are going to decide providing internet service is lucrative, the cheaper my internet service is going to get. "Useful" is a pretty loaded term anyway. Chatting and emailing frivolous messages can be useful, just to stay connected to people we wouldn't talk to otherwise. Downloading pornography is useful in that it provides a much more discreet way to obtain it, thereby reducing seedy looking porn shops that, typically, aren't adding much the city landscape. The downloading of music is insanely useful to me (at least it was, until EMusic effectively shut down). I also use the internet to read news and teach myself how to code in various languages, but I don't think these are the things that define "usefulness". If indeed our kids' test scores are dropping along with our standards (which I don't see happening, but maybe you have some insight that I don't), maybe it has more to do with their home situation, as opposed to the 9 hours a week or so that they spend online.
The survey was as follows:
How many times per week do you masturbate?
a) 0: Too busy getting laid.
b) 0: Too busy playing NetHack.
c) 1: Every Sunday during Alias.
d) >= 2: My Mom says it's natural.
Results:
68% answered a).
31% answered b).
1% wrote in to ask where the CowboyNeal option was.
The levy on CD media actually stayed the same, and will remain the same through 2004 (link). Only mp3 players with non-removable storage media are charged. Removable storage devices, and also recordable DVDs, are exempt. I believe the act covers only music, not all content.
This uploading/downloading part is what I don't get. Where do they think the downloads come from? Under the analogy that downloading is the 'borrowing', wouldn't me sharing my files just be the 'allowing you to borrow', as opposed to the 'distribution'? It's not like I drag and drop my mp3 files onto your desktop. Anyway, the 'downloading legal, uploading illegal' is the position of the Copyright Board of Canada, not the Canadian legal system (yet).
Another good one is cantus, although I don't think it's active anymore. Cantus does batch retagging based on filenames, or batch renaming based on tags. Also has great controls for stripping leading/trailing spaces, fixing buggy tags, etc.
Can't someone please integrate cantus or easytag with a library management system, along with an mp3 player?!? It can be a gnome or kde app, I don't care. I want an (xmms | noatun | juk) & (madman | rhythmbox) & (easytag | cantus) combo.
You mean it now has most of the functionality of MusicMatch? I'm still looking for a Linux player that can do what MusicMatch does (not that winamp is a linux player, I'm just saying).
Summary:
Darl says: "GPL is exactly opposite in its effect from the 'copyright' laws adopted by the US Congress and the European Union" because, with copyright, you give out your idea, and get something (usually money) in return. With GPL, you give out your idea and get nothing in return. Furthermore, you require anyone who uses your idea to get nothing in return.
Linus says: Wrong, you do get something in return, it's just not money, it's other people's ideas. If those ideas are GPL'd, they're copyrighted (is this right?), and the copyright law expressly states that copyrighted material is fair exchange.
I think the argument is a bit flaky, though, as it's mainly semantic. Darl says 'financial gain' means 'money or something that can be exchanged for money', and Linus says 'financial gain' means 'anything of value, including other copyrighted works'. I think the author of this part probably expected that you could then sell said copyrighted works for money, and this is why it's included.
Also, what about if I just want to give away my copyrighted work, and don't necessarily want others' copyrighted works in return? I like Lessig's rebuttal better. He says that copyright owners get to do whatever they want with their work (with a few exceptions), and that's what copyright law is about. Therefore if they want to give it away, they should be able to.
I believe he wrote the entire thing out of the press release, and a quote from a "friend", but we have never seen this before have we!
Look, just because you don't agree with Eugenia's OS reviews, that doesn't mean you should get all sarcastic...
why choose GNOME to do this? Is there no Bengali support in KDE? I'm just wondering if there was a prevailing reason. On a side note, I like the Totem screen shot in the pictures. Why isn't there a KDE media player based on Xine, dammit?!?
This is a common interpretation of part of the Canadian Copyright Act (as another poster in this thread already linked to). However, this act protects the private copying of audio recordings. It is meant to protect someone who borrows a cd from a friend, and copies it onto a cdr, but the wording can be interpreted to mean any form of copying, as long as the person who owns the original is NOT the person doing the copying (I can copy my buddy's cd, but my buddy can't copy it for me).
What this act does not cover is the distribution of copyrighted material. Radio and television stations pay SOCAN for broadcasting SOCAN's copyrighted material. I realize that p2p copying can be seen as a mechanism of distribution, such that the Canadian Copyright Act and this SOCAN act have overlap, but I think the intended distinction is CCA covers private copying, SOCAN act covers public distribution.
So, is SOCAN completely retarded and evil? I don't think so, I think they see the ISP as "distibuting" in the same sense as the radio stations. Are they mislead? Yes, because the ISPs are the equivalent of the radio tower builders, the equipment providers, and the other people who provide infrastructure that enables radio communication, and not the equivalent of content broadcasters. I think they may know this, and just see the ISPs as easier targets than file-sharers/website owners.
and the internet service provider's position was at least represented by an eloquent speaker. I was surprised, however, that the segment noted that Canadian radio stations pay SOCAN a chunk of money, but nobody made the obvious (to me, anyway) observation that the people who enable radio communications are not paying SOCAN. The ISPs are saying, "don't go after us, go after the people who are distributing your material, like website owners, internet radio djs, etc." To drive the point home, they should be saying, "you don't get a check from the guy who builds the radio tower, or the guy who puts up the antannae, do you? then leave us alone for providing an infrastructure"
Where's the "gaping wound"? Let me check... hmmm... Holy Christ, my Mandrake Update still works! Surely this black hole that RedHat has created has caused SuSE's auto-update feature to break down! What's that, SuSE users? YaST still works? Oh...
We were using RedHat 8.0 in my lab, and now we have to switch distros. Not a big deal, we've got choices. I don't like RedHat's Gnome-y desktop anyway. Users who want what RedHat no longer provides will get along fine.
I realize that rural areas still suffer from lack of broadband options, but I wonder if power line broadband is really the solution. Just because power lines reach out to rural areas doesn't mean power line internet will, just as phone lines reach out to rural areas, but DSL might not. Anyway, 3 years is a long time ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the rural area you lived in before now has lots of providers.
then you probably have cheap enough DSL. There are 66 DSL providers, according to Canadian ISP. I don't know how much cheaper than $20 CDN (that's about $15 USD) you can expect. You can expect to pay $30 CDN for higher-than-average speeds (1700kb/s down, 300kb/s up), and/or no caps. Let's see power line internet beat that.
The connection he's trying to make is that when KaZaA spreads spyware to 10s of millions of people, it is largely ignored by the /. crowd. Most comments come to KaZaA's defence, saying Sharman Networks is the white knight trumpeting P2P legitimacy in the face of the 800lb gorilla (RIAA/MPAA), and could do no wrong. Then when an article comes up about Spyware distribution, which usually occurs through less-than-obvious installation on the back of programs like KaZaA, /. comments latch on to the less-common mechanism of email exploitation and are quick to blame Microsoft.
Compare the earlier thread about KaZaA with this one. There is very little critism of KaZaA's spyware distribution (if any), and more just back and forth with the same tired arguments about P2P legitimacy (I'm not saying they're not valid, I've just heard them all a million times). This thread has little or no mention of KaZaA (except for the parent post and subsequent replies), and more talk about poor email client design.
WinXP still has the curses-like insterface as well. I get this all the time from friends I'm trying to convert, "why doesn't Linux have a nice installer like Windows XP?" I tell them that the Windows XP SETUP is not the Windows XP INSTALLER.
True enough. I wonder if the other online music stores use WMA partly to lock out the iPod? I realize that they're not about to offer AAC files, and mp3 files perhaps do not have the DRM wrapper, but perhaps it's a nice side-effect.
How was it FUD? Don't just claim it's crap without addressing his points:
- Short battery life: TRUE. Apple's website claims that the battery life is 8 hours, whereas the author at CNet claims "six-plus". Seems about right, given variation from manufacturers' claims and user's experience. This is a valid complaint! I use a compactflash-based player for partly this reason (and cost, more on this in a second)
- Jogging enthusiasts need not apply: NOT SURE. I don't like his reasoning here, especially the line "Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that". Whatever... I'm more willing to believe the player is too bulky for joggers.
- High Cost: TRUE. Hugely true, in fact. You might find an old 10GB for $300 or less, but the newer ones are over $400. That's $520 Canadian, and for my money, I prefer to get a little Nex IIe for $70 ($90 CDN) and a 512MB CF card for $100 ($130 CDN) or so. Others would prefer a CD-mp3 player for $50-100.
- High Quality Recording: Probably TRUE. Musician friends of mine right now are still using their minidisc players to do recordings of their gigs. Probably a niche, but still a valid point.
- Choice of online store: CRAP. This is the weakest point of the article. I love his line that he doesn't "like being hemmed in". Yeah, the freedom of "secure" WMA files has all the liberation of a gulag... Since the death of EMusic, there hasn't been an online music store worth paying for, and I'm not going to base my choice of player on the current landscape. In fact, I've found that popular CDs are coming down in price. There have been CDs I've seen at $12 and $13 CDN (this is under $10 USD) in popular record stores around Toronto. It's only a few select new releases, but it's a step. Another year or two of competition from online music stores, I may find myself going back to CDs.
Aside from all this, from your logic CNet is disparaging the use of the iPod, because... what, they think mp3 players are detrimental to their mp3 downloading services? That's fantastic reasoning. If they were disparaging iTunes, maybe, but even then I don't think the markets are overlapping.
Where do they get your screen name?
I'm assuming with ICQ they just run through all numbers from about 5 digits to 9 digits (or whatever ICQ's up to these days). With MSN IM most people use their hotmail address as identifier (because you don't have to go through the process of registering another email with MSN, IIRC). Hotmail addresses are easily obtained, through a variety of methods (guessed, harvested, purchased...). I'm not sure how hard it is to obtain AIM or Yahoo screen names. I don't think it has to do with the protocol being open or not, though. I think the people at Trillian and Gaim have basically opened all the protocols. I think the "spim"ers aren't using protocol exploits (although I could be wrong), I think they're just obtaining screen names.
I find that my 1950 mAh NiMH rechargeables last longer on each charge (> 10 hours) than brand-name alkalines, let alone the Sorny versions that choke after a few hours in my mp3 player. You can probably pick up a charger and 4-8 battaries for $30-40. For me it paid for itself in a matter of weeks, and I don't constantly find myself without batteries for my walk home.
When a linux distro has that slick of an install ("Just click "next""...), along with *all* the device drivers, it'll really take off on the desktop.
/mnt/windows. I had no problem with any of my hardware, nor have I had any problems with putting it on my friends' computers.
I am soooo tired of the assumption that the Windows SETUP is the Windows INSTALLER. Have you ever installed WinXP from scratch? It's still the ugly yellow text on blue TEXT INTERFACE. You can't just click next, next, next. You have to hit, like Shift-F8 to agree with the license, and partition/format the harddrive (I'm not complaining about the ability to partition/format here, I'm just pointing out it's not as easy as people think), and then install the OS. You are not guaranteed that everything will "just work" when you boot up. It will boot (assuming you haven't made the egregious mistake of trying to install Windows second, assuming it knows how to properly overwrite the MBR), and there will be GUI, and sound, and maybe networking, but you still probably need the disks a lot of your hardware came with.
Now, Mandrake, RedHat, and SuSE all have very nice graphical installers. I haven't tried all these installers, but I know Mandrake (my favourite) has an installer where you can click next, next, next, except for the choice of root password, and a single user/pass, and the rest is taken care of for you. Even the part where it partitions for you, and, IIRC, shrinks any Windows partition you have without formating it, and installs Linux in a dual boot configuration with Windows automaticlally mounted at
Granted, you do have a point with the USB devices. I have yet to plug in a usb mouse and have it "just work", but general usb storage devices "just work" in Mandrake. USB printers still have to be configured, AFAIK. Anyway, just my Canadian 2 cents...
Jess is very handy, don't get me wrong, and the Java API is great except for one large omission:
Right now the jess.Defrule class does not expose enough public methods to properly create one outside of the jess package.
That's straight out of the latest Jess documentation. You can't construct rules from Java! Well, you can pass a text string to Rete.executeCommand, but this is hardly elegant. Grrr... Am I missing something here? If not, then PLEASE give me a constructor for Defrules, Mr. Friedman-Hill.
It's getting frustrating enough that I've been interested in an open-source alternative to Jess (academic license is no charge, but you have to pay for it for commercial use): drools. This has to be the dumbest project name ever, and I haven't even looked at much of the code yet, but it looks promising. Anybody have any experience with it? Please hold back your drool jokes for now...
Dear NVidia and Microsoft,
I believe that you are attempting to boost sales of your video cards and operating systems by associating yourselves with our acclaimed film. Please desist or we will be forced send naked robots to kill you.
Sincerely,
Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy