I think they could fix this problem by discarding result URLs which do not actually have the searched for term.
They aren't trying to infer how high quality the set of results is, just the relative proportion of sites indexed by either engine, so I think this would be a good solution.
I think the thing that annoys some of us about the buzzword is that it is tied to one company, Apple. They didn't invent RSS or MP3 players. In fact both things were pretty well established when the iPod came along. Apple just happens to have an overpriced MP3 player brand that has been made popular by the Mac artsy types that hold sway over the tech publications, presumably because macs are historically popular for DTP.
The whole mac-elite thing just gets on my nerves and I'm not totally sure why. Take MAKE, for example. A great idea, and really cool at times but the whole shiny clean Mac bias in there makes me want to throw it up on top of the house and let it get nice and funky up there before I fetch it and take another look at it. Electronics and building things is gritty bare metal kind of stuff. It doesn't have nice clean lines, good use of color and impeccable grammar. Am I communicating here?
Anyway, if it was called "RSS Radio" or "RSS Audio" or something like that it would grate less on my nerves.
was all it took for me to figure out which package to install. Or during a desktop install it is there by default as I believe it is in Debian and Ubuntu.
Yes at some point I had to learn how to use apt. At some point windows users have to learn to find things in the control panel, and what "my computer" is, and what a virus scanner is, and to find the setup.exe, not to open email attachments, etc.
The learning curve always costs. Whether it is a good tradeoff to learn something new is on a case by case basis. In some cases, you can hire someone else who already knows how to do the work.
Installing Debian Linux (one time hit) and learning to use apt or synaptic makes a library of 30,000 programs an apt-get away. That's a very high return on your investment. In Windows you pop in a CD and look for the setup.exe. A bit less to do, but hey, you can pay me $75 an hour to come to your house and install the occasional app via apt-get and you'll probably pay less than if you bought payware.
As to whether having code is valuable... having the code to Windows has a value. Every time I try to figure out why some bloody control isn't working, and have to work around a bug instead of fixing it, or at least scoping out the code to see exactly what I'm up against I incur more cost than if I had the code.
So I would say you're just wrong there... having the code has an inherent value, just like having a support contract for software has an inherent value, or the right to return a product to the store has an inherent value (that you pay for) even if you never use it.
As to saying "open source is the one true way" or "you're either with us or agin us" is not what I said. Proprietary software has advantages and open source has advantages. Probably the biggest difference between the two in this regard is that often in open source developers are working on their free time so they don't pick the unpleasent squishy messy UI polish tasks that a proprietary software maker just pays to get done. And for open source the community of early adopters does the QA. Well, maybe we're the same on that score...
No one said your work was meaningless (why would I, I don't know what you do). I write some proprietary software too. It's often a perfectly rational thing to do.
In this case though, to a systems programmer anyway, virtualization software is all fun, so it's being worked on and is going to be worked on, and it will lay waste to the products in this market. That's life in the big city.
Here's an idea I have seen implemented infrequently by professors: allowing the students to use the previous edition. Usually between two subsequent editions there isn't much change. If you can remap the chapter and problem numbers to allow students to reuse a prior edition, they can save a lot of money by buying an older copy at a significantly reduced price.
Also mention "buying online" to students. Even on new books one can save about 50% over the campus bookstore price. Same for the inflated used book prices. As online venues continue to lower the prices, and students know about and use them, the campus bookstores will be forced to price sensibly. Today, they behave like they have a monopoly.
"Free stuff is worth what you pay for it" is absolute nonsense. Please, pick up an economics text... a good is worth the maximum amount you would be WILLING TO PAY for it. I use Openoffice.org, Debian Linux, Vim, Firefox, gcc, many libraries etc. on a daily basis. I paid nothing to acquire them other than the bandwidth to download them, and the time to install them (apt-get install mozilla-firefox, wait 30 seconds). Your statement implies that they therefore have no value beyond perhaps the cost of getting them set up. Right.
What's the real value of open source alternatives... lets see there's the utility of the programs themselves, the value of having the source code that I can alter myself or pay someone else to alter, that value of having a community that is motivated for various reasons to give free or cheap support, and when necessary paid support. Often you get to talk directly to the developer of the software themselves. What's all that worth?
Xen is catching up, with a big assist from the hardware vendors. Add to that the fact that there isn't much more to be added to virtual machine emulators, and VmWare has to be worried over some specific timeframe... my guess, 2 to 3 years and this product will be a commodity with close to $0 price tag.
I guess there's always the possibility that they could leverage some of their patents against their open source competitors. But that's about the only thing they have in their arsenal.
I made no assumption that VmWare is going to "sit still"... my point is the most important parts of the functionality they support already exists in the free equivalents. The free equivalents are slower today, and they don't have the hot-swap stuff but they will when they start to leverage the hardware support.
What chance does a competitor to GCC have on a Linux based OS? None... C compilation is basically a solved problem. My point is that the same thing is happening to virtual machine software. It was a niche market to begin with, and it's coming to an end, that simple.
This is the kind of system component that F/OSS projects can quite effectively commoditize (or snuff out depending on your point of view). It's a purely technical thing, no UI of importance, and for the most part you can drive development with bug reports and patches. I.e. once the infrastructure is in place, improvements can be made completely incrementally.
Perhaps you're right that a stupid company dies by standing still. But you have to admit that sometimes "not standing still" means shutting down the company/division or exiting a market.
Huh? An API is not source code. Nothing to see there...
VmWare is going to continue in the proprietary vein. The F/OSS community has several projects going for it though: QEMU, Bochs, CoLinux, Xen and some others.
VmWare Workstation is a solid product. But I think VmWare/EMC is probably in trouble as these other projects become more mature, especially Xen since it will take advantage of hardware support for virtualization.
They are all fairly usable now, and it doesn't seem that pushing them over the hump is going to take moving heaven and earth.
Since the purchase by EMC, their new business model is helping companies consolidate several virtual servers onto one machine, and to be able to move virtual servers easily off of broken hardware quickly. They still sell the Workstation product though.
Does Bill have a handle on Free Software versus Open Source software licenses? If the word Free appeared in his original responses, it was magically filtered out by PR. Just about all the qestions read "F/OSS" and in all the responses the "F/" is missing, even in questions where it seemed to be relevant.
If Hilf is Microsoft's ear/mouthpiece to our community, it would be pretty shocking to think that Free and OSS are really muddled together in his head. So I would bet this was done after the fact... but with what rationale?
Actually I responded to directly to his question. First, I reinforced his supposition (which he seems to be waffling on) that there's probably nothing you can do if you let people have general purpose computers. And I made the point that to attempt to try would be costly.
Then I said that if you're just worried about an employee acting negligently (i.e. not being careful) then you need to start checking people for secrets at the door, and make some examples. Suddenly you will find that the accidents become much less frequent.
So while yeah it is a rant, I think also hit all his points.
How about a kernel compiled without USB drivers. Hmm... while we're at it probably should remove serial port drivers, parallel port driver (backpack cdrom writer uh-oh) cd writer drivers, sound card drivers (the analog hole eek!), network drivers (don't want a hole through which data could escape to another machine which DOES have USB) and probably we won't be needing video drivers, because if you have those, then the employee might look at the company secrets on the monitor and assimilate them into their "brain" and OMFG WALK OFF WITH THEM.
There's nothing you can do. It's stupid to try. There are any number of ways to steal data electronically if an employee wishes to do it. If it's happening by accident maybe you could do random searches on exit of the premises (please, though be egalitarian... the execs should actually be the first to be searched since they have the most important data). Oh yeah, and fire the first poor soul that walks out with any data storage media with company data on it.
A few employees getting busted and the news will spread. People will be very careful about where the data ends up if they understand the policy AND that it is going to be enforced.
This is a human problem, unfortunately you can't solve every problem with technology. Attempting to do so will just interfere with hardworking creative techies who are actually just trying to get their work done efficiently.
It's not dreaming to demand and expect source drivers. It's like when one of my former bosses was asked "how do you get your engineers to keep their documentation up-to-date?" Reply: "Simple. I make it a condition of employment."
Always prefer hardware for which a open source driver exists. Avoid solutions for which there is no good hardware which has an open source driver. Tell problem OEMs why you aren't buying their stuff.
That, and growing the Linux user base is the way to attract the OEMs.
Except for graphic chips, where vendors are worried about infringing patents and so they keep stuff proprietary, there is no advantage for OEMs to keep their hardware undocumented. They are selling the hardware, not the bits to go with it. The proof to that is that you can usually go to their web site and download the bits for free; they don't require registration of the drivers, etc.
"Concentrate on driver support..." are you kidding? As far as the "catch up" game of creating drivers AFTER hardware shows up on the market, often with no public chip docs, the kernel devs do a really good job. But by definition of "catch up" we can never be as good as other platforms until 3rd parties support us out of the box.
The reason we don't have supported 3rd party drivers is because Linux doesn't have the market share (yet) to warrant the OEMs supporting us.
The more people use Linux the more support we'll get.
Or, we could all just sit around "concentrating" on better driver support and user support.
As to end-user support... I've had good experiences with every Linux company and every lone developer I needed help from. As to "migrate native applications" to the platform, I assume you mean Office.
Yeah, you keep waiting for MS to port Office to Linux, something they've specifically said they won't do. I'm not going to hold my breath. There are good alternatives (OOo) and Word, Excel run just fine under Crossover.
The story we need to tell is that there are tens of thousands of applications at your fingertips at $0 cost when you use something like Debian GNU/Linux. The apps are here. Try a vanilla Windows install something. It comes with a browser, a media player, Write, notepad, a calculator, Solitaire and Hyperterm. Almost nothing, and what is there is, compared to FOSS solutions, mostly crap.
So we just need to build the user base to make the platform ubiquitous. Heck, end users may even need a geek to maintain their box for the time being, or at least do the initial install. I don't know about you, but the last time I checked that's the case even with Windows. I'm always getting hit up for free support from family members.
I agree, to an extent. But if you throw inheritance out for composition, you really need a more evolved concept of composition than is typical.
Inheritance is never necessary. But just saying "always use object composition" doesn't make sense either, in and of itself.
All objects should be considered as an assembly with a boundary, with multiple terminals to connect to other components. Each terminal can have its own interface type. Multiple interfaces nodes (connectable terminals) with different types is a much more straightforward and flexible concept than mashing all your interfaces together with multiple inheritance. It is simply unnatural to expect interfaces to mix like paint. They don't.
Why not just have a orderly constructed system of components, subcomponents, terminals and a connection broker to rig it all up? Is-a and has-a degenerate cases not worth considering. Almost all real world components of interesting complexity are a case of "this-does" where this-does breaks into naturally into multiple subfunctions (connectable terminals).
Anybody know a language that facilitates such a model (don't mention COM, please, most of that is dedicated to versioning interfaces and not really important for the main concept)? You can do this in C++ or C if you want to do all the scaffolding yourself.
Not only should we have giant genetically engineered food animals, but we should make them smart, just to tell God and anyone else who the new boss is.
Personally, I don't like my windows to haphazardly overlap at all... I use a tabbed non-overlapping window manage Ion. Ratpoison is cool too.
Plus these windowing systems have nice keyboard shortcuts.
In general the desktop metaphor sucks. My real-life desktop is a perpetual mess and I can't find a damn thing. Why simulate a crappy system on a computer? I won't say Ion and Ratpoison don't have rough edges. But it's a more exciting direction and more usable for a keyboard user like me.
Sure the virtual desktop was cool in the 80's just to see the graphics capabilities finally be used on a daily basis. But it's 2005, stick a fork in it, it's done...
Well I won't give Dvorak a page hit; I don't think he's really a drooling idiot, so it must be a troll.
But I'll counter his argument with one example where CC worked beautifully:
I asked Leo Brodie author of Thinking Forth to allow republication of his book under a Creative Commons license. We discussed different options... he chose a "non-commercial" clause, but allowed derivative works and share-alike.
So what we have is a LaTeX repub and PDF downloadable from SourceForge by anyone. And he is selling hardcopies of the book through a print-on-demand publisher.
A project is in the works to update all the classic Forth examples to modern Forth usage. Also a translation to Spanish of the LaTeX repub is underway.
How could Dvorak be so obtuse? Of course Brodie could negotiate a separate license with each person who wanted to make some use of Thinking Forth, or just sell copies. But without granting additional rights, he wouldn't have gotten the free labor and TF would have stayed out of print and an orphaned works for 70 PLUS YEARS.
The Creative Commons licenses are just a legal tool, that's all. It's like going to the bookstore and buying a bunch of standard contracts. It reduces the time, if any, you have to spend with a real lawyer in order to grant rights to use your work beyond what copyright allows, safely, to a wide audience without negotating with each user individually, one-on-one.
Simple, understandable. Dvorak, you're just a troll.
KnoppMyth... the main stumbling blocks were figuring out that the card doesn't show up as/dev/dtv0 (as it used to) but instead as/dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 and also that the HDTV channel numbers as given by zap2it (28-1 for example) are not understood by MythTV. And when it doesn't understand them, you get a nice black screen.
I don't really hang out on the forums so if you try KnoppMyth and need help, just email me (my email is accessible through the URL link).
Well the state of Linux today is that if you have relatively new hardware you either cannot use it fully or you need to be able to add publicly available patches and patch your own kernel.
Doing HDTV under MythTV with 2.6.12 is cutting edge unfortunately... I've spent the last week hassling with it but I finally got it going. For regular TV though, KnoppMyth is a walk in the park.
KnoppMyth is in the end based on Debian. So there's nothing to stop you from installing any programs you want including Octave. You just need to learn to use apt-get.
As to your HD hardware working on Windows... well, yeah, your card was designed, tested, and possibly certified by Microsoft to run on Windows. Until the hardware vendors get on board and fully support Linux, there will always be at least a lag time between the card appearing on the market, and it being usable in Linux by the average user.
Well, MythTV is in my opinion a perfect argument for more, specialized distributions.
For MythTV, there is "KnoppMyth" which provides a super simple install based on Knoppix (which is derived from Debian). It is targeted at being easy to install.
There's no way a dedicated PVR box is going to be served best by a vanilla Debian or FC install. Even Microsoft produces "Windows Media Center Edition" as a customized OS to be used as a PVR.
You imply that less is never more. Sometimes it is, especially when the more you're getting is a more usable interface and longer battery life.
Personally, I use a Palm IIIxe. It was the last Palm that used standard AAA batteries, easily replaceable in the field. It has less RAM/flash than a modern Palm, and a monochrome screen, but it works great as a PIM, and has a standard serial port. Wireless internet access, games and movies on my PIM are just distractions so there is no real trade-off for me.
Property does come into it for me, since I sincerely desire that JKR's crappy writing be kept OFF MY PROPERTY. Alas it's not to be since my wife is hooked on the Harry Crack.
Tolkien's prose ruined me for all fantasy I've read since.
The article's scope is clearly, purposefully limited to poking around the filesystem. No DMCA or other copyright issues involved. If anything, trade secret, but it's hard to argue using an Apple filesystem is a reasonable step towards protecting a secret.
Anyway, I'd be surprised if IBM legal hadn't already given the article the green light.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they could fix this problem by discarding result URLs which do not actually have the searched for term.
They aren't trying to infer how high quality the set of results is, just the relative proportion of sites indexed by either engine, so I think this would be a good solution.
-- John.
I think the thing that annoys some of us about the buzzword is that it is tied to one company, Apple. They didn't invent RSS or MP3 players. In fact both things were pretty well established when the iPod came along. Apple just happens to have an overpriced MP3 player brand that has been made popular by the Mac artsy types that hold sway over the tech publications, presumably because macs are historically popular for DTP.
The whole mac-elite thing just gets on my nerves and I'm not totally sure why. Take MAKE, for example. A great idea, and really cool at times but the whole shiny clean Mac bias in there makes me want to throw it up on top of the house and let it get nice and funky up there before I fetch it and take another look at it. Electronics and building things is gritty bare metal kind of stuff. It doesn't have nice clean lines, good use of color and impeccable grammar. Am I communicating here?
Anyway, if it was called "RSS Radio" or "RSS Audio" or something like that it would grate less on my nerves.
-- John.
apt-cache search firefox
was all it took for me to figure out which package to install. Or during a desktop install it is there by default as I believe it is in Debian and Ubuntu.
Yes at some point I had to learn how to use apt. At some point windows users have to learn to find things in the control panel, and what "my computer" is, and what a virus scanner is, and to find the setup.exe, not to open email attachments, etc.
The learning curve always costs. Whether it is a good tradeoff to learn something new is on a case by case basis. In some cases, you can hire someone else who already knows how to do the work.
Installing Debian Linux (one time hit) and learning to use apt or synaptic makes a library of 30,000 programs an apt-get away. That's a very high return on your investment. In Windows you pop in a CD and look for the setup.exe. A bit less to do, but hey, you can pay me $75 an hour to come to your house and install the occasional app via apt-get and you'll probably pay less than if you bought payware.
As to whether having code is valuable... having the code to Windows has a value. Every time I try to figure out why some bloody control isn't working, and have to work around a bug instead of fixing it, or at least scoping out the code to see exactly what I'm up against I incur more cost than if I had the code.
So I would say you're just wrong there... having the code has an inherent value, just like having a support contract for software has an inherent value, or the right to return a product to the store has an inherent value (that you pay for) even if you never use it.
As to saying "open source is the one true way" or "you're either with us or agin us" is not what I said. Proprietary software has advantages and open source has advantages. Probably the biggest difference between the two in this regard is that often in open source developers are working on their free time so they don't pick the unpleasent squishy messy UI polish tasks that a proprietary software maker just pays to get done. And for open source the community of early adopters does the QA. Well, maybe we're the same on that score...
No one said your work was meaningless (why would I, I don't know what you do). I write some proprietary software too. It's often a perfectly rational thing to do.
In this case though, to a systems programmer anyway, virtualization software is all fun, so it's being worked on and is going to be worked on, and it will lay waste to the products in this market. That's life in the big city.
-- John.
Here's an idea I have seen implemented infrequently by professors: allowing the students to use the previous edition. Usually between two subsequent editions there isn't much change. If you can remap the chapter and problem numbers to allow students to reuse a prior edition, they can save a lot of money by buying an older copy at a significantly reduced price.
Also mention "buying online" to students. Even on new books one can save about 50% over the campus bookstore price. Same for the inflated used book prices. As online venues continue to lower the prices, and students know about and use them, the campus bookstores will be forced to price sensibly. Today, they behave like they have a monopoly.
-- John.
"Free stuff is worth what you pay for it" is absolute nonsense. Please, pick up an economics text... a good is worth the maximum amount you would be WILLING TO PAY for it. I use Openoffice.org, Debian Linux, Vim, Firefox, gcc, many libraries etc. on a daily basis. I paid nothing to acquire them other than the bandwidth to download them, and the time to install them (apt-get install mozilla-firefox, wait 30 seconds). Your statement implies that they therefore have no value beyond perhaps the cost of getting them set up. Right.
What's the real value of open source alternatives... lets see there's the utility of the programs themselves, the value of having the source code that I can alter myself or pay someone else to alter, that value of having a community that is motivated for various reasons to give free or cheap support, and when necessary paid support. Often you get to talk directly to the developer of the software themselves. What's all that worth?
Xen is catching up, with a big assist from the hardware vendors. Add to that the fact that there isn't much more to be added to virtual machine emulators, and VmWare has to be worried over some specific timeframe... my guess, 2 to 3 years and this product will be a commodity with close to $0 price tag.
I guess there's always the possibility that they could leverage some of their patents against their open source competitors. But that's about the only thing they have in their arsenal.
I made no assumption that VmWare is going to "sit still"... my point is the most important parts of the functionality they support already exists in the free equivalents. The free equivalents are slower today, and they don't have the hot-swap stuff but they will when they start to leverage the hardware support.
What chance does a competitor to GCC have on a Linux based OS? None... C compilation is basically a solved problem. My point is that the same thing is happening to virtual machine software. It was a niche market to begin with, and it's coming to an end, that simple.
This is the kind of system component that F/OSS projects can quite effectively commoditize (or snuff out depending on your point of view). It's a purely technical thing, no UI of importance, and for the most part you can drive development with bug reports and patches. I.e. once the infrastructure is in place, improvements can be made completely incrementally.
Perhaps you're right that a stupid company dies by standing still. But you have to admit that sometimes "not standing still" means shutting down the company/division or exiting a market.
-- John.
Huh? An API is not source code. Nothing to see there...
VmWare is going to continue in the proprietary vein. The F/OSS community has several projects going for it though: QEMU, Bochs, CoLinux, Xen and some others.
VmWare Workstation is a solid product. But I think VmWare/EMC is probably in trouble as these other projects become more mature, especially Xen since it will take advantage of hardware support for virtualization.
They are all fairly usable now, and it doesn't seem that pushing them over the hump is going to take moving heaven and earth.
-- John.
Since the purchase by EMC, their new business model is helping companies consolidate several virtual servers onto one machine, and to be able to move virtual servers easily off of broken hardware quickly. They still sell the Workstation product though.
Does Bill have a handle on Free Software versus Open Source software licenses? If the word Free appeared in his original responses, it was magically filtered out by PR. Just about all the qestions read "F/OSS" and in all the responses the "F/" is missing, even in questions where it seemed to be relevant.
If Hilf is Microsoft's ear/mouthpiece to our community, it would be pretty shocking to think that Free and OSS are really muddled together in his head. So I would bet this was done after the fact... but with what rationale?
Yes El Duderino, I did.
Actually I responded to directly to his question. First, I reinforced his supposition (which he seems to be waffling on) that there's probably nothing you can do if you let people have general purpose computers. And I made the point that to attempt to try would be costly.
Then I said that if you're just worried about an employee acting negligently (i.e. not being careful) then you need to start checking people for secrets at the door, and make some examples. Suddenly you will find that the accidents become much less frequent.
So while yeah it is a rant, I think also hit all his points.
-- John.
Well I didn't notice a mention of OS, but...
How about a kernel compiled without USB drivers. Hmm... while we're at it probably should remove serial port drivers, parallel port driver (backpack cdrom writer uh-oh) cd writer drivers, sound card drivers (the analog hole eek!), network drivers (don't want a hole through which data could escape to another machine which DOES have USB) and probably we won't be needing video drivers, because if you have those, then the employee might look at the company secrets on the monitor and assimilate them into their "brain" and OMFG WALK OFF WITH THEM.
There's nothing you can do. It's stupid to try. There are any number of ways to steal data electronically if an employee wishes to do it. If it's happening by accident maybe you could do random searches on exit of the premises (please, though be egalitarian... the execs should actually be the first to be searched since they have the most important data). Oh yeah, and fire the first poor soul that walks out with any data storage media with company data on it.
A few employees getting busted and the news will spread. People will be very careful about where the data ends up if they understand the policy AND that it is going to be enforced.
This is a human problem, unfortunately you can't solve every problem with technology. Attempting to do so will just interfere with hardworking creative techies who are actually just trying to get their work done efficiently.
-- John.
It's not dreaming to demand and expect source drivers. It's like when one of my former bosses was asked "how do you get your engineers to keep their documentation up-to-date?" Reply: "Simple. I make it a condition of employment."
Always prefer hardware for which a open source driver exists. Avoid solutions for which there is no good hardware which has an open source driver. Tell problem OEMs why you aren't buying their stuff.
That, and growing the Linux user base is the way to attract the OEMs.
Except for graphic chips, where vendors are worried about infringing patents and so they keep stuff proprietary, there is no advantage for OEMs to keep their hardware undocumented. They are selling the hardware, not the bits to go with it. The proof to that is that you can usually go to their web site and download the bits for free; they don't require registration of the drivers, etc.
-- John.
"Concentrate on driver support..." are you kidding? As far as the "catch up" game of creating drivers AFTER hardware shows up on the market, often with no public chip docs, the kernel devs do a really good job. But by definition of "catch up" we can never be as good as other platforms until 3rd parties support us out of the box.
The reason we don't have supported 3rd party drivers is because Linux doesn't have the market share (yet) to warrant the OEMs supporting us.
The more people use Linux the more support we'll get.
Or, we could all just sit around "concentrating" on better driver support and user support.
As to end-user support... I've had good experiences with every Linux company and every lone developer I needed help from. As to "migrate native applications" to the platform, I assume you mean Office.
Yeah, you keep waiting for MS to port Office to Linux, something they've specifically said they won't do. I'm not going to hold my breath. There are good alternatives (OOo) and Word, Excel run just fine under Crossover.
The story we need to tell is that there are tens of thousands of applications at your fingertips at $0 cost when you use something like Debian GNU/Linux. The apps are here. Try a vanilla Windows install something. It comes with a browser, a media player, Write, notepad, a calculator, Solitaire and Hyperterm. Almost nothing, and what is there is, compared to FOSS solutions, mostly crap.
So we just need to build the user base to make the platform ubiquitous. Heck, end users may even need a geek to maintain their box for the time being, or at least do the initial install. I don't know about you, but the last time I checked that's the case even with Windows. I'm always getting hit up for free support from family members.
-- John.
absolutely would like to hear about it ( email jhoger@pobox.com )
I agree, to an extent. But if you throw inheritance out for composition, you really need a more evolved concept of composition than is typical.
Inheritance is never necessary. But just saying "always use object composition" doesn't make sense either, in and of itself.
All objects should be considered as an assembly with a boundary, with multiple terminals to connect to other components. Each terminal can have its own interface type. Multiple interfaces nodes (connectable terminals) with different types is a much more straightforward and flexible concept than mashing all your interfaces together with multiple inheritance. It is simply unnatural to expect interfaces to mix like paint. They don't.
Why not just have a orderly constructed system of components, subcomponents, terminals and a connection broker to rig it all up? Is-a and has-a degenerate cases not worth considering. Almost all real world components of interesting complexity are a case of "this-does" where this-does breaks into naturally into multiple subfunctions (connectable terminals).
Anybody know a language that facilitates such a model (don't mention COM, please, most of that is dedicated to versioning interfaces and not really important for the main concept)? You can do this in C++ or C if you want to do all the scaffolding yourself.
-- John.
Not only should we have giant genetically engineered food animals, but we should make them smart, just to tell God and anyone else who the new boss is.
I agree 100%.
Personally, I don't like my windows to haphazardly overlap at all... I use a tabbed non-overlapping window manage Ion. Ratpoison is cool too.
Plus these windowing systems have nice keyboard shortcuts.
In general the desktop metaphor sucks. My real-life desktop is a perpetual mess and I can't find a damn thing. Why simulate a crappy system on a computer? I won't say Ion and Ratpoison don't have rough edges. But it's a more exciting direction and more usable for a keyboard user like me.
Sure the virtual desktop was cool in the 80's just to see the graphics capabilities finally be used on a daily basis. But it's 2005, stick a fork in it, it's done...
-- John.
Well I won't give Dvorak a page hit; I don't think he's really a drooling idiot, so it must be a troll.
But I'll counter his argument with one example where CC worked beautifully:
I asked Leo Brodie author of Thinking Forth to allow republication of his book under a Creative Commons license. We discussed different options... he chose a "non-commercial" clause, but allowed derivative works and share-alike.
So what we have is a LaTeX repub and PDF downloadable from SourceForge by anyone. And he is selling hardcopies of the book through a print-on-demand publisher.
A project is in the works to update all the classic Forth examples to modern Forth usage. Also a translation to Spanish of the LaTeX repub is underway.
How could Dvorak be so obtuse? Of course Brodie could negotiate a separate license with each person who wanted to make some use of Thinking Forth, or just sell copies. But without granting additional rights, he wouldn't have gotten the free labor and TF would have stayed out of print and an orphaned works for 70 PLUS YEARS.
The Creative Commons licenses are just a legal tool, that's all. It's like going to the bookstore and buying a bunch of standard contracts. It reduces the time, if any, you have to spend with a real lawyer in order to grant rights to use your work beyond what copyright allows, safely, to a wide audience without negotating with each user individually, one-on-one.
Simple, understandable. Dvorak, you're just a troll.
-- John.
KnoppMyth... the main stumbling blocks were figuring out that the card doesn't show up as
I don't really hang out on the forums so if you try KnoppMyth and need help, just email me (my email is accessible through the URL link).
Good luck
-- John.
Well the state of Linux today is that if you have relatively new hardware you either cannot use it fully or you need to be able to add publicly available patches and patch your own kernel.
Doing HDTV under MythTV with 2.6.12 is cutting edge unfortunately... I've spent the last week hassling with it but I finally got it going. For regular TV though, KnoppMyth is a walk in the park.
KnoppMyth is in the end based on Debian. So there's nothing to stop you from installing any programs you want including Octave. You just need to learn to use apt-get.
As to your HD hardware working on Windows... well, yeah, your card was designed, tested, and possibly certified by Microsoft to run on Windows. Until the hardware vendors get on board and fully support Linux, there will always be at least a lag time between the card appearing on the market, and it being usable in Linux by the average user.
-- John.
Well, MythTV is in my opinion a perfect argument for more, specialized distributions.
For MythTV, there is "KnoppMyth" which provides a super simple install based on Knoppix (which is derived from Debian). It is targeted at being easy to install.
There's no way a dedicated PVR box is going to be served best by a vanilla Debian or FC install. Even Microsoft produces "Windows Media Center Edition" as a customized OS to be used as a PVR.
-- John.
You imply that less is never more. Sometimes it is, especially when the more you're getting is a more usable interface and longer battery life.
Personally, I use a Palm IIIxe. It was the last Palm that used standard AAA batteries, easily replaceable in the field. It has less RAM/flash than a modern Palm, and a monochrome screen, but it works great as a PIM, and has a standard serial port. Wireless internet access, games and movies on my PIM are just distractions so there is no real trade-off for me.
Property does come into it for me, since I sincerely desire that JKR's crappy writing be kept OFF MY PROPERTY. Alas it's not to be since my wife is hooked on the Harry Crack.
Tolkien's prose ruined me for all fantasy I've read since.
-- John.
Your co-worker leeching files impacts you in what way?
Why do you care?
I'd be more concerned about the physical security of my player.
The article's scope is clearly, purposefully limited to poking around the filesystem. No DMCA or other copyright issues involved. If anything, trade secret, but it's hard to argue using an Apple filesystem is a reasonable step towards protecting a secret.
Anyway, I'd be surprised if IBM legal hadn't already given the article the green light.