Yeah i agree there... Lots of people seem to be converting existing projects to ruby because "it's the in thing", without bringing any practical benefit to the project, but at the same time replacing perfectly good code with new untested code which runs much slower and consumes more resources...
Compare the performance of metasploit 2 to metasploit 3 for a good example.
Not quite... What you are thinking of is the NX bit, which was introduced by the first 64bit chips from AMD... Intel added something similar to later P4 revisions, but earlier ones lack support for it.
Exactly, if you're going to put native code into a browser applet, it should be arm code because it is embedded devices that need the performance more than quad core desktops...
I don't get all this fascination with ruby, and why it currently seems to be so fashionable that people are willing to take perfectly good projects and rewrite them in this new fashionable language...
Take for example metasploit (see metasploit.com), version 2.x was written in perl and was reasonably quick, version 3 is a complete rewrite in ruby and it's now orders of magnitude slower and more memory hungry than the perl version ever was... Trying to script the CLI based version is now pretty much useless because of how long it takes to initialize, even considering that the hardware in use is a couple of years newer and much faster.
Inefficiency like this is a bad thing, people complain about microsoft bloat, and yet they champion a language which produces code a fraction of the speed of any alternatives... They talk about how 1.9 is 5x faster than 1.8, and is still ridiculously slow compared to anything else? You think Vista is bloated and slow? imagine if they wrote it in ruby...
Actually, there are situations in many countries where you must complete government forms or other mandates, which are stored in proprietary formats, and not completing them can result in jail or fines.
In the UK for instance, for certain types of tax return you must use proprietary accounting software... see here:
specifically the sentence which says "Bear in mind that HMRC's software only offers the supplementary pages listed above. If you want to send other pages online you'll need to use third party software"
There is no documentation available publicly to write your own interoperable software, so if you want to do anything beyond submitting the "supplementary pages listed above" you are forced to obtain software from one of the listed vendors, who have clearly obtained this information, most likely by paying a fee for it which places it outside of the reach of hobbyists. If you don't want to do this, you have to fill out the paper forms which have a much shorter deadline for completion, and the government is gradually pushing people onto the online system. And by that extension, the chinese also have the option to not use computers at all.
So if you want to use a computer to file your taxes, you have to use software from the government supplied list and subsequently any dependencies it may have. Your alternatives are jail/fines or not using a computer.
In china if you want to use a computer to operate a cybercafe you have to use software from the government supplied list, which supplies the dependencies it has. Your alternatives are jail/fines or not running a cybercafe.
Do you know of any "format x to format y" converter i can use to convert the output from something like gnucash to interoperate with the government forms? Can i run one on my platform of choice and obtain it for free?
I hate having my freedom of choice taken away from me. Being told "you must use X" while extremely unpleasant, is direct and easy to explain to people why it's bad... Being told "you must use Y (and in order to do that you can only use X) is equally unpleasant, but much harder to get people to understand why. And educating people as to why something is a problem is the first step towards having them stand up against the oppression and try to change things. There is nothing more damaging than people who don't care or don't realize that they're being screwed, that's why people get away with doing it in such underhanded ways.
Quite a few ISPs do in the uk, nitrex.net, goscomb.net, ovh.co.uk do for colocated servers, he.net do v6 hosting in the uk too...
Apple don't make routers, just wireless access points, and they are about the only consumer oriented networking devices with any v6 support... Your alternatives are linux based devices with third party firmware, and expensive highend kit like cisco.
As i have native v6 connectivity at home, i would use v6 connectivity to the phone if possible, without tunneling... Assuming the telcos don't block it.
It's not so much about V6 support, as having misconfigured V6 routes... If your machine supports V6 but doesn't have any V6 connectivity, then it's connection attempt will return a host unreachable immediately and revert to V4. It's only when you have a V6 default route that goes nowhere that you start having problems.
Providing support in most cases is really an insurance policy... Companies buy your support, but would prefer not to need it... If they make lots of support calls then your margins go down, if they make no support calls then you make a lot more profit. Companies will still buy the support because they want the fallback. So it's actually in your interest to have software that works well, so you don't need to expend too many resources fixing it.
Also support is not just bug fixing, it's also training users, often performing the initial installs and diagnosing/fixing errors caused by users or hardware faults.
Similarly with OSS, upgrading to the latest version is a no brainer, as a support provider you can roll out the newest version to your clients periodically so it looks like you're doing more work for them, and it makes them feel good knowing they can always have the latest version as part of the support contract they took out with you.
Yeah, they should have an easy toggle switch between "easy mode" and the underlying system... Users like it they stick with it, they don't like it and they can go back...
And there should be a graphical package manager available from which users can easily select and install thousands of apps... This should all be in the instruction booklet... Once users realize that thousands more apps are a single click away, and they have a "desktop" mode available to them they will be more likely to stick with it.
And the retailer and manufacturer thinks there's no demand for linux based machines, so the future versions will be windows only and filled with cheap hardware that noone ever bothered to write linux drivers for.
The best part about the linux netbooks from the perspective of long term linux users, is that the manufacturer will go to some effort to ensure the hardware is actually compatible with linux. Also any sale of a linux based machine tells manufacturers and retailers that there is a demand and userbase for linux, and the chance of something new being developed which is windows-only decreases.
Is there any other webkit browser for linux aside from konqueror? I don't want the burden of all the kde libraries when i won't use them for anything else...
Yeah, VBA is a nasty hack and MS is trying to deprecate it anyway... OpenOffice supports macros in multiple languages, including python java and javascript which are proper languages rather than having to use a single language that has no other real use.
That is really a poor decision tho, everything has been idle for 16 hours suggesting that the user has gone away and will eventually be back and want to use his apps. Interactive desktop apps should not get swapped out unless it's absolutely necessary... Also, apps which read files that are unlikely to be read again any time soon should bypass the caching system... as someone pointed out earlier, antivirus will read every file once, spooling a video off disk is only likely to be done once etc.
Tried a 64bit version? I had a few machines that had major troubles running 32bit, but ran fine with 64... I can only imagine these modern machines are not well tested for running 32bit stuff.
AmigaOS multitasked, and didn't use memory mapping like that... It had a flat memory model, and ran on processors which lacked the necessary memory management hardware.
If you did have an upgraded cpu with MMU, then there were third party virtual memory addons.
Unfortunately governments mandate software already in many cases, the Chinese are simply being more direct about it... How many times have you seen government websites or published information in proprietary formats?
I don't think the government should force anyone to use any particular software from any source, they should promote a free open market where people are free to choose anything they want.
That said, software companies through the american government and the wto are putting a lot of pressure on china to curb piracy... A lot of people in china simply can't afford the prices charged for proprietary software, and they don't know anything else so their only option is to pirate. By getting chinese people used to linux, they will have less need to pirate anything and thus comply with the demands placed on the government... It may not be what the software companies intended, but it's better for china than sending billions of dollars out of the country and leaving lots of their people without computers at all.
What is most disturbing, is where businesses adapt the way they do things to suit the software they're using, rather than the software complementing their existing way of doing business.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah i agree there...
Lots of people seem to be converting existing projects to ruby because "it's the in thing", without bringing any practical benefit to the project, but at the same time replacing perfectly good code with new untested code which runs much slower and consumes more resources...
Compare the performance of metasploit 2 to metasploit 3 for a good example.
Not quite...
What you are thinking of is the NX bit, which was introduced by the first 64bit chips from AMD...
Intel added something similar to later P4 revisions, but earlier ones lack support for it.
Exactly, if you're going to put native code into a browser applet, it should be arm code because it is embedded devices that need the performance more than quad core desktops...
I don't get all this fascination with ruby, and why it currently seems to be so fashionable that people are willing to take perfectly good projects and rewrite them in this new fashionable language...
Take for example metasploit (see metasploit.com), version 2.x was written in perl and was reasonably quick, version 3 is a complete rewrite in ruby and it's now orders of magnitude slower and more memory hungry than the perl version ever was... Trying to script the CLI based version is now pretty much useless because of how long it takes to initialize, even considering that the hardware in use is a couple of years newer and much faster.
Inefficiency like this is a bad thing, people complain about microsoft bloat, and yet they champion a language which produces code a fraction of the speed of any alternatives... They talk about how 1.9 is 5x faster than 1.8, and is still ridiculously slow compared to anything else?
You think Vista is bloated and slow? imagine if they wrote it in ruby...
Actually, there are situations in many countries where you must complete government forms or other mandates, which are stored in proprietary formats, and not completing them can result in jail or fines.
In the UK for instance, for certain types of tax return you must use proprietary accounting software... see here:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/Taxes/SelfAssessmentYourTaxReturn/DG_10013651
specifically the sentence which says "Bear in mind that HMRC's software only offers the supplementary pages listed above. If you want to send other pages online you'll need to use third party software"
There is no documentation available publicly to write your own interoperable software, so if you want to do anything beyond submitting the "supplementary pages listed above" you are forced to obtain software from one of the listed vendors, who have clearly obtained this information, most likely by paying a fee for it which places it outside of the reach of hobbyists.
If you don't want to do this, you have to fill out the paper forms which have a much shorter deadline for completion, and the government is gradually pushing people onto the online system. And by that extension, the chinese also have the option to not use computers at all.
So if you want to use a computer to file your taxes, you have to use software from the government supplied list and subsequently any dependencies it may have. Your alternatives are jail/fines or not using a computer.
In china if you want to use a computer to operate a cybercafe you have to use software from the government supplied list, which supplies the dependencies it has. Your alternatives are jail/fines or not running a cybercafe.
Do you know of any "format x to format y" converter i can use to convert the output from something like gnucash to interoperate with the government forms? Can i run one on my platform of choice and obtain it for free?
I hate having my freedom of choice taken away from me. Being told "you must use X" while extremely unpleasant, is direct and easy to explain to people why it's bad... Being told "you must use Y (and in order to do that you can only use X) is equally unpleasant, but much harder to get people to understand why.
And educating people as to why something is a problem is the first step towards having them stand up against the oppression and try to change things. There is nothing more damaging than people who don't care or don't realize that they're being screwed, that's why people get away with doing it in such underhanded ways.
Quite a few ISPs do in the uk, nitrex.net, goscomb.net, ovh.co.uk do for colocated servers, he.net do v6 hosting in the uk too...
Apple don't make routers, just wireless access points, and they are about the only consumer oriented networking devices with any v6 support... Your alternatives are linux based devices with third party firmware, and expensive highend kit like cisco.
As i have native v6 connectivity at home, i would use v6 connectivity to the phone if possible, without tunneling... Assuming the telcos don't block it.
It's not so much about V6 support, as having misconfigured V6 routes...
If your machine supports V6 but doesn't have any V6 connectivity, then it's connection attempt will return a host unreachable immediately and revert to V4. It's only when you have a V6 default route that goes nowhere that you start having problems.
Linux 2.2.x supported ipv6...
Providing support in most cases is really an insurance policy...
Companies buy your support, but would prefer not to need it... If they make lots of support calls then your margins go down, if they make no support calls then you make a lot more profit. Companies will still buy the support because they want the fallback. So it's actually in your interest to have software that works well, so you don't need to expend too many resources fixing it.
Also support is not just bug fixing, it's also training users, often performing the initial installs and diagnosing/fixing errors caused by users or hardware faults.
Similarly with OSS, upgrading to the latest version is a no brainer, as a support provider you can roll out the newest version to your clients periodically so it looks like you're doing more work for them, and it makes them feel good knowing they can always have the latest version as part of the support contract they took out with you.
Mandating in an underhanded way, yes, which is even worse because many users won't realize what's really happening.
Or import one from another country, or mail order it... Don't forget to let those retailers know why they lost your sale.
Yeah, they should have an easy toggle switch between "easy mode" and the underlying system... Users like it they stick with it, they don't like it and they can go back...
And there should be a graphical package manager available from which users can easily select and install thousands of apps...
This should all be in the instruction booklet... Once users realize that thousands more apps are a single click away, and they have a "desktop" mode available to them they will be more likely to stick with it.
And the retailer and manufacturer thinks there's no demand for linux based machines, so the future versions will be windows only and filled with cheap hardware that noone ever bothered to write linux drivers for.
The best part about the linux netbooks from the perspective of long term linux users, is that the manufacturer will go to some effort to ensure the hardware is actually compatible with linux.
Also any sale of a linux based machine tells manufacturers and retailers that there is a demand and userbase for linux, and the chance of something new being developed which is windows-only decreases.
It got 100/100, but still failed the test on a number of small points...
http://amigaowb.googlepages.com/screenshot2.png
Firefox doesn't compile on BSD anymore? What happened? Isn't it in ports?
Is there any other webkit browser for linux aside from konqueror? I don't want the burden of all the kde libraries when i won't use them for anything else...
Yeah, VBA is a nasty hack and MS is trying to deprecate it anyway...
OpenOffice supports macros in multiple languages, including python java and javascript which are proper languages rather than having to use a single language that has no other real use.
I use iCal for calendar, and a separate mail client...
I never understood why people think it needs to be built in to the mail client.
What do you use for viewing visio files?
That is really a poor decision tho, everything has been idle for 16 hours suggesting that the user has gone away and will eventually be back and want to use his apps.
Interactive desktop apps should not get swapped out unless it's absolutely necessary...
Also, apps which read files that are unlikely to be read again any time soon should bypass the caching system... as someone pointed out earlier, antivirus will read every file once, spooling a video off disk is only likely to be done once etc.
Tried a 64bit version?
I had a few machines that had major troubles running 32bit, but ran fine with 64... I can only imagine these modern machines are not well tested for running 32bit stuff.
AmigaOS multitasked, and didn't use memory mapping like that...
It had a flat memory model, and ran on processors which lacked the necessary memory management hardware.
If you did have an upgraded cpu with MMU, then there were third party virtual memory addons.
Unfortunately governments mandate software already in many cases, the Chinese are simply being more direct about it...
How many times have you seen government websites or published information in proprietary formats?
I don't think the government should force anyone to use any particular software from any source, they should promote a free open market where people are free to choose anything they want.
That said, software companies through the american government and the wto are putting a lot of pressure on china to curb piracy... A lot of people in china simply can't afford the prices charged for proprietary software, and they don't know anything else so their only option is to pirate. By getting chinese people used to linux, they will have less need to pirate anything and thus comply with the demands placed on the government... It may not be what the software companies intended, but it's better for china than sending billions of dollars out of the country and leaving lots of their people without computers at all.
What is most disturbing, is where businesses adapt the way they do things to suit the software they're using, rather than the software complementing their existing way of doing business.