Has anyone actually used this service? I checked out the free preview and it actually seemed kinda cool, and I was considering signing up for a month to see how well the burning technology works - they seem to imply that you get a real CD out of it, which basically amounts to 'download high quality MP3/OGGs for 99 cents each', which is something I'd actually be interested in.
Well, the simple answer is that if you're going to write a simple document that doesn't need formatting information, don't use a file format that embedds assloads of formatting information:P That said, I think this whole use of "XML for everything" is a huge, moronic pain in the ass. As other posters have said, there's nothing open about XML unless you also have DTD, and the overhead from converting everything into tags and charsets instead of binary data is immenese, to say nothing of the programmatic overhead of embedding an XML parser in everything (or more than one, if you need to support more than one version of the standard, since it's still not finalized). And the network overhead of translating binary data and function calls to XML so you can pipe them over HTTP. Aarg. *hate*
I'm sure the performace is really bad for you - but I have no idea why. I'm not a linux guru by any means, but I'm running debian unstable on a 350 MHz pentium 2, 256 megs of ram cause I had it lying around, some POS onboard 2 meg ATI Rage card, and both KDE and Gnome are perfectly usable - about the same as win95 on the same hardware. This is with no custom X tweaking or anything, and RH and Mandrake both ran about the same on the same machine. I did turn off pretty much all the eyecandy using the standard KDE control panel, though. On a machine with the specs you mention, you should't be having any trouble, even with the eyecandy turned on.
You seem to be implying that anyone who is able to provide a service at a lesser cost is somehow freeloading - as other posters have said, VoIP is no different than any other internet traffic - by the same token, we should block IM and email, because people use those instead of voice calls. Cross-subsidies and such are an internal telco problem, not mine - perhaps in the future, IP traffic will subsidize the costs of POTS calls. Maybe it already does, I don't know. But artifically repressing a new technology in order to maintain the pricing scheme of a monopoly is stupid, especially when it's done it such a blatantly ridiculous manner.
As I recall from the Dune Encyclopedia (as canon as you want it to be), Holtzman far pre-dated the Jihad. His conciousness was placed in a robotic ship that looped in and out of known space in an erratic orbit, and he was actually destroyed during the Jihad because of his cyborg nature. Pre-Jihad space folding used AI to navigate, after the Jihad the Guild grew to fill that need.
You're a nitwit. If MS even hinted that they might do such a thing, every OEM in the world would start funneling R & D money into making a new desktop OS - the main reason that things like KDE and Gnome don't compare in usability to OS X and Windows is because nobody really thinks they can unseat Windows, so there's very little funded development. MS threatning to pull Windows would pretty much eliminate that - Palm would quickly revive the BeOS codebase, and either sell it to someone with lots of funds (IBM?) or borrow money to develop it themselves. Hardware manufacturers would scramble to proved driver specs. Things might be a little rough for a year or so, but after a short but intense development period, you'd have at least one, and possibly more, mature, technically superior (Linux, BSD) OSes, with excellent desktop support.
On to your libertatian bullcrap... the government has both the right and the responsibility to act in the public interest (that is, in fact, the entire purpose of having a democratic government). If you choose to run a buisness, there are certain regulations and guidelines you must follow, in the interest of society. It's kinda like how we have laws against killing people and taking thier money (which is MUCH more efficent than trying to get them to buy something - muggers are the ultimate capitalists). Bill knew this when he got into buisness, but decided that he could break the rules anyway, much like alot of people (I'd imagine you as well, assuming you actually own/run a buisness of your own).
Maybe your analagy is just bad, but I'm not sure how a central key authority is inherently any more secure than a distributed one. If I get this right, you "knock" on the door and see if the person inside lets you in. This sounds very much to me like object level security permissions, which isn't really any different than file-level permissions. One of the reasons why we invented things like group level permissions was because of the administrative nightmare associate with individually coding security into every object, so I don't see how this is really a gain...
You know, of course, that 30 years ago everyone that was older than 30 said exactly the same thing, and what happened? The adults of today turned out to be more or less the same as the adults of yesterday. I predict exactly the same thing happening again. Hysterical reviling of youth culture has been a hobby of the current generation in power for as long as we've had youth, culture, hobbies, and generations.
"Really, our whole tax system is a sham. Numbers were just released today that showed that in 2000, the top 50% of wage earners ($26,000 a year or so or more) are paying 96% of all taxes..."
This is a nonsensical statement. You should also show a) how much of the total wages that top 50% earn - I suspect it's pretty close to the amount of tax burden they pay (also, you don't specifiy whether thats the actual amount paid, or whether it's a calculated burden and doesn't reflect reality). In many parts of the US, 26k is a barely livable wage, if that. It's certainly not middle class. It's a pretty sad day if 50% of American workers are making less than that, which is another reason I don't trust those numbers.
If someone could point me to a free(as in beer or speech, I'm not a zealot), stable (slap acrobat), fast, and easy to work with application for viewing and editing PDF files, on Windows, I'll be alot happier about PDFs.
People have been worrying over the "decreasing skills of our youth" for the last 400 years, at least. The evolution of language and communication is always percieved as a decrease. This is not to say that AOL kiddies talking in single letters, upper case, 26 point pink and maroon letters doesn't make me grind my teeth with rage, but *your* idea of "communicate effectively" and the your great-grandchilds will probably be rather different. As an example, a couple hundered years ago, anyone who wanted to be taken seriously in academics(any field) HAD to be fluent in (at least) Latin. Now, hardly anyone uses it. A couple hundered years from now, probably even fewer. Remember, all these kids who you think won't be able to manage in the real world can talk to each other just fine. 40 years from now, YOU will be the one who can't communicate..
Federal funding actually makes it HARDER to supress your work, not easier. It's that whole constitution thing. You know, freedom of speech? And the federal funding doesn't have jack to do with whether or not they can classify it.
Of course, this is also exactly how humans play chess:P They look at the board, evaluate the possiblities of potential moves (to various depths, depending on the ability of the player), making choices about which branches to follow and which to discard. It's in the mechanism by which you choose your branches that humans differ from computers (and not as much as they used to...), not in the mechanics of gameplay.
We use an IBM mainframe, and transferring data from our (modern, working, fast) PCs to our (old, slow, not working) mainframe is ALREADY a huge pain in the ass. Thank god we didn't decide to use XML.
The higher prices on SCSI drives are totally out of proportion to the gain a home user ("prosumer") sees from them. That's why people currently use IDE RAID - because you get higher reliability and performance, without spending more on a single 20 gig drive than you do on the rest of your computer. There's alot of room for reliable IDE drives at a price point higher than the crap you get in OEM machines, yet less than you pay for SCSI.
Off topic but relevent: When you open a new window from within an explorer window, with open link in new window or by hitting ctrl-n, then it's a child window of the original, and dies when the parent does. A totally new IE window, opened by invoking iexplore.exe, is a seperate process. As for why it works exactly like this - I don't know.
You didn't read what I said. Yes, you CAN do that but it will always be intrinsically larger and less efficent than IE - and it won't integrate with the OS the way IE does and can. because all those calls are integrated into the system libraries. Using them is using IE. For example - windows key + e opens an explorer window - Explorer is a component of IE (or vice versa, depending on how you look at it). You can't bind that key combo to your application. IE is a file manager as well as a web browser - type "C:/" into IE sometime - so thats why I talked about file access.
Re:so XFree86 = usage stattistics?
on
The End Of Minix?
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· Score: 4, Funny
I don't even really want to think about what kind of freak gets off looking at the ALT tags of porn pictures.
Any more than, say, the US might wish to harm "rouge" nations? The idea that we're the most important nation in the world and that we need/deserve special treatment because of it is really a fallacy. There's plenty of nations (I'd go so far as to say most of them) who don't really care about the US and have no beef to grind. And pre-emptively claiming that we need immunity to prosecution because of the POSSIBILITY of false claims... well, that just strikes all kinds of wrong chords with me. It's a claim that the US is a) automatically in the right in any of it's actions b) can be depended upon to police it's own military (something that we actually have a pretty poor track record of). It makes us look like either arrogant hypocrites, or a country with something to hide. If bringing a false claim is so easy as to justify this claim to immunity, what reason is there for the court at all? If we're so positive that no US soldier would ever do anything to warrant investigation by this court, why are we afraid to allow them to appear before it? Is it an admission that the normal rule of law just doesn't work? Do we really believe there would be a concerted, organized effort to harm America via this court? If we do believe that, isn't our vulnerability to these claims something we should investigate on our own?
You can't re-implement IE without using IE, because IE is part of the OS. That's his point. If you wanted to write a combination file manager/web browser with all the functionality if IE, you would need to write one from scratch (like mozilla or konq), and then it wouldn't integrate with the OS - thus not gaining the benefit of being pre-loaded with the system libraries, etc.
You can, of course, use the existing components and APIs for HTML rendering, file access, etc. However, thats not a replacement for IE - that is IE.
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Has anyone actually used this service? I checked out the free preview and it actually seemed kinda cool, and I was considering signing up for a month to see how well the burning technology works - they seem to imply that you get a real CD out of it, which basically amounts to 'download high quality MP3/OGGs for 99 cents each', which is something I'd actually be interested in.
If it's common, it's not an error. It's a change in language.
Well, the simple answer is that if you're going to write a simple document that doesn't need formatting information, don't use a file format that embedds assloads of formatting information :P That said, I think this whole use of "XML for everything" is a huge, moronic pain in the ass. As other posters have said, there's nothing open about XML unless you also have DTD, and the overhead from converting everything into tags and charsets instead of binary data is immenese, to say nothing of the programmatic overhead of embedding an XML parser in everything (or more than one, if you need to support more than one version of the standard, since it's still not finalized). And the network overhead of translating binary data and function calls to XML so you can pipe them over HTTP. Aarg. *hate*
I'm sure the performace is really bad for you - but I have no idea why. I'm not a linux guru by any means, but I'm running debian unstable on a 350 MHz pentium 2, 256 megs of ram cause I had it lying around, some POS onboard 2 meg ATI Rage card, and both KDE and Gnome are perfectly usable - about the same as win95 on the same hardware. This is with no custom X tweaking or anything, and RH and Mandrake both ran about the same on the same machine. I did turn off pretty much all the eyecandy using the standard KDE control panel, though. On a machine with the specs you mention, you should't be having any trouble, even with the eyecandy turned on.
You seem to be implying that anyone who is able to provide a service at a lesser cost is somehow freeloading - as other posters have said, VoIP is no different than any other internet traffic - by the same token, we should block IM and email, because people use those instead of voice calls. Cross-subsidies and such are an internal telco problem, not mine - perhaps in the future, IP traffic will subsidize the costs of POTS calls. Maybe it already does, I don't know. But artifically repressing a new technology in order to maintain the pricing scheme of a monopoly is stupid, especially when it's done it such a blatantly ridiculous manner.
Leto Atreides claimes (in the Herbert books) to trace his lineage back to the house of Atreus in ancient Greece.
As I recall from the Dune Encyclopedia (as canon as you want it to be), Holtzman far pre-dated the Jihad. His conciousness was placed in a robotic ship that looped in and out of known space in an erratic orbit, and he was actually destroyed during the Jihad because of his cyborg nature. Pre-Jihad space folding used AI to navigate, after the Jihad the Guild grew to fill that need.
On to your libertatian bullcrap... the government has both the right and the responsibility to act in the public interest (that is, in fact, the entire purpose of having a democratic government). If you choose to run a buisness, there are certain regulations and guidelines you must follow, in the interest of society. It's kinda like how we have laws against killing people and taking thier money (which is MUCH more efficent than trying to get them to buy something - muggers are the ultimate capitalists). Bill knew this when he got into buisness, but decided that he could break the rules anyway, much like alot of people (I'd imagine you as well, assuming you actually own/run a buisness of your own).
Maybe your analagy is just bad, but I'm not sure how a central key authority is inherently any more secure than a distributed one. If I get this right, you "knock" on the door and see if the person inside lets you in. This sounds very much to me like object level security permissions, which isn't really any different than file-level permissions. One of the reasons why we invented things like group level permissions was because of the administrative nightmare associate with individually coding security into every object, so I don't see how this is really a gain...
You know, of course, that 30 years ago everyone that was older than 30 said exactly the same thing, and what happened? The adults of today turned out to be more or less the same as the adults of yesterday. I predict exactly the same thing happening again. Hysterical reviling of youth culture has been a hobby of the current generation in power for as long as we've had youth, culture, hobbies, and generations.
"Really, our whole tax system is a sham. Numbers were just released today that showed that in 2000, the top 50% of wage earners ($26,000 a year or so or more) are paying 96% of all taxes..."
This is a nonsensical statement. You should also show a) how much of the total wages that top 50% earn - I suspect it's pretty close to the amount of tax burden they pay (also, you don't specifiy whether thats the actual amount paid, or whether it's a calculated burden and doesn't reflect reality). In many parts of the US, 26k is a barely livable wage, if that. It's certainly not middle class. It's a pretty sad day if 50% of American workers are making less than that, which is another reason I don't trust those numbers.
If someone could point me to a free(as in beer or speech, I'm not a zealot), stable (slap acrobat), fast, and easy to work with application for viewing and editing PDF files, on Windows, I'll be alot happier about PDFs.
You mean I just have to logon using "sadmin" and I'll have total access to the file system?
It didn't crash me either, and this machine isn't even patched....
People have been worrying over the "decreasing skills of our youth" for the last 400 years, at least. The evolution of language and communication is always percieved as a decrease. This is not to say that AOL kiddies talking in single letters, upper case, 26 point pink and maroon letters doesn't make me grind my teeth with rage, but *your* idea of "communicate effectively" and the your great-grandchilds will probably be rather different. As an example, a couple hundered years ago, anyone who wanted to be taken seriously in academics(any field) HAD to be fluent in (at least) Latin. Now, hardly anyone uses it. A couple hundered years from now, probably even fewer. Remember, all these kids who you think won't be able to manage in the real world can talk to each other just fine. 40 years from now, YOU will be the one who can't communicate..
Federal funding actually makes it HARDER to supress your work, not easier. It's that whole constitution thing. You know, freedom of speech? And the federal funding doesn't have jack to do with whether or not they can classify it.
Of course, this is also exactly how humans play chess :P They look at the board, evaluate the possiblities of potential moves (to various depths, depending on the ability of the player), making choices about which branches to follow and which to discard. It's in the mechanism by which you choose your branches that humans differ from computers (and not as much as they used to...), not in the mechanics of gameplay.
We use an IBM mainframe, and transferring data from our (modern, working, fast) PCs to our (old, slow, not working) mainframe is ALREADY a huge pain in the ass. Thank god we didn't decide to use XML.
I've been to a couple theaters where they serve beer. I think there's one in New York.
The higher prices on SCSI drives are totally out of proportion to the gain a home user ("prosumer") sees from them. That's why people currently use IDE RAID - because you get higher reliability and performance, without spending more on a single 20 gig drive than you do on the rest of your computer. There's alot of room for reliable IDE drives at a price point higher than the crap you get in OEM machines, yet less than you pay for SCSI.
Off topic but relevent: When you open a new window from within an explorer window, with open link in new window or by hitting ctrl-n, then it's a child window of the original, and dies when the parent does. A totally new IE window, opened by invoking iexplore.exe, is a seperate process. As for why it works exactly like this - I don't know.
You didn't read what I said. Yes, you CAN do that but it will always be intrinsically larger and less efficent than IE - and it won't integrate with the OS the way IE does and can. because all those calls are integrated into the system libraries. Using them is using IE. For example - windows key + e opens an explorer window - Explorer is a component of IE (or vice versa, depending on how you look at it). You can't bind that key combo to your application. IE is a file manager as well as a web browser - type "C:/" into IE sometime - so thats why I talked about file access.
I don't even really want to think about what kind of freak gets off looking at the ALT tags of porn pictures.
Any more than, say, the US might wish to harm "rouge" nations? The idea that we're the most important nation in the world and that we need/deserve special treatment because of it is really a fallacy. There's plenty of nations (I'd go so far as to say most of them) who don't really care about the US and have no beef to grind. And pre-emptively claiming that we need immunity to prosecution because of the POSSIBILITY of false claims... well, that just strikes all kinds of wrong chords with me. It's a claim that the US is a) automatically in the right in any of it's actions b) can be depended upon to police it's own military (something that we actually have a pretty poor track record of). It makes us look like either arrogant hypocrites, or a country with something to hide. If bringing a false claim is so easy as to justify this claim to immunity, what reason is there for the court at all? If we're so positive that no US soldier would ever do anything to warrant investigation by this court, why are we afraid to allow them to appear before it? Is it an admission that the normal rule of law just doesn't work? Do we really believe there would be a concerted, organized effort to harm America via this court? If we do believe that, isn't our vulnerability to these claims something we should investigate on our own?
You can't re-implement IE without using IE, because IE is part of the OS. That's his point. If you wanted to write a combination file manager/web browser with all the functionality if IE, you would need to write one from scratch (like mozilla or konq), and then it wouldn't integrate with the OS - thus not gaining the benefit of being pre-loaded with the system libraries, etc.
You can, of course, use the existing components and APIs for HTML rendering, file access, etc. However, thats not a replacement for IE - that is IE.