because it's the default homepage for Internet Explorer, and as we all know, 90% of people don't bother to change their defaults. I wonder how many of those MSN hits are people who actually stay on the site, compared to those who just let IE load it up on startup then immediately go somewhere else.
Thank you for the kind words, but unfortunately after being gang-modded down into negativeland I think getting back up is going to be a challenge at best, since my name is on somebody's blacklist now. I've got a new account ready, but I just wanted to give this one a final go. You, Mr. Bell, seem to be in fairly good standing though; if you ever have any mod points and are feeling generous feel free to boost me up. Good luck, and be on the lookout for my new account (it should be pretty easy to recognize:-)
(I would post anonymously, but the editors seem to have removed that privilege from my account. Oh well.)
DSL got a bad rap in its infancy as the weak and incompetent services like Speak-easy polluted the DSL space with cheap but lousy service. However, time and the free market have weeded out most of the lemons, and along with the maturing of DSL technology, service is excellent these days. DSL carries several advantages over cable anyway:
Reliable bandwidth. While DSL doesn't have the same "potential" bandwidth of cable, you get the 1.5Mbps to yourself, since you have your very own copper loop to your telco's central office (i.e. your phone line). Cable lines are shared throughout your neighborhood, so your maximum transfer speed varies astronomically depending on how many people have their TV or cable internet connections on at the time.
Cheap setup. In most cities these days, the phone lines are already DSL-ready, and chances are you have at least one phone line going into your house. If you don't already have cable TV installed, you'll have to pay big bucks to get the cable line.
Support. Cable companies still make the majority of cash from cable TV, and because of this tend to treat their Internet subscribers as second-class citizens.
Really, the death of cable is just the free market choosing the better technology in the end, and that is what capitalism is supposed to do, isn't it? I feel sorry for all the cable subscribers, but you all really should have done more research before picking a broadband provider.
Given that, it is absurd that developers, who often know more about the OS and reinstalling/etc., have to sit on their hands waiting for some moron from IS to come and install software for them, etc. In my company the development group (with a couple of small exceptions) absolutely eclipses the IS group as far as OS management skills, yet humorously enough along came some new SOE policies : What an irony.
This is exactly the problem I'm talking about. The egotistical developers and other halfwits who think they know more than the IS people going in and trying to handle things for themselves. These people are very rarely as smart as they think they are, and too often screw everything up, but are too egoistic to call IT. So then I have to spend a day trying to find the source of a problem, only to find out that the loser who screwed things up knew about the problem for a week but "forgot" to tell us about it.
And what is with all the troll accusations? Is everybody here really so small-minded and petty that they dismiss anything that they don't want to believe?
I work as an IT director at a medium-sized company. At first, I had the security rather lax on all our Windows 2000 desktops, trusting that our workers and developers were smart enough to avoid messing things up. I was utterly wrong. Fairly quickly, I was being called non-stop as people had managed to screw up their systems by opening random attachments, installing tons of crapware like AIM, RealPlayer, and doing various other brain-dead things. Some of the more smug, "1337" members of our development team thought it would be neat to sneak Linux on their computer. Of course, since they had no idea how to properly set it up to behave on the network, they caused the whole NT domain to get utterly screwed up.
So, after weeks of hair-pulling, I finally locked down the goddamn machines. No installations. No WindowShade. No Instant Messengers. No Linux. This is a place of business. I'm sorry to say it, but if you want to get any work out of a business network, you need to protect users from themselves, no matter how savvy they think they are.
We need high-profile projects like this and Komodo to show off the immense power of the Mozilla platform. All you people who whine about how it "needs to just be a browser" need to realise that Mozilla people went out to create a completely cross-platform application framework, using XUL, Gecko and all the other top-notch technologies they have developed. Far from only enabling surface features such as skinning and scriptability, the engine allows for a wide range of programs to be written once and then available to all Mozilla users.
With Java being removed from Windows XP, and AOL poised to start including a Mozilla-based browser in their next version of Internet software, Mozilla could very well become the cross-platform development environment of choice. Keep an eye out for more Mozilla-based projects like this to come.
I don't want to sound like a troll, but GNOME is at least five years away from any sort of maturity. I use Solaris at work on large SPARCstation arrays, because I need the extra performance of Sun's platforms. Complain all you want about CDE's age, poor design, etc. but it is damn fast and responsive. I tried running GNOME 1.4 on a couple of new machines we were integrating into the network, and it was unbearably sludgy. The combination of Nautilus and the bloated Sawfish window manager ate over 50% of the valuable CPU time, time that could be far better spent handling database queries and web requests. The interface was clumsy and difficult to navigate. I am glad that Sun came to its senses ; in my mind, they are doing what's best for their customers.
Now, GNOME does show potential, but as I said, it would very likely take several years of dedicated professional usability testing and performance tweaking to bring it up to enterprise quality. But the open-source community is diligent, and I look forward to hopefully giving GNOME another try in a couple years.
While having open-source code makes source compatibility easier to handle than binary compatibility, I've been wondering if there has been any work towards improving binary compatibility between versions of major libraries. The glibc mess has made binary compatibility between distributions more and more difficult, and important libraries like Qt and the various KDE and GNOME libs regularly break binary compatibility. I realize a lot of this has to do with the C++ ABI; have the GCC people thought of any ways to make binary compatibility easier to maintain in C++ programs without requiring vtable hacks and other ugliness?
As Linux comes of age, this is an important issue. Major companies want to bring their software to Linux, but often give up when face with the nightmare of having to support the thousands of subtly different library interfaces. Working to maintain binary compatibility for new versions of software would be a good goal for Linux's advancement.
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
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· Score: 0
NT was already out for a year by the time Windows 95 came out, so I would hardly call it a rewrite. And KDE did have essentially a complete rewrite between 1.1.x and 2.0.
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
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· Score: 0
Well, of course they did. By the time Windows 95 was out, they had a stable infrastructure upon which they could base the enormous improvements from 95 to 2k. It is the basic groundlaying that takes the most time. KDE had that down with 2.0, and since that version arrived improvements have been streaming in at an ever-increasing rate. The time between 3.0 (due out next yet) and 2.0 is almost one-third of the time it took to go from 1.0 to 2.0.
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 3, Troll
Well, that's not exactly true. The Windows NT (from which XP hails) and WinDOS (3.1, 9x, ME) families were completely different operating systems, being worked on simultaneously. It would be more accurate to say they went from Windows NT 3.1 to XP, which is still impressive of course. But the Windows NT kernel was essentially just VMS force-fitted to DOS-style conventions. In fact, WNT = VMS with all the letters incremented. The "New Technology" line was force-fitted later for marketing:-)
A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In 5 years, Microsoft went from Windows 1.0 to 2.1, all of which were essentially poor-to-mediocre DOS shells.
In 5 years, KDE has gone from nothing to KDE 2.2, which is an almost enterprise-quality desktop suite, with sophisticated development tools, an included office suite, and hundreds of other tools.
Anyway, DeMuDi looks to be a step in the right direction - maybe if a Linux distro starts shipping with 2 kernels, a standard kernel and a multi-media enhanced kernel, we'll finally have a workable solution.
I think having a distribution with two kernels would be overkill; what I had more in mind was something like DeMuDi being used in a dedicated sound-processing box (like Fostex's digital multitrackers, except cheaper since they wouldn't require proprietary software and hardware interfaces). I think a digital multitracker/mixer/signal processor unit running a specially-tuned Linux kernel on cheap commodity x86 hardware would be a huge boon to independent artists who don't have the thousands of dollars to spend on proprietary solutions.
No, unfortunately. Professional audio processing requires an extremely special form of real-time processing that is pretty much only good for handling audio, and which actually can cause problems with any other types of software. Therefore, it is unlikely that preemption patches for Linux, which must remain a general-purpose system, will be made. Even most Windows professional audio programs don't use Windows' built-in scheduling; they instead take advantage of Windows' rather loose kernel hooks to preempt the operating system and handle real-time scheduling for themselves.
Look at BeOS for an example of why this sort of processing can't possibly fit into a normal-use system. BeOS was constructed especially for the handling of low-latency media such as audio, but as anyone who tried to program it can tell you, it was exceptionally difficult to program anything other than media apps with it! The extremely high-resolution threading of the operating system made even the simplest programming tasks near impossible, as mutex locks and thread conditionals needed to be spread throughout the code to ensure proper execution. This is why BeOS ultimately flopped: it was too hard to program for.
But, of course, this is an area where Linux could shine. Due to its open-source nature, a special media-processing fork of the kernel could be made for those who need to deal with real-time audio, while the general-purpose kernel remains general-purpose. In fact, DeMuDi Linux is already striving for this goal.
The game seemed like a hamfisted attempt to combine System Shock 2 and Thief to me. Certainly it was better than most of the contemporary games at the time, but nowhere near as great as the two games it drew from.
Sorry, but I have ceased caring about the latest and greatest graphics chipsets, game engines, processors, etc. I don't want games to be "more realistic" or "better looking". What these developers have become blind to is that games should be fun. I don't care how many triangles per second the games puts out if it's just another variation of the tired Doom point-and-click kill-everything-that-moves theme.
The lack of innovation in the gaming industry has gotten so terrible that crap has become celebrated. Mediocre titles like The Sims and Deus Ex win tons of awards by the dubious virtue of being only slightly more interesting than all the other dross on the retail shelves. Meanwhile, all of the truly innovative thinkers slowly trickle away to the console markets, leaving the PC game landscape for the wasteland it is. This Harvey Smith is representative of the sad state of the entire PC game industry, which every day seems more and more like it only exists to line nVidia and the other high-end hardware makers' pockets instead of entertaining its customers.
Middle mouse button w/tabs
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Is there a way to make it so that clicking the middle mouse button on a link opens it in a new tab, instead of a new window? That would be very nice, since tabs open a lot faster than new windows do and I've become used to using the middle mouse button.
The Linux JDK can be installed using the java/linux-jdk13 port (or linux-ibm-jdk13 for the IBM JDK). While the IBM JDK did give me some problems, I have yet to see any trouble using Sun's Linux JDK under FreeBSD; it even works under native-compiled Konqueror for applets. Tomcat runs fine for servlets, too.
I think having a cluster of Athlons would create a miniature sun with all that heat.
Perl trying to outgrow its niche
on
Apocalypse 3
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Let's face it, perl is absolutely great for its original intention - fast, easy, write-and-forget scripting. But as I see the plans for Perl 6 unfold, one thought comes to my mind - Yuck. The language they propose is bloated and convoluted beyond words; it's clearly evident that Wall and his fellow "designers" are struggling vainly to make Perl "grow up" -- something that it has absolutely no need to do. Thereareotherlanguages out there to fill the other niches; languages which try to do everything doom themselves to failure. Ambition kills.
Slashdot Mirror
because it's the default homepage for Internet Explorer, and as we all know, 90% of people don't bother to change their defaults. I wonder how many of those MSN hits are people who actually stay on the site, compared to those who just let IE load it up on startup then immediately go somewhere else.
Thank you for the kind words, but unfortunately after being gang-modded down into negativeland I think getting back up is going to be a challenge at best, since my name is on somebody's blacklist now. I've got a new account ready, but I just wanted to give this one a final go. You, Mr. Bell, seem to be in fairly good standing though; if you ever have any mod points and are feeling generous feel free to boost me up. Good luck, and be on the lookout for my new account (it should be pretty easy to recognize :-)
(I would post anonymously, but the editors seem to have removed that privilege from my account. Oh well.)
- Reliable bandwidth. While DSL doesn't have the same "potential" bandwidth of cable, you get the 1.5Mbps to yourself, since you have your very own copper loop to your telco's central office (i.e. your phone line). Cable lines are shared throughout your neighborhood, so your maximum transfer speed varies astronomically depending on how many people have their TV or cable internet connections on at the time.
- Cheap setup. In most cities these days, the phone lines are already DSL-ready, and chances are you have at least one phone line going into your house. If you don't already have cable TV installed, you'll have to pay big bucks to get the cable line.
- Support. Cable companies still make the majority of cash from cable TV, and because of this tend to treat their Internet subscribers as second-class citizens.
Really, the death of cable is just the free market choosing the better technology in the end, and that is what capitalism is supposed to do, isn't it? I feel sorry for all the cable subscribers, but you all really should have done more research before picking a broadband provider.This is exactly the problem I'm talking about. The egotistical developers and other halfwits who think they know more than the IS people going in and trying to handle things for themselves. These people are very rarely as smart as they think they are, and too often screw everything up, but are too egoistic to call IT. So then I have to spend a day trying to find the source of a problem, only to find out that the loser who screwed things up knew about the problem for a week but "forgot" to tell us about it.
And what is with all the troll accusations? Is everybody here really so small-minded and petty that they dismiss anything that they don't want to believe?
The NT loader is perfectly capable of booting Linux, or any other OS for that matter.
So, after weeks of hair-pulling, I finally locked down the goddamn machines. No installations. No WindowShade. No Instant Messengers. No Linux. This is a place of business. I'm sorry to say it, but if you want to get any work out of a business network, you need to protect users from themselves, no matter how savvy they think they are.
With Java being removed from Windows XP, and AOL poised to start including a Mozilla-based browser in their next version of Internet software, Mozilla could very well become the cross-platform development environment of choice. Keep an eye out for more Mozilla-based projects like this to come.
Screenshots can be seen on the GNOME site There also are some more Nautilus-centric screenshots on their sourceforge project page.
(FLIP, eat it ACs)
Now, GNOME does show potential, but as I said, it would very likely take several years of dedicated professional usability testing and performance tweaking to bring it up to enterprise quality. But the open-source community is diligent, and I look forward to hopefully giving GNOME another try in a couple years.
As Linux comes of age, this is an important issue. Major companies want to bring their software to Linux, but often give up when face with the nightmare of having to support the thousands of subtly different library interfaces. Working to maintain binary compatibility for new versions of software would be a good goal for Linux's advancement.
NT was already out for a year by the time Windows 95 came out, so I would hardly call it a rewrite. And KDE did have essentially a complete rewrite between 1.1.x and 2.0.
Well, of course they did. By the time Windows 95 was out, they had a stable infrastructure upon which they could base the enormous improvements from 95 to 2k. It is the basic groundlaying that takes the most time. KDE had that down with 2.0, and since that version arrived improvements have been streaming in at an ever-increasing rate. The time between 3.0 (due out next yet) and 2.0 is almost one-third of the time it took to go from 1.0 to 2.0.
Well, that's not exactly true. The Windows NT (from which XP hails) and WinDOS (3.1, 9x, ME) families were completely different operating systems, being worked on simultaneously. It would be more accurate to say they went from Windows NT 3.1 to XP, which is still impressive of course. But the Windows NT kernel was essentially just VMS force-fitted to DOS-style conventions. In fact, WNT = VMS with all the letters incremented. The "New Technology" line was force-fitted later for marketing :-)
In 5 years, KDE has gone from nothing to KDE 2.2, which is an almost enterprise-quality desktop suite, with sophisticated development tools, an included office suite, and hundreds of other tools.
Imagine where we'll be in another five years.
$ less TextDoc.txt
It isn't perfect, but it works well enough for the rare occasions somebody sends me a .doc attachment (or I get one from Sircam :-).
Look at BeOS for an example of why this sort of processing can't possibly fit into a normal-use system. BeOS was constructed especially for the handling of low-latency media such as audio, but as anyone who tried to program it can tell you, it was exceptionally difficult to program anything other than media apps with it! The extremely high-resolution threading of the operating system made even the simplest programming tasks near impossible, as mutex locks and thread conditionals needed to be spread throughout the code to ensure proper execution. This is why BeOS ultimately flopped: it was too hard to program for.
But, of course, this is an area where Linux could shine. Due to its open-source nature, a special media-processing fork of the kernel could be made for those who need to deal with real-time audio, while the general-purpose kernel remains general-purpose. In fact, DeMuDi Linux is already striving for this goal.
The game seemed like a hamfisted attempt to combine System Shock 2 and Thief to me. Certainly it was better than most of the contemporary games at the time, but nowhere near as great as the two games it drew from.
The lack of innovation in the gaming industry has gotten so terrible that crap has become celebrated. Mediocre titles like The Sims and Deus Ex win tons of awards by the dubious virtue of being only slightly more interesting than all the other dross on the retail shelves. Meanwhile, all of the truly innovative thinkers slowly trickle away to the console markets, leaving the PC game landscape for the wasteland it is. This Harvey Smith is representative of the sad state of the entire PC game industry, which every day seems more and more like it only exists to line nVidia and the other high-end hardware makers' pockets instead of entertaining its customers.
Is there a way to make it so that clicking the middle mouse button on a link opens it in a new tab, instead of a new window? That would be very nice, since tabs open a lot faster than new windows do and I've become used to using the middle mouse button.
#!/usr/bin/perl
($_=HWX)and s|[IQ-Z!*B]X|EMLP VPS|and(tr@L-U@K-Z@),
s&(V|K)&++($A=$1)&ge&&print"${_}LD\n";
The Linux JDK can be installed using the java/linux-jdk13 port (or linux-ibm-jdk13 for the IBM JDK). While the IBM JDK did give me some problems, I have yet to see any trouble using Sun's Linux JDK under FreeBSD; it even works under native-compiled Konqueror for applets. Tomcat runs fine for servlets, too.
I think having a cluster of Athlons would create a miniature sun with all that heat.
Let's face it, perl is absolutely great for its original intention - fast, easy, write-and-forget scripting. But as I see the plans for Perl 6 unfold, one thought comes to my mind - Yuck. The language they propose is bloated and convoluted beyond words; it's clearly evident that Wall and his fellow "designers" are struggling vainly to make Perl "grow up" -- something that it has absolutely no need to do. There are other languages out there to fill the other niches; languages which try to do everything doom themselves to failure. Ambition kills.