I think Corel Linux was good because it was sort of a stepping stone for the new users moving into Linux territory. A person who "outgrows" the Corel feature set can easily move up to a more advanced distribution if need be, but the initial step from windows is vital if Linux is to get wide acceptance on the desktop. It seems to me Corel played a big role in facilitating that first step.
Why does there seem to be such a negative attitude towards Corel and their products here on slashdot? Their Linux distro made pretty big strides toward bringing the OS to the desktop and boradening its market as far as novice users are concerned.
It seems to me that the distribution's further development should be considered a good thing.
I think that micropayments are a more profitable avenue to raising funds of r a quality sites than advertisement is. If you think about it, your average sites get about $1 - $2 per 1000 page views, which is pretty little. Asking a user to contribute aronud 50 cents per month for access to the site, isn't asking for too much, and if the process was somehow automated, and made into a one-click proposition, I don't think a lot of people would object to paying the fee.
If you think about it, such a small payment will add up to large monthly sums for the sites that carry content users are really interested in. This will also result in a "survival of the fittest" kind of an atmosphere, eliminating a lot of fluff sites out there.
Is pretty important to my work selection. I live in NY, and though i wish to stay to work there and geography is of little concern, I try to find a job that interferes as little as possible with my schedule.
I'm 2 years of college, and working 60 hour weeks is something that I don't yet think I need to do, especially since I don't have a family to support and expenses to cover. And really it is possible to find a good full time job that will be a 9 - 5 or 9 - 6 gig without sacriicing too much pay.
I can totally see the point of view of people who don't want to take a job that would require them to move to a socially conservative area, regardless of the living costs.
If you consider the average age of the people in the industry, it's a surprize to me that there are as many people employed in he field outside of large metropolitan areas as there are.
Isn't X.com's pay pal doing the same exact thing but at no cost to either the recepient and the person payng? (I think they have a small fee on larger accounts though)
Places like blogger.com have been having paypal funding drives where they asked people interested in helping out to send money by paypal, and as far as I know these have been pretty successful.
I guess this may not be sufficient prior art for the USPTO though...
... is to make viruses and VB scripts run on Linux through WINE. Once that is done, the migration of the desktop user base to Linux can begin in earnest.
I actually think that the community here has matured quite a bit since a couple of years back.
Used to be that anytime someone criticized Linux, everyone would start bitching about how wrong and off base they are, and the discussion boards'd be full of posts proclaiming how windows sucks, with their main argument being the ability to substitute a dollars sign for the "S" in "MS". Those posts are still there, but a much larger portion of people now recognize that while Linux is a good OS, it is still weak on some fronts. (This Freshmeat article on Linux Browsers is a good example of this attitude).
I think the Linux comunity as a whole has matured and become able to realistically appraise their current situation, which makes the outlook for the future of Linux very optimistic.
I saw this film on Friday (though with no high expectations -- the "Castaway" show I was hoping to catch was sold out), and it sucked (as you may have guessed from the reviews).
But my big problem with the film isn't the fact that the story was bad, or that major technical errors were made. I believe that the movie trivializes the entire open source movement.
The movie basically said that the company was bad because they killed programmers, without getting into the topic of anti-competitive practices that still obeyed the letter of the law.
It upheld all the stereotypes that have plagued our comunity throughout its existence.
It leads us to believe that if the Windows source code was to be broadcast over the internet tomorrow, all the problems with microsoft will go away.
You make a good point, but then building new powerplants has been problematic as well...
Everyone agrees they are needed, but noone can quite agree where to build them.
The same people that are adamant about how something needs to be done about the power shortage, are just as verbal on the topic of not wanting a powerplant in their back yard. Or anywhere in their general vicinity for that matter.
As far as I am aware, a number of initiatives have been subdued by activists lobbying for plants to be built somwhere else. And, just like in that Simpsons episode about the bear tax, everyone is finding an easy target for the blame, be it the government, the power companies or the geeks.
So hasn't something like this been around for quite some time? I've seen ATX cases with all sorts of wonderful port outs on the back where nothing but the old DIN keyboard used to plug in a couple of years ago...
Aren't these aimed at proffessional workstation markets where cutting edge graphics and surround sound don't matter as much as the raw CPU speed and RAM/Hard drive space? Not everything that's not a hot-rod gaming rig is a low end system... Some just have a different purpose.
I think it's great that a person can buy their way into space. This is what will lead to competition among non-government space developers, and ultimately result in innovative technologies for getting to and utilizing space.
One would think slashdotters more than anyone would see the advantages of breaking the monopoly of a single agency over something with as much potential as space.
I think the point i was trying to make is that USA does have the ability to do this. Obviously wether or not they chose to is something that is entirely up to the government of our fair nation.
I think who's in power in the white house and congress goes a long way toward the policies that get set, but I would like to think that if the right decisions get made, US is in the best position to do good by its citizens.
I believe that while (as is obvious to any Slashdot reader) USA is far from a perfect place to live as far as your freedom is concerned, it is still the best choice out there.
The reason is that the trend toward the dominaiton commercial interest in almost every field is a global one, and as such, no technologically advanced country is safe. If a country were to chose to push for individual freedom over the interest of large corporations, it might well find itself excluded from the technological progress that these corporations bring. As such many nations might be "scared" into giving away the pie.
The U.S. is the one country that has little to fear in this respect. For a company with a global vision, excluding the American marketplace is not an option, and therefore America is in a better position to protect the interests of its citizens.
So while it might happen that some concessions to the corporate world are made, i think that US has the best chance of any country in this battle, should they chose to undertake it.
Heh... I remember when I took the test it was given in Pascal. That was my High-school language. C++ became the standard for my college years, and now in the workplace I use Java exclusively, and while it's made me lazy, I couldn't be happier.
I think that the decision to switch to Java testing was a good one on the part of the College Board, but will miss it's mark by the time it's put into full effect.
From taking a look at the language subset that they plan on testing (here) I can see that they are focusing as little as possible on Java's little quirks and try to cover as much broad concepts of OO as possible.
In this respect I think that Java is a pretty good tool for the job. C++ has too much language overhead that you have to be familiar with in order to be able to use it.
As far as arguments of a language-neutral test go, I would like to see anyone clearly abstract away an inheritance tree in a way that is can be objectively evaluated. The last thing you want on a test is a prick grader deciding to misinterpret your pseudo-code. And with something as fuzzy as OO in question, I think any kind of pseudo coding will be wide-open to interpretation.
Actually, my being a libertarian has nothing tp do with it... I hate the man for being too stupid to realize that he's not smart enough to be president.
Humanity would not benefit from a product designed to draw people away from Word. The should try to build a product that would stand up on it's own merits, and not try and sell it by pointing out Word's flaws.
Obviously the world is doing just fine using Word right now. Besides, saying that imposing your point of view on people will be good for humanity smacks of the middle ages and the crusades.
As long as there is a company that takes up the torch after Corel, I doubt anyone will cry about the deal.
Well, there's a bunch of words nobody at slashdot expected to see in the same sentence... Who could have thought we'd have a transmeta/linux based appliance that comes from the Microsoft of the Iternet...
I wonder if this is a genuine effort, or just an attempt to dumb down these cool technologies for the average AOL brain-dead users...
I think that IE is definitely a winner for the windows platform (though I still use Netscape on windows). However I also think that a lot of that has to do with IE's ties with windows.
I've used IE on mac OS X today, and it had crashed repeatedly, and was generally slow for me. I think this is simply because Microsoft was not able to leverage their own OS to build on top of.
While Netscape should not hope to compete with IE on Windows outright, it has a good chance of winning market share on the "alternative" platforms. If it can build enough of a following among Mac and *Nix users, and if Linux continues to grow, Netscape will have a chance of leveraging that market share to get its foot back in the door.
It's not neccessarily true. Depends on what you're using it for, and how good the scanner is. If you wanna catalogue your cd/book/video collection a scanner can very well be the way to go.
And from a marketing company's standpoint, a cuecat code is definitely better than a url. They wanna track their traffic based on which ads people are reacting to and what publications they're from. The only way to do that is creating complicated URLs that contain ad/publication tracking infos, and people like you and I would just chop off everything after the top level domain name. So the codes are a definite plus for advertisement people.
The problem is that the cuecat reader is not that good to begin with. I've had the pleasure of playing with one, and basically it involved a lot of random waving back and forth, and turning the sucker at all the weird angles I could think of before the code went through. That does make it more hassle than it's worth.
If they made it good and accurate, it's sitting right there by the keyboard, heck, I'd use it if I found an ad with the code on it... Maybe the first few ads I'd even scan in if I wasn't interested in the product. Just for the sheer heck of it. Unfortunately for them, like I said, the scanner isn't too accurate.
Because you don't like MS's EULA for SQL Server, you should not buy it. If you agree with the EULA, go ahead and buy it. Larry is just
weasel anyway, so why should there be any defence for him and his corporate thugs?
That's not a good argument. (about the EULA, not about Larry being a weasel, that i cannot comment on) The whole principle is that you should not be forced into ridiculous lisencing terms by a large organisation with a substantial market share. Imagine they put something ludicrous like that into the windows EULA:
"You cannot write about your Operating system crashing without prior expressed permission from Microsoft"
And then they'd say if you don't like it -- don't use it. Linux aside, Windows has the majority of the desktop market share, and such logic will leave little choice to most of the people using PCs at home.
Isn't publishing benchmarks of something covered under fair use? I mean if you go to a restaurant, can someone tell you that you can't let anyone out there know how good the food is? No. Benchmarks for a DB server are excatly the same thing. I don't see how a lisence agreement like this can stand up in court. Then again, IANAL...
I wonder if 2 kilobytes is enough to really do something cool with the chip. I mean it can obviously be used to scre up the operation completely, but i wonder if it can be made to run a demo every time it starts up. I know there are 4k and even 1k intros for the PC, but those usually take advantage of the OS services...
Slashdot Mirror
I think Corel Linux was good because it was sort of a stepping stone for the new users moving into Linux territory. A person who "outgrows" the Corel feature set can easily move up to a more advanced distribution if need be, but the initial step from windows is vital if Linux is to get wide acceptance on the desktop. It seems to me Corel played a big role in facilitating that first step.
It seems to me that the distribution's further development should be considered a good thing.
If you think about it, such a small payment will add up to large monthly sums for the sites that carry content users are really interested in. This will also result in a "survival of the fittest" kind of an atmosphere, eliminating a lot of fluff sites out there.
So I say, bring it on.
I'm 2 years of college, and working 60 hour weeks is something that I don't yet think I need to do, especially since I don't have a family to support and expenses to cover. And really it is possible to find a good full time job that will be a 9 - 5 or 9 - 6 gig without sacriicing too much pay.
I can totally see the point of view of people who don't want to take a job that would require them to move to a socially conservative area, regardless of the living costs.
If you consider the average age of the people in the industry, it's a surprize to me that there are as many people employed in he field outside of large metropolitan areas as there are.
Hey, COOL, now with a SNES emulator installed on one of these, I can have the pocket SNES I have been dreaming about for all these years! Whoooo!
And then any of us could be that guy from the IMB's commercial.
Places like blogger.com have been having paypal funding drives where they asked people interested in helping out to send money by paypal, and as far as I know these have been pretty successful.
I guess this may not be sufficient prior art for the USPTO though...
... is to make viruses and VB scripts run on Linux through WINE. Once that is done, the migration of the desktop user base to Linux can begin in earnest.
Used to be that anytime someone criticized Linux, everyone would start bitching about how wrong and off base they are, and the discussion boards'd be full of posts proclaiming how windows sucks, with their main argument being the ability to substitute a dollars sign for the "S" in "MS". Those posts are still there, but a much larger portion of people now recognize that while Linux is a good OS, it is still weak on some fronts. (This Freshmeat article on Linux Browsers is a good example of this attitude).
I think the Linux comunity as a whole has matured and become able to realistically appraise their current situation, which makes the outlook for the future of Linux very optimistic.
But my big problem with the film isn't the fact that the story was bad, or that major technical errors were made. I believe that the movie trivializes the entire open source movement.
The movie basically said that the company was bad because they killed programmers, without getting into the topic of anti-competitive practices that still obeyed the letter of the law.
It upheld all the stereotypes that have plagued our comunity throughout its existence.
It leads us to believe that if the Windows source code was to be broadcast over the internet tomorrow, all the problems with microsoft will go away.
The same people that are adamant about how something needs to be done about the power shortage, are just as verbal on the topic of not wanting a powerplant in their back yard. Or anywhere in their general vicinity for that matter.
As far as I am aware, a number of initiatives have been subdued by activists lobbying for plants to be built somwhere else. And, just like in that Simpsons episode about the bear tax, everyone is finding an easy target for the blame, be it the government, the power companies or the geeks.
Aren't these aimed at proffessional workstation markets where cutting edge graphics and surround sound don't matter as much as the raw CPU speed and RAM/Hard drive space? Not everything that's not a hot-rod gaming rig is a low end system... Some just have a different purpose.
Is it just a chipset built into the motherboard? If so, hasn't this been done for a while now?
One would think slashdotters more than anyone would see the advantages of breaking the monopoly of a single agency over something with as much potential as space.
I think who's in power in the white house and congress goes a long way toward the policies that get set, but I would like to think that if the right decisions get made, US is in the best position to do good by its citizens.
The reason is that the trend toward the dominaiton commercial interest in almost every field is a global one, and as such, no technologically advanced country is safe. If a country were to chose to push for individual freedom over the interest of large corporations, it might well find itself excluded from the technological progress that these corporations bring. As such many nations might be "scared" into giving away the pie.
The U.S. is the one country that has little to fear in this respect. For a company with a global vision, excluding the American marketplace is not an option, and therefore America is in a better position to protect the interests of its citizens.
So while it might happen that some concessions to the corporate world are made, i think that US has the best chance of any country in this battle, should they chose to undertake it.
I think that the decision to switch to Java testing was a good one on the part of the College Board, but will miss it's mark by the time it's put into full effect.
From taking a look at the language subset that they plan on testing (here) I can see that they are focusing as little as possible on Java's little quirks and try to cover as much broad concepts of OO as possible.
In this respect I think that Java is a pretty good tool for the job. C++ has too much language overhead that you have to be familiar with in order to be able to use it.
As far as arguments of a language-neutral test go, I would like to see anyone clearly abstract away an inheritance tree in a way that is can be objectively evaluated. The last thing you want on a test is a prick grader deciding to misinterpret your pseudo-code. And with something as fuzzy as OO in question, I think any kind of pseudo coding will be wide-open to interpretation.
Actually, my being a libertarian has nothing tp do with it... I hate the man for being too stupid to realize that he's not smart enough to be president.
Obviously the world is doing just fine using Word right now. Besides, saying that imposing your point of view on people will be good for humanity smacks of the middle ages and the crusades.
As long as there is a company that takes up the torch after Corel, I doubt anyone will cry about the deal.
I wonder if this is a genuine effort, or just an attempt to dumb down these cool technologies for the average AOL brain-dead users...
I've used IE on mac OS X today, and it had crashed repeatedly, and was generally slow for me. I think this is simply because Microsoft was not able to leverage their own OS to build on top of.
While Netscape should not hope to compete with IE on Windows outright, it has a good chance of winning market share on the "alternative" platforms. If it can build enough of a following among Mac and *Nix users, and if Linux continues to grow, Netscape will have a chance of leveraging that market share to get its foot back in the door.
And from a marketing company's standpoint, a cuecat code is definitely better than a url. They wanna track their traffic based on which ads people are reacting to and what publications they're from. The only way to do that is creating complicated URLs that contain ad/publication tracking infos, and people like you and I would just chop off everything after the top level domain name. So the codes are a definite plus for advertisement people.
The problem is that the cuecat reader is not that good to begin with. I've had the pleasure of playing with one, and basically it involved a lot of random waving back and forth, and turning the sucker at all the weird angles I could think of before the code went through. That does make it more hassle than it's worth.
If they made it good and accurate, it's sitting right there by the keyboard, heck, I'd use it if I found an ad with the code on it... Maybe the first few ads I'd even scan in if I wasn't interested in the product. Just for the sheer heck of it. Unfortunately for them, like I said, the scanner isn't too accurate.
"You cannot write about your Operating system crashing without prior expressed permission from Microsoft"
And then they'd say if you don't like it -- don't use it. Linux aside, Windows has the majority of the desktop market share, and such logic will leave little choice to most of the people using PCs at home.
Isn't publishing benchmarks of something covered under fair use? I mean if you go to a restaurant, can someone tell you that you can't let anyone out there know how good the food is? No. Benchmarks for a DB server are excatly the same thing. I don't see how a lisence agreement like this can stand up in court. Then again, IANAL...
I wonder if 2 kilobytes is enough to really do something cool with the chip. I mean it can obviously be used to scre up the operation completely, but i wonder if it can be made to run a demo every time it starts up. I know there are 4k and even 1k intros for the PC, but those usually take advantage of the OS services...