On another note, there could be big problems when we uses these in, oh, a password database.
I'm no cryptographer, but I don't think this is a problem. After all, an md5 sum is longer than an 8-character password; most passwords won't have a conflict of reasonable length.
It suggests creating 'development environments configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application.'
That's all well and good, but after a developer codes 5 apps which work pretty much the same way, won't he just develop libraries so that any subsequent app will take less than an hour to code?
The employees here actually remembered sysadmin day! Choice quotes:
"Today is SysAdmin Day and I would like to thank the IT dept for hanging in there when the going gets tough. Join me in thanking them for all their help this past year and keep up the good work."
"I am always grateful to you guys but I will say it again THANKS!"
"YOUR THE BEST!!!!!!"
Makes us all warm and fuzzy inside. After all, were the best!
Why not consolidate quality standards between major open desktop before continue working separately on each of them?
Freedesktop.org does exactly that. More and more great desktop standards are coming out all the time -- thumbnailing, window manager hints, MIME types.... It's a great project. oGALAXYo is basically saying that freedesktop.org shouldn't exist, that user-level programs should not drive kernel enhancements, and that GNOME 1.4 was "right" while GNOME 2 is "wrong".
Can you say, "troll"? oGALAXYo: Just don't use GNOME 2 if you don't like it! If you're going to disagree with every decision every GNOME developer makes, maybe you're focusing on the wrong project....
I think IT people have the right to be annoying when people come into their offices with the following situations:
They typed their password in wrong, and insist they didn't
They got an error message and insist they didn't
They got an error message and didn't read it
They got a warning that what they were about to do was stupid and they did it anyway
They did something we told them a few hours ago explicitly not to do
They come to our office when we have an easy-to-use problem tracking system that everyone else in the company uses and they know we're going to tell them to use the problem tracking system anyway
They don't believe the problem tracking system applies to their problem
They installed spyware or other dumb programs
They lie about what they did
They watch you do exactly what they said they did, and then they say that the computer didn't respond the same way when they did it
They click every "print" button they can find, even though we encourage a paperless office
They are rude to us
They expect us to drop everything and work on their problems
They don't log out of the system when we ask
When we have a critical problem and tell them not to call us and that we know about it, they call us and ask if we've fixed it yet
IT people only do two things wrong: they're sometimes rude and sometimes stubborn. But really, that's nothing compared to what users put us through every day.
A "Garbage collector" is simply irrelevant to PHP. Memory management is taken care of for you.
That was my question. Memory management is taken care of when PHP is run as a server in a simplistic way: it allocates memory as it needs it, and then deallocates everything when the process is complete. When PHP is run as a memory-resident application, it needs to be able to keep track of which variables are no longer referenced so that it can free up their memory; otherwise it will keep growing and growing in memory size until it runs out. The logic which frees memory as the program is running is the garbage collector; without it, applications just aren't reliable enough to use in any but the most simple scenarios.
PHP was designed with websites in mind. I've googled and am unable to come up with an answer to a pretty basic question: does PHP5 even have a garbage collector?
Python has mature GTK/GNOME bindings and a much more developer-friendly syntax than PHP. Not to mention, it takes virtually no time to learn the language.
In other news, Microsoft has recently announced that it has no plans to relicense Windows or Office under the GPL. Apache, Sun, Oracle, the BSD teams, and just about every other commercial software company have followed suit and not licensed their flagship products under the GPL.
The PHP team has shown great pride at being the leader in this worldwide movement of not licensing software under the GPL.
GConf is nothing like the Windows Registry, except for the similar appearance of their respective editors. If Mr. Petreley cares to compare and contrast GConf and the Windows Registry he would know this. In fact Nicholas, I will paypal you $100 US if you can name three architectural similarities between GConf and the Registry.
Has anyone benchmarked Mono against the latest.NET 1.1?
I seem to remember reading something about benchmarking being explicitly disallowed in the.NET license agreement. I may be confusing the clause with that of some other Microsoft app, though.
Nobody likes people who toot their own horns. I'd feel much more inclined to like you if you had only written in your Ask Slashdot, "I love learning, yet I never have found school enjoyable." All the rest makes people dislike you, and it doesn't help anyone answer the question.
I'm speaking from personal experience: I used to be quite full of myself. And guess what, I didn't like high school when I used that attitude. Quite certainly, your first step to enjoying school (and life!) more is to learn a lesson in humility.
After that, ask yourself: is school the best thing to do? It sounds like you're only going to college because that's what everybody else is doing / told you to do. When I felt that way I took a year off school --boy, did it clear things up for me and help me decide what I want to do! So don't think school is the only option; it's not.
All that said: University is nothing at all like high school. You're treated like an adult and are expected to learn fast. So it sounds to me like you'd enjoy it -- but lose the attitude or you'll be miserable. You're treated like an adult because you're expected to be an adult; bullshit about being "unique" won't get you anywhere.
On MacOS and on GNOME, apps all behave so similarly. On Windows, just about every program I download has a completely different GUI (including apps by Microsoft itself); in my GNOME desktop at home, apps are simpler, more powerful, more intuitive and more consistent. There are no MDI apps in GNOME. Everything "just works."
Of course, I still can break things and I sometimes spend half an hour trying to get new devices to work. But I, personally, don't have a problem with that. And that kind of thing has been improving in Linux in general at an alarming rate.
Oh, and in GNOME the mouse-wheel works on the window underneath your mouse! That alone is a reason for switching (let alone that there's an actually-functional terminal app).
in that if you burn at a faster rate than a different reader can read, the DVD cannot be read. I know a while back when I had a blazing 2x cd ROM, my friend burned me something on a 4x, but alas, I couldn't read it. Needless to say I was pissed...
No, and CDs don't work like that either. The situation you describe was an isolated incident. Even a 1x DVD reader (e.g., a DVD player) can read a 16x-burned CD. In fact, there should be no physical difference between a DVD burned at 1x and one burned at 16x.
I can think of dozens of examples of this. Hell, where I work, the blank fields on our contracts must be typed in all caps. I wrote a screenplay once, and you need caps all over the place. When I'm coding, I write some macro names in all-caps.
Just because the output must appear to be in caps doesn't mean you should write the caps. Word processors have style options to set properly-capitalized selections to all-caps or small-caps.
I'd expect any screenplay-writing program to automatically capitalize where necessary.
Pressing capslock puts the keyboard into upper case until the shift key is pressed. Then it should go off.
While I think this is a clever idea, it would nullify the point above. People who use capslock to type in long constants would have to press it after each underscore. As any decent programmer will tell you, ACONSTANTNAME is much worse than A_CONSTANT_NAME.
I personally touch-type and hold down the Shift key for long constants; I find it faster than synchronizing my Shift keypresses with my '_' keypresses.
Obviously only certain kinds of plugins would work on a non-XUL implementation like Epiphany or Camino, but other plugins like the flashblock or useragent-switcher should be possible to port.
Flashblock, for one, works out-of-the-box. Go to about:config and set xpinstall.enabled to true, then install the flashblock extension just as you would for Firefox.
For that matter, many XUL-based extensions work, at least partially. The DOM inspector *almost* works, and other stuff (for example, the certificates manager) works perfectly.
Not to mention, there's epiphany-extensions. Not many people have coded extensions, but those who have try very hard to keep the "feel" of Epiphany the same -- it's certainly the best browser around in terms of user interface, and we don't want to give that up for our favourite features! My Popup Blocker and Error Viewer extensions fit in very well (I find the HTML validator particularly useful). Also of note are the Certificates Manager (loads the XUL dialog), tabs-menu extensions, and mouse gestures extensions.
And the future is indeed bright. The possibilities of a Storage-based history system make my mind boggle.
currently players:
a. don't play incomplete avi at all
b. can't rewind
c. can reconstruct index on start (takes some time).
MPlayer does all three. I never bothered setting up TiVo-ish software: I just run mencoder to start recording and immediately run mplayer to play back the file as it's being written. I can pause for commercials and skip forwards and backwards.
I'm trying to argue both sides here - but Microsoft does offer free support and such free, comprehensive Linux support doesn't exist.
I call bullshit.
Microsoft's knowledge base is nice, yes, but honestly, it's there out of strict necessity. And it's not as good as Google anyway. For both Linux and Windows, Google is the way to go.
If you have a real problem with Windows, it won't be on support.microsoft.com, it'll be on Google. Probably Google Groups. And probably with a bunch of people with titles like "Microsoft MVP" chiming in with their two pence, all wrong and clueless. Guess why? Because nobody knows how the software works. And these real problems don't get solved.
How do you solve the problems? By calling up Microsoft. They'll charge you hundreds of dollars, to be refunded if they decide it's a bug in their software. You will be on hold for hours on end, and their support is far from helpful.
I spent over six months with Microsoft support on a single issue a few years ago; I still see the problem today, so their solution obviously didn't work, but we just learn to live with the problem.
More recently we experienced a bug with Windows 2000 Server SP4; it just kept rebooting randomly. Turns out this stems from a fix of a vulnerability in SP3 and below. Microsoft support was useless and to my knowledge they haven't actually fixed the new bug. Google Groups, on the other hand, helped us find the problem (we just use SP3 now, vulnerability and all).
I've set up GNU/Linux in mission-critical situations. When problems come up, IRC or Google or Google Groups has always had the answer. The three have a combined 100% track record. Why? Because the developers listen, and if not, you can always look at the source code. (You'd be surprised how easy it is to find the problem in the source code going by nothing more than an error message.)
In my experience, GNU/Linux support costs all of $0. But if I had a scary manager who wanted support, I could always recommend one of the zillions of companies selling Linux support. I doubt any would be as good as newsgroups, but they can't hurt. They'd certainly be more helpful than Microsoft, since in my experience Microsoft support is nothing more than a waste of time and patience.
Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time. It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now.
Your observations fly in the face of empirical evidence, which has clearly shown that BitTorrent is in fact the best way to distribute FC2.
Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it won't work.
Yes, Russ. The democratic process has always been one of the messier aspects of democracy.
I hope you're not talking about Debian. Debian is not a democracy and never will be. Can you imagine what the system would be like if features were created simply because of popularity? The end result would be a complete mess. Most developers and users do not understand the bigger picture; only a few are able to plan out an entire system.
Debian is a meritocracy, which works much better.
Then again, so is GNOME and it's released once every 6 months. That works much better.
This is exactly why I love Debian: it's the community. Yes, many Red Hat employees are deeply involved in the GNU/Linux community; but it seems to work both ways with Debian: the members of the GNU/Linux community affect Debian's direction substantially.
Red Hat ships its software as a "complete package", so to speak. You buy the CDs and put them in and install, and that's what you've got. Debian is much more of a "work in progress" that you can actually become a part of. You download the 50-meg install image which fetches a snapshot of what the developers are working on. That seems much more honest to me, because GNU/Linux is a work in progress and always will be.
Of course, some of Debian's politics suck. I run testing on servers and unstable on desktops because stable is just so damned old that it's almost useless. A six-month release schedule like GNOME's would solve this, IMO.
My school's team made the iSun solar-powered car which goes in excess of 65mph and is one of the lightest in the world. Not to mention, it looks really cool.
Since SP1 didn't stop anyone from using pirated copies neither will SP2 even if they tried, so spin it like they care.
SP1 did stop people from using pirated copies; it wouldn't install if the registration key was one of two red-flagged ones (for example, that one that starts with "F...").
Of course, the day after that, out come all those programs which automatically change your Windows key to a new, un-flagged one.
If I were running Microsoft, I'd give up on copy-protection altogether. It's a waste of resources, because it simply does not work and never will. Except maybe with NGSCB, since Microsoft will be administering your computer and not you.
Slashdot Mirror
On another note, there could be big problems when we uses these in, oh, a password database.
I'm no cryptographer, but I don't think this is a problem. After all, an md5 sum is longer than an 8-character password; most passwords won't have a conflict of reasonable length.
It suggests creating 'development environments configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application.'
That's all well and good, but after a developer codes 5 apps which work pretty much the same way, won't he just develop libraries so that any subsequent app will take less than an hour to code?
The employees here actually remembered sysadmin day! Choice quotes:
"Today is SysAdmin Day and I would like to thank the IT dept for hanging in there when the going gets tough. Join me in thanking them for all their help this past year and keep up the good work."
"I am always grateful to you guys but I will say it again THANKS!"
"YOUR THE BEST!!!!!!"
Makes us all warm and fuzzy inside. After all, were the best!
Am I the only person left who thinks it is unethical to use a person's site and block their ads?
You may be. Personally, whether I block the ads or not I won't be clicking on them, so what difference does it make to the site's owner?
The one exception is Google AdWords. Those things are pretty cool.
Why not consolidate quality standards between major open desktop before continue working separately on each of them?
Freedesktop.org does exactly that. More and more great desktop standards are coming out all the time -- thumbnailing, window manager hints, MIME types.... It's a great project. oGALAXYo is basically saying that freedesktop.org shouldn't exist, that user-level programs should not drive kernel enhancements, and that GNOME 1.4 was "right" while GNOME 2 is "wrong".
Can you say, "troll"? oGALAXYo: Just don't use GNOME 2 if you don't like it! If you're going to disagree with every decision every GNOME developer makes, maybe you're focusing on the wrong project....
I think IT people have the right to be annoying when people come into their offices with the following situations:
IT people only do two things wrong: they're sometimes rude and sometimes stubborn. But really, that's nothing compared to what users put us through every day.
A "Garbage collector" is simply irrelevant to PHP. Memory management is taken care of for you.
That was my question. Memory management is taken care of when PHP is run as a server in a simplistic way: it allocates memory as it needs it, and then deallocates everything when the process is complete. When PHP is run as a memory-resident application, it needs to be able to keep track of which variables are no longer referenced so that it can free up their memory; otherwise it will keep growing and growing in memory size until it runs out. The logic which frees memory as the program is running is the garbage collector; without it, applications just aren't reliable enough to use in any but the most simple scenarios.
PHP was designed with websites in mind. I've googled and am unable to come up with an answer to a pretty basic question: does PHP5 even have a garbage collector?
Python has mature GTK/GNOME bindings and a much more developer-friendly syntax than PHP. Not to mention, it takes virtually no time to learn the language.
Why not use the right tool for the job?
In other news, Microsoft has recently announced that it has no plans to relicense Windows or Office under the GPL. Apache, Sun, Oracle, the BSD teams, and just about every other commercial software company have followed suit and not licensed their flagship products under the GPL.
The PHP team has shown great pride at being the leader in this worldwide movement of not licensing software under the GPL.
gconf == regedit
To quote Jorge Castro, here:
Has anyone benchmarked Mono against the latest .NET 1.1?
I seem to remember reading something about benchmarking being explicitly disallowed in the .NET license agreement. I may be confusing the clause with that of some other Microsoft app, though.
Nobody likes people who toot their own horns. I'd feel much more inclined to like you if you had only written in your Ask Slashdot, "I love learning, yet I never have found school enjoyable." All the rest makes people dislike you, and it doesn't help anyone answer the question.
I'm speaking from personal experience: I used to be quite full of myself. And guess what, I didn't like high school when I used that attitude. Quite certainly, your first step to enjoying school (and life!) more is to learn a lesson in humility.
After that, ask yourself: is school the best thing to do? It sounds like you're only going to college because that's what everybody else is doing / told you to do. When I felt that way I took a year off school --boy, did it clear things up for me and help me decide what I want to do! So don't think school is the only option; it's not.
All that said: University is nothing at all like high school. You're treated like an adult and are expected to learn fast. So it sounds to me like you'd enjoy it -- but lose the attitude or you'll be miserable. You're treated like an adult because you're expected to be an adult; bullshit about being "unique" won't get you anywhere.
On MacOS and on GNOME, apps all behave so similarly. On Windows, just about every program I download has a completely different GUI (including apps by Microsoft itself); in my GNOME desktop at home, apps are simpler, more powerful, more intuitive and more consistent. There are no MDI apps in GNOME. Everything "just works."
Of course, I still can break things and I sometimes spend half an hour trying to get new devices to work. But I, personally, don't have a problem with that. And that kind of thing has been improving in Linux in general at an alarming rate.
Oh, and in GNOME the mouse-wheel works on the window underneath your mouse! That alone is a reason for switching (let alone that there's an actually-functional terminal app).
in that if you burn at a faster rate than a different reader can read, the DVD cannot be read. I know a while back when I had a blazing 2x cd ROM, my friend burned me something on a 4x, but alas, I couldn't read it. Needless to say I was pissed...
No, and CDs don't work like that either. The situation you describe was an isolated incident. Even a 1x DVD reader (e.g., a DVD player) can read a 16x-burned CD. In fact, there should be no physical difference between a DVD burned at 1x and one burned at 16x.
I can think of dozens of examples of this. Hell, where I work, the blank fields on our contracts must be typed in all caps. I wrote a screenplay once, and you need caps all over the place. When I'm coding, I write some macro names in all-caps.
Just because the output must appear to be in caps doesn't mean you should write the caps. Word processors have style options to set properly-capitalized selections to all-caps or small-caps.
I'd expect any screenplay-writing program to automatically capitalize where necessary.
Capslock does more harm than it does good.
Pressing capslock puts the keyboard into upper case until the shift key is pressed. Then it should go off.
While I think this is a clever idea, it would nullify the point above. People who use capslock to type in long constants would have to press it after each underscore. As any decent programmer will tell you, ACONSTANTNAME is much worse than A_CONSTANT_NAME.
I personally touch-type and hold down the Shift key for long constants; I find it faster than synchronizing my Shift keypresses with my '_' keypresses.
Obviously only certain kinds of plugins would work on a non-XUL implementation like Epiphany or Camino, but other plugins like the flashblock or useragent-switcher should be possible to port.
Flashblock, for one, works out-of-the-box. Go to about:config and set xpinstall.enabled to true, then install the flashblock extension just as you would for Firefox.
For that matter, many XUL-based extensions work, at least partially. The DOM inspector *almost* works, and other stuff (for example, the certificates manager) works perfectly.
Not to mention, there's epiphany-extensions. Not many people have coded extensions, but those who have try very hard to keep the "feel" of Epiphany the same -- it's certainly the best browser around in terms of user interface, and we don't want to give that up for our favourite features! My Popup Blocker and Error Viewer extensions fit in very well (I find the HTML validator particularly useful). Also of note are the Certificates Manager (loads the XUL dialog), tabs-menu extensions, and mouse gestures extensions.
And the future is indeed bright. The possibilities of a Storage-based history system make my mind boggle.
MPlayer does all three. I never bothered setting up TiVo-ish software: I just run mencoder to start recording and immediately run mplayer to play back the file as it's being written. I can pause for commercials and skip forwards and backwards.
You can use standard Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V if you want. They should behave exactly the same as on Windows. If they don't, it's a bug.
At the same time, you can use highlight-middle-click.
I'm trying to argue both sides here - but Microsoft does offer free support and such free, comprehensive Linux support doesn't exist.
I call bullshit.
Microsoft's knowledge base is nice, yes, but honestly, it's there out of strict necessity. And it's not as good as Google anyway. For both Linux and Windows, Google is the way to go.
If you have a real problem with Windows, it won't be on support.microsoft.com, it'll be on Google. Probably Google Groups. And probably with a bunch of people with titles like "Microsoft MVP" chiming in with their two pence, all wrong and clueless. Guess why? Because nobody knows how the software works. And these real problems don't get solved.
How do you solve the problems? By calling up Microsoft. They'll charge you hundreds of dollars, to be refunded if they decide it's a bug in their software. You will be on hold for hours on end, and their support is far from helpful.
I spent over six months with Microsoft support on a single issue a few years ago; I still see the problem today, so their solution obviously didn't work, but we just learn to live with the problem.
More recently we experienced a bug with Windows 2000 Server SP4; it just kept rebooting randomly. Turns out this stems from a fix of a vulnerability in SP3 and below. Microsoft support was useless and to my knowledge they haven't actually fixed the new bug. Google Groups, on the other hand, helped us find the problem (we just use SP3 now, vulnerability and all).
I've set up GNU/Linux in mission-critical situations. When problems come up, IRC or Google or Google Groups has always had the answer. The three have a combined 100% track record. Why? Because the developers listen, and if not, you can always look at the source code. (You'd be surprised how easy it is to find the problem in the source code going by nothing more than an error message.)
In my experience, GNU/Linux support costs all of $0. But if I had a scary manager who wanted support, I could always recommend one of the zillions of companies selling Linux support. I doubt any would be as good as newsgroups, but they can't hurt. They'd certainly be more helpful than Microsoft, since in my experience Microsoft support is nothing more than a waste of time and patience.
Bittorrent seems like an odd way to distribute files for any extended length of time. It wholly depends on how many people are downloading it at any specific moment, so when you come back maybe 3 days later, the download speeds drop to a trickle because you're the only one downloading the file now.
Your observations fly in the face of empirical evidence, which has clearly shown that BitTorrent is in fact the best way to distribute FC2.
Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it won't work.
Yes, Russ. The democratic process has always been one of the messier aspects of democracy.
I hope you're not talking about Debian. Debian is not a democracy and never will be. Can you imagine what the system would be like if features were created simply because of popularity? The end result would be a complete mess. Most developers and users do not understand the bigger picture; only a few are able to plan out an entire system.
Debian is a meritocracy, which works much better.
Then again, so is GNOME and it's released once every 6 months. That works much better.
This is exactly why I love Debian: it's the community. Yes, many Red Hat employees are deeply involved in the GNU/Linux community; but it seems to work both ways with Debian: the members of the GNU/Linux community affect Debian's direction substantially.
Red Hat ships its software as a "complete package", so to speak. You buy the CDs and put them in and install, and that's what you've got. Debian is much more of a "work in progress" that you can actually become a part of. You download the 50-meg install image which fetches a snapshot of what the developers are working on. That seems much more honest to me, because GNU/Linux is a work in progress and always will be.
Of course, some of Debian's politics suck. I run testing on servers and unstable on desktops because stable is just so damned old that it's almost useless. A six-month release schedule like GNOME's would solve this, IMO.
Is there a www-site dedicated to this?
My school's team made the iSun solar-powered car which goes in excess of 65mph and is one of the lightest in the world. Not to mention, it looks really cool.
Since SP1 didn't stop anyone from using pirated copies neither will SP2 even if they tried, so spin it like they care.
SP1 did stop people from using pirated copies; it wouldn't install if the registration key was one of two red-flagged ones (for example, that one that starts with "F...").
Of course, the day after that, out come all those programs which automatically change your Windows key to a new, un-flagged one.
If I were running Microsoft, I'd give up on copy-protection altogether. It's a waste of resources, because it simply does not work and never will. Except maybe with NGSCB, since Microsoft will be administering your computer and not you.