Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 1
This is exactly right. Software, just as other creative mediums, falls under copyright law. Imagine if music could be patented, it would just be absurd. Some jackass would try patenting the major scale, then everyone would be forced to buck up or accept listening to shitty music (oh wait, they do that already -- the radio).
To the parent of the post I'm responding to:
It is greed that pursuades people to patent things they know are not really inventions, and the problem is this greed is tolerated and even encouraged in our society. Telling programmers it's time they accepted patents as well shows you're either ignorant, in which case you shouldn't be making such presumptuous statements, or that you have dollar-signs in your eyes and you're just another greedy fuck, which is more likely seeing as how you placed your statements under the guise of a question.
Re:My vision of what it was supposed to be
on
The Truth Revealed
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· Score: 1
Who cares? It's nice of Ford to supply them with the vehicles they needed to film the show. I'm sure we can all tolerate a brief shouts out during the commercials (which have been the same for quite a few years now, there's no conspiracy there) to Ford for their help.
I agree. The big (admittedly cheesy) ending was about not giving up hope, because when you give up hope you stop trying. I've always believed that if you sincerely try, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, because it's not about the end result so much as the means; what you did and learned along the way. I think in the same token, it doesn't matter whether or not Scully and Mulder win or lose, but that we were with them to learn about them and ourselves along the way.
Even if it was going downhill over the last few seasons, I'm sad to see it go. Characters like Mulder and the Lone Gunmen were heroes in a landscape quite lacking in those. Perhaps we don't or shouldn't need heroes to base our actions or beliefs on, but maybe we need them to reassure us we're not crazy for hoping and for believing.
It would be nice if that were possible. Do you think the big corporations that farmers are forced to deal with would accept that? Farmers are often forced to sell their crops for less than what it cost to produce them. Why? Because if they don't, the buyers will just go elsewhere to someone who's willing to be ripped off (ie. can't afford to say 'no').
It's a terrible industry, and a proactive approach to a solution is about the last thing the US (or Canadian, I'm up here in Manitoba) government is about to do. That's just not how they work. With everything, the government reacts to the effects of a problem, never recognizing the cause (for an example you can relate to, take a look at all the anti-terrorism laws/. readers have been in a frenzy over; do any of them really address the cause or are they reactions to an effect?). Plus, they've found it to be more profitable to be that way, and that would require a way of thinking they've long since sacrificed in favour of sucking cock whenever big business reaches for its fly.
The day the government recognizes people before profits is a long way off, my friend.
I'd say I have to agree with some of this. Moz 0.9.9 was a freakin' rock on my machine, but rc1 has crashed probably close to 100 times since it's been installed. Same machine, nothing else on the machine has changed for a while, so I have a tough time justifying the "ah, it's just windows again" excuse on this one.
Just finished downloading rc2, so there is hope. *crossing my fingers*
It is, on the other hand, kind of funny when you hear about a *nix virus, and the description includes "...must be executed as root to actually *do* anything...". Although, I admit that if a *nix virus got out and affected only lowly user accounts, data loss is still a huge impact.
They could just license technology from an existing AV provider, instead of trying to be the be-all-and-end-all of software on a user's system. Then they wouldn't have to worry about the government pretending to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey with their ass, plus they wouldn't have to fund a new AV division (not like that matters for them anyway).
Some of that dude's points were rather on the common-sense side of things though too (security before features, access to running processes, turn off auto-executing emails, etc.).
I'm running Red Hat 7.1 (much newer than 4.x) and I agree that the original menus are quite confusing, still. It's partly because you have programs with names like exmh and xlrn, and even though they display more descriptive text when you scroll over them, it's not enough.
For ease of use, including logical menus, I would recommend Ximian Gnome. Ximian makes really nice apps, and really turns a RH7 machine around. The menus are definitely more task-oriented (top level menus like Finance and Calendar). Plus, Ximian Red Carpet lets you just "download and select run" with apps, almost. It does solve much of the difficulty in installing and maintaining apps on a Linux machine though.
Of course, there are also other distros whose big selling point is ease of use, right out of the box, and RH is definitely not the leader in this area.
I've got a 700mhz athlon at home, and a 1.4ghz athlon at work. They've both got 256mb ram, except the 1.4's got DDR ram. I've got 2 30gb 7200rpm drives at home and a big 60gb 7200rpm drive at work. Everything else is pretty similar, except the odd part that happens to be slightly faster because technology apparently moves fast, and the home machine is 2 years old now.
When I go home, the only problem I ever have with the machine is that it runs WinME (sound card is not compatible with WinNT/2k/XP or Linux), but I dual boot. I run Linux at work.
For 99% of the stuff I do on it though, including running a local PHP/MySQL/Apache server, leaving SETI@home on in the background, testing pages in IE, Mozilla, NS4 & Opera, plus having Photoshop open half the time, listening to Winamp, sometimes downloading some stuff off Gnucleus in the background as well, oh, and hitting record whenever I get a new idea for a tune and want to get it down in Saw32 and Fruityloops, I swear the machine acts like a newborn. Just blazing. I never notice the age! Of course, I've got good specs all around, which helps a lot, but assuming you're only 300mhz away from me, and I can't tell the difference between my two machines with 700mhz difference between them, yours shouldn't be aging all that noticeably.
Perhaps you should up the ram or try things like that before junking them all.
Anyone know or willing to guess how the ibook would fare against the vaio notebooks? There's no way in hell I can afford a TiBook right now, and most x86-based notebooks seem to be more in line price-wise with the iBook.
Liability is the reason that the Broadcast 2000 project was removed from public access, which is a tragedy because I'm sure tons of people could benefit from their free software. From their web site:
In recent months the line between warranty exemption and liability has become increasingly blurred as more companies have liquidated and more individuals have begun to seek compensation. We've already seen several organizations win lawsuits against GPL/warranty free software writers because of damage that software caused to the organization. Several involved the RIAA vs mp3/p2p software writers. Several involved the MPAA vs media player authors. You might say that warranty exemption has become quite meaningless in today's economy.
Theirs isn't a security issue, but it's still very relevant as they are acting out of the fear of being held liable for what they were offering for free. That is really sad.
Security issues are deep-rooted, and most definitely can't be solved by nullifying the liability clause in licenses.
I just plugged my old ghetto blaster with a single cassette deck into my line-in on my PC, used a cracked copy of Sound Forge my friend gave me way back, and hit record. Sure I had to wait and actually listen to the songs as I put them to wavs then to both mp3 (saved to my gnucleus-readable directory) and CD, but I copied that tape off my friend years ago for a reason: because I enjoyed listening to it. I don't mind hearing it once more as it's converted.
Time taken: 1/2 hour per side, plus burning time. How much different will it be with these new things? None. No DRM scheme can stop me either. Dataplay will fail, and they're stupid not to know this themselves.
Gnome does a pretty good job, and also runs on *BSD, Solaris, etc.
Linux itself is just a kernel though, so what you're talking about here is compatibility at a much higher level, where the various Linux distros tend to choose to do things differently. Users can also choose to do things differently here, since they have the source, and a fully disclosed API.
Regarding GUI toolkits, Tk, Qt, and Gtk are all very compatible on likely just about every Linux distro, plus they achieve cross-platform compatibility with Windows and MacOS, to varying degrees of success. You can also run Qt (KDE) apps in Gnome (Gtk), and vice versa.
If you have installed the libraries and such that some complex GUI app depends on, then it is very likely that it will do just fine.
Mozilla is a refreshing new product, where the new stuff like the tabs, sidebars and navigation bar mean that I can get rid of some of the things that has nagged me the most in both IE and Netscape 4.x.
I hope Mozilla does inspire/force other browser makers to compete in terms of the user interface. But AOL/CompuServer are only using the rendering engine anyways, so the majority of Gecko users probably won't even be aware of the switch, and will continue to be content with the AOL/CompuServer GUI they've come to know/expect/love/tolerate.
Since Mozilla is going to be basically everywhere, it seems that this is going to prompt the user interface stuff in the browsers again. With the new facilities now available in both the major browsers like XSLT we should see a surge in new XML-based services, and that the rest of the browsers keep up.
I think Mozilla 1.0 marks an important step forward for web application development possibilities, especially in the areas of the XML/XSLT, and also the GUI. It's been a long time coming, but the future of the web browser is looking a lot less like the headache for us developers that it has been for the past few years!
Crafting and bringing to market an oil filter and a computer operating system are way different. An oil filter fits on one car (okay, motor) at one precisely built and designed spot. It does not have to fit on dozens of entirely different engines and handle dozens of different fluids and stresses. An operating system on the other hand has to work on a wide range of wildly varying hardware setups, with wildly varying software, in a pretty broad range of environments and conditions (created by the user).
Pop Quiz:
1. How many different processors/platforms does Linux currently run on?
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The fact of the matter is that standard interfaces (A.K.A. fully and honestly disclosed APIs) are present in other industries, and could also be in IT if people played the game with fairness and integrity.
The other fact is that Microsoft broke the law. When you break the law, you get punished for it.
True that. They haven't caved from Intel pressure yet.
This is very disillusioning. I'm just about to purchase two new development servers, and I'm afraid that politics and the gut feeling I get from companies plays a role in the hardware and software I choose, since it is obviously indicative of their true attitudes towards customers.
I'm afraid that Flash doesn't use Lingo; that's used in Director to make Shockwave files, which tend to be more interactive, and still play through the same plugin anyway. Just for the sake of keeping our facts straight, Flash actually uses something called ActionScript, which is an embedded JavaScript interpreter with a Flash-specific object model. Not quite so bad, but the focus of Flash on a frame-by-frame structure makes organizing ActionScript code in Flash really ugly for all but the smallest projects.
Thirdly, and very importantly, all information held in the system is (C) the user, licensed under strict contract to the Information Repository to use. This is a protection against somebody buying the system if it becomes successful and changing the terms of service.
Too bad so few companies would ever agree to or word a TOS this way...
Eighth, and most importantly, none of this is worth shit without a constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy. Without that, any scheme can be forced over time into revealing more about users than they wish to reveal, either by legal, economic, social or political means.
In Canada, there are new laws that are being slowly introduced that are much more oriented in favour of the individual, and that have pretty strong implications for businesses doing business here and collecting personal data. My lawyer's main area of interest is privacy law, and they have some good links on their site, including some papers he has published on the subject at:
http://www.aikins.com/practice/tekno.htm
As a semi-intelligent user, any hailstorm/passport/liberty alliance projects are not for me. It's too bad most people aren't aware of the security and privacy infringing implications or at least the potential for these things in systems like these.
Everything I want as a user I've already got. You'll find all you need in terms of password and personal info management under the Tasks > Privacy & Security menu in Mozilla and Netscape 6. It's too bad the big bully on the block (MSIE) doesn't even try to offer these sorts of things, for fear of killing the need for a hailstorm/passport system, and the risk of losing all that precious user data.
Thanks for the recommendation! Bluefish definitely has potential, and I try it out briefly each new major release, but it suffers from the same lack of GUI expertise that most Windows and Unix apps do.
If you look at the BBEdit interface, it's a blank window. It has a single thin bar at the top, and that's it. When you open any additional toolbars, they open horizontally, so that they can be placed beside the editing window(s), on either side. This translates into more screen space for the editor, because the more toolbars that are thrown at the top take away from the number of visible lines. The width of the lines doesn't need to extend to the edges of a 1200x1000 screen - that would be too difficult to read - so the placement of toolbars on either side is perfect.
Otherwise, there are only minor issues, which are shared by 99% of the editors out there, but I need the polish of a production tool. As much as I wish I could contribute more to projects like Bluefish, I simply don't have the time.
Another comparison is the GUI of the GIMP (or any other graphics app for that matter) vs. Photoshop (or any other Adobe app). These projects will get the attention they deserve when they become more intuitive to GUI-based users. Then there's those that use Gnome and gang purely to have multiple shells open.:)
Personally, I want BBEdit for Linux or Unix in general, not just OSX. Windows would be smarter, since it would drastically increase their potential market, but who cares. There are already a million editors for Windows anyway, and Windows users have never been famous for appreciating quality.
I know there are plenty of good editors for Unix already, but they either have too much of a learning curve for the average user (Vi, Emacs), or they just lack that extra polish that Bare Bones puts into BBEdit. My current choice for Linux is NEdit, but it's based on a rather unintuitive toolkit, which makes save/open dialogs awkward.
Now that OSX is part of the Unix gang, their Mac-only stance is kind of passe.
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This is exactly right. Software, just as other creative mediums, falls under copyright law. Imagine if music could be patented, it would just be absurd. Some jackass would try patenting the major scale, then everyone would be forced to buck up or accept listening to shitty music (oh wait, they do that already -- the radio).
To the parent of the post I'm responding to:
It is greed that pursuades people to patent things they know are not really inventions, and the problem is this greed is tolerated and even encouraged in our society. Telling programmers it's time they accepted patents as well shows you're either ignorant, in which case you shouldn't be making such presumptuous statements, or that you have dollar-signs in your eyes and you're just another greedy fuck, which is more likely seeing as how you placed your statements under the guise of a question.
His quest isn't over:
Scully: You'll never give up.
(more conversation)
Mulder: Maybe there is hope.
Plus, what could be more inspiring than hope?
Who cares? It's nice of Ford to supply them with the vehicles they needed to film the show. I'm sure we can all tolerate a brief shouts out during the commercials (which have been the same for quite a few years now, there's no conspiracy there) to Ford for their help.
I agree. The big (admittedly cheesy) ending was about not giving up hope, because when you give up hope you stop trying. I've always believed that if you sincerely try, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, because it's not about the end result so much as the means; what you did and learned along the way. I think in the same token, it doesn't matter whether or not Scully and Mulder win or lose, but that we were with them to learn about them and ourselves along the way.
:)
Even if it was going downhill over the last few seasons, I'm sad to see it go. Characters like Mulder and the Lone Gunmen were heroes in a landscape quite lacking in those. Perhaps we don't or shouldn't need heroes to base our actions or beliefs on, but maybe we need them to reassure us we're not crazy for hoping and for believing.
Wow, that was cheesier than the show's ending!
This is the same thing they're phasing in in Canada. There are some pieces on my lawyers web site about it: http://www.aikins.com/practice/tekno.htm
It would be nice if that were possible. Do you think the big corporations that farmers are forced to deal with would accept that? Farmers are often forced to sell their crops for less than what it cost to produce them. Why? Because if they don't, the buyers will just go elsewhere to someone who's willing to be ripped off (ie. can't afford to say 'no').
/. readers have been in a frenzy over; do any of them really address the cause or are they reactions to an effect?). Plus, they've found it to be more profitable to be that way, and that would require a way of thinking they've long since sacrificed in favour of sucking cock whenever big business reaches for its fly.
It's a terrible industry, and a proactive approach to a solution is about the last thing the US (or Canadian, I'm up here in Manitoba) government is about to do. That's just not how they work. With everything, the government reacts to the effects of a problem, never recognizing the cause (for an example you can relate to, take a look at all the anti-terrorism laws
The day the government recognizes people before profits is a long way off, my friend.
I'd say I have to agree with some of this. Moz 0.9.9 was a freakin' rock on my machine, but rc1 has crashed probably close to 100 times since it's been installed. Same machine, nothing else on the machine has changed for a while, so I have a tough time justifying the "ah, it's just windows again" excuse on this one.
Just finished downloading rc2, so there is hope. *crossing my fingers*
Oh, the good ole' days...
It is, on the other hand, kind of funny when you hear about a *nix virus, and the description includes "...must be executed as root to actually *do* anything...". Although, I admit that if a *nix virus got out and affected only lowly user accounts, data loss is still a huge impact.
They could just license technology from an existing AV provider, instead of trying to be the be-all-and-end-all of software on a user's system. Then they wouldn't have to worry about the government pretending to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey with their ass, plus they wouldn't have to fund a new AV division (not like that matters for them anyway).
Some of that dude's points were rather on the common-sense side of things though too (security before features, access to running processes, turn off auto-executing emails, etc.).
It is on a farm of 200+ rendering boxes.
I'm running Red Hat 7.1 (much newer than 4.x) and I agree that the original menus are quite confusing, still. It's partly because you have programs with names like exmh and xlrn, and even though they display more descriptive text when you scroll over them, it's not enough.
For ease of use, including logical menus, I would recommend Ximian Gnome. Ximian makes really nice apps, and really turns a RH7 machine around. The menus are definitely more task-oriented (top level menus like Finance and Calendar). Plus, Ximian Red Carpet lets you just "download and select run" with apps, almost. It does solve much of the difficulty in installing and maintaining apps on a Linux machine though.
Of course, there are also other distros whose big selling point is ease of use, right out of the box, and RH is definitely not the leader in this area.
I've got a 700mhz athlon at home, and a 1.4ghz athlon at work. They've both got 256mb ram, except the 1.4's got DDR ram. I've got 2 30gb 7200rpm drives at home and a big 60gb 7200rpm drive at work. Everything else is pretty similar, except the odd part that happens to be slightly faster because technology apparently moves fast, and the home machine is 2 years old now.
When I go home, the only problem I ever have with the machine is that it runs WinME (sound card is not compatible with WinNT/2k/XP or Linux), but I dual boot. I run Linux at work.
For 99% of the stuff I do on it though, including running a local PHP/MySQL/Apache server, leaving SETI@home on in the background, testing pages in IE, Mozilla, NS4 & Opera, plus having Photoshop open half the time, listening to Winamp, sometimes downloading some stuff off Gnucleus in the background as well, oh, and hitting record whenever I get a new idea for a tune and want to get it down in Saw32 and Fruityloops, I swear the machine acts like a newborn. Just blazing. I never notice the age! Of course, I've got good specs all around, which helps a lot, but assuming you're only 300mhz away from me, and I can't tell the difference between my two machines with 700mhz difference between them, yours shouldn't be aging all that noticeably.
Perhaps you should up the ram or try things like that before junking them all.
Anyone know or willing to guess how the ibook would fare against the vaio notebooks? There's no way in hell I can afford a TiBook right now, and most x86-based notebooks seem to be more in line price-wise with the iBook.
But what about insecurities that are NOT due to misconfigurations, but the result of a lack of consideration on the part of the software vendor?
Liability is the reason that the Broadcast 2000 project was removed from public access, which is a tragedy because I'm sure tons of people could benefit from their free software. From their web site:
Theirs isn't a security issue, but it's still very relevant as they are acting out of the fear of being held liable for what they were offering for free. That is really sad.
Security issues are deep-rooted, and most definitely can't be solved by nullifying the liability clause in licenses.
I just plugged my old ghetto blaster with a single cassette deck into my line-in on my PC, used a cracked copy of Sound Forge my friend gave me way back, and hit record. Sure I had to wait and actually listen to the songs as I put them to wavs then to both mp3 (saved to my gnucleus-readable directory) and CD, but I copied that tape off my friend years ago for a reason: because I enjoyed listening to it. I don't mind hearing it once more as it's converted.
Time taken: 1/2 hour per side, plus burning time. How much different will it be with these new things? None. No DRM scheme can stop me either. Dataplay will fail, and they're stupid not to know this themselves.
Gnome does a pretty good job, and also runs on *BSD, Solaris, etc.
Linux itself is just a kernel though, so what you're talking about here is compatibility at a much higher level, where the various Linux distros tend to choose to do things differently. Users can also choose to do things differently here, since they have the source, and a fully disclosed API.
Regarding GUI toolkits, Tk, Qt, and Gtk are all very compatible on likely just about every Linux distro, plus they achieve cross-platform compatibility with Windows and MacOS, to varying degrees of success. You can also run Qt (KDE) apps in Gnome (Gtk), and vice versa.
If you have installed the libraries and such that some complex GUI app depends on, then it is very likely that it will do just fine.
I hope Mozilla does inspire/force other browser makers to compete in terms of the user interface. But AOL/CompuServer are only using the rendering engine anyways, so the majority of Gecko users probably won't even be aware of the switch, and will continue to be content with the AOL/CompuServer GUI they've come to know/expect/love/tolerate.
I think Mozilla 1.0 marks an important step forward for web application development possibilities, especially in the areas of the XML/XSLT, and also the GUI. It's been a long time coming, but the future of the web browser is looking a lot less like the headache for us developers that it has been for the past few years!
Pop Quiz:
1. How many different processors/platforms does Linux currently run on?
---
The fact of the matter is that standard interfaces (A.K.A. fully and honestly disclosed APIs) are present in other industries, and could also be in IT if people played the game with fairness and integrity.
The other fact is that Microsoft broke the law. When you break the law, you get punished for it.
True that. They haven't caved from Intel pressure yet.
This is very disillusioning. I'm just about to purchase two new development servers, and I'm afraid that politics and the gut feeling I get from companies plays a role in the hardware and software I choose, since it is obviously indicative of their true attitudes towards customers.
I'm afraid that Flash doesn't use Lingo; that's used in Director to make Shockwave files, which tend to be more interactive, and still play through the same plugin anyway. Just for the sake of keeping our facts straight, Flash actually uses something called ActionScript, which is an embedded JavaScript interpreter with a Flash-specific object model. Not quite so bad, but the focus of Flash on a frame-by-frame structure makes organizing ActionScript code in Flash really ugly for all but the smallest projects.
Good point.
As a semi-intelligent user, any hailstorm/passport/liberty alliance projects are not for me. It's too bad most people aren't aware of the security and privacy infringing implications or at least the potential for these things in systems like these.
Everything I want as a user I've already got. You'll find all you need in terms of password and personal info management under the Tasks > Privacy & Security menu in Mozilla and Netscape 6. It's too bad the big bully on the block (MSIE) doesn't even try to offer these sorts of things, for fear of killing the need for a hailstorm/passport system, and the risk of losing all that precious user data.
Thanks for the recommendation! Bluefish definitely has potential, and I try it out briefly each new major release, but it suffers from the same lack of GUI expertise that most Windows and Unix apps do.
:)
If you look at the BBEdit interface, it's a blank window. It has a single thin bar at the top, and that's it. When you open any additional toolbars, they open horizontally, so that they can be placed beside the editing window(s), on either side. This translates into more screen space for the editor, because the more toolbars that are thrown at the top take away from the number of visible lines. The width of the lines doesn't need to extend to the edges of a 1200x1000 screen - that would be too difficult to read - so the placement of toolbars on either side is perfect.
Otherwise, there are only minor issues, which are shared by 99% of the editors out there, but I need the polish of a production tool. As much as I wish I could contribute more to projects like Bluefish, I simply don't have the time.
Another comparison is the GUI of the GIMP (or any other graphics app for that matter) vs. Photoshop (or any other Adobe app). These projects will get the attention they deserve when they become more intuitive to GUI-based users. Then there's those that use Gnome and gang purely to have multiple shells open.
Personally, I want BBEdit for Linux or Unix in general, not just OSX. Windows would be smarter, since it would drastically increase their potential market, but who cares. There are already a million editors for Windows anyway, and Windows users have never been famous for appreciating quality.
I know there are plenty of good editors for Unix already, but they either have too much of a learning curve for the average user (Vi, Emacs), or they just lack that extra polish that Bare Bones puts into BBEdit. My current choice for Linux is NEdit, but it's based on a rather unintuitive toolkit, which makes save/open dialogs awkward.
Now that OSX is part of the Unix gang, their Mac-only stance is kind of passe.