this fuel cell devie is cool, but still nowhere near as clean and renewable as human power/solar... and their first products needs to be a pocket power source instead of a laptop or PDA. I was going to post: Sorry, false. Alcohol is 100% renewable (what do you think beer is made of, petroleum?). But, for one (I must be new here), I checked the facts before posting. The article says that they are going to use methanol, which according to wikipedia is usually got from the methane ("the most economical and widely used feedstock for methanol production") in natural gas, which is "ultimately unsustainable". I'm sure all this is cleaner than batteries, but not 100% clean & renewable.
And here go my mod points and karma I doubt that Linux would be where it is today without the domination of Microsoft. You can't be more right, and this is something that everybody here tends to forget. The amazingly fast development of linux happened because microsoft was so closed: the monopoly created a pressure that wanted to come out to somewhere; the lack of alternatives and the opressive environment made the openess of linux irresistibly attractive for a lot of people. Do people here really think that if the market had been 40% MS, 40% IBM & 30% Apple during the 90's, linux would have been the programmer's (or university's, or fanboy's) choice? I doubt it.
Not really, just imagine what would happen in the case apple announced a PDA for next year. Palm would be competing with vapor, because a lot of people would just wait for the apple version. Maybe a lot of sites are just waiting for sun et al to finish their work, just to stick to a more open version (not probable, but...)
Worse, another open source group could fork the project and change the behaviour of some of the core classes, making an incompatible implementation (which would still be bound by the GPL). If you think of it, this already has happened. The existing free-software implementations of java are GPL, and incompatible with the mainstream java (because they are incomplete).
The GNOME/Mac ordering however makes for consistent button location, however, since the "positive" (most commonly used) button is always in the same location in the dialog, which (as mentioned above) is both easier and more efficient physically and mentally, for both novice and experienced users. I'd rather have the "negative" (most safe option) button always in the same location in the dialog. Just to make sure I don't mess up with something by clicking "Yes" or "Save" instead of "Cancel".
Lots of users and developers think the GNOME/Mac button order is "weird" because they're used to the Windows' way, but that kind of thinking doesn't ever foster improvements. I'm used to the motif/win32/KDE way, and find "weird" gnome's button ordering, and I don't thing that altering the ordering of the buttons can be calified as "improvement". Try changing the colors of semaphores because "really really we see the bottom light the most and so we should put the important color -red- there". It's just stupid, even if it is an improvement.
Copy and Paste from a post below:
Wikipedia about mandrake (Score:5, Informative) by Elektroschock (659467) on Thursday February 19, @02:38PM (#8330318) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Mandrake is the common name for the plant Mandragora, whose roots, because their curious bifurcation cause them to have a semblance to the human figure (male & female), have long been used in witchcraft. It is alleged by adherents of the dark arts that when the plant is pulled from the ground, it shrieks in pain. Supposedly, this shriek is able to kill or deafen an unprotected human; the occult literature includes complex directions for harvesting a mandrake root in relative safety.
The Mandrake is a member of the Solanaceae (or Nightshade) family.
Other uses of this term include:
* Mandrake Linux
* Mandragoras, familiar demons (mandrakes)
* Mandrake, a comedic play written by Niccolo Machiavelli in 1518
* Leon Mandrake, magician (1911 - 1993)
* Mandrake the Magician, comic strip character
* Mandrake (publishers)
It seems that Mandrake "the comic strip character" is trying to monopolize the magic background of the plant. This is like suing the batman copyright holders because it infringes over dracula's IP of bats as dark creatures.
I live in Spain, and we also have an ID and the obligation to show it to a police officer when required.
One point of difference is probably the political system you've been raised in vs. the one in which US citizens have been raised. I don't know what the panamanian constitution looks like, but I imagine that its very different from the freedoms provided in the US constitution, particularly in the area of the Bill of Rights. This paragraph particularly bothers me. You are implicitly saying that the US Bill of Rights is like the Holy Grail of liberties and the rest of the world has a somewhat inferior constitution. And don't take it as an attack, but it offends me, coming from the country of Guantanamo and the RIAA, that you try to give us lectures about liberties.
The US legal system, for instance, is based on presumed innocence. i.e. law enforcement is expected - no, mandated - to presume citizens are innocent, not guilty of commiting crimes. Yeah, like most legal systems in democratic countries. Why do you imply that it is not that way?
No it doesn't. Intel may be a 800 lb. gorilla, but it is not god.
I have been paying attention, and while intel is the #1 semiconductor manufacturer, still doesn't dominate all markets.
Case in point: Itanium
Intel can kill any but the most amazingly advanced technology, which Bluetooth definitely is not. Case closed. Yeah, that's why AMD has gone bankrupt and IBM doesn't manufacture cpus anymore, etc.
PalmSource Cheif Competitve Officer, Michael Mace, has issued a statement direcct from PalmSource regarding the issue in the article comments, "PalmSource is fortunate to have a great Palm OS developer community who provide solutions for Macintosh compatibility today. Palm OS provides an open and flexible architecture and allows its licensees to decide whether to ship a Mac compatibility solution with their Palm Powered device. (One such solution is provided by Mark/Space.) We are continuing our efforts with Apple to provide compatibility between Palm OS and Macintosh."
You can buy a Tungsten E for $200, which is not that expensive. With a 256Mb SD card you can play some mp3, or even a 320x320 version of a movie. Some PDAs can connect to a GPS and use navigation software, I've seen packs below $500. It, as allways, depends on how much are you willing to spend...
My calendar wasn't that busy... Well, a busy calendar is about the main point of having an organizer, isn't it? For the average person it may or may not be the case, but saying that there is nothing to see here because you don't need the PDA for its main purpose...
In nokia's products page, you can see a "coming soon" that is B/W. Just besides twoother fairly recent B/W models.
I agree anyway that some features just will not be an option, 2 years from now. In the same B/W case: it suddently becomes cheaper to make them color if you produce more color screens than B/W. Which anyway is what happened to TVs. Or the SMS case. It's just not worth it to make a spetial chip and OS just not to include it.
You sure dind't search so hard. How about tab separated values? My phone does, and it is not a strange model. I'm sure you guys like to complain about bloat, but you know, cell phone manufacturers aren't (allways) stupid. They know about market segmentation, and they sell exactly what you want. Just from nokia: Want a plain cheap color-screen phone? nokia 3100 Color too fancy for you? nokia 2100 Want it with IrDA? nokia 6100 Want it with FM radio? nokia 6610 With integrated camera, fm and IrDA? 7250 And that just looking at the product page from one manufacturer.
People. I really don't know how many articles are going to be posted about cell phone feature bloat. But it is not true. You can get a simple-cheap-i-only-want-it-for-calls phone anywhere!!!. The fact that they advertise heavily the most complete phones is because there are people that are willing to pay for it and throw away the old one. In Europe, manufacturers have to do that because everyone has already a phone, and they want to keep selling something.
With last events of IE insecurity, if I were a bank I would be scared to hell. What I would do is hiring a bunch of security experts, throw mozilla firebird to them and say: Fort Knox Browser. Now. Then just make every client download and use that browser if they want to do online banking. Because secure online banking is not only important. For many banks is crucial. Remember that a bank's value is in trust. This is something free-sw beats the crap out of closed-sw: it is an effort that can be shared among many banks and the oss-community, because it is something in the interest of everyone.
1. More consistency between apps due to not having gimp among the native apps 2. Nicer interface layout. Better spacing, and while I don't like the OS 9 style menu up the top, I have the option. Also nicer, more eye-candy options. 3. Options. GNOME has very few options. GNOME is nice, but I like to configure things my way and Gconf is hell. KDE Control Center is a far better way to go. 4. Apps. KDE/Qt has all the apps I want. Gems like KOffice (PDF edition) and K3b when there is nothing that compares on GNOME. Also the old standbys like KDevelop and Konqueror. 5. Lastly, the KDE community! Too many sites to cite here, and already done in this thread.
Come on, mods. Score:5, Informative? What the hell do you drink on weekends?
From my spanish experience (computer engineering): we stop using textbooks in secondary school. In university, we only hear from meyer, pressman, booch et al. I have, let's see... 4 books I bought during university. And I know people that bought 0. Anyway, I suppose good old xerox helps us very much...
How about closing all non-web & email usage ports by default and put a web tool to open them? If every ISP did that, we wouldn't have that much spamming relays and worms, and the hassle for the user would be minimum. If you need it, you open it. If you don't know what it is, you at least aren't a menace for the whole internet;)
The all-too-common misconception again. The all-too-common reality again.
I'm an engineer and a programmer, working only on free software projects, and I make a decent living off of it. For a lot of people, there is no way to be that selective without starving. It's already hard to find a job in non-free software.
It all depends on where you set your priorities
eating
everything else
whether you are willing to question the established way of dealing with software, and try something new There is no establised way of dealing with software. Trolltech, IBM and Apple are the proof.
Just because debian had a smaller user base to begin with (and so its percentage growth happens to be more) does not mean that debian is growing faster than Red Hat. No. It exactly means that debian is growing faster. Not more, just faster. If the percentage growth is mantained, debian would catch redhat at some time (not saying that this can happen).
Well, it could be something like Open Office and Star Office... Put a commercial grammar/spell checker, a collection of cliparts, and 1-year support and there you have. Something you can sell and still beneficial for the OSS community. It's just an idea, though.
Linus has flat out said he doesn't like binary drivers, for pretty good reasons, I think (harder to debug being the main one).
That's a drawback for developers, which could be suppressed if they worked with manufacturers (with a NDA or something like that). Anyway, Linus doesn't like binary drivers and manufacturers don't like open source drivers. Result: no drivers for linu(s|x).
Why encourage this?
Because is a PITA to have buggy, incomplete or inexistant drivers for a lot of products.
So, any other good reasons why you'd want userland drivers? Are those reasons good enough to offset the additional overhead that this would incur (additional context switching,etc)? The new layers of indirection that would have to be added?
Slow is better than nothing.
Frankly, I think you might have been bitten by the microkernel bug. But, sorry, Linux ain't no microkernel. And, so far, it hasn't needed to be. So, why start now? If you say so...
I agree that OS-drivers would be the best scenario. But it will not happen anytime soon, for a lot of manufacturers.
The problem with this is sometimes a few bad apples make the OSS community look like a bunch of crazy lunatics. Take the nice worm that is going around now... CNN already has an article which pretty much blames the OSS community for the worm. In fact, a quote like this: "Virus experts suggested MyDoom's author was a fan of the Linux open source community..." can be damaging to getting Linux and OSS recognized in a good light.
The problem with this is that we-the-oss-community have a lot of crazy lunatics among us. We have a high clpsm (crazy lunatic per square meter). It's true, face it; starting from RMS, BTW. We owe him a lot, but he is still is a crazy lunatic.
I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.
That's not what happened with KHTML. They gave a lot back to the community, not only in the code area; they also gave their colaboration in merging their changes to KHTML back to Konqueror's. The result is a good browser for apple, and a better browser for all of us. What I don't get is that you praise TT's attitude (which I agree) and don't praise apple's. It's more or less the same: make money while contributing quality code.
I can assure you that 99.99% of phone users don't know which OS its phone has. It is a manufacturer thing, and if microsoft doesn't play its cards well, it will stay so for a long time, because this is not the desktop market; ms doesn't have any monopoly granted power to use against nokia et al. They'll have to compete by their own merits. The only advantage MS has is lots of money, which doesn't grant you the key for success, being this getting more money than you spend (see xbox).
Slashdot Mirror
this fuel cell devie is cool, but still nowhere near as clean and renewable as human power/solar... and their first products needs to be a pocket power source instead of a laptop or PDA.
I was going to post: Sorry, false. Alcohol is 100% renewable (what do you think beer is made of, petroleum?).
But, for one (I must be new here), I checked the facts before posting. The article says that they are going to use methanol, which according to wikipedia is usually got from the methane ("the most economical and widely used feedstock for methanol production") in natural gas, which is "ultimately unsustainable".
I'm sure all this is cleaner than batteries, but not 100% clean & renewable.
And here go my mod points and karma
I doubt that Linux would be where it is today without the domination of Microsoft.
You can't be more right, and this is something that everybody here tends to forget. The amazingly fast development of linux happened because microsoft was so closed: the monopoly created a pressure that wanted to come out to somewhere; the lack of alternatives and the opressive environment made the openess of linux irresistibly attractive for a lot of people.
Do people here really think that if the market had been 40% MS, 40% IBM & 30% Apple during the 90's, linux would have been the programmer's (or university's, or fanboy's) choice? I doubt it.
Not really, just imagine what would happen in the case apple announced a PDA for next year. Palm would be competing with vapor, because a lot of people would just wait for the apple version.
Maybe a lot of sites are just waiting for sun et al to finish their work, just to stick to a more open version (not probable, but...)
Worse, another open source group could fork the project and change the behaviour of some of the core classes, making an incompatible implementation (which would still be bound by the GPL).
If you think of it, this already has happened. The existing free-software implementations of java are GPL, and incompatible with the mainstream java (because they are incomplete).
The GNOME/Mac ordering however makes for consistent button location, however, since the "positive" (most commonly used) button is always in the same location in the dialog, which (as mentioned above) is both easier and more efficient physically and mentally, for both novice and experienced users.
I'd rather have the "negative" (most safe option) button always in the same location in the dialog. Just to make sure I don't mess up with something by clicking "Yes" or "Save" instead of "Cancel".
Lots of users and developers think the GNOME/Mac button order is "weird" because they're used to the Windows' way, but that kind of thinking doesn't ever foster improvements.
I'm used to the motif/win32/KDE way, and find "weird" gnome's button ordering, and I don't thing that altering the ordering of the buttons can be calified as "improvement". Try changing the colors of semaphores because "really really we see the bottom light the most and so we should put the important color -red- there". It's just stupid, even if it is an improvement.
Copy and Paste from a post below:
Wikipedia about mandrake (Score:5, Informative)
by Elektroschock (659467) on Thursday February 19, @02:38PM (#8330318)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Mandrake is the common name for the plant Mandragora, whose roots, because their curious bifurcation cause them to have a semblance to the human figure (male & female), have long been used in witchcraft. It is alleged by adherents of the dark arts that when the plant is pulled from the ground, it shrieks in pain. Supposedly, this shriek is able to kill or deafen an unprotected human; the occult literature includes complex directions for harvesting a mandrake root in relative safety.
The Mandrake is a member of the Solanaceae (or Nightshade) family.
Other uses of this term include:
* Mandrake Linux
* Mandragoras, familiar demons (mandrakes)
* Mandrake, a comedic play written by Niccolo Machiavelli in 1518
* Leon Mandrake, magician (1911 - 1993)
* Mandrake the Magician, comic strip character
* Mandrake (publishers)
It seems that Mandrake "the comic strip character" is trying to monopolize the magic background of the plant. This is like suing the batman copyright holders because it infringes over dracula's IP of bats as dark creatures.
I live in Spain, and we also have an ID and the obligation to show it to a police officer when required.
One point of difference is probably the political system you've been raised in vs. the one in which US citizens have been raised. I don't know what the panamanian constitution looks like, but I imagine that its very different from the freedoms provided in the US constitution, particularly in the area of the Bill of Rights.
This paragraph particularly bothers me. You are implicitly saying that the US Bill of Rights is like the Holy Grail of liberties and the rest of the world has a somewhat inferior constitution.
And don't take it as an attack, but it offends me, coming from the country of Guantanamo and the RIAA, that you try to give us lectures about liberties.
The US legal system, for instance, is based on presumed innocence. i.e. law enforcement is expected - no, mandated - to presume citizens are innocent, not guilty of commiting crimes.
Yeah, like most legal systems in democratic countries. Why do you imply that it is not that way?
No it doesn't. Intel may be a 800 lb. gorilla, but it is not god.
I have been paying attention, and while intel is the #1 semiconductor manufacturer, still doesn't dominate all markets.
Case in point: Itanium
Intel can kill any but the most amazingly advanced technology, which Bluetooth definitely is not. Case closed.
Yeah, that's why AMD has gone bankrupt and IBM doesn't manufacture cpus anymore, etc.
Update from the article:
PalmSource Cheif Competitve Officer, Michael Mace, has issued a statement direcct from PalmSource regarding the issue in the article comments, "PalmSource is fortunate to have a great Palm OS developer community who provide solutions for Macintosh compatibility today. Palm OS provides an open and flexible architecture and allows its licensees to decide whether to ship a Mac compatibility solution with their Palm Powered device. (One such solution is provided by Mark/Space.) We are continuing our efforts with Apple to provide compatibility between Palm OS and Macintosh."
Let's see where this goes...
You can buy a Tungsten E for $200, which is not that expensive. With a 256Mb SD card you can play some mp3, or even a 320x320 version of a movie. Some PDAs can connect to a GPS and use navigation software, I've seen packs below $500.
It, as allways, depends on how much are you willing to spend...
My calendar wasn't that busy...
Well, a busy calendar is about the main point of having an organizer, isn't it?
For the average person it may or may not be the case, but saying that there is nothing to see here because you don't need the PDA for its main purpose...
Better yet: connect a bomb to the airbag in all cars.
Darwin at work!
In nokia's products page, you can see a "coming soon" that is B/W. Just besides two other fairly recent B/W models.
I agree anyway that some features just will not be an option, 2 years from now. In the same B/W case: it suddently becomes cheaper to make them color if you produce more color screens than B/W. Which anyway is what happened to TVs.
Or the SMS case. It's just not worth it to make a spetial chip and OS just not to include it.
You sure dind't search so hard. How about tab separated values? My phone does, and it is not a strange model.
I'm sure you guys like to complain about bloat, but you know, cell phone manufacturers aren't (allways) stupid. They know about market segmentation, and they sell exactly what you want.
Just from nokia:
Want a plain cheap color-screen phone? nokia 3100
Color too fancy for you? nokia 2100
Want it with IrDA? nokia 6100
Want it with FM radio? nokia 6610
With integrated camera, fm and IrDA? 7250
And that just looking at the product page from one manufacturer.
People. I really don't know how many articles are going to be posted about cell phone feature bloat. But it is not true. You can get a simple-cheap-i-only-want-it-for-calls phone anywhere!!!.
The fact that they advertise heavily the most complete phones is because there are people that are willing to pay for it and throw away the old one. In Europe, manufacturers have to do that because everyone has already a phone, and they want to keep selling something.
With last events of IE insecurity, if I were a bank I would be scared to hell. What I would do is hiring a bunch of security experts, throw mozilla firebird to them and say: Fort Knox Browser. Now.
Then just make every client download and use that browser if they want to do online banking. Because secure online banking is not only important. For many banks is crucial. Remember that a bank's value is in trust.
This is something free-sw beats the crap out of closed-sw: it is an effort that can be shared among many banks and the oss-community, because it is something in the interest of everyone.
Yeah - I use KDE. Why you ask?
1. More consistency between apps due to not having gimp among the native apps
2. Nicer interface layout. Better spacing, and while I don't like the OS 9 style menu up the top, I have the option. Also nicer, more eye-candy options.
3. Options. GNOME has very few options. GNOME is nice, but I like to configure things my way and Gconf is hell. KDE Control Center is a far better way to go.
4. Apps. KDE/Qt has all the apps I want. Gems like KOffice (PDF edition) and K3b when there is nothing that compares on GNOME. Also the old standbys like KDevelop and Konqueror.
5. Lastly, the KDE community! Too many sites to cite here, and already done in this thread.
Come on, mods. Score:5, Informative? What the hell do you drink on weekends?
From my spanish experience (computer engineering): we stop using textbooks in secondary school. In university, we only hear from meyer, pressman, booch et al.
I have, let's see... 4 books I bought during university. And I know people that bought 0. Anyway, I suppose good old xerox helps us very much...
How about closing all non-web & email usage ports by default and put a web tool to open them? ;)
If every ISP did that, we wouldn't have that much spamming relays and worms, and the hassle for the user would be minimum. If you need it, you open it. If you don't know what it is, you at least aren't a menace for the whole internet
The all-too-common reality again.
I'm an engineer and a programmer, working only on free software projects, and I make a decent living off of it.
For a lot of people, there is no way to be that selective without starving. It's already hard to find a job in non-free software.
It all depends on where you set your priorities
whether you are willing to question the established way of dealing with software, and try something new
There is no establised way of dealing with software. Trolltech, IBM and Apple are the proof.
Just because debian had a smaller user base to begin with (and so its percentage growth happens to be more) does not mean that debian is growing faster than Red Hat.
No. It exactly means that debian is growing faster. Not more, just faster. If the percentage growth is mantained, debian would catch redhat at some time (not saying that this can happen).
Well, it could be something like Open Office and Star Office... Put a commercial grammar/spell checker, a collection of cliparts, and 1-year support and there you have. Something you can sell and still beneficial for the OSS community.
It's just an idea, though.
Is insmod so difficult?
Yes, it is for non-geeks.
Since when did we care?
Since we have no driver for a lot of products.
Linus has flat out said he doesn't like binary drivers, for pretty good reasons, I think (harder to debug being the main one).
That's a drawback for developers, which could be suppressed if they worked with manufacturers (with a NDA or something like that). Anyway, Linus doesn't like binary drivers and manufacturers don't like open source drivers. Result: no drivers for linu(s|x).
Why encourage this?
Because is a PITA to have buggy, incomplete or inexistant drivers for a lot of products.
So, any other good reasons why you'd want userland drivers? Are those reasons good enough to offset the additional overhead that this would incur (additional context switching,etc)? The new layers of indirection that would have to be added?
Slow is better than nothing.
Frankly, I think you might have been bitten by the microkernel bug. But, sorry, Linux ain't no microkernel. And, so far, it hasn't needed to be. So, why start now?
If you say so...
I agree that OS-drivers would be the best scenario. But it will not happen anytime soon, for a lot of manufacturers.
The problem with this is sometimes a few bad apples make the OSS community look like a bunch of crazy lunatics. Take the nice worm that is going around now... CNN already has an article which pretty much blames the OSS community for the worm. In fact, a quote like this: "Virus experts suggested MyDoom's author was a fan of the Linux open source community..." can be damaging to getting Linux and OSS recognized in a good light.
The problem with this is that we-the-oss-community have a lot of crazy lunatics among us. We have a high clpsm (crazy lunatic per square meter). It's true, face it; starting from RMS, BTW. We owe him a lot, but he is still is a crazy lunatic.
I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.
That's not what happened with KHTML. They gave a lot back to the community, not only in the code area; they also gave their colaboration in merging their changes to KHTML back to Konqueror's. The result is a good browser for apple, and a better browser for all of us.
What I don't get is that you praise TT's attitude (which I agree) and don't praise apple's. It's more or less the same: make money while contributing quality code.
I can assure you that 99.99% of phone users don't know which OS its phone has. It is a manufacturer thing, and if microsoft doesn't play its cards well, it will stay so for a long time, because this is not the desktop market; ms doesn't have any monopoly granted power to use against nokia et al. They'll have to compete by their own merits.
The only advantage MS has is lots of money, which doesn't grant you the key for success, being this getting more money than you spend (see xbox).