Wanna' know why MS word is so popular in the office? Cuz' the document you get looks like the document I sent, and you can edit it as such, and return it, and the document I get returned looks just like it did when you finished working on it.
Can't say that of many widely used document formats...
Therefore, let's all adopt PDF.
PDF isn't designed for editable content, and Word files are. This is actually a major source of irritation for me.
Word documents are frequently used to hand information around. This is DUMB. I don't care if you're an MS shop, you love MS and you'd like nothing more than to give 50% of your yearly revenue to MS, Word documents are a fucking awful publication format. They're good for collaborating, actively working on documents when everyone uses Word. However, people that hand out documentation or similar in DOC format should stop.
Reasons to use PDF instead of Word files when releasing read-only information: * You don't have to worry about the remote person having the proper fonts -- you can embed all needed information * You don't have to worry about macro viruses * You don't have to worry about old version of Word not being able to import your document * You don't have to worry about formatting differences when a newer version of Word mis-imports your document * Acrobat Reader is a much better "reader" from a UI standpoint than Word * PDFs can be read by anyone on almost any platform * Acrobat Reader is free, unlike Word * You're pretty much guaranteed no printing issues with a PDF.
Okay, I'll be the first to admit that the DMCA is full of flaws, but this post is at least as bad. Let's examine it.
Say Sony comes out with a new CD format that's encrypted and can only be played on sony equipment, which doesn't allow you to burn copies, convert to MP3, etc.
Let's say, Phillips engineers figured out how to decrypt this new CD format, and they wanted to a sell player for this CD format.
Before the DMCA, this would have been ok.
Now, It's a criminal offense...
Nope, it's still fine, as long as you can't make copies of the thing. If your device doesn't allow copying or weaken the protection, you're fine. It's just another playback device.
That's what happened when some 16 year old Norwegian kid wrote a program to play DVDs on Linux.
This misconception has been overused to death. He was involved in the writing, but he was certainly not the main author. He just happened to be the only one dumb enough to take credit for it. DeCSS was not a Linux program, and not a player. It's purpose was to let Windows users rip DVDs. Now, I'll grant that it helped along the Linux DVD playback world, but it's hardly the innocent lamb that you're portraying it as.
There was a close call with a Russian programmer who wrote a program allowing eBook users to convert thier eBooks to other formats, but the DOJ dropped it.
Again, pretty much bogus. Yes, this *would* let eBook users convert their eBooks to other formats. There were some legitimate issues. However, this is a fricking Russian software company -- the point of the thing was to let people make copies of eBooks. Sure, *after* the accusations all sorts of innocent, wonderful-sounding applications were waved around.
BTW, As a libertarian, I'm about as free-market as it gets.
Drug money sponsers terrorism? Who's laundering the drug money? (Click on homepage)
Libertarians would be much more appealing if they'd stick to straighforward things like free speech infringements, and knock off lame issues like drug legalization, IMHO. (Another great example of an area where people's primary goal is to abuse something, but they can come up with corner cases of something being useful "those poor, poor glaucoma sufferers". Christ. Why do 90% of libertarian arguments sound like this?)
Hmm, the KDE site doesn't list Objective-C as a language with bindings, but I'll take your word for it. That also screws over a lot of people who left Windows development precisely because of the massive reliability on C++. And as for those languages...Objective C and C# might be nice (haven't used either enough), but Java is too slow for general application use, and Perl and Python are scripting languages, not something you'd normally use to write a full-size app. Now, I admit that occasionally writing just a front end can be useful, but there isn't actually a lot of reasonable alternative presented there.
Gtk+ is actually quite slow and is as bloated as Qt.
I can say with certainty that this is not the case. Gtk+ apps are much snappier on my PII/266, and as for bloat -- Qt has *far* more extraneous features built into the thing. It isn't a widget set, it's a whole bloody platform.
You can use the STL within Qt from version 3 onwards
I haven't gone through Qt 3 -- was the API actually redone to support the STL fully? On the level that, say, gtkmm does? I'm rather dubious.
That [dynamic keybinding] has disappeared in GNOME 2.
This is not true, though apparently it now requires a minimal amount of effort on the application developer's part. See gtk-menu-set-accel-path() in the gtk2 documentation.
GPL is the recommended library license [as said by the FSF -- big surprise]...It's only a problem if you want to write closed source software while freeloading on other people's work.
Ah, thank you for clarifying that. I wasn't aware that FreeBSD, OpenSSH, XFree86, and other major projects were "closed source software" written by "freeloaders". Those BSD types sure are the antithesis of open source programmers.
Well, there's Python, Perl, Java, C#, Ruby, and C++ according to the KDE docs. Not bad, but pretty lame that it can't even do a single functional language, much less Objective C.
Gtk has Ada, C++, Perl, Python, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Erlang, Guile, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, Objective-Caml, Objective-Label, Pascal, PHP, Ruby, TCL, TOM, and XBase bindings.
GTK+ has a native (not a preferred) language specifically chosen because it's least-common-denominator. The Qt people evidently didn't see compatibility with less-used languages as important, so they snubbed everyone else.
Qt uses the STL.
Really? When did they lose the QString and QVector class and other ugly warts?
And it's bigger because it does a heck of a lot more than widgets-only GTK+
Which is a *bad* thing, violating the UNIX design principle of many small parts, each the best for its job. I frequently use glib even in projects that I'm not using gtk+ in -- I find it makes C a joy to use. You can't do that with Qt -- it's all or nothing. I don't want a bloody "platform" on my computer. I got my fill of that with JVMs. Qt is bloated, and far more so than gtk.
GTK+ manages with the LGPL because it is a free beer library.
Okay, I miswrote. My point has not changed -- if you want to put it that way, Qt is not a free beer library. And that's a sorry state of affairs.
The impression I got is that Qt pretty much exists to pander to ex-Windows types, who are used to coding in C++.
Because there only needs to be *one* person out there who *does* look at the diffs and catches the thing. *Not* every person needs to catch the thing.
Furthermore, analysis of what the thing is doing is much easier with open source.
I disagree -- client validation a handrail
on
W3C Releases XForms
·
· Score: 2
I strongly disagree with what you're placing in here. Client validation should be a *handrail*. It is intended to do nothing more than help the user not accidently enter a data field in a format that the server will reject, like July 30, 2002 instead of 7/30/2002. It should never fail on potentially valid data. You want heavyweight validation, use the *server*. (Matter of fact, client-side output should never be trusted, as more and more "web programmers" seem to think is a good idea).
If someone wants to enter a bogus name, they're going to do it. Overzealous "validation" is a PITA for a bunch of people. Why do it? Your "checking" above doesn't help security or the integrity of your database in the least. Now, I will grant that if someone *accidently* writes a sentence describing themselves instead of their name in the name field, then indeed, your solution would have caught something that mine would not have. However, I'm quite dubious as to the value of this (how often do people make mistakes like this?), but I'm quite certain that Jennifer and Prince are not tremendously thrilled with your refusing to accept legal names.
I still think that Qt is easily the worst thing about KDE. It supports few languages (and only C++ well) unlike the huge array of languages with excellent gtk bindings, it's much slower than gtk, it's large (and brings a lot more baggage with it than I want for a simple widget set), it fails to use the STL, every packaged version I've used screws with and then fails to clean up my ld.so.conf...
I don't find the widgets that attractive. Qt lacks gtk's incredibly useful dynamic keybinding features (in any gtk-using program, drag your mouse down to a menu item, and while holding the button, hit the key combination you want to bind to the key).
The licensing thing isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's still frusterating. Some people have said that this needs to be the case for Qt to be funded -- well, gtk manages without putting annoying licensing into their product, and I'm not entirely sure that something as fundamental as a (intended to be universalized) widget set should be controlled by a single, private organization.
Just my thoughts, and I'm sure some people (Guillame Laurent, and the ever-vocal Mosfet) probably feel quite differently...
Oh, and on another note, I get a few people talking about performance issues in using 5400 RPM drives instead of 7200 RPM drives. That's silly. If you're using either of the two, you're probably using IDE drives, and thus probably building a workstation. The performance hit is just not important. A 5400 RPM drive is 25% slower than a 7200 RPM drive. If you're hitting the disk at *all*, you're going to be slow compared to working entirely in RAM. Increasing rotational speed by even a factor of two or so is not going to be an issue -- the amount of RAM you have to cache stuff on the disk is, in almost any real-world situation, a far more influential factor. The filesystem you're using, the fragmentation level, what OS you're using and how you have the caches set up...all these can have far more impact than a 25% change.
And when it really comes down to it, what do you care about more -- your data not being lost, or large file copies finishing 25% faster (under ideal circumstances: assuming the bottleneck is entirely from the hard drive and that head movement time is not an issue). Background the copy and do other work while it's going on.
There was one person working on wget support for rtsp (finally being able to save those damn streams to disk would be nice). Unfortunately, there's some handshaking that they weren't able to figure out. If there are some clever protocol people out there, I suspect that person could use the help...
I wonder what impact this is going to have on future donations of code. If these guys had a couple of months to make all their money before someone makes a free piece of software using their code that pretty much renders their software pointless, I wonder whether in the future people will be willing to donate code.:-(
Barring any patent infringements, I am perfectly within my rights to create source code that produces an identical effect or product as yours
Not quite sure about this. For example, if I run an automated decompiler on your source, getting source that produces the same assembly, the original copyright clearly still covers the decompiled code.
Though courts rarely let companies get away with copyright/reverse engineering claims that prevent compatibility. I doubt Sorenson or Apple would win a case based on this.
few days after installing a Maxtor 60gig, i was inside the box cleaning up the spaghetti and happened to touch the top of the Maxtor.... and was scared shitless to find that it was *HOT*. 10 minutes later $7 bought me a HDD fan/drive bay mount combo. nice and cool now, and i'd bet dollars to doughnuts my Maxtor 60gig will outlast any Maxtor 60gig without a fan.
Unfortunately, this is an artifact of people trying to jack speed on cheap drives. It's a really, really stupid idea. If you want a reliable, quiet drive, buy a *5400 RPM* drive. I can't stress this enough. They're getting unpleasantly difficult to find, but a few people still make 'em last I looked. 7200 RPM drives run *much* hotter, though FDB may eliminate that. Have to take another look...
Fortunately, there's a fix. You can buy server-class drives SCSI drives if you're uncomfortable with cheapo ones. Sure, they're going to cost you more, but that may simply be the cost of reliability.
It really comes down to how much you're willing to pay for peace of mind about your data. A monitor failing is no big deal. A hard drive failing can cost you years of work, source code, everything.
Unfortunately, "backing up" is no longer a really good option for most people. Perhaps buying a second drive and mirroring, but tapes (except for the very most expensive) and CD-Rs are simply too small compared to drive size to be very useful for backup. It's actually cheaper to use a second drive to back things up these days (compared to tape). Writeable DVDs still are expensive, still aren't popular or standardized, and even when they get so, are very fragile and likely to require at least ten discs to back up a complete hard drive.
If anyone knows of a less expensive, large-amount-of-data-per-unit backup system, I'd be interested to hear about it.
Hard drives got too big too fast. They outstripped CPUs and Moore's law. They outstripped all competing storage devices. They actually outstripped consumer demand in the last two years or so. The people doing the research on them are *too* good. I remember buying an 80MB drive not-so-many years ago. Slow. Physically huge. Cost something like $3 per megabyte. Now drives have a price/performance ratio 6000 times better. No other product in any field I know of has come anywhere close to this.
I have a collection of (closed source) Linux games. I buy them because there are no reasonable open-source equivalents, and I like to have them. Quake 3, Alien Crossfire, Jagged Alliance 2...
However, I heavily weight open source into my decisions. If there is *any* open source version (and free as in beer is also a factor), I'm far more likely to get the open source than the closed source version. Sorry, but I've had enough issues with the damn HZ and clock ticks breaking timing on closed source games with my redefined HZ in 2.4 and the new 2.5 HZ value (which, BTW, apparently breaks just about *all* old closed-source Linux games).
Linux is simply not particularly accessable to closed source, and there's a strong culture around open source. You can try to see your product, but remember that when Acme Software comes along pimping their roughly equivalent open source product, you may be up shit creek...
Here's a proposal that I put up a while ago on Slashdot for preventing malicious nodes from attacking the network (and for preventing "fake shares", etc).
I've also put up a few proposals for avoiding the "download slot saturation" attacks that the RIAA/MPAA was originally considering.
It's too bad that P2P people don't have a centralized forum for the discussion of this. Sure, groups like the GDF are good, but a lot of these ideas would be useful to multiple P2P groups, and everyone would benefit from a more attack-resistant, less exploitable network.
Yeah, I was more than a little disappointed as well.
I thought the display was going to be driven by the computer -- there are a number of people that have written software (often for Linux) to control attached LCD panels, which can be mounted in a drive bay to display time/load/temp, etc. The worst, though, was the fact that it had another power cable running through the back. Ugh.
With all these casemod stories, Slashdot is just trying to get a foothold in the nu-geek community -- the kind who was raised by Windows, is addicted helplessly to online gaming, always wears Slipknot t-shirts, always believes all the hardware and game hype that every crap hardware/gaming site out there says, and doesn't even know jack shit about coding, *nix, or computer science as they only care about spurious issues like ATI vs. Nvidia -- but they try to pass themselves off as a Linux hackers and anti-Microsoft rebels, and somehow gravitate towards slashdot after they run Linux for a week and give up on it.
I like the term. I've frequently wanted a word for these folks, but didn't have one. nuGeek. Nice.
GPL'd computer software has fuck all to do with medicine, dickwad. Or are you proposing a GPL'd drug system?/me grins. You really don't have any idea how dependent upon huge amounts of software the medical and pharmaceutical fields are, do you?
Slashdot Mirror
Wanna' know why MS word is so popular in the office?
Cuz' the document you get looks like the document I sent, and you can edit it as such, and return it, and the document I get returned looks just like it did when you finished working on it.
Can't say that of many widely used document formats...
Therefore, let's all adopt PDF.
PDF isn't designed for editable content, and Word files are. This is actually a major source of irritation for me.
Word documents are frequently used to hand information around. This is DUMB. I don't care if you're an MS shop, you love MS and you'd like nothing more than to give 50% of your yearly revenue to MS, Word documents are a fucking awful publication format. They're good for collaborating, actively working on documents when everyone uses Word. However, people that hand out documentation or similar in DOC format should stop.
Reasons to use PDF instead of Word files when releasing read-only information:
* You don't have to worry about the remote person having the proper fonts -- you can embed all needed information
* You don't have to worry about macro viruses
* You don't have to worry about old version of Word not being able to import your document
* You don't have to worry about formatting differences when a newer version of Word mis-imports your document
* Acrobat Reader is a much better "reader" from a UI standpoint than Word
* PDFs can be read by anyone on almost any platform
* Acrobat Reader is free, unlike Word
* You're pretty much guaranteed no printing issues with a PDF.
Okay, I'll be the first to admit that the DMCA is full of flaws, but this post is at least as bad. Let's examine it.
Say Sony comes out with a new CD format that's encrypted and can only be played on sony equipment, which doesn't allow you to burn copies, convert to MP3, etc.
Let's say, Phillips engineers figured out how to decrypt this new CD format, and they wanted to a sell player for this CD format.
Before the DMCA, this would have been ok.
Now, It's a criminal offense...
Nope, it's still fine, as long as you can't make copies of the thing. If your device doesn't allow copying or weaken the protection, you're fine. It's just another playback device.
That's what happened when some 16 year old Norwegian kid wrote a program to play DVDs on Linux.
This misconception has been overused to death. He was involved in the writing, but he was certainly not the main author. He just happened to be the only one dumb enough to take credit for it. DeCSS was not a Linux program, and not a player. It's purpose was to let Windows users rip DVDs. Now, I'll grant that it helped along the Linux DVD playback world, but it's hardly the innocent lamb that you're portraying it as.
There was a close call with a Russian programmer who wrote a program allowing eBook users to convert thier eBooks to other formats, but the DOJ dropped it.
Again, pretty much bogus. Yes, this *would* let eBook users convert their eBooks to other formats. There were some legitimate issues. However, this is a fricking Russian software company -- the point of the thing was to let people make copies of eBooks. Sure, *after* the accusations all sorts of innocent, wonderful-sounding applications were waved around.
BTW, As a libertarian, I'm about as free-market as it gets.
Drug money sponsers terrorism? Who's laundering the drug money? (Click on homepage)
Libertarians would be much more appealing if they'd stick to straighforward things like free speech infringements, and knock off lame issues like drug legalization, IMHO. (Another great example of an area where people's primary goal is to abuse something, but they can come up with corner cases of something being useful "those poor, poor glaucoma sufferers". Christ. Why do 90% of libertarian arguments sound like this?)
Sounds like "wolfpack". "geekpack".
This is one of the best posts I've seen on Slashdot in a while. In particular,
The work of the artists and scientists and engineers outlives the work of the kings and generals, in the end.
is a candidate for fortune files.
...most of the popular ones...
Hmm, the KDE site doesn't list Objective-C as a language with bindings, but I'll take your word for it. That also screws over a lot of people who left Windows development precisely because of the massive reliability on C++. And as for those languages...Objective C and C# might be nice (haven't used either enough), but Java is too slow for general application use, and Perl and Python are scripting languages, not something you'd normally use to write a full-size app. Now, I admit that occasionally writing just a front end can be useful, but there isn't actually a lot of reasonable alternative presented there.
Gtk+ is actually quite slow and is as bloated as Qt.
I can say with certainty that this is not the case. Gtk+ apps are much snappier on my PII/266, and as for bloat -- Qt has *far* more extraneous features built into the thing. It isn't a widget set, it's a whole bloody platform.
You can use the STL within Qt from version 3 onwards
I haven't gone through Qt 3 -- was the API actually redone to support the STL fully? On the level that, say, gtkmm does? I'm rather dubious.
That [dynamic keybinding] has disappeared in GNOME 2.
This is not true, though apparently it now requires a minimal amount of effort on the application developer's part. See gtk-menu-set-accel-path() in the gtk2 documentation.
GPL is the recommended library license [as said by the FSF -- big surprise]...It's only a problem if you want to write closed source software while freeloading on other people's work.
Ah, thank you for clarifying that. I wasn't aware that FreeBSD, OpenSSH, XFree86, and other major projects were "closed source software" written by "freeloaders". Those BSD types sure are the antithesis of open source programmers.
Well, there's Python, Perl, Java, C#, Ruby, and C++ according to the KDE docs. Not bad, but pretty lame that it can't even do a single functional language, much less Objective C.
Gtk has Ada, C++, Perl, Python, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Erlang, Guile, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, Objective-Caml, Objective-Label, Pascal, PHP, Ruby, TCL, TOM, and XBase bindings.
GTK+ has a native (not a preferred) language specifically chosen because it's least-common-denominator. The Qt people evidently didn't see compatibility with less-used languages as important, so they snubbed everyone else.
Qt uses the STL.
Really? When did they lose the QString and QVector class and other ugly warts?
And it's bigger because it does a heck of a lot more than widgets-only GTK+
Which is a *bad* thing, violating the UNIX design principle of many small parts, each the best for its job. I frequently use glib even in projects that I'm not using gtk+ in -- I find it makes C a joy to use. You can't do that with Qt -- it's all or nothing. I don't want a bloody "platform" on my computer. I got my fill of that with JVMs. Qt is bloated, and far more so than gtk.
GTK+ manages with the LGPL because it is a free beer library.
Okay, I miswrote. My point has not changed -- if you want to put it that way, Qt is not a free beer library. And that's a sorry state of affairs.
The impression I got is that Qt pretty much exists to pander to ex-Windows types, who are used to coding in C++.
Apparently, it was less than one day.
As someone else pointed out, the closed-source Interbase (DBMS) contained a trojan for over six years which was only found after it was open-sourced.
Because there only needs to be *one* person out there who *does* look at the diffs and catches the thing. *Not* every person needs to catch the thing.
Furthermore, analysis of what the thing is doing is much easier with open source.
I strongly disagree with what you're placing in here. Client validation should be a *handrail*. It is intended to do nothing more than help the user not accidently enter a data field in a format that the server will reject, like July 30, 2002 instead of 7/30/2002. It should never fail on potentially valid data. You want heavyweight validation, use the *server*. (Matter of fact, client-side output should never be trusted, as more and more "web programmers" seem to think is a good idea).
If someone wants to enter a bogus name, they're going to do it. Overzealous "validation" is a PITA for a bunch of people. Why do it? Your "checking" above doesn't help security or the integrity of your database in the least. Now, I will grant that if someone *accidently* writes a sentence describing themselves instead of their name in the name field, then indeed, your solution would have caught something that mine would not have. However, I'm quite dubious as to the value of this (how often do people make mistakes like this?), but I'm quite certain that Jennifer and Prince are not tremendously thrilled with your refusing to accept legal names.
I still think that Qt is easily the worst thing about KDE. It supports few languages (and only C++ well) unlike the huge array of languages with excellent gtk bindings, it's much slower than gtk, it's large (and brings a lot more baggage with it than I want for a simple widget set), it fails to use the STL, every packaged version I've used screws with and then fails to clean up my ld.so.conf...
I don't find the widgets that attractive. Qt lacks gtk's incredibly useful dynamic keybinding features (in any gtk-using program, drag your mouse down to a menu item, and while holding the button, hit the key combination you want to bind to the key).
The licensing thing isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's still frusterating. Some people have said that this needs to be the case for Qt to be funded -- well, gtk manages without putting annoying licensing into their product, and I'm not entirely sure that something as fundamental as a (intended to be universalized) widget set should be controlled by a single, private organization.
Just my thoughts, and I'm sure some people (Guillame Laurent, and the ever-vocal Mosfet) probably feel quite differently...
However, mplayer uses aalib, which doesn't require a one letter per pixel ratio (though it could certainly do so...).
Oh, and on another note, I get a few people talking about performance issues in using 5400 RPM drives instead of 7200 RPM drives. That's silly. If you're using either of the two, you're probably using IDE drives, and thus probably building a workstation. The performance hit is just not important. A 5400 RPM drive is 25% slower than a 7200 RPM drive. If you're hitting the disk at *all*, you're going to be slow compared to working entirely in RAM. Increasing rotational speed by even a factor of two or so is not going to be an issue -- the amount of RAM you have to cache stuff on the disk is, in almost any real-world situation, a far more influential factor. The filesystem you're using, the fragmentation level, what OS you're using and how you have the caches set up...all these can have far more impact than a 25% change.
And when it really comes down to it, what do you care about more -- your data not being lost, or large file copies finishing 25% faster (under ideal circumstances: assuming the bottleneck is entirely from the hard drive and that head movement time is not an issue). Background the copy and do other work while it's going on.
There was one person working on wget support for rtsp (finally being able to save those damn streams to disk would be nice). Unfortunately, there's some handshaking that they weren't able to figure out. If there are some clever protocol people out there, I suspect that person could use the help...
I wonder what impact this is going to have on future donations of code. If these guys had a couple of months to make all their money before someone makes a free piece of software using their code that pretty much renders their software pointless, I wonder whether in the future people will be willing to donate code. :-(
Barring any patent infringements, I am perfectly within my rights to create source code that produces an identical effect or product as yours
Not quite sure about this. For example, if I run an automated decompiler on your source, getting source that produces the same assembly, the original copyright clearly still covers the decompiled code.
Though courts rarely let companies get away with copyright/reverse engineering claims that prevent compatibility. I doubt Sorenson or Apple would win a case based on this.
few days after installing a Maxtor 60gig, i was inside the box cleaning up the spaghetti and happened to touch the top of the Maxtor.... and was scared shitless to find that it was *HOT*. 10 minutes later $7 bought me a HDD fan/drive bay mount combo. nice and cool now, and i'd bet dollars to doughnuts my Maxtor 60gig will outlast any Maxtor 60gig without a fan.
Unfortunately, this is an artifact of people trying to jack speed on cheap drives. It's a really, really stupid idea. If you want a reliable, quiet drive, buy a *5400 RPM* drive. I can't stress this enough. They're getting unpleasantly difficult to find, but a few people still make 'em last I looked. 7200 RPM drives run *much* hotter, though FDB may eliminate that. Have to take another look...
Fortunately, there's a fix. You can buy server-class drives SCSI drives if you're uncomfortable with cheapo ones. Sure, they're going to cost you more, but that may simply be the cost of reliability.
It really comes down to how much you're willing to pay for peace of mind about your data. A monitor failing is no big deal. A hard drive failing can cost you years of work, source code, everything.
Unfortunately, "backing up" is no longer a really good option for most people. Perhaps buying a second drive and mirroring, but tapes (except for the very most expensive) and CD-Rs are simply too small compared to drive size to be very useful for backup. It's actually cheaper to use a second drive to back things up these days (compared to tape). Writeable DVDs still are expensive, still aren't popular or standardized, and even when they get so, are very fragile and likely to require at least ten discs to back up a complete hard drive.
If anyone knows of a less expensive, large-amount-of-data-per-unit backup system, I'd be interested to hear about it.
Hard drives got too big too fast. They outstripped CPUs and Moore's law. They outstripped all competing storage devices. They actually outstripped consumer demand in the last two years or so. The people doing the research on them are *too* good. I remember buying an 80MB drive not-so-many years ago. Slow. Physically huge. Cost something like $3 per megabyte. Now drives have a price/performance ratio 6000 times better. No other product in any field I know of has come anywhere close to this.
I have a collection of (closed source) Linux games. I buy them because there are no reasonable open-source equivalents, and I like to have them. Quake 3, Alien Crossfire, Jagged Alliance 2...
However, I heavily weight open source into my decisions. If there is *any* open source version (and free as in beer is also a factor), I'm far more likely to get the open source than the closed source version. Sorry, but I've had enough issues with the damn HZ and clock ticks breaking timing on closed source games with my redefined HZ in 2.4 and the new 2.5 HZ value (which, BTW, apparently breaks just about *all* old closed-source Linux games).
Linux is simply not particularly accessable to closed source, and there's a strong culture around open source. You can try to see your product, but remember that when Acme Software comes along pimping their roughly equivalent open source product, you may be up shit creek...
Here's a proposal that I put up a while ago on Slashdot for preventing malicious nodes from attacking the network (and for preventing "fake shares", etc).
I've also put up a few proposals for avoiding the "download slot saturation" attacks that the RIAA/MPAA was originally considering.
It's too bad that P2P people don't have a centralized forum for the discussion of this. Sure, groups like the GDF are good, but a lot of these ideas would be useful to multiple P2P groups, and everyone would benefit from a more attack-resistant, less exploitable network.
Stuff that's hit AP and other news stuff like Slashdot in the last two weeks or so:
"Size does matter"
"Drinking proven to reduce mental competence"
"Pot smoking worse than cigarette smoking"
Ah, yes. Science grants. Your tax dollars at work.
Making a CAT5 cable is so important that it should be common knowledge
For what, people trapped on a desert island, forced to do IT work without any bulk cable at all?
Yeah, I was more than a little disappointed as well.
I thought the display was going to be driven by the computer -- there are a number of people that have written software (often for Linux) to control attached LCD panels, which can be mounted in a drive bay to display time/load/temp, etc. The worst, though, was the fact that it had another power cable running through the back. Ugh.
Face it, the days of the Linux Hippies are numbered.
Linux postdates the hippie by quite a bit.
With all these casemod stories, Slashdot is just trying to get a foothold in the nu-geek community -- the kind who was raised by Windows, is addicted helplessly to online gaming, always wears Slipknot t-shirts, always believes all the hardware and game hype that every crap hardware/gaming site out there says, and doesn't even know jack shit about coding, *nix, or computer science as they only care about spurious issues like ATI vs. Nvidia -- but they try to pass themselves off as a Linux hackers and anti-Microsoft rebels, and somehow gravitate towards slashdot after they run Linux for a week and give up on it.
I like the term. I've frequently wanted a word for these folks, but didn't have one. nuGeek. Nice.
GPL'd computer software has fuck all to do with medicine, dickwad. Or are you proposing a GPL'd drug system? /me grins. You really don't have any idea how dependent upon huge amounts of software the medical and pharmaceutical fields are, do you?