I've traveled acros US few times. I thought some places are worse than others. Now, after moving to Toronto area I understand that was nothing comparing to chaos on Ontario roads. The wors part is that you don't have a chance to see any police cars doing any job on streets and highways.
Highway speed limit is not than 100 kmph. You rarely (onlt when traffic is jammed) see someone driving below 110 kmph, typically all at 120. Result? They speed untill someone is crashed and then all they move slowly as traffic is jammed. Everyone complain about traffic jams. Isn't it stupid?
When you signal to change line, the drive on your target line behind will immidieately come forward to make it dangerous for you to change the line. The only way to change the line: *don't* signal you change it, just do it and do it fast. The driver on the target lane behind will be scared and let you go. What kind of culture is that?
When you move at exactly speed limit (100 kmph) on the right lane, someone will tale-gate you. That one can be a bus or a truck. No matter you have "baby on borad" sign - the monster will come so cles that you don't see his bumper and will start flash light you.. to what? I usually begin even slow down more. What's wrong with truck/bus companies? They cannot hire non-violent drivers?
Speaking about a distance, regular cars are doingthe same. But later listen those drivers after next car accident: "the guy in the front of me stopped to saddenly". Hey, he didn't stop by hitting the wall. It's most likely you who did not keep the distance.
I don't know about the rest of Canada, but drivers of GTA must ride only horses, because those animals will fix many driver's mistakes having much better brains than those drivers.
Google used some GPL code right behind the button "I am feeling lucky". So the button, using the GPL code, is infexted and behave accordingly. It's a perfect illustration that the viral nature of GPL is not bad - it's rather very useful.
You don't have to keep your tabsize as 8 - it can be any other value in Python. Moreover, you don't have to use tabs at all - all your program can be just a single line:
print [(x,y) for x in (1,2,3,4) for y in (10,15,3,22) if x*y > 25]
Have you ever consider to use Portage from Gentoo for big in-house projects? IMHO a good way to have a fine-grained dependency control. Also it's Python-based. The downside is that Portage is in its alpha stage of being ported to Cygwin.
By the way, do you use Cook and Aegis in Cygwin? I've tried to build them in Cygwin once - both seem like still not ported completely yet.
Never-ever-whatsoever post any bad comments about Apple or Macs on/., even on thread unrelated to Macs. Otherwise - be ready of being modded down. Mac zealots are everywhere. All they do on/. is posting bad comments about M$, collecting karma and using it to mod-down all anti-Apple comments.
There are many areas of the market place that this should be applied.
First where I'd like to see it is with Apple computers.
Apple must leave the choice of OS to customers - right now you still have to pay for OSX when you are buying Mac even if you plan to use Mac with Linux or BeOS or BSD.
And, of course, Apple must let go their firmware, so that Mac clones will be available again.
FreeBSD uses a system called ports. Gentoo is an imitation, that's why they named it portage
Gentoo is not an imitation of BSD: it's a GNU userland with Portage as a package manager. Portage is also not an imitation of ports - Portage is a further development of good ideas of ports after leaving behind bad implementation details of ports. The major improveent of the ports' concept in Portage is fine-grained control of dependencies and system/application settings/configurations.
If I do HTML in standard-compliant way than 99% it will work in IE. But I am forced (by requirements) to use a lot of Javascript and Shockwave. And that is the biggest source of the pain in the neck.
Let me answer it assuming you mean IE rather than Windows.
If we make an application (I mean web-based one) for corporate users - 99% of them. If we make an application for retail customers (home users) - 90% of them. If we make it for geeks - between 30% and 70%. The problem is that we are making most of money on corporate users, some - on retail and almost nothing on geeks. In other words - almsot all money comes from IE users. So, guess what browser my boss want to support?
How about being fired for that same day as would publish it online? You can do it with your home site, or in your University. The corporate world doesn't accept such things.
Certainly it is better for Moz developers to simulate IE than to keep the browser being used only by geeks.
Peope like me have constantly problems with project managers when we are trying to get a budget (time and efforts) to develop the content working *equally* on both IE and Mozilla, while project managers don't give enough budget *and* they don't like the idea of "the least common dominator" for their content. You know a typical answer of project managers: "Make it just for IE and as flashy/sexy as possible... Who cares about Mozilla?.. All our customers use IE..."
No way I am responsible for IE-oriented content on the Web. But neither my boss, who has to deploy the content to end-users. How about end-users? Should they be blamed for choosing IE? Do they have such a choice if they work for a company with IT dept installing everything on their PCs? Should IT depts be blame for installing IE on PCs of corporate users, who is supposed to access an onlibe content of their corporate partner? Guess what is that content oriented?
It's a catch-22. Personally, I blame Microsoft. But US goverment has another opinion. So I blame US govt as well.
GTK itself apeared as QT wasn't really free. Now QT is free but it's too late: many developers prefer GTK.
Now, XUL appeared as QT wasn't free and GTK wasn't ready. Why the usage of XUL is still limited to Mozilla? I would expect to see three competiting toolkits, QT, GTK and XUL, but it's not happened yet. Is XUL really ready to be used outside of Mozilla?
the other browsers out there, Mozilla and Opera mainly, will make gains in the market because of standards, constant updates and new features being added, support for new technologies that may emerge in the next few years
Main features, desired first of all by 90% of browser users, to add to Mozilla and Opera will be feature already in IE: (1) *stable* support of *all* plugins that needed to display a plugin-based content that is already on the Web and (2) simulating IE to display a IE-oriented content that is already on the Web.
Let me try it in few small logical steps. Why do people use browser? To access online content. What content? The one published for existing web users. What do people use now to surf? IE. So, what is the main feature they need? IE-compatibility. What about W3C standards? leave for academicians. IE is the real standard.
Personally I hate IE way of standard ignorance. I love W3C standards. But when I develop my content I develop it not for myself, but for other people, 90% of them are IE users.
Mozilla (and/or Opera and/or KHTML) can surpass IE only if it will work *exactly* (including all standard problems) as IE *plus* it will have some additional useful feature, (like tabs, gestures and smart bookmarks) many of them all non-IE browsers already have.
If I invent an algorithm and patent it, the algorithm is protected by the patent monopoly, and anybody who wants to implement that patent has to pay me royalties. If I then implement my algorithm, the implementation is covered by copyright monopoly. The algorithm is not a trade secret, because it is published. The code to implement the algorithm, no matter how trivial, is the trade secret.
Wrong. You don't invent an algorithm - you discover it. Algorithm has been exisiting forever as a part of the math. So, if you patent it then you just participate in a very wrong patent system of USA. If you want to protect your investment to that research you've made then you should implement it and then protect the code. When you implement the code - you invent it. Sort of. If you close your invented sources than it's a trade secret. Make sure to obfuscate it as much as even you stop uderstanding it - otherwise it will be reverse engineered. If you ope your invented source then you can copyright them.
But whatever you do the only way to protect your research investments is to keep researching and developing. In software industry every algorithm has an idea. If you got an idea - you don't need any freeking algorithm since you can re-implement it in no time. Examples: gzip vs zip, png vs gif, pgp vs rsa etc and so on. So, the real artifact of your invention is a combination of the source code *AND* the environment you've created to compile it, debug, test, and package. Again, the only way to proect investments to such combination is to keep being faster than your competitors.
Marketing through mail-list? Are you serious? You can do it with developers - they are used to read many mail-lists anyway. But you can not reach any non-technical people with such a marketing tool as a mail-list.
Here is my advise regarding Mozilla's marketing:
You have to creat a better looking web-site. Now it looks like for developers. Put there more flashy stuff. Make a contest among designers.
You have to tell us success stories from regular users and big corporations. Please use arguments that make sense for both Joe Six Pack and Mr. COO/CIO.
You have to promote sites that have their content as standard compliant (no IE workarounds). Some contest here also won't hurt.
You have to promote (but not just inform about) features, so people will understand, for example, (1) how bookmark manager works and (2) why is it better than in IE.
When you promote features, pay a very special attention on plugins. Put more demonstration on your site with flash, director, java, real-layer, media-player, quicktime, mp3 and other interactive and/or multimedia non-HTML content, and promize people mozilla t-shirts for free if they can report that they don't see that content (or it is crashing the browser).
An individual developers may do marketing through mail-lists. You are presenting a non=profit organization. "Non-profit" does not mean "not-money". How much do you get from AOL? 2M? Can't you spend 10K for t-shirts for some contest? And by the way, not everything cost a hard cash: a designer's contest for new look-n-feel can free on both sides.
But don't send me your marketing "spam" - I have enough of it from other "promoters".
... AOL will never switch from their own existing browser, which is based on IE, to their own new browser, which may be based on Mozilla. It's too late. Their customers already used to use Internet with all that content that is displayed fine on IE, including all those plugins. With Mozilla they will be pissed off as most of plugin-based content will be broken or it will crash Mozilla. And that will hurt AOL's business. And that is the reason that AOL customers will never see Mozilla. At least untill Mozilla can simulate IE's HTML rendering *AND* Mozilla will flawlesly take *ALL* plugins that exist for IE.
Let's face it: plugin support in Mozilla is experimental, while Mozilla cannot properly display the "IE-oriented" content. You may repeat the mantra about web standards again and again, but AOL customers do not care about standards. They care that the content they use to see is still there and it's still work on their computers. Period.
UNO python bridge - python is now a first class language for creating UNO components for OpenOffice.org
Python? No Elisp support? Then it's not good for real (X)Emacs users yet!
Just kidding. Seriosuly, I'd love to script macros using Python in OOo. Python is a real and powerfull OOP (strong typing) language, and it's a scripting one at the same time (dynamic typing + lazy evaluation) - it's exactly what I need for macros. I hope Python scripting will come soon after Python componentes in OOo.
As I can see in a changelog, Python now is a first class language to create components. I guess, soon in OOo you will have a scripting language, which will work same way in both Windows and Linux. Besides, Python is a real OOP language to be attractive for former Java programmers and it's a real scripting language to be attractive for former VB and Perl users.
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Highway speed limit is not than 100 kmph. You rarely (onlt when traffic is jammed) see someone driving below 110 kmph, typically all at 120. Result? They speed untill someone is crashed and then all they move slowly as traffic is jammed. Everyone complain about traffic jams. Isn't it stupid?
When you signal to change line, the drive on your target line behind will immidieately come forward to make it dangerous for you to change the line. The only way to change the line: *don't* signal you change it, just do it and do it fast. The driver on the target lane behind will be scared and let you go. What kind of culture is that?
When you move at exactly speed limit (100 kmph) on the right lane, someone will tale-gate you. That one can be a bus or a truck. No matter you have "baby on borad" sign - the monster will come so cles that you don't see his bumper and will start flash light you.. to what? I usually begin even slow down more. What's wrong with truck/bus companies? They cannot hire non-violent drivers?
Speaking about a distance, regular cars are doingthe same. But later listen those drivers after next car accident: "the guy in the front of me stopped to saddenly". Hey, he didn't stop by hitting the wall. It's most likely you who did not keep the distance.
I don't know about the rest of Canada, but drivers of GTA must ride only horses, because those animals will fix many driver's mistakes having much better brains than those drivers.
That was a joke. Never mind if you don't have a sense of humor.
Google used some GPL code right behind the button "I am feeling lucky". So the button, using the GPL code, is infexted and behave accordingly. It's a perfect illustration that the viral nature of GPL is not bad - it's rather very useful.
Your workarounds remnd me Portage from Gentoo. Have you ever tried it?
By the way, do you use Cook and Aegis in Cygwin? I've tried to build them in Cygwin once - both seem like still not ported completely yet.
Never-ever-whatsoever post any bad comments about Apple or Macs on /., even on thread unrelated to Macs. Otherwise - be ready of being modded down. Mac zealots are everywhere. All they do on /. is posting bad comments about M$, collecting karma and using it to mod-down all anti-Apple comments.
Check the motivation for LaTeX3 project. It seems they are addressing page-layout issues even more agressively than in current LaTeX.
You can clearly use WYSIWYG tools with LaTeX: LyX and TeXmacs are just two of them :)
Anything that helps you here?
Q: what is DTP?
First where I'd like to see it is with Apple computers.
Apple must leave the choice of OS to customers - right now you still have to pay for OSX when you are buying Mac even if you plan to use Mac with Linux or BeOS or BSD.
And, of course, Apple must let go their firmware, so that Mac clones will be available again.
Gentoo is not an imitation of BSD: it's a GNU userland with Portage as a package manager. Portage is also not an imitation of ports - Portage is a further development of good ideas of ports after leaving behind bad implementation details of ports. The major improveent of the ports' concept in Portage is fine-grained control of dependencies and system/application settings/configurations.
If I do HTML in standard-compliant way than 99% it will work in IE. But I am forced (by requirements) to use a lot of Javascript and Shockwave. And that is the biggest source of the pain in the neck.
Let me answer it assuming you mean IE rather than Windows.
If we make an application (I mean web-based one) for corporate users - 99% of them. If we make an application for retail customers (home users) - 90% of them. If we make it for geeks - between 30% and 70%. The problem is that we are making most of money on corporate users, some - on retail and almost nothing on geeks. In other words - almsot all money comes from IE users. So, guess what browser my boss want to support?
Certainly it is better for Moz developers to simulate IE than to keep the browser being used only by geeks.
No way I am responsible for IE-oriented content on the Web. But neither my boss, who has to deploy the content to end-users. How about end-users? Should they be blamed for choosing IE? Do they have such a choice if they work for a company with IT dept installing everything on their PCs? Should IT depts be blame for installing IE on PCs of corporate users, who is supposed to access an onlibe content of their corporate partner? Guess what is that content oriented?
It's a catch-22. Personally, I blame Microsoft. But US goverment has another opinion. So I blame US govt as well.
Now, XUL appeared as QT wasn't free and GTK wasn't ready. Why the usage of XUL is still limited to Mozilla? I would expect to see three competiting toolkits, QT, GTK and XUL, but it's not happened yet. Is XUL really ready to be used outside of Mozilla?
Main features, desired first of all by 90% of browser users, to add to Mozilla and Opera will be feature already in IE: (1) *stable* support of *all* plugins that needed to display a plugin-based content that is already on the Web and (2) simulating IE to display a IE-oriented content that is already on the Web.
Let me try it in few small logical steps. Why do people use browser? To access online content. What content? The one published for existing web users. What do people use now to surf? IE. So, what is the main feature they need? IE-compatibility. What about W3C standards? leave for academicians. IE is the real standard.
Personally I hate IE way of standard ignorance. I love W3C standards. But when I develop my content I develop it not for myself, but for other people, 90% of them are IE users.
Mozilla (and/or Opera and/or KHTML) can surpass IE only if it will work *exactly* (including all standard problems) as IE *plus* it will have some additional useful feature, (like tabs, gestures and smart bookmarks) many of them all non-IE browsers already have.
Wrong. You don't invent an algorithm - you discover it. Algorithm has been exisiting forever as a part of the math. So, if you patent it then you just participate in a very wrong patent system of USA. If you want to protect your investment to that research you've made then you should implement it and then protect the code. When you implement the code - you invent it. Sort of. If you close your invented sources than it's a trade secret. Make sure to obfuscate it as much as even you stop uderstanding it - otherwise it will be reverse engineered. If you ope your invented source then you can copyright them.
But whatever you do the only way to protect your research investments is to keep researching and developing. In software industry every algorithm has an idea. If you got an idea - you don't need any freeking algorithm since you can re-implement it in no time. Examples: gzip vs zip, png vs gif, pgp vs rsa etc and so on. So, the real artifact of your invention is a combination of the source code *AND* the environment you've created to compile it, debug, test, and package. Again, the only way to proect investments to such combination is to keep being faster than your competitors.
Here is my advise regarding Mozilla's marketing:
- You have to creat a better looking web-site. Now it looks like for developers. Put there more flashy stuff. Make a contest among designers.
- You have to tell us success stories from regular users and big corporations. Please use arguments that make sense for both Joe Six Pack and Mr. COO/CIO.
- You have to promote sites that have their content as standard compliant (no IE workarounds). Some contest here also won't hurt.
- You have to promote (but not just inform about) features, so people will understand, for example, (1) how bookmark manager works and (2) why is it better than in IE.
- When you promote features, pay a very special attention on plugins. Put more demonstration on your site with flash, director, java, real-layer, media-player, quicktime, mp3 and other interactive and/or multimedia non-HTML content, and promize people mozilla t-shirts for free if they can report that they don't see that content (or it is crashing the browser).
An individual developers may do marketing through mail-lists. You are presenting a non=profit organization. "Non-profit" does not mean "not-money". How much do you get from AOL? 2M? Can't you spend 10K for t-shirts for some contest? And by the way, not everything cost a hard cash: a designer's contest for new look-n-feel can free on both sides.But don't send me your marketing "spam" - I have enough of it from other "promoters".
Let's face it: plugin support in Mozilla is experimental, while Mozilla cannot properly display the "IE-oriented" content. You may repeat the mantra about web standards again and again, but AOL customers do not care about standards. They care that the content they use to see is still there and it's still work on their computers. Period.
Not if they have got AOL signup CD.
Python? No Elisp support? Then it's not good for real (X)Emacs users yet!
Just kidding. Seriosuly, I'd love to script macros using Python in OOo. Python is a real and powerfull OOP (strong typing) language, and it's a scripting one at the same time (dynamic typing + lazy evaluation) - it's exactly what I need for macros. I hope Python scripting will come soon after Python componentes in OOo.
As I can see in a changelog, Python now is a first class language to create components. I guess, soon in OOo you will have a scripting language, which will work same way in both Windows and Linux. Besides, Python is a real OOP language to be attractive for former Java programmers and it's a real scripting language to be attractive for former VB and Perl users.