That only works for launchers put on the panel (where there is a command field), not for launchers created on the desktop (right-click on desktop, create launcher). Once it's created, you don't get the original dialog box back when you choose properties and there seems to be no way to change the original command field (at least in Gnome 2.4 from Fedora Core 1).
That's another inconsistency by the way, that launchers on the panel and desktop seems to be different somehow...
I use Gnome every day at work and while there is much about the environment to love, there are also some really anoying glitches that I don't understand why they haven't been addressed allready. A few examples:
1. You can easily create or install themes by clicking your way through or drag-n-drop, but there is no apparent way of REMOVING a theme.
2. You can't change the location a launcher or shortcut points to once you have created it. That's irritating if you just needed to move the file or rename one folder in a long path and don't want to go through the hassle of creating a new launcher, name it and select icon from a long list again.
3. You can drag-n-drop emblems onto icons from the sidebar, but you can't remove them in the same easy way. To do that you need to right-click the icon and go into a totally different dialogue.
4. View files as a list in Nautilus and there is no way you can right-click on the background to get the context menu in order to for example add a folder. You then have to do it through the top-of-window menu instead.
5. Listview in Nautilus again: you can't drag-n-drop a file from another window without dropping it onto an entry.
6. There is no way you can change the permissions or emblems of multiple selected files in one go from Nautilus. You have to address them one by one.
Just like Gnome's small features really adds to the experience, these small glitches really destroys it too when you run into them. Gnome is my prefered environment though, here's to hoping that some of these gets fixed in the next release...
Agreed - Openness opens businesspossibilities
on
The Cult of the NDA
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· Score: 1
As a person who have witnessed the start up of at least two tech companies very closely and currently attempts to set up a new company together with some colleagues, I just want to agree with the headline (haven't read the full article yet and won't have any time doing it today):(
Recognizing that our idea isn't that original (although it contains a quite original mix of other ideas), we have been very open about what we intend to do towards everyone we've been talking to in the business. This has paid out very well so far in the way that potential business partners that we didn't even know of have stepped forward (somebody we spoke to knew somebody who... etc) and approached us, which has opened up fantastic possibilities for us. We today stand on a much more solid ground, with the access to a wast network of complementing competence and established business associates who are interested in helping us getting a good start, since they see that our business can benefit them in the long run.
We are not too worried that somebody with the insight in our business successfully would copy our ideas. We have allready created momentum through this backing and established good relationships with the parties around us. Anybody who would attempt to take over our position in the network would have hard to fit in our shoes.
Therefore I'm more worried about the parties further away that we have no knowledge of and independently are going for the same business plan, backed by another network the same way we are and are likely to become fierce competitors 5 years down the road...
For those who don't know it, Tungsten means "heavy stone" in Swedish and that's not exactly what I want to carry around in my pocket...
I guess Palm didn't know/care when they decided for the name since only approx. 9 million people speak Swedish. To me, the name would have been much more appropriate for a mainframe.:)
Btw. The chemical substance Tungsten is called Volfram in Sweden, so does anyone have any idea how the english name ended up to be Tungsten?
The US gave OpenBSD a grant. OpenBSD made anti-US comments. US pulled OpenBSD funding.
Seems pretty self-explanatory to me.
..except that the US administration never admited that they withdrew it because of anti-US comments, in fact, they seem to deny it.
The reason for denying it is also obvious, their main supporters (the US citizens) would probably not be in support of that decision, thus they are betraying them.
And that my friend is a good reason to kick and scream about it, but because if we don't, it will be far easier for them to betray their people agian.
> > Printer manufacturers realized -maybe 10 years ago- the same thing that game manufacturers realized more recently; that far greater proffits await those who seek out continuous revenue streams.
> That may be true, but it still doesn't explain the drop in quality of printers. I can't buy your cartridges if my printer doesn't work, and if I have a bad experience I am likely to take my cartridge business to various competitors until I find one that sucks the least.
Yes it does. The printer manufacturers wants you to buy a new printer every few years, even if they sell them at a loss. Why? Because when you have a new printer you have no choice but to buy your ink from the original manufacturer since there are no 3rd party cartridges yet. If you have an old printer, chances are that you can find cheaper third party cartridges.
This scheme works extremely well in order to keep the heavy users to buy your cartridges. Their printers break down quicker, thus giving them a quicker upgrade cycle, probably ahead of the 3rd party ink suppliers, making them buy only your cartridges. These are otherwise the clientel that is most inclined to put in the effort to find and buy good, cheap 3rd party cartridges.
So I guess that the most lucrative "point of failure"-setting for the printer manufacturers would be so they make the printers break down for the heavy users around the same time as the 3rd party ink cartridges gets available.
The best way to remedy this sick and wasteful situation would be for some government-, industry- or consumer-organization with a lot of clout to set a simple, patent free standard for ink cartridges and strongly encourage the use of it. If a large enough share of the user base gets behind it, the printer manufacturers are forced to accept it. The same goes for many other product groups, including wacum cleaner bags.
Every new technology that touches the matter privacy would classify, such as encryption, surveilance equipment, recorded weblogs, gadgets for hiding ones true identity (webanonymizers) etc.
Increased privacy both protects the innocent and the criminals. Giving easy and safe encryption to the world would protect many people from big brother snooping and could be very valuable for freedom fighters in abusive countries (even if their material still might be found and they might be punished, the government can't use the material to find associates etc), but also for terrorists, child pornographers and common criminals.
Just reposting the edonkey-links of the above comment since that had a score of 0, making a lot of people miss the links, and I currently don't have any moderation points to mod it up with:(
In other words, Open Source is about destroying wealth... or specifically about preventing those who create the intellectual property from profiting from it.
No, the wealth isn't destroyed, actually it is increased quite substantially since the generated code can find its way into and improve products where a more costly or less adaptive alternative wouldn't fit. But you don't see that so easily since this isn't piled up by the developer, but more evenly spread among all those who benefit from it. With other words, Open Source is about creating more wealth and spreading it more evenly, just like the original poster said.
It bothers me to see this, because I personally think tech people are extremely undervalued today for what value they bring to companies, even though we are relatively highly paid.
Are we? It's quite easy to overvalue your own contribution. There are quite many companies where the factory worker believes they should be paid more since they are doing all the work, the sales and marketing people because its their skills that lets the company put a slightly higher price-tag than some competitors with identical products, the sysadmin because the whole company is depending on him etc. Just because the technological progress has made it possible for the company to do certain improvements and savings, doesn't mean that the people assigned to implement those should be given the majority of what that brings in. They would have been worth nothing if other scientists before them had not made those improvements possible in the first place or the company wouldn't have had people producing or selling the products.
These people love open source, because they can take *YOUR* work and use it to make more money. That way they can continue to have their 7 figure salary and not worry about sharing it with you.
Sure, that's what they believe and what motivates them, but in a working market economy they can only do that for a short time period until their competitors do the same thing. So, in the end it all just goes towards producing more for less and we all benefit. The material wealth we enjoy today is just the result of the above scheme repeated over more than a hundred years, combined with some lawmaking designed to make it spread somewhat evenly.
I don't think you can patent obvious ideas like "mobile PCs" anyway. It's hard to prove there isn't prior art out there somewhere
FYI, you don't need to prove that there isn't prior art out there to get a patent, it's the defendant accused of infringing on the patent that must prove the existence of prior art to get off the hook. This is one of the things that is totally backwards with the patent system, it's the accused one who has to prove his innocence, making it belong more in the dark ages than an enlightened society.
Your dissection of the authors knowledge is strongly flawed.
The author first asserts that the process of moving files between the systems causes the upper/lower caseness of the filenames to be munged
This is the case, I've run into this problem myself many times and it has little to do with how the files are saved and much to do with how fs-drivers are implemented and configured. Compare to how you often end up with read-only files if you copy them from a CD in Linux. Sure you can change some settings, but then often get other side-effects in other situations (goes for both).
I believe he is the original author of his project.
The author displays no knowledge of the network mounting of filesystems using SAMBA (CIFS) or NFS.
The fact that he is dual-booting strongly suggests that he (like most of us) only has one development machine, not a complete network of machines. Don't get ignorant just because you are better equipped.
Why isn't the source code checked into a configuration management tool, like CVS?
Once again, he only has one workstation, thus is CVS out of the question since it needs to be hosted under one of the OSes and he can only run one at once. Besides, CVS is in most cases just unnecessary and complicates and slows stuff down if you are the single developer. You can make backups through normal file copying.
As others have already noted elsewhere, he will still have to test on the target platform.
Which I'm sure he does now and then too (by dual booting). However, if you just need to do some minor change in platform independent code it's really a bliss to not need to dual-boot.
Besides, your criticism of using VMWare for testing is quite irrelevant. It's true you need to test on multiple environments to know that it works on them all, but as you said, VMWare with Windows X *IS* one of these environments. If he's dual booting he only has access to one environment anyway, using VMWare as well will add one or more extra testing environments.
I would have LOVED to have a similar setup as his when I was developing BladeEnc. Like him I only had one development machine (couldn't afford more) and constantly needed to dual-boot in order to recompile and package a new version. The platform dependent parts of BladeEnc were very limited and untouched for 95% of the development, thus this setup + testing under wine (for possible quality degradation due to compiler excentricities) would have been more than enough during most of my days. Only performance tweaking would have to be done in windows environment.
With your 20+ years as software developer you obviously have found your way of working in your projects and with your budget. Don't knock others creative solutions for solving their problems with their resources in a totally different situation.
Everybody has moral obligations to act in certain ways given certain situations, this includes both companies and people. If Symantec had a moral obligation to release this information or not is another question, but I'm sick and tired of the argument that companies don't have moral obligations since they're only into business to make money. Hey, I'm only into getting as much fun out of my life as possible, does that mean that I'm without moral obligations?
ADPCM encoding is actually quite cool, it has some advantages compared to other compression algorithms, but in the end I don't think there is so much use for it.
I once wrote a very simple ADPCM encoder which we used for the soundtrack in a computer game (Ignition, released in around '96 for PC). The advantages of that one was:
1. Compressed 16 bit audio to 4 bits, giving a compression ratio of 4:1.
2. Extrememely fast decompression, decompressing and playing actually took less CPU resources than just playing the original WAV file. This because I just needed to send each sample through two very small look-up tables (less than 1kb in total) which therefore were cached and uncached memory reads from main memory was decreased by a ratio of 4:1.
3. Very fast compression, almost as fast as decompression.
4. Very simple algorithms. Both compression and decompression algorithms were written from scratch and tweaked in less than two days, including WAV-conversion tool.
5. Good sound quality. Sure, the difference could easily be spotted by a trained ear by direct comparison with the original using good sound equipment, but there were no specific artifacts, just a feeling of a lowpass filter having been applied (which basically is what happens with ADPCM compression, it smoothes out the soundwaves a bit).
However, there is still no compelling argument for using ADPCM today except for very specific needs. Compression/decompression speed is with todays fast processors secondary to the quality/size ratio. 256 kbit/sec mp3 or Vorbis sounds definitely better than 4 bit/sample ADPCM and is notably smaller.
Reading all the fearfilled comments here about what might happen with Borland C, Kylix etc including their communities and all that time and effort people have spent on learning those development environments, just makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside that I've settled for free software.:)
Nobody can take over free software like that, at least not with the communitys acceptance, feels great to be immune against threats like that.:)
Of course, still hopes that things turns out well for Borland, the Kylix community etc...
Skimming through the other comments here I only find a lot of standard, political correct responses stating the importance of characters and plot. Of course, that goes for ANY book/movie in any category, not just SF, but what I find that good Science Fiction brings to the table that hardly can be found in other categories are:
1. The way it lets authors play around with and explore philosophical ideas of how society develops. Asimov did this with the Foundation series, basing a whole story on a theory of how society develops through crises, what steps are taken in what order, who gets in power when and why. That's quite hard to make in a non-science fiction novel, unless you write a historical novel which often gets more dull and predictable.
2. Separate what is undeniable facts in the world around us (i e many aspects of human nature, like love, hate, passion, greed, curiosity etc) and what is just the results of our cultural heritage (our economical system, democracy, patriarchalism, monogamy and focus on material wealth just to mention a few). A good science fiction novel can be an eye opener to what can be changed and what can not.
3. Let's us explore our possible futures. Good SF gives us a glimpse (although very simplified and exagerated) of how the future might look like. By comparing the scenarios of Star Trek with Cyberpunk and 1984, we can more easily get aware of what the future might hold and as a society make decisions on what we want and don't want of what's ahead of us. The novel 1984 has definitely helped to raise the public awareness of the threats of totalitarianism combined with technology, likewise has Cyberpunk woken up many people to how global corporations gathers more and more power and how that might affect society.
4. Epical tales. I'm personally a real sucker for this and no other category except fantasy so easily allows for grand epical tales as SF.
These are to me the promises of SF and a good SF book should take advantage of at least one of these posibilities, otherwise there is no need to put the plot/characters in another space and time. Plot and characters must still be good though, but I expect that from books of any category.
Actually, I'm a bit surprised that not more of the./ community has more elaborate thoughts of why they've fallen in love with SF and not just books with good plots/characters...
Come on moderators, +5 for a personal, non-subjective praising of the old Amiga 1000!?
Also, don't blame Amiga's failure on the marketplace, Commodore screwed things up badly time after time. Shifting of market focus, failure to deliver, low quality components (high return rate for substantial amounts of time), economical extravaganzas, do I need to go on?
And if you think that average corporate offices should have chosen Amigas instead of PCs or Macs, then you obviously don't understand the corporate needs of the 80's. What the hell would an office computer do with advanced graphics, advanced sound, flickery colorscreens (either interlace or way to expensive monitors), an immature platform with a seriously buggy OS and hardly any software support (we're talking about A1000, right?)??? Not to speak about the dependence the company would get on one single, small supplier.
Sure, I also regret how things turned out, but put the blame on those who deserves it. As far as I see it Atari Mega STs would have fit the corporate desktop much better (more user friendly GUI, cheaper hardware and a rock solid B/W screen), but I don't blame them for not choosing that either. Atari also screwed up a lot and was also a too small single supplier.
What you say may be correct when speaking about two equal parties, but the producer consumer relationship is often far from equal.
First of all, the producer can hire lawyers to write long EULAs which the average consumer has no chance of understanding and thus get away with a horrible leverage on how you live your life if they are deemed valid by a court. There is no way for you to make sure that you don't agree on anything you don't like without carefully reading through the EULA before making the purchase (or having a lawyer doing it). Different products could have different EULAs and new runs of the same old model could have modified EULAs. There is no way that I would spend hours deciphering and memorizing a EULA every time I bought something, it simply doesn't work. The result would just be that I would open myself up to legal attacks from the company if I happen to do something they don't like. Do you remember all the details of all the EULAs of all equipment you have bought during the last 5 years?
Secondly, the consumer has often no choice but accepting whatever crap the company tries to squeeze into the EULA because of the state of the market. For example, if I want cable TV in my appartment I just have to accept the agreement with the company who owns the cable. Their terms are horrible, but thank God that they are somewhat restricted by the law, otherwise it would have been even worse.
Sorry, but Sawfish is actually quite heavy on resources nowadays, much thanks to feature creep combined with its built in interpreter, running interpreted code in realtime.
I don't have any hard numbers here right now, but I remember seeing a comparison of memory consumption in window managers, landing Sawfish around 2-3 megs, making it one of the heaviest in the test.
When I asked why (our users run the basic Office apps, with standard email (no Exchange), and all their work is done through a telnet app to an HP-UX server)... no one could give a single reason other than "everyone else uses Windows".
Sounds like that was your golden opportunity to say "I know Linux will work just fine for us on the desktop, just give me a few days to set up a well adapted system and I'll prove it to you" and earn yourself some extra credits for taking creative initiatives...
I left UDS in March 2000 in order to pursuit another career (had been with the company since the start in 93/94) and by then they had started doing some prototyping, including experimenting with cellshaded 3D in order to give the graphics a good cartoon feeling.
I will however move back to Norrköping and start working at UDS again by the 1st of November, so I will know more by then. I caught some glimpses by the game when I was visiting about a month ago and its some kind of 3rd person 3D adventure. Can't say anything about how it plays yet though.
Although I understand you've chosen to not state your country for probably good purposes, I might have country specific material and/or links and/or people to connect you to. Just e-mail me (tord/dot/jansson/at/swipnet/dot/se) and I'll see what I can do.
However, if you are from Sweden, Norway, Denmark or Finland and therefore have a good chance of understanding Swedish (or at least knowing somebody who does) you might find this link interesting.
It's the homepage of my webzine called "Patentnytt" where I provide abstracts of and links to articles and material that is useful for anyone working against patents on software.
I have somewhat of a suspicion of who you are and that you already have mailed me though;)
Maybe the "free as in price" aspect isn't so important here, but don't undererstimate the "free as in freedom" aspects of this product.
I'm sure that eventually will advanced homeusers and hackers involved in indie projects start to hack the code and add cool features and effects. This will make the program grow and become more sophisticated and useful over time.
There is a big difference between all OSS licenses that I know of (BSD, GPL and LGPL) and commercial licenses:
You don't need to agree with the license in order to use the product.
I remember a windows GPL:ed program (might have been a port of the GIMP) that in the installer showed the GPL like most programs show a license, but with the difference that a text below the small scrollbox said something along the lines "Please note that you don't have to agree with this license to use the program. You only have to agree with it if you want to redistribute this program" and there was only one button to continue (think it said "cool", definitely not "I agree").
Here is how I see it, but IANAL:
If no special license is agreed upon, then normal copyright laws apply. Since basically all non-OSS licenses restrict the users rights (compared to copyright law), they need to force the user to accept the license in order to use the program. They also have to convince the court that the user has seen and accepted the license before installing, thus click-through licenses.
Since OSS licenses don't restrict users (compared to copyright) but instead grants extra freedoms, there is no need to accept the license ever. If somebody violates the GPL he can't state that he has not agreed upon the license, in that case he has violated copyright instead and he's in trouble no matter what.
My impression is that the company who wants a license demanding click-through either has not thought about it enough or is trying to get a license passed as OSS compliant when it in fact is not. In either case it would be wrong to accept it.
Sounds like the ISPs essentially would be screwing their own customers by disallowing them to visit popular sites despite having paid for internet access...
Slashdot Mirror
That only works for launchers put on the panel (where there is a command field), not for launchers created on the desktop (right-click on desktop, create launcher). Once it's created, you don't get the original dialog box back when you choose properties and there seems to be no way to change the original command field (at least in Gnome 2.4 from Fedora Core 1).
That's another inconsistency by the way, that launchers on the panel and desktop seems to be different somehow...
I use Gnome every day at work and while there is much about the environment to love, there are also some really anoying glitches that I don't understand why they haven't been addressed allready. A few examples:
1. You can easily create or install themes by clicking your way through or drag-n-drop, but there is no apparent way of REMOVING a theme.
2. You can't change the location a launcher or shortcut points to once you have created it. That's irritating if you just needed to move the file or rename one folder in a long path and don't want to go through the hassle of creating a new launcher, name it and select icon from a long list again.
3. You can drag-n-drop emblems onto icons from the sidebar, but you can't remove them in the same easy way. To do that you need to right-click the icon and go into a totally different dialogue.
4. View files as a list in Nautilus and there is no way you can right-click on the background to get the context menu in order to for example add a folder. You then have to do it through the top-of-window menu instead.
5. Listview in Nautilus again: you can't drag-n-drop a file from another window without dropping it onto an entry.
6. There is no way you can change the permissions or emblems of multiple selected files in one go from Nautilus. You have to address them one by one.
Just like Gnome's small features really adds to the experience, these small glitches really destroys it too when you run into them. Gnome is my prefered environment though, here's to hoping that some of these gets fixed in the next release...
As a person who have witnessed the start up of at least two tech companies very closely and currently attempts to set up a new company together with some colleagues, I just want to agree with the headline (haven't read the full article yet and won't have any time doing it today) :(
Recognizing that our idea isn't that original (although it contains a quite original mix of other ideas), we have been very open about what we intend to do towards everyone we've been talking to in the business. This has paid out very well so far in the way that potential business partners that we didn't even know of have stepped forward (somebody we spoke to knew somebody who... etc) and approached us, which has opened up fantastic possibilities for us. We today stand on a much more solid ground, with the access to a wast network of complementing competence and established business associates who are interested in helping us getting a good start, since they see that our business can benefit them in the long run.
We are not too worried that somebody with the insight in our business successfully would copy our ideas. We have allready created momentum through this backing and established good relationships with the parties around us. Anybody who would attempt to take over our position in the network would have hard to fit in our shoes.
Therefore I'm more worried about the parties further away that we have no knowledge of and independently are going for the same business plan, backed by another network the same way we are and are likely to become fierce competitors 5 years down the road...
For those who don't know it, Tungsten means "heavy stone" in Swedish and that's not exactly what I want to carry around in my pocket...
:)
I guess Palm didn't know/care when they decided for the name since only approx. 9 million people speak Swedish. To me, the name would have been much more appropriate for a mainframe.
Btw. The chemical substance Tungsten is called Volfram in Sweden, so does anyone have any idea how the english name ended up to be Tungsten?
Seems pretty self-explanatory to me.
The reason for denying it is also obvious, their main supporters (the US citizens) would probably not be in support of that decision, thus they are betraying them.
And that my friend is a good reason to kick and scream about it, but because if we don't, it will be far easier for them to betray their people agian.
> That may be true, but it still doesn't explain the drop in quality of printers. I can't buy your cartridges if my printer doesn't work, and if I have a bad experience I am likely to take my cartridge business to various competitors until I find one that sucks the least.
Yes it does. The printer manufacturers wants you to buy a new printer every few years, even if they sell them at a loss. Why? Because when you have a new printer you have no choice but to buy your ink from the original manufacturer since there are no 3rd party cartridges yet. If you have an old printer, chances are that you can find cheaper third party cartridges.
This scheme works extremely well in order to keep the heavy users to buy your cartridges. Their printers break down quicker, thus giving them a quicker upgrade cycle, probably ahead of the 3rd party ink suppliers, making them buy only your cartridges. These are otherwise the clientel that is most inclined to put in the effort to find and buy good, cheap 3rd party cartridges.
So I guess that the most lucrative "point of failure"-setting for the printer manufacturers would be so they make the printers break down for the heavy users around the same time as the 3rd party ink cartridges gets available.
The best way to remedy this sick and wasteful situation would be for some government-, industry- or consumer-organization with a lot of clout to set a simple, patent free standard for ink cartridges and strongly encourage the use of it. If a large enough share of the user base gets behind it, the printer manufacturers are forced to accept it. The same goes for many other product groups, including wacum cleaner bags.
Increased privacy both protects the innocent and the criminals. Giving easy and safe encryption to the world would protect many people from big brother snooping and could be very valuable for freedom fighters in abusive countries (even if their material still might be found and they might be punished, the government can't use the material to find associates etc), but also for terrorists, child pornographers and common criminals.
ed2k://|file|Mandrake91-cd1-inst.i586.iso|68216422 4|7422d9374a1bd9187254de638f47c7d3|8 |9bc5687f06ecf26e1f767623dc8f6421|0 0|82530029d63b3624020fcc40aa9ad625|
ed2k://|file|Mandrake91-cd2-ext.i586.iso|68127948
ed2k://|file|Mandrake91-cd3-i18n.i586.iso|6815744
and unlike ftp links, the more people that use these, the better.
No, the wealth isn't destroyed, actually it is increased quite substantially since the generated code can find its way into and improve products where a more costly or less adaptive alternative wouldn't fit. But you don't see that so easily since this isn't piled up by the developer, but more evenly spread among all those who benefit from it. With other words, Open Source is about creating more wealth and spreading it more evenly, just like the original poster said.
It bothers me to see this, because I personally think tech people are extremely undervalued today for what value they bring to companies, even though we are relatively highly paid.
Are we? It's quite easy to overvalue your own contribution. There are quite many companies where the factory worker believes they should be paid more since they are doing all the work, the sales and marketing people because its their skills that lets the company put a slightly higher price-tag than some competitors with identical products, the sysadmin because the whole company is depending on him etc. Just because the technological progress has made it possible for the company to do certain improvements and savings, doesn't mean that the people assigned to implement those should be given the majority of what that brings in. They would have been worth nothing if other scientists before them had not made those improvements possible in the first place or the company wouldn't have had people producing or selling the products.
These people love open source, because they can take *YOUR* work and use it to make more money. That way they can continue to have their 7 figure salary and not worry about sharing it with you.
Sure, that's what they believe and what motivates them, but in a working market economy they can only do that for a short time period until their competitors do the same thing. So, in the end it all just goes towards producing more for less and we all benefit. The material wealth we enjoy today is just the result of the above scheme repeated over more than a hundred years, combined with some lawmaking designed to make it spread somewhat evenly.
FYI, you don't need to prove that there isn't prior art out there to get a patent, it's the defendant accused of infringing on the patent that must prove the existence of prior art to get off the hook. This is one of the things that is totally backwards with the patent system, it's the accused one who has to prove his innocence, making it belong more in the dark ages than an enlightened society.
The author first asserts that the process of moving files between the systems causes the upper/lower caseness of the filenames to be munged
This is the case, I've run into this problem myself many times and it has little to do with how the files are saved and much to do with how fs-drivers are implemented and configured. Compare to how you often end up with read-only files if you copy them from a CD in Linux. Sure you can change some settings, but then often get other side-effects in other situations (goes for both). I believe he is the original author of his project.
The author displays no knowledge of the network mounting of filesystems using SAMBA (CIFS) or NFS.
The fact that he is dual-booting strongly suggests that he (like most of us) only has one development machine, not a complete network of machines. Don't get ignorant just because you are better equipped.
Why isn't the source code checked into a configuration management tool, like CVS?
Once again, he only has one workstation, thus is CVS out of the question since it needs to be hosted under one of the OSes and he can only run one at once. Besides, CVS is in most cases just unnecessary and complicates and slows stuff down if you are the single developer. You can make backups through normal file copying.
As others have already noted elsewhere, he will still have to test on the target platform.
Which I'm sure he does now and then too (by dual booting). However, if you just need to do some minor change in platform independent code it's really a bliss to not need to dual-boot.
Besides, your criticism of using VMWare for testing is quite irrelevant. It's true you need to test on multiple environments to know that it works on them all, but as you said, VMWare with Windows X *IS* one of these environments. If he's dual booting he only has access to one environment anyway, using VMWare as well will add one or more extra testing environments.
I would have LOVED to have a similar setup as his when I was developing BladeEnc. Like him I only had one development machine (couldn't afford more) and constantly needed to dual-boot in order to recompile and package a new version. The platform dependent parts of BladeEnc were very limited and untouched for 95% of the development, thus this setup + testing under wine (for possible quality degradation due to compiler excentricities) would have been more than enough during most of my days. Only performance tweaking would have to be done in windows environment.
With your 20+ years as software developer you obviously have found your way of working in your projects and with your budget. Don't knock others creative solutions for solving their problems with their resources in a totally different situation.
Everybody has moral obligations to act in certain ways given certain situations, this includes both companies and people. If Symantec had a moral obligation to release this information or not is another question, but I'm sick and tired of the argument that companies don't have moral obligations since they're only into business to make money. Hey, I'm only into getting as much fun out of my life as possible, does that mean that I'm without moral obligations?
ADPCM encoding is actually quite cool, it has some advantages compared to other compression algorithms, but in the end I don't think there is so much use for it.
I once wrote a very simple ADPCM encoder which we used for the soundtrack in a computer game (Ignition, released in around '96 for PC). The advantages of that one was:
1. Compressed 16 bit audio to 4 bits, giving a compression ratio of 4:1.
2. Extrememely fast decompression, decompressing and playing actually took less CPU resources than just playing the original WAV file. This because I just needed to send each sample through two very small look-up tables (less than 1kb in total) which therefore were cached and uncached memory reads from main memory was decreased by a ratio of 4:1.
3. Very fast compression, almost as fast as decompression.
4. Very simple algorithms. Both compression and decompression algorithms were written from scratch and tweaked in less than two days, including WAV-conversion tool.
5. Good sound quality. Sure, the difference could easily be spotted by a trained ear by direct comparison with the original using good sound equipment, but there were no specific artifacts, just a feeling of a lowpass filter having been applied (which basically is what happens with ADPCM compression, it smoothes out the soundwaves a bit).
However, there is still no compelling argument for using ADPCM today except for very specific needs. Compression/decompression speed is with todays fast processors secondary to the quality/size ratio. 256 kbit/sec mp3 or Vorbis sounds definitely better than 4 bit/sample ADPCM and is notably smaller.
Reading all the fearfilled comments here about what might happen with Borland C, Kylix etc including their communities and all that time and effort people have spent on learning those development environments, just makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside that I've settled for free software. :)
:)
Nobody can take over free software like that, at least not with the communitys acceptance, feels great to be immune against threats like that.
Of course, still hopes that things turns out well for Borland, the Kylix community etc...
1. The way it lets authors play around with and explore philosophical ideas of how society develops. Asimov did this with the Foundation series, basing a whole story on a theory of how society develops through crises, what steps are taken in what order, who gets in power when and why. That's quite hard to make in a non-science fiction novel, unless you write a historical novel which often gets more dull and predictable.
2. Separate what is undeniable facts in the world around us (i e many aspects of human nature, like love, hate, passion, greed, curiosity etc) and what is just the results of our cultural heritage (our economical system, democracy, patriarchalism, monogamy and focus on material wealth just to mention a few). A good science fiction novel can be an eye opener to what can be changed and what can not.
3. Let's us explore our possible futures. Good SF gives us a glimpse (although very simplified and exagerated) of how the future might look like. By comparing the scenarios of Star Trek with Cyberpunk and 1984, we can more easily get aware of what the future might hold and as a society make decisions on what we want and don't want of what's ahead of us. The novel 1984 has definitely helped to raise the public awareness of the threats of totalitarianism combined with technology, likewise has Cyberpunk woken up many people to how global corporations gathers more and more power and how that might affect society.
4. Epical tales. I'm personally a real sucker for this and no other category except fantasy so easily allows for grand epical tales as SF.
These are to me the promises of SF and a good SF book should take advantage of at least one of these posibilities, otherwise there is no need to put the plot/characters in another space and time. Plot and characters must still be good though, but I expect that from books of any category.
Actually, I'm a bit surprised that not more of the ./ community has more elaborate thoughts of why they've fallen in love with SF and not just books with good plots/characters...
Come on moderators, +5 for a personal, non-subjective praising of the old Amiga 1000!?
Also, don't blame Amiga's failure on the marketplace, Commodore screwed things up badly time after time. Shifting of market focus, failure to deliver, low quality components (high return rate for substantial amounts of time), economical extravaganzas, do I need to go on?
And if you think that average corporate offices should have chosen Amigas instead of PCs or Macs, then you obviously don't understand the corporate needs of the 80's. What the hell would an office computer do with advanced graphics, advanced sound, flickery colorscreens (either interlace or way to expensive monitors), an immature platform with a seriously buggy OS and hardly any software support (we're talking about A1000, right?)??? Not to speak about the dependence the company would get on one single, small supplier.
Sure, I also regret how things turned out, but put the blame on those who deserves it. As far as I see it Atari Mega STs would have fit the corporate desktop much better (more user friendly GUI, cheaper hardware and a rock solid B/W screen), but I don't blame them for not choosing that either. Atari also screwed up a lot and was also a too small single supplier.
What you say may be correct when speaking about two equal parties, but the producer consumer relationship is often far from equal.
First of all, the producer can hire lawyers to write long EULAs which the average consumer has no chance of understanding and thus get away with a horrible leverage on how you live your life if they are deemed valid by a court. There is no way for you to make sure that you don't agree on anything you don't like without carefully reading through the EULA before making the purchase (or having a lawyer doing it). Different products could have different EULAs and new runs of the same old model could have modified EULAs. There is no way that I would spend hours deciphering and memorizing a EULA every time I bought something, it simply doesn't work. The result would just be that I would open myself up to legal attacks from the company if I happen to do something they don't like. Do you remember all the details of all the EULAs of all equipment you have bought during the last 5 years?
Secondly, the consumer has often no choice but accepting whatever crap the company tries to squeeze into the EULA because of the state of the market. For example, if I want cable TV in my appartment I just have to accept the agreement with the company who owns the cable. Their terms are horrible, but thank God that they are somewhat restricted by the law, otherwise it would have been even worse.
Guess this gives a whole new dimension to the words "power hungry equipment"...
Sorry, but Sawfish is actually quite heavy on resources nowadays, much thanks to feature creep combined with its built in interpreter, running interpreted code in realtime.
I don't have any hard numbers here right now, but I remember seeing a comparison of memory consumption in window managers, landing Sawfish around 2-3 megs, making it one of the heaviest in the test.
Both blackbox and IceWM is much lighter.
Sounds like that was your golden opportunity to say "I know Linux will work just fine for us on the desktop, just give me a few days to set up a well adapted system and I'll prove it to you" and earn yourself some extra credits for taking creative initiatives...
I left UDS in March 2000 in order to pursuit another career (had been with the company since the start in 93/94) and by then they had started doing some prototyping, including experimenting with cellshaded 3D in order to give the graphics a good cartoon feeling.
I will however move back to Norrköping and start working at UDS again by the 1st of November, so I will know more by then. I caught some glimpses by the game when I was visiting about a month ago and its some kind of 3rd person 3D adventure. Can't say anything about how it plays yet though.
Although I understand you've chosen to not state your country for probably good purposes, I might have country specific material and/or links and/or people to connect you to. Just e-mail me (tord/dot/jansson/at/swipnet/dot/se) and I'll see what I can do.
;)
However, if you are from Sweden, Norway, Denmark or Finland and therefore have a good chance of understanding Swedish (or at least knowing somebody who does) you might find this link interesting.
It's the homepage of my webzine called "Patentnytt" where I provide abstracts of and links to articles and material that is useful for anyone working against patents on software.
I have somewhat of a suspicion of who you are and that you already have mailed me though
Maybe the "free as in price" aspect isn't so important here, but don't undererstimate the "free as in freedom" aspects of this product.
I'm sure that eventually will advanced homeusers and hackers involved in indie projects start to hack the code and add cool features and effects. This will make the program grow and become more sophisticated and useful over time.
There is a big difference between all OSS licenses that I know of (BSD, GPL and LGPL) and commercial licenses:
You don't need to agree with the license in order to use the product.
I remember a windows GPL:ed program (might have been a port of the GIMP) that in the installer showed the GPL like most programs show a license, but with the difference that a text below the small scrollbox said something along the lines "Please note that you don't have to agree with this license to use the program. You only have to agree with it if you want to redistribute this program" and there was only one button to continue (think it said "cool", definitely not "I agree").
Here is how I see it, but IANAL:
If no special license is agreed upon, then normal copyright laws apply. Since basically all non-OSS licenses restrict the users rights (compared to copyright law), they need to force the user to accept the license in order to use the program. They also have to convince the court that the user has seen and accepted the license before installing, thus click-through licenses.
Since OSS licenses don't restrict users (compared to copyright) but instead grants extra freedoms, there is no need to accept the license ever. If somebody violates the GPL he can't state that he has not agreed upon the license, in that case he has violated copyright instead and he's in trouble no matter what.
My impression is that the company who wants a license demanding click-through either has not thought about it enough or is trying to get a license passed as OSS compliant when it in fact is not. In either case it would be wrong to accept it.
So what if these sites doesn't pay up?
Sounds like the ISPs essentially would be screwing their own customers by disallowing them to visit popular sites despite having paid for internet access...