The need for the new in this case is also probably linked to the facts that 1) Ximian/Novell wants to increase Mono's marketshare(a laudable goal), quite probably by increasing it's mindshare in the gnome community(still laudable) through being "the most compatible desktop environment to Microsoft's.NET" (not so laudable). 2) A new language might help allay some of the (hypothetical) problems(I don't develop for Gnome so I don't know what they would be) that a mix of language choice/design introduced earlier 3) A new language, with a seperate remote procedure call convention might drive them to change their corba-based current setup(Java's RMI and Mono's version of XMLRPC come to mind). This may or may not be related to hypothetical 2) Corba is generally considered useful, but heavy, but platform and language-agnostic. Moving to a different language might change the equation in this case(not saying it's necessarily for the worse, but I'm trying to understand the logic behind this)
Yet Microsoft patent encumbered so many aspects of.NET very few people know what, if any, parts of the C#/.NET beast is not so encumbered, and it's certainly raised equivalent uncertainty to sun's ownership of the java platform
News providers can not become ad whores but - consumers can't be ad prudes!
The pessimist in me says news distributors(to seperate the content producer from the one that gets it to my eyeballs) already are a bit ad-happy. The optimist in me says as a publisher they'd refuse ad dollars if it would compromise journalistic integrity. Idealistic of me isn't it?
As for consumers, consumers are ad-overloaded. No matter which argument is put out to get ads on this or that format, in this or that medium, they don't have more money to spend, so it's diminishing returns for advertisers, they need to take a sabbatical...
On the other hand, I am a journalist and I would refuse to have my work become part of an ad.
And by sharing the same half-page with an ad your work is somehow free from ad-influence? Ads are mixed in with content so the two will blend in in the consumer's mind... If not, you'd put the ads at the end of the magazine(some trade publications do put most of their ads there, I skip the ones blended in with the content, and most of the articles... knowing some of the publications don't share my opinion: "if you ain't saying more bad things than good things about something, it ain't a critical review" but that's not entirely germane: I wonder why I still get some of those publications...)
I think the main reason subscription models don't work is that the customer knows for certain only that he'll be paying, there are no guarantees he'll be entertained by what is provided... Or exactly how many articles/content will be on-target, useful, etc... Most subscriptions revolve around daily production of new material, but how many producers can provide the same quality each and every day, day after day, regularly? The more specialised the field, the less such people exist. The more specialised the field, the more valuable such content might be(rarity and usability).
You're right, good information isn't free, but consumer protection for information consumers lags way back behind product consumers... And that doesn't help content providers right now, they have to establish their bona fides before people will pay in advance(subscription), and the ad-base d model has a few problems, first of which is that use/benefit from content doesn't translate to the ad provider except in extreme cases.
Since the RIAA did buy the trademarks, copyrights, and signed up the artists with contracts under which the artists no longer directly collect those rights, it's the RIAA's member companies job(and as a consortium, they can gang up) to defend the rights they bought. Whether such rights should be buyable is irrelevant. Whether such rights being bought is against the public's interest is also irrelevant, since the public isn't censoring politicians strongly enough when politicians attack those interests.
On another note, that the artists no longer have any incentive to sign those rights away in future contracts(and they shouldn't IMHO) doesn't exonerate the record companies from having to defend those rights, and record execs could be sued for not respecting fiduciary duties to their shareholders for not defending rights they bought rigorously enough. That those companies hide behind the RIAA to do its dirty work shows just how the thing works(using AOL-TimeWarner as an example):
-AOLTW's copyrights are threatened, AOLTW gets the RIAA to sue, RIAA wins suit, demands 1 million from a college student, RIAA is the bad guy. AOLTW doesn't get boycotted for attacking a college student.
I agree with you that a direct-artist system would be more efficient, for the artists and the public, and we wouldn't NEED records anymore, we could just burn them ourselves. But that system is far in the future, with copyright terms being extended, etc... it keeps getting further and further away(that could just be part of the RIAA's plan: they've been obsolete for about 2-3 years already, but they managed to legislate themselves a grace period). An artist that signed a record label could be sued for submitting directly to ITMS, by the way, breach of a contract's exclusive clause. Paranoid people from outside of the U.S. might just say that the proportion of record labels from the US vs the proportion of artists from there means the current system protects US interests(it siphons money inside the USA, away from the artists) and that's why the RIAA has such clout, not only is it a huge industry, but it's a net importer of money for the USA.
-- The world needs more independant artists and less corporate ones
virus-targeting, and the cause of the problem
on
Linux in Canada
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
About those viruses becoming more prevalent... Can someone balance that FUD with equivalent numbers from MacOS X?? It's a lot more popular than Linux, and both haven't been plagued with viruses(yet) in widely publicised numbers. The bit about multi-user was nice, but user-education about the benefits of proper privilege separation is very low, and needs to be addressed by those people who think changing OSes is a solution to the social problem of viruses. Of course, a lot of CIOs would rather use viruses to justify spending half a mil to change servers, than 10000$ on training... Even on equivalent returns... That's also a social factor.
1) I disagree that properly designed software is designed front-end, or UI-first. Such software, in my experience, ends up hard to extend, hard to use in unplanned contexts, and unflexible... That doesn't mean UI can't contribute to the design, even at the beginning... But you design by datastructures lately, and orient from there, in many modern programming environments(when you aren't flat-out using objects, data structures work quite well). If the UI can store/manipulate the data he needs, in the format he needs, he will usually be quite happy(and won't forget to make his software localizable, currency-converting, language-translating, etc...)
2) Wizards: Technical users' aversion to wizards is usually misunderstood and I'm not sure the article is an exception. just yet...
Technical users mind wizards because: 1) they let people who misunderstand how the system works keep using the system without updating their grokking of the problem or its solution 2) they require work, work that could be spent at improving the UI as a whole, not just for non-technical users(why would we like the developers(aka us) improving the software for everyone BUT us, when we usually have current grievances with the software is beyond me(and there is no such thing as perfect software, especially not in the eyes of a techie purist) 3) A "basic-level" ui with advanced buttons/sections usually is a better solution, with a good design to back it up, as the same UI can scale to growing understanding of the situation by the user, they can also, with a little work, cover several use cases. Wizards are usually static, linked to a single use-case and limited to a single way of looking at a problem. 4) That limited to a single way of looking at a problem can be irritating to some people. Those people tend to follow TIMTOWTODI and other "geek" thought processes, which don't follow the norm. It can appear condescending, limitative, or just plain annoying to someone that's too concentrated on his/her view of the problem to see the one from the wizard. That such people tend to be heavy/repetitive users of software, and not casual users compounds the problem.
As a footnote, Mac software UI design has gotten prettier in the last years... But in terms of consistency, the Mac User Interface Guidelines, as a global, almost-universally followed, enforced standard for UI has not yet been outdone... That the Mac can apply this to software that they can choose to open can only benefit everyone once they do. That such a thing hasn't been extended universally to all computing concepts explains why we have such articles popping up from time to time...
When you are a consultant to someone, or otherwise provide custom services, you acquire the intent of your customer... In some cases, it's possible Cisco didn't know that it would be used to discriminate or otherwise harm democracy(build us a filter, and tell us how to add our own banned words).
It's also possible that Cisco knew: "We want to have the capability to do this, or else we buy elsewhere".
Without the international penal tribunal of La Hague getting involved, who will ever know.
Despite what some would have you believed, the Internet has never been above local or international law. It seems putting an international communications network answerable only to international bodies only makes sense to the users... (The case where multiple trademarks in different countries can all be used in a trademark dispute to a single domain name being a case in point, although I believe ICANN would rather just not hear such a case...)
Psychology, you have a faster computer, that can do more tasks, and you can multitask, so you will run larger tasks that take more ram, and that swap WILL be used.
The other reason is that you have some recurring processes(scheduled tasks, crons, disk defrags) that run at times when the machine is supposed to be idle, but may just be busy. With larger swap, you avoid a crash, by risking more swapin/swapouts.
Not quite, but the smaller universities may not have a dedicated comp sci building, and it makes no sense for Bill Gates to fund a math building does it? We'd figure out how much money he "really" has...
ok, puny humor this morning I should know better than to attempt this before coffee
did you know that giving even 10^5 ipv6 addresses every second, we might not run out before the heat death of the universe? 2^128 is a f###ing large number...
You made your point, here's mine. If it's that important to your company, they should pay for it, period.
You shouldn't need to subsidize their uptime. They should pay your cellphone, they should pay you "extra" to have a cellphone that improves their uptime. Those things have business value, and should be recognized by even the most pointy-haired boss out there(hint: if not, he's just using a negotiating tactic, and playing dumb about it too)
Your PERSONAL cell phone you should leave at home... And only carry when off-duty... And yes, that might mean you need 2 cell phones, and that precious few(if any) people ever have both numbers without a gold-plated marble writ from God.
Some of us make a business of uptime, and I would highly resent your giving in on this without a fight... You should thank me for giving you back your life, when you're not on-duty, you can finally turn the cell phone off..
-- My cell phone is never off, but that's because thats the service I sell to my clents. Me, 7 days a week, 24 hous a day.
and urged a change of attitude: "Developers should look at publishers as people they hire to sell the game they made."
But the publisher usually owns the trademarks, and usually hires the developer, not the other way around... Usually because the developer isn't the one providing the overall funding for the project, the publisher, or more properly, the publishing group, does.
But what happens is the more one group funds this kind of project, the more they line their pockets with the profits, if any, while the others are kinda menials, necessary evils with little control over the project's lifecycle.
The only way I see for developer companies to get out of this is to deal directly with financing companies, and publish their own games. Partly because publishing companies won't hire themselves to developers(they'd get the short end of the contract, and they wouldn't like it), invidivuals involved in publishing might however. Of course, large companies like EA might take a gimlet eye to smaller companies throwing off their yoke, but that's just the point, it IS a yoke, meant to keep money in the pockets of people who already have it(capitalism at work) and away from people who know how to do a thing, but need money to get the materials/time to do them... It reminds me a bit of the situation with individual artists, most artists sign away their firstborn to the record label, usually on directives from on high inside the riaa-member companies, who are less and less involved in the creation process(or who are involved, to hinder it, creating "commercial, carbon-copy" acts instead of artists). And when napster came out(wasn't the riaa happy it could say napster helped pirates... if it would have gotten all those independant artists a tribune, what a disaster(from the riaa's perspective) that would have been. Notice how mp3.com who used to have some independant artists selling tracks got coopted?
But nvidia's drivers can be installed on j random debian kernel and debian-built kernel, well all that I've tried anyways(nvidia's module includes a dri interface that links to the kernel). Source is a preferred medium for many things which have to hook with kernels(which are source-built for many people). Will ATI help other distros incorporate their "gift" or will they just tout redhat's horn?
How about auto-creating "unknown" zones, where one is dropped should one die, or for that matter, when one is punished for whatever reason. It doesn't stop the game... But whoever is affected loses the opportunities of wherever they were... And might face some kind of risk/danger on landing? Or perhaps a sphinx with some questions to answer or else you die?
For giving Volvo the idea, great going guys, wreck another little pocket of openness in the world.
It's annoying and disquieting to realize how to corporations, until customers actually pay "more" for openness(or refuse to pay for "not-open") openness is considered a necessary evil.
Next time we compare open-source to something of the real world, let's not mention something else that is open... Let's mention something someone wouldn't buy BECAUSE it's closed, say a clock.
Would you buy a clock with a lid on it that prevents you from reading the time?
At least this way, clock manufacturers can't close something ELSE up to quiet open source proponents. </sarcasm>
When people speak of gas, as in "natural gas", (apparently except in the us) they normally mean Methane. Propane is usually spelled out... It may be a regional custom however.
You have propane LINES under your house? And it's cheaper than methane? Or did you just mean the tankable kind?
server-side It's my impression that crm114 is already supported by procmail and maildrop and pretty much any server-side filtering device that filters on a known added "spammy" header. Retraining server-side is a little bit less... er fun though.
Slashdot Mirror
The need for the new in this case is also probably linked to the facts that .NET" (not so laudable).
1) Ximian/Novell wants to increase Mono's marketshare(a laudable goal), quite probably by increasing it's mindshare in the gnome community(still laudable) through being "the most compatible desktop environment to Microsoft's
2) A new language might help allay some of the (hypothetical) problems(I don't develop for Gnome so I don't know what they would be) that a mix of language choice/design introduced earlier
3) A new language, with a seperate remote procedure call convention might drive them to change their corba-based current setup(Java's RMI and Mono's version of XMLRPC come to mind). This may or may not be related to hypothetical 2) Corba is generally considered useful, but heavy, but platform and language-agnostic. Moving to
a different language might change the equation in this case(not saying it's necessarily for the worse, but I'm trying to understand the logic behind this)
Yet Microsoft patent encumbered so many aspects of .NET very few people know what, if any, parts of the C#/.NET beast is not so encumbered, and it's certainly raised equivalent uncertainty to sun's ownership of the java platform
Idealistic of me isn't it?
As for consumers, consumers are ad-overloaded. No matter which argument is put out to get ads on this or that format, in this or that medium, they don't have more money to spend, so it's diminishing returns for advertisers, they need to take a sabbatical...
And by sharing the same half-page with an ad your work is somehow free from ad-influence? Ads are mixed in with content so the two will blend in in the consumer's mind... If not, you'd put the ads at the end of the magazine(some trade publications do put most of their ads there, I skip the ones blended in with the content, and most of the articles... knowing some of the publications don't share my opinion: "if you ain't saying more bad things than good things about something, it ain't a critical review" but that's not entirely germane: I wonder why I still get some of those publications...)
I think the main reason subscription models don't work is that the customer knows for certain only that he'll be paying, there are no guarantees he'll be entertained by what is provided... Or exactly how many articles/content will be on-target, useful, etc... Most subscriptions revolve around daily production of new material, but how many producers can provide the same quality each and every day, day after day, regularly? The more specialised the field, the less such people exist. The more specialised the field, the more valuable such content might be(rarity and usability).
You're right, good information isn't free, but consumer protection for information consumers lags way back behind product consumers... And that doesn't help content providers right now, they have to establish their bona fides before people will pay in advance(subscription), and the ad-base d model has a few problems, first of which is that use/benefit from content doesn't translate to the ad provider except in extreme cases.
Since the RIAA did buy the trademarks, copyrights, and signed up the artists with contracts under which the artists no longer directly collect those rights, it's the RIAA's member companies job(and as a consortium, they can gang up) to defend the rights they bought. Whether such rights should be buyable is irrelevant. Whether such rights being bought is against the public's interest is also irrelevant, since the public isn't censoring politicians strongly enough when politicians attack those interests.
On another note, that the artists no longer have any incentive to sign those rights away in future contracts(and they shouldn't IMHO) doesn't exonerate the record companies from having to defend those rights, and record execs could be sued for not respecting fiduciary duties to their shareholders for not defending rights they bought rigorously enough. That those companies hide behind the RIAA to do its dirty work shows just how the thing works(using AOL-TimeWarner as an example):
-AOLTW's copyrights are threatened, AOLTW gets the RIAA to sue, RIAA wins suit, demands 1 million from a college student, RIAA is the bad guy. AOLTW doesn't get boycotted for attacking a college student.
I agree with you that a direct-artist system would be more efficient, for the artists and the public, and we wouldn't NEED records anymore, we could just burn them ourselves. But that system is far in the future, with copyright terms being extended, etc... it keeps getting further and further away(that could just be part of the RIAA's plan: they've been obsolete for about 2-3 years already, but they managed to legislate themselves a grace period).
An artist that signed a record label could be sued for submitting directly to ITMS, by the way, breach of a contract's exclusive clause.
Paranoid people from outside of the U.S. might just say that the proportion of record labels from the US vs the proportion of artists from there means the current system protects US interests(it siphons money inside the USA, away from the artists) and that's why the RIAA has such clout, not only is it a huge industry, but it's a net importer of money for the USA.
--
The world needs more independant artists and less corporate ones
About those viruses becoming more prevalent...
Can someone balance that FUD with equivalent numbers from MacOS X?? It's a lot more popular than Linux, and both haven't been plagued with viruses(yet) in widely publicised numbers.
The bit about multi-user was nice, but user-education about the benefits of proper privilege separation is very low, and needs to be addressed by those people who think changing OSes is a solution to the social problem of viruses. Of course, a lot of CIOs would rather use viruses to justify spending half a mil to change servers, than 10000$ on training... Even on equivalent returns...
That's also a social factor.
two points:
1) I disagree that properly designed software is designed front-end, or UI-first. Such software, in my experience, ends up hard to extend, hard to use in unplanned contexts, and unflexible...
That doesn't mean UI can't contribute to the design, even at the beginning... But you design by datastructures lately, and orient from there, in many modern programming environments(when you aren't flat-out using objects, data structures work quite well). If the UI can store/manipulate the data he needs, in the format he needs, he will usually be quite happy(and won't forget to make his software localizable, currency-converting, language-translating, etc...)
2) Wizards:
Technical users' aversion to wizards is usually misunderstood and I'm not sure the article is an exception. just yet...
Technical users mind wizards because:
1) they let people who misunderstand how the system works keep using the system without updating their grokking of the problem or its solution
2) they require work, work that could be spent at improving the UI as a whole, not just for non-technical users(why would we like the developers(aka us) improving the software for everyone BUT us, when we usually have current grievances with the software is beyond me(and there is no such thing as perfect software, especially not in the eyes of a techie purist)
3) A "basic-level" ui with advanced buttons/sections usually is a better solution, with a good design to back it up, as the same UI can scale to growing understanding of the situation by the user, they can also, with a little work, cover several use cases. Wizards are usually static, linked to a single use-case and limited to a single way of looking at a problem.
4) That limited to a single way of looking at a problem can be irritating to some people. Those people tend to follow TIMTOWTODI and other "geek" thought processes, which don't follow the norm. It can appear condescending, limitative, or just plain annoying to someone that's too concentrated on his/her view of the problem to see the one from the wizard. That such people tend to be heavy/repetitive users of software, and not casual users compounds the problem.
As a footnote, Mac software UI design has gotten prettier in the last years... But in terms of consistency, the Mac User Interface Guidelines, as a global, almost-universally followed, enforced standard for UI has not yet been outdone... That the Mac can apply this to software that they can choose to open can only benefit everyone once they do.
That such a thing hasn't been extended universally to all computing concepts explains why we have such articles popping up from time to time...
2.4 does not have those limitations, and has been "production-quality" for some time now. Thanks for proving my point :)
I like the concept of BSD myself, and I've done a pilot of it, but for my use, Debian is still superior, it takes all kinds.
When you are a consultant to someone, or otherwise provide custom services, you acquire the intent of your customer...
In some cases, it's possible Cisco didn't know that it would be used to discriminate or otherwise harm democracy(build us a filter, and tell us how to add our own banned words).
It's also possible that Cisco knew: "We want to have the capability to do this, or else we buy elsewhere".
Without the international penal tribunal of La Hague getting involved, who will ever know.
Despite what some would have you believed, the Internet has never been above local or international law. It seems putting an international communications network answerable only to international bodies only makes sense to the users... (The case where multiple trademarks in different countries can all be used in a trademark dispute to a single domain name being a case in point, although I believe ICANN would rather just not hear such a case...)
the console long lifecycles actually attract game developers, less support headaches.
You pays you money and you make you choices...
be that as it may, the extra overhead of redundant writes might slow you down...
Swap is a necessary evil, optimizing it is in everyone's interest.
It "does" look like many of them memorized the features for Linux 1.3 and can't believe anything improved since, doesn't it?
Kinda like SCO assuming IBM had to buy all them 2.4 goodness...
Gotta remember they have vested interest in linux not being as good as it can be, makes them look good.
Psychology, you have a faster computer, that can do more tasks, and you can multitask, so you will run larger tasks that take more ram, and that swap WILL be used.
The other reason is that you have some recurring processes(scheduled tasks, crons, disk defrags) that run at times when the machine is supposed to be idle, but may just be busy. With larger swap, you avoid a crash, by risking more swapin/swapouts.
eh? *naive look*
make "some" money writing uncrappy software?
= University Building Monopoly !!!!
Not quite, but the smaller universities may not have a dedicated comp sci building, and it makes no sense for Bill Gates to fund a math building does it? We'd figure out how much money he "really" has...
ok, puny humor this morning I should know better than to attempt this before coffee
twenty extra bytes?
twenty extra bytes per packet you mean
that's a world of difference, unless you have header compression, like van jacobsen did for ipv4
did you know that giving even 10^5 ipv6 addresses every second, we might not run out before the heat death of the universe?
2^128 is a f###ing large number...
You made your point, here's mine.
If it's that important to your company, they should pay for it, period.
You shouldn't need to subsidize their uptime. They should pay your cellphone, they should pay you "extra" to have a cellphone that improves their uptime. Those things have business value, and should be recognized by even the most pointy-haired boss out there(hint: if not, he's just using a negotiating tactic, and playing dumb about it too)
Your PERSONAL cell phone you should leave at home... And only carry when off-duty... And yes, that might mean you need 2 cell phones, and that precious few(if any) people ever have both numbers without a gold-plated marble writ from God.
Some of us make a business of uptime, and I would highly resent your giving in on this without a fight... You should thank me for giving you back your life, when you're not on-duty, you can finally turn the cell phone off..
--
My cell phone is never off, but that's because thats the service I sell to my clents. Me, 7 days a week, 24 hous a day.
But the publisher usually owns the trademarks, and usually hires the developer, not the other way around... Usually because the developer isn't the one providing the overall funding for the project, the publisher, or more properly, the publishing group, does.
But what happens is the more one group funds this kind of project, the more they line their pockets with the profits, if any, while the others are kinda menials, necessary evils with little control over the project's lifecycle.
The only way I see for developer companies to get out of this is to deal directly with financing companies, and publish their own games. Partly because publishing companies won't hire themselves to developers(they'd get the short end of the contract, and they wouldn't like it), invidivuals involved in publishing might however. Of course, large companies like EA might take a gimlet eye to smaller companies throwing off their yoke, but that's just the point, it IS a yoke, meant to keep money in the pockets of people who already have it(capitalism at work) and away from people who know how to do a thing, but need money to get the materials/time to do them...
It reminds me a bit of the situation with individual artists, most artists sign away their firstborn to the record label, usually on directives from on high inside the riaa-member companies, who are less and less involved in the creation process(or who are involved, to hinder it, creating "commercial, carbon-copy" acts instead of artists). And when napster came out(wasn't the riaa happy it could say napster helped pirates... if it would have gotten all those independant artists a tribune, what a disaster(from the riaa's perspective) that would have been. Notice how mp3.com who used to have some independant artists selling tracks got coopted?
But nvidia's drivers can be installed on j random debian kernel and debian-built kernel, well all that I've tried anyways(nvidia's module includes a dri interface that links to the kernel). Source is a preferred medium for many things which have to hook with kernels(which are source-built for many people).
Will ATI help other distros incorporate their "gift" or will they just tout redhat's horn?
How about auto-creating "unknown" zones, where one is dropped should one die, or for that matter, when one is punished for whatever reason. It doesn't stop the game... But whoever is affected loses the opportunities of wherever they were... And might face some kind of risk/danger on landing? Or perhaps a sphinx with some questions to answer or else you die?
For giving Volvo the idea, great going guys, wreck another little pocket of openness in the world.
It's annoying and disquieting to realize how to corporations, until customers actually pay "more" for openness(or refuse to pay for "not-open") openness is considered a necessary evil.
Next time we compare open-source to something of the real world, let's not mention something else that is open... Let's mention something someone wouldn't buy BECAUSE it's closed, say a clock.
Would you buy a clock with a lid on it that prevents you from reading the time?
At least this way, clock manufacturers can't close something ELSE up to quiet open source proponents.
</sarcasm>
When people speak of gas, as in "natural gas", (apparently except in the us) they normally mean Methane. Propane is usually spelled out... It may be a regional custom however.
You have propane LINES under your house? And it's cheaper than methane? Or did you just mean the tankable kind?
While I doubt it's the case of the person in the article, it does make a joe-job(spammer pretending to be you) a lot more threatening...
server-side It's my impression that crm114 is already supported by procmail and maildrop and pretty much any server-side filtering device that filters on a known added "spammy" header.
Retraining server-side is a little bit less... er fun though.
until the next "trinoo-like" proxy allows spammers to spend email from a desktop near you...