Slashdot Mirror


User: asapien

asapien's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
31
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 31

  1. nice, another study on Study Claims Offshoring Doesn't Cost US Jobs · · Score: 1

    Forgetting the fact that I've had to get a new job nearly once a year since 2001 due to outsourcing, not necessarily to India, but to Canada and Vietnam.

  2. Re:Disagree with a point on The Failure of the $100 Laptop? · · Score: 1

    Well, these are intended for community, rather than personal use, so anyone stealing the village laptop would likely have a lot of social pressure on them.

  3. Re:Samba on Ballmer Says Linux "Infringes Our Intellectual Property" · · Score: 1

    hmm, maybe at this point KDE is "safer" because you don't have Mono embedded, as you have with Gnome. Its could be possible that this winds up being a turning point where some people turn against Gnome, because its development is sponsored by Novell, and perhaps they included clones of the windows .net libraries to create an "eater egg," now the gnome and gtk .net libraries shouldn't be a problem, but they also have clones of the windows .net libraries which the Novell people have embedded into Gnome.

  4. Re:Durrr... on Flash 9 Beta for Linux Available · · Score: 1

    Java is really better, but everyone uses flash, so it comes to be expected. However the current state of java actually makes it more suitable for applets than when it first came out.

  5. now this is a real competitor on Another Linux PDA to Challenge the Nokia 770 · · Score: 1

    This looks like its got a decent sized, usable keyboard, plus it has both wifi and cell support, and qtopia, so a lot of the software made for the zaurus should run on this.

  6. Re:770 challenger? I think not. on Sony Mylo Challenges Nokia 770 · · Score: 1

    Ironically it'd be like getting a Rolls Royce for just $20 more :-)

  7. with nokia you have sdk on Sony Mylo Challenges Nokia 770 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, if you want to hack around the nokia has an sdk so you can write your own software. I'm betting the sony is a closed system, where you can web browse but I bet you can't run your own software on it. The same problem the ps3 will have, now that MS is releasing an sdk for making games on both xboxlive and pc, with a system for sharing. But the nokia is even better, its all for free, so you have not just a gadget, but a software platform.

  8. Re:Other weapons on Fantasy Trumps Sci-Fi For MMOs · · Score: 1

    Something like John Carter on Mars might work, maybe a space fantasy hybrid. That's why Star Wars did well, it was more Space Opera than SciFi. 2001 was a deep film, but would make a boring game.

  9. podcasting best bet on Low Cost Webcast Optimizations? · · Score: 1

    Well, unless it needs to absolutely be live, podcasting is a good alternative to streaming since it doesn't present the same problems and the audio quality is better. But if it needs to be live, maybe hook up with live365's service or something similar so you have co-hosted streams.

  10. Soylent Green -- Its coders on Where Do All of the Old Programmers Go? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, you wonder what's in that yummy pudding that mangament gets to eat once a year around the holidays. Where I work, when you turn 40 your get shoved into a giant meat grinder and then are served to the upper eschelon. Maybe like Soylent Green meets Logan's Run. Seriously there is vicious agism in coding, you don't find it in other professions such as law. Funny how people who can actually make things are so reviled in our culture.

  11. Re:Who owns it? on Another Belated Microsoft Memo · · Score: 1

    Hey, that's the question nobody's asking about AJAX, is it patented by MS. Given that they developed the xml request object for the web version of outlook, they've certainly been doing "AJAX" before the term was coined, so its possible they have a patent, or would want to patent it. Ultimately AJAX is no good for a lot of things people use Windows for, like authoring 3D animation, editing video, or doing audio sequencing with protools. You still have to know plain old c++ and there's nothing to be gained from running those types of apps over a network. AJAX is what it is, its not a good solution for building most informational websites, its a tool for web applications. But there's still a whole class of uses for Windows that I don't see going anywhere, you need that "ol' c++ magic" to create really robust multimedia apps. True, you can watch video and listen to music over the web, but it would be a real pain to edit video or audio over the web. Though I'm building a program called phpsound to use AJAX to develop csound csd files, but there again you have to run csound on a local machine to render the audio.

  12. free as in beer vs free as in speech on Creating .NET C# Applications for Linux · · Score: 1

    For some people its about the licensing, java is owned by sun, so you can make free software, but its still dependent upon non-free libraries, while mono is open source, because MS put out the specs as an ECMA standard, while Sun wants to totally own java. So it depends, if you want to write open source software, you're only choice would be mono, because everything is free/open. Sun doesn't force you to sell your software, you can give it away, but the underlying platform is closed.

  13. Re:Sell a "dev kit" version of OS X for x86 on More Mac OS X on Plain Old x86 Boxes · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I wish they did that bundling of dev tools back in the mid 90s, I remember you had to get a top of the line machine just to have enough disk space to run code warrior, which is why I got into java when they came out with the macos jdk 1.0, didn't know about python to know I could use it to program.

  14. innerHTML, the big enemy on Migrating IE Web Apps to Mozilla · · Score: 2, Informative

    Even though mozilla support innerHTML, its still the wrong thing to use. This is a valuable article because there are a lot of differences that can make things complicated, differences with DOM handling and limitations with IE. Sometimes it might be necessary to create a switch that will serve innerHTML to IE when it refuses to do DOMII correctly, esepcially creating and inserting nodes. But you still want to have it detect IE for that because Safari, Opera and Mozilla handle DOMII in a similar fashion, but I always have problems with IE.

  15. use web standards, dang-it on Web Design Hampers Mobile Internet? · · Score: 3, Informative
    The answer is to use web standards, you can have a seperate style sheet for handhelds. The real problem is that too many sites still use tables to lay out their content, so when you look at it in a handheld, you can't strip the text easily from all the other crud that takes up all the screen real-estate. But with style sheets, the content can be easily repurposed, and I've even simply turned off the style sheet for hand-helds, so that they just get the meat of the site in the text. Handhelds work great for reading text, but most sites are designed for visual impact. Also doing sites "all in flash" can be a problem. The typical gui's people build for navigation will just show up too small on a hand-held, but if you use style sheets instead of tables to create naviagtion, you can use a simple list of links
    1. that will be usable on a handheld when its styled for it. When most sites are using web standards, they will be more usable for handhelds. I just believe strongly that table based layout is the biggest culprit.
  16. Re:Meet The Forkers on Microsoft Remains Firm On Ending VB6 Support · · Score: 1

    Isn't Perl5 mostly backwards compatible? The problem here is that VB had to be totally re-written to get it to work with the .net CLR. Has anyone noticed that Java supports win98, but C#/.net won't? Interesting, anyways if you have to support old machines, re-write in Python, you can use SWIG to create a set of windows dll/exe that will work on machines all the way back to win98, while .Net only works on win2k or XP.

  17. neither - use python instead on Developing for Healthcare - .NET vs J2EE? · · Score: 1

    I would actually reccomend python instead, you can use all the win32 libraries, and when iron python gets mature you could recompile into .net, but the advantage with python is that you can use dist-utils to spit out a regular win32 binary, so your app can run on lowly windows2000 or even win98 machines, python supports a much larger subset of the older, cruddy machines they may be running at hospitals, but it would scale out for larger systems. You can use tkinter to create GUI apps that will run on windows, linux, osx, even mac os 9.

  18. Re:Isn't it obvious - teach IT classes on What Do People in the IT Field Do for Side Jobs? · · Score: 1

    Its not hard to teach one or two IT seminars a month, I teach a class on php/mysql in LA at rgb computing, it keeps me on my toes because students constantly come with new questions.

  19. Re:In which world? on LAMP Grid Application Server, No More J2EE · · Score: 1

    Is yahoo slow? Is google slow? Some of the largest sites on the web are built on LAMP, amazone, yahoo, google. How many major pure-play sites are based on J2EE? Certainly tons of business software gets written in java, but with LAMP you can also interface legacy systems via C/C++. I'm suprised how many business apps get built with vbscript, which has to be about one of the lamest languages in regular use, its less capable in many ways compared to LAMP or J2EE, but because you have a lot of companies with old NT servers they won't replace a lot of business apps wind being written in vbscript.

  20. Re:Bad planning. on Can People Really Program 80+ Hours a Week? · · Score: 1

    This is totally insane, they just don't understand that more hours != better code. I think one reason so much proprietary software sucks so hard (compared to open source), is that its often a product of such insanely unreasonable working situations. Perhaps linux is better than windows because it IS made in the spare time by people working for the joy of it, while buggy crap code like windows is the product of horrific work conditions.

  21. Re:don't do it! on Switching to Contracting? · · Score: 1

    Sometimes you have no choice, but contracting is tough. You turn your hours in and then have to wait up to a month before you get the check, and I've had places forget to turn in my hours, so once I wound up waiting almost three months while I was still working, then finally had to stop working because I went totally broke and didn't have any more gas $$. Then they finally paid me, they were in violation of my contract.

    Fortunately I didn't stop looking for work, but still wound up now not doing coding work, because its too hard to get. I'm doing more design oriented work, trying to get my atrophied right brain working again. Coding work is hard to get, which is why I'm starting to work on patches to contribute to gnu software, I'd rather code as a volunteer and have a more stable job (even with the $2000/month paycut).

    What's also difficult is having to pay your own taxes, because by making you wait a month after you turn in your hours, your cash flow will really suck, especially if you wind up having to work for half the $$ you used to. Then you wind up owing taxes, so its a situation that's not easy to manage, and when the New Economy forces you into it, its not easy. If you're doing it as a choice, then you can get prepared to do it right, but its a real b@@tch when the market forces you into being a contractor, after your unemployment has run out.

  22. use java on Is The Lone Coder Dead? · · Score: 1

    If you do something based on the standard java libraries, well then hasn't Sun written the technology that your system is based on? I would think that java is very attractive to coders who have limited resources and want to write commercial software. Sun has already settled in a lot of patent lawsuits, so there's a layer of protection in using the java libraries, they even had to pay out on the Kodak lawsuit over the patents Kodak bought from Wang, and if you do something really ground-breaking with java, Sun certainly has an interest in seeing you suceed with java as a commercial programmer. Although I'm more fond of python as a language, I could see where jython and java are a nice combo for creating commercial, closed source software. Java was designed for commercial use, and with its extensive and now very mature and given that its not just a language, but an extensive library, it makes it a lot easier to do commercial software with limited resources.

  23. Re:The real reason it's not a threat on Microsoft Says Firefox Not a Threat to IE · · Score: 1

    Ummmm, well, it depends. If you're using windows xp with service pack II, then sure, IE is not as unsafe as it is for the rest of the world. But even with SP II, problems still come up, that's not to say firefox is perfect, but it does actually have the idea of a code sandbox, where the code in the browser can't say, write files to the disk drive. By integrating IE with the OS, MS is violating the sandbox, leading to situations where you get autoinstalled spyware that you didn't ask for.

  24. Re:Does that mean . . . on Novell Pulls Out Their Ace Against SCO · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, they make $$ from Suse and have pledged to use their patents only to protect linux from BS lawsuits such as SCO: http://www.novell.com/linux/truth/better_choice.ht ml CLAIM: Customers who deploy Linux are at risk for patent violation and copyright issues. FACTS: Novell has no intention of asserting its patent portfolio against the Linux kernel or other open source programs included in Novell offerings. Novell will use its patent portfolio to protect open source products against potential third-party patent challenges, meaning that Novell is prepared to asserts its patents against such third parties. Novell is continuing to actively grow its patent portfolio, which currently corresponds to Novell's pioneering products in areas such as networking, directories, resource management, and identity management. For more information on Novell and patents, see http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent/. Novell believes that customers and the marketplace are best served when technology investment decisions are driven by vendor innovation and competition. As with all purchasing considerations, customers should keep software patents in perspective. In reality, open source software poses no greater risk of patent infringement than does closed source software. And, while some software vendors may attempt to counter the competitive threat to Linux by making arguments about patent risks, they would assert patents against customers at their own peril. They would also do so against competitors (such as Novell) at the certainty of provoking a response. We urge customers to remind vendors that all are best served by using innovation and competition to drive purchasing decisions. Intellectual property rights systems vary throughout the world, and where patent protection is available for software, Novell has and will continue to use patents as a legitimate means of protecting software offerings. We believe that the current system in the European Union has served the industry, the individual member states and Novell well, and that it generally promotes innovation and competition in the industry. Accordingly, Novell does not see the need for the proposed changes to the current system. In the event the European Union were to allow broader patentability of software, Novell would nonetheless be able to freely market its software offerings, whether closed or open source, in Europe and other jurisdictions that presently favor software patents. To highlight how difficult patent protection can be, the United States Patent and Trademark Office recently rejected all of the claims of Microsoft's patent on the FAT file system, which Microsoft describes as "the ubiquitous format used for interchange of media between computers, and, since the advent of inexpensive, removable flash memory, also between digital devices." Novell has previously offered customers protection against similar threats to open source software by using its unique contractual and intellectual property rights from its position in the historical ownership chain of UNIX and UnixWare. Novell offers an indemnification program for copyright infringement claims made by third parties against registered Novell customers who obtain SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8 (or later) and who after January 12, 2004, obtain upgrade protection and a qualifying technical support contract from Novell or a participating Novell or SUSE LINUX channel partner. Novell holds unique contractual and intellectual property rights because of its position in the historical ownership chain of UNIX and UnixWare. These rights include: The rights to license UNIX technology pursuant to a Technology License Agreement between SCO and Novell, including the right to authorize Novell customers to use that UNIX technology in their internal business operations The rights to take action on behalf of SCO under legacy UNIX SVRX licenses pursuant to the Asset Purchase Agreement between SCO and Novell As Novell previously confirmed, copyright registrations on UNIX SVRX releases, consistent with its position that it retained ownership of these copyrights.

  25. Re:being a technie myself... on Techies Migrate in Search of Work · · Score: 1

    Good luck, its not easy to move to canada.