Yeah, no kidding; I laughed at that too. CD-quality sound in a lossy format. (Granted, in the context of MP3 players, this seems like a minor quibble.)
> what is it about fm radio that doesn't appeal to you? > To me it's a free jokebox, it has no downside
It has no downside, but it also has no upside. It's a free jukebox I would never listen to, because it would never play anything I want to hear. I know what kinds of things are on FM radio, because sometimes I have to ride in cars with people who turn it on. I do wish cars didn't have FM radio receivers in them, because then people couldn't turn them on, and I would be significantly less annoyed when I have to ride in someone else's car. This is a non-issue with the MP3 players, because nobody's going to turn the radio feature on and make me listen to it -- but having one also is no benefit to me, because I'd never turn it on, at least, not on purpose.
> their machines the prices have been on par with Intel machines. It's true, > it's just the perception of Apples as more expensive that persists. I have > a maxed out 12" PowerBook that cost $2k brand new. This is about what I'd > expect to pay for a nice Intel laptop with similar specs and is probably > quite a bit cheaper than Sony's offering at this level. Apple doesn't offer > a $500 WalMart PC, it's true...oh wait, scratch that (and don't gripe: you > already *have* a mouse, monitor and keyboard).
The low end of el-cheapo PCs was $500 in 2001, but today it is $200. This, however, is not Apple's shortcoming -- those $200 PCs are only $200 for a very good reason: they're junk. The extreme low-end isn't a large market anyway; the overwhelming majority of new PCs sold cost at least $500, not counting the cost of a monitor (or printer or cetera). The keyboard and mouse are usually included, but they're only $10 between them, so that's not a big issue. Apple's reason for leaving the mouse and keyboard off the Mini has nothing at all to do with cutting costs. (My analysis is, they don't want to ship a system that comes with a two-button mouse out of the box, but they figure a significant portion of the demographic they're trying to reach with the Mini will not want a one-button mouse. If they ship a one-button mouse and say, "but you can replace it", these people will feel like they're wasting money paying for something inferior they don't want, but if they say, "you can use your existing mouse and keyboard", they feel like they're saving.)
The problem with comparing specs and prices between Apple products and PCs is that the people who say "see, the Apple is competitive" always start with an Apple product (your Powerbook, say, or an iMac, or whatever), then find a comparably-specced PC, and then compare prices.
If you go at it the other way, you run into a certain problem: expandability. I can go out and buy a PC for $800 (sans monitor; I have one of those already, which I quite like, thanks), and buy a midrange PC. It will have, among other things, a couple of expansion slots and a couple of empty drive bays (actually, a couple empty drive bays of each of the two major sizes). To get those things in an Apple product, I have to spend the thick end of three grand (again, sans monitor). Now, the PowerMac tower that I would get for the three grand is a very nice, high-end system, *VASTLY* better than the $800 PC I'm talking about; they're not really comparable. A PC that *is* comparable to it (here we're going back to the Apple advocate's way of doing things: pick an Apple product, and find a comparable PC) will cost most of three grand, sans monitor. Nevertheless, three grand is rather at the high end, and some of us don't need a system that good, and some of our budgets steer us toward the midrange instead, the sub-thousand range. If I buy an Apple product in that sub-thousand range, there are certain things I can't have, notably, expansion slots and drive bays. The stock Apple-advocate answer here is that expansion slots and drive bays are hopelessly antequated and two USB ports are worth 256 of them, but some of us disagree rather sharply with that view. USB is nice, but the $800 PC also has USB ports (probably four on the front and four on the back these days), and yet they are not an adequate substitute for expansion slots and drive bays -- at least, not for the tinkerer.
There is a certain irony, too, in this situation, because back in the day, the Apple//c was a tinkerer's dream; people used its expansion slots in combination with soldering irons and speaker wire and who knows what else to computer-control such things as household lighting. (Computer-controlled household lighting turned out not to the the killer app some people thought it would be, but the point is that the//c was tinkerer-friendly.)
> The legacy code I have to work on must be submitted. No body knows how it > works and there is no documentation.
Yeah, but is it _short_ enough to fit within the IOCCC's draconian size limits?
That's why the Obfuscated Perl Competition is better: it has size limits too, but a skilled Perl golfer can squeeze virtually anything into them. Golf is much harder in C.
> As someone else pointed out, this could be used to DDOS someone by using a > zombie net sending spam purporting to come from them. They'd then get > innundated with challenge/reponse emails. Not nice.
How is that different from the current system, wherein I get inundated with bounced messages I never sent, because the spammers have my address in their database and use it in the From: field almost as often as they use it in the To: field, and never ever purge undeliverable addresses from their database.
This technique needs to be combined with short-delay greylisting, i.e., a tempfail should be sent the first time, and then when the message is _resent_, from the same IP address and with the same From: field, _then_ the challenge should be sent, to port 25 on the sending mail server, with the From: address in the envelope under RCPT TO. A key thing here is that you keep the sending server waiting (using teargrube-like delays) while you try to send the challenge, and if you can't send the challenge (e.g., if port 25 isn't open), then you figure the sending system is not a real mail server, and you send a 400-level error then and there -- none of this nonsense about bouncing it to the forged From: address; let the sending mail server send its OWN undeliverable notification back to the user on the off chance it's for real. In the text part of the 400-level error you say something like "Sending server does not accept challenge on port 25 and is not associated with sender address domain.", just in case you're blocking a misconfigured but basically legitimate server and the user is (rare though this may be) on the ball enough to send the actual error message text to the admin.
All of that won't stop spam, but it will increase the cost of sending it, because the sending server either needs a new domain pointed to it every time you blacklist the old one, or else it has to receive incoming mail, detect the challenge messages, and respond accordingly. (Okay, so there may be another way or two around it; the point is, the sender has to jump through more hoops.)
> Like it or not (for all you athiests out there) the Bible is a classic.
Yet, it is a mistake to treat the Bible the same as one of the classics. That would upset nearly everyone; certainly it would upset certain atheists, but even more it would also upset a great many other people, not least of all the Bible-believing Christians. The Bible is really in a class of its own.
> Surprisingly enough, they have not scanned the Holy Bible yet. You think with > it being the #1 best selling book of al time they would have, but I guess not.
Which translation would they scan? The one authorized by King James? Which revision of it? The 1881 Oxford? Or the one done in the early twentieth century? Surely not the 1611? Maybe the NKJV? Or perhaps another translation... The NASB? The NIV? Of course, all the recent ones are under copyright...
I'd like to see them do the Bible too, but I can understand why they haven't. Meanwhile, it is available in other places, e.g., biblegateway.com
> Well, if it's typing then they ought to call it typing.
They quit calling it typing during the bronze age, when mankind abandoned stone knives, burlap clothing, and typewriters.
> The "keyboarding" thing as I recall did not include any mention of wpm.
wpm is less critical than it used to be. It's still useful to have an intuitive feel for where all the keys are and be able to input data without looking at the keys, but it's no longer important to do it really quickly, because the last job position keying in data from hard copy transcripts was downsized about the time the dot-com bubble burst. These days, almost all keyboarding that is done involves (ostensibly) original content coming out of the mind of the person doing the keyboarding, so 20 wpm is more than adequate for most people, because they can't compose decent content much faster than that anyway. (Consequently, keyboarding tends to amount to only one or at most two semesters these days, instead of two years. Once you get to the point where you never have to look down at the keys, you're pretty much all set.)
> I worked for ZSoft writing drivers for PC Paintbrush when VGA came out, > so going back to the day there.
ZSoft -- aren't they the outfit that came up with the PCX format? But you're talking to the wrong guy calling VGA "back to the day"; I used a CGA monitor for my first several years of computing. (In fairness, I think VGA did exist at the time, or at least EGA, but I didn't have it.)
> Remember that corporations are a much bigger market than home users.
Where did you here that? It's preposterous. It's patently rediculous. Upwards of 90% of the people who work at corporations also have the internet at home. Additionally, of the *other* 45-55% of the working-age adults, who work blue collar jobs if they work at all, more than half have internet access at home. Furthermore, of the 30% or so of the population who are still in school, more than 90% have internet access at home. Then there are the retired and the elderly, almost half of whom have internet access at home.
Home users are a *WAY* larger market than corporations. They're much smaller deployments, but there are a whole lot more of them all told.
> I am having problems with this calculation - I may probably not thinking > clearly this morning. If Firefox has 6 percent and IE is now below 90% > (granted they don't give an exact figure) then that means that other browsers > like Safari, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla and Conquer total for only 4% of usage?
Roughly. That is, if their numbers are accurate. It's very hard to determine browser market share with any precision at all. Also, bear in mind that there is a huge difference between market share in terms of all the browsing that is done, versus all the individual people doing the browsing, and potentially also a difference between all the individual browser installations versus the people doing the browsing. Attaching a single number to any given browser's market share is inherently a gross oversimplification.
> Since Apple has about a 5% market share,
Apple *says* they have a 5% market share. Like any vendor, they count rather optimistically.
> and Safari is the de-facto browser for Apple,
Only relatively recently. Quite a lot of Apple users still have the IE that shipped with their OS. Also, a lot of Apple users use other browsers, including Firefox, Camino, Netscape, Mozilla Seamonkey, iCab,...
> doesn't that mean that mean that all of the other bowsers I mentioned > basically are not used by anyone?
Some of them get lost in the underflow. Konqueror's number for instance is somewhere in the general vicinity of 0% I think: almost *nobody* uses it on any platform besides KDE, and the overwhelming majority of KDE users use a Gecko-based browser instead, and there aren't that many KDE users in the first place, as compared to other platforms. (KDE and Gnome together represent only something like 70% of the non-Mac *nix desktop, which overall probably has lower market share than Apple.)
> My website statistics do not show that. I would guess that IE is WAY > below 90%; maybe even approaching somewhere in the 70% area.
Different websites get different demographics based on the nature of their content. You get one set of figures if your website is specifically oriented towards open-source stuff, another set if it's generally technically oriented but without platform bias, another if it's Windows-oriented but technical, another set of figures if it's non-computer oriented but still technical... Even among non-technical sites, you get different numbers depending on other factors related to your content. Just for one example, the *age* of the readership you attract makes a *huge* difference, and measuring *average* age doesn't even tell the whole story, either; specific age *ranges* are more or less likely to install anything other than what comes preinstalled.
> With IE7 on it's way, is this going to slow down the adoption of Firefox by > the masses?
Not until it is actually available. As it stands now, the masses don't know or care that IE7 is on its way. However, the release of XP SP2 on WindowsUpdate may have slowed Firefox adoption. It's impossible to measure how much, though.
> They only reason they had a browser was to head off Netscape becoming a > platform unto itself. Once Netscape was thoroughly squashed, no more reason > to develop.
A light bulb just went on in my head. This is why Firefox is now on Microsoft's radar: it's not about web browser market share. I had been wondering why Microsoft cares what web browser you use -- that has no impact on any product they charge money for. But now I get it: it's not about what browser you use to read CNN and browse eBay. It's about XUL. It's about Gecko as a *platform* (potentially), and *that* is why MS has reversed itself and decided to deliver an IE7 after all.
Not that I really think Gecko as a platform could ever obsolete actual OSes or make them irrelevant. But Microsoft doesn't want to take any chances. Releasing IE7 is a pre-emptive move against XUL in the same sense that.Net is a move against Java. (Personally, I hope Parrot matures soon enough to eat both their lunches, but that's another topic for another thread.)
> A much better position would be for there to be lots of browsers with > around 15% market share.
I'd settle for two with around 30% each, and a bunch of lesser ones with various smaller percentages. But I'd prefer that no single browser have more than 50% at most. Incidentally, in the entire history of the web (well, since Mosaic came out anyway), there have only been a *few* months when there *wasn't* a single browser with a majority market share. There was a short time when the upcoming Navigator and the previously-leading Mosaic both had between 40 and 50%, but that didn't last but for a couple of months; there was the period when IE was just gaining market share and both it and Communicator were just shy of 50%, but again, that didn't last but for at *most* half a year, and then IE climbed past 50%, where it has been since then. I would dearly love to see a couple of major ISPs (say, Earthlink and RoadRunner) start bundling minority browsers in their connection kits. Extra bonus points if they bundle different ones.
> Actually by including tabbed browsing they are taking a leaf from Opera's > book, same as Mozilla did. Credit where its due.
Except that Opera got tabbed browsing wrong -- badly. When I experimented with Opera's tabbed browsing, I hated it, and immediately wanted to turn it off. But when the Seamonkey nightlies just before 0.9.5 came out with it, something about the way it was implemented or presented was better, and immediately caught my attention and quickly became indispensible.
I'll give Opera credit for having the idea, but they didn't get it quite right, somehow. When Hyatt stood on Opera's shoulders, as it were, then the concept of tabbed browsing was developed to the point where it became useful.
Disclaimer: I do not now remember the precise details of how Opera's tabbed browsing worked when they introduced it, and they've improved it since.
> I think the same is true here in the US from what I read. On the other hand, > I went through school and college before PC's were invented and I really > don't have any idea what is supposed to be taught on PC's. I remember a > niece saying something about "keyboarding", whatever that is.
It would be good to teach a little programming, but none of the teachers know any (especially in elementary school, when it would be most beneficial to teach it), so that makes that rather hard. They teach 'em how to use PowerPoint; the main reason, as near as I can figure, is because that's something all the teachers can figure out. So could the kids, without being taught it, but the schools feel like they have to include some computer in the cirruculum, for political reasons, and teaching PowerPoint makes the parents happy. Most of the rest of the computer-oriented cirruculum is like that, too -- stuff the kids don't actually need a class for, because they could figure it out easily on their own, but it gives adults warm, fuzzy feelings because it seems vaguely like a useful skill, if you don't think about it too hard.
They do also use computers to help teach other subjects. Most notably, computers are integrated into the reading cirruculum, through special software that administers little quizzes over the books they've just read, or something along those lines; I think the details vary from one school district to another -- there are apparently several competing "solutions" for this, peddled by various vendors, but most or all elementary schools use one or another of them. I do not know how effective this is or is not versus other methods of teaching reading, but all the schools are doing it.
Keyboarding is what they used to call typing, and that *is* something the schools ought to be teaching, because it doesn't come naturally without instruction like the other computer stuff they teach does.
> Personally I think it says alot about how schools here in Sweden are low > priority. Much more important to let the politicians buy luxury apartments.
I doubt that's the reason. The schools in the US give their students ancient computers to use too, and it is my considered opinion that the schools could easily afford better: the money they spend on computers is NOTHING compared to their overall budget. The elementary schools spend more money on that foul-smelling absorbant powder they always sprinkle vomit than they spend on computers. The high schools spend more money subsidizing the golf team's green fees than they spend on computer equipment. When I was in high school (graduated in '93), the _newest_ computer in the building was a single Mac 2SE. The next newest ones were a dozen Mac Plusses that the yearbook class used, and which were also used for the computer-oriented classes (e.g., for the Pascal class). The rest were Apple ][ series (//e mostly IIRC). That's at the high school, and the elementary schools get leftover castoff equipment from the high school when the high school no longer has any use for it because it's too old (though they also do get some new ones -- occasionally).
Is it because we don't care about education? No. (That's the reason teachers aren't allowed to flunk the students if they don't do their work.) The reason the schools don't spend more money on computers is because the schools don't fundamentally care about computers. (Whether they *should* care more about them is an open question; it seems to me that the kids easily know more about computers, on average, than their parents, so I think the education system is failing them more in other areas; they seem to learn computers okay. The older computers may, in fact, be just as good for didactic purposes as new ones; if you learn to use DOS and Windows 3, you'll be able to figure out Longhorn when you get your hands on it in 2040 (or whenever the heck it's coming out; I've lost track).)
At work, we've got three basic kinds of staff workstations: there are the VT510 dumb terminals connected to the minicomputer that runs OpenVMS; there are the Windows systems with DOS (either PC DOS 7 or MS DOS 6) running inside of VirtualPC, with special DOS software (that won't run under WinXP at all and not very well under Win98 either, hence VirtualPC and DOS) that connects to the VMS system and does stuff; the third kind of staff workstations are the non-mission-critical ones that don't do anything but web and email; everything important is on VMS and DOS. And no, we couldn't get by with just VMS, because there are certain highly-important functions that cannot be done on the dumb terminals; we absolutely have to have the DOS systems.
Yeah. On a related note, the kernel issue that bothers me most (and well neigh the only time I even think about my kernel) is what happens when one process is flogging a disk hard, so that the system is IO-bound: all the other processes slow down too, even if their disk usage requirements are quite minimal. It ought to be possible (perhaps at the expense of slowing the IO-bound process a little) to allow every *other* process on the system to function normally in such a scenerio. As it is, if I try to run du -h over my whole filesystem, I can't effectively do much else until it completes. It would be okay with me if du took half again as long, if it meant the rest of the system could stay responsive. (I'm using kernel 2.4.22 currently, and yes, I have heard that 2.6 is starting toward addressing this issue a little better. I'll upgrade eventually, but I'm waiting for the next release of my distro.)
It's a source-code management system, like RCS or CVS or Subversion or Arch. The only thing it has to do with Linux is that Linus happens to use it to manage the kernel source tree, but you do not need Bitkeeper to use the Linux kernel; you can just download a tarball from kernel.org or whatever if you prefer to go that route. The reason this is news on slashdot, I guess, is because some people want to get the absolute latest kernel straight from Linus' repository, before it makes it to tarball stage. For most of us, that would be insane (if there's one piece of software on your system that you don't want to have break, the kernel is it), but if you were actively working on the kernel, I suppose it might be an interesting option.
Part of the problem is that the website doesn't make it clear exactly what "stable" means to the Debian people. It just says, "the latest stable release is 3.0" -- when most projects say something like that, they mean that's the latest release that's stable enough for anyone other than one of the project's own developers to seriously consider using. It would also help if the Debian front page said *anything* about the testing and unstable releases; at first glance, it appears that the latest stable release is also the latest release when, in fact, installing it is a trip back in time to the tune of the better part of a decade. What the front page *should* say is something along the lines of this: Current releases: Long-term production/stable: 3.0 "woody" Medium-term current/recent: 4.0 "potato" Bleeding Edge latest/newest: 5.0 "sid" (I may have those numbers and nicknames off; I'm not really a Debian guy.) As it stands, I suspect too many people do what I do: look at the front page, figure 3.0 is the latest release (after all, it says so), go to cheapbytes or wherever, nab 3.0, install it, and then try to pick our jaw up off the floor when it asks us if we want to use a 2.0 kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, no kidding; I laughed at that too. CD-quality sound in a lossy format.
(Granted, in the context of MP3 players, this seems like a minor quibble.)
> what is it about fm radio that doesn't appeal to you?
> To me it's a free jokebox, it has no downside
It has no downside, but it also has no upside. It's a free jukebox I would
never listen to, because it would never play anything I want to hear. I know
what kinds of things are on FM radio, because sometimes I have to ride in cars
with people who turn it on. I do wish cars didn't have FM radio receivers in
them, because then people couldn't turn them on, and I would be significantly
less annoyed when I have to ride in someone else's car. This is a non-issue
with the MP3 players, because nobody's going to turn the radio feature on and
make me listen to it -- but having one also is no benefit to me, because I'd
never turn it on, at least, not on purpose.
> their machines the prices have been on par with Intel machines. It's true,
//c was a tinkerer's dream; people used its expansion slots in //c was tinkerer-friendly.)
> it's just the perception of Apples as more expensive that persists. I have
> a maxed out 12" PowerBook that cost $2k brand new. This is about what I'd
> expect to pay for a nice Intel laptop with similar specs and is probably
> quite a bit cheaper than Sony's offering at this level. Apple doesn't offer
> a $500 WalMart PC, it's true...oh wait, scratch that (and don't gripe: you
> already *have* a mouse, monitor and keyboard).
The low end of el-cheapo PCs was $500 in 2001, but today it is $200. This,
however, is not Apple's shortcoming -- those $200 PCs are only $200 for a very
good reason: they're junk. The extreme low-end isn't a large market anyway;
the overwhelming majority of new PCs sold cost at least $500, not counting the
cost of a monitor (or printer or cetera). The keyboard and mouse are usually
included, but they're only $10 between them, so that's not a big issue.
Apple's reason for leaving the mouse and keyboard off the Mini has nothing
at all to do with cutting costs. (My analysis is, they don't want to ship
a system that comes with a two-button mouse out of the box, but they figure
a significant portion of the demographic they're trying to reach with the
Mini will not want a one-button mouse. If they ship a one-button mouse and
say, "but you can replace it", these people will feel like they're wasting
money paying for something inferior they don't want, but if they say, "you
can use your existing mouse and keyboard", they feel like they're saving.)
The problem with comparing specs and prices between Apple products and PCs
is that the people who say "see, the Apple is competitive" always start with
an Apple product (your Powerbook, say, or an iMac, or whatever), then find
a comparably-specced PC, and then compare prices.
If you go at it the other way, you run into a certain problem: expandability.
I can go out and buy a PC for $800 (sans monitor; I have one of those already,
which I quite like, thanks), and buy a midrange PC. It will have, among other
things, a couple of expansion slots and a couple of empty drive bays (actually,
a couple empty drive bays of each of the two major sizes). To get those
things in an Apple product, I have to spend the thick end of three grand
(again, sans monitor). Now, the PowerMac tower that I would get for the
three grand is a very nice, high-end system, *VASTLY* better than the $800
PC I'm talking about; they're not really comparable. A PC that *is*
comparable to it (here we're going back to the Apple advocate's way of
doing things: pick an Apple product, and find a comparable PC) will cost
most of three grand, sans monitor. Nevertheless, three grand is rather at
the high end, and some of us don't need a system that good, and some of
our budgets steer us toward the midrange instead, the sub-thousand range.
If I buy an Apple product in that sub-thousand range, there are certain
things I can't have, notably, expansion slots and drive bays. The stock
Apple-advocate answer here is that expansion slots and drive bays are
hopelessly antequated and two USB ports are worth 256 of them, but some
of us disagree rather sharply with that view. USB is nice, but the $800
PC also has USB ports (probably four on the front and four on the back
these days), and yet they are not an adequate substitute for expansion
slots and drive bays -- at least, not for the tinkerer.
There is a certain irony, too, in this situation, because back in the day,
the Apple
combination with soldering irons and speaker wire and who knows what else
to computer-control such things as household lighting. (Computer-controlled
household lighting turned out not to the the killer app some people thought
it would be, but the point is that the
This idea probably comes from the traditional (and quite correct) advise not
to mix aluminum and copper (e.g., in household electrical wiring).
Oh, that. That's been around for a while, but this is the first I've heard it called greytrapping.
> The legacy code I have to work on must be submitted. No body knows how it
> works and there is no documentation.
Yeah, but is it _short_ enough to fit within the IOCCC's draconian size limits?
That's why the Obfuscated Perl Competition is better: it has size limits too,
but a skilled Perl golfer can squeeze virtually anything into them. Golf is
much harder in C.
> .Net regular expressions can parse from right to left as well.
> Very useful sometimes
Yeah, especially for parsing Hebrew text. HTH.HAND.
Greylisting I'm familiar with, but what's greytrapping?
> As someone else pointed out, this could be used to DDOS someone by using a
> zombie net sending spam purporting to come from them. They'd then get
> innundated with challenge/reponse emails. Not nice.
How is that different from the current system, wherein I get inundated with
bounced messages I never sent, because the spammers have my address in their
database and use it in the From: field almost as often as they use it in the
To: field, and never ever purge undeliverable addresses from their database.
This technique needs to be combined with short-delay greylisting, i.e., a tempfail should be sent the first time, and then when the message is _resent_, from the same IP address and with the same From: field, _then_ the challenge should be sent, to port 25 on the sending mail server, with the From: address in the envelope under RCPT TO. A key thing here is that you keep the sending server waiting (using teargrube-like delays) while you try to send the challenge, and if you can't send the challenge (e.g., if port 25 isn't open), then you figure the sending system is not a real mail server, and you send a 400-level error then and there -- none of this nonsense about bouncing it to the forged From: address; let the sending mail server send its OWN undeliverable notification back to the user on the off chance it's for real. In the text part of the 400-level error you say something like "Sending server does not accept challenge on port 25 and is not associated with sender address domain.", just in case you're blocking a misconfigured but basically legitimate server and the user is (rare though this may be) on the ball enough to send the actual error message text to the admin.
All of that won't stop spam, but it will increase the cost of sending it, because the sending server either needs a new domain pointed to it every time you blacklist the old one, or else it has to receive incoming mail, detect the challenge messages, and respond accordingly. (Okay, so there may be another way or two around it; the point is, the sender has to jump through more hoops.)
> Like it or not (for all you athiests out there) the Bible is a classic.
Yet, it is a mistake to treat the Bible the same as one of the classics.
That would upset nearly everyone; certainly it would upset certain atheists,
but even more it would also upset a great many other people, not least of all
the Bible-believing Christians. The Bible is really in a class of its own.
> Surprisingly enough, they have not scanned the Holy Bible yet. You think with
> it being the #1 best selling book of al time they would have, but I guess not.
Which translation would they scan? The one authorized by King James? Which revision of it? The 1881 Oxford? Or the one done in the early twentieth century? Surely not the 1611? Maybe the NKJV? Or perhaps another translation... The NASB? The NIV? Of course, all the recent ones are under copyright...
I'd like to see them do the Bible too, but I can understand why they haven't. Meanwhile, it is available in other places, e.g., biblegateway.com
> Well, if it's typing then they ought to call it typing.
They quit calling it typing during the bronze age, when mankind abandoned
stone knives, burlap clothing, and typewriters.
> The "keyboarding" thing as I recall did not include any mention of wpm.
wpm is less critical than it used to be. It's still useful to have an
intuitive feel for where all the keys are and be able to input data without
looking at the keys, but it's no longer important to do it really quickly,
because the last job position keying in data from hard copy transcripts was
downsized about the time the dot-com bubble burst. These days, almost all
keyboarding that is done involves (ostensibly) original content coming out
of the mind of the person doing the keyboarding, so 20 wpm is more than
adequate for most people, because they can't compose decent content much
faster than that anyway. (Consequently, keyboarding tends to amount to
only one or at most two semesters these days, instead of two years. Once
you get to the point where you never have to look down at the keys, you're
pretty much all set.)
> I worked for ZSoft writing drivers for PC Paintbrush when VGA came out,
> so going back to the day there.
ZSoft -- aren't they the outfit that came up with the PCX format? But
you're talking to the wrong guy calling VGA "back to the day"; I used a
CGA monitor for my first several years of computing. (In fairness, I
think VGA did exist at the time, or at least EGA, but I didn't have it.)
> Remember that corporations are a much bigger market than home users.
Where did you here that? It's preposterous. It's patently rediculous. Upwards of 90% of the people who work at corporations also have the internet at home. Additionally, of the *other* 45-55% of the working-age adults, who work blue collar jobs if they work at all, more than half have internet access at home. Furthermore, of the 30% or so of the population who are still in school, more than 90% have internet access at home. Then there are the retired and the elderly, almost half of whom have internet access at home.
Home users are a *WAY* larger market than corporations. They're much smaller deployments, but there are a whole lot more of them all told.
> I am having problems with this calculation - I may probably not thinking
...
> clearly this morning. If Firefox has 6 percent and IE is now below 90%
> (granted they don't give an exact figure) then that means that other browsers
> like Safari, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla and Conquer total for only 4% of usage?
Roughly. That is, if their numbers are accurate. It's very hard to determine browser market share with any precision at all. Also, bear in mind that there is a huge difference between market share in terms of all the browsing that is done, versus all the individual people doing the browsing, and potentially also a difference between all the individual browser installations versus the people doing the browsing. Attaching a single number to any given browser's market share is inherently a gross oversimplification.
> Since Apple has about a 5% market share,
Apple *says* they have a 5% market share. Like any vendor, they count rather optimistically.
> and Safari is the de-facto browser for Apple,
Only relatively recently. Quite a lot of Apple users still have the IE that shipped with their OS. Also, a lot of Apple users use other browsers, including Firefox, Camino, Netscape, Mozilla Seamonkey, iCab,
> doesn't that mean that mean that all of the other bowsers I mentioned
> basically are not used by anyone?
Some of them get lost in the underflow. Konqueror's number for instance is somewhere in the general vicinity of 0% I think: almost *nobody* uses it on any platform besides KDE, and the overwhelming majority of KDE users use a Gecko-based browser instead, and there aren't that many KDE users in the first place, as compared to other platforms. (KDE and Gnome together represent only something like 70% of the non-Mac *nix desktop, which overall probably has lower market share than Apple.)
> My website statistics do not show that. I would guess that IE is WAY
> below 90%; maybe even approaching somewhere in the 70% area.
Different websites get different demographics based on the nature of their content. You get one set of figures if your website is specifically oriented towards open-source stuff, another set if it's generally technically oriented but without platform bias, another if it's Windows-oriented but technical, another set of figures if it's non-computer oriented but still technical...
Even among non-technical sites, you get different numbers depending on other factors related to your content. Just for one example, the *age* of the readership you attract makes a *huge* difference, and measuring *average* age doesn't even tell the whole story, either; specific age *ranges* are more or less likely to install anything other than what comes preinstalled.
In short, it's complicated.
> With IE7 on it's way, is this going to slow down the adoption of Firefox by
> the masses?
Not until it is actually available. As it stands now, the masses don't know or care that IE7 is on its way. However, the release of XP SP2 on WindowsUpdate may have slowed Firefox adoption. It's impossible to measure how much, though.
> They only reason they had a browser was to head off Netscape becoming a
.Net
> platform unto itself. Once Netscape was thoroughly squashed, no more reason
> to develop.
A light bulb just went on in my head. This is why Firefox is now on
Microsoft's radar: it's not about web browser market share. I had been
wondering why Microsoft cares what web browser you use -- that has no
impact on any product they charge money for. But now I get it: it's not
about what browser you use to read CNN and browse eBay. It's about XUL.
It's about Gecko as a *platform* (potentially), and *that* is why MS has
reversed itself and decided to deliver an IE7 after all.
Not that I really think Gecko as a platform could ever obsolete actual OSes
or make them irrelevant. But Microsoft doesn't want to take any chances.
Releasing IE7 is a pre-emptive move against XUL in the same sense that
is a move against Java. (Personally, I hope Parrot matures soon enough to
eat both their lunches, but that's another topic for another thread.)
> A much better position would be for there to be lots of browsers with
> around 15% market share.
I'd settle for two with around 30% each, and a bunch of lesser ones with
various smaller percentages. But I'd prefer that no single browser have
more than 50% at most. Incidentally, in the entire history of the web
(well, since Mosaic came out anyway), there have only been a *few* months
when there *wasn't* a single browser with a majority market share. There
was a short time when the upcoming Navigator and the previously-leading
Mosaic both had between 40 and 50%, but that didn't last but for a couple
of months; there was the period when IE was just gaining market share and
both it and Communicator were just shy of 50%, but again, that didn't last
but for at *most* half a year, and then IE climbed past 50%, where it has
been since then. I would dearly love to see a couple of major ISPs (say,
Earthlink and RoadRunner) start bundling minority browsers in their
connection kits. Extra bonus points if they bundle different ones.
> Actually by including tabbed browsing they are taking a leaf from Opera's
> book, same as Mozilla did. Credit where its due.
Except that Opera got tabbed browsing wrong -- badly. When I experimented
with Opera's tabbed browsing, I hated it, and immediately wanted to turn it
off. But when the Seamonkey nightlies just before 0.9.5 came out with it,
something about the way it was implemented or presented was better, and
immediately caught my attention and quickly became indispensible.
I'll give Opera credit for having the idea, but they didn't get it quite
right, somehow. When Hyatt stood on Opera's shoulders, as it were, then the
concept of tabbed browsing was developed to the point where it became useful.
Disclaimer: I do not now remember the precise details of how Opera's tabbed
browsing worked when they introduced it, and they've improved it since.
> I think the same is true here in the US from what I read. On the other hand,
> I went through school and college before PC's were invented and I really
> don't have any idea what is supposed to be taught on PC's. I remember a
> niece saying something about "keyboarding", whatever that is.
It would be good to teach a little programming, but none of the teachers know
any (especially in elementary school, when it would be most beneficial to teach
it), so that makes that rather hard. They teach 'em how to use PowerPoint;
the main reason, as near as I can figure, is because that's something all the
teachers can figure out. So could the kids, without being taught it, but the
schools feel like they have to include some computer in the cirruculum, for
political reasons, and teaching PowerPoint makes the parents happy. Most of
the rest of the computer-oriented cirruculum is like that, too -- stuff the
kids don't actually need a class for, because they could figure it out easily
on their own, but it gives adults warm, fuzzy feelings because it seems
vaguely like a useful skill, if you don't think about it too hard.
They do also use computers to help teach other subjects. Most notably,
computers are integrated into the reading cirruculum, through special
software that administers little quizzes over the books they've just read,
or something along those lines; I think the details vary from one school
district to another -- there are apparently several competing "solutions"
for this, peddled by various vendors, but most or all elementary schools
use one or another of them. I do not know how effective this is or is not
versus other methods of teaching reading, but all the schools are doing it.
Keyboarding is what they used to call typing, and that *is* something the
schools ought to be teaching, because it doesn't come naturally without
instruction like the other computer stuff they teach does.
> Personally I think it says alot about how schools here in Sweden are low
> priority. Much more important to let the politicians buy luxury apartments.
I doubt that's the reason. The schools in the US give their students ancient
computers to use too, and it is my considered opinion that the schools could
easily afford better: the money they spend on computers is NOTHING compared
to their overall budget. The elementary schools spend more money on that
foul-smelling absorbant powder they always sprinkle vomit than they spend on
computers. The high schools spend more money subsidizing the golf team's
green fees than they spend on computer equipment. When I was in high school
(graduated in '93), the _newest_ computer in the building was a single Mac
2SE. The next newest ones were a dozen Mac Plusses that the yearbook class
used, and which were also used for the computer-oriented classes (e.g., for
the Pascal class). The rest were Apple ][ series (//e mostly IIRC). That's
at the high school, and the elementary schools get leftover castoff equipment
from the high school when the high school no longer has any use for it because
it's too old (though they also do get some new ones -- occasionally).
Is it because we don't care about education? No. (That's the reason teachers
aren't allowed to flunk the students if they don't do their work.) The reason
the schools don't spend more money on computers is because the schools don't
fundamentally care about computers. (Whether they *should* care more about
them is an open question; it seems to me that the kids easily know more about
computers, on average, than their parents, so I think the education system
is failing them more in other areas; they seem to learn computers okay. The
older computers may, in fact, be just as good for didactic purposes as new
ones; if you learn to use DOS and Windows 3, you'll be able to figure out
Longhorn when you get your hands on it in 2040 (or whenever the heck it's
coming out; I've lost track).)
At work, we've got three basic kinds of staff workstations: there are the
VT510 dumb terminals connected to the minicomputer that runs OpenVMS; there
are the Windows systems with DOS (either PC DOS 7 or MS DOS 6) running inside
of VirtualPC, with special DOS software (that won't run under WinXP at all
and not very well under Win98 either, hence VirtualPC and DOS) that connects
to the VMS system and does stuff; the third kind of staff workstations are
the non-mission-critical ones that don't do anything but web and email;
everything important is on VMS and DOS. And no, we couldn't get by with
just VMS, because there are certain highly-important functions that cannot
be done on the dumb terminals; we absolutely have to have the DOS systems.
Yeah. On a related note, the kernel issue that bothers me most (and well neigh
the only time I even think about my kernel) is what happens when one process is
flogging a disk hard, so that the system is IO-bound: all the other processes
slow down too, even if their disk usage requirements are quite minimal. It
ought to be possible (perhaps at the expense of slowing the IO-bound process
a little) to allow every *other* process on the system to function normally
in such a scenerio. As it is, if I try to run du -h over my whole filesystem,
I can't effectively do much else until it completes. It would be okay with
me if du took half again as long, if it meant the rest of the system could
stay responsive. (I'm using kernel 2.4.22 currently, and yes, I have heard
that 2.6 is starting toward addressing this issue a little better. I'll
upgrade eventually, but I'm waiting for the next release of my distro.)
It's a source-code management system, like RCS or CVS or Subversion or Arch.
The only thing it has to do with Linux is that Linus happens to use it to
manage the kernel source tree, but you do not need Bitkeeper to use the Linux
kernel; you can just download a tarball from kernel.org or whatever if you
prefer to go that route. The reason this is news on slashdot, I guess, is
because some people want to get the absolute latest kernel straight from
Linus' repository, before it makes it to tarball stage. For most of us,
that would be insane (if there's one piece of software on your system that
you don't want to have break, the kernel is it), but if you were actively
working on the kernel, I suppose it might be an interesting option.
Part of the problem is that the website doesn't make it clear exactly what
"stable" means to the Debian people. It just says, "the latest stable release
is 3.0" -- when most projects say something like that, they mean that's the
latest release that's stable enough for anyone other than one of the project's
own developers to seriously consider using. It would also help if the Debian
front page said *anything* about the testing and unstable releases; at first
glance, it appears that the latest stable release is also the latest release
when, in fact, installing it is a trip back in time to the tune of the better
part of a decade. What the front page *should* say is something along the
lines of this:
Current releases:
Long-term production/stable: 3.0 "woody"
Medium-term current/recent: 4.0 "potato"
Bleeding Edge latest/newest: 5.0 "sid"
(I may have those numbers and nicknames off; I'm not really a Debian guy.)
As it stands, I suspect too many people do what I do: look at the front page,
figure 3.0 is the latest release (after all, it says so), go to cheapbytes or
wherever, nab 3.0, install it, and then try to pick our jaw up off the floor
when it asks us if we want to use a 2.0 kernel.
> Gabe and Tycho were planning to publish their work, only to lose the rights
> to all their stuff to some scumbag
For those of us who do NOT recall this story, can someone fill us in on exactly how this happened?