Oh, poor little babies! You won't be able to use your expensive new toy on the sidewalk!
Dude, get real. The Segway is a ludicrous device that fills almost no extant needs.
Apparently its only attractive feature is its clever balance and steering control. Other than that, what? You don't have to walk a few blocks, just stand there like an upright couch potato? This is a useful thing, a revolution in transportation? Can't you tell when you're about to get swindled by a snake-oil salesman?
Sheesh. I should get into the Invent Things for Affluent Idiots game.
I only recently installed jEdit for the first time, and don't have much experience with it yet.
It is, of course, a cross-platform editor, and you don't have to be a java developer for it to be useful.
They have boxed sets at retailers, and WalMart
sells their distro on really cheap PCs.
Why aren't they making money?
People like me who download it for free and install it on the half-dozen machines within their reach are a loss of market share, but there are millions of new PCs sold each year. You would think a small company could make a few bucks on a tiny part of that market.
Here is my prediction, and you can throw it back in my face 10 years from now:
By 2012 computer displays as we now know them (LCD, CRT) will have been relegated to inexpensive embedded systems. Bleeding edge office information devices will function by tracking the user's movements and speech, as well as manipulation of common objects in her work environment. They will serve the same purpose as graphical icons do today. The computer screen will have been subsumed into dynamic surface markings and other detectable changes in the objects in her environment. They will have reflective (as opposed to backlit) display surfaces where information can be encoded in textual, graphical, color, or texture attributes, and sometimes some degree of 3D physical configuration changes. These will range from writing surfaces that resemble paper, cards, packaging materials, and other document-like entities, to instrument or appliance control panels and communications devices. User interactions with these items can produce changes in both the displays and the underlying data repositories. Moving them, rearranging their relative locations, adjusting them, speaking into them, and other as yet unforeseeable user interactions will effect the state changes that embody the user's day to day tasks. Think of a cube with an environment of intelligent interactive devices that visibly and audibly change as work gets done. The devices themselves will also be communicating and interacting as needed.
An organization is broadcasting information gratis for all to consume. It includes paid advertising it expects you to patiently and passively consume along with the rest of the content. How can it possibly be considered theft to decline to view the advertising?
This has already been discussed quite a bit. Is there any compelling legal argument that there is a real contractual obligation, express or implied, to force us to consume the advertising?
1) except for a few crucial algorithms Why open it up at all? Those are the parts the customer would want to inspect the most!
2) the resulting executable would not operate in a meaningful way without the key routines. Why bother? How would the customer test or debug it, or suggest extensions?
3) Shame on the designers; their indiscretion should be on display for all to see If you have the rare privilege of working in an organization that doesn't need it yesterday, is understaffed, and has to scale up very quickly, then I can see your point. The rest of us have to deal with a competitive marketplace.
I agree that open source has an important role to play in many types of commercial software, but this article is a trivial discussion of the problems involved.
It was a mistake to make the ISS. It is far too expensive to support human life in space, with very little to gain from it. We should have spent that same amount of money on unmanned robots, thousands of them, orbiting the earth, going to the moon and mars, wandering around the asteroid belt and the greater solar system, sending back vast streams of video, audio, and all sorts of other telemetry.
This could stimulate a much broader industrial and academic base, and provide several modalities of fascinating edutainment to those of us sitting at home watching 3D video with stereo sound from the martian surface, coming from an intrepid band of autonomous rovers.
The Bible is both literally and metaphorically true, and I have the right to supplement and reinterpret it to make it meet and survive all possible challenges.
I have a better idea! Let's invent a thing out of nothing. It will start from a point so small that most people will think there's nothing really there. Except, of course, that it's really hot. Really, really hot. In fact, it is so hot, that in no time it blows up. Well, actually after a very, very short time it blows up, and then gets incredibly big. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger, never slowing down. At least people will never be able to tell for sure if it's slowing down. One thing, though, it cools off fairly quickly.
But that's not the best part. The best part is that everything is in it. Everything. Planets, dogs, food, galaxies, weird physical phenomena, you name it. Plus, it's set up so that whatever is not there eventually gets created from the things that are there. Cool, eh. Just the thing you would expect from a Truly Lazy Programmer.
BTW, it also will have quite a few 3D animation packages, so perhaps you might think twice about writing another one, especially from scratch.
Linux is gratis and libre, and $99 bucks will get you a packaged distro that beats the living crap out of Solaris or Windows with respect to all the software you get.
Come to think of it, Solaris and Windows appear to be hitting the same price point. What demographic is Sun aiming at? How many copies can they expect to sell a year? Who's market share do they think they can erode? How will they, or can they, market to the average Joe? SUNW
I think you are a little out of date. Recent versions of Samba + Cups make this trivial. What distribution / version are you using?
Hardly trivial. This has got to be the most irritating pending issue for linux to make it on the desktop. Even if CUPS can see the printer, that doesn't mean it's going to actually print anything. The printer setup on linux is unintuitive and fraught with complication. Upon trying to print from an application, one has to either remember all of the queue names, or go find them somewhere to fill in the desired one. Remeber jbolden, we are talking about point-and-click culture, not geeks willing to figure it out no matter how long it takes.
Once this is solved, a large pulse of new desktop installations will occur around the world.
I doubt that they capture the gases. I can imagine them burning the corpse in such a way as to leave a reasonable amount of material that we would call charcoal if we were referring to wood. That seems grisly, but you might be able to do a reasonable job of separating it from much of the inorganic stuff by grinding it up, putting it in a container of water, and taking the stuff that floats.
It still sounds a bit hokey. There would still be enough contaminants in the charcoal to discolor the resulting diamond.
The thing that perplexes me is that we are talking about cremation remains. The carbon should have burned off, leaving mainly inorganic salts from bones and cytoplasm. Sure, there's probably some carbonate in there (you really have to wonder how much, though), but you'd have to do some serious purification to get rid of all the calcium, phosphate, potassium, sodium, etc., especially to get "high quality" diamonds. I seriously doubt you can get a VVS1 diamond from the stuff that's in the urn.
Saying "People should be free to keep their papers private" as an argument against government FOI laws is just a stupid strawman, unworthy of further debate.
Insofar as we are not talking about FOI, that remark is a "stupid straw man." We are talking about procurement policy.
Software must be judged on merit, TCO, ROI, maintainability, fulfillment of requirements, etc. Government should certainly be compelled to use open standards. Whether governments choose Open Source or not is in itself secondary, although one might expect that TCO, ROI, and standards compliance are often better with Open Source.
I agree with Tim O'Reilly:
No one should be forced to choose open source, any more than they should be forced to choose proprietary software.
There is no One True Programming Language.
There is no One True Computing Platform.
There is no One True Ice Cream Flavor.
There is no One True Beer.
There is no One True..., um, you get the picture, right?
The creators of films including Final Fantasy and Shrek claimed to have had to reduce the quality of their renderings because they would have appeared "too realistic." Is this a credible claim? Why do it if part of the aim is in fact to appear highly realistic?
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently its only attractive feature is its clever balance and steering control. Other than that, what? You don't have to walk a few blocks, just stand there like an upright couch potato? This is a useful thing, a revolution in transportation? Can't you tell when you're about to get swindled by a snake-oil salesman?
Sheesh. I should get into the Invent Things for Affluent Idiots game.
Today's new term: Seg Potato
Karma: Sucky (mostly affected by the delusion that he is saying things people know to be true but don't want to hear)
Apparently, you can write major book projects with jEdit.
It probably isn't the most robust business model in the world.
Especially for recommending xemacs and vi to a GNU/Linux newbie coming from Windows. Please find it within yourself to forgive our dumbassedness.
qwerty
Install nedit from your installation disks. It's almost as good as TextPad, which unfortunately only runs on Windows.
Why aren't they making money?
People like me who download it for free and install it on the half-dozen machines within their reach are a loss of market share, but there are millions of new PCs sold each year. You would think a small company could make a few bucks on a tiny part of that market.
By 2012 computer displays as we now know them (LCD, CRT) will have been relegated to inexpensive embedded systems. Bleeding edge office information devices will function by tracking the user's movements and speech, as well as manipulation of common objects in her work environment. They will serve the same purpose as graphical icons do today. The computer screen will have been subsumed into dynamic surface markings and other detectable changes in the objects in her environment. They will have reflective (as opposed to backlit) display surfaces where information can be encoded in textual, graphical, color, or texture attributes, and sometimes some degree of 3D physical configuration changes. These will range from writing surfaces that resemble paper, cards, packaging materials, and other document-like entities, to instrument or appliance control panels and communications devices. User interactions with these items can produce changes in both the displays and the underlying data repositories. Moving them, rearranging their relative locations, adjusting them, speaking into them, and other as yet unforeseeable user interactions will effect the state changes that embody the user's day to day tasks. Think of a cube with an environment of intelligent interactive devices that visibly and audibly change as work gets done. The devices themselves will also be communicating and interacting as needed.
This has already been discussed quite a bit. Is there any compelling legal argument that there is a real contractual obligation, express or implied, to force us to consume the advertising?
2) the resulting executable would not operate in a meaningful way without the key routines. Why bother? How would the customer test or debug it, or suggest extensions?
3) Shame on the designers; their indiscretion should be on display for all to see If you have the rare privilege of working in an organization that doesn't need it yesterday, is understaffed, and has to scale up very quickly, then I can see your point. The rest of us have to deal with a competitive marketplace.
I agree that open source has an important role to play in many types of commercial software, but this article is a trivial discussion of the problems involved.
The CIA has already found evidence of Al Qaeda camps on the moon, based on anomalous magnetic fields near the crater Tycho.
This could stimulate a much broader industrial and academic base, and provide several modalities of fascinating edutainment to those of us sitting at home watching 3D video with stereo sound from the martian surface, coming from an intrepid band of autonomous rovers.
This is the currently fashionable argument:
The Bible is both literally and metaphorically true, and I have the right to supplement and reinterpret it to make it meet and survive all possible challenges.
But that's not the best part. The best part is that everything is in it. Everything. Planets, dogs, food, galaxies, weird physical phenomena, you name it. Plus, it's set up so that whatever is not there eventually gets created from the things that are there. Cool, eh. Just the thing you would expect from a Truly Lazy Programmer.
BTW, it also will have quite a few 3D animation packages, so perhaps you might think twice about writing another one, especially from scratch.
Linux is gratis and libre, and $99 bucks will get you a packaged distro that beats the living crap out of Solaris or Windows with respect to all the software you get.
Come to think of it, Solaris and Windows appear to be hitting the same price point. What demographic is Sun aiming at? How many copies can they expect to sell a year? Who's market share do they think they can erode? How will they, or can they, market to the average Joe?
SUNW
Yow! That bad?
Hardly trivial.
This has got to be the most irritating pending issue for linux to make it on the desktop. Even if CUPS can see the printer, that doesn't mean it's going to actually print anything. The printer setup on linux is unintuitive and fraught with complication. Upon trying to print from an application, one has to either remember all of the queue names, or go find them somewhere to fill in the desired one. Remeber jbolden, we are talking about point-and-click culture, not geeks willing to figure it out no matter how long it takes.
Once this is solved, a large pulse of new desktop installations will occur around the world.
Iron from hemoglobin and myoglobin would give it a yellow or brown tinge, coincidentally the least valuable diamond colors.
It still sounds a bit hokey. There would still be enough contaminants in the charcoal to discolor the resulting diamond.
On the face of it, I'm still dubious.
Insofar as we are not talking about FOI, that remark is a "stupid straw man." We are talking about procurement policy. Software must be judged on merit, TCO, ROI, maintainability, fulfillment of requirements, etc. Government should certainly be compelled to use open standards. Whether governments choose Open Source or not is in itself secondary, although one might expect that TCO, ROI, and standards compliance are often better with Open Source.
I agree with Tim O'Reilly:
No one should be forced to choose open source, any more than they should be forced to choose proprietary software.
There is no One True Programming Language.
There is no One True Computing Platform.
There is no One True Ice Cream Flavor.
There is no One True Beer.
There is no One True..., um, you get the picture, right?
The creators of films including Final Fantasy and Shrek claimed to have had to reduce the quality of their renderings because they would have appeared "too realistic." Is this a credible claim? Why do it if part of the aim is in fact to appear highly realistic?