This is much easier with the way stuff is developed in Linux. For instance, in Linux, all the CD burners run off a small set of Command Line tools. But what really puts them apart is the interface. All their functionality is derived a from a small set of stable, well test utilities. Then the developers of the UI can focus on the UI, without having to reinvent the wheel. It works this way with a lot of other applications too. There's lots of different window managers for Linux, they all do them the same thing, but in a different way. Depending on the user, they may like one more than the other. I think this is a better model for computers, rather than the windows methodology of only 1 way to do anything.
This is exactly the point. This desktop may work well for 10's or 100's of documents, but what about when you are managing 1000's of documents. Trying to manage a large collection of photos or music is a lot easier when they are stored digitally. Allowing things to be categorized into many folders, makes my music and pictures a lot easier to find.
That's the problem with computers. People try to take stuff they know from other realms and apply it to computers, but that doesn't work. It may be nice if it did, but it isn't. People refuse to learn something new, and only learn the minimal amount for their job to get done. They don't want to learn it well enough to get their job done quick and easily, just enough to get the job done.
Seriously, as a web developer, I couldn't see how one could get by without Google and Firefox. Firstly, Google groups is where I find 80% of my answers, then 15% from google web search, and then maybe 5% from asking co-workers. It usually takes less or about the same time to google something, plus, i'm not interupting someone else and taking up their time. Secondly, Firefox with it's web developer tool bar is a godsend. I know one exists for IE, but it's not as good. I also find that FF gives better descriptions of javascript errors, along with the color coded source code view, which makes Firefox about 10 times easier to use for web development.
Competent coders is the key here. During the Dot-Com boom, everybody and their mother could get a job as a programmer provided they knew how to turn on a computer. Then the bust hit, and there was a lot of cleaning up to do. A lot of people who really had no qualifications or skills were stuck without a job. The people who really knew what they were doing never had a problem to begin with. Even during the bust, a lot of competent people were probably laid off when companies went bust, but they found new jobs quickly enough.
I'm sure there's enough computer programmers out there that don't know about the whole SCO fiasco that they would gladly go and work for them. Probably not any programmers with real Unix/Linux experience, but there are a lot of developers out there who don't know about this stuff. Not everybody reads slashdot.
Often when I go over to someone's house and play video games, it gets really boring really fast, because some of the new games require so much time to learn. This is with games that are meant to be played with others, like sports, driving, and fighting games. It gets even worse for FPSs and games that are mostly played with 1 player, or over a network. I have a gamecube, and I like that there's a lot of games available that don't require weeks of play before someone is good. Games like Bomberman, MarioKart, MarioParty, really stand out as games that anybody can pick up and play.
Would this really be that much worse than what we have in western countries. Currently, there's many people going into programs that don't have any jobs at the end. Or people going into something that they really don't have the brains to do. Lets face it. People are different, not everyone has the brain to be an engineer, or has the patience to work as a teacher, or has the physical ability to work as a labourer. If everyone was trained for a certain job (or if no training was required, given a job), then there would probably be a lot less people out of a job, or doing something below their skill level.
Exactly, because in China, I'm sure the schools are all state run (they are communist). They open as many as they can. They also maintain high standards so that people graduating with be worth something. If you give everyone a degree, a degree is no longer worth anything. On a side note, they may just be better off studying. Most of the time when I was in university, I saw many people trying to cheat, and thinking up these elaborate schemes, or spending hours typing notes into their programmable calculator. If they spend half the time they did cheating on just doing the work, the probably could have gotten at least a B average. People would spend hours running around the engineering building looking for answers to an assignment that could be completed in 45 minutes.
For encryption most web services use HTTPS to make sure everything is encrypted. It's already built, and we know it works well, why try to build something new. On the other hand, web serviecs took over because of the web. It's much easier to just send an HTTP request in XML, and parse the XML you get back. I did some CORBA work in university, and just doing something simple like getting the server to send back Hello World required a more work than it should. Everytime you changed the server side code, you had to copy files to the client box so they could run the code. This wasn't too much of a problem for a university assignment, but imagine doing this with 100,000 clients connecting to your server. Making sure everyone had the same interface files (on development and production boxes) would be a nightmare.
Which is why it's such a bad name. It's so close to a real word, that half the time you end up spelling it wrong, and people end up reading it wrong. It's like that idea that people can understand words, as long as the first and last letters are in place, the middle letters can be quite jumbled, and people will still be able to read it. Well, it works teh other way too, If your word looks like something else, them when people glance over it, they will probably see the other word.
Oh, that doesn't account for some of the terrible voicemail systems offered by phone providers. Some of it goes on for 1 minute, asking you to key in numbers to leave a message, or you can type in your phone number so, they don't have to actually redial it. It's a real pain. I just want to leave a message. As a side note, if you don't want to leave a message, there's always the double ring, right before the answering machine picks up. Usually when the double ring hits, if I don't want to leave a message, then I hang up.
I don't think I've ever seen a 0.05 mm lead. maybe.5 mm, which is what I use, although I think they still.3 mm also. As far as the sharpness goes, yes, it does require the pencil be rotated every so often , but that can be solved by just learning to get a rhythm, and rotating it before it gets to the point of being too thick. This also helps the contrast problem, as it usually shows up darker when you're writing on the sharp edge. You definitely won't get anything as good as a pen, but it's a trade off. I'd take the erasability of a pencil any day, over having to futz with whiteout, or having to cross things out. I find that I actually like the resistence given by a pencil, and find pens to be too smooth. I guess it's all just personal preference, but I don't really understand the appeal of pens, except in circumstances when you don't want something to be erased, like when you sign your name to something.
I actually prefer pencils (the mechanical kind). That along with a good vinyl erase is the best writing instrument. You can correct your mistakes, and you don't ever have to sharpen the pencil. And they maintain a relatively consistent sharpness.
I just bought a new PC, and it has those new huge diameter fans. It doesn't even sound like it's on most of the time. You'd think that going to a more powerful machine with more fans would make for a louder machine, but no, this thing in ultra silent.
Many modern distros also just display a nice splash screen with a progress bar (kind of like windows XP), and a message saying "Press ESC to show more information". It makes the boot-up process a little nicer for people who wouldn't know what the messages mean anyway. Actually I like the old style boot-up, because seeing all those "OK" messages lets you know that stuff is working.
There's no set up necessary when you get a hosting plan. Just click on Gallery 2, and it gets installed for you. Nothing to set up. Apache is set up, MySQL is set up, Email servers set up, webmail set up. I trust that the guys running the hosting service know more about properly setting up all this stuff than I do. Also, I save money on the electricity of running that extra box, the cost of having an extra box, and I pay cheaper Internet access rates because I'm not hosting a server. It's also more reliable than your general home internet. They also do back-ups, and a myriad of other services I wouldn't bother to do myself. And I bet if you put a couple Google ads on the 25 friends' accounts you were hosting, you could probably make your money back, and then some.
Yeah, so it only took them like 4 years (longer maybe?) to get a piece of Beta software to support transparent PNGs. And from what I hear, their CSS support, although improved, is still quite lacking. Also, it's only available for Vista, XP, and Server 2003. That cuts out everyone using 2000 (which is a good OS, which many people still use) and those still stuck using 98. If Microsoft really cared about supporting the standards then they would. They have a lot of smart people, and a lot of money, and there is no excuse for them to be so far behind everyone else. Apple has less money, a substantially smaller user base, and still they have much better support for the standards.
Yeah, Maybe if they want to interoperate better with OSS they should implement CSS 2, or transparent PNGs. Or maybe use ODF in their next word processor. Or fix their broken Kerberos implementation. There's a million things they could do to make it easier for their software to interoperate with GPLd softwaree. Maybe they should release some specs to their API, file formats, and network protocols so that OSS programmers don't have to guess how things are done, or reverse engineer them.
it might be possible to fly it as often as a couple times a month if needed
That's what they said about the space shuttle. Originally, they planned for a 2 week turn around with the shuttle. All things being perfect, they might be able to pull this off, although I don't think it has ever happened, or ever will happen. I also don't think there's enough demand to launch 2 shuttles a month.
That's exactly the way it was 600 years ago, when people were trying to discover our own planet. How many sailors died trying to find the new world, or travel the northwest passage. We hear of Christopher Columbus and Magellan, but there was probably many other sailors who weren't so successful in their voyages. And there were probably a lot of crew members that we don't know a lot about, who gave their lives to discover the new world. People give their lives every day for wars about oil and religion. I'm sure, given the choice, many would choose to give their lives if it meant that someday we may reach another hospitable planet.
I don't know why it surprises everyone when they use free services and aren't allowed to do something you want. Like when you use a free email service, and all of a sudden they start charging for POP access. Or with free web hosting, they decide to take away features, or just cut you off because your using too much bandwidth, or the company goes bust. If you want web hosting, you'd be better off paying for it. For under $10 a month, you can get 20 GB of space, 1000 GB of transfer, and lots of nice features like blogs, email, photo albums, databases, and your free to access all the stuff you're hosting by FTP, SSH, or whatever else your host provides. If the free stuff isn't good enough, then cough up some money for some good hosting. It isn't expensive, and will save you a lot of grief.
Of course it's your rights online. If you are a member of Wikipedia, and contribute good content to it all the time, then it kind of sucks that you are no longer able to edit certain articles, because other people post material of questionable quality. The contributors helped to build wikipedia, and now they are being blocked out of editing some of the content they may have even written themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
This is much easier with the way stuff is developed in Linux. For instance, in Linux, all the CD burners run off a small set of Command Line tools. But what really puts them apart is the interface. All their functionality is derived a from a small set of stable, well test utilities. Then the developers of the UI can focus on the UI, without having to reinvent the wheel. It works this way with a lot of other applications too. There's lots of different window managers for Linux, they all do them the same thing, but in a different way. Depending on the user, they may like one more than the other. I think this is a better model for computers, rather than the windows methodology of only 1 way to do anything.
This is exactly the point. This desktop may work well for 10's or 100's of documents, but what about when you are managing 1000's of documents. Trying to manage a large collection of photos or music is a lot easier when they are stored digitally. Allowing things to be categorized into many folders, makes my music and pictures a lot easier to find.
That's the problem with computers. People try to take stuff they know from other realms and apply it to computers, but that doesn't work. It may be nice if it did, but it isn't. People refuse to learn something new, and only learn the minimal amount for their job to get done. They don't want to learn it well enough to get their job done quick and easily, just enough to get the job done.
Seriously, as a web developer, I couldn't see how one could get by without Google and Firefox. Firstly, Google groups is where I find 80% of my answers, then 15% from google web search, and then maybe 5% from asking co-workers. It usually takes less or about the same time to google something, plus, i'm not interupting someone else and taking up their time. Secondly, Firefox with it's web developer tool bar is a godsend. I know one exists for IE, but it's not as good. I also find that FF gives better descriptions of javascript errors, along with the color coded source code view, which makes Firefox about 10 times easier to use for web development.
Competent coders is the key here. During the Dot-Com boom, everybody and their mother could get a job as a programmer provided they knew how to turn on a computer. Then the bust hit, and there was a lot of cleaning up to do. A lot of people who really had no qualifications or skills were stuck without a job. The people who really knew what they were doing never had a problem to begin with. Even during the bust, a lot of competent people were probably laid off when companies went bust, but they found new jobs quickly enough.
Now all we need is hosting services to start adopting PostgreSql.
I'm sure there's enough computer programmers out there that don't know about the whole SCO fiasco that they would gladly go and work for them. Probably not any programmers with real Unix/Linux experience, but there are a lot of developers out there who don't know about this stuff. Not everybody reads slashdot.
Often when I go over to someone's house and play video games, it gets really boring really fast, because some of the new games require so much time to learn. This is with games that are meant to be played with others, like sports, driving, and fighting games. It gets even worse for FPSs and games that are mostly played with 1 player, or over a network. I have a gamecube, and I like that there's a lot of games available that don't require weeks of play before someone is good. Games like Bomberman, MarioKart, MarioParty, really stand out as games that anybody can pick up and play.
Would this really be that much worse than what we have in western countries. Currently, there's many people going into programs that don't have any jobs at the end. Or people going into something that they really don't have the brains to do. Lets face it. People are different, not everyone has the brain to be an engineer, or has the patience to work as a teacher, or has the physical ability to work as a labourer. If everyone was trained for a certain job (or if no training was required, given a job), then there would probably be a lot less people out of a job, or doing something below their skill level.
Exactly, because in China, I'm sure the schools are all state run (they are communist). They open as many as they can. They also maintain high standards so that people graduating with be worth something. If you give everyone a degree, a degree is no longer worth anything. On a side note, they may just be better off studying. Most of the time when I was in university, I saw many people trying to cheat, and thinking up these elaborate schemes, or spending hours typing notes into their programmable calculator. If they spend half the time they did cheating on just doing the work, the probably could have gotten at least a B average. People would spend hours running around the engineering building looking for answers to an assignment that could be completed in 45 minutes.
For encryption most web services use HTTPS to make sure everything is encrypted. It's already built, and we know it works well, why try to build something new. On the other hand, web serviecs took over because of the web. It's much easier to just send an HTTP request in XML, and parse the XML you get back. I did some CORBA work in university, and just doing something simple like getting the server to send back Hello World required a more work than it should. Everytime you changed the server side code, you had to copy files to the client box so they could run the code. This wasn't too much of a problem for a university assignment, but imagine doing this with 100,000 clients connecting to your server. Making sure everyone had the same interface files (on development and production boxes) would be a nightmare.
Which is why it's such a bad name. It's so close to a real word, that half the time you end up spelling it wrong, and people end up reading it wrong. It's like that idea that people can understand words, as long as the first and last letters are in place, the middle letters can be quite jumbled, and people will still be able to read it. Well, it works teh other way too, If your word looks like something else, them when people glance over it, they will probably see the other word.
Oh, that doesn't account for some of the terrible voicemail systems offered by phone providers. Some of it goes on for 1 minute, asking you to key in numbers to leave a message, or you can type in your phone number so, they don't have to actually redial it. It's a real pain. I just want to leave a message. As a side note, if you don't want to leave a message, there's always the double ring, right before the answering machine picks up. Usually when the double ring hits, if I don't want to leave a message, then I hang up.
I don't think I've ever seen a 0.05 mm lead. maybe .5 mm, which is what I use, although I think they still .3 mm also. As far as the sharpness goes, yes, it does require the pencil be rotated every so often , but that can be solved by just learning to get a rhythm, and rotating it before it gets to the point of being too thick. This also helps the contrast problem, as it usually shows up darker when you're writing on the sharp edge. You definitely won't get anything as good as a pen, but it's a trade off. I'd take the erasability of a pencil any day, over having to futz with whiteout, or having to cross things out. I find that I actually like the resistence given by a pencil, and find pens to be too smooth. I guess it's all just personal preference, but I don't really understand the appeal of pens, except in circumstances when you don't want something to be erased, like when you sign your name to something.
I actually prefer pencils (the mechanical kind). That along with a good vinyl erase is the best writing instrument. You can correct your mistakes, and you don't ever have to sharpen the pencil. And they maintain a relatively consistent sharpness.
I just bought a new PC, and it has those new huge diameter fans. It doesn't even sound like it's on most of the time. You'd think that going to a more powerful machine with more fans would make for a louder machine, but no, this thing in ultra silent.
College students also don't have the money to spend on this thing.
Many modern distros also just display a nice splash screen with a progress bar (kind of like windows XP), and a message saying "Press ESC to show more information". It makes the boot-up process a little nicer for people who wouldn't know what the messages mean anyway. Actually I like the old style boot-up, because seeing all those "OK" messages lets you know that stuff is working.
There's no set up necessary when you get a hosting plan. Just click on Gallery 2, and it gets installed for you. Nothing to set up. Apache is set up, MySQL is set up, Email servers set up, webmail set up. I trust that the guys running the hosting service know more about properly setting up all this stuff than I do. Also, I save money on the electricity of running that extra box, the cost of having an extra box, and I pay cheaper Internet access rates because I'm not hosting a server. It's also more reliable than your general home internet. They also do back-ups, and a myriad of other services I wouldn't bother to do myself. And I bet if you put a couple Google ads on the 25 friends' accounts you were hosting, you could probably make your money back, and then some.
Yeah, so it only took them like 4 years (longer maybe?) to get a piece of Beta software to support transparent PNGs. And from what I hear, their CSS support, although improved, is still quite lacking. Also, it's only available for Vista, XP, and Server 2003. That cuts out everyone using 2000 (which is a good OS, which many people still use) and those still stuck using 98. If Microsoft really cared about supporting the standards then they would. They have a lot of smart people, and a lot of money, and there is no excuse for them to be so far behind everyone else. Apple has less money, a substantially smaller user base, and still they have much better support for the standards.
Yeah, Maybe if they want to interoperate better with OSS they should implement CSS 2, or transparent PNGs. Or maybe use ODF in their next word processor. Or fix their broken Kerberos implementation. There's a million things they could do to make it easier for their software to interoperate with GPLd softwaree. Maybe they should release some specs to their API, file formats, and network protocols so that OSS programmers don't have to guess how things are done, or reverse engineer them.
it might be possible to fly it as often as a couple times a month if needed
That's what they said about the space shuttle. Originally, they planned for a 2 week turn around with the shuttle. All things being perfect, they might be able to pull this off, although I don't think it has ever happened, or ever will happen. I also don't think there's enough demand to launch 2 shuttles a month.
That's exactly the way it was 600 years ago, when people were trying to discover our own planet. How many sailors died trying to find the new world, or travel the northwest passage. We hear of Christopher Columbus and Magellan, but there was probably many other sailors who weren't so successful in their voyages. And there were probably a lot of crew members that we don't know a lot about, who gave their lives to discover the new world. People give their lives every day for wars about oil and religion. I'm sure, given the choice, many would choose to give their lives if it meant that someday we may reach another hospitable planet.
I don't know why it surprises everyone when they use free services and aren't allowed to do something you want. Like when you use a free email service, and all of a sudden they start charging for POP access. Or with free web hosting, they decide to take away features, or just cut you off because your using too much bandwidth, or the company goes bust. If you want web hosting, you'd be better off paying for it. For under $10 a month, you can get 20 GB of space, 1000 GB of transfer, and lots of nice features like blogs, email, photo albums, databases, and your free to access all the stuff you're hosting by FTP, SSH, or whatever else your host provides. If the free stuff isn't good enough, then cough up some money for some good hosting. It isn't expensive, and will save you a lot of grief.
Of course it's your rights online. If you are a member of Wikipedia, and contribute good content to it all the time, then it kind of sucks that you are no longer able to edit certain articles, because other people post material of questionable quality. The contributors helped to build wikipedia, and now they are being blocked out of editing some of the content they may have even written themselves.