Funny, I just read an article in the local newspaper about it being tested here in full scale.
The article is in swedish but basically it says the system has been running for about 3 weeks now in 3 small villages which are too small and too remote to get the fiber which is used in the other villages around here.
Any user interface that requires you have a friend or a book to help you is clearly not user friendly or intuitive enough.
The whole catch-22 of the "man" command is that
it assumes you know what the command is called in the first place. A good "man" would not only display a short description of commands, it would also:
- Be called "manual" or something even more intuitive, so that a first-time cli user would find it.
- Not assume that I know what command I want help about, but rather what I want to do.
Why aren't websites sponsored by applets doing distributed tasks? I'm thinking mainly websites with huge numbers of visitors, where visitors tend to stay long enough to do any meaningful work. (Like GMail for example). Most people don't use more than 5% of computing power when surfing the web, and an applet is safe and easily distributed.
Personally, I'd much rather have an applet using 10% of my cpu power instead of an annoying flash banner (which probly itself uses 10% cpu...).
Obviously someone has to pay for internet content, and that to me would be the least intrusive way. Popup-blockers will be inefficient by the end of the year. Ads will be inside the site content. Or worse still, the popup window is the main window, while the actual content is spawned as "pop under" meaning that if you have a popup stopper, all you get is the ad window...
Cpu cycles is the perfect internet currency. Everyone who visits a website has them.
This looks like an excellent way of "browsing" for music which is not played on the radio. I mean, it's not really competing with the $.99 "own the song"-price of iTunes, but rather it seems like a neat way to preview a lot of songs once (at a penny each) then buy the ones you like on cd or from iTunes.
Is finding a sustainable business model always the answer in internet infrastructure? Compare with roads and other infrastructure, surely we could have a complicated system of roadbuilding, fees and such, or we could just all pay up and build the damn things, because no other business model would be anything but complicated and annoying (I have never once had to stop my car to pay a toll/fee, but I suspect it would annoy me).
For whatever reason, market economy is always assumed to solve all problems related to electronic infrastructure. And that assumption is the reason why dsl services are still embarassingly overpriced in the US.
In small stakes bar blackjack tables around here (about $10 max bets) the dealers usuall play 5 to 5½ shoes out of 6 before shuffling. Also, you can count out loud if you prefer.
Still, after a couple of beers I have a lot of trouble keeping up after about 3 cards have been dealt.
What's the state of the best free complete platform for gaming development? Something like this ought to be included anyway as the DirectPlay part of the DirextX competition.
I surely hope there will be an alternative to DirectX soon, or gaming will be forever stuck in windows.
A unified platform is a must-have to develop games in a smooth fashion, one can't be bothered using separate libraries for audio, 3d, networking, and so on.
No I'm not saying that linux tries (or even should try) to be the definite replacement for windows, or a unified desktops. But I'm saying that every year since 1999 has been "the year of linux desktop", so someone is pushing...
This discussion is about how it should be easier to replace windows with linux, nothing else.
I like having a choice in my desktop, and I like having a choice in my development tools.
I like those choices too. But what is the downside of this (especially on the linux desktop) is that my choices as a developer forces the user to make choices (for example choosing between kde and gnome). My choice of development tools should not end up dictating the look and feel of the program (ideally).
Right now I'm running fluxbox with several KDE and Gnome apps open. They don't tell me "Fuck you, I'm not gonna work if you have those other guys' libraries installed!".
Sadly, that is something that often happens to less experienced linux users, like me.
If you develop in GTK+, it will look like GTK+ in every desktop; If you develop in QT, it will look like QT in every desktop
Indeeed, and this discussion is about how we want things to look familiar and/or consistent isn't it?
I as a developer shouldn't even get a say in the matter of how applications should look and feel. The operating system/desktop system should dictate the look and feel of the applications.
I'm not saying that any platform has succeeded in that yet (for example, the pre-swt java look and feel in windows is just horrible), but this is an opportunity for desktop linux to do something original instead of copying behavior from others.
I'm not an expert on the differences between gtk+ and qt for example, but how difficult would it be (or is it already being done?) to develop a standard that would allow both to look *exactly* the same? Are the two camps even interested in that?
Again, we need interoperability and compatibility, not a dictatorship.
Agreed, I just feel (from experience) that dictatorship seems like the best way to achieve interoperability.
Being forced to use DOS as a server OS is better than being able to choose between Linux and Solaris?
Those who like linux for the choices I realize are able to choose, and perhaps also very intelligent. Ordinary users however neither CAN nor WANT TO make any choices!
That's the whole problem. Nothing ever goes away. This is the first time this has become a problem for the OSS development model, but a serious problem it is.
I want a desktop OS where I can be sure that any application I develop will run on any desktop and look exactly the same on all of them, regardless of what language I develop it in.
What I want is something that could come in a box with an apple on it.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's not the user experience of mac/windows that should be copied by linux, it's the whole model of development control that should be adopted to open source development, much like the kernel development process. Less and freedom and less choice. Less pride and zealotry from the supporters of each camp. The linux people need to understand that ONE half-assed product is better than the choice between TWO superb products. This has certainly been realized at redmond.
What desktop linux needs is ONE desktop to replace them all. That is; one set of widgets, one way of doing everything, and one interface for developing gui apps for linux. This kind of dictatorship works dandy at the core level of linux, and needs to be extended to include the GUI, or the "linux desktop" will remain a flamewar of competing technologies, each trying to copy what the "top-down" managed software is doing.
As long as there is choice, there will be no breakthrough. One more choice won't help either.
Sure, starting in various ends will perhaps give a Darwinian process of development, but now with a plethora of applications developed on the different desktops, incompatible with eachother, there will be no survival of the fittest. All the desktop technologies seem doomed to live side by side forever. sigh.
These days it contains everything and the kitchen sink. If it doesn't contain exactly what you're looking for, it's pretty easy to write a new generator.
Offline, you could use cocoon in a cron job to build presentation trees of various kinds, for exampe every night take the docbook tree, and build several output trees (e.g. ps, html, pdf). Making a tarball of these trees would just be the next step of the cronjob.
No I had no Idea that the documents were mirrored. Cocoon is of course suited for the *LDP website*.
Why should the documents be rendered dynamically rather than every time they are updated?
Thats the whole point of separation of content and presentation, that you shouldn't have to worry about "rebuilding" or otherwise updating a presentation layer because you change the data.
That said, cocoon could also be used to rebuild static output using all of the desired formats, in one go, whenever the xml data is updated.
Using anything other than apache cocoon for this project is ridiculous.
Of course all the documents are/should be stored as DocBook, then the presentation layer can be handled automatically by cocoon. You could have a zillion options for output, for example:
pure xml
html without css
html with css
xhtml
wml
pdf
ps
svg
flash
It amazes me that people always assume that what is a "feature" for one person will always break something for another...
How will ISP:s protect themselves against connection sharing? Even now, me and 3 or 4 neighbours could theoretically share the same 10mbit connection (each of us paying every 4rd or 5th month, instead of $40 each, per month).
The 802.11 gets kinda crappy through concrete external walls though. But these new standards should provide a suspicious drop in the number of paid internet connections in any area, no?
sorry bout that, at 1mb they would only room their customers and no transactions, you're right. Funny how the disks shrink. We all remember saying we'd never fill up that 350mb harddrive, and all of a sudden I can come up with a totally reasonable use for 250TB...
I Can see how a web archive or some accelerator laboratory could end up having many terabytes to store, but how come telephone companies have terabyte databases? Sure, huge numbers of customers make lots of data, but say 250M custmers (megacustomers) and a megabyte of info each (that's a whole lot) is still just in the hundreds of gigabytes.
Could the rest be just logs of past telephone traffic? All phone traffic ever made through the company? What portion of these databases contain actual used data (data that is likely to be used in business), rather than just stored historic data? Are companies kepping huge amounts of old data because they can? Because it gives the db administrator a stiffie to think he's got $many terabytes in his db rather than on old tapes in the basement?
This is just like the horrible pollution of banner ads on commercial internet sites. They used to be quite bearable, with perhaps a banner on top, like here on slashdot, but recently I sense an almost ridiculous increase in ads on sites. Now they are inside the actual content I want to read, and/or they are semi transparent and over the content I want to read. Like if this was not obnoxious enough, they are often animated and use sound to annoy me even more.
The result of this is that people start using popup blockers, and black out off-site images, disable flash etc. Looking at for example Sweden's largest newspaper website these days, you could have a hard time even finding the actual news. If you don't have flash, you will be reminded to get it, about seven times before the page has loaded.
If I read this without flash, and with no off-site images, the page is ok, but if we all did, the site would either have to adapt (i.e. use less annoying ads) or disappear.
The same I think goes for tv shows. Commercial breaks are not half as frequent in Sweden as they are in the U.S (I guess because when Letterman says "we'll be right back after this", there's only a 50% chance of a commercial break:). If they were, I'd just not watch the shows. I guess the maximum acceptable number of breaks is one every 30 minutes. That means one break in a normal sitcom, and about 3 in a movie. And even that is almost too much. But at that rate I could accept their business model and not get some ad-avoiding device. At least it's better than having full screen closeup's at every product and brand name in the scene...or having things like
Ross: "Why isn't that laser beem cutting through the paint!?"
I Absolutely agree.
All computers not bolted to a rack should have a media player pre-installed these days. period.
It has to be pre-installed. The choice of picking from countless free and proprietary media players doesn't cut it.
Why should making an operating system automatically imply that you have to make a fair playing field for application developers? I don't think it would be unfair of microsoft to ship windows without the possibility of ever installing software on it. People would have to use another os, or just use wordpad and paint.
Even with their huge market share, one still has a choice. Making a bad product isn't criminal, it's just stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
...Sadly I think that beats my Volkswagen on all three
The article is in swedish but basically it says the system has been running for about 3 weeks now in 3 small villages which are too small and too remote to get the fiber which is used in the other villages around here.
http://norran.se/sektion_c.php?id=402667&avdelning _1=102&avdelning_2=0#/
The project is a cooperation between the local power company, intel and others.
The whole catch-22 of the "man" command is that it assumes you know what the command is called in the first place. A good "man" would not only display a short description of commands, it would also:
- Be called "manual" or something even more intuitive, so that a first-time cli user would find it.
- Not assume that I know what command I want help about, but rather what I want to do.
Personally, I'd much rather have an applet using 10% of my cpu power instead of an annoying flash banner (which probly itself uses 10% cpu...).
Obviously someone has to pay for internet content, and that to me would be the least intrusive way. Popup-blockers will be inefficient by the end of the year. Ads will be inside the site content. Or worse still, the popup window is the main window, while the actual content is spawned as "pop under" meaning that if you have a popup stopper, all you get is the ad window...
Cpu cycles is the perfect internet currency. Everyone who visits a website has them.
This looks like an excellent way of "browsing" for music which is not played on the radio. I mean, it's not really competing with the $.99 "own the song"-price of iTunes, but rather it seems like a neat way to preview a lot of songs once (at a penny each) then buy the ones you like on cd or from iTunes.
For whatever reason, market economy is always assumed to solve all problems related to electronic infrastructure. And that assumption is the reason why dsl services are still embarassingly overpriced in the US.
In small stakes bar blackjack tables around here (about $10 max bets) the dealers usuall play 5 to 5½ shoes out of 6 before shuffling. Also, you can count out loud if you prefer. Still, after a couple of beers I have a lot of trouble keeping up after about 3 cards have been dealt.
I surely hope there will be an alternative to DirectX soon, or gaming will be forever stuck in windows.
A unified platform is a must-have to develop games in a smooth fashion, one can't be bothered using separate libraries for audio, 3d, networking, and so on.
This discussion is about how it should be easier to replace windows with linux, nothing else.
I like those choices too. But what is the downside of this (especially on the linux desktop) is that my choices as a developer forces the user to make choices (for example choosing between kde and gnome). My choice of development tools should not end up dictating the look and feel of the program (ideally). Sadly, that is something that often happens to less experienced linux users, like me.I as a developer shouldn't even get a say in the matter of how applications should look and feel. The operating system/desktop system should dictate the look and feel of the applications.
I'm not saying that any platform has succeeded in that yet (for example, the pre-swt java look and feel in windows is just horrible), but this is an opportunity for desktop linux to do something original instead of copying behavior from others.
I'm not an expert on the differences between gtk+ and qt for example, but how difficult would it be (or is it already being done?) to develop a standard that would allow both to look *exactly* the same? Are the two camps even interested in that?
Every manual for the simplest of tasks would soon start with "now, depending on your windowmanager..."
I want a desktop OS where I can be sure that any application I develop will run on any desktop and look exactly the same on all of them, regardless of what language I develop it in.
What I want is something that could come in a box with an apple on it.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's not the user experience of mac/windows that should be copied by linux, it's the whole model of development control that should be adopted to open source development, much like the kernel development process. Less and freedom and less choice. Less pride and zealotry from the supporters of each camp. The linux people need to understand that ONE half-assed product is better than the choice between TWO superb products. This has certainly been realized at redmond.
As long as there is choice, there will be no breakthrough. One more choice won't help either.
Sure, starting in various ends will perhaps give a Darwinian process of development, but now with a plethora of applications developed on the different desktops, incompatible with eachother, there will be no survival of the fittest. All the desktop technologies seem doomed to live side by side forever. sigh.
Same goes if you show a picture of eclipse to a guy running emacs...
or a picture of someone "visually designing" software, to a guy running slashdot.
Offline, you could use cocoon in a cron job to build presentation trees of various kinds, for exampe every night take the docbook tree, and build several output trees (e.g. ps, html, pdf). Making a tarball of these trees would just be the next step of the cronjob.
No I had no Idea that the documents were mirrored. Cocoon is of course suited for the *LDP website*.
Why should the documents be rendered dynamically rather than every time they are updated?Thats the whole point of separation of content and presentation, that you shouldn't have to worry about "rebuilding" or otherwise updating a presentation layer because you change the data.
That said, cocoon could also be used to rebuild static output using all of the desired formats, in one go, whenever the xml data is updated.
Using anything other than apache cocoon for this project is ridiculous.
Of course all the documents are/should be stored as DocBook, then the presentation layer can be handled automatically by cocoon. You could have a zillion options for output, for example:
It amazes me that people always assume that what is a "feature" for one person will always break something for another...
How will ISP:s protect themselves against connection sharing? Even now, me and 3 or 4 neighbours could theoretically share the same 10mbit connection (each of us paying every 4rd or 5th month, instead of $40 each, per month). The 802.11 gets kinda crappy through concrete external walls though. But these new standards should provide a suspicious drop in the number of paid internet connections in any area, no?
sorry bout that, at 1mb they would only room their customers and no transactions, you're right. Funny how the disks shrink. We all remember saying we'd never fill up that 350mb harddrive, and all of a sudden I can come up with a totally reasonable use for 250TB...
Could the rest be just logs of past telephone traffic? All phone traffic ever made through the company? What portion of these databases contain actual used data (data that is likely to be used in business), rather than just stored historic data? Are companies kepping huge amounts of old data because they can? Because it gives the db administrator a stiffie to think he's got $many terabytes in his db rather than on old tapes in the basement?
...by Al Gore (inventor of GoreLAN)
The result of this is that people start using popup blockers, and black out off-site images, disable flash etc. Looking at for example Sweden's largest newspaper website these days, you could have a hard time even finding the actual news. If you don't have flash, you will be reminded to get it, about seven times before the page has loaded.
If I read this without flash, and with no off-site images, the page is ok, but if we all did, the site would either have to adapt (i.e. use less annoying ads) or disappear.
The same I think goes for tv shows. Commercial breaks are not half as frequent in Sweden as they are in the U.S (I guess because when Letterman says "we'll be right back after this", there's only a 50% chance of a commercial break :). If they were, I'd just not watch the shows. I guess the maximum acceptable number of breaks is one every 30 minutes. That means one break in a normal sitcom, and about 3 in a movie. And even that is almost too much. But at that rate I could accept their business model and not get some ad-avoiding device. At least it's better than having full screen closeup's at every product and brand name in the scene...or having things like
Ross: "Why isn't that laser beem cutting through the paint!?"
I Absolutely agree. All computers not bolted to a rack should have a media player pre-installed these days. period. It has to be pre-installed. The choice of picking from countless free and proprietary media players doesn't cut it. Why should making an operating system automatically imply that you have to make a fair playing field for application developers? I don't think it would be unfair of microsoft to ship windows without the possibility of ever installing software on it. People would have to use another os, or just use wordpad and paint. Even with their huge market share, one still has a choice. Making a bad product isn't criminal, it's just stupid.