alternatives..
on
Aethera 1.0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
..this is looking like a viable alternative to evolution, which aside from raising the level of development for this sort of software, should be beneficial to the desktop linux market; having a viable alternative to outlook is one thing, but having a community in which more than one are being actively developed to compete or provide more choice for companies migrating to different operating systems is excellent.:)
The interface certainly doesn't look as pretty as evolution (although it's hard to tell; after 5 posts, the server is treacley already), but I'm not really into KDE interfaces. *shrug*.. it'll be interesting to see how much of a userbase it builds..
Why is this moderated to offtopic? The topic of this article is.. a reusable spacecraft named 'phoenix'. The posting address the name of said spacecraft.. ergo surely it *is* ontopic?
What's more, since this is a site which is concerned with issues like the mozilla browser project's renaming and this is a connected issue, doesn't that make this posting *doubly* not offtopic, even if the posting didn't have much intelligent to say?
An article I wrote on h2g2 which was published in the h2g2 post (the official h2g2 weekly publication produced by the site community) on the subject.. uh..
When I was sharing a house, we had a P-233mmx which was shared between several of the occupants, running windows 9x. After using the thing for some time, the machine began to slow down, behave oddly, and then a few other odd things started to occur; the mouse moved strangely - and then the machine started to type things. By itself. It was fairly obviously some sort of remote control program (either trojan or maliciously stuck on there by one of my housemates) - which started to do other odd things.
Including displaying child pornography on the screen.
The first time this happened, I had the willies scared out of me as my 14 inch monitor was suddenly filled with an image of a girl of a similar age to the size of my monitor, barely dressed, obviously looking up at a taller photographer. It petrified and disgusted me so much that for a moment I didn't move - before I promptly turned the machine off at the mains and gutted it. I couldn't work out what had caused it - and no virus software picked the thing up. Thank god it was a shared computer, or I'd have never used the net again, I think - in the following months the above happened on a monthly basis, and every now and then the bootup screen changed to an image of a fly on windows background, with the label "ISpyFly Windows {something I forget}".
To this day, I have NO idea what the software was that caused it, but of one thing I'm certain - child pornography *can* get onto your computer without your consent or knowledge. No-one knows better than I how much paedophilia goes on online - I worked in computer forensics - but all the same, there are *two* sides to this coin, in whatever proportions they occur.
Incidentally, if anyone's heard of the software or has any idea what it was, let me know. And no, I don't still have access to the machine. It wasn't mine anyway.
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later. Apache/1.3.28 Server at www.sinclairc5.com Port 80
poor sinclair.. always disappointing.;)..so much for british engineering.:)
..my laptop *has* four-directional scroll. Guess dell are just doing that innovative thing again.
But seriously, how is this innovative exactly? Any major change of direction accompanied by a press release from a major company seems to be treated like some sort of computer renaissance. It's common sense at best, and fairly redundant. I don't *ever* use the four-directional scrollpad on my dell laptop. I just don't use any applications that require me to scroll left and right, except when I'm HTMLing and forgotten/chosen not to leave wordwrap on.
Nautical Miles are generally abbreviated in capitals (ie. two nautical miles would be represented as 2NM.). Correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik, the article didn't do that.
..spaceflight has advanced over the last 50 years..
Apollo missions regularly landed within 2nm of the predicted point
..;).. maybe the army/navy should start using those apollo boosters for weapons delivery.:p
Re:www.dictionary.com...
on
Random Humor
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· Score: 2, Funny
"...(and as an afterthought, don't bother correcting me on describing 'naive' as a noun if you missed the SF reference in the fourth definition.;))"
As I posted an hour ago.;).
Re:www.dictionary.com...
on
Random Humor
·
· Score: 1
...(and as an afterthought, don't bother correcting me on describing 'naive' as a noun if you missed the SF reference in the fourth definition.;))
www.dictionary.com...
on
Random Humor
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· Score: 5, Funny
naive or naïve ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-v, nä-) also naif or naïf (n-f, nä) adj.
1. Lacking worldly experience and understanding, especially:
1. Simple and guileless; artless: a child with a naive charm.
2. Unsuspecting or credulous: "Students, often bright but naive, betand losesubstantial sums of money on sporting events" (Tim Layden).
2. Showing or characterized by a lack of sophistication and critical judgment: "this extravagance of metaphors, with its naive bombast" (H.L. Mencken).
...
4. naive: noun, descriptive; historical usage, 21st century. Anyone who posts a link to an mp3 file on slashdot.org
I'm sure that he has quite enough e-mail with which to occupy his time without me filling up his inbox; I suppose you could say that I'm too cynical to think that my opinion really matters - besides, I don't necessarily think that it's desirable (or likely) for someone like Linus to make the jump to PR figurepiece (and there's a difference between this and the spokesperson I mentioned his being in a previous posting): in any case, the mass market identifies far more readily with branded images than it does with spokespeople, especially those as genuine as Linus (by which I mean that he's no Connie - he actually has something to do with the *product*, which most successful spokespeople don't). Maybe I'm wrong - linux certainly isn't a 'product' in any entirely conventional sense of the word, and perhaps it's unfair for me to consider it as one.
However, whilst I see your point (and I fully appreciate that under certain circumstances this could apply), I don't know that it does apply here - the medium of publication is a newspaper whose circulation *isn't* the vocal minority (by which I refer to technophiles) - as you can tell from the front page, it's a local newspaper, complete with all that makes one of these, from local interest stories to the kind of quasi-fictional human interest stories which don't impact the demographic of readership which most newspapers utilise in order to catch peoples interest. Whilst due to the population demographic of the catchment area of the newspaper (read: silicon valley, as far as I can see), a significant proportion of the readership of the newspaper may happen to *be* geeks, but this doesn't indicate that this is the audience which the newspaper is aimed at.
But besides this, even discarding questions which seem to be fairly indicative of a linux-naive readership ("How about the history of Unix itself. Is it hard to follow?"), one explicitly indicates that the journalist is aware that not all of the readership of the paper are linux-savvy ("For our readers who don't know the origins of Linux, can you talk about how it was written given the existence of Unix?"). It may be that the readership of the newspaper is sufficiently diverse that the article requires questions like this *and* more complex ones which appeal to the technophile (and those in between), but nevertheless, this doesn't negate my point; the article *will* be read by people who don't have requisite knowledge to understand even some of the questions (eg. Do you see any boundaries for Linux? Do you want to go after Wind River and other companies in the embedded software space?) and this should have been taken into account, both by the journalist and by Linus.
Part of the problem may be (and I come from a family of journalists who've written regularly for local, national, and international newspapers) that local news doesn't always tend to be the best put-together in the world.;)
As far as my wife goes, she doesn't regularly read *any* technological news outlet. I pried her away from coding html in order to have a second opinion by which to check my own, but I'm fairly sure that she'd be comfortable reading a site like slashdot (as she has in the past).
I "felt compelled to raise the issue" because it's an issue which impacts on myself, my life, and my business, and because it's something I'm interested in. Most importantly, I *did* because I *can*. I fail to see what point you're trying to make other than fishing for karma or simply being malevolent: surely you have something more accomplished, finely worded, or interesting to bring to the discussion than that.
If you genuinely feel that Linus's wording wasn't improvable-upon and that there was nothing wrong with his statement, perhaps you'd like to tell me why? That would categorically be altogether more productive than making a poorly veiled, ambiguous, and unfunny jibe at the marriage of someone you don't know for the sake of it. But then, looking at your picture, perhaps you don't know much about marriage in any case. (feel free to be jibed back.;))
Perhaps most of my point is that I have an altogether hidden agenda which motivates most of what I post with regard to any of my views as expressed on this site - I'm fairly anti-libertarian (and also fairly liberal - take that as you will). I majored in philosophy at a fairly respectable university, and part of the belief structure which, as someone who's devoted a reasonable amount of time to constructive thought, I've generated includes a lot of idealism, part of which is a genuine wish for open source operating systems to be able to gain more users than currently they seem doomed to be restricted to. There are some genuinely well-intended attempts which have been made by the open-source community to strike out into new ground (eg. lindows, or the way in which mandrake has rounded off what most average users would see as unsightly corners) but almost all of these are based in commerce - it is *necessary* in order for open-source projects to reach the mass-market (unless they sell themselves out) that any spokespeople which they have (and Linus is certainly this) pander to the needs and perceptions of the mass majority. And Linus, in this case, did *not* do this. In my original post, I stressed a number of possible reasons for this not having happened, but the fact remains that it *didn't*. And until this happens consistantly, Linux will remain, ostensibly, a project for geeks.
..Linus really doesn't do very much for popular perception of how linux works. He may be stressed, and he may not have been answering with this in mind, but some of his answers really aren't particularly comprehensible to anyone who doesn't understand how linux works.
Looking at the questions in mind, it's fairly obvious that they were set up - ie. that the journalist in question was asking for specific answers (ie. had done his homework properly), but Linus was far too prepared to answer briefly, obviously giving the journalist a reply he'd understand, but not making for good reading.
My wife - who has a fairly good understanding of how open projects work (and has coded both programming languages and html), but is by no means a linux geek - only just understood what Linus was saying, and she's both fairly knowledgable and extremely insightful.
Q: Do you think it works well that you have the final say?
A: I think it works well because I don't have the final say. I have this final say in my tree. It is special in that a lot of people trust my tree. So some people will not use it if it is not my tree. That is a minority. But most people end up using various appendages. My tree is really not. Yes I have the final say on my tree. There is always this forking but there is always this joining. There is more forking than there is joining. But that just means that there are all these dead branches that not end up not being interesting. My branch is to some degree, you could think of it as the trunk of the tree. People try to join back into my tree.
This paragraph, for instance, has so many dependancies (:p) - it requires the user to understand coding, *open source* coding, and have a fairly good understanding of the ethos of.. well, several things. Most readers will *not* be reading with these understandings - if anything, they'll read in *order* to glean these kinds of understandings of something they'll only barely have heard of.
I don't think it's entirely because Linus doesn't speak english natively, either, to fend off potential criticism: I speak three languages, and I know *plenty* of efl (english as a foreign language) speakers who speak english which isn't as good as Linus's (which is excellent) who can explain technical issues with more clarity
In summary.. this is yet another of the problems facing popular adoption of a niche's product.;)
Re:Obligatory Blackadder reference
on
Isn't It Ironic?
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· Score: 1
afaik, the line was actually "like coppery and goldy". But still.;)
Actually, as far as I remember, they released a bootable iso which had complete hardware support with a huge library of software, and network support - a la knoppix.
But their floppy was phenomenally useful - on a site of several thousand people, I used to use it in preference to windows to troubleshoot network equipment - until the company stopped to buy floppy drives for their workstations by default...
An interesting article; not only this, it addresses the issue of inexperienced or job-only computer users using KDE - hitherto not really mentioned in linux-promotion material (apart from obvious examples, eg. lindows). Quite a feather in kde's cap, I'd say.
Slashdot Mirror
..this is looking like a viable alternative to evolution, which aside from raising the level of development for this sort of software, should be beneficial to the desktop linux market; having a viable alternative to outlook is one thing, but having a community in which more than one are being actively developed to compete or provide more choice for companies migrating to different operating systems is excellent. :)
The interface certainly doesn't look as pretty as evolution (although it's hard to tell; after 5 posts, the server is treacley already), but I'm not really into KDE interfaces. *shrug*.. it'll be interesting to see how much of a userbase it builds..
..and it came up with an article on it and more than one site listing it for download - the second link, in fact, was one such site.
How are the results lacking, precisely?
Why is this moderated to offtopic? The topic of this article is.. a reusable spacecraft named 'phoenix'. The posting address the name of said spacecraft.. ergo surely it *is* ontopic?
What's more, since this is a site which is concerned with issues like the mozilla browser project's renaming and this is a connected issue, doesn't that make this posting *doubly* not offtopic, even if the posting didn't have much intelligent to say?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A698925
:-D
An article I wrote on h2g2 which was published in the h2g2 post (the official h2g2 weekly publication produced by the site community) on the subject.. uh..
of some relevance.
..that one community composed entirely of geeks has strong similarities with another community composed also entirely of geeks.
:-D
Sorry, am I missing something?
*shrug*.. wasn't my computer.
When I was sharing a house, we had a P-233mmx which was shared between several of the occupants, running windows 9x. After using the thing for some time, the machine began to slow down, behave oddly, and then a few other odd things started to occur; the mouse moved strangely - and then the machine started to type things. By itself. It was fairly obviously some sort of remote control program (either trojan or maliciously stuck on there by one of my housemates) - which started to do other odd things.
Including displaying child pornography on the screen.
The first time this happened, I had the willies scared out of me as my 14 inch monitor was suddenly filled with an image of a girl of a similar age to the size of my monitor, barely dressed, obviously looking up at a taller photographer. It petrified and disgusted me so much that for a moment I didn't move - before I promptly turned the machine off at the mains and gutted it. I couldn't work out what had caused it - and no virus software picked the thing up. Thank god it was a shared computer, or I'd have never used the net again, I think - in the following months the above happened on a monthly basis, and every now and then the bootup screen changed to an image of a fly on windows background, with the label "ISpyFly Windows {something I forget}".
To this day, I have NO idea what the software was that caused it, but of one thing I'm certain - child pornography *can* get onto your computer without your consent or knowledge. No-one knows better than I how much paedophilia goes on online - I worked in computer forensics - but all the same, there are *two* sides to this coin, in whatever proportions they occur.
Incidentally, if anyone's heard of the software or has any idea what it was, let me know. And no, I don't still have access to the machine. It wasn't mine anyway.
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
;) ..so much for british engineering. :)
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
Apache/1.3.28 Server at www.sinclairc5.com Port 80
poor sinclair.. always disappointing.
..my laptop *has* four-directional scroll. Guess dell are just doing that innovative thing again.
But seriously, how is this innovative exactly? Any major change of direction accompanied by a press release from a major company seems to be treated like some sort of computer renaissance. It's common sense at best, and fairly redundant. I don't *ever* use the four-directional scrollpad on my dell laptop. I just don't use any applications that require me to scroll left and right, except when I'm HTMLing and forgotten/chosen not to leave wordwrap on.
Nautical Miles are generally abbreviated in capitals (ie. two nautical miles would be represented as 2NM.). Correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik, the article didn't do that.
Either way, it's wrong.
..I would, but I just ran out of points. ;)
Pity I ran out of mod points yesterday evening. :(.. mod parent, anyone..
..spaceflight has advanced over the last 50 years..
..;).. maybe the army/navy should start using those apollo boosters for weapons delivery. :p
" ...(and as an afterthought, don't bother correcting me on describing 'naive' as a noun if you missed the SF reference in the fourth definition. ;))"
As I posted an hour ago. ;).
...(and as an afterthought, don't bother correcting me on describing 'naive' as a noun if you missed the SF reference in the fourth definition. ;))
naive or naïve ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-v, nä-) also naif or naïf (n-f, nä)
...
adj.
1. Lacking worldly experience and understanding, especially:
1. Simple and guileless; artless: a child with a naive charm.
2. Unsuspecting or credulous: "Students, often bright but naive, betand losesubstantial sums of money on sporting events" (Tim Layden).
2. Showing or characterized by a lack of sophistication and critical judgment: "this extravagance of metaphors, with its naive bombast" (H.L. Mencken).
4. naive: noun, descriptive; historical usage, 21st century. Anyone who posts a link to an mp3 file on slashdot.org
I'm sure that he has quite enough e-mail with which to occupy his time without me filling up his inbox; I suppose you could say that I'm too cynical to think that my opinion really matters - besides, I don't necessarily think that it's desirable (or likely) for someone like Linus to make the jump to PR figurepiece (and there's a difference between this and the spokesperson I mentioned his being in a previous posting): in any case, the mass market identifies far more readily with branded images than it does with spokespeople, especially those as genuine as Linus (by which I mean that he's no Connie - he actually has something to do with the *product*, which most successful spokespeople don't). Maybe I'm wrong - linux certainly isn't a 'product' in any entirely conventional sense of the word, and perhaps it's unfair for me to consider it as one.
However, whilst I see your point (and I fully appreciate that under certain circumstances this could apply), I don't know that it does apply here - the medium of publication is a newspaper whose circulation *isn't* the vocal minority (by which I refer to technophiles) - as you can tell from the front page, it's a local newspaper, complete with all that makes one of these, from local interest stories to the kind of quasi-fictional human interest stories which don't impact the demographic of readership which most newspapers utilise in order to catch peoples interest. Whilst due to the population demographic of the catchment area of the newspaper (read: silicon valley, as far as I can see), a significant proportion of the readership of the newspaper may happen to *be* geeks, but this doesn't indicate that this is the audience which the newspaper is aimed at.
But besides this, even discarding questions which seem to be fairly indicative of a linux-naive readership ("How about the history of Unix itself. Is it hard to follow?"), one explicitly indicates that the journalist is aware that not all of the readership of the paper are linux-savvy ("For our readers who don't know the origins of Linux, can you talk about how it was written given the existence of Unix?"). It may be that the readership of the newspaper is sufficiently diverse that the article requires questions like this *and* more complex ones which appeal to the technophile (and those in between), but nevertheless, this doesn't negate my point; the article *will* be read by people who don't have requisite knowledge to understand even some of the questions (eg. Do you see any boundaries for Linux? Do you want to go after Wind River and other companies in the embedded software space?) and this should have been taken into account, both by the journalist and by Linus.
Part of the problem may be (and I come from a family of journalists who've written regularly for local, national, and international newspapers) that local news doesn't always tend to be the best put-together in the world. ;)
As far as my wife goes, she doesn't regularly read *any* technological news outlet. I pried her away from coding html in order to have a second opinion by which to check my own, but I'm fairly sure that she'd be comfortable reading a site like slashdot (as she has in the past).
I "felt compelled to raise the issue" because it's an issue which impacts on myself, my life, and my business, and because it's something I'm interested in. Most importantly, I *did* because I *can*. I fail to see what point you're trying to make other than fishing for karma or simply being malevolent: surely you have something more accomplished, finely worded, or interesting to bring to the discussion than that.
If you genuinely feel that Linus's wording wasn't improvable-upon and that there was nothing wrong with his statement, perhaps you'd like to tell me why? That would categorically be altogether more productive than making a poorly veiled, ambiguous, and unfunny jibe at the marriage of someone you don't know for the sake of it. But then, looking at your picture, perhaps you don't know much about marriage in any case. (feel free to be jibed back. ;))
Perhaps most of my point is that I have an altogether hidden agenda which motivates most of what I post with regard to any of my views as expressed on this site - I'm fairly anti-libertarian (and also fairly liberal - take that as you will). I majored in philosophy at a fairly respectable university, and part of the belief structure which, as someone who's devoted a reasonable amount of time to constructive thought, I've generated includes a lot of idealism, part of which is a genuine wish for open source operating systems to be able to gain more users than currently they seem doomed to be restricted to. There are some genuinely well-intended attempts which have been made by the open-source community to strike out into new ground (eg. lindows, or the way in which mandrake has rounded off what most average users would see as unsightly corners) but almost all of these are based in commerce - it is *necessary* in order for open-source projects to reach the mass-market (unless they sell themselves out) that any spokespeople which they have (and Linus is certainly this) pander to the needs and perceptions of the mass majority. And Linus, in this case, did *not* do this. In my original post, I stressed a number of possible reasons for this not having happened, but the fact remains that it *didn't*. And until this happens consistantly, Linux will remain, ostensibly, a project for geeks.
Yeah. Part of my point was that I think it's conceivable that it's still in beta. ;)
I have the scripbook. :p (Which means I should use it to check, shouldn't I.. )
Looking at the questions in mind, it's fairly obvious that they were set up - ie. that the journalist in question was asking for specific answers (ie. had done his homework properly), but Linus was far too prepared to answer briefly, obviously giving the journalist a reply he'd understand, but not making for good reading.
My wife - who has a fairly good understanding of how open projects work (and has coded both programming languages and html), but is by no means a linux geek - only just understood what Linus was saying, and she's both fairly knowledgable and extremely insightful.
This paragraph, for instance, has so many dependancies (:p) - it requires the user to understand coding, *open source* coding, and have a fairly good understanding of the ethos of.. well, several things. Most readers will *not* be reading with these understandings - if anything, they'll read in *order* to glean these kinds of understandings of something they'll only barely have heard of.
I don't think it's entirely because Linus doesn't speak english natively, either, to fend off potential criticism: I speak three languages, and I know *plenty* of efl (english as a foreign language) speakers who speak english which isn't as good as Linus's (which is excellent) who can explain technical issues with more clarity
In summary.. this is yet another of the problems facing popular adoption of a niche's product. ;)
afaik, the line was actually "like coppery and goldy". But still. ;)
That's what I took to doing - knoppix, with a USB keychain drive as my home directory. Tres useful. ;)
Actually, as far as I remember, they released a bootable iso which had complete hardware support with a huge library of software, and network support - a la knoppix.
But their floppy was phenomenally useful - on a site of several thousand people, I used to use it in preference to windows to troubleshoot network equipment - until the company stopped to buy floppy drives for their workstations by default...
An interesting article; not only this, it addresses the issue of inexperienced or job-only computer users using KDE - hitherto not really mentioned in linux-promotion material (apart from obvious examples, eg. lindows). Quite a feather in kde's cap, I'd say.
:)
Or certainly a good sign.