I second this idea. I rolled my own CMS for my personal family news web site. I had a very specific set of requirements, and now I have exactly the system I wanted, no more, no less.
My main reason for writing my own was that existing systems were all designed to generate each web page on the fly. I wanted both the ease of maintenance provided by a CMS and the benefits of a free static web page. My system combined the two approaches by locally generating web pages from a database, then uploading the pages to the free web server provided by my ISP. Judicious use of JavaScript makes the pages appear more dynamic than they actually are.
You may want to start from scratch or use an existing CMS as a baseline. I had basic functionality working for mine in less than a week. I suggest planning from the start for upgrades. I found new features I wanted as I used the system throughout the year. For example, I didn't know until Christmas time that I wanted to be able to post family members' wish lists.
You and I know that there is nothing of great value on the internet that requires a hard drive, but the average user doesn't. Do you know what the number one complaint I got from my Mom after I switched her to Linux? That she couldn't run all the neat programs that her friends downloaded.
Also, that doesn't address the spam issue. The best solution by far I have found for that is http://sneakemail.com/. Before sneakemail, I personally received over 70 spam messages a day. Sneakemail lets you create a different disposable email address for every website you give your email. I have over 100 currently active email addresses now, and get virtually no spam. Well worth the $2 per month (they have a free trial too).
And use the spam armoring feature on slashdot and other forums! Without it, it takes less than a day to start receiving spam on a fresh slashdot email address. With armoring active, I only have to change my slashdot email about once a year.
It all comes down to education. The deeper one delves into the internet, the more one needs to be educated about the dangers and how to avoid them. Unfortunately most people will not listen until their computer is completely unusable, and then forget as soon as things are running nice again. I am astounded at what people shrug off as being normal performance and what dangerous actions are seen as harmless.
I have no idea. You have my vote. The first time I looked at the code was last night to write my reply. My guess is that it was just easier to do it that way.
Is increasing the value of SHEET_MAX_ROWS in src/gnumeric.h and recompiling easy enough for you?
Being able to solve problems like this (making a change that almost no one wants, but is a deal-breaker for those that do) is just one reason why I love open source software.
Talk about feeling disenfranchised. I voted early in our last gubernatorial election. The winner was declared before my vote was even counted! The absentee ballots were pushing the results toward the candidate I voted for, but he bowed out gracefully a few days later before they were finished being counted.
Why can't they tally the early votes early and just hold the results until the polls close?
My Dad, knowing that I prefer to support family and friends' Linux boxes, and having had a good experience with his previous Mandrake system, bought a PC with Linux pre-installed.
The modem and sound card didn't work out of the box and were one of the more difficult to get working with Linux, even for a Linux veteran like me. The resolution on the video card was also very low and difficult to fix. I ended up completely installing a new distribution.
The PC came with a disk of windows drivers for its non-standard modem, sound card, and video card. You can't honestly say that vendor expected anyone to keep that Linux distro on their machine.
I love how they use the term bait-and-switch like it's a con or something. A bait-and-switch is when you bait a customer by representing a product as being of a certain quality, then switch it with an inferior product upon delivery. The people selling these PCs are delivering exactly what they advertise.
I take it back. This must be the first example of a bait-and-switch that the victim pulls on himself. Buying a product as advertised, then voluntarily lowering its value immediately after purchase by wiping Linux and installing pirate Windows.
I do have to admit that some pre-installed Linux vendors do a pretty poor job of pre-installing Linux. My Dad bought one which didn't have a working modem or sound card, and had only very low resolution graphics. It came with a disk of windows drivers for its non-standard included hardware. You can't tell me that the vendor really expected anyone to keep Linux on that machine.
I find that sad because the open nature of Linux makes it possible for OEMs to relatively easily make an uber-customized distribution just for the computers they sell, in a way that isn't technically or financially possible with Windows. I honestly don't think that Linux will ever be accepted by the average Joe until most major OEMs really start making an effort to make it attractive right out of the box. I would pay extra, for example, for a Dell Linux Distribution and security updates that I knew had been thoroughly optimized, tested and pre-installed on my specific model of Dell computer compared to the same computer with the latest version of Red Hat (or worse, something like ThizLinux) slapped on it and forgotten.
I'm planning to write my congressman about the problem. He was pretty responsive the last time I wrote about another issue. Does anyone have a pointer to accurate sources I can refer to in my letter?
You are almost correct. Actually, the original creator of the software doesn't need the GPL in order to freely distribute the software because they hold the copyright. As the GPL only grants rights to distribute and does not revoke any, they are not required to distribute the source to anyone, not even the party they distributed the binary to, but that begs the question, "What's the point?"
If the company is not the one and only original creator of the software, then that is a different matter entirely. They must tell everyone that receives GPL software they distribute where to get the original source code or distribute it themselves. They must also distribute the source to any modifications they make for at least 3 years to any third party that makes a request or distribute the entire source together with any binary.
I agree with you though. I don't think Sun is violating any terms of the GPL with its subscription model, and I think we would know about it if they were. I don't know what specific perceived offences "treating the GPL right" refers to, but it is obvious that the FUD surrounding the GPL is still going strong.
I couldn't agree with you more. I am an embedded software engineer. I have only done maintenance for about the last year (no new code), and wouldn't want to maintain a large project in any other language than Ada. Most everyone I work with will agree. Let me give you just two reasons why.
In Ada, if programs fail during runtime, they are much more likely to fail at the point where the coding error actually occurred, instead of at some side-effect point later in the execution.
The constraints of the Ada language make most errors occur at compile time. I recently had to increase the size of one element of a frequently used data structure. It was a pain to get it to compile again, but every single bug caused by the size increase was fixed before I even ran it once. As a frequent C programmer, I know that I would have missed a large number of those until runtime, and at least one bug would probably have gone unnoticed until the most inopportune time (like a customer demo).
I'd even argue about the initial coding taking longer in a language like Ada. Sure, it can sometimes take a little more effort to bang out your first compilable version, but it is a lot more likely to work the first time. And usually it is only the declaration section that is significantly different from a C implementation.
I had to set my wi-fi to channel 1 in order to prevent interference with my 2.4 GHz spread spectrum phone. I thought I was just having random driver anomalies until one day I couldn't connect at all while my wife was on the phone then finally connected the instant she hung up. Watching the signal to noise ratio when I turned the phone on and off finally proved it.
What a lot of people don't realize is that both 802.11 and cordless phones are part 15 devices, meaning they have no spectrum allocated to them, they can't generate any interference to licensed users of that frequency, and have to accept any interference from other sources.
Much of the bandwidth that 802.11 uses is allocated to amateur radio, meaning that I can transmit up to 1500 Watts on those channels and legally interfere with any wi-fi stations that are in my way.
Lucky for everyone, Hams are nice guys that like computers and wireless internet too, and do everything in their power to avoid such interference even though it is their legal right.
Reminds me of an old joke. How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None. They just redefine darkness as the industry standard.
About a year ago, my wife tripped over my HP laptop cord and knocked it off of the table. The hard drive crashed hard enough to make tinkling noises. Mind you this was at least the third time it had a fall like that. I took out the (IBM) hard drive, popped in a standard Knoppix disk, and have been using that ever since. I'm typing this right now on that laptop over an 802.11g connection that takes me less than 30 seconds to configure with a nice gui every time I boot up. It has connected by default before to my neighbor's unsecured wireless router without having to do anything.
This laptop definitely runs Linux well and is definitely hardy enough to withstand some abuse. When it finally does give out you can bet I will be replacing it with one of HP's preinstalled Linux laptops.
I personally don't use VNC at work because straight X is available and looks better in my opinion, but a lot of colleagues do because they can be working at their desk and then go to the lab and have all their editor windows, etc. open in exactly the same way. I use screen for the same reason at home. One of the nice things about gnome is that you don't have to have everything installed that's available. Most distros only install about half when you install "Gnome". Probably, you will have to install a package like gnome-vnc to get the extra (but tightly integrated) functionality.
Don't forget that it is a part 15 radio receiver and subject to interference. I had similar problems when I first got wi-fi where my connection would be flawless for an hour and then all of a sudden drop out completely. It took me about half a day to figure out that my cordless phone was interfering and what channel to use to prevent the interference. His interference seems to be more constant and could be caused by almost anything electrical in the house or even at a neighbor's house. Just go around the house flipping stuff on and off and see how the signal to noise ratio is affected.
Exactly. We haven't even had a windows partition for a couple of years and I was suprised to see my wife use the famous blue "e" icon to launch firefox from her gnome desktop the other day. I had forgotten I originally made it for her way back when firefox didn't even exist. That single icon was the only thing she balked at when we made the switch to 100% Linux.
My wife probably has more time on a Linux desktop than half of slashdot readers. She gets frustrated at how "clunky" Windows is when she has to use it at the library or a relative's house. She's fully aware that she isn't using IE, and in fact hates the look and feel of IE now. But she still equates that little blue "e" with a web browser. Behold the power of familiarity.
Best argument for open source business software I have ever heard.
My first internship was replacing a 25 year old pc and two 30 year old pieces of equipment hooked to it in a wafer fab that was still using the equipment 24 hours a day for full production. It is a unique perspective to work on a project with a 3 decade span of technology. How many software companies have born and died in that time? How many will be born and die in the next 30 years? You can never count on a vendor to be around for more than a few years.
I think that's why I have such an affinity for open source. If my hardware is still running 30 years from now and I make reasonable backup/maintenance efforts, then I will still have the source to my software and a means to upgrade and compile it, even if the original developer is long gone.
If you had went with GNUPOS a few years ago, you wouldn't be sunk now. You would have software that meets your current needs. If your needs change in the future, you can hire anyone you want to upgrade/maintain it. The original developer even seems willing to make changes for the right price based on the sourceforge page. If your needs don't change, or only change within the scope of the existing software, it costs you nothing. Why keep an ongoing support contract with a company when you really only need the occasional short contract for upgrades? As a former contract programmer I can tell you that contract programmers thrive on change and can pick up new software very quickly.
Contrast this with a closed source alternative that goes out of business (or even EOLs your version). You can continue to use the software as long as it meets your needs, but as soon as your needs change you are stuck. Your only alternative is to change to another software package.
In Puerto Rico, the cops always drive with their
lights on so as to be better noticed. The legend is that
some high government official got caught in an affair
or something and passed a law so he would have
advance warning next time. An interesting side
effect is that drivers in San Juan are among the
worst I have ever seen.
I agree. The only ebuild problems I have had were since I switched to accept ~x86 and occasionally when I unmask an ebuild. But then I knew I was disabling stability safeguards and had no cause for complaint.
I manually compile and inject the cvs version of mplayer (I'm working on getting a patch accepted) and have had no problems getting it to work together with the mplayer plugin ebuild, which has a pretty strong dependency relationship.
I think the Gentoo developers as a whole do a great job of making stable ebuilds for weeks-old software, making unstable ebuilds available extremely quickly for the testing pioneers, and clearly differentiating between the two.
If you want bleeding edge software on your machine, then the cost is doing some of the work yourself. Otherwise, just wait for it to become stable. In my experience it doesn't take very long at all with Gentoo.
You seriously need to take econ 101. He isn't screwing anyone by licensing his 100 LOC program for $10,000 because no one is going to buy it at that price. The great thing about a free market is that trades only happen if they are fair as agreed upon by both buyer and seller.
If $100 wasn't a reasonable price for a game, no one would buy it and they would eventually lower the price until people did buy it. Just because something costs more than you are willing to pay doesn't make it an unfair cost.
You want to talk about theft of energy. What do you think paying nothing for a game that cost millions of dollars to develop and that millions of people think $100 is a fair value for is?
I agree with you about spending a little bit of time to check compatibility paying off. I have had that habit for so long that I get suprised when other people (LUG, relatives) have difficulty with their hardware because I haven't had problems myself in a long time.
I think we need to add another short step to our purchasing decisions: informing the companies of unsupported products of the reason why we went with their competitor. I bet if all Linux users did that instead of quietly buying only well-supported hardware then we would see a lot more well-supported hardware. They would have concrete evidence of at least some money they are losing by ignoring (or actively opposing) Linux.
Linux is just as easy to use as Windows, if not easier. (Have you tried Gnome 2.4 yet? The latest KDE is probably excellent as well.) Almost everyone who has used both will agree on that. What is easier on Windows is setup, installation, and administration. Which is precisely why my Mother only runs Linux.
Illogical, you say? Well, I don't get any calls now like, "I tried to fix this, but ended up royally screwing up everything" like I did when she ran Windows (and still get from other family members that I can't get to switch). Windows gives the novice user just enough rope to hang herself.
I would much rather get a call saying they want to switch ISPs so can I set them up than a call saying they tried to do it themself and now they can't connect to the shared printer on the other computer either and they don't know what they did to break it. No requests for pirated software, getting rid of popups, "why does my network light blink so much", or "why does my hard drive thrash so much since I opened that email".
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My main reason for writing my own was that existing systems were all designed to generate each web page on the fly. I wanted both the ease of maintenance provided by a CMS and the benefits of a free static web page. My system combined the two approaches by locally generating web pages from a database, then uploading the pages to the free web server provided by my ISP. Judicious use of JavaScript makes the pages appear more dynamic than they actually are.
You may want to start from scratch or use an existing CMS as a baseline. I had basic functionality working for mine in less than a week. I suggest planning from the start for upgrades. I found new features I wanted as I used the system throughout the year. For example, I didn't know until Christmas time that I wanted to be able to post family members' wish lists.
You and I know that there is nothing of great value on the internet that requires a hard drive, but the average user doesn't. Do you know what the number one complaint I got from my Mom after I switched her to Linux? That she couldn't run all the neat programs that her friends downloaded.
Also, that doesn't address the spam issue. The best solution by far I have found for that is http://sneakemail.com/. Before sneakemail, I personally received over 70 spam messages a day. Sneakemail lets you create a different disposable email address for every website you give your email. I have over 100 currently active email addresses now, and get virtually no spam. Well worth the $2 per month (they have a free trial too).
And use the spam armoring feature on slashdot and other forums! Without it, it takes less than a day to start receiving spam on a fresh slashdot email address. With armoring active, I only have to change my slashdot email about once a year.
It all comes down to education. The deeper one delves into the internet, the more one needs to be educated about the dangers and how to avoid them. Unfortunately most people will not listen until their computer is completely unusable, and then forget as soon as things are running nice again. I am astounded at what people shrug off as being normal performance and what dangerous actions are seen as harmless.
I have no idea. You have my vote. The first time I looked at the code was last night to write my reply. My guess is that it was just easier to do it that way.
Being able to solve problems like this (making a change that almost no one wants, but is a deal-breaker for those that do) is just one reason why I love open source software.
Why can't they tally the early votes early and just hold the results until the polls close?
The modem and sound card didn't work out of the box and were one of the more difficult to get working with Linux, even for a Linux veteran like me. The resolution on the video card was also very low and difficult to fix. I ended up completely installing a new distribution.
The PC came with a disk of windows drivers for its non-standard modem, sound card, and video card. You can't honestly say that vendor expected anyone to keep that Linux distro on their machine.
If you really want to make sure it's clean, you have to lick it.
I take it back. This must be the first example of a bait-and-switch that the victim pulls on himself. Buying a product as advertised, then voluntarily lowering its value immediately after purchase by wiping Linux and installing pirate Windows.
I do have to admit that some pre-installed Linux vendors do a pretty poor job of pre-installing Linux. My Dad bought one which didn't have a working modem or sound card, and had only very low resolution graphics. It came with a disk of windows drivers for its non-standard included hardware. You can't tell me that the vendor really expected anyone to keep Linux on that machine.
I find that sad because the open nature of Linux makes it possible for OEMs to relatively easily make an uber-customized distribution just for the computers they sell, in a way that isn't technically or financially possible with Windows. I honestly don't think that Linux will ever be accepted by the average Joe until most major OEMs really start making an effort to make it attractive right out of the box. I would pay extra, for example, for a Dell Linux Distribution and security updates that I knew had been thoroughly optimized, tested and pre-installed on my specific model of Dell computer compared to the same computer with the latest version of Red Hat (or worse, something like ThizLinux) slapped on it and forgotten.
I'm planning to write my congressman about the problem. He was pretty responsive the last time I wrote about another issue. Does anyone have a pointer to accurate sources I can refer to in my letter?
If the company is not the one and only original creator of the software, then that is a different matter entirely. They must tell everyone that receives GPL software they distribute where to get the original source code or distribute it themselves. They must also distribute the source to any modifications they make for at least 3 years to any third party that makes a request or distribute the entire source together with any binary.
I agree with you though. I don't think Sun is violating any terms of the GPL with its subscription model, and I think we would know about it if they were. I don't know what specific perceived offences "treating the GPL right" refers to, but it is obvious that the FUD surrounding the GPL is still going strong.
In Ada, if programs fail during runtime, they are much more likely to fail at the point where the coding error actually occurred, instead of at some side-effect point later in the execution.
The constraints of the Ada language make most errors occur at compile time. I recently had to increase the size of one element of a frequently used data structure. It was a pain to get it to compile again, but every single bug caused by the size increase was fixed before I even ran it once. As a frequent C programmer, I know that I would have missed a large number of those until runtime, and at least one bug would probably have gone unnoticed until the most inopportune time (like a customer demo).
I'd even argue about the initial coding taking longer in a language like Ada. Sure, it can sometimes take a little more effort to bang out your first compilable version, but it is a lot more likely to work the first time. And usually it is only the declaration section that is significantly different from a C implementation.
What a lot of people don't realize is that both 802.11 and cordless phones are part 15 devices, meaning they have no spectrum allocated to them, they can't generate any interference to licensed users of that frequency, and have to accept any interference from other sources.
Much of the bandwidth that 802.11 uses is allocated to amateur radio, meaning that I can transmit up to 1500 Watts on those channels and legally interfere with any wi-fi stations that are in my way.
Lucky for everyone, Hams are nice guys that like computers and wireless internet too, and do everything in their power to avoid such interference even though it is their legal right.
Reminds me of an old joke. How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None. They just redefine darkness as the industry standard.
About a year ago, my wife tripped over my HP laptop cord and knocked it off of the table. The hard drive crashed hard enough to make tinkling noises. Mind you this was at least the third time it had a fall like that. I took out the (IBM) hard drive, popped in a standard Knoppix disk, and have been using that ever since. I'm typing this right now on that laptop over an 802.11g connection that takes me less than 30 seconds to configure with a nice gui every time I boot up. It has connected by default before to my neighbor's unsecured wireless router without having to do anything.
This laptop definitely runs Linux well and is definitely hardy enough to withstand some abuse. When it finally does give out you can bet I will be replacing it with one of HP's preinstalled Linux laptops.
I personally don't use VNC at work because straight X is available and looks better in my opinion, but a lot of colleagues do because they can be working at their desk and then go to the lab and have all their editor windows, etc. open in exactly the same way. I use screen for the same reason at home. One of the nice things about gnome is that you don't have to have everything installed that's available. Most distros only install about half when you install "Gnome". Probably, you will have to install a package like gnome-vnc to get the extra (but tightly integrated) functionality.
Don't forget that it is a part 15 radio receiver and subject to interference. I had similar problems when I first got wi-fi where my connection would be flawless for an hour and then all of a sudden drop out completely. It took me about half a day to figure out that my cordless phone was interfering and what channel to use to prevent the interference. His interference seems to be more constant and could be caused by almost anything electrical in the house or even at a neighbor's house. Just go around the house flipping stuff on and off and see how the signal to noise ratio is affected.
My wife probably has more time on a Linux desktop than half of slashdot readers. She gets frustrated at how "clunky" Windows is when she has to use it at the library or a relative's house. She's fully aware that she isn't using IE, and in fact hates the look and feel of IE now. But she still equates that little blue "e" with a web browser. Behold the power of familiarity.
My first internship was replacing a 25 year old pc and two 30 year old pieces of equipment hooked to it in a wafer fab that was still using the equipment 24 hours a day for full production. It is a unique perspective to work on a project with a 3 decade span of technology. How many software companies have born and died in that time? How many will be born and die in the next 30 years? You can never count on a vendor to be around for more than a few years.
I think that's why I have such an affinity for open source. If my hardware is still running 30 years from now and I make reasonable backup/maintenance efforts, then I will still have the source to my software and a means to upgrade and compile it, even if the original developer is long gone.
Contrast this with a closed source alternative that goes out of business (or even EOLs your version). You can continue to use the software as long as it meets your needs, but as soon as your needs change you are stuck. Your only alternative is to change to another software package.
In Puerto Rico, the cops always drive with their lights on so as to be better noticed. The legend is that some high government official got caught in an affair or something and passed a law so he would have advance warning next time. An interesting side effect is that drivers in San Juan are among the worst I have ever seen.
I manually compile and inject the cvs version of mplayer (I'm working on getting a patch accepted) and have had no problems getting it to work together with the mplayer plugin ebuild, which has a pretty strong dependency relationship.
I think the Gentoo developers as a whole do a great job of making stable ebuilds for weeks-old software, making unstable ebuilds available extremely quickly for the testing pioneers, and clearly differentiating between the two.
If you want bleeding edge software on your machine, then the cost is doing some of the work yourself. Otherwise, just wait for it to become stable. In my experience it doesn't take very long at all with Gentoo.
If $100 wasn't a reasonable price for a game, no one would buy it and they would eventually lower the price until people did buy it. Just because something costs more than you are willing to pay doesn't make it an unfair cost.
You want to talk about theft of energy. What do you think paying nothing for a game that cost millions of dollars to develop and that millions of people think $100 is a fair value for is?
I think we need to add another short step to our purchasing decisions: informing the companies of unsupported products of the reason why we went with their competitor. I bet if all Linux users did that instead of quietly buying only well-supported hardware then we would see a lot more well-supported hardware. They would have concrete evidence of at least some money they are losing by ignoring (or actively opposing) Linux.
Illogical, you say? Well, I don't get any calls now like, "I tried to fix this, but ended up royally screwing up everything" like I did when she ran Windows (and still get from other family members that I can't get to switch). Windows gives the novice user just enough rope to hang herself.
I would much rather get a call saying they want to switch ISPs so can I set them up than a call saying they tried to do it themself and now they can't connect to the shared printer on the other computer either and they don't know what they did to break it. No requests for pirated software, getting rid of popups, "why does my network light blink so much", or "why does my hard drive thrash so much since I opened that email".