My Clie NX-70v already has a universal remote, and it's a fully functional PalmOS PDA, with other toys like a still/video camera, an MP3 player, a voice recorder, and a full (but tiny) qwerty keyboard.
And according to Amazon, you can get the things for under $120 now. Don't you just love the radical depreciation on a device you paid four times more for barely 18 months ago? *sigh*
But anyway, yeah, the remote. It's fantastic. Going out to eat with a whole bunch of friends, and the restaraunt puts you all in a private room with not one, not two, but three televisions obnoxiously drowning out conversation with sports & news? No problem! The same thing happened to me last week, and the Clie was able to turn off all the televisions right from the table, even when the TVs were 20 or 30 feet away. This only worked, of course, because I happened to have my Clie with me -- but then, it's a PDA, and I almost always have it with me.
The device described in this article, aside from being several times more expensive, is also several times less likely to have general purpose use outside of your living room (unless you're in the habit of going around town turning off televisions, but that isn't a very common hobby). If you're going to spend that much money, why not get a general purpose device?
The Clie I have isn't the only one that has the remote, either. The PEG-T665C also has one, as did the PEG-T415, and it seems like all the models in the NX/NV series (the folding clamshell ones like the NX-70v) have it, too. Even the fanciest of these should be available for a couple hundred bucks cheaper than the Navitus, and all of them are more capable. Shop around!:-)
And that is? You haven't mentioned any musical qualities in your post at all...
She sings sogs [sic] that a lot of people enjoy listening to.
This completely fails to address the question. The question was "what qualities appeal to people", not "what is her profession." If you factor in the lip synching thing, you didn't even address the question of what her profession is, but nevermind.
I like all kinds of music, all genres. Not all of it is particularly talented -- I love the Ramones but they never did figure out how to play a song with three chords in it -- but I do try to take in as wide a variety of genres as I can get my hands on: rock (Beatles, Kinks, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Clash, the Pixies, and lots of punk & indie rock type stuff from there), jazz (Miles Davis, Louie Armstrong, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Martin Medeski & Wood, John Zorn), electronic music (Kraftwerk, Massive Attack, Autechre), rap & hip hop (Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest, the Roots), classical (Bach, Beethoven), world music (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, klezmer jazz, tuva singing, Los Lobos [or are they rock?], Japanese pop), etc. Just to scratch the surface.
If there's something inventive & vibrant there, I'll give it a chance and probably like it. If it's crap, I do what I can to avoid it, no matter how popular it is. Jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish are crap -- they pick a scale and noodle around in it aimlessly in a pot-addled haze for a few hours, but dammit you could write a Perl script to do that. The Doors are a collossal, steaming, quaking mound of crap. Jimi Hendrix was astounding, as were the Beatles. The Rolling Stones were okay, but nothing brilliant like Hendrix or the Beatles. Pick & choose.
This inventivness area is where Britney Spears makes falls down dramatically -- there's no spark in it that makes it worth paying attention to. That's not to say that pop musicians can't also be interesting artists -- both Prince & Madonna showed that magnificently since the 80s -- but more often than not, the stuff on pop radio is middle of the road crap that really does have little to redeem it. This has nothing to do with popularity -- I neither know nor care what bands are popular on the charts these days -- it has to do with the performer's ability to work as an artist and establish some kind of visceral connection with the listener.
But then, I'm not really answering the question either. You're just saying she's good because people like her; I'm just saying she sucks in spite of the fact that people like her. Neither of those angles really gets to the heart of the question. For that kind of answer, you could do a lot worse than to read Pat Metheny's commentary on Kenny G's version of Louie Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World". No, it doesn't have anything to do with Britney Spears, but it does convey quite nicely how painful it can be to see some no-talent ass-clown arrogantly stomping all over the memory of one of the most widely enjoyed people in American music. This isn't the exact transgression Britney makes with her music, but it ends up pushing a lot of the same buttons.
But really, if you want proof that Britney Spears is not only a talentless ass-clown, but also a dangerously corrupting influence on America's youth, you need look no further than this quote:
I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.
America's "wholesome little sweetheart" is nothing but a Stalinist! Argggh!
In the most recent report I could find, Apple's market share was put at 3.7%, with recent quarter growth of 9.3% -- but this is in a market where Dell alone has a share of 32.9%, and the market overall grew by 10.9% in the USA and 15.5% globally. That is to say, even though Apple is "growing" relative to their own recent performance, they're still not growing at a rate that keeps up with the industry as a whole, and they're especially slipping behind global figures. Their market share trend is going down, even as their health as an individual company appears to be holding steady or improving.
Meanwhile, figures for Linux are harder to determine, but it seems that the past couple of years suggest that Linux has hovered at a steady 1%, so the picture isn't any stronger on that side -- they're doing at best 1/3 of what Apple is doing.
(And yes, market share figures are all voodoo that is about as reliable as hardware benchmarks (that is to say, hardly reliable at all), but still, the discussion doesn't work if you don't at least take a stab at quantifying things. So please, grant me some leeway here:-)
More to the point, it doesn't seem like Google has ever had a problem with catering to just the dominant platform. Consider the Google Toolbar, which has been available for years as an IE only plugin on Windows -- it has never been available for the Mac version of IE, and it has never been offered for other operating systems (they just meekly suggest putting links to Google in your Netscape bookmark bar, but that hardly counts for much). Admittedly, Mozilla has had third-party Google search plugins for a while now, and when Safari came out it had a built-in Google search box, but these were both provided by third-parties, not Google.
The only client-side software Google has offered in the past has been for Windows and IE, and the Picassa acquisition is just a continuation of this pattern.
I played around with Picassa for a little while last night, and it is a pretty slick application; I can see why they wanted it (the UI is quite clever, and they may want to put some of the people who thought it up to work on their existing web tools & webmail). I'd love to see a version of it for OSX (please, please something better than iPhoto), but I'm not convinced that that Google will bother porting it, based on the questionable market share trends and their past client-side offerings.
Polarizing filters can be used with color or black and white film to reduce reflections. This can be essential when photographing through glass or when trying to capture an image of something floating beneath the surface of a lake or pool.
A trained studio photographer can use tricks like polarized lenses & carefully placed lighting to make it seem as if glass is perfectly transparent & non-reflective.
You're an exception though, Pudge. If you want to define "professional" as "someone who is paid to work in a profession", then you are nearly unique among Slashdot editors in being both professional and competent.
There's still an embarrassing continuity of basic errors, ranging from failures in basic spelling & grammar on through a consistent unwillingness to cover the basic journalistic who / what / where / when questions in many of the article summaries.
The site may not be as bad as it used to be (that or I've just gotten used to it over the years), but it still averages at a level far cruder than you typically see on just about any other major tech site. About the only site that seems consistently worse is The Register, but then they're pretty much the National Enquirer of tech news journalism and being more competent than them isn't such a grand thing to be.
So, yes, the comment you're replying to was silly & dumb, but come on -- there was more than a little bit of truth in it. You personally may not be to blame for the problem here, but you can't really deny that the sloppy editing skills on Slashdot has been a consistent problem for years now, can you?
This could be an addition to the usual humorous fortune cookie suffixes. It's well known that most fortune cookies are much improved by adding the words "in bed" onto the end; most Unix nerds (but absolutely no one else ever anywhere) will also find adding "using Emacs" to work, and now that you mention it, "in Japan" should work as well. Consider these fortune enhancements, which are all based on actual fortune cookies cataloged at this site:
You will receive a fortune (cookie). You will receive a fortune (cookie) in bed. / You will receive a fortune (cookie) using Emacs. / You will receive a fortune (cookie) in Japan.
You love Chinese Food. You love Chinese Food in bed. / You love Chinese Food using Emacs. / You love Chinese Food in Japan.
Someone will invite you to a Karaoke party. Someone will invite you to a Karaoke party in bed. / Someone will invite you to a Karaoke party using Emacs. / Someone will invite you to a Karaoke party in Japan.
Don't forget, you are always on our minds. Don't forget, you are always on our minds in bed. / Don't forget, you are always on our minds using Emacs. / Don't forget, you are always on our minds in Japan.
You are filled with life's most precious treasuere... Hope! You are filled with life's most precious treasuere... Hope in bed! / You are filled with life's most precious treasuere... Hope using Emacs! / You are filled with life's most precious treasuere... Hope in Japan!
Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence. Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence in bed. / Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence using Emacs. / Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence in Japan.
You long to see the great pyramids in Egypt. You long to see the great pyramids in Egypt in bed. / You long to see the great pyramids in Egypt using Emacs. / You long to see the great pyramids in Egypt in Japan.
Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life. Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life in bed. / Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life using Emacs. / Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life in Japan.
Everything is not yet lost. Everything is not yet lost in bed. / Everything is not yet lost using Emacs. / Everything is not yet lost in Japan.
Buy many dream boxes. Ask a friend to select one. Buy many dream boxes. Ask a friend to select one in bed. / Buy many dream boxes. Ask a friend to select one using Emacs. / Buy many dream boxes. Ask a friend to select one in Japan.
Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily. Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily in bed. / Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily using Emacs. / Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily in Japan.
Suppose you can get what you want.... Suppose you can get what you want... in bed. / Suppose you can get what you want... using Emacs. / Suppose you can get what you want... in Japan.
What you left behind is more mellow than wine. What you left behind is more mellow than wine in bed. / What you left behind is more mellow than wine using Emacs. / What you left behind is more mellow than wine in Japan.
A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard. A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard in bed. / A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard using Emacs. / A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard in Japan.
Never wear your best pants when you go to fight for freedom. Never wear your best pants when you go to fight for freedom in bed. / Never we
Right now, the state of the art in software security is to pass your code through some kind of static source-code analyzer such as ITS4 or Fortify that looks for dangerous practices and known bugs. That's a great start, and, according to my friend Gary McGraw--chief technology officer of Cigital and author of several books on software security--who works with the stuff, it catches a significant number of potential security problems. But, as you can see, the compiler already knows a lot of what it needs to in order to make a good stab at determining what is being done wrong.
One really neat concept is embodied in the Perl programming language--tainting. The idea of tainting is that the interpreter tracks the source of data and turns off dangerous operations if they are called directly as a result of user input. For example, when you're running a Perl script in taint mode, it turns on a lot of error checking before passing user-provided data to certain system calls. When you try to open a file for write using a filename that is tainted data, it checks to make sure the directory tree ownerships for the target directory are correct and that the filename doesn't contain "../" path expansions. In other words, the runtime environment tracks not just the type and value of the data but also its origin. You can imagine how nice this capability can be for writing server-side code or captive applications.
Unfortunately, few programmers use tainting because it imposes an extra burden on the programmer, and it's sometimes difficult to figure out a secure way to get the job done. But what if we built tainting-type capabilities right into our runtime environments for C/C++? A simple high-value approach might be to modify I/O routines (read/write) to determine if they are connected to a socket from a remote system, and to do some basic checks on data coming across it, such as checking to see if the stack is altered across calls to certain functions following I/O.
Ranum is citing this as an example of a way that existing tools -- such as GCC -- could be enhanced in such a way that programmers using currently popular languages (C/C++) would have a better security safety net without having to be retrained in practices (like checking for buffer overflows) that while obvious are still under-utilized in most software. The whole article is interesting reading, but this remark about Perl's taint mode seems like one of the best concrete examples of a modern protective language feature.
I am starting to see signs of Japanese cultural influence in the U. S.
I am starting to see signs of Italian cultural influence in the U. S. "Sopranos" merchandise, pizza, etc.
I am starting to see signs of Mexican cultural influence in the U. S. Latin pop music, tex-mex restaraunts, etc.
Etc.
The problem, of course, is that as a so-called melting pot -- how much things "melt" is debatable, and maybe "tossed salad" is a better metaphor, but whatever -- the U.S. exhibits lots of non-local cultural influences.
The thing is, these influences may or may not have any bearing on how dominant the amalgamated American culture is in other places.
A better indicator would be how American vs. [other] cultural artifacts are being adopted in other parts of the world. For examples, what movies were biggers hits in Jakarta, Nairobi, Lagos, Lima, Buenos Aires, etc: Lord of the Rings & Finding Nemo, or Shaolin Soccer & Spirited Away? What ethnic foods are more popular -- hamburgers or sushi? What languages are more popular in schools?
You'll learn far more about which culture is more popular by looking abroad than you will by looking at what is happening in the USA.
Have a look at the wonderful world of bioinformatics, where (hopefully) you should be able to find an array of academic institutions publishing their data for peer review.
To pick just the one place I'm vaguely familiar with, try Boston University's BMERC lab, which publishes both raw genomes and MySQL databases. BMERC's main genome.sql.gz file is 119,294,059 bytes (113 mb, compressed), which should be well into the "large dataset" category you're asking for:-)
There are surely many other schools publishing similar data if you poke around a bit.
Of course, at that point, you start to be bound by the problem domain. Sure, you have lots of data and that's all well & good, but what does it mean? What sorts of analysis can you usefully do on it? Without a biology background, maybe not much, but it's an interesting field and you should be able to give yourself enough of a crash course to make something useful out of it...
I have no interest in sports. I would be happy not to have any sports networks. I would, on the other hand, enjoy a suite of comercial-free movie channels (Sundance, IFC, TCM, etc), but basic Comcast cable in my town has lots of sports and -- with the exception of AMC (which seems to have started running channels some time in the past few years [is it obvious I'm not a frequent teevee watcher?] and so doesn't appeal as much as it used to) -- no movie channels.
Likewise, I could do without Fox "News", though I'd be willing to have them along with a suite of similer info-tainment channels (CNN, MSNBC, BBC News in a perfect world, C-SPAN, etc). My wife loves the home improvement & home makeover channels (since when did TLC not show perpetual reruns of James Burke's "Connections" series [really, is it obvious that I'm not a teeveee watcher? when did they kick him off the air and turn into the "all home makeovers all the time" channel?]), so she'd be interested in a package of those networks.
*****
In other words, there may be a middle ground between the channel package system we have now -- in which most people end up paying lots of money to subsidize many channels they don't want in order to get a couple of channels they do -- and the possibly untenable situation you describe -- where everything is a la carte and, while cheaper, it's likely that spinofff channels would have a real challenge.
With themed clusters of channels -- sports, news, movies, music, home life (home improvement, cooking), children, international (non-English channels for immigrant communities), etc -- people would be able to get the kinds of channels they want and new channels would have ready audiences.
I'm curious what the bottleneck is preventing these sorts of things. Is there a technical issue, where (say) bandwidth consideration in putting all these channel packs on the same trunk of subscription lines, or is the barrier simply economical & logistic on the business end of the cable companies?
Yeah, no kidding -- I remember using BeOS 4.5 and 5.0 [paid version!] and thinking that the application grouping was such an obviously good idea -- as plentyofscreenshots will illustrate -- that I couldn't see why this idea wasn't being ripped off in the Windows taskbar.
But then, of course, Be was chased out of town and Windows put in substantially the same interface into XP when it came out. As forseen by prophesy -- Microsoft never saw a good idea that they weren't above flagrantly stealing for their next major release.
Yeah, no kidding -- I remember using BeOS 4.5 and 5.0 [paid version!] and thinking that the application grouping was such an obviously good idea -- as plentyofscreenshots will illustrate -- that I couldn't see why this idea wasn't being ripped off in the Windows taskbar.
But then, of course, Be was chased out of town and Windows put in substantially the same interface into XP when it came out. As forseen by prophesy -- Microsoft never saw a good idea that they weren't above flagrantly stealing for their next major release.
Yeah, but look at the map they made: aside from the USA, Canada, Sweden, and Austria, the surveyors basically ignored the first world. The sampled as many developing and under-developed countries, where it seems safe to assume that the average people are far less likely to have a computer or broadband access at home.
For people in these places, access to a cybercafe is about the only option -- which is why the surveyors looked at the ratio of average hourly cybercafe rates cost to average daily wages. That's why the "expensive" $5.00 average in the USA and the $4.30 in Canada gets a bright green "cheap" rating, while the "cheap" $0.60 average in Ghana and $1.35 in India get a deep red "expensive" rating.
Most of the world's population aren't wealthy westerners like the average Slashdot reader!
I'm not a Fleet customer, so I couldn't say what the problem is.
I have been told though by two people -- both accountants -- that they've had problems working with Fleet's site when managing corporate accounts. I don't know if Fleet has a separate site for home & corporate users or what, I just know that, in the case of one of these people, he was having problems completing a [big] transaction online and when he called Fleet's tech support and the found out he's using Mozilla, they told him that they do not support anything other than IE.
This particular guy would be delighted to ditch IE if he could -- he hates the popups, the spyware that keeps infesting his compute, etc -- but there are sites that he cannot avoid using that simply do not work with Mozilla. It's not as simple as switching a personal bank account; these are sites needed for business use.
I like the Gecko family of browsers as much as any of you, but as a sysadmin that has to support user's day to day needs (including family & friends, from time to time), I just can't see the value in hammering people into using software that, while nominally "better", just isn't useful in every case. You have to be pragmatic: yes, people need to be more willing to consider other browsers, but this isn't appropriate for all users at all times.
The laziness of the people who publish broken sites deserve just as much blame as user lethargy or even browser vendor incompetence. This is a problem with many facets, and the users are just one of them.
That sounds nice and all, but if your bank's site only works in IE -- as is true for many banks both large & small -- then the customer doesn't really have a choice in the matter.
I know people that are perfectly happy to use Mozilla 90% of the time, but when they have to log in to Fleet (or whatever other bank site), they must use IE there.
Yes, the problem here is the bank's broken site, but what can you do? Their standard response is "95% of people use IE, so that's what we support", completely ignoring the line of thought that if they wrote in a portable, standards compliant way, they wouldn't have to think about these issues, and their customers would be much happier. But there we are -- stuck.
Your exclamation points are appreciated, but until the banks & other IE-only sites realize the errors of their ways, you're just berating the victims of the larger crime here.
Did you actually read the point that you're getting all worked up about? Here, let me repeat it for you, with added emphasis here and there to make it easier to grasp:
6. Beware of a guy in a room.
This is really just a special case of "Don't go dark." Specialist developers who lock themselves away in a room, going dark for long stretches, are anathema to shipping great software on time. Without regard to their individual brilliance, before investing a developer with a significant assignment, it is essential that they understand and agree with the type of development program you intend to run. They must be capable of performing on a team, making their work visible in modest increments and subjecting it to scrutiny as it matures. Some people find this intolerable, and though there is a role for people of this disposition in the software world, it is not as part of a team devoted to shipping great software on time.
There are many pathologies at play here as well as certain healthy patterns of creative behavior. One pathology is a type of savior complex that cannot be satisfied without blowing every single deadline but the last, and then emerging victoriously with a brilliant piece of work five minutes late. A more healthy pattern is that of the true innovator who is truly designing something great, but who has no personal resources left over for anything but the work at hand. Every ounce of psychological, emotional and intellectual energy is being consumed in the work itself. Teamwork, in this case, is an insignificant factor to a person immersed in this sort of creative experience.
Random observations:
He says to beware of the guy in the room, not avoid or curtail him. He concedes that some talented programmers will be more creative when left to their own devices, but warns that more often this kind of behavior is a risk.
He presents this as a subset of the don't go dark rule, which basically just says that a non-communicating team is a dysfunctional team. This shouldn't be a controversial assertion, and it should be obvious that isolated developers are a subset of this dysfunction.
He warns that while these isolated geniuses can develop great work, they generally aren't doing it in the context of a structured, scheduled development team. Generally. It can happen, and he allows room for it, but he's saying that these lone geniuses need at least some supervision in order to keep everything on track.
He describes the dysfunctional variant of the lone genius as having a savior complex, who will let everything fall apart until the last minute, at which he will pull the rabbit out of the hat just past the deadline. I've worked with this guy; it's extremely stressful for all the other staff, and is not the sort of behavior that should be encouraged. He contrasts this with the guy that is a true innovator who is putting so much of his effort into his work that he has nothing left for distractions like teamwork & meetings.
While this latter kind of isolated-yet-healthily-constructive behavior is indeed a good thing -- and is obviously what you're sticking up for -- my hunch is that these guys are a lot more rare than they think they are. Moreover, my hunch is that this healthy form of solitude can tend over time to turn to the unhealthy & unproductive variety without at least some supervision & interaction with peers.
So, the title he gave -- "beware of a guy in a room" -- about sums it up. It's not to say that the "guy in a room" can't do good work or be an effective member of a large software development effort. Rather, he's pointing out that there's several possibly unhealthy factors going on with such behavior, which lead to a fine line between how successful or otherwise such a person will be as a member of such a development group. It is the job of a software development manager -- who is, after all, the target audience for this essay -- to be attuned to these factors and make sure that the lone geniuses on their teams are tending towards the productive end of the spectrum rather than the dysfunctional end.
On the other hand, the Mozilla profile does appear to be portable across operating systems.
At work, we have NFS distributed home directories to a mix of Linux, OSX, and Windows users, and we realized that if you set up the Mac's standard browser config directories as symlinks to the Linux equivalentt, everything will work just fine. All you have to do (assuming that you already have it set up on Linux; reverse the commands if you want to migrate a Mac profile to Linux) is one or more of these commands:
With such a setup in place, going back & forth between Macs & Linux/Unix is just transparent -- everything is always up to date on both sides.
I'm pretty sure you can go a step further and have your *nix ~/.mozilla also be a symlink &/or clone of the Windows version that would typically be in something like %username%\Local Settings\Mozilla. This could be useful for people who are dual booting -- the "real" Mozilla data can live on a Linux-accessible Windows partition, and ~/.mozilla/ will be a symlink to/windows/Documents and Settings/... or whatever.
But to stop belaboring what should have been obvious a while ago, all of this data should be portable at least within the Mozilla family.
Building bridges to the other browsers would be a bigger project.
On Windows, the IE bookmarks/"favorites" list is stored as individual ".url" files under the user's profile directory. The framework is relatively easy to understand -- I seem to remember that the.url files are just ascii data -- so getting Mozilla to interoperate with this shouldn't be difficult if there were the will to implement it.
On the Mac, IE keeps bookmarks in ~/Library/Preferences/Explorer/Favorites.html as a simple HTML file, while Safari keeps them in an XML file in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist. These are probably as close as you're going to get to a "system" bookmark file on the Mac.
Neither of these would be impossible, but they would come down to the old problem of trying to write software to interface with what your competitor is doing -- if bridges were built to the other, dominant browsers on each platform, there's no guarantee that the vendors won't deliberately break compatibility in future versions.
That said, this would be really useful in some situations. At my company, Mozilla is the standard browser for all desktops, but for some people they really do need to use IE for [broken] sites that really don't work with non-IE browsers. It's one thing to rant about ditching IE on Slashdot, but quite another to be unable to get into your bank's website because they're using crappy ActiveX controls for everything. Some people are happy to spend 90% of their time in Mozilla, but they have to be able to get into IE to access for some sites, and for these people, being able to share as much configuration as possible would be a very good thing...
True, but I can't think of any reason why Apple would based the Xcode engine on distcc and use something else for Xgrid. I can picture them using a heavily hacked up version of distcc, but if they really thought they had a better piece of software that had been developed in-house, I don't see why it wouldn't be used for both applications.
You're right in that I'm not able to find any documentation for my assertion that distcc is the foundation for all of the Apple distributed compilation software, but it's clearly & widely documented that they're using it already in Xcode, so I don't think it's any staggering leap of the imagination to assume that Xgrid would be based on it as well.
If someone can offer a URL that says Xgrid is using something else, I'd be happy to read it, but I haven't been able to find anything definitive either way. I suggest starting with Apple's Xgrid intro site, from which several other pages about the technology are linked. Maybe there's something under there saying they're using something else, but I can't find it.
Xcode uses distcc to manage distributed builds. The distcc client manages the setup and distribution of build tasks. The server process (distccd) manages communication with the remote computers hosting the build tasks. The server process runs on both the local, or client, computer and on the remote computer.
We're never going to agree on this, but at least the conversation was interesting.
Suffice to say that I recognize that writing a grammar checker that's worth a damn is a Hard problem, and probably one that would take a lot of work by a team of talented programmers, linguists (maybe), editors, etc.
If they do any less than a stellar job, they'll end up with something that makes Word's grammar checker look good -- which isn't to say that Word's grammar checker is good (obviously, I wouldn't say that by now:-), but rather that they've been throwing talented resources at it for over a decade and people still don't think it's up to the task.
It would be, in other words, a big, expensive gamble.
For an open source project with limited resources, I'm glad they're focusing their attention on more tractable problems.
If some third party wanted to offer an optional Mozilla plugin that provides grammar checking services for Gecko based software, that may be worth considering. But the core developers, for whatever reason, have not decided to do this on their own, and I for one think they've made the right decision.
And there, as I said before, can we agree to disagree?:-)
I understand that you feel the checker is of little benefit yourself
No, that's not what I'm saying! Something that makes your writing only a little bit better is "of little benefit"; something that makes it worse, as contemporary software does, is a detriment. That's why I think it matters!
I prefer the second - I find it clearer
I suppose, but the meaning changes. Maybe for the better, but in any case you're making a list of three -- "Shakespeare, Dickens, all the others" -- while I was trying to list two of the biggies, and throw in everyone else while I was at it "Shakespeare and Dickens, and everyone else too".
Maybe I was being too subtle. In any case, this is exactly the kind of shaded meaning that a human editor can cut through easily, but software falls apart completely with. Maybe your rephrased version, to my ears, radically changed the meaning of the sentence -- what then? In a conversation with you, we could hash out what was meant and come up with a better phrasing, but you can't do anything like that with contemporary software.
Natural language processing is a Hard Problem for computers, and until the state of AI systems gets considerably better, I'm inclined to distrust nearly all of them. Grammar checkers, in this context, are just one facet of the primitive state of the art in this field.
Hemmingway or Vonnegut (why you picked this particular author is unclear)
This was mostly random: he's contemporary, and he has a nice, simple writing style that Strunk & White would probably approve of.
But this paragraph of yours sums up my side of things: you've got four phrases, the second of which is sandwiched in parentheses between the first (an independent clause, and a simple declarative statement) and the third (another independent clause, but interrogative instead of declarative). Sentence structure like this doesn't really work: it's perfectly okay to split a sentence in half with some kind of parenthetical remark, but of the pre-split half is a declaration and the post-split half is a question, the reader is thrown off balance, and the writer is perceived as being a cruel and sneaky bastard.
You're not a cruel, sneaky bastard are you? Of course you're not.
Yet again, this is a situation where clear understanding of grammatical structure will make finding an appropriate expression easy, and software can do nothing but make vague suggestions that may or may not get to the heart of what you're trying to say. If your personal understanding of the foundations is weak, then the software can seem helpful, but it's useless if you can't decide whether to take what it suggests exactly as given or come up with some other phrasing; on the other hand, if you have a firm grasp on the foundations, then the software can't tell you anything you didn't already know, and when you're trying to express yourself at any kind of advanced level, it can do nothing but try to hammer you back into simpler & less interesting constructs.
Slowly? During a lifetime of painstaking dedication? I suspect famous pre-20th century authors didn't write much email and, as such, remain poor examples in this context. Misuse of tools is more likely responsible for the poor results you have experienced than the concept of automated proofing per se.
Ahh, I see, so modern writers are blazing new trails into some kind of mechanized cyborg reality, where we just don't think like our predecessors did. Is that it? And like any self-respecting cyborg, we know our limits and know when we need software support for those times when the keybord is willing but the CPU is weak. That's it, yes?
Wouldn't you have found it helpful to be shown that [....]
No. One of us -- I won't name names, but it's not me -- doesn't want to sound like a robot. I know there are quirks in my writing style, and if I was writing anything more serious than a Slashdot post then sure I'd appreciate input from a good, harsh editor. But hell, this is just Slashdot -- I'm okay with relaxing a little bit.
Besides, the points you raise are all stylistic rather than grammatical. I'm not being inconsistent with my use of ampersands and the word "and", for example: when I'm expressing things that are being somehow paired, I tend to use ampersands, while when I'm merely conjoining words or phrases and I'm trying to express a kind of conceptual bridge from one part of the sentence to another, I'll tend to use the word "and". I'm using different notation because I'm using them in different ways; this is, I suspect, a subtle point that software may not cope well with.
See?
When we get to the point that software can generate text -- or at least, that it can massively assist the preparation of text by a human author -- on the order of a Hemingway or a Vonnegut, then I'll start to take software grammar checkers seriously. But that day is a long, long way off, and until then, the crude software tools we have to work with are a dreadful substitute for learning your own damn way around your own damn language:-):-)
If you internalize the example set by good books (or similar reference material -- you could do much worse than by trying to follow The Economist's house style), you don't need software tools.
How do you think Shakespeare & Dickens and all the other authors pre-20th century managed not to sound like gibbering idiots? Special typewriter assistants? Magical quills?
You're right, I don't consider a software grammar checker a tool; I consider it a crutch, and something to be carefully avoided. I am drawing a distinction: for grammar, books and other existing writing are superb teaching tools, while software frameworks are crude, blunt instruments that at best homogenize writing styles and at worse reduce users to a kind of lowest common denominator of crude, inexpressive, generic nonsense.
But hey, some people seem to be in to that sort of thing, so go right ahead...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
My Clie NX-70v already has a universal remote, and it's a fully functional PalmOS PDA, with other toys like a still/video camera, an MP3 player, a voice recorder, and a full (but tiny) qwerty keyboard.
And according to Amazon, you can get the things for under $120 now. Don't you just love the radical depreciation on a device you paid four times more for barely 18 months ago? *sigh*
But anyway, yeah, the remote. It's fantastic. Going out to eat with a whole bunch of friends, and the restaraunt puts you all in a private room with not one, not two, but three televisions obnoxiously drowning out conversation with sports & news? No problem! The same thing happened to me last week, and the Clie was able to turn off all the televisions right from the table, even when the TVs were 20 or 30 feet away. This only worked, of course, because I happened to have my Clie with me -- but then, it's a PDA, and I almost always have it with me.
The device described in this article, aside from being several times more expensive, is also several times less likely to have general purpose use outside of your living room (unless you're in the habit of going around town turning off televisions, but that isn't a very common hobby). If you're going to spend that much money, why not get a general purpose device?
The Clie I have isn't the only one that has the remote, either. The PEG-T665C also has one, as did the PEG-T415, and it seems like all the models in the NX/NV series (the folding clamshell ones like the NX-70v) have it, too. Even the fanciest of these should be available for a couple hundred bucks cheaper than the Navitus, and all of them are more capable. Shop around! :-)
This completely fails to address the question. The question was "what qualities appeal to people", not "what is her profession." If you factor in the lip synching thing, you didn't even address the question of what her profession is, but nevermind.
I like all kinds of music, all genres. Not all of it is particularly talented -- I love the Ramones but they never did figure out how to play a song with three chords in it -- but I do try to take in as wide a variety of genres as I can get my hands on: rock (Beatles, Kinks, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Clash, the Pixies, and lots of punk & indie rock type stuff from there), jazz (Miles Davis, Louie Armstrong, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Martin Medeski & Wood, John Zorn), electronic music (Kraftwerk, Massive Attack, Autechre), rap & hip hop (Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest, the Roots), classical (Bach, Beethoven), world music (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, klezmer jazz, tuva singing, Los Lobos [or are they rock?], Japanese pop), etc. Just to scratch the surface.
If there's something inventive & vibrant there, I'll give it a chance and probably like it. If it's crap, I do what I can to avoid it, no matter how popular it is. Jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish are crap -- they pick a scale and noodle around in it aimlessly in a pot-addled haze for a few hours, but dammit you could write a Perl script to do that. The Doors are a collossal, steaming, quaking mound of crap. Jimi Hendrix was astounding, as were the Beatles. The Rolling Stones were okay, but nothing brilliant like Hendrix or the Beatles. Pick & choose.
This inventivness area is where Britney Spears makes falls down dramatically -- there's no spark in it that makes it worth paying attention to. That's not to say that pop musicians can't also be interesting artists -- both Prince & Madonna showed that magnificently since the 80s -- but more often than not, the stuff on pop radio is middle of the road crap that really does have little to redeem it. This has nothing to do with popularity -- I neither know nor care what bands are popular on the charts these days -- it has to do with the performer's ability to work as an artist and establish some kind of visceral connection with the listener.
But then, I'm not really answering the question either. You're just saying she's good because people like her; I'm just saying she sucks in spite of the fact that people like her. Neither of those angles really gets to the heart of the question. For that kind of answer, you could do a lot worse than to read Pat Metheny's commentary on Kenny G's version of Louie Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World". No, it doesn't have anything to do with Britney Spears, but it does convey quite nicely how painful it can be to see some no-talent ass-clown arrogantly stomping all over the memory of one of the most widely enjoyed people in American music. This isn't the exact transgression Britney makes with her music, but it ends up pushing a lot of the same buttons.
But really, if you want proof that Britney Spears is not only a talentless ass-clown, but also a dangerously corrupting influence on America's youth, you need look no further than this quote:
America's "wholesome little sweetheart" is nothing but a Stalinist! Argggh!
Ahh, so you admit that you're just trolling people here. How cute.
What a pity that the Register survey didn't find out what's popular with Slashdot trolls...
The problem with that analysis is that it's much too kind to the underdog operating systems.
I'm having a hard tiime finding good numbers, but it seems that Apple's market share has generally been in decline over the years, with most sources citing a market share or install base fluttering around three or four percent for the past couple of years, with some wildly optimistic speculation that Apple could hit eight percent by 2008.
In the most recent report I could find, Apple's market share was put at 3.7%, with recent quarter growth of 9.3% -- but this is in a market where Dell alone has a share of 32.9%, and the market overall grew by 10.9% in the USA and 15.5% globally. That is to say, even though Apple is "growing" relative to their own recent performance, they're still not growing at a rate that keeps up with the industry as a whole, and they're especially slipping behind global figures. Their market share trend is going down, even as their health as an individual company appears to be holding steady or improving.
Meanwhile, figures for Linux are harder to determine, but it seems that the past couple of years suggest that Linux has hovered at a steady 1%, so the picture isn't any stronger on that side -- they're doing at best 1/3 of what Apple is doing.
(And yes, market share figures are all voodoo that is about as reliable as hardware benchmarks (that is to say, hardly reliable at all), but still, the discussion doesn't work if you don't at least take a stab at quantifying things. So please, grant me some leeway here :-)
More to the point, it doesn't seem like Google has ever had a problem with catering to just the dominant platform. Consider the Google Toolbar, which has been available for years as an IE only plugin on Windows -- it has never been available for the Mac version of IE, and it has never been offered for other operating systems (they just meekly suggest putting links to Google in your Netscape bookmark bar, but that hardly counts for much). Admittedly, Mozilla has had third-party Google search plugins for a while now, and when Safari came out it had a built-in Google search box, but these were both provided by third-parties, not Google.
The only client-side software Google has offered in the past has been for Windows and IE, and the Picassa acquisition is just a continuation of this pattern.
I played around with Picassa for a little while last night, and it is a pretty slick application; I can see why they wanted it (the UI is quite clever, and they may want to put some of the people who thought it up to work on their existing web tools & webmail). I'd love to see a version of it for OSX (please, please something better than iPhoto), but I'm not convinced that that Google will bother porting it, based on the questionable market share trends and their past client-side offerings.
A trained studio photographer can use tricks like polarized lenses & carefully placed lighting to make it seem as if glass is perfectly transparent & non-reflective.
You're an exception though, Pudge. If you want to define "professional" as "someone who is paid to work in a profession", then you are nearly unique among Slashdot editors in being both professional and competent.
There's still an embarrassing continuity of basic errors, ranging from failures in basic spelling & grammar on through a consistent unwillingness to cover the basic journalistic who / what / where / when questions in many of the article summaries.
The site may not be as bad as it used to be (that or I've just gotten used to it over the years), but it still averages at a level far cruder than you typically see on just about any other major tech site. About the only site that seems consistently worse is The Register, but then they're pretty much the National Enquirer of tech news journalism and being more competent than them isn't such a grand thing to be.
So, yes, the comment you're replying to was silly & dumb, but come on -- there was more than a little bit of truth in it. You personally may not be to blame for the problem here, but you can't really deny that the sloppy editing skills on Slashdot has been a consistent problem for years now, can you?
Be honest...
This could be an addition to the usual humorous fortune cookie suffixes. It's well known that most fortune cookies are much improved by adding the words "in bed" onto the end; most Unix nerds (but absolutely no one else ever anywhere) will also find adding "using Emacs" to work, and now that you mention it, "in Japan" should work as well. Consider these fortune enhancements, which are all based on actual fortune cookies cataloged at this site:
You will receive a fortune (cookie).
You will receive a fortune (cookie) in bed. / You will receive a fortune (cookie) using Emacs. / You will receive a fortune (cookie) in Japan.
You love Chinese Food.
You love Chinese Food in bed. / You love Chinese Food using Emacs. / You love Chinese Food in Japan.
Someone will invite you to a Karaoke party.
Someone will invite you to a Karaoke party in bed. / Someone will invite you to a Karaoke party using Emacs. / Someone will invite you to a Karaoke party in Japan.
Don't forget, you are always on our minds.
Don't forget, you are always on our minds in bed. / Don't forget, you are always on our minds using Emacs. / Don't forget, you are always on our minds in Japan.
You are filled with life's most precious treasuere ... Hope! ... Hope in bed! / You are filled with life's most precious treasuere ... Hope using Emacs! / You are filled with life's most precious treasuere ... Hope in Japan!
You are filled with life's most precious treasuere
Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence.
Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence in bed. / Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence using Emacs. / Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence in Japan.
You long to see the great pyramids in Egypt.
You long to see the great pyramids in Egypt in bed. / You long to see the great pyramids in Egypt using Emacs. / You long to see the great pyramids in Egypt in Japan.
Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life.
Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life in bed. / Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life using Emacs. / Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life in Japan.
Everything is not yet lost.
Everything is not yet lost in bed. / Everything is not yet lost using Emacs. / Everything is not yet lost in Japan.
Buy many dream boxes. Ask a friend to select one.
Buy many dream boxes. Ask a friend to select one in bed. / Buy many dream boxes. Ask a friend to select one using Emacs. / Buy many dream boxes. Ask a friend to select one in Japan.
Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily.
Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily in bed. / Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily using Emacs. / Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else's water lily in Japan.
Suppose you can get what you want....
Suppose you can get what you want... in bed. / Suppose you can get what you want... using Emacs. / Suppose you can get what you want... in Japan.
What you left behind is more mellow than wine.
What you left behind is more mellow than wine in bed. / What you left behind is more mellow than wine using Emacs. / What you left behind is more mellow than wine in Japan.
A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard.
A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard in bed. / A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard using Emacs. / A starship ride has been promised to you by the galactic wizzard in Japan.
Never wear your best pants when you go to fight for freedom.
Never wear your best pants when you go to fight for freedom in bed. / Never we
...and that's why they never seem to have girlfriends... :-)
Ranum is citing this as an example of a way that existing tools -- such as GCC -- could be enhanced in such a way that programmers using currently popular languages (C/C++) would have a better security safety net without having to be retrained in practices (like checking for buffer overflows) that while obvious are still under-utilized in most software. The whole article is interesting reading, but this remark about Perl's taint mode seems like one of the best concrete examples of a modern protective language feature.
I am starting to see signs of Italian cultural influence in the U. S. "Sopranos" merchandise, pizza, etc.
I am starting to see signs of Mexican cultural influence in the U. S. Latin pop music, tex-mex restaraunts, etc.
Etc.
The problem, of course, is that as a so-called melting pot -- how much things "melt" is debatable, and maybe "tossed salad" is a better metaphor, but whatever -- the U.S. exhibits lots of non-local cultural influences.
The thing is, these influences may or may not have any bearing on how dominant the amalgamated American culture is in other places.
A better indicator would be how American vs. [other] cultural artifacts are being adopted in other parts of the world. For examples, what movies were biggers hits in Jakarta, Nairobi, Lagos, Lima, Buenos Aires, etc: Lord of the Rings & Finding Nemo, or Shaolin Soccer & Spirited Away? What ethnic foods are more popular -- hamburgers or sushi? What languages are more popular in schools?
You'll learn far more about which culture is more popular by looking abroad than you will by looking at what is happening in the USA.
Have a look at the wonderful world of bioinformatics, where (hopefully) you should be able to find an array of academic institutions publishing their data for peer review.
To pick just the one place I'm vaguely familiar with, try Boston University's BMERC lab, which publishes both raw genomes and MySQL databases. BMERC's main genome.sql.gz file is 119,294,059 bytes (113 mb, compressed), which should be well into the "large dataset" category you're asking for :-)
There are surely many other schools publishing similar data if you poke around a bit.
Of course, at that point, you start to be bound by the problem domain. Sure, you have lots of data and that's all well & good, but what does it mean? What sorts of analysis can you usefully do on it? Without a biology background, maybe not much, but it's an interesting field and you should be able to give yourself enough of a crash course to make something useful out of it...
Have fun!
Ok, so set up themed packages.
I have no interest in sports. I would be happy not to have any sports networks. I would, on the other hand, enjoy a suite of comercial-free movie channels (Sundance, IFC, TCM, etc), but basic Comcast cable in my town has lots of sports and -- with the exception of AMC (which seems to have started running channels some time in the past few years [is it obvious I'm not a frequent teevee watcher?] and so doesn't appeal as much as it used to) -- no movie channels.
Likewise, I could do without Fox "News", though I'd be willing to have them along with a suite of similer info-tainment channels (CNN, MSNBC, BBC News in a perfect world, C-SPAN, etc). My wife loves the home improvement & home makeover channels (since when did TLC not show perpetual reruns of James Burke's "Connections" series [really, is it obvious that I'm not a teeveee watcher? when did they kick him off the air and turn into the "all home makeovers all the time" channel?]), so she'd be interested in a package of those networks.
*****
In other words, there may be a middle ground between the channel package system we have now -- in which most people end up paying lots of money to subsidize many channels they don't want in order to get a couple of channels they do -- and the possibly untenable situation you describe -- where everything is a la carte and, while cheaper, it's likely that spinofff channels would have a real challenge.
With themed clusters of channels -- sports, news, movies, music, home life (home improvement, cooking), children, international (non-English channels for immigrant communities), etc -- people would be able to get the kinds of channels they want and new channels would have ready audiences.
I'm curious what the bottleneck is preventing these sorts of things. Is there a technical issue, where (say) bandwidth consideration in putting all these channel packs on the same trunk of subscription lines, or is the barrier simply economical & logistic on the business end of the cable companies?
Yeah, no kidding -- I remember using BeOS 4.5 and 5.0 [paid version!] and thinking that the application grouping was such an obviously good idea -- as plenty of screenshots will illustrate -- that I couldn't see why this idea wasn't being ripped off in the Windows taskbar.
But then, of course, Be was chased out of town and Windows put in substantially the same interface into XP when it came out. As forseen by prophesy -- Microsoft never saw a good idea that they weren't above flagrantly stealing for their next major release.
But then, I've whined about such things already on Slashdot, as have others I'm sure...
Yeah, no kidding -- I remember using BeOS 4.5 and 5.0 [paid version!] and thinking that the application grouping was such an obviously good idea -- as plenty of screenshots will illustrate -- that I couldn't see why this idea wasn't being ripped off in the Windows taskbar.
But then, of course, Be was chased out of town and Windows put in substantially the same interface into XP when it came out. As forseen by prophesy -- Microsoft never saw a good idea that they weren't above flagrantly stealing for their next major release.
But then, I've whined about such things already on Slashdot, as have others I'm sure...
Yeah, but look at the map they made: aside from the USA, Canada, Sweden, and Austria, the surveyors basically ignored the first world. The sampled as many developing and under-developed countries, where it seems safe to assume that the average people are far less likely to have a computer or broadband access at home.
For people in these places, access to a cybercafe is about the only option -- which is why the surveyors looked at the ratio of average hourly cybercafe rates cost to average daily wages. That's why the "expensive" $5.00 average in the USA and the $4.30 in Canada gets a bright green "cheap" rating, while the "cheap" $0.60 average in Ghana and $1.35 in India get a deep red "expensive" rating.
Most of the world's population aren't wealthy westerners like the average Slashdot reader!
I'm not a Fleet customer, so I couldn't say what the problem is.
I have been told though by two people -- both accountants -- that they've had problems working with Fleet's site when managing corporate accounts. I don't know if Fleet has a separate site for home & corporate users or what, I just know that, in the case of one of these people, he was having problems completing a [big] transaction online and when he called Fleet's tech support and the found out he's using Mozilla, they told him that they do not support anything other than IE.
This particular guy would be delighted to ditch IE if he could -- he hates the popups, the spyware that keeps infesting his compute, etc -- but there are sites that he cannot avoid using that simply do not work with Mozilla. It's not as simple as switching a personal bank account; these are sites needed for business use.
I like the Gecko family of browsers as much as any of you, but as a sysadmin that has to support user's day to day needs (including family & friends, from time to time), I just can't see the value in hammering people into using software that, while nominally "better", just isn't useful in every case. You have to be pragmatic: yes, people need to be more willing to consider other browsers, but this isn't appropriate for all users at all times.
The laziness of the people who publish broken sites deserve just as much blame as user lethargy or even browser vendor incompetence. This is a problem with many facets, and the users are just one of them.
That sounds nice and all, but if your bank's site only works in IE -- as is true for many banks both large & small -- then the customer doesn't really have a choice in the matter.
I know people that are perfectly happy to use Mozilla 90% of the time, but when they have to log in to Fleet (or whatever other bank site), they must use IE there.
Yes, the problem here is the bank's broken site, but what can you do? Their standard response is "95% of people use IE, so that's what we support", completely ignoring the line of thought that if they wrote in a portable, standards compliant way, they wouldn't have to think about these issues, and their customers would be much happier. But there we are -- stuck.
Your exclamation points are appreciated, but until the banks & other IE-only sites realize the errors of their ways, you're just berating the victims of the larger crime here.
Did you actually read the point that you're getting all worked up about? Here, let me repeat it for you, with added emphasis here and there to make it easier to grasp:
Random observations:
While this latter kind of isolated-yet-healthily-constructive behavior is indeed a good thing -- and is obviously what you're sticking up for -- my hunch is that these guys are a lot more rare than they think they are. Moreover, my hunch is that this healthy form of solitude can tend over time to turn to the unhealthy & unproductive variety without at least some supervision & interaction with peers.
So, the title he gave -- "beware of a guy in a room" -- about sums it up. It's not to say that the "guy in a room" can't do good work or be an effective member of a large software development effort. Rather, he's pointing out that there's several possibly unhealthy factors going on with such behavior, which lead to a fine line between how successful or otherwise such a person will be as a member of such a development group. It is the job of a software development manager -- who is, after all, the target audience for this essay -- to be attuned to these factors and make sure that the lone geniuses on their teams are tending towards the productive end of the spectrum rather than the dysfunctional end.
What's so controversial about that?
On the other hand, the Mozilla profile does appear to be portable across operating systems.
At work, we have NFS distributed home directories to a mix of Linux, OSX, and Windows users, and we realized that if you set up the Mac's standard browser config directories as symlinks to the Linux equivalentt, everything will work just fine. All you have to do (assuming that you already have it set up on Linux; reverse the commands if you want to migrate a Mac profile to Linux) is one or more of these commands:
With such a setup in place, going back & forth between Macs & Linux/Unix is just transparent -- everything is always up to date on both sides.
I'm pretty sure you can go a step further and have your *nix ~/.mozilla also be a symlink &/or clone of the Windows version that would typically be in something like %username%\Local Settings\Mozilla. This could be useful for people who are dual booting -- the "real" Mozilla data can live on a Linux-accessible Windows partition, and ~/.mozilla/ will be a symlink to /windows/Documents and Settings/... or whatever.
But to stop belaboring what should have been obvious a while ago, all of this data should be portable at least within the Mozilla family.
Building bridges to the other browsers would be a bigger project.
Neither of these would be impossible, but they would come down to the old problem of trying to write software to interface with what your competitor is doing -- if bridges were built to the other, dominant browsers on each platform, there's no guarantee that the vendors won't deliberately break compatibility in future versions.
That said, this would be really useful in some situations. At my company, Mozilla is the standard browser for all desktops, but for some people they really do need to use IE for [broken] sites that really don't work with non-IE browsers. It's one thing to rant about ditching IE on Slashdot, but quite another to be unable to get into your bank's website because they're using crappy ActiveX controls for everything. Some people are happy to spend 90% of their time in Mozilla, but they have to be able to get into IE to access for some sites, and for these people, being able to share as much configuration as possible would be a very good thing...
True, but I can't think of any reason why Apple would based the Xcode engine on distcc and use something else for Xgrid. I can picture them using a heavily hacked up version of distcc, but if they really thought they had a better piece of software that had been developed in-house, I don't see why it wouldn't be used for both applications.
You're right in that I'm not able to find any documentation for my assertion that distcc is the foundation for all of the Apple distributed compilation software, but it's clearly & widely documented that they're using it already in Xcode, so I don't think it's any staggering leap of the imagination to assume that Xgrid would be based on it as well.
If someone can offer a URL that says Xgrid is using something else, I'd be happy to read it, but I haven't been able to find anything definitive either way. I suggest starting with Apple's Xgrid intro site, from which several other pages about the technology are linked. Maybe there's something under there saying they're using something else, but I can't find it.
Actually, that is completely false:
As 30 seconds of Googling will tell you, distcc [is] a fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler.
As they have done with KDE's KHTML engine in Safari, so is Samba's distcc engine being used in XCode.
Care to try again ?
:-)
We're never going to agree on this, but at least the conversation was interesting.
Suffice to say that I recognize that writing a grammar checker that's worth a damn is a Hard problem, and probably one that would take a lot of work by a team of talented programmers, linguists (maybe), editors, etc.
If they do any less than a stellar job, they'll end up with something that makes Word's grammar checker look good -- which isn't to say that Word's grammar checker is good (obviously, I wouldn't say that by now :-), but rather that they've been throwing talented resources at it for over a decade and people still don't think it's up to the task.
It would be, in other words, a big, expensive gamble.
For an open source project with limited resources, I'm glad they're focusing their attention on more tractable problems.
If some third party wanted to offer an optional Mozilla plugin that provides grammar checking services for Gecko based software, that may be worth considering. But the core developers, for whatever reason, have not decided to do this on their own, and I for one think they've made the right decision.
And there, as I said before, can we agree to disagree? :-)
No, that's not what I'm saying! Something that makes your writing only a little bit better is "of little benefit"; something that makes it worse, as contemporary software does, is a detriment. That's why I think it matters!
I suppose, but the meaning changes. Maybe for the better, but in any case you're making a list of three -- "Shakespeare, Dickens, all the others" -- while I was trying to list two of the biggies, and throw in everyone else while I was at it "Shakespeare and Dickens, and everyone else too".
Maybe I was being too subtle. In any case, this is exactly the kind of shaded meaning that a human editor can cut through easily, but software falls apart completely with. Maybe your rephrased version, to my ears, radically changed the meaning of the sentence -- what then? In a conversation with you, we could hash out what was meant and come up with a better phrasing, but you can't do anything like that with contemporary software.
Natural language processing is a Hard Problem for computers, and until the state of AI systems gets considerably better, I'm inclined to distrust nearly all of them. Grammar checkers, in this context, are just one facet of the primitive state of the art in this field.
This was mostly random: he's contemporary, and he has a nice, simple writing style that Strunk & White would probably approve of.
But this paragraph of yours sums up my side of things: you've got four phrases, the second of which is sandwiched in parentheses between the first (an independent clause, and a simple declarative statement) and the third (another independent clause, but interrogative instead of declarative). Sentence structure like this doesn't really work: it's perfectly okay to split a sentence in half with some kind of parenthetical remark, but of the pre-split half is a declaration and the post-split half is a question, the reader is thrown off balance, and the writer is perceived as being a cruel and sneaky bastard.
You're not a cruel, sneaky bastard are you? Of course you're not.
Yet again, this is a situation where clear understanding of grammatical structure will make finding an appropriate expression easy, and software can do nothing but make vague suggestions that may or may not get to the heart of what you're trying to say. If your personal understanding of the foundations is weak, then the software can seem helpful, but it's useless if you can't decide whether to take what it suggests exactly as given or come up with some other phrasing; on the other hand, if you have a firm grasp on the foundations, then the software can't tell you anything you didn't already know, and when you're trying to express yourself at any kind of advanced level, it can do nothing but try to hammer you back into simpler & less interesting constructs.
But maybe we should just agree to disagree... :-)
Ahh, I see, so modern writers are blazing new trails into some kind of mechanized cyborg reality, where we just don't think like our predecessors did. Is that it? And like any self-respecting cyborg, we know our limits and know when we need software support for those times when the keybord is willing but the CPU is weak. That's it, yes?
No. One of us -- I won't name names, but it's not me -- doesn't want to sound like a robot. I know there are quirks in my writing style, and if I was writing anything more serious than a Slashdot post then sure I'd appreciate input from a good, harsh editor. But hell, this is just Slashdot -- I'm okay with relaxing a little bit.
Besides, the points you raise are all stylistic rather than grammatical. I'm not being inconsistent with my use of ampersands and the word "and", for example: when I'm expressing things that are being somehow paired, I tend to use ampersands, while when I'm merely conjoining words or phrases and I'm trying to express a kind of conceptual bridge from one part of the sentence to another, I'll tend to use the word "and". I'm using different notation because I'm using them in different ways; this is, I suspect, a subtle point that software may not cope well with.
See?
When we get to the point that software can generate text -- or at least, that it can massively assist the preparation of text by a human author -- on the order of a Hemingway or a Vonnegut, then I'll start to take software grammar checkers seriously. But that day is a long, long way off, and until then, the crude software tools we have to work with are a dreadful substitute for learning your own damn way around your own damn language :-) :-)
Well then, there's your problem.
If you internalize the example set by good books (or similar reference material -- you could do much worse than by trying to follow The Economist's house style), you don't need software tools.
How do you think Shakespeare & Dickens and all the other authors pre-20th century managed not to sound like gibbering idiots? Special typewriter assistants? Magical quills?
You're right, I don't consider a software grammar checker a tool; I consider it a crutch, and something to be carefully avoided. I am drawing a distinction: for grammar, books and other existing writing are superb teaching tools, while software frameworks are crude, blunt instruments that at best homogenize writing styles and at worse reduce users to a kind of lowest common denominator of crude, inexpressive, generic nonsense.
But hey, some people seem to be in to that sort of thing, so go right ahead... :-)