I guess I'm one of the lucky few that doesn't yet get cable. My co-worker just gave it up because of the expense.
Ironically, the reception in my area is so bad - thanks to some local radio station - that half the time I can't even pick up local stations, and I'm virtually living next to the city.
Well, it appears I don't even get to read the FCC site, either:
NOTICE: The FCC web site will be unavailable to the public from 6:00 p.m. (EDT) on Friday June 6, until 6:00 p.m. on Saturday June 7 in order to facilitate electrical system upgrades.
Re:nostalgic
on
Ximian's Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That was pretty much the opinion of the article's author as well:
The Home, My Computer, and Trash icons on the desktop proper are permanent and cannot be deleted. I really dislike them. Nevertheless, I guess Nautilus (a fine tool, but I don't use it) needs them to be there. My Computer? Please. I don't want that on my desktop.
C'mon, guys... Remember that moment when you discovered that Playboy has pretty pictures and content?
It might have been an interesting review, but it was so cluttered with opinions that it was hard to actually find the content.
I don't use BeOS much anymore, but I do have a good grasp of its excellence in some points and its suckiness in others, so please forgive me for being opinionated.
It takes about 15 minutes to install Zeta and it is not difficult at all. However, it is more involved than Be's original Installer and in my opinion, it shouldn't have been.
YellowTAB should have concentrated on fixing this limitation of BeOS' Drive Setup instead of adding useless features like "Stings", application selection and "GCC version choice" that only bloat the installation and do not follow the paradigm that Be had and everyone loved: "keep it simple".
However, what is immediately disappointing is that Zeta takes 23 whole seconds to load on this machine (a machine which has had BeOS 5 on it forever and loads it between 9 and 10 seconds).
First and foremost, Zeta comes with some 400 fonts. Personally, I find this ridiculous.
It takes about 15 minutes to install Zeta and it is not difficult at all. However, it is more involved than Be's original Installer and in my opinion, it shouldn't have been.
Was the author paying attention in Philospophy 101? These sort of epistemological questions ("How do we know what we know") have been around for a long time, and the famous philosopher Rene Descartes ("I think, therefore I am") is famous for his reponse.
Isn't this stuff required reading anymore? Sigh. It's just as well, I think Mark Knopfler nailed it in "Industrial Disease":
"On ITV and BBC they talk about the curse
Philosophy is useless theology is worse..."
Anyhoo, the question Rene poses is this:"What if all this were an illusion created by some evil djinn?"
Apparently, "evil djinn" was the 16th century equivalent of holodecks.
So he starts out with first principles: "How can I know that I exist?" to which he answers famously that since someone is doing the thinking - and experiencing that thought - someone must exist. Cognito ergo sum; I exist.
Now he moves on to the big question: how to know if anything else exists. He's aware of Plato's cave analogy; he's got to dispose of this "What if it's all a dream" problem.
Unfortunately, some hand waving appears at this point. He can't really prove that everything isn't an illusion.
So what's his clever answer?
He dodges the question, and says that he's prefers to assume that reality is... well, real, since the alternative bites.
It's all a bit of a letdown - he starts out with a bang, and a couple paragraphs later ends with a whimper. Some things are unknowable, some things are unprovable.
Deal with it. If you want to live as if you were in a holodeck projection... more power to you, young Zaphod.
[Fox Pro programmers] live in a world disconnected from reality as we know it (which is why they haven't upgraded to a reasonably new database technology and support language)
Like those people who cling to C, C++, VB, Java and all those other non-.NET technologies?
[and] would probably blame microsoft for all kinds of problems that were OS related and not product related.
Is this speculation based on anything?
I also get the impression from people that developed fox pro that the users were upset when MS bought the product and were upset when they made it a "visual" lanugage.
My own "impression" was that FoxPro developers felt that Microsoft purchased FoxPro for the Rushmore technology and to convert FoxPro developers to Access, which (by your own description) is pretty much the way it's played out.
That said, I can't imagine that MS hasn't thought about possible lost OS license sales and that the lost sales aren't a major motivator for clamping down on the howto.
So FoxPro exists not for developers to create applications, but for Microsoft to lock users onto the Windows platform?
"[Microsoft]don't have to worry anymore, because Corel has pretty well failed at everything they've done. They're clearly not a player of the office suite market anymore, and the graphics business is in a tailspin."
What more is there to say?
Re:TCL vs TK / Ousterhout bailing/ maintaining cod
on
Tcl Core Team Interview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was initially quite impressed by Tcl/Tk when I first encountered it a number of years ago. I had been looking for a cross-platform toolkit, and Tk looked like exactly the thing I had been looking for.
The layout managers were an especially nice feature, since they would manage the placement of widgets on the windows automatically. Coming from a Windows/Mac background, I had never seen anything like it.
Unfortunately, the actual experience of using Tcl/Tk was less nice. Even though it had a Windows-esque wrapping, the widgets still seemed to behave like Motif widgets (yech!), and the applications didn't scale well to low resolutions (800x600) - they all seemed to have been written for people with huge X Terminals.
As others have pointed out, the Tcl grammar is quite consistant, but so is LISP. It just felt klunky.
I spent some time browsing the Net looking for a version of Tk that stood alone from Tcl. There was one I found, but it was unmaintained. I dug into the code for a while, trying to see if I could do it myself, but it seemed pretty tightly embedded. Besides, trying to keep up with the changes to Tk seemed hopeless task.
To be fair, Tcl/Tk had a particular niche it was aiming for: being a "glue" language. For that, it seems to do an admiral job. But other languages (Lua, Perl) or toolkits (wxWindows, Qt) seem better poised in the market.
This is one of those "what went wrong with Gnome" articles. Obviously, if you love where Gnome 2.2, the isn't anything gone wrong.
I belong to the "something has gone wrong with Gnome" school of thought. I dearly want Gnome to succeed. It's got a different sort of style and sensibility than KDE and Windows, and there's a lot of great stuff there.
Love it or hate it, KDE feels like a unified desktop, while Gnome feels like a cobbled together set of unrelated tools.
The "Open File" dialog is a thing of shame, and I can't believe that it won't be until October until a replacement comes along. The fact that something so basic has been allowed to stay unchanged so long, in my mind, reflects the difference between KDE and Gnome.
I don't think that it's an organization issue, or even that one group is more clever than the other. My guess is that, at some level, Qt really is better than GTK. I don't know if it's C vs. C++, or KParts vs. Corba, Glade vs. KDevelop... Perhaps Nick's got it right, that it's the underlying objects. KDE doesn't seem to have suffered from having a C++-centric toolkit, and Gnome doesn't seem to have benefitted from having a C-centric toolkit.
The last release of KDE had some pretty cool stuff in it - I was eager to get my hands on it and play with it. In contrast, most of what I've heard about Gnome 2.2 has been about what it doesn't have in it anymore. It apparently won't even be featured in the next Knoppix release, since it's broken so badly.
But I wouldn't discount the future of Gnome. Maybe.NET/Mono will solve the problems (I wouldn't bet the farm on it). Maybe there are no problems at all - just a different desktop, with a different way of doing things.
An FBI agent testified that Puffer asked during questioning what punishment he faced if he was found guilty. Berry interpreted the question as an admission of guilt.
Yes, that's pretty gosh-darned compelling. Next time you are accused of a crime, don't ask what the punishment might be. After all, that would be exactly the same as admitting you are guilty. Sounds like something out of Kafka's "The Trial".
Unless, of course, it's my 5 year old son.
OK, I'll admit it: I didn't read the entire book. I mean, I tried, but after a while my eyes blurred over and I just skimmed the rest of the chapters. Zzzzzzz... Thank goodness for smarmy sarcasm. Now there's a philosophy you can build a career on.
Standing in a field, like John Carter of Mars, hoping that sheer force of will would be enough to reach into the future and call me back.
I'd recognize my 12 year old self by the fear in my eyes, the doubts about the future and his place in it. At times, what lay ahead looked like little more than dust and ashes, scorched earth after a terrifying moment of nuclear holocaust. Despite all the signs leading to perdition, he still held out hope. But was it too much to ask for a small sign?
Would he recognize me? He'd no doubt ask me what to tell him what he was thinking of - a secret password only known to himself and (hopefully) his future self. I'd have to tell him that 30 years is a long time, that some things just slip away from you. He'd have to accept that it was enough for me to be there, pulled through the tesseract.
Even at 12, I think he'd see our father's profile and know the cadence in my speech. He'd know me just the same way that, looking at him, my younger self, I'd see the reflection of my own sons.
There would be no questions about stock, bonds or assasination attempts. He knows that I'm was already bending the rules, giving him this small glimpse into the future. Paradoxes be damned, I owed myself something, promised myself that if there were some way to make contact, I'd do it. Like Houdini or Lazarus, come back by way of science and magic. There was only one thing he really wants to know.
"Is there a future?"
"Is there a place for me in it?"
A normal life, with bills to pay and teething children, someone to love and someone who loved me. Family and friends, grief and pain. Something other than the oblivion of a nuclear rain.
I wouldn't even have to answer him. He'd know, seeing me standing there. He'd know enough that he could ignore those doomsayers, and slip into bed at the end of the day, gentle into that dark night, knowing that there was a tomorrow.
So cheers to us, one and all, who have made it this far. A moment of silence, perhaps, for the dear friends and family we've lost along the way.
Since the WinAPI has control over the blit requests, it wouldn't be that difficult to lock access to internal bitmaps so that they are only available to "secure" applications.
In fact, DRM is already built into Media Player - you can't grab a screenshot via the Print Screen button on secured video. You just get a black image where the video image would be.
Why not have a look at ReactOS, an open source clone of NT?
Unlike some doomed attempts to make a "better" Windows clone *cough*Freedows*cough* that degenerated into a puff of vaporware, the fine people at ReactOS have been keeping their noses to the grindstone and quietly worked away at getting an NT clone working. It's still a long way from replacing NT, as this screenshot of the one and only GUI application shows.
But if you want a free and open look at Inside the development of [a] Windows NT [clone], ReactOS is a good place to look.
They've done a number of things right:
Shut up and coded...
Picked NT as a target instead of the more glitzy Win9x
Or check out one of the "Moms To Be" chat boards - the importance of selecting the right name is a Big Deal, and always has been. One can't pick a name that's too popular, or too obscure. And there's that unpleasant shock when the "perfect" name has been found, only to find that it's the rising star of the Baby Names Top 10 List - back to the drawing board.
Perhaps the most important issue is "teasability". You can have hours of fun with your spouse, shooting down every name they think up by turning it into a childish taunt:
Her: What about "Duncan"?
You : Yeah, I can hear it now: "Come here, Mister Dunkin' Donuts!"
Her : Isn't there any name you like?
You : I'm just saying... But now that you mention it, have you considered "Guy"?
Her : No. Have you considered an frontal lobotamy?
Hours of fun, kids! Those 9 months of pregnancy will be gone before you know it.
Personally, I've found the most effective strategy is to waffle until the baby's been born. Then, once your wife is back in the recovery room, all doped up and groggy from pain that men can't even imagine (thank goodness for epidurals and pain-induced memory blocks), pop your suggestion to her:
I heard about this the other week on NPR (in quite a bit more depth), and they mentioned that a lot of people are looking into technology to shield their plates from cameras. They are illegal, but akin to radar detectors in the US. Being illegal isn't much of a deterrent.
It's not clear that the 'tax' will have much effect, since most estimate that it would take about 16 pounds to have any real effect.
They also reported that the people hardest hit are likely to be the small shops in London which do deliveries. Most residents already walk or take the tube.
Visiting my brother in London, I was struck by the difference in scale between London and any other large US city. In the US, when you shop you fill up a large cart, stuff your minivan, and fill your fridge. In London, you take enough to fit into a shopping bag, carry it home, and put it in your small fridge in your modest kitchen (all things being relative, of course).
Still, the proposal is a start on a real problem of traffic that's not unique to London, and a number of large US cities are watching it closely.
I thought that QL was pronounced "quell", and SQL "sequel", as both an homage and a terrible pun.
That the fine MySQL people have chosen to pronounce it wrong is their own choice. Heck, some people can't even decide if the 'S' stands for Structured or Standard.
As for me an my house, we choose sequel, since it has nice hacker resonance.
The link to the actual document is here, or you could just check Google.
This document has been around forever; I could have sworn that I found it in the first place via Slashdot.
I was looking at it a couple months ago to see if it would make a possible replacement for Access. It appeared that OpenOffice could give a nice frontend for simple forms, but not much beyond that. I didn't want to mess with ODBC, and wasn't about to install MySQL on my work machine.
Access is great for single user desktop applications, but it doesn't really scale that well, even with SQL support.
VB is normally the tool of choice, but I'm caught between the.EXE version becoming obsolete, and our organization not being ready to jump onto the.NET bandwagon.
I'm looking forward to seeing what's new with it in the next OpenOffice release.
I grabbed the following from the Clear Channel site. They appear to be quite proud of this technology. After all, it directly benefits us, the consumer!
Despite Clear Channel Radio's far reaching geography, radio remains a live and local medium in every market the company serves.
Except, of course, when it's not actually live nor local.
Clear Channel Radio's size, however, allows it to leverage state-of-the-art technology and large-market on-air talent to deliver premium programming to smaller towns.
"Leverage" is must be a euphanism for "use our market power to drive everyone else out of business".
"Premium programming to smaller towns" is a nice phrase... You certainly don't want any local DJ on the airwaves. Thank goodness for Clear Channel!
Hugely popular shows can be broadcast all over the country, giving listeners the programming and diversity they crave no matter where they are.
Ever wonder what "diversity" means? According to Clear Channel, it's "everyone listening to the same thing."
There's a difference between "everyone is forced to listen to it" and "hugely popular". Pretty much everyone had to eat cafeteria food in my elementry school, but I don't recall it being "hugely popular."
Clear Channel uses digital voice tracking and in-market feeds to deliver a sound that is live and local.
Except, of course, that it's neither live nor local. Oops, I'm repeating myself.
The biggest scam is that the audience is largely unaware that it's canned, which means that your profit stream is based on the idea of deceiving to your customers. Any what justifies this?
Oh, yes... Premium profits.
Technology enhancements across the board are changing the way Clear Channel logs inventory, sells airtime, programs radio stations, bills advertisers and runs promotions. Result: Greater value for both advertisers and listeners.
Thanks again, Clear Channel! Those tunes sound so much better, now that you more efficiently sell huge blocks of advertising time through national markets.
It's pledge drive at my local NPR station. I'm suddenly feeling much, much more guilty for not contributing.
Re:The long, slow, death of the DJ.
on
Digital Celebrities
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Frequently celebrity interviews are mocked up from a stock tape of the celebrity answering questions with the DJ's voice dubbed between even.
I used to scrounge around in used junk stores, and a couple times I ran across records containing pre-recorded interviews. They were great - they included the script for the DJ for the canned questions. I wish I hadn't been so poor back then; I could have bought them and... never mind, they wouldn't fit into my CD player anyway.
In one of my old jobs, the guy who wrote documentation had a passing resemblance to Tom Cruise. Whenever a new Cruise movie came out, he got a call from his agent to look the part and cruise the town (pun intended). Apparently it's a common scam to send out dopplegangers to get some local media buzz going.
There are two kinds of lies.
No, sorry, I lied about that.
For one thing, developers wouldn't be able to look at the source, because it would taint anything they would put out.
More importantly, the BeOS relied on a lot of proprietary, third party components. The BeOS developers pretty much said that it would be virtually impossible to disentagle the proprietary stuff from the Be stuff. Even if that were possible, you wouldn't have anything useful.
Besides, the Open BeOS is making good progress without the source code.
Exactly the same excellent advice I got from my Dad. The short lecture went something like:
Get a real joh. You want to do something that's fun? That's called a hobby.
I spent years working for small, fun companies that went bankrupt. I'm now work for the State, 9:00 to 5:30. It allows me to do important stuff, like raise a family. As a bonus, I end up supporting programs with socially redeeming value.
And since I'm a geek, I luck out, because I get to do something I like to do anyway - code! Real programmers would work for free just to be able to code, but are smart enough not to tell their bosses. Well, not necessarily on the Guide Dog Assistance Program in COBOL.
Besides, being a musician pays nothing, especially if you haven't really got any real talent.
This bit has puzzled me, as well. How can something so simple - with so many examples of that are done right - be implemented so poorly?
I run Mandrake, and have tried both KDE and Gnome. I really like the look of Gnome, but the file selector literally drove from Gnome and back to KDE. It sounds petty, but it's not. (OK, maybe it is petty.)
The decision to move the "OK" button to the left side hasn't garnered any brownie points, either.
Of course, The KDE file selector has problems, too. When it loads icons, it first displays them, then shimmys them around a bit, reordering them. Quite often, I'll have hit one icon, only to have it moved and another one be selected.
I'm looking forward to seeing Gnome with more polish, especially since my favorite toolkit (wxWindows) doesn't have bindings to Qt/KDE.
Still, I suspect that KDE will end up my desktop of choice. But I'm willing to be pursuaded otherwise.
Re:Extremely impressive feature list
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
I love Konq, but waiting for the icons to finish shuffling is a bit problematic - I'll often click one icon, and have something else appear.
In the Under the Hood section of the KDE 3.1 New Feature Guide, there's a small blurb:
... and smarter thumbnail generation.
So I'm holding out some small hope that this got addressed.
I'm a bit leery about upgrading to the Mandrake 9.1 beta, but I really want to play with KDE 3.1. Hopefully Knoppix will come out with it Real Soon Now - apparently Klaus is waiting for the internationalization stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, the reception in my area is so bad - thanks to some local radio station - that half the time I can't even pick up local stations, and I'm virtually living next to the city.
Well, it appears I don't even get to read the FCC site, either:
C'mon, guys... Remember that moment when you discovered that Playboy has pretty pictures and content?
Same here. Give it a try.
- I don't use BeOS much anymore, but I do have a good grasp of its excellence in some points and its suckiness in others, so please forgive me for being opinionated.
Come on, Eugenia... tell us how you really feel.It takes about 15 minutes to install Zeta and it is not difficult at all. However, it is more involved than Be's original Installer and in my opinion, it shouldn't have been.
YellowTAB should have concentrated on fixing this limitation of BeOS' Drive Setup instead of adding useless features like "Stings", application selection and "GCC version choice" that only bloat the installation and do not follow the paradigm that Be had and everyone loved: "keep it simple".
However, what is immediately disappointing is that Zeta takes 23 whole seconds to load on this machine (a machine which has had BeOS 5 on it forever and loads it between 9 and 10 seconds).
First and foremost, Zeta comes with some 400 fonts. Personally, I find this ridiculous.
It takes about 15 minutes to install Zeta and it is not difficult at all. However, it is more involved than Be's original Installer and in my opinion, it shouldn't have been.
Isn't this stuff required reading anymore? Sigh. It's just as well, I think Mark Knopfler nailed it in "Industrial Disease":
Philosophy is useless theology is worse..."
Anyhoo, the question Rene poses is this:"What if all this were an illusion created by some evil djinn?"
Apparently, "evil djinn" was the 16th century equivalent of holodecks.
So he starts out with first principles: "How can I know that I exist?" to which he answers famously that since someone is doing the thinking - and experiencing that thought - someone must exist. Cognito ergo sum; I exist.
Now he moves on to the big question: how to know if anything else exists. He's aware of Plato's cave analogy; he's got to dispose of this "What if it's all a dream" problem.
Unfortunately, some hand waving appears at this point. He can't really prove that everything isn't an illusion.
So what's his clever answer?
He dodges the question, and says that he's prefers to assume that reality is... well, real, since the alternative bites.
It's all a bit of a letdown - he starts out with a bang, and a couple paragraphs later ends with a whimper. Some things are unknowable, some things are unprovable.
Deal with it. If you want to live as if you were in a holodeck projection... more power to you, young Zaphod.
What more is there to say?
The layout managers were an especially nice feature, since they would manage the placement of widgets on the windows automatically. Coming from a Windows/Mac background, I had never seen anything like it.
Unfortunately, the actual experience of using Tcl/Tk was less nice. Even though it had a Windows-esque wrapping, the widgets still seemed to behave like Motif widgets (yech!), and the applications didn't scale well to low resolutions (800x600) - they all seemed to have been written for people with huge X Terminals.
As others have pointed out, the Tcl grammar is quite consistant, but so is LISP. It just felt klunky.
I spent some time browsing the Net looking for a version of Tk that stood alone from Tcl. There was one I found, but it was unmaintained. I dug into the code for a while, trying to see if I could do it myself, but it seemed pretty tightly embedded. Besides, trying to keep up with the changes to Tk seemed hopeless task.
To be fair, Tcl/Tk had a particular niche it was aiming for: being a "glue" language. For that, it seems to do an admiral job. But other languages (Lua, Perl) or toolkits (wxWindows, Qt) seem better poised in the market.
I hate to mention this (because it makes this post Grammar Police posting instead of merely -1 Still Not Funny), but here goes:
The Rule About It's and Its
Unfortunately, application of this rule guarantees that your sentences look wrong.
Oh, yes: for creamy sugary smoothness, I rely on A&W Cream Soda. But who wants to drink what the Grammar Police drink?
I belong to the "something has gone wrong with Gnome" school of thought. I dearly want Gnome to succeed. It's got a different sort of style and sensibility than KDE and Windows, and there's a lot of great stuff there.
Love it or hate it, KDE feels like a unified desktop, while Gnome feels like a cobbled together set of unrelated tools.
The "Open File" dialog is a thing of shame, and I can't believe that it won't be until October until a replacement comes along. The fact that something so basic has been allowed to stay unchanged so long, in my mind, reflects the difference between KDE and Gnome.
I don't think that it's an organization issue, or even that one group is more clever than the other. My guess is that, at some level, Qt really is better than GTK. I don't know if it's C vs. C++, or KParts vs. Corba, Glade vs. KDevelop... Perhaps Nick's got it right, that it's the underlying objects. KDE doesn't seem to have suffered from having a C++-centric toolkit, and Gnome doesn't seem to have benefitted from having a C-centric toolkit.
The last release of KDE had some pretty cool stuff in it - I was eager to get my hands on it and play with it. In contrast, most of what I've heard about Gnome 2.2 has been about what it doesn't have in it anymore. It apparently won't even be featured in the next Knoppix release, since it's broken so badly.
But I wouldn't discount the future of Gnome. Maybe .NET/Mono will solve the problems (I wouldn't bet the farm on it). Maybe there are no problems at all - just a different desktop, with a different way of doing things.
But, gah... Please, fix that "Open File" dialog!
Yes, that's pretty gosh-darned compelling. Next time you are accused of a crime, don't ask what the punishment might be. After all, that would be exactly the same as admitting you are guilty. Sounds like something out of Kafka's "The Trial".
Unless, of course, it's my 5 year old son.
OK, I'll admit it: I didn't read the entire book. I mean, I tried, but after a while my eyes blurred over and I just skimmed the rest of the chapters. Zzzzzzz... Thank goodness for smarmy sarcasm. Now there's a philosophy you can build a career on.
I'd recognize my 12 year old self by the fear in my eyes, the doubts about the future and his place in it. At times, what lay ahead looked like little more than dust and ashes, scorched earth after a terrifying moment of nuclear holocaust. Despite all the signs leading to perdition, he still held out hope. But was it too much to ask for a small sign?
Would he recognize me? He'd no doubt ask me what to tell him what he was thinking of - a secret password only known to himself and (hopefully) his future self. I'd have to tell him that 30 years is a long time, that some things just slip away from you. He'd have to accept that it was enough for me to be there, pulled through the tesseract.
Even at 12, I think he'd see our father's profile and know the cadence in my speech. He'd know me just the same way that, looking at him, my younger self, I'd see the reflection of my own sons.
There would be no questions about stock, bonds or assasination attempts. He knows that I'm was already bending the rules, giving him this small glimpse into the future. Paradoxes be damned, I owed myself something, promised myself that if there were some way to make contact, I'd do it. Like Houdini or Lazarus, come back by way of science and magic. There was only one thing he really wants to know.
"Is there a future?"
"Is there a place for me in it?"
A normal life, with bills to pay and teething children, someone to love and someone who loved me. Family and friends, grief and pain. Something other than the oblivion of a nuclear rain.
I wouldn't even have to answer him. He'd know, seeing me standing there. He'd know enough that he could ignore those doomsayers, and slip into bed at the end of the day, gentle into that dark night, knowing that there was a tomorrow.
So cheers to us, one and all, who have made it this far. A moment of silence, perhaps, for the dear friends and family we've lost along the way.
In fact, DRM is already built into Media Player - you can't grab a screenshot via the Print Screen button on secured video. You just get a black image where the video image would be.
Unlike some doomed attempts to make a "better" Windows clone *cough*Freedows*cough* that degenerated into a puff of vaporware, the fine people at ReactOS have been keeping their noses to the grindstone and quietly worked away at getting an NT clone working. It's still a long way from replacing NT, as this screenshot of the one and only GUI application shows.
But if you want a free and open look at Inside the development of [a] Windows NT [clone], ReactOS is a good place to look.
They've done a number of things right:
Did I mention they spend thankless hours coding?
And exactly how is this different from the usual Slashdot posting?
I'm guessing that you're single, and not (yet) seriously considering children. Had you even come close to the Childbirth section of your local bookstore, you'd have been deluged by books such as Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana : What To Name Your Baby Now.
You haven't stumbled on to anything new here.
Or check out one of the "Moms To Be" chat boards - the importance of selecting the right name is a Big Deal, and always has been. One can't pick a name that's too popular, or too obscure. And there's that unpleasant shock when the "perfect" name has been found, only to find that it's the rising star of the Baby Names Top 10 List - back to the drawing board.
Perhaps the most important issue is "teasability". You can have hours of fun with your spouse, shooting down every name they think up by turning it into a childish taunt:
You : Yeah, I can hear it now: "Come here, Mister Dunkin' Donuts!"
Her : Isn't there any name you like?
You : I'm just saying... But now that you mention it, have you considered "Guy"?
Her : No. Have you considered an frontal lobotamy?
Hours of fun, kids! Those 9 months of pregnancy will be gone before you know it.
Personally, I've found the most effective strategy is to waffle until the baby's been born. Then, once your wife is back in the recovery room, all doped up and groggy from pain that men can't even imagine (thank goodness for epidurals and pain-induced memory blocks), pop your suggestion to her:
Her : (groggy): Hrm? Bosco? Yes, I'm thirsty...
You : Excellent! Roscoe it is! Wasn't that easy?
Thank goodness for blogs on slow days like this!
It's not clear that the 'tax' will have much effect, since most estimate that it would take about 16 pounds to have any real effect.
They also reported that the people hardest hit are likely to be the small shops in London which do deliveries. Most residents already walk or take the tube.
Visiting my brother in London, I was struck by the difference in scale between London and any other large US city. In the US, when you shop you fill up a large cart, stuff your minivan, and fill your fridge. In London, you take enough to fit into a shopping bag, carry it home, and put it in your small fridge in your modest kitchen (all things being relative, of course).
Still, the proposal is a start on a real problem of traffic that's not unique to London, and a number of large US cities are watching it closely.
That the fine MySQL people have chosen to pronounce it wrong is their own choice. Heck, some people can't even decide if the 'S' stands for Structured or Standard.
As for me an my house, we choose sequel, since it has nice hacker resonance.
Your "standard platform components" and "compliant script engines" only run under Windows?
Sort of comparing apples to oranges, then.
But I'll agree that it's not Access. At this point, it's more a data browser tool - it hasn't even got a good report generator.
Even as that, it's missing the most important feature of any tool: being able to lock the users out of the application.
Still, not being Access is probably a good thing, since the advice from all my advanced Access instructors has been "Code it in VB."
This document has been around forever; I could have sworn that I found it in the first place via Slashdot.
I was looking at it a couple months ago to see if it would make a possible replacement for Access. It appeared that OpenOffice could give a nice frontend for simple forms, but not much beyond that. I didn't want to mess with ODBC, and wasn't about to install MySQL on my work machine.
Access is great for single user desktop applications, but it doesn't really scale that well, even with SQL support.
VB is normally the tool of choice, but I'm caught between the .EXE version becoming obsolete, and our organization not being ready to jump onto the .NET bandwagon.
I'm looking forward to seeing what's new with it in the next OpenOffice release.
Except, of course, when it's not actually live nor local.
"Leverage" is must be a euphanism for "use our market power to drive everyone else out of business".
"Premium programming to smaller towns" is a nice phrase... You certainly don't want any local DJ on the airwaves. Thank goodness for Clear Channel!
Ever wonder what "diversity" means? According to Clear Channel, it's "everyone listening to the same thing."
There's a difference between "everyone is forced to listen to it" and "hugely popular". Pretty much everyone had to eat cafeteria food in my elementry school, but I don't recall it being "hugely popular."
Except, of course, that it's neither live nor local. Oops, I'm repeating myself.
The biggest scam is that the audience is largely unaware that it's canned, which means that your profit stream is based on the idea of deceiving to your customers. Any what justifies this?
Oh, yes... Premium profits.
Thanks again, Clear Channel! Those tunes sound so much better, now that you more efficiently sell huge blocks of advertising time through national markets.
It's pledge drive at my local NPR station. I'm suddenly feeling much, much more guilty for not contributing.
I used to scrounge around in used junk stores, and a couple times I ran across records containing pre-recorded interviews. They were great - they included the script for the DJ for the canned questions. I wish I hadn't been so poor back then; I could have bought them and ... never mind, they wouldn't fit into my CD player anyway.
In one of my old jobs, the guy who wrote documentation had a passing resemblance to Tom Cruise. Whenever a new Cruise movie came out, he got a call from his agent to look the part and cruise the town (pun intended). Apparently it's a common scam to send out dopplegangers to get some local media buzz going.
There are two kinds of lies. No, sorry, I lied about that.
For one thing, developers wouldn't be able to look at the source, because it would taint anything they would put out.
More importantly, the BeOS relied on a lot of proprietary, third party components. The BeOS developers pretty much said that it would be virtually impossible to disentagle the proprietary stuff from the Be stuff. Even if that were possible, you wouldn't have anything useful.
Besides, the Open BeOS is making good progress without the source code.
I spent years working for small, fun companies that went bankrupt. I'm now work for the State, 9:00 to 5:30. It allows me to do important stuff, like raise a family. As a bonus, I end up supporting programs with socially redeeming value.
And since I'm a geek, I luck out, because I get to do something I like to do anyway - code! Real programmers would work for free just to be able to code, but are smart enough not to tell their bosses. Well, not necessarily on the Guide Dog Assistance Program in COBOL.
Besides, being a musician pays nothing, especially if you haven't really got any real talent.
I run Mandrake, and have tried both KDE and Gnome. I really like the look of Gnome, but the file selector literally drove from Gnome and back to KDE. It sounds petty, but it's not. (OK, maybe it is petty.)
The decision to move the "OK" button to the left side hasn't garnered any brownie points, either.
Of course, The KDE file selector has problems, too. When it loads icons, it first displays them, then shimmys them around a bit, reordering them. Quite often, I'll have hit one icon, only to have it moved and another one be selected.
I'm looking forward to seeing Gnome with more polish, especially since my favorite toolkit (wxWindows) doesn't have bindings to Qt/KDE.
Still, I suspect that KDE will end up my desktop of choice. But I'm willing to be pursuaded otherwise.
In the Under the Hood section of the KDE 3.1 New Feature Guide, there's a small blurb:
So I'm holding out some small hope that this got addressed.
I'm a bit leery about upgrading to the Mandrake 9.1 beta, but I really want to play with KDE 3.1. Hopefully Knoppix will come out with it Real Soon Now - apparently Klaus is waiting for the internationalization stuff.