I would have loved the opportunity to try out my game skills against my peers instead of having my canoe oar stolen by some arse hole of a kid canoeing up the river. Health isn't just physical, it's social health too and as others have pointed out, 3 hrs of video games a day leaves plenty of time to socialise.
In a surprise move, Apple bans Opera on the iPhone and iPad. When questioned company spokesmen would not say why, although an unnamed source says that it is because, "Safari enables people to view sites that ridicule public figures."
Safari, Apple says, is allowed because it uses Apple's iCensor.
Linux is ostensibly better than Windows and OS X because it's open source but Windows and OS X still dominate the desktop market and will for a long time since. Since when has being Open Source been equal to ubiquitous?
Realistically, Flash to iPhone would be easier excepting for Apple's licensing and such. One thing Apple DOES do well is standardise its interface and APIs. HTML5 isn't well supported and won't be implemented for years and YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS from now by which time real people will have gotten fed up and the various implementations WILL have diverged. And then we'll have everyone bleating about HTML6 to solve all our problems...Flash -> iPhone seemed to be a proof of concept against a non-moving target. It's just that said target went and made it illegal to do so.
That is a fair comment; there were or are moves to try and remove the non-open parts of OpenSolaris more open.
So that we're not throwing brick bats at Sun, though, I suspect Sun might have wanted to open all of OpenSolaris but got stuck with a codebase where some of the licensing for it simply didn't allow them.
That, of course, is exactly the whole point of many open source advocates' message - if you use ANY source that has a restrictive license you can lock yourself in and end up not being able to open your source as much as you'd like to.
There are arguments about the CDDL versus the other open source or free licenses but that, I don't think, matters here. My point is that even if Sun wanted to make ALL of OpenSolaris free (eg. GPLv3 free) they couldn't have due to prior legal obligations.
It actually looks as though they're describing functional programming with something akin to CLOS as an object system.
Think:
It generates code
It appears the object orientation system works on some form of generic methods
Perhaps admitting they're using one of the other well-known basis' of computing (Lambda Calculus vs Turing/Von Neumann machines) is a bit too much for them to confess or maybe, even, understand?
They could even "borrow" Solaris' scheduling framework so that those who thought SCHEDULER A was better than SCHEDULER B (for no particular reason) could just plug their favourite scheduler in. One would hope, though, that they'd think about which scheduler to use...
Much to the consternation of my fellow colleagues, I sometimes use an abacus to perform simple additions and multiplications. Why? I don't have a calculator lying around and the older xcalc - which used to be good - got replaced by some gtk+ calculator - which is crap.
Result: Abacus is actually more efficient for me than using the default xcalc on my Debian Sid system.
I think this demonstrates that the issue isn't open document standards or anything bizarre like that - even Microsoft believe there should be standards that are, for their definition, "open". It's the usability of the products that make open documents...
If they're unusable, useless, not available or anything like that, you're not going to get anything anyway and last time I like a zero length file was the same regardless of whether you used Windows, Linux or VMS.
Having all the bigger players jump on the band wagon simply increases the chances of getting user and geek friendly tools to deal with open documents.
Not to start a debate, but let's say that The Utopians develop nanotechnology that eventually allows them to survive the change of climate from what we have now to significantly warmer. Most of the other humans (and species) die...
Is this:
* evolution?
* progress?
* some kind of perverted Intelligent Design where the intelligent designers were human?
Let's say that The Utopians develop nanotechnology that eradicates, say, the Dog 'Flu (which is as effective as Ebola Zaire and contagious by air).
How do we control who gets to have these nanotechnology units installed, with the following assumptions:
* they're EASY to produce
* they're INEXPENSIVE even by the billions to produce...in other words there's no economic or technical reason why the whole world couldn't be "immunised" against Dog 'Flu excepting political ones?
Intriguing; I really don't believe that the size of nanotechnology robots is the issue - the crunch is the ethics.
I play the MUD Achaea and have been doing so for about a year and a half now. During that time I've risen from a mere young adventurer to a Ministerial position in my city and a reasonably high rank in my Order.
It is so easy to see people who have never played an RPG:
They talk l1k3 l33t haXX0rs
They talk about things like keyboards and Internet
I don't know about other people "playing the game" but I certainly try to stay in character, at least in public. When I am "in character", the world is very real to me. The characters are very real, the people are very real and I actually look on my "alter ego" as being me.
RPGs do have a different frame of mind than first person, shoot'em up type games. I can see that a course introducing people about RPGs would be very useful whether they're D&D in "real life" or MUDs in "cyber space".
Voice: "Please enter your phone number" Me: Enters Phone Number...wait at least 15 if not 45 minutes Operator: "Can you tell me your phone number, please?"
I've taken to stating bluntly that "I've already entered my phone number, isn't it in front of you?". God, I hate that - why waste my time entering my damned phone number and then ask me it AGAIN?
Telstra (http://www.telstra.com/) has this stupid voice recognition system which incidentally, doesn't really work:
Telstra: "Please say your phone number." Me: "I want to talk to a Fsdjfdsfjng person." [repeat about 5 times]...and voila, you get put on a different queue./me stupid Telcos
Well, coding standards can be very complex to very simple not to mention they're language independent. A coding standard for Perl would almost certainly be different to one for C - simple example, Perl doesn't have/* and */ so mentioning them in a Perl coding standard doesn't make a lot of sense.
Here's some advice though:
1. Take a top down approach and a bottom up approach at the same time
- What are your broad goals and what do you want your standards to do?
- What standards already exist in the organisation?
2. Remember, you need to win the hearts and minds of your teams to change
- Sure you can be PHB and say "Thou shalt", but unhappy coders write unhappy code
- Listen to your team and get their feedback
3. Don't make wholesale changes because "you can"
- Otherwise you might end up making things worse
Out of all these three points, if you want to effect change, maintain respect and have coders who you can still herd about, point 2 is probably the most important...in fact, if you have the time and support to do it, getting your programming team to formulate the standards FOR YOU will mean they're more likely to actually follow them because they OWN them:)
Personally, I prefer to use a Desktop Environment that "Just Works" [tm]. I actually don't "like" the default look and feel of either Gnome or KDE on Debian Unstable, however I find that the default Gnome install is more understandable to ME than the default KDE install.
Why? Up until a few years ago I never had a computer that was quite up to running KDE efficiently. When it came time for me to settle for a desktop environment Gnome won, not because I "liked" it but because its competitor on my machines just wouldn't run fast enough.
I think the punters will purchase and use a distribution whose user interface works for them. If that's a Gnome dressed as KDE or a KDE dressed as a Gnome, I'm not sure that they actually even *care*. Let's face it, unless you happen to be a desktop environment developer, you're not using your computer to use the desktop environment - the desktop environment is simply a means to an end.
Will it be bad if KDE just goes away? Quite possibly yes.
Is it bad that Novell has switched camps? Quite possibly yes if you're in the KDE camp.
In the long term if a Novell/SuSE customer says: "I bought SuSE version 15 and even my computer illiterate sister could use it straight away, my blind cousin can use it out of the box and I, power user, find that it doesn't get in my way"...then Novell/SuSE have won the game.
Yeah, but if you put any of your mentioned tools in then it would be MORE than the TOP TEN - note the word representing the number 10:P
Personally there are times when I prefer vi (i.e. the real vi) rather than vim - anyone had trouble reading the syntax highlighting where you can't see the blue at all? Maybe all my screens' gamma adjustments are just wrong...
"Hi There, my beautiful development team, it's Bill!" says Bill.
"Wassup?"
"I've got a virus! If you don't fix it RIGHT NOW, I'm gonna fire you. Really!" is Bill's reply.
"You canna do that!"
"Don't you know I own this company? If you don't get your sorry ass up here right now and fix it within 24 hours I'm gonna look like a liar and you're mince meat." says Bill and hangs the phone up.
I am having a merry merry-go-round with their support department. I think I've convinced them that they can't possibly bind me to their terms and conditions.
Basically I have said:
* No, I want the law in Australia to apply
* No, I want the right to a jury trial...and then got the response:
"You can't opt out."...to which I replied:
"I'm a law abiding citizen - you are asking me to do something which is illegal."
Slashdot Mirror
I would have loved the opportunity to try out my game skills against my peers instead of having my canoe oar stolen by some arse hole of a kid canoeing up the river. Health isn't just physical, it's social health too and as others have pointed out, 3 hrs of video games a day leaves plenty of time to socialise.
An Identified Flying Object...FLEE!
I meant to say, "Opera enables people to view sites that ridicule public figures."
In a surprise move, Apple bans Opera on the iPhone and iPad. When questioned company spokesmen would not say why, although an unnamed source says that it is because, "Safari enables people to view sites that ridicule public figures."
Safari, Apple says, is allowed because it uses Apple's iCensor.
Linux is ostensibly better than Windows and OS X because it's open source but Windows and OS X still dominate the desktop market and will for a long time since. Since when has being Open Source been equal to ubiquitous?
Realistically, Flash to iPhone would be easier excepting for Apple's licensing and such. One thing Apple DOES do well is standardise its interface and APIs. HTML5 isn't well supported and won't be implemented for years and YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS from now by which time real people will have gotten fed up and the various implementations WILL have diverged. And then we'll have everyone bleating about HTML6 to solve all our problems...Flash -> iPhone seemed to be a proof of concept against a non-moving target. It's just that said target went and made it illegal to do so.
That is a fair comment; there were or are moves to try and remove the non-open parts of OpenSolaris more open.
So that we're not throwing brick bats at Sun, though, I suspect Sun might have wanted to open all of OpenSolaris but got stuck with a codebase where some of the licensing for it simply didn't allow them.
That, of course, is exactly the whole point of many open source advocates' message - if you use ANY source that has a restrictive license you can lock yourself in and end up not being able to open your source as much as you'd like to.
There are arguments about the CDDL versus the other open source or free licenses but that, I don't think, matters here. My point is that even if Sun wanted to make ALL of OpenSolaris free (eg. GPLv3 free) they couldn't have due to prior legal obligations.
"Oracle kills OpenSolaris" - what next? MySQL?
DSL
Oh dear,
I misread ex. Disney as sex. Disney...
DSL
Well, those who innovate turn once again to Parental Nature for inspiration; not entirely surprising seeing Parental Nature either has:
I just hope enough of Parental Nature is around the place for long enough before we lose the wealth of knowledge and technology which we can copy.
If I had one of those things on my head now, it would pop something up that said:
Hmmm...
- It generates code
- It appears the object orientation system works on some form of generic methods
Perhaps admitting they're using one of the other well-known basis' of computing (Lambda Calculus vs Turing/Von Neumann machines) is a bit too much for them to confess or maybe, even, understand?They could even "borrow" Solaris' scheduling framework so that those who thought SCHEDULER A was better than SCHEDULER B (for no particular reason) could just plug their favourite scheduler in. One would hope, though, that they'd think about which scheduler to use...
Oi, I've already come up with that idea and if you even THINK of doing it, I'll sue you for my having done nothing about it! /me oh la la
Think of it:
And:
Much to the consternation of my fellow colleagues, I sometimes use an abacus to perform simple additions and multiplications. Why? I don't have a calculator lying around and the older xcalc - which used to be good - got replaced by some gtk+ calculator - which is crap.
Result: Abacus is actually more efficient for me than using the default xcalc on my Debian Sid system.
I think this demonstrates that the issue isn't open document standards or anything bizarre like that - even Microsoft believe there should be standards that are, for their definition, "open". It's the usability of the products that make open documents...
If they're unusable, useless, not available or anything like that, you're not going to get anything anyway and last time I like a zero length file was the same regardless of whether you used Windows, Linux or VMS.
Having all the bigger players jump on the band wagon simply increases the chances of getting user and geek friendly tools to deal with open documents.
Not to start a debate, but let's say that The Utopians develop nanotechnology that eventually allows them to survive the change of climate from what we have now to significantly warmer. Most of the other humans (and species) die...
...in other words there's no economic or technical reason why the whole world couldn't be "immunised" against Dog 'Flu excepting political ones?
Is this:
* evolution?
* progress?
* some kind of perverted Intelligent Design where the intelligent designers were human?
Let's say that The Utopians develop nanotechnology that eradicates, say, the Dog 'Flu (which is as effective as Ebola Zaire and contagious by air).
How do we control who gets to have these nanotechnology units installed, with the following assumptions:
* they're EASY to produce
* they're INEXPENSIVE even by the billions to produce
Intriguing; I really don't believe that the size of nanotechnology robots is the issue - the crunch is the ethics.
DSL
I play the MUD Achaea and have been doing so for about a year and a half now. During that time I've risen from a mere young adventurer to a Ministerial position in my city and a reasonably high rank in my Order.
It is so easy to see people who have never played an RPG:
I don't know about other people "playing the game" but I certainly try to stay in character, at least in public. When I am "in character", the world is very real to me. The characters are very real, the people are very real and I actually look on my "alter ego" as being me.
RPGs do have a different frame of mind than first person, shoot'em up type games. I can see that a course introducing people about RPGs would be very useful whether they're D&D in "real life" or MUDs in "cyber space".
Voice: "Please enter your phone number" ...wait at least 15 if not 45 minutes
...and voila, you get put on a different queue. /me stupid Telcos
Me: Enters Phone Number
Operator: "Can you tell me your phone number, please?"
I've taken to stating bluntly that "I've already entered my phone number, isn't it in front of you?". God, I hate that - why waste my time entering my damned phone number and then ask me it AGAIN?
Telstra (http://www.telstra.com/) has this stupid voice recognition system which incidentally, doesn't really work:
Telstra: "Please say your phone number."
Me: "I want to talk to a Fsdjfdsfjng person."
[repeat about 5 times]
DSL
I wonder if they can make new brains? Golly, we might be able to make even the stupidest people Menza candidates yet :P
Well, coding standards can be very complex to very simple not to mention they're language independent. A coding standard for Perl would almost certainly be different to one for C - simple example, Perl doesn't have /* and */ so mentioning them in a Perl coding standard doesn't make a lot of sense.
:)
Here's some advice though:
1. Take a top down approach and a bottom up approach at the same time
- What are your broad goals and what do you want your standards to do?
- What standards already exist in the organisation?
2. Remember, you need to win the hearts and minds of your teams to change
- Sure you can be PHB and say "Thou shalt", but unhappy coders write unhappy code
- Listen to your team and get their feedback
3. Don't make wholesale changes because "you can"
- Otherwise you might end up making things worse
Out of all these three points, if you want to effect change, maintain respect and have coders who you can still herd about, point 2 is probably the most important...in fact, if you have the time and support to do it, getting your programming team to formulate the standards FOR YOU will mean they're more likely to actually follow them because they OWN them
HTH
Personally, I prefer to use a Desktop Environment that "Just Works" [tm]. I actually don't "like" the default look and feel of either Gnome or KDE on Debian Unstable, however I find that the default Gnome install is more understandable to ME than the default KDE install.
Why? Up until a few years ago I never had a computer that was quite up to running KDE efficiently. When it came time for me to settle for a desktop environment Gnome won, not because I "liked" it but because its competitor on my machines just wouldn't run fast enough.
I think the punters will purchase and use a distribution whose user interface works for them. If that's a Gnome dressed as KDE or a KDE dressed as a Gnome, I'm not sure that they actually even *care*. Let's face it, unless you happen to be a desktop environment developer, you're not using your computer to use the desktop environment - the desktop environment is simply a means to an end.
Will it be bad if KDE just goes away? Quite possibly yes.
Is it bad that Novell has switched camps? Quite possibly yes if you're in the KDE camp.
In the long term if a Novell/SuSE customer says: "I bought SuSE version 15 and even my computer illiterate sister could use it straight away, my blind cousin can use it out of the box and I, power user, find that it doesn't get in my way"...then Novell/SuSE have won the game.
DSL
Yeah, but if you put any of your mentioned tools in then it would be MORE than the TOP TEN - note the word representing the number 10 :P
Personally there are times when I prefer vi (i.e. the real vi) rather than vim - anyone had trouble reading the syntax highlighting where you can't see the blue at all? Maybe all my screens' gamma adjustments are just wrong...
DSL
...his own personal machine. Seriously.
Heh!Well,
...and then got the response:
...to which I replied:
I am having a merry merry-go-round with their support department. I think I've convinced them that they can't possibly bind me to their terms and conditions.
Basically I have said:
* No, I want the law in Australia to apply
* No, I want the right to a jury trial
"You can't opt out."
"I'm a law abiding citizen - you are asking me to do something which is illegal."
*hmmm*
They don't seem to understand the last bit.