Microsoft's hand in hardware "standards" has all been negative
Not true - and I'm not just saying that because I'm typing this comment on a Microsoft "split" Natural keyboard!
If it wasn't for DOS's dominence on PC's in the 80s then cheap commodity PC Hardwar wouldn't be so commonplace now.
Think back a few years to when a PC cost the same as a car, and now because of the popularity of DOS, and Windows 3.1, etc. PC Hardware is commonplace, cheap, interoperable.
Microsoft didn't cause this, but they helped a hell of a lot.
And without commonplace cheap PC hardware where would Linux be today?
Sometimes I worry that I pimp out the list too often' but it was a real suprise to see that, my sincere thanks and appreciation to you for your generous gift.
Any feature requestions or suggestions will be moved to the front of the queue now;)
Once upon a time I wanted an MP3 streaming server, none of the ones I looked at did what I wanted. So I did the standard thing and designed my own.
After releasing my first version to freshmeat I had about five subscribers to the project.
These subscribers gave me patches, feedback, and encouragement.
Doing a websearch for the project name I discovered by accident that the the package made it into Gentoo, and similarly Netbsd without any feedback or involvement from myself!
The next step was my becoming a Debian Developer so that I could upload it there - and not worry about other people doing a bad job without me. (Not a real concern; I had wanted to join Debian for some time anyway).
Now life is good - I've no idea if it's in RedHat because I've not touched it for years, but SuSE include it the *BSD's and Gentoo cover it, and Debian gets the latest versions all the time.
Freshmeat lists 120+ subscribers to the project, and it's probably on the verge of becoming an official GNU package sometime soon.
Sure they've taken the site and the ROM's down.. but look at this:
Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the
person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or
privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination
or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by
persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you
received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from
all computers.
They've posted a confidential email to the world - they're gonna get sued bigtime now!
(OT: But didn't we used to be able to use <pre> tags?)
I grew up with computers, my first being a ZX Spectrum, then graduating through bigger machines until I landed in PC-land.
I fought for a job with a local company a few years back and managed to become a java programmer despite minimal knowledge. Since then I've worked for about four years as a Java/C++ programmer - utilising other skills such as perl, x86 assembly, etc.
After that much time though I realised I actually hated programming for other people - it took most of the fun out of it. (This is a simplification of course).
Luckily I found myself in a position to do 'part time' sysadmining when a colleauge left the job.
Now I'm full-time sole sysadmin for a larger company and I couldn't be happier.
Sure I still write code.. bash scripts, perl code, and other utilities to help myself and my minions - but now I do it for fun.
There's no way that I'd ever go back to being a developer. I like the variety, the challenges, the sheer unpredictability of my current role - becoming a developer would remove so much of that.
I've got several large tattoos - 6 in total which are all covered by my normal clothing. I'm fairly certain that most of the company knows these exist after drunking nights out - but I've never really shown them at work, and nobody has every commented.
Piercings are pretty much the same. At the moment I have 12 piercings, and I see a colleague across the other side of the office with a lone eyebrow piercing.
I guess if I had a customer facing position things would be different - but hiding around in the office my Septum (middle of the nose; like a bull!) piercing doesn't give me anything to worry about.
(I'm annoyed I had to lose the tongue piercing I've had for the past 8 years recently for unrelated reasons. *grumbles*)
I think if you're good at your job and haven't got really uptight employers a ring or tattoo here or there isn't likely to cause any problems - it's only if you've got a load of "obvious" mods that folk might get the wrong idea and judge you upon appearence more than necessary.
Considering you'll need a C compiler to bootstrap and build the Java Virtual Machine I think it's fair to say that for any OS/Platform Java exists upon you'll find a C compiler.
Unless the JVM is bootstrapped in something baraque like Forth;)
Normally the slashdot interviewees take a long time to answer their questions, (I'm not complaining as the candidates are normally very busy people), but this one seems like it was much quicker than any recent one.
Perhaps he distributed the answering of the questions?
And there was me thinking that running a discussion forum, maybe posting news articles every couple of hours, and charging subscription fees would never work!
Lets not slashdot them out of existence out of jealousy; please!
Oh, I dunno. Fax SPAM was effectively stopped by law;
That's possible because it's easy to trace the sender of a fax message, and they were almost always sent from within the same country as you.
Sadly with spam these two things are not true; spam is sent via forged addresses almost all the time, and even if you track down the true sending machine/user it's somebody in America or the far east - which wouldn't be covered by any law created over here in the UK.
I'd be happy with spam if it was possible to identify the senders; a nice big lart would do the trick - but for a law to come into effect it would have to be global in nature.
Thats fine for a desktop system, but I used a mac laptop with only one button - adding an external mouse with more buttons is fine; but you can't use it so easily upon a train, etc.
Sure you can use left-button + Cmnd key, but coming from a Linux + Windows background I find it hard to deal with.
I'd love to see a Mac Laptop with a three button device built in. (Granted they may well exist, I'm using a 5+ year old laptop to type this which I swagged from work as it's obsolete.. runs Debian just fine though;)
That depends.. I run a small project (MP3 streamer in Perl; runs under Windows too;)
I have two sourceforge mailing lists, a developers one, and a users one.
Both are near dead. One person recently mailed somehting along the lines of "The list is quiet; the software just works."
Originally the mailing lists were busy, but now even with growing users and inclusion in several distributions the online forums are the single most important point of contact for questions, bug reports, and suggestsions.
I attribute my success to writing something that worked well for me before releasing it, listening to feedback, and including the magic letters 'MP3' in the project name!
I've regarded the project complete-enough-for-me for a very long time, it keeps evolving as interesting suggestions are made by users more than anything else.
In terms of real achievements I feel proud to have created something that others want, humbled by the time taken by other people to help out, and would gladly code another 24 hours for every single "Thank you" email I receive (rarely).
OK I'm a money grabbing whore too - but the simple emails and guestbook signees always put a smile on my face and make me want to do more for my users.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true - and I'm not just saying that because I'm typing this comment on a Microsoft "split" Natural keyboard!
If it wasn't for DOS's dominence on PC's in the 80s then cheap commodity PC Hardwar wouldn't be so commonplace now.
Think back a few years to when a PC cost the same as a car, and now because of the popularity of DOS, and Windows 3.1, etc. PC Hardware is commonplace, cheap, interoperable.
Microsoft didn't cause this, but they helped a hell of a lot.
And without commonplace cheap PC hardware where would Linux be today?
http://www.debian.org/security/...
Wow - I'm stunned and look forward to reading it.
Sometimes I worry that I pimp out the list too often' but it was a real suprise to see that, my sincere thanks and appreciation to you for your generous gift.
Any feature requestions or suggestions will be moved to the front of the queue now ;)
Once upon a time I wanted an MP3 streaming server, none of the ones I looked at did what I wanted. So I did the standard thing and designed my own.
After releasing my first version to freshmeat I had about five subscribers to the project.
These subscribers gave me patches, feedback, and encouragement.
Doing a websearch for the project name I discovered by accident that the the package made it into Gentoo, and similarly Netbsd without any feedback or involvement from myself!
The next step was my becoming a Debian Developer so that I could upload it there - and not worry about other people doing a bad job without me. (Not a real concern; I had wanted to join Debian for some time anyway).
Now life is good - I've no idea if it's in RedHat because I've not touched it for years, but SuSE include it the *BSD's and Gentoo cover it, and Debian gets the latest versions all the time.
Freshmeat lists 120+ subscribers to the project, and it's probably on the verge of becoming an official GNU package sometime soon.
If you use it and like it buy something nice? </ObPlug>
Sure they've taken the site and the ROM's down .. but look at this:
Note: The information transmitted in this Notice is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, reproduction, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from all computers.They've posted a confidential email to the world - they're gonna get sued bigtime now!
(OT: But didn't we used to be able to use <pre> tags?)
I'm suprised at the direction of the change..
I grew up with computers, my first being a ZX Spectrum, then graduating through bigger machines until I landed in PC-land.
I fought for a job with a local company a few years back and managed to become a java programmer despite minimal knowledge. Since then I've worked for about four years as a Java/C++ programmer - utilising other skills such as perl, x86 assembly, etc.
After that much time though I realised I actually hated programming for other people - it took most of the fun out of it. (This is a simplification of course).
Luckily I found myself in a position to do 'part time' sysadmining when a colleauge left the job.
Now I'm full-time sole sysadmin for a larger company and I couldn't be happier.
Sure I still write code .. bash scripts, perl code, and other utilities to help myself and my minions - but now I do it for fun.
There's no way that I'd ever go back to being a developer. I like the variety, the challenges, the sheer unpredictability of my current role - becoming a developer would remove so much of that.
I've got several large tattoos - 6 in total which are all covered by my normal clothing. I'm fairly certain that most of the company knows these exist after drunking nights out - but I've never really shown them at work, and nobody has every commented.
Piercings are pretty much the same. At the moment I have 12 piercings, and I see a colleague across the other side of the office with a lone eyebrow piercing.
I guess if I had a customer facing position things would be different - but hiding around in the office my Septum (middle of the nose; like a bull!) piercing doesn't give me anything to worry about.
(I'm annoyed I had to lose the tongue piercing I've had for the past 8 years recently for unrelated reasons. *grumbles*)
I think if you're good at your job and haven't got really uptight employers a ring or tattoo here or there isn't likely to cause any problems - it's only if you've got a load of "obvious" mods that folk might get the wrong idea and judge you upon appearence more than necessary.
I'd like to think so too, but I don't believe this will change anything.
Too many people consider the Mac surfers as a tiny section of the internet, rightly or wrongly and won't make any effort for them.
I wonder though how many websites insist upon Internet Explorer not so much for the browser, but for ActiveX plugins, vbscript, etc?
I'm not sure .. but I'd imagine these would never have worked upon Macs anyway, right?
If that is the case even Mac users who used IE would have suffered compared to Windows users if a site required IE...
There are several sites that I look at regularly for different programming things.
When I did windows development Code Project was a lifesaver, nowadays that's been replaced by the venerable Perl Monk
For online books I'd browse through The Assayer, and for zany reference nothing beats How Much Is Inside .. Stuff!
Considering you'll need a C compiler to bootstrap and build the Java Virtual Machine I think it's fair to say that for any OS/Platform Java exists upon you'll find a C compiler.
Unless the JVM is bootstrapped in something baraque like Forth ;)
On pain of death?
Just to be clear it was more than two months of work, yet it fitted on a Floppy?
Wow!
I guess thinking about it I could believe it .. but at first glance that sounds a bit fishy.
"Patenting Patents .. Priceless .."
Just glancing over the site I see that the first entry in the changelog is the Entry called '404' - clicking upon that entry gives you what?
A 404 - page not found error.
I wonder how that'll be represented in the paper version of the book, perhaps listing it in the index as page 2.5?
But surely you'd only go to this effort for something really secure?
Which means a DOS attack of trying to listen in, distrupting the schemes is a good thing to do?
And of course if your cable is 100KM long you've got literally hundreds of locations to hack/check for breaches?
Normally the slashdot interviewees take a long time to answer their questions, (I'm not complaining as the candidates are normally very busy people), but this one seems like it was much quicker than any recent one.
Perhaps he distributed the answering of the questions?
Irony is ...
What is this evil bit of which you speak, it sounds like the kind of thing I'd expect to see covered upon /.
I don't remember hearing about it though..
Ssshhhh! It'll be our little secret..
And there was me thinking that running a discussion forum, maybe posting news articles every couple of hours, and charging subscription fees would never work!
Lets not slashdot them out of existence out of jealousy; please!
If you don't like the anti-Christian attributes of Linux, then you'll hate Lesbian GNU/Linux!
It doesn't help address the rest of your points but xsmbrowser is a great tool for browsing windows workgroups.
You can see all the computers in the domain, browse them, and copy to/from them - entering passwords if necessary.
I use it all the time.
That's possible because it's easy to trace the sender of a fax message, and they were almost always sent from within the same country as you.
Sadly with spam these two things are not true; spam is sent via forged addresses almost all the time, and even if you track down the true sending machine/user it's somebody in America or the far east - which wouldn't be covered by any law created over here in the UK.
I'd be happy with spam if it was possible to identify the senders; a nice big lart would do the trick - but for a law to come into effect it would have to be global in nature.
Thats fine for a desktop system, but I used a mac laptop with only one button - adding an external mouse with more buttons is fine; but you can't use it so easily upon a train, etc.
Sure you can use left-button + Cmnd key, but coming from a Linux + Windows background I find it hard to deal with.
I'd love to see a Mac Laptop with a three button device built in. (Granted they may well exist, I'm using a 5+ year old laptop to type this which I swagged from work as it's obsolete .. runs Debian just fine though ;)
That depends .. I run a small project (MP3 streamer in Perl; runs under Windows too ;)
I have two sourceforge mailing lists, a developers one, and a users one.
Both are near dead. One person recently mailed somehting along the lines of "The list is quiet; the software just works."
Originally the mailing lists were busy, but now even with growing users and inclusion in several distributions the online forums are the single most important point of contact for questions, bug reports, and suggestsions.
I attribute my success to writing something that worked well for me before releasing it, listening to feedback, and including the magic letters 'MP3' in the project name!
I've regarded the project complete-enough-for-me for a very long time, it keeps evolving as interesting suggestions are made by users more than anything else.
In terms of real achievements I feel proud to have created something that others want, humbled by the time taken by other people to help out, and would gladly code another 24 hours for every single "Thank you" email I receive (rarely).
OK I'm a money grabbing whore too - but the simple emails and guestbook signees always put a smile on my face and make me want to do more for my users.