I read somewhere that the Windoze family of OS'es, and the Office softwares are THE big money-makers for M$, and other products are just riding along on that capital.
A story like this just shows that from a customer's point of view, Windoze/Office have value (that M$ can cash in on), but having Free/OSS alternatives, lowers that value.
So making Linux a more attractive alternative, lowers the net value of Microsofts golden eggs. How nice...
I mostly go for an optimum usefulness vs. cost ratio. That almost never translates to the latest, newest, fastest (too expensive for what you get). Nor does it translate to the cheapest available (cheap, but often low quality or lousy support). Although cheap, common, low-cost hardware can be a good choice. It might even mean second hand hardware, but from a useful/cost ratio perspective, that is not often a good choice.
The sweet spot for me mostly lies around the bottom range of hardware that is sold new. A couple of times better than what you have, brandnew, with warranty, and relatively affordable.
For single components, ignore the component-only specs, always consider how they improve your full setup. A CPU that's twice as fast, won't make your entire system twice as fast.
You are a member of a minority who won't use IE no matter what
Actually I think IE is a very capable browser. I just don't like a lot of minor, but important details. If it would be installed as an add-on program like any other, I would use Firefox and IE for different occasions, like I do with Firefox & Opera now.
Fully removing IE also kills some problems that you have with IE installed, even if you don't use it. My Win98SE install works more stable, eats less memory, and boots up faster because it doesn't load IE components at startup.
As a website designer you can't afford to ignore non-IE users, because they are among the visitors of your site, and their numbers seem to be growing. The biggest significance of Mozilla & friends is that they keep this variety in the market, so that users can choose whatever browser they like.
enough users of alternative browsers that any company would be crazy to ignore them
There's still some around, like this webshop near where I live (navigation buttons don't work in Mozilla/Opera/Konquerer, making their site useless for non-IE users).
Frankly, I don't give a damn. I'll just make a buy elsewhere, so that shop loses my business. If they can afford to lose 3% of potential clients, let them. But with that percentage growing, and narrow profit margins to work with, their stupidity is increasing with time, and if they ignore that, they'll just go out of business. Put your money where your mouth is, that'll do it in the long term.
Once Firefox 1.0 is released (..)
It's out NOW, somebody just goofed with the version numbers;-)
I've been using Mozilla (Firefox lately) for a long time now, and it simply rules. There are some sites that don't work properly, but they're very rare. Using Firefox as your primary browser doesn't limit your movement around the web.
I used IE a while ago, and was immediately annoyed by pop-ups, and a bunch of other little irritating things. And ofcourse, we all know the endless stream of security problems, some of which aren't even fixed at all. So why won't users switch?
If you ask random IE users, the answer mostly comes down to that they didn't know other 'serious' browsers exist, think it's too much hassle to download/install/configure, or they're not bothered enough by IE's problems, to make a switch.
I'm sure that if all users would base their choices only on technical merits, Mozilla & friends would have far bigger market share (and open source, as well).
So that leaves the conclusion that throwing in software with new PC's, giving a 'default' to use, really IS a powerful way to push software around.
Open source developers should be aware of that, and not underestimate that power. Having a comparable alternative isn't good enough, you really need added value.
Ofcouse, removing $$$ price tags, and having stuff that's more fun and reliable to work with, helps a lot
I watched "Bowling" a while ago, and I found it had some interesting points about violence, gun control, and cause-effect relations between them.
This Michael Moore dude is right on with his questioning the US' morals on guns, war, foreign politics and so son.
But at the same time, there's plenty of evidence to be found on the net, that shows he twisted quite a few facts in "Columbine". So please give the parent poster some credit for putting a question mark behind Mr.Moore's integrity, okay?
It's kind of sad, because Moore has got some good points, and there exist more than enough facts, to stick it to the public. No need to twist the facts.
BTW: Can anyone give a view on how much truth-twisting is done in "Fahrenheit"?
With physical items, there's always been the concept of "mine!", property. But for ideas? Don't think so. When the first Neanderthaler found out how to make fire, that was it, and anyone who saw how it was done, could just do it as well.
There wasn't stupid things like copyright or patent laws... and knowledge was passed freely around the world.
Then, some people got greedy, and said: "okay, you give me some gold pieces, and I'll learn you how to build a ship!".
Then copyright & patent laws were invented, to 'promote science and creativity', by using greed to stimulate the spread of creative works.
All these patent law suits, GPL vs. closed source battles we see today, is to me just a sign of society finding out that copyright etc. simply doesn't work: for some, yes, but society as a whole doesn't benefit from letting ideas have 'owners'.
Open Source is just a move back to the old ways, where ideas were free to use as you like, and only physical items (can) have owners.
I expect this to expand, to hardware, books, music, whatever non-tangible stuff, simply because it works better for society as a whole. It just takes lots of time for people to understand that it does, and why.
A lot of comments on this subject come down to this: some copyrighted work isn't commercially available anymore, and it's not somehow possible to get copyright owner's permission to re-distribute.
The practical solution in many cases: put that copyrighted work on the internet anyway (without permission), and hope/pray that the copyright owner isn't interested enough to take legal steps to prevent that (example: old videogame ROMs).
Why not change the law such, to make that practice legal?
That would give copyright owners all the usual benefits, but only for as long as they keep the work available (under reasonable terms).
When the copyright owner would stop making the work available, then with that they would at the same time waive their right to enforce copyright protection, or stop others from making it available.
Nice, but what I'd like to see more, are those mini-sized (8 cm.) discs. Specially the rewritable types are very handy as backup media for small amounts of data, or rescue-disc/liveCD type applications.
As CD's they're not so common, but available at somewhat reasonable prices, if you look for them.
DVD media increases storage space bigtime, and allows 1.4 GB (single sided) or 2.8 GB (double sided, DVD-RAM) on such a mini disc.
They are available now (used in some digital camcorders), but the only ones I've seen on sale so far, are about 10 times more expensive than normal DVD-RWs. About the same price per disc for both 12 & 8 cm. discs would seem more reasonable to me.
So slap me with a couple of new, higher density formats if you want to, but I prefer the little ones.
Speed measured in LOC, Lines-Of-Code? That's nonsense.
For all assembly languages that I've seen, there's 2 metrics involved: code size (exact number of bytes) and clock cycles needed for execution.
Most assembly languages have varying number of bytes per instruction, and varying number of clock cycles needed. Almost always, the simplest form of an instruction executes fastest, because a) it's coded in less bytes, and b) takes less cycles to execute
A fancy looking one-liner might look fast, but gets coded in a long sequence of bytes, eating more clock cycles than a short sequence of simple counterparts.
The real question is, if a password's that old, what use SHOULD it still have?
It doesn't matter how OLD a password is. For security, all that matters is how well a password is kept.
If it's used by multiple parties, transfered in different ways, etc., it might improve security to change it regularly.
But if it's used very rarely, and kept written on a piece of paper that's sitting inside a fireproof safe & only one person has an access key, it can still be a very secure password even after years.
What matters is the opportunities evil parties might have to obtain it, and if changing a password involves transferring it somehow, than that is just one more possible moment where 'evil parties' could intercept it.
Sure, P2P apps can be useful, and the platform/OS you run them on shouldn't really matter.
But I can think of at least a couple of reasons to want OSS versions: Think the same reasons we use OSS in the first place. And for another, ridding yourself of that spyware shit that comes with many P2P filesharing progs for W*n***s
FDD connector? Where? You mean that blue one? You can count +/- 40 pins in it, so I suspect that's an old-style IDE plug.
And the parallel port? Consider the small size of the board (take eg. the audio/USB ports for reference), and compare with the size of the bigger connector on the left side.
Maybe it's a digital video (DVI) connector (ok, probably not), or one of those midi/game ports? Anyway, if you're keeping one of those old ports, the parallel port doesn't seem like a bad choice to me. There's still lots of people with printers, ZIP-drives, or scanners hooked up to it.
Need some perspective? I decided a while ago that a next computer for myself shall be
Smaller/lighter (case)
Have at least the performance of what I have now, but most likely better
More power-efficient, and related to that, lower-noise
For the rest, I don't care much if it'll be AGP8X or PCI Express, DDR-II or QBM memory, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX, or Pico-BTX case, AMD, Intel, or maybe a next-generation Via (C5?) CPU. As long as it becomes somewhat mainstream, popular, and with good quality/performance/price ratio.
It is very nice though to see those pictures of the next-generation hardware, so that you have an idea what it looks like.
Something struck me as very unlogical when looking at those LGA-775 sockets: as I understand it, they are small contact springs in the socket, that press against flat contacts on the CPU bottom. The unlogical thing: If you swap CPUs a lot, those springs (read socket) might get damaged, result: mainboard (=difficult/expensive to replace) f**ked up.
Why not put those little springs on the CPUs, and the flat contact surfaces in the CPU socket instead? If you swap CPUs a lot then, only the CPU (easily replaced) would be damaged, instead of the mainboard socket.
Maybe someone has a good explanation for why it was designed that way?
Once it was thought that such old game classics, and the machines they were played on, would go out of use once the original hardware would die, waiting to be replaced by new platforms & remakes. Not so.
Development of both hardware & software simply continues as time goes on, no matter what. If an original manufacturer pulls the hardware of the market, and games go off the shelves, development slows down, but continues anyway. If the manufacturer/copyright holders try to prevent remakes, emulators, don't release ROMs, hardware info, schematics etc, that slows things down. But they can also promote this, and enjoy having an active community further developing these old designs, like in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum case. Given enough time, all there is to know about the inner workings of these old machines becomes known, and new things are done with it.
I think the appeal to enthousiasts results from the simplicity of these old systems. If you put in enough time, you can write code that uses every single part to the max, doing incredible things with minimal hardware.
One of my favourites is the Sinclair ZX81. 1 KB of RAM, no sound, no colour, and: no videoprocessor. About 3/4 of CPU time is spent on directly writing black&white dot patterns to the TV screen, using some simple logic to turn it into a video signal. With only the remaining 1/4 CPU time left for doing useful things.
With the arrival of quickly reprogammable hardware like FPGA's, the border between hardware and software blurs further, nice example is FPGA Arcade, where old games are rewritten in hardware circuitry. So instead of having a CPU eat through instructions coded in ROM, your joystick input directly affects the logic programmed into a FPGA. Very cool!
First thought I had here was another quote, probably saw it before somewhere on/.: "The true measure of a good coder is not how complex his code is, but how simple."
Today's software systems become bigger, bigger, and bigger. Maybe single components are simplified, debugged or optimised, but not a system as a hole. The results we see today, in many systems, a single slip in one place, can screw up the entire system.
IMHO the logical way to combat this, would be to design software using methods that can be formally proven to do what they're supposed to do. Such methods do exist.
Today's security measures in operating systems (like running apps as non-root user under *nix) are in place at least for one reason: an assumption is made, that as a piece of software grows bigger, it's simply not possible to guarantee that there are no bugs in there, that it will always work as expected.
That assumption is flawed: it is possible to design software such, that it always works as expected (hardware failures aside, that is). Doing so is just very hard. Not impossible.
Cool....Great for cleaning up lots of junk!
on
3D, FPS File Manager
·
· Score: 1
Only the delete function working? That would make it ideal and fun for cleaning up lots of junk like:
-A pile of files leeched on a recent LAN party
-Shooting down worms/virususses/spam from an e-mail archive
-Blowing away unused apps from your harddrive
Are there any difficulty levels or computer opponents that can be set?
Come get some !!
Slashdot Mirror
Like not having a boss that claims your eternal soul.
I read somewhere that the Windoze family of OS'es, and the Office softwares are THE big money-makers for M$, and other products are just riding along on that capital.
A story like this just shows that from a customer's point of view, Windoze/Office have value (that M$ can cash in on), but having Free/OSS alternatives, lowers that value.
So making Linux a more attractive alternative, lowers the net value of Microsofts golden eggs. How nice...
The sweet spot for me mostly lies around the bottom range of hardware that is sold new. A couple of times better than what you have, brandnew, with warranty, and relatively affordable.
For single components, ignore the component-only specs, always consider how they improve your full setup. A CPU that's twice as fast, won't make your entire system twice as fast.
If you're in a desert, you still have to transport that water as well, and any weight savings are lost in that case.
Actually I think IE is a very capable browser. I just don't like a lot of minor, but important details. If it would be installed as an add-on program like any other, I would use Firefox and IE for different occasions, like I do with Firefox & Opera now.
Fully removing IE also kills some problems that you have with IE installed, even if you don't use it. My Win98SE install works more stable, eats less memory, and boots up faster because it doesn't load IE components at startup.
As a website designer you can't afford to ignore non-IE users, because they are among the visitors of your site, and their numbers seem to be growing. The biggest significance of Mozilla & friends is that they keep this variety in the market, so that users can choose whatever browser they like.
There's still some around, like this webshop near where I live (navigation buttons don't work in Mozilla/Opera/Konquerer, making their site useless for non-IE users).
Frankly, I don't give a damn. I'll just make a buy elsewhere, so that shop loses my business. If they can afford to lose 3% of potential clients, let them. But with that percentage growing, and narrow profit margins to work with, their stupidity is increasing with time, and if they ignore that, they'll just go out of business. Put your money where your mouth is, that'll do it in the long term.
Once Firefox 1.0 is released (..)
It's out NOW, somebody just goofed with the version numbers ;-)
I used IE a while ago, and was immediately annoyed by pop-ups, and a bunch of other little irritating things. And ofcourse, we all know the endless stream of security problems, some of which aren't even fixed at all. So why won't users switch?
If you ask random IE users, the answer mostly comes down to that they didn't know other 'serious' browsers exist, think it's too much hassle to download/install/configure, or they're not bothered enough by IE's problems, to make a switch.
I'm sure that if all users would base their choices only on technical merits, Mozilla & friends would have far bigger market share (and open source, as well).
So that leaves the conclusion that throwing in software with new PC's, giving a 'default' to use, really IS a powerful way to push software around. Open source developers should be aware of that, and not underestimate that power. Having a comparable alternative isn't good enough, you really need added value.
Ofcouse, removing $$$ price tags, and having stuff that's more fun and reliable to work with, helps a lot
But at the same time, there's plenty of evidence to be found on the net, that shows he twisted quite a few facts in "Columbine". So please give the parent poster some credit for putting a question mark behind Mr.Moore's integrity, okay?
It's kind of sad, because Moore has got some good points, and there exist more than enough facts, to stick it to the public. No need to twist the facts.
BTW: Can anyone give a view on how much truth-twisting is done in "Fahrenheit"?
There wasn't stupid things like copyright or patent laws... and knowledge was passed freely around the world.
Then, some people got greedy, and said: "okay, you give me some gold pieces, and I'll learn you how to build a ship!".
Then copyright & patent laws were invented, to 'promote science and creativity', by using greed to stimulate the spread of creative works.
All these patent law suits, GPL vs. closed source battles we see today, is to me just a sign of society finding out that copyright etc. simply doesn't work: for some, yes, but society as a whole doesn't benefit from letting ideas have 'owners'.
Open Source is just a move back to the old ways, where ideas were free to use as you like, and only physical items (can) have owners.
I expect this to expand, to hardware, books, music, whatever non-tangible stuff, simply because it works better for society as a whole. It just takes lots of time for people to understand that it does, and why.
- People who hate the concept of DRM (that includes me), buy less CD's (so am I), or none with copy-protection (I sure as hell am not buying those)
- So that leaves more market percentage (not more sales!) to those dumb asses who don't care about DRM. Result: bigger percentage of CD's sold with DRM.
- And ofcourse the music industry in general could be getting very desperate, coming up with ever more crazy methods.
I think in the end, DRM is simply bad news for everyone, bad for consumers, and bad for business.Unfortunately, things first have to get worse, before they get better...
Why not change the law such, to make that practice legal?
That would give copyright owners all the usual benefits, but only for as long as they keep the work available (under reasonable terms).
When the copyright owner would stop making the work available, then with that they would at the same time waive their right to enforce copyright protection, or stop others from making it available.
As CD's they're not so common, but available at somewhat reasonable prices, if you look for them.
DVD media increases storage space bigtime, and allows 1.4 GB (single sided) or 2.8 GB (double sided, DVD-RAM) on such a mini disc.
They are available now (used in some digital camcorders), but the only ones I've seen on sale so far, are about 10 times more expensive than normal DVD-RWs. About the same price per disc for both 12 & 8 cm. discs would seem more reasonable to me.
So slap me with a couple of new, higher density formats if you want to, but I prefer the little ones.
And in 50 years from now, some space-tourists will play catch-up with it, just because they're curious what became of it
For all assembly languages that I've seen, there's 2 metrics involved: code size (exact number of bytes) and clock cycles needed for execution.
Most assembly languages have varying number of bytes per instruction, and varying number of clock cycles needed. Almost always, the simplest form of an instruction executes fastest, because a) it's coded in less bytes, and b) takes less cycles to execute
A fancy looking one-liner might look fast, but gets coded in a long sequence of bytes, eating more clock cycles than a short sequence of simple counterparts.
But probably not the next...
It doesn't matter how OLD a password is. For security, all that matters is how well a password is kept.
If it's used by multiple parties, transfered in different ways, etc., it might improve security to change it regularly. But if it's used very rarely, and kept written on a piece of paper that's sitting inside a fireproof safe & only one person has an access key, it can still be a very secure password even after years.
What matters is the opportunities evil parties might have to obtain it, and if changing a password involves transferring it somehow, than that is just one more possible moment where 'evil parties' could intercept it.
- Determine conditions that Sun is sure of it finds acceptable right now for released files
- Throw release files & those conditions on some big-iron ftp/http server under Sun's control
- Make public announcement (& hopefully survive being
/dotted ;o)
- Inlude in conditions the option to submit patches to Sun
- Include in conditions the option to publish patches to everyone else
- Give selected regular patch-submitters limited write-access under strict additional conditions
- Relax those conditions as time goes by, and you see the source base evolving nicely
- Move source depository elsewhere, to make that big-iron ftp/http free for newer, more interesting projects
Just my suggestion for how Sun could do itBut I can think of at least a couple of reasons to want OSS versions: Think the same reasons we use OSS in the first place. And for another, ridding yourself of that spyware shit that comes with many P2P filesharing progs for W*n***s
Maybe it's a digital video (DVI) connector (ok, probably not), or one of those midi/game ports? Anyway, if you're keeping one of those old ports, the parallel port doesn't seem like a bad choice to me. There's still lots of people with printers, ZIP-drives, or scanners hooked up to it.
- Smaller/lighter (case)
- Have at least the performance of what I have now, but most likely better
- More power-efficient, and related to that, lower-noise
For the rest, I don't care much if it'll be AGP8X or PCI Express, DDR-II or QBM memory, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX, or Pico-BTX case, AMD, Intel, or maybe a next-generation Via (C5?) CPU. As long as it becomes somewhat mainstream, popular, and with good quality/performance/price ratio.It is very nice though to see those pictures of the next-generation hardware, so that you have an idea what it looks like.
Something struck me as very unlogical when looking at those LGA-775 sockets: as I understand it, they are small contact springs in the socket, that press against flat contacts on the CPU bottom. The unlogical thing: If you swap CPUs a lot, those springs (read socket) might get damaged, result: mainboard (=difficult/expensive to replace) f**ked up.
Why not put those little springs on the CPUs, and the flat contact surfaces in the CPU socket instead? If you swap CPUs a lot then, only the CPU (easily replaced) would be damaged, instead of the mainboard socket.
Maybe someone has a good explanation for why it was designed that way?
Development of both hardware & software simply continues as time goes on, no matter what. If an original manufacturer pulls the hardware of the market, and games go off the shelves, development slows down, but continues anyway. If the manufacturer/copyright holders try to prevent remakes, emulators, don't release ROMs, hardware info, schematics etc, that slows things down. But they can also promote this, and enjoy having an active community further developing these old designs, like in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum case. Given enough time, all there is to know about the inner workings of these old machines becomes known, and new things are done with it.
I think the appeal to enthousiasts results from the simplicity of these old systems. If you put in enough time, you can write code that uses every single part to the max, doing incredible things with minimal hardware.
One of my favourites is the Sinclair ZX81. 1 KB of RAM, no sound, no colour, and: no videoprocessor. About 3/4 of CPU time is spent on directly writing black&white dot patterns to the TV screen, using some simple logic to turn it into a video signal. With only the remaining 1/4 CPU time left for doing useful things.
With the arrival of quickly reprogammable hardware like FPGA's, the border between hardware and software blurs further, nice example is FPGA Arcade, where old games are rewritten in hardware circuitry. So instead of having a CPU eat through instructions coded in ROM, your joystick input directly affects the logic programmed into a FPGA. Very cool!
Well, it looks like /. put the site to sleep already...
Legit spammers? Do they exist?
Is it legal to use "legit" and "spammers" in one sentence?
"The true measure of a good coder is not how complex his code is, but how simple."
Today's software systems become bigger, bigger, and bigger. Maybe single components are simplified, debugged or optimised, but not a system as a hole. The results we see today, in many systems, a single slip in one place, can screw up the entire system.
IMHO the logical way to combat this, would be to design software using methods that can be formally proven to do what they're supposed to do. Such methods do exist.
Today's security measures in operating systems (like running apps as non-root user under *nix) are in place at least for one reason: an assumption is made, that as a piece of software grows bigger, it's simply not possible to guarantee that there are no bugs in there, that it will always work as expected.
That assumption is flawed: it is possible to design software such, that it always works as expected (hardware failures aside, that is). Doing so is just very hard. Not impossible.
-A pile of files leeched on a recent LAN party
-Shooting down worms/virususses/spam from an e-mail archive
-Blowing away unused apps from your harddrive
Are there any difficulty levels or computer opponents that can be set? Come get some !!