Sure, you can ignore it if it comes up in a document, but if a user with little care or knowledge about such issues loads a document up that uses such a tag in (for example) OOo and their table doesn't look like it did in Word, they're probably going to think that OOo is at fault, and may make a decision to not use the alternative software in the future (or may go around telling everyone they know that said software sucks).
If Microsoft, the developer of the main product which generates these data files continues to use these tags, they become impossible to ignore without introducing rendering issues which will be sufficient to annoy potential users of alternative software.
Yes, purportedly these tags are only supposed to be used by Microsoft when converting documents in older Word formats -- but how many hundreds of millions of such documents exist out there? Quite a few, which seems to guarantee that these "ignorable" tags are going to occur quite frequently, and will impose sufficient differences on document rendering if they are ignored. So unless these optional tags are fully documented, why should anyone outside of Microsoft want to adopt this standard?
Standards aren't often perfect the first time around, but someone at Microsoft should have realized this, and should have prevented themselves from trying to fast-track this standard. The biggest problem is that there is the appearance that Microsoft was trying to pull a fast-one on the international standardization community with an incomplete, and highly imperfect standard that they wanted to rush to fruition for purely competitive (and not technical) reasons. With time and revision, OOXML may indeed be a fine standard, but as it stood at the point where they tried to ram it through the ISO, it had (and has) serious flaws.
In one of your other posts to this thread, you mention:
Am personally proud that Jody and Michael made Microsoft add ~650 pages or so to the spec that documented the formulas (one of the things we struggled a lot with in the Gnumeric days).
Here you admit that you've already seen first hand how incomplete standards can affect Open Source (and really any third-party) development. You had a problem with the lack of documentation, and pressured MS for more details to get your software working correctly. So why is it that you have an issue when others want to pressure MS into either rectifying other areas lacking proper documentation, or removing them from the standard altogether, in areas that matter to them?
Belief in a power greater then ourselves is not about logic. It is about faith.
Well, you can call it that if it makes you feel better, but the rest of us just call that "wishful thinking".
I have little doubt your faith makes you feel good inside, but then again, so does a hit to a heroin addict.
Of course, assuming TFA is valid, my denying the entire notion of your "faith" will probably re-enforce it. So you're welcome. Enjoy it in good health.
That way when something goes wrong (and it will...), just copy over the clean virtual disk image.
While having a backup of the VM is certainly a good idea, and easier way of handling the situation for reverting back when something is screwed up would be to take a snapshot of the VM immediately after booting it up the first time, and then at fixed intervals (or at least when things get messed up) simply revert back to the snapshot.
It is my understanding that when in snapshot mode, the VM does a copy-on-write to a different file (that is, changes to the virtual hard drive aren't written to the virtual hard drive file, but to a separate file). When you revert back to the previous snapshot, the system just deletes the copy-on-write file; the original virtual disk image is thus unchanged, making for a significantly faster "restore" procedure.
I don't know if this behaviour can be scripted, but if it can I'd snapshot at boot time, delete the snapshot file when a VM is booted, and then set the guest OS to reboot on, say, a daily or twice daily basis. In this way the system would be self-resetting -- at a suitable time the guest shuts down, the snapshot is reverted, a new snapshot is taken, and the system is rebooted.
No mess, no fuss, the system is identical to the previous boot-up every time it reboots. This allows the system to still be writable for things like browser cache and such, but also allows for long-term consistency (and if short term consistency is compromised in the guest, do a manual guest OS shutdown/snapshot reversion/new snapshot).
One of the really nice things is with such a system is that you can give them the same guest OS on every system you have, even if you have a mixed environment of host systems (Linux, Mac, Windows). You can start with a mixed host environment, slowly move the Windows hosts to Linux (retaining the same guests), and when adding new machines, get either Intel Linux boxes or Macs. The guest can even still be Windows if the residents insist on it for some reason.
If there really is a wi-fi-touch-screen-OSX based iPod coming out that may or may not be based on the iPhone, they better make sure there is no mic. This could make a fantastic Skype handset. And damage the iPhone business model. Not that unlocking hasn't done that already though...
The iPod is available in practically every country in the world. The iPhone is available in one.
So while it might damage their iPhone business model in one country, I imagine any losses in that one country would be offset by the gains in every other country in the world.
The problem is the iTunes Music Store. Tracks bought online are still AAC but the content is held in an encrypted container that renders them unreadable on other devices. So as long as you don't use iTMS you should be safe.
Just for the sake of completeness, this only holds true for non-iTunes Plus tracks. While the selection is lower (and the cost is a bit higher), iTunes Plus versions of audio tracks are DRM-free, and can be played by other AAC enabled devices.
I'll never understand the obsession with using a portable device as a VOIP phone. Don't you have enough regular minutes? Is it really worth the hassle of switching back and forth between the two services? Don't you just have a cell phone that works fine?
I'm not the OP, but I'd love to have such a device myself. In my case, I had a cell phone, which cost me over $50 CAD per month, and which I'd use for about 15 minutes per month because:
Reception was crap in my apartment, and
Reception was non-existent in my office.
As such, the two places I spend over 90% of my time in, the phone simply wouldn't work. Switching providers in my case wouldn't help (for unknown reasons, nobody gets cell reception in my office building unless you stand next to a specific set of windows in a corridor, or go outside).
Now, both locations do have excellent WiFi coverage, and my Vonage time is dirt cheap compared to what a cell would cost (in fact, as I already subscribe to the softphone service, the added airtime cost to me would be zero). Sure, it may not work in every location I go -- but then again, I'm one of those (apparently rare) human beings who doesn't want to use their phone in restaurants, movie theatres, or while driving the car.
I like being free of the oppressive shackles that are the Canadian cell phone industry. A good VoIP phone would be, to me, the best of both worlds (and to me "good" means that it should have a mobile browser, PIM that can sync to my Mac, and Bluetooth to support my wireless headset, without it costing me an arm, leg, and my firstborn).
Why? Could you give them a naked box and a Vista DVD and have them get it up and running?
This is exactly the sort of attitude that I would first change about Linux: the idea that Linux needs to replicate Windows, and that it doesn't need to excel past Windows to win the hearts and minds of users.
Linux distros need to strive to be better than Windows. They shouldn't be attempting to duplicate the Windows desktop (something early versions of both KDE and Gnome were, IMO, quite guilty of); they shouldn't be attempting to simply improve upon Windows; they should be attempting to create a unique, best-of-breed solution that users will actually be excited about running (like what Apple is doing with OS X).
So if you can't give the relatives a naked box and a Vista DVD and expect them to get through the install, then we should be aiming to allow them to do this with Linux. The goal of a non-server Linux distro shouldn't be to wind up with the same mundacity that Windows has, or a feature-to-feature parity while ignoring those features Windows lacks; it should attempt simply to be the best operating system it can be -- and if this means forging new ground, then that's what should be done. Linux will never win by trying to be Windows, or by having people say "Well, Windows isn't good at that, so we don't have to be good at that either" -- which is, in effect, the attitude you've just displayed.
Since I'm in Canada I'm SOL without either Apple offering the iPhone here, or using a cracked version.
Except that you're still pretty much SOL, as you're stuck with having to sign up with Rogers and pay them an arm and a leg to use the iPhone data services (outside of a suitable WiFi area, at least).
Or you could choose to sign up with Fido (which is owned by Rogers) but instead charges you a leg and an arm for the same services. And a few other appendages if you want to access Roger's "expanded network".
iPhone or not, you're still stuck with our crappy, over-expensive Canadian cell service.
If OOXML is ratified as a standard I'm going to start distributing my source code in it. Of course I will be sure to use one of its undocumented "features" to make sure the code is totally inaccessible to anyone not using my proprietary text editor, which conveniently you can purchase for a mere $2k.
My description is merely conversational; the GPL has a more expanded notion of this:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source
code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to
control compilation and installation of the executable.
True enough -- admittedly as someone who doesn't typically have direct contact with DBMS', I didn't know if MySQL had contributors reassign copyright (that is, if they were the sole and only copyright holders for the work).
Note however that if they are distributing their own code to users with a GPL license attached, they still have to make sources available, otherwise their customers would have a license to redistribute the binary code, but without the ability to satisfy clause 3 of the license (which isn't necessarily improper, but would make the GPL attached to the distributed binaries moot). This appears to be what MySQL is indeed doing -- they're still providing source to their own customers.
If/. MySQL users are that incensed over this, they should start a fund to buy one copy of MySQL Enterprise Server, get the sources for it, and then host those sources themselves.
If the enterprise edition is still under the GNU public license, how is it legal for them to close off the source code to the general public? From my understanding, when you use the GNU license you have to distribute the code with the binaries and cannot sell the code for profit.
Well, it appears they are already selling the Enterprise Server. And according to the article summary, they're still making it available to customers who purchase the binaries. As such, they are completely above board in terms of the GPL (remember, with the GPL you only have to make the source available to anyone you give the binaries to. It doesn't specify that you can't charge for the binaries, or that the source has to be made available on the web for anyone to get hold of. Note as well that you also don't have to provide the source with the binaries -- you simply have to make it available upon request in a suitably usable standard form).
Each column of a punched card was one byte. Each card contained 80 bytes of data, which was one line on a terminal.
Neither of us are exactly incorrect, however where you describe the screen visualization of the card as being converted to a byte, I'm thinking of it as a series of binary cells (hole, no hole). As such, an 80x25 display can display the pictoral representation of two punch cards, as opposed to the byte representation of an entire column of punches.
As such, my point stands. Yes, you can encode the punches into series of bytes that only require one 80-column row, but then again we could also Huffman encode them and have them take up significantly less.
I've been drinking Caffeine-free (NOT DIET!) Coca-Cola ice it came out on the market a few years ago, after consuming who-knows-how-much caffeine over the course of my lifetime previous to its release. It has all the sugar and calories of regular Coke, but zero caffeine, and tastes virtually the same (although perhaps a tiny bit sweeter, as it lacks the bitterness of the caffeine). I bring a case to the office every week or two for my own consumption. People always ask me about it, as it comes in a shiny, golden coloured can, as if it were Coke for the super-rich or something.
Unfortunately, it's brutally difficult to find. I went through a three-month stretch a year or so ago where I simply couldn't buy it at all. So now I keep a small stock-pile. I know of one store in the area that carries it (I used to know at least four, three of which have stopped carrying it), and they often get 3 or 4 cases every week or so. Recently, however, they suddenly had more than a dozen cases on their shelf, and I've been slowly buying it up.
Anyhow, if you're looking to get your body out of the caffeine-consumption cycle, but don't want to give up that sweet, sweet nectar, look around for it. It's good stuff. Maybe if I can convince more people to drink it, it will become possible to find it in more places and more sizes (I've only ever seen it in 12-can cases and 2 litre bottles, and never in a vending machine, and only very rarely in a convenience store as single cans).
No, 80 is not arbitrary. 64 or 128 would have been arbitrary.
I don't know the history, but 80 was a deliberate design choice that goes against the electronics in at least one obvious way.
IBM's most popular punch cards from the 1920's onwards were 12 rows by 80 columns. A standard 80 x 25 video display can thus display two such cards stacked atop each other, with one row left over for displaying status information.
The cards were initially not intended for binary encodings (although that became possible later), and thus there was no "power of two" basis for them. The 12 rows were enumerated as 0 - 9, with two extra punch zones that acted, in effect, as control characters.
The choice of 80 columns was pretty much arbitrary -- indeed, IBM also made 51 column and 96 column cards at various points. 80 columns was big enough to record an 80-digit decimal number, and had no real special significance that I'm aware of.
And now you know how the worlds most popular punch cards continue to influence our computing experience.
However, what really happened underneath the facade was that the same behavior continued. An honest company pays a lot of Microsoft Office, A dishonest company pays $90, according to spam emails that I just viewed. That apparently illegal behavior drove the other office product companies out of business. There has always been a choice: Legal Microsoft Office for hundreds of dollars, or illegal copies that most customers cannot recognize as illegal, for $50 to $90. Apparently Microsoft would rather encourage, or at least not stop, piracy as a way of preventing legitimate competition.
It's an interesting contrast, as I remember such days very well myself: Microsoft largely ignored piracy in the early 90's as a way of building it's dominance. Today, now that they're the defacto choice for the majority of PC buyers, they're tightening the screws down on all their users to prevent such piracy.
I fear for the future of humanity if all Universities are doing is churning out mediocre Java developers and then cutting out essential parts of the course because it doesn't fit the Javarific world they've chosen for themselves. Tannenbaum would be spinning on his bicycle.
I don't disagree at all. By the time they get to me, they will have had a little bit of C experience, but it's just a perhaps month-long module in a course on general Unix development (which also includes Unix commands, Perl, and CVS). I am having the tutorial leader teach them various C stuff in their weekly tutorial sessions, which is a start I suppose.
And while we're complaining, I'll also note that I'm introducing a paper to the course this term, as I've found with some previous experience at this University that the report writing abilities of the undergrad students here are pretty weak. I can't exactly blame the students however, as by-and-large most of their courses in Computer Science are strictly programming courses.
I imagine we can find problems with the curriculum at pretty much any University, but the one I'm at needs to do more advanced low-level programming and more report writing at the lower year levels IMHO.
By todays standards, everyone's software was crappy in the 90's.
Yes, but by the 1990's standards MS's then-current software was still crappy. There were always better alternatives, but MS used a lot of dirty, underhanded, and illegal tactics to ensure they stayed on top, and other alternatives were forced out of the market.
We did no kernel programming in either the undergrad or graduate OS class at my undergraduate institution (I took both). It was all fairly low-level C systems programming. The undergrad OS class at my graduate institution (a top ten CS school) is the same way -- in fact, the OS class there is sometimes taught in Java.
I'm currently the 3rd year Undergraduate Operating Systems instructor at a big University, and while I'd love to have my students do their work with a real kernel (and preferably an Open Source kernel, like Linux, BSD, or Xnu), it just isn't feasible. First off, the student's C is somewhat weak -- by the time they get to me, they've spent most of their time working in Java. Giving them 2 - 3 week long assignments hacking the Linux kernel would absolutely brutalize them. In my case, I have have a lab issue -- the department hasn't assigned a lab to the course, so I don't have a common system they can do their work on. And even if I did, the IT department probably wouldn't be too fond of them having the ability to recompile and load their own kernels (although this could be mitigated by having them run entirely within a VM -- if we had an assigned lab for the course). And finally, the burden on the grad student marker to be able to mark such assignments would be rough.
The only way I can think to make such a course work (at least where I'm teaching) would be to ask the students to study and explain how various OS subsystems work. I'm all for doing such a thing, but my department wants the students to do programming assignments (note that I'm just a lowly Instructor -- I'm not a tenured Professor).
In the end, however, I don't think that it's realistic for me to expect my students to be able to write an OS once they get out, as few (if any) ever will. My stated goals for them are to have them be able to understand how OS's work, so that they can a) write code that interfaces correctly with the system (API/system calls, IPC, memory management, etc.), and b) be able to compare and contrast different aspects of different OS's, and recommend the best OS for a given task.
Now ideally, my course would then segue to a more advanced kernel-hacking course for those who are sufficiently motivated to take it. However, I doubt many Universities have a suitable practical kernel hacking Instructor/Professor on staff. I'd love to be able to teach such a course, but my practical Linux kernel experience doesn't really extend beyond make clean;make menuconfig;make dep;make;make modules;make install.
Such a course would be cool -- I just imagine many Universities lack the expertise in house to offer such a course.
The chance of 11 bad boxes for one person is 0.05^11. Apparently they'd need to ship 200 trillion boxes in order for this to happen.
No, they'd only have to sell one, and then replace it eleven times.
Now, assuming they could maintain an average failure rate of 5% over the lifetime of the console, you wouldn't expect to see this happen again until more than 200 trillion units had shipped, but the one occurence could occur anywhere within the first 200 trillion unit interval.
There we go with stupid semantics arguments.. "upset"/"dontlike".. whatever.. have it your way.
WinFS? I dont see anything about WinFS in your post, do you?
Yes, I do. WinFS is the Object Oriented File System they were talking about for Cairo, which I did very specifically mention.
You see, it helps to have some idea of what you're talking about before you try to flame me.
None of which changes the fact that I still don't like the way they've designed Windows, and don't like to use it, but can step back enough to see that Vista does indeed run well enough under a virtual machine to be usable and evaluatable to those who do like the Windows platform.
What version of OS X are you running? Is it a mix of 32 and 64-bit or is it Leopard Beta (all-64)? Is running a 64-bit OS under virtualization an issue on a non-64-bit host OS?
10.4.10, and no, running a 64-bit OS under Tiger does not present any problems -- but you do have to run it on a Core 2 Duo with VT-x (which includes all current Macs, excepting the Mac mini). Your processor needs to be able to support 64-bit mode of course(which is why the C2D is mandatory), but the host OS itself doesn't need to be fully 64-bit for this to work (Tiger is fortunately partly 64-bit already, which I imagine helps when it comes to being able to allocate large amounts of memory within a single address segment).
It's interesting to note from the Wiki article that VMware doesn't use VT-x for 32 bit OS's -- only 64 bit OS's. They (apparently) claim that their 32 bit code is already sufficiently optimized that using VT-x would actually slow them down, but this difference may explain my perceived speed boost running Vista 64 as opposed to my original Vista 32 install.
Actually, your core2duo IS top of the line. Don't let the gigahertz fool you--it is twice as fast as a previous generation athlon or pentium of the same clock speed.
Okay -- the processor family is top-of-the-line, but I certainly don't have the fastest one, and there are other components on the system which aren't top-of-the-line. As a gamer, I'm sure you wouldn't want to do a ton of gaming with the Intel shared memory GMA 950 built into this MacBook (although for the types of things I typically use the system for it hasn't been an issue).
I was talking about overall system specs, and not just the core CPU, but re-reading my own post I may not have made this all that clear. Hopefully this clarifies things.
LOL, you're upset with Vista and yet you rant about stuff that took place 10+ years ago. I don't see a single point other than DRM which is of recent relevance(which BTW *is* also present in MacOS.. which makes you a hypocrite?.. yeah i know what thats like)
AAAAAND you run Vista when your dev suite also seems to work with XP.
Now, before you dotters start flaming. I dont give a fuck about either OS. But if you want to present an argument at least think first?
Want to reply? Try my a little reading comprehension first.
Point 1: I didn't say I'm upset with Vista. What I did say is that I don't like the Widows Platform. As such, moving from running my embedded dev tools on XP instead of Vista really makes no difference to me -- I don't like either one, have a free license for 64-bit Vista Business Edition, and so use it in those few instances where I have to.
Secondly, I was defending Vista as actually running quite well under VM. So where do you get the idea that I'm upset with Vista? I dislike Windows because the entire line has been poorly designed, I don't like the UI at all, and MS routinely over-promises and under-delivers (how is WinFS, which was most recently supposed to ship in Vista and was yanked roughly a year ago "10+ years ago"?), but I don't have any particular hatred for Vista beyond it being another flavour of Windows crap.
As for your accusation of hypocrisy, Mac OS X doesn't have anywhere near the level of RM Vista has, and OS X's DRM is pretty easy to avoid: just don't buy songs from the iTunes Music Store. It doesn't have secured pathways that require handshaking with your video display just to play encoded videos, and it doesn't have a kernel you can only plug signed, vendor-validated extensions/drivers into (and which refuses to ply such content if you don't). It simply has a DRM decryption module built into a codec. That's it. It's easy to void and remove, and doesn't impinge developers abilities to develop applications or drivers for the system. Don't like DRM on the Mac? Drag and Drop iTunes to the trash and it's effectively gone. Then go and play your media in VLC.
So, before you post, at least use some reading comprehension first before you go foaming at the mouth?
With a VM, you'd probably have the easiest time using virtual screen captures (no need to look at the real screen, just look at the right spot in the player's decoded memory). In your described case, you don't need to bother with such a mess - You could just use a virtual display driver that either writes the raw data directly to HDD for later recompression, or acts as a buffered frameserver for something like VirtualDub. Both of those require rather fast hardware (HDD in the first case, CPU in the second), so you'd probably lose frames.
Just to clarify my previous post -- I'm working under the assumption that changing the VM itself to facilitate the capture isn't possible, and that it's done through software buffer hijacking at the host OS layer.
With a good OSS VM solution, of course, this assumption goes right out the window, as anyone could modify the VM to implement the producer side of the Producer-Consumer problem, and have producer-level blocking whenever the buffer has been filled with data.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if Microsoft keeps using it you can't.
Sure, you can ignore it if it comes up in a document, but if a user with little care or knowledge about such issues loads a document up that uses such a tag in (for example) OOo and their table doesn't look like it did in Word, they're probably going to think that OOo is at fault, and may make a decision to not use the alternative software in the future (or may go around telling everyone they know that said software sucks).
If Microsoft, the developer of the main product which generates these data files continues to use these tags, they become impossible to ignore without introducing rendering issues which will be sufficient to annoy potential users of alternative software.
Yes, purportedly these tags are only supposed to be used by Microsoft when converting documents in older Word formats -- but how many hundreds of millions of such documents exist out there? Quite a few, which seems to guarantee that these "ignorable" tags are going to occur quite frequently, and will impose sufficient differences on document rendering if they are ignored. So unless these optional tags are fully documented, why should anyone outside of Microsoft want to adopt this standard?
Standards aren't often perfect the first time around, but someone at Microsoft should have realized this, and should have prevented themselves from trying to fast-track this standard. The biggest problem is that there is the appearance that Microsoft was trying to pull a fast-one on the international standardization community with an incomplete, and highly imperfect standard that they wanted to rush to fruition for purely competitive (and not technical) reasons. With time and revision, OOXML may indeed be a fine standard, but as it stood at the point where they tried to ram it through the ISO, it had (and has) serious flaws.
In one of your other posts to this thread, you mention:
Here you admit that you've already seen first hand how incomplete standards can affect Open Source (and really any third-party) development. You had a problem with the lack of documentation, and pressured MS for more details to get your software working correctly. So why is it that you have an issue when others want to pressure MS into either rectifying other areas lacking proper documentation, or removing them from the standard altogether, in areas that matter to them?
Yaz.
Well, you can call it that if it makes you feel better, but the rest of us just call that "wishful thinking".
I have little doubt your faith makes you feel good inside, but then again, so does a hit to a heroin addict.
Of course, assuming TFA is valid, my denying the entire notion of your "faith" will probably re-enforce it. So you're welcome. Enjoy it in good health.
Yaz.
While having a backup of the VM is certainly a good idea, and easier way of handling the situation for reverting back when something is screwed up would be to take a snapshot of the VM immediately after booting it up the first time, and then at fixed intervals (or at least when things get messed up) simply revert back to the snapshot.
It is my understanding that when in snapshot mode, the VM does a copy-on-write to a different file (that is, changes to the virtual hard drive aren't written to the virtual hard drive file, but to a separate file). When you revert back to the previous snapshot, the system just deletes the copy-on-write file; the original virtual disk image is thus unchanged, making for a significantly faster "restore" procedure.
I don't know if this behaviour can be scripted, but if it can I'd snapshot at boot time, delete the snapshot file when a VM is booted, and then set the guest OS to reboot on, say, a daily or twice daily basis. In this way the system would be self-resetting -- at a suitable time the guest shuts down, the snapshot is reverted, a new snapshot is taken, and the system is rebooted.
No mess, no fuss, the system is identical to the previous boot-up every time it reboots. This allows the system to still be writable for things like browser cache and such, but also allows for long-term consistency (and if short term consistency is compromised in the guest, do a manual guest OS shutdown/snapshot reversion/new snapshot).
One of the really nice things is with such a system is that you can give them the same guest OS on every system you have, even if you have a mixed environment of host systems (Linux, Mac, Windows). You can start with a mixed host environment, slowly move the Windows hosts to Linux (retaining the same guests), and when adding new machines, get either Intel Linux boxes or Macs. The guest can even still be Windows if the residents insist on it for some reason.
Yaz
The iPod is available in practically every country in the world. The iPhone is available in one.
So while it might damage their iPhone business model in one country, I imagine any losses in that one country would be offset by the gains in every other country in the world.
Yaz.
Just for the sake of completeness, this only holds true for non-iTunes Plus tracks. While the selection is lower (and the cost is a bit higher), iTunes Plus versions of audio tracks are DRM-free, and can be played by other AAC enabled devices.
Yaz.
I'm not the OP, but I'd love to have such a device myself. In my case, I had a cell phone, which cost me over $50 CAD per month, and which I'd use for about 15 minutes per month because:
As such, the two places I spend over 90% of my time in, the phone simply wouldn't work. Switching providers in my case wouldn't help (for unknown reasons, nobody gets cell reception in my office building unless you stand next to a specific set of windows in a corridor, or go outside).
Now, both locations do have excellent WiFi coverage, and my Vonage time is dirt cheap compared to what a cell would cost (in fact, as I already subscribe to the softphone service, the added airtime cost to me would be zero). Sure, it may not work in every location I go -- but then again, I'm one of those (apparently rare) human beings who doesn't want to use their phone in restaurants, movie theatres, or while driving the car.
I like being free of the oppressive shackles that are the Canadian cell phone industry. A good VoIP phone would be, to me, the best of both worlds (and to me "good" means that it should have a mobile browser, PIM that can sync to my Mac, and Bluetooth to support my wireless headset, without it costing me an arm, leg, and my firstborn).
Yaz.
I keep trying to tag the story with one of those, but every time I do /. tells me that I've been killed by a grue.
Sigh.
Yaz.
This is exactly the sort of attitude that I would first change about Linux: the idea that Linux needs to replicate Windows, and that it doesn't need to excel past Windows to win the hearts and minds of users.
Linux distros need to strive to be better than Windows. They shouldn't be attempting to duplicate the Windows desktop (something early versions of both KDE and Gnome were, IMO, quite guilty of); they shouldn't be attempting to simply improve upon Windows; they should be attempting to create a unique, best-of-breed solution that users will actually be excited about running (like what Apple is doing with OS X).
So if you can't give the relatives a naked box and a Vista DVD and expect them to get through the install, then we should be aiming to allow them to do this with Linux. The goal of a non-server Linux distro shouldn't be to wind up with the same mundacity that Windows has, or a feature-to-feature parity while ignoring those features Windows lacks; it should attempt simply to be the best operating system it can be -- and if this means forging new ground, then that's what should be done. Linux will never win by trying to be Windows, or by having people say "Well, Windows isn't good at that, so we don't have to be good at that either" -- which is, in effect, the attitude you've just displayed.
Yaz.
Except that you're still pretty much SOL, as you're stuck with having to sign up with Rogers and pay them an arm and a leg to use the iPhone data services (outside of a suitable WiFi area, at least).
Or you could choose to sign up with Fido (which is owned by Rogers) but instead charges you a leg and an arm for the same services. And a few other appendages if you want to access Roger's "expanded network".
iPhone or not, you're still stuck with our crappy, over-expensive Canadian cell service.
Yaz.
My description is merely conversational; the GPL has a more expanded notion of this:
Yaz.
True enough -- admittedly as someone who doesn't typically have direct contact with DBMS', I didn't know if MySQL had contributors reassign copyright (that is, if they were the sole and only copyright holders for the work).
Note however that if they are distributing their own code to users with a GPL license attached, they still have to make sources available, otherwise their customers would have a license to redistribute the binary code, but without the ability to satisfy clause 3 of the license (which isn't necessarily improper, but would make the GPL attached to the distributed binaries moot). This appears to be what MySQL is indeed doing -- they're still providing source to their own customers.
If /. MySQL users are that incensed over this, they should start a fund to buy one copy of MySQL Enterprise Server, get the sources for it, and then host those sources themselves.
Yaz.
Well, it appears they are already selling the Enterprise Server. And according to the article summary, they're still making it available to customers who purchase the binaries. As such, they are completely above board in terms of the GPL (remember, with the GPL you only have to make the source available to anyone you give the binaries to. It doesn't specify that you can't charge for the binaries, or that the source has to be made available on the web for anyone to get hold of. Note as well that you also don't have to provide the source with the binaries -- you simply have to make it available upon request in a suitably usable standard form).
Yaz.
Neither of us are exactly incorrect, however where you describe the screen visualization of the card as being converted to a byte, I'm thinking of it as a series of binary cells (hole, no hole). As such, an 80x25 display can display the pictoral representation of two punch cards, as opposed to the byte representation of an entire column of punches.
As such, my point stands. Yes, you can encode the punches into series of bytes that only require one 80-column row, but then again we could also Huffman encode them and have them take up significantly less.
Yaz
I've been drinking Caffeine-free (NOT DIET!) Coca-Cola ice it came out on the market a few years ago, after consuming who-knows-how-much caffeine over the course of my lifetime previous to its release. It has all the sugar and calories of regular Coke, but zero caffeine, and tastes virtually the same (although perhaps a tiny bit sweeter, as it lacks the bitterness of the caffeine). I bring a case to the office every week or two for my own consumption. People always ask me about it, as it comes in a shiny, golden coloured can, as if it were Coke for the super-rich or something.
Unfortunately, it's brutally difficult to find. I went through a three-month stretch a year or so ago where I simply couldn't buy it at all. So now I keep a small stock-pile. I know of one store in the area that carries it (I used to know at least four, three of which have stopped carrying it), and they often get 3 or 4 cases every week or so. Recently, however, they suddenly had more than a dozen cases on their shelf, and I've been slowly buying it up.
Anyhow, if you're looking to get your body out of the caffeine-consumption cycle, but don't want to give up that sweet, sweet nectar, look around for it. It's good stuff. Maybe if I can convince more people to drink it, it will become possible to find it in more places and more sizes (I've only ever seen it in 12-can cases and 2 litre bottles, and never in a vending machine, and only very rarely in a convenience store as single cans).
Yaz.
IBM's most popular punch cards from the 1920's onwards were 12 rows by 80 columns. A standard 80 x 25 video display can thus display two such cards stacked atop each other, with one row left over for displaying status information.
The cards were initially not intended for binary encodings (although that became possible later), and thus there was no "power of two" basis for them. The 12 rows were enumerated as 0 - 9, with two extra punch zones that acted, in effect, as control characters.
The choice of 80 columns was pretty much arbitrary -- indeed, IBM also made 51 column and 96 column cards at various points. 80 columns was big enough to record an 80-digit decimal number, and had no real special significance that I'm aware of.
And now you know how the worlds most popular punch cards continue to influence our computing experience.
Yaz.
It's an interesting contrast, as I remember such days very well myself: Microsoft largely ignored piracy in the early 90's as a way of building it's dominance. Today, now that they're the defacto choice for the majority of PC buyers, they're tightening the screws down on all their users to prevent such piracy.
Yaz.
I don't disagree at all. By the time they get to me, they will have had a little bit of C experience, but it's just a perhaps month-long module in a course on general Unix development (which also includes Unix commands, Perl, and CVS). I am having the tutorial leader teach them various C stuff in their weekly tutorial sessions, which is a start I suppose.
And while we're complaining, I'll also note that I'm introducing a paper to the course this term, as I've found with some previous experience at this University that the report writing abilities of the undergrad students here are pretty weak. I can't exactly blame the students however, as by-and-large most of their courses in Computer Science are strictly programming courses.
I imagine we can find problems with the curriculum at pretty much any University, but the one I'm at needs to do more advanced low-level programming and more report writing at the lower year levels IMHO.
Yaz.
Yes, but by the 1990's standards MS's then-current software was still crappy. There were always better alternatives, but MS used a lot of dirty, underhanded, and illegal tactics to ensure they stayed on top, and other alternatives were forced out of the market.
Yaz.
I'm currently the 3rd year Undergraduate Operating Systems instructor at a big University, and while I'd love to have my students do their work with a real kernel (and preferably an Open Source kernel, like Linux, BSD, or Xnu), it just isn't feasible. First off, the student's C is somewhat weak -- by the time they get to me, they've spent most of their time working in Java. Giving them 2 - 3 week long assignments hacking the Linux kernel would absolutely brutalize them. In my case, I have have a lab issue -- the department hasn't assigned a lab to the course, so I don't have a common system they can do their work on. And even if I did, the IT department probably wouldn't be too fond of them having the ability to recompile and load their own kernels (although this could be mitigated by having them run entirely within a VM -- if we had an assigned lab for the course). And finally, the burden on the grad student marker to be able to mark such assignments would be rough.
The only way I can think to make such a course work (at least where I'm teaching) would be to ask the students to study and explain how various OS subsystems work. I'm all for doing such a thing, but my department wants the students to do programming assignments (note that I'm just a lowly Instructor -- I'm not a tenured Professor).
In the end, however, I don't think that it's realistic for me to expect my students to be able to write an OS once they get out, as few (if any) ever will. My stated goals for them are to have them be able to understand how OS's work, so that they can a) write code that interfaces correctly with the system (API/system calls, IPC, memory management, etc.), and b) be able to compare and contrast different aspects of different OS's, and recommend the best OS for a given task.
Now ideally, my course would then segue to a more advanced kernel-hacking course for those who are sufficiently motivated to take it. However, I doubt many Universities have a suitable practical kernel hacking Instructor/Professor on staff. I'd love to be able to teach such a course, but my practical Linux kernel experience doesn't really extend beyond make clean;make menuconfig;make dep;make;make modules;make install.
Such a course would be cool -- I just imagine many Universities lack the expertise in house to offer such a course.
Yaz.
No, they'd only have to sell one, and then replace it eleven times.
Now, assuming they could maintain an average failure rate of 5% over the lifetime of the console, you wouldn't expect to see this happen again until more than 200 trillion units had shipped, but the one occurence could occur anywhere within the first 200 trillion unit interval.
Yaz.
Yes, I do. WinFS is the Object Oriented File System they were talking about for Cairo, which I did very specifically mention.
You see, it helps to have some idea of what you're talking about before you try to flame me.
None of which changes the fact that I still don't like the way they've designed Windows, and don't like to use it, but can step back enough to see that Vista does indeed run well enough under a virtual machine to be usable and evaluatable to those who do like the Windows platform.
Yaz.
10.4.10, and no, running a 64-bit OS under Tiger does not present any problems -- but you do have to run it on a Core 2 Duo with VT-x (which includes all current Macs, excepting the Mac mini). Your processor needs to be able to support 64-bit mode of course(which is why the C2D is mandatory), but the host OS itself doesn't need to be fully 64-bit for this to work (Tiger is fortunately partly 64-bit already, which I imagine helps when it comes to being able to allocate large amounts of memory within a single address segment).
It's interesting to note from the Wiki article that VMware doesn't use VT-x for 32 bit OS's -- only 64 bit OS's. They (apparently) claim that their 32 bit code is already sufficiently optimized that using VT-x would actually slow them down, but this difference may explain my perceived speed boost running Vista 64 as opposed to my original Vista 32 install.
Yaz.
Okay -- the processor family is top-of-the-line, but I certainly don't have the fastest one, and there are other components on the system which aren't top-of-the-line. As a gamer, I'm sure you wouldn't want to do a ton of gaming with the Intel shared memory GMA 950 built into this MacBook (although for the types of things I typically use the system for it hasn't been an issue).
I was talking about overall system specs, and not just the core CPU, but re-reading my own post I may not have made this all that clear. Hopefully this clarifies things.
Yaz.
Want to reply? Try my a little reading comprehension first.
Point 1: I didn't say I'm upset with Vista. What I did say is that I don't like the Widows Platform. As such, moving from running my embedded dev tools on XP instead of Vista really makes no difference to me -- I don't like either one, have a free license for 64-bit Vista Business Edition, and so use it in those few instances where I have to.
Secondly, I was defending Vista as actually running quite well under VM. So where do you get the idea that I'm upset with Vista? I dislike Windows because the entire line has been poorly designed, I don't like the UI at all, and MS routinely over-promises and under-delivers (how is WinFS, which was most recently supposed to ship in Vista and was yanked roughly a year ago "10+ years ago"?), but I don't have any particular hatred for Vista beyond it being another flavour of Windows crap.
As for your accusation of hypocrisy, Mac OS X doesn't have anywhere near the level of RM Vista has, and OS X's DRM is pretty easy to avoid: just don't buy songs from the iTunes Music Store. It doesn't have secured pathways that require handshaking with your video display just to play encoded videos, and it doesn't have a kernel you can only plug signed, vendor-validated extensions/drivers into (and which refuses to ply such content if you don't). It simply has a DRM decryption module built into a codec. That's it. It's easy to void and remove, and doesn't impinge developers abilities to develop applications or drivers for the system. Don't like DRM on the Mac? Drag and Drop iTunes to the trash and it's effectively gone. Then go and play your media in VLC.
So, before you post, at least use some reading comprehension first before you go foaming at the mouth?
Yaz.
Just to clarify my previous post -- I'm working under the assumption that changing the VM itself to facilitate the capture isn't possible, and that it's done through software buffer hijacking at the host OS layer.
With a good OSS VM solution, of course, this assumption goes right out the window, as anyone could modify the VM to implement the producer side of the Producer-Consumer problem, and have producer-level blocking whenever the buffer has been filled with data.
Yaz.