I dont know all that much about these rovers, but jeez... it has only moved 2km in all this time. Surely this is a typo?!
You have to remember the goal of this mission isn't to move the furthest distance from the landing zone as possible. It's to explore the surface of Mars, something you find every few centimeters:).
Much of this "exploration" involves stopping every few metres to sit around for a day or so and test rock and soil samples.
And even when it is on the roll, each rover doesn't move terribly fast, and often needs to navigate around terrain. Nevermind the fact that if you did want to move a long distance, you'd only be able to move a few metres, take a snapshot of your surrroundings, send them back to Earth, and await the next set of movement instructions. Both sending the snapshot and retreiving the next set of instructions takes several hours due to the distances involved, resulting in quite a bit of time spent not going anywhere.
Here are the general problems I have with Unix and Unix-like operating systems:
Threading models and scheduling. A few Unicies have decent thread models, but others have abysmal thread models and scheduling. Because of this, far too many Unix applications wind up eschewing threads for simply running multiple processes, which isn't the same thing. Thread priority needs to be global, and the thread should be the most primitive execution unitt upon which all other execution units are built. No more "my thread priority is set to the max, but I get very few slices because my process priority is set low". My OS/2 machine running on a P3-450 can still out-thread many multi-gigahertz Unix systems, and that's just sad. Too many Unix kernels have had threads bolted on as an after-thought, and it shows.
(Note that this isn't to say that every Unix-style system has a bad threading model -- some of them are pretty good, and others are getting better. But it's currently difficult to write decent cross-platform multithreaded Unix code when some Unicies you know in advance have really crappy threading subsystems).
Clipboard support in GUI subsystems. Come on, it's 2004 already. Unified clipboards have been around for more than 20 years now, and yet many Unicies still can't get this right. Cutting and pasting between applications shouldn't be a major PITA. Users shouldn't have to worry about which widget library an application was compiled against to figure out if they'll be able to paste to that application from another. Things are getting better, but really, this should have been fixed years ago, and shouldn't be taking so long.
GUI application font support. Again, a rare few get this right, but most of them have this big conglomeration of font types, and no unified font access system. Windows 3.0 had a beter font subsystem than what some Unicies have.
Printing. Again, some Unicies have done a good job, but far too many still don't have a good unified printing subsystem. Others here have done a great job of pointing out the problems with Unix printing in general, so I won't rehash them all here.
Desktop access APIs. Even with KDE and Gnome, there still isn't an API to call to do something as simple as create an application icon on the desktop or in the application menus which can be used to launch an application. Everyone winds up having to roll-their-own, if they bother to do so at all. Again, not all Unix GUI environments suffer from this, but the majority do. As I developer, I shouldn't have to care what environment a user is running if I want to do something like put an icon on their desktop as a part of an installation/configuration routine -- there should be an API I can call that says "create an icon with the following properties", and have it worry about WM/environment specifics.
USB driver development and device access. Again, in many Unicies this is fundementally flawed and can be very difficult for users to set-up and configure. And it differs drastically from Unix to Unix. Where we have pretty standard systems for accessing RS-232 serial ports, and parallel ports, USB access is completely non-standardized across Unicies. Just witness the PITA it is to set-up the newly standardized javax.usp API on Linux, and the kernel work-arounds that had to be implemented to allow APIs like this to unload aggressive modules that grab interface focus immediately just because they were included with the distro. There isn't much excuse for this IMO.
Unicode support. Again, hit or miss.
Okay -- now don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of things to like about Unix and Unix-like environments. But those are the items I personally have problems with in the general case (and again, not all Unicies exhibit all of these issues. In particular, Mac OS X doesn't suffer from any of them, and is my current OS of choice for doing development and as my personal workstation desktop environment).
The worst hit will be the numerous tourists who have visited these places. No one really knows how many have gone missing.
No, the worst hit so far have been the children, who don't have the knowledge, speed, strength, or endurance to cope with such a disaster.
The current numbers have fully 1 in 3 casualties being children, far dwarfing the tourist casualties. There are now nearly 14000 fewer children in the world, and that number is only going to climb as disease starts to affect populations in the area unless a global effort is taken immediately to provide clean water and supplies, and provide badly needed medical care to those affected thus far.
5. Flee to the wrong place. Like an upper story in a house (which doesn't do you much good when the floor below you washes completely out and the roof collaspes on top of you). Or into a car. Or some other place where you think you'll be safe, but which is just going to wind up being your tomb.
This isn't bias in American Media, this is bias in human brains. The further away something is from us personally, the less we care. It's not at all unique to the US.
I disagree. Coverage here in Canada has been massive. The disaster has been the top story, and has been dominating newscasts. The CBC last night even presented twice during its newscast a big list of organizations accepting donations, and how to reach them via phone and the web to do so.
But then again, about twenty years ago it was Canadians that spearheaded sending aid to Ethiopia on a massive scale. I guess our brains are just wired differently.
Take a look at the Technology Assisted Practice Application Suite, which is based on Zope/Plone (written in Python), the jSyncManager (a pure Java (J2SE) synchronization protocol stack and toolkit for PalmOS-based handhelds), and some custom applications.
This project is geared towards two areas: online access for medical offices, hospitals, retirements homes, etc., and handheld access using Palm Tungsten C handhelds. It uses open tools and open standards, and is released completely as Open Source. Phase One, currently under development, is implementing handheld management systems, security (both validation and encryption) calendaring, and messaging. Phase Two, starting Spring 2005, will be implementing patient data.
Being open and using languages like Python and Java, the suite runs virtually anywhere. The prototype systems are running Debian, however I often do development and testing against a similar setup on Mac OS X (as I develop all of the handheld synchronization and management routines).
Before you go out there and start writing soething similar from scratch, you might want to see if there are Open Source tools you can build upon and extend for your purposes first.
TAPAS is, BTW, being developed in conjunction with a major university, a major hospital, a group of doctors, and a provincial Ministry of Health here in Canada. You might want to take a look at what we're doing before jumping in and starting from scratch yourselves.
If you'd like more information, please feel free to drop me a line. In particular, if your company hasn't even considered the handheld side of your system, let me know as I have a lot of expertise in this area.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
You really need to re-read the GPL. You can't charge a fee for it, and you can't prevent them from re-publishing it. This means that one smart-aleck who buys your binaries in a product gets to maintain their website with all the source code, and any attempt to manipulate the GPL in the way you describe is shot to hell.
Methinks it is you who needs to re-read both the GPL and what I posted, namely:
From the GPL Preamble: For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have.
From the GPL, ss 1: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
From the GPL, ss3 sub-section b: Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
From what I posted: And besides which, any user or developer which does get the source code could turn around and start redistributing it for free using whatever mechanism they desired.
From what I posted: the extra barriers are also going to be barriers to their users, and they'd have to trust each of them(the users) to not redistribute the sources (as they can't restrict them from doing so via a license agreement).
Now I just plucked that $100 figure out of thin air, and obviously it is an extreme. However, the GPL does indeed permit you to charge a fee for source distribution. And I did mention (twice!) that any user of said code could then redistribute the sources using any mechanism free of charge.
Don't go around telling people to re-read things when it is you who has missed the relevant portions of said documents:).
rom the GPL: "[3]b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution...
Which is somewhat ambiguous. My time is worth $10/minute to me, and it takes me 10 minutes to burn the CD, write up the label, prep the mailing envelope, and walk it down to the mailbox. As this is what I charge for my time, this is the "cost of physically performing source distribution". Indeed, so long as you don't charge less for you time for anything else, you could get away with doing this.
As for an OCR printout, the EFF used it some years ago in their book on breaking DES-56, as it was the only way to redistribute the code without falling afoul of crypto export regulations -- so it has in fact been done before. It's hardly commmon, but it has been used to distribute software before.
I was offering a bit of an extreme example for illustrative purposes, however -- the end point being you can make things somewhat inconvenient to those who want to use your sources under the GPL if you want -- but doing so will effectively kill your project unless you can pay a team of developers to do the work for you.
Yeah, editors, cut it out with those sensationalistic headlines!
...you must be new here.
Not at all. They can be sensationalist if they want. But can't they at least change the sensationalism once in a while? Is it really all that hard to come up with some new sensationalism once in a while?
Or perhaps at least some sensationalism which is accurate?;)
...at least until something comes out that actually kills the iPod?
Yes, there are a lot of pretenders to the throne. However, the iPod is still king, and doesn't look like it's going to be deposed any time in the near future. Maybe one day a descendant to one of the current pretenders will knock the iPod off its throne, but that day is hardly today.
So please,/. editors -- can we stop calling every handheld device released that has a digital audio playback system an "iPod Killer"? Can't we just call them competitors, and then wait and see if they actually do any "killing", or if they just sink into the same morass previous devices now lie in?
Their code gives you a license to use the source as you see fit. If they don't like it, too bad for them.
The person who writes the patches/modifications retains its copyright (unless the project has everyone assign their copyrights to a single entity), and the GPL does require you to mention this. So long as you do that, you're in the clear.
If the other developer doesn't like this, there isn't a whole lot they can do about past instances, but there are things they can do to slow you down. One thing most people don't realize about the GPL is that:
The GPL doesn't require you to give the program away for free,
The GPL doesn't require you to make the program available over the Internet,
The GPL doesn't require you to give away the source over the Internet, and
The GPL doesn't require you to bundle the source with the binaries,
The GPL doesn't require you provide the source for free.
The primary requirement is that the developer has to make the source to the program available upon request to anyone they have distributed the binaries to. Thus, if you want to make things inconvienent to others, you can restrict the binary distribution, and then require someone to make a request in writing for the source, which you can then send via regular postal mail on diskette, CD-ROM, or as an OCR-able print-out (as the GPL does stipulate "machine readable"), for a fee of $100.
You, as a "competing" project, would wind up forced to play catch-up, as there would be a delay between when the binaries were produced, and when you could gain acccess to the source code for it.
However -- and here is the important part -- doing this would completely stymie their project in the process, and will probably kill it off. If accessing the source code is difficult, the developer isn't going to be able to attract other developers, and won't be getting patches from users. Many potential users would probably be turned off by the added hassle of getting the source code. And besides which, any user or developer which does get the source code could turn around and start redistributing it for free using whatever mechanism they desired.
So there are things they can do to try to slow you down if they really wanted to, but the extra barriers are also going to be barriers to their users, and they'd have to trust each of them to not redistribute the sources (as they can't restrict them from doing so via a license agreement).
Ethically you haven't done anything wrong. Technically there are things the other developer could do to slow down the possibility of you getting any of their additions (only use developers they know and trust not to redistribute the source code, provide binaries only online to registered users, providing sources only upon request and then only via mail), but unless they have a big bank account with which to bankroll continued development, it would probably hurt them more than it would hurt you (as the added hassles would probably allow you to poach all of their part-time developers, and users who value easy and open source code access).
Feel free to share the hidden trick with the rest of the class:)
Find the Calculator icon in the Finder, and select "Get Info" (or press Command-I after clicking on the calculator). In the plug-ins section, select the "Add" button, and in the resulting file dialog, browser your way to the Calculator -> Contents -> Resources. Select any/all of the *.calcview directories, and press "Choose". Presto -- open the Calculator and select the "View" menu item, and your new plug-in views will be available.
Now for the caveat. Ever since one of the 10.3 updates (10.3.3 maybe?), none of the plug-ins work anymore. But in the event they ever fix this, you now know how to activate different view modes.
I doubt that the graphing capability built into the calculator has anything to do with the Graphing Calculator application, as the one built into the regular Calculator is supposedly 2D only, whereas the Graphing Calculator supports 3D graphs as well.
I've played with Knoppix before, and think it's just amazing.
Just over a year ago, I inhereted an old K6-2 450Mhz box with a dead hard drive. As I had an old monitor kicking around, and as I typically hate having guests use any of my workstations, I decided to remove the hard drive and set the system up as a dedicated Knoppix box.
I dutifully downloaded the ISO and burned a CD, only to find that the machine in question had an old CD-ROM drive incapable of reading 700MB discs. So I was SOL (and eventually found Gnoppix, which did fit onto a 650MB disc this machine could boot).
I can't imagine I've been the only person to run into this issue with Knoppix, so I wonder if this new "lite" version will be designed to work on 650MB discs (although admittedly I had a bit of a rough time even finding such discs to burn that Gnoppix CD oh so long ago).
(And yes, I suppose I could spend a bit of money and buy a new CD-ROM drive for the machine, but it was a freebie, and is supposed to be a guest machine, so it isn't as if I'm personally hurting by not putting any money into it;) ).
I'm not quite sure if I'd go that far -- but if you're going to have them, you need to be smart on how you integrate them into the curriculum. They should be used for research purposes (ie: smartly using the web to research reports and papers, and how to differentiate between trusted sources and untrusted sources, and maybe some math modelling software for the older grades), but not to teach operating systems or word processing.
But otherwise, I agree -- all of those schools filling up with high-end PCs for status aren't doing their students any favours. Computers don't automatically improve the educational process -- indeed, from much of what I've seen they often slow the education process down. Many classrooms wind up having computers sitting completely idle, meaning they were nothing more than a big pit to sink money needed elsewhere.
Maybe it's just me and I'm one of the few lucky people in the world, but out of 5 regular email addresses that I use on a daily basis, I rarely if ever recieve spam, and during the workday, watching mailserver logs, the only people in my company getting silly amounts of spam (to me, one or two messages a day is just a minor annoyance) are people who click every popup and put their email addresses in every form available.
There are many ways in which spammers harvest and generate spam messages, and not all of them require entering your e-mail address into web forms.
I have a number of e-mail addresses, some of which date back to the early 90's and use daily, and others which are more recent and which I've never used at all.
My oldest e-mail address was my primary e-mail adddress for newsgroup postings for many, many years. I haven't given or used that address in roughly 2 years now (as I'm using a different address that forwards to this old mailbox), and yet I still get dozens of spam messages being sent to this address daily (all of which are thankfully auttomatically filtered).
On the other end of the spectrum is my Gmail account. I have never used this account for anything at all. I've never sent an e-mail from it, or used it to register for anything. And yet it too receives spam (all of which Google also does a good job of filtering automatically). An old e-mail account I got from my ISP when I signed up for my first cable modem was similar -- I already had a mailbox and never used that account. I never even bothered _checking_ it, until one day nearly a year later out of curiousity to see how many spam messages it may have received -- only to find the mailbox was filled with hundreds of spam messages.
I often see messages where the list of recipients was obviously generated by attaching a list of user names to each entry in a list of domains and then sending the results. And who knows how many Windows e-mail worms out there are sending users address book entries back to spammers.
Best practices can reduce your spam load from certain vectors, but not all of them, making some form of filtering good policy. When even unused mailboxes are getting clogged with spam, however, you know that best practices alone just aren't enough.
If you were to teach something, would you teach something that 95% of people could use, or teach something that only 5% of people could use?
Okay, so you're in Grade 4 (in North America -- about 10 years old). You won't be entering the workforce for at least another 8 to 14 years (depending on whether or not you attend University). Do you think it will matter one whit 8 to 14 years from now whether you did your web surfing and word processing on a Windows machine or a Mac?
Your logic lacks a basis in logic. Computer hardware and software generally changes at a fairly rapid pace (particularily in terms of how they interface with humans). The idea of getting an education in computer systems should be in how those systems generally function, and in making good educational use of them now, rather than trying to train students on specific software packages that will be out-of-date long before they enter the workforce.
If you want skills in software that companies and industry is demanding, go to a cheap local community college. That is what they are there for. You can go and get your MS Office certification and bask in the knowledge that you just spent a whack of money for a piece of paper that will be meaningless in two years time.
Personally, I find it much more useful to teach children in K-12 much more basic skills, such as language, mathematics, science, and the basic principals of information research. Virtually any computer can do this for them. The key is to make the computer accessable to the student, and this means having a system that is easy to use, somewhat intuitive in its functionality, and somethat that requires little maintenence, permitting a teacher who doesn't hold a computer administrator certificate like an MCSE to spend as little time as possible keeping the machines running for their students.
When I was 12 years old, I became an expert on the Commodore 64, the most popular computer at its time. Want to know how useful any of that knowledge is today, or how many C64 software titles I need to work with? Zero. The things I retained from then that are useful? Basic concepts like binary logic and math, and some programming fundementals.
Trying to teach the latest and greatest software misses the whole point of an education, and is simply a waste of time and effort. Teach students the fundementals, and they'll have the tools they need to figure out how to use new software packages as the need arises.
I still have one these I got free at a nightclub. It came with a sample packet of lube that I assume contains antiseptic. Is Performa still on the market? Mine might be worth something one Ebay.
Please allow me to post the following warning:
WARNING: Do not use any item purchased from eBay as a contraceptive device
Mind you, I could see some hopeful geek buying this. "I just bought a comdom on eBay for $15! Now in 4 to 6 weeks I will get to have sex!";).
Its actually ingenious when you think about, if more than a little counterproductive.
I looked at this once, the intention seems good, but java? Any chance of a rewrite in a portable language like C (Im half-joking here).
Java is actually an excellent fit for this sort of project. The project is not only source portable, but also binary portable across platforms. It doesn't have to worry about vaguarities on different platforms.
It's also heavily object oriented, so if it were to be ported to a native language, it would probably be Objective C.
We do have a plan to offer a native library access module using JNI to permit native applications to build upon the Java-based protocol stack -- however, we don't have any timeline for implementing this.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
I don't know how you can defend the Think Pad, with those latches and that silly little red button for a mouse.
Different models over the years have had different latching mechanisms. My brother has an inexpensive iSerial laptop, and on that model, the latches do indeed feel and look cheap, especially compared to the latch on my PowerBook.
As for the pointing device, I've always been a fan of the TrackPoint. You can easily manipulate the pointer without ever removing your fingers from the keyboard. My mouse of choice has long been the original IBM ScrollPoint mouse (the one with the TrackPoint between the two mouse buttons), as it's a much more natural (and precise) 2D scroller than a wheel is IMO.
I do realize it's a love-it-or-hate-it type device, but for the time when it was introduced it was a pretty big innovation, as suddenly laptops no longer needed either an external mouse or a built-in track ball (as trackpads had yet to be invented at the time).
That would be great but could you please come up with full support for syncing with Linux as well?
There is already an excellent cross platform, Open Source PalmOS synchronization solution that runs on Linux (and Mac OSX and Windows and OS/2 and Solaris and everywhere else) called the jSyncManager.
It has all of the necessary APIs for synchronizing calendars and accessing the handheld Expansion Manager and Virtual File System.
What it needs it some more jConduit plug-ins written for accessing popular Linux applications. However, it has an extensive API and is licensed under the GPL/LGPL, so Palm (or anyone else) could very easily create a Linux-integrated synchronization tool if they so desired.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
(and yes I am a power user - a software developer for 20 years)
We really need to nip the perception some people out there have that Mac users aren't power users.
Macs are modern RISC-based, Unix-based powerhouses. They are every serious power users dream machines. They are built upon a vastly better technology base than Intel machines are.
Every day I see more and more power users making the switch to the Mac and OSX. It has a powerful (and free) development environment, and a full suite of standard Unix tools. It integrates with and plays extremely well with other systems.
Anyone who thinks that a modern Mac isn't for power users simply doesn't know what they're talkinng about.
The 15 is the middle size. Apple also sells a lunch tray version. Don't believe me? Walk into the cafeteria at Apple some time and you'll see what I mean. 17 inches of usable food tray space.:-D
I should have also mentioned to the guy who levied the original complaints that if he's really wedded to the 14" size, the iBook is available in a 14" model.
My three problems with apple powerbook laptop are simple:
Let's take a look at these reasons, shall we?
1. its fucking white. I hate WHITE. Its god awful bright and gets dirty easily.
All of the PowerBooks are brushed aluminium. They are silver, not white. You're thinking of the iBook.
2. They dont have a "middle" size powerbook. They go from tiny 12 to large 15+. Where is the 14 ?
Fair enough. Personally, I like the sizes they offer. I need the extreme portability, so I use a 12" model myself. It doesn't have the cool backlit keyboards that the 15" and 17" have, but other than that it's an extremely usuable size. I can't say I've ever found it to be tiny.
3. What the hell is the deal with the speakers being next to the keyboard ? I hate the way it looks and feels.
It's only that way on the 15" and 17" models. On the 12" models they are on the back (there are actually three), positioned under the hinge point so the sound reflects off the screen (thus allowing them to be completely hidden).
They are high quality, but they are geared towards "ooh shiney" types not power users.
Uh huh. You're talking to a certified "power user" here. I'm running a high end RISC-based, Unix-based laptop here you know. I also administer three different open source projects, and do software design and development consultency.
Sorry, but the term power user was invented for me. My desktop machines are all Intel boxes running various forms of Linux (and one lone OS/2 server box), but my laptop of choice is Apple's PowerBook.
(don't even bring up Apple, people - if you do, you have no idea what you're talking about)
I take umbrage at that. You see, I used to work for IBM. I've had a number of ThinkPads over the years. I also currently own an Apple PowerBook. And I'd easily put this system in the same league as the ThinkPad (if not slightly higher -- where most modern ThinkPads are designed primarily as Windows systems, Apple's boxes are at least Unix based).
If you don't lock yourself into a specific architecture, you can see that Apple's PowerBooks easily rank up there with IBM's ThinkPads. Indeed, these are the only two companies for a very long time who have done any significant R&D into laptop usability. I'd pit my PowerBook against an Intel-based laptop any day.
I guess this is why they've only got a five year window to brand them as IBM Thinkpads - IBM doesn't want their name sullied as part of the deal. Which begs the question, what's really in it for Levono? What do they do in year six?
In year one I imagine they'll use the IBM name. In year two they'll introduce some models under their own name in certain parts of the world. In years two through five they'll brand their systems under both the IBM and Lenovo names at the same time (ie: both logos on the boxes).
The idea being they'll wean their customers into thinking of their brand name as being equivalent to the IBM brand name. They have five years to do so -- an eternity in Internet time.
The questions becomes -- will it be successful, or will five years from now people be talking about the "good old days" when IBM made their PCs with quality and usability in mind.
Lenovo is buying a lot of expertise for their money in this area, so maybe they'll be able to pull it off. Or maybe not. Personally, I'm an Apple guy now for my laptops, so I couldn't really care less:).
Slashdot Mirror
You have to remember the goal of this mission isn't to move the furthest distance from the landing zone as possible. It's to explore the surface of Mars, something you find every few centimeters :).
Much of this "exploration" involves stopping every few metres to sit around for a day or so and test rock and soil samples.
And even when it is on the roll, each rover doesn't move terribly fast, and often needs to navigate around terrain. Nevermind the fact that if you did want to move a long distance, you'd only be able to move a few metres, take a snapshot of your surrroundings, send them back to Earth, and await the next set of movement instructions. Both sending the snapshot and retreiving the next set of instructions takes several hours due to the distances involved, resulting in quite a bit of time spent not going anywhere.
Yaz.
Here are the general problems I have with Unix and Unix-like operating systems:
(Note that this isn't to say that every Unix-style system has a bad threading model -- some of them are pretty good, and others are getting better. But it's currently difficult to write decent cross-platform multithreaded Unix code when some Unicies you know in advance have really crappy threading subsystems).
Okay -- now don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of things to like about Unix and Unix-like environments. But those are the items I personally have problems with in the general case (and again, not all Unicies exhibit all of these issues. In particular, Mac OS X doesn't suffer from any of them, and is my current OS of choice for doing development and as my personal workstation desktop environment).
Yaz.
No, the worst hit so far have been the children, who don't have the knowledge, speed, strength, or endurance to cope with such a disaster.
The current numbers have fully 1 in 3 casualties being children, far dwarfing the tourist casualties. There are now nearly 14000 fewer children in the world, and that number is only going to climb as disease starts to affect populations in the area unless a global effort is taken immediately to provide clean water and supplies, and provide badly needed medical care to those affected thus far.
Yaz.
...or:
5. Flee to the wrong place. Like an upper story in a house (which doesn't do you much good when the floor below you washes completely out and the roof collaspes on top of you). Or into a car. Or some other place where you think you'll be safe, but which is just going to wind up being your tomb.
Yaz.
I disagree. Coverage here in Canada has been massive. The disaster has been the top story, and has been dominating newscasts. The CBC last night even presented twice during its newscast a big list of organizations accepting donations, and how to reach them via phone and the web to do so.
But then again, about twenty years ago it was Canadians that spearheaded sending aid to Ethiopia on a massive scale. I guess our brains are just wired differently.
Yaz.
Take a look at the Technology Assisted Practice Application Suite, which is based on Zope/Plone (written in Python), the jSyncManager (a pure Java (J2SE) synchronization protocol stack and toolkit for PalmOS-based handhelds), and some custom applications.
This project is geared towards two areas: online access for medical offices, hospitals, retirements homes, etc., and handheld access using Palm Tungsten C handhelds. It uses open tools and open standards, and is released completely as Open Source. Phase One, currently under development, is implementing handheld management systems, security (both validation and encryption) calendaring, and messaging. Phase Two, starting Spring 2005, will be implementing patient data.
Being open and using languages like Python and Java, the suite runs virtually anywhere. The prototype systems are running Debian, however I often do development and testing against a similar setup on Mac OS X (as I develop all of the handheld synchronization and management routines).
Before you go out there and start writing soething similar from scratch, you might want to see if there are Open Source tools you can build upon and extend for your purposes first.
TAPAS is, BTW, being developed in conjunction with a major university, a major hospital, a group of doctors, and a provincial Ministry of Health here in Canada. You might want to take a look at what we're doing before jumping in and starting from scratch yourselves.
If you'd like more information, please feel free to drop me a line. In particular, if your company hasn't even considered the handheld side of your system, let me know as I have a lot of expertise in this area.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
Methinks it is you who needs to re-read both the GPL and what I posted, namely:
Now I just plucked that $100 figure out of thin air, and obviously it is an extreme. However, the GPL does indeed permit you to charge a fee for source distribution. And I did mention (twice!) that any user of said code could then redistribute the sources using any mechanism free of charge.
Don't go around telling people to re-read things when it is you who has missed the relevant portions of said documents :).
Yaz.
Which is somewhat ambiguous. My time is worth $10/minute to me, and it takes me 10 minutes to burn the CD, write up the label, prep the mailing envelope, and walk it down to the mailbox. As this is what I charge for my time, this is the "cost of physically performing source distribution". Indeed, so long as you don't charge less for you time for anything else, you could get away with doing this.
As for an OCR printout, the EFF used it some years ago in their book on breaking DES-56, as it was the only way to redistribute the code without falling afoul of crypto export regulations -- so it has in fact been done before. It's hardly commmon, but it has been used to distribute software before.
I was offering a bit of an extreme example for illustrative purposes, however -- the end point being you can make things somewhat inconvenient to those who want to use your sources under the GPL if you want -- but doing so will effectively kill your project unless you can pay a team of developers to do the work for you.
Yaz.
Not at all. They can be sensationalist if they want. But can't they at least change the sensationalism once in a while? Is it really all that hard to come up with some new sensationalism once in a while?
Or perhaps at least some sensationalism which is accurate? ;)
Yaz.
...at least until something comes out that actually kills the iPod?
Yes, there are a lot of pretenders to the throne. However, the iPod is still king, and doesn't look like it's going to be deposed any time in the near future. Maybe one day a descendant to one of the current pretenders will knock the iPod off its throne, but that day is hardly today.
So please, /. editors -- can we stop calling every handheld device released that has a digital audio playback system an "iPod Killer"? Can't we just call them competitors, and then wait and see if they actually do any "killing", or if they just sink into the same morass previous devices now lie in?
Yaz.
Their code gives you a license to use the source as you see fit. If they don't like it, too bad for them.
The person who writes the patches/modifications retains its copyright (unless the project has everyone assign their copyrights to a single entity), and the GPL does require you to mention this. So long as you do that, you're in the clear.
If the other developer doesn't like this, there isn't a whole lot they can do about past instances, but there are things they can do to slow you down. One thing most people don't realize about the GPL is that:
The primary requirement is that the developer has to make the source to the program available upon request to anyone they have distributed the binaries to. Thus, if you want to make things inconvienent to others, you can restrict the binary distribution, and then require someone to make a request in writing for the source, which you can then send via regular postal mail on diskette, CD-ROM, or as an OCR-able print-out (as the GPL does stipulate "machine readable"), for a fee of $100.
You, as a "competing" project, would wind up forced to play catch-up, as there would be a delay between when the binaries were produced, and when you could gain acccess to the source code for it.
However -- and here is the important part -- doing this would completely stymie their project in the process, and will probably kill it off. If accessing the source code is difficult, the developer isn't going to be able to attract other developers, and won't be getting patches from users. Many potential users would probably be turned off by the added hassle of getting the source code. And besides which, any user or developer which does get the source code could turn around and start redistributing it for free using whatever mechanism they desired.
So there are things they can do to try to slow you down if they really wanted to, but the extra barriers are also going to be barriers to their users, and they'd have to trust each of them to not redistribute the sources (as they can't restrict them from doing so via a license agreement).
Ethically you haven't done anything wrong. Technically there are things the other developer could do to slow down the possibility of you getting any of their additions (only use developers they know and trust not to redistribute the source code, provide binaries only online to registered users, providing sources only upon request and then only via mail), but unless they have a big bank account with which to bankroll continued development, it would probably hurt them more than it would hurt you (as the added hassles would probably allow you to poach all of their part-time developers, and users who value easy and open source code access).
Yaz.
Find the Calculator icon in the Finder, and select "Get Info" (or press Command-I after clicking on the calculator). In the plug-ins section, select the "Add" button, and in the resulting file dialog, browser your way to the Calculator -> Contents -> Resources. Select any/all of the *.calcview directories, and press "Choose". Presto -- open the Calculator and select the "View" menu item, and your new plug-in views will be available.
Now for the caveat. Ever since one of the 10.3 updates (10.3.3 maybe?), none of the plug-ins work anymore. But in the event they ever fix this, you now know how to activate different view modes.
I doubt that the graphing capability built into the calculator has anything to do with the Graphing Calculator application, as the one built into the regular Calculator is supposedly 2D only, whereas the Graphing Calculator supports 3D graphs as well.
Yaz.
I've played with Knoppix before, and think it's just amazing.
Just over a year ago, I inhereted an old K6-2 450Mhz box with a dead hard drive. As I had an old monitor kicking around, and as I typically hate having guests use any of my workstations, I decided to remove the hard drive and set the system up as a dedicated Knoppix box.
I dutifully downloaded the ISO and burned a CD, only to find that the machine in question had an old CD-ROM drive incapable of reading 700MB discs. So I was SOL (and eventually found Gnoppix, which did fit onto a 650MB disc this machine could boot).
I can't imagine I've been the only person to run into this issue with Knoppix, so I wonder if this new "lite" version will be designed to work on 650MB discs (although admittedly I had a bit of a rough time even finding such discs to burn that Gnoppix CD oh so long ago).
(And yes, I suppose I could spend a bit of money and buy a new CD-ROM drive for the machine, but it was a freebie, and is supposed to be a guest machine, so it isn't as if I'm personally hurting by not putting any money into it ;) ).
Yaz.
I'm not quite sure if I'd go that far -- but if you're going to have them, you need to be smart on how you integrate them into the curriculum. They should be used for research purposes (ie: smartly using the web to research reports and papers, and how to differentiate between trusted sources and untrusted sources, and maybe some math modelling software for the older grades), but not to teach operating systems or word processing.
But otherwise, I agree -- all of those schools filling up with high-end PCs for status aren't doing their students any favours. Computers don't automatically improve the educational process -- indeed, from much of what I've seen they often slow the education process down. Many classrooms wind up having computers sitting completely idle, meaning they were nothing more than a big pit to sink money needed elsewhere.
Yaz.
There are many ways in which spammers harvest and generate spam messages, and not all of them require entering your e-mail address into web forms.
I have a number of e-mail addresses, some of which date back to the early 90's and use daily, and others which are more recent and which I've never used at all.
My oldest e-mail address was my primary e-mail adddress for newsgroup postings for many, many years. I haven't given or used that address in roughly 2 years now (as I'm using a different address that forwards to this old mailbox), and yet I still get dozens of spam messages being sent to this address daily (all of which are thankfully auttomatically filtered).
On the other end of the spectrum is my Gmail account. I have never used this account for anything at all. I've never sent an e-mail from it, or used it to register for anything. And yet it too receives spam (all of which Google also does a good job of filtering automatically). An old e-mail account I got from my ISP when I signed up for my first cable modem was similar -- I already had a mailbox and never used that account. I never even bothered _checking_ it, until one day nearly a year later out of curiousity to see how many spam messages it may have received -- only to find the mailbox was filled with hundreds of spam messages.
I often see messages where the list of recipients was obviously generated by attaching a list of user names to each entry in a list of domains and then sending the results. And who knows how many Windows e-mail worms out there are sending users address book entries back to spammers.
Best practices can reduce your spam load from certain vectors, but not all of them, making some form of filtering good policy. When even unused mailboxes are getting clogged with spam, however, you know that best practices alone just aren't enough.
Yaz.
Okay, so you're in Grade 4 (in North America -- about 10 years old). You won't be entering the workforce for at least another 8 to 14 years (depending on whether or not you attend University). Do you think it will matter one whit 8 to 14 years from now whether you did your web surfing and word processing on a Windows machine or a Mac?
Your logic lacks a basis in logic. Computer hardware and software generally changes at a fairly rapid pace (particularily in terms of how they interface with humans). The idea of getting an education in computer systems should be in how those systems generally function, and in making good educational use of them now, rather than trying to train students on specific software packages that will be out-of-date long before they enter the workforce.
If you want skills in software that companies and industry is demanding, go to a cheap local community college. That is what they are there for. You can go and get your MS Office certification and bask in the knowledge that you just spent a whack of money for a piece of paper that will be meaningless in two years time.
Personally, I find it much more useful to teach children in K-12 much more basic skills, such as language, mathematics, science, and the basic principals of information research. Virtually any computer can do this for them. The key is to make the computer accessable to the student, and this means having a system that is easy to use, somewhat intuitive in its functionality, and somethat that requires little maintenence, permitting a teacher who doesn't hold a computer administrator certificate like an MCSE to spend as little time as possible keeping the machines running for their students.
When I was 12 years old, I became an expert on the Commodore 64, the most popular computer at its time. Want to know how useful any of that knowledge is today, or how many C64 software titles I need to work with? Zero. The things I retained from then that are useful? Basic concepts like binary logic and math, and some programming fundementals.
Trying to teach the latest and greatest software misses the whole point of an education, and is simply a waste of time and effort. Teach students the fundementals, and they'll have the tools they need to figure out how to use new software packages as the need arises.
Brad BARCLAY
Please allow me to post the following warning:
Mind you, I could see some hopeful geek buying this. "I just bought a comdom on eBay for $15! Now in 4 to 6 weeks I will get to have sex!" ;).
Shouldn't that be counterreproductive?
Yaz.
Java is actually an excellent fit for this sort of project. The project is not only source portable, but also binary portable across platforms. It doesn't have to worry about vaguarities on different platforms.
It's also heavily object oriented, so if it were to be ported to a native language, it would probably be Objective C.
We do have a plan to offer a native library access module using JNI to permit native applications to build upon the Java-based protocol stack -- however, we don't have any timeline for implementing this.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
Different models over the years have had different latching mechanisms. My brother has an inexpensive iSerial laptop, and on that model, the latches do indeed feel and look cheap, especially compared to the latch on my PowerBook.
As for the pointing device, I've always been a fan of the TrackPoint. You can easily manipulate the pointer without ever removing your fingers from the keyboard. My mouse of choice has long been the original IBM ScrollPoint mouse (the one with the TrackPoint between the two mouse buttons), as it's a much more natural (and precise) 2D scroller than a wheel is IMO.
I do realize it's a love-it-or-hate-it type device, but for the time when it was introduced it was a pretty big innovation, as suddenly laptops no longer needed either an external mouse or a built-in track ball (as trackpads had yet to be invented at the time).
Yaz.
There is already an excellent cross platform, Open Source PalmOS synchronization solution that runs on Linux (and Mac OSX and Windows and OS/2 and Solaris and everywhere else) called the jSyncManager.
It has all of the necessary APIs for synchronizing calendars and accessing the handheld Expansion Manager and Virtual File System.
What it needs it some more jConduit plug-ins written for accessing popular Linux applications. However, it has an extensive API and is licensed under the GPL/LGPL, so Palm (or anyone else) could very easily create a Linux-integrated synchronization tool if they so desired.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
We really need to nip the perception some people out there have that Mac users aren't power users.
Macs are modern RISC-based, Unix-based powerhouses. They are every serious power users dream machines. They are built upon a vastly better technology base than Intel machines are.
Every day I see more and more power users making the switch to the Mac and OSX. It has a powerful (and free) development environment, and a full suite of standard Unix tools. It integrates with and plays extremely well with other systems.
Anyone who thinks that a modern Mac isn't for power users simply doesn't know what they're talkinng about.
Yaz.
I should have also mentioned to the guy who levied the original complaints that if he's really wedded to the 14" size, the iBook is available in a 14" model.
Yaz.
Let's take a look at these reasons, shall we?
I take umbrage at that. You see, I used to work for IBM. I've had a number of ThinkPads over the years. I also currently own an Apple PowerBook. And I'd easily put this system in the same league as the ThinkPad (if not slightly higher -- where most modern ThinkPads are designed primarily as Windows systems, Apple's boxes are at least Unix based).
If you don't lock yourself into a specific architecture, you can see that Apple's PowerBooks easily rank up there with IBM's ThinkPads. Indeed, these are the only two companies for a very long time who have done any significant R&D into laptop usability. I'd pit my PowerBook against an Intel-based laptop any day.
In year one I imagine they'll use the IBM name. In year two they'll introduce some models under their own name in certain parts of the world. In years two through five they'll brand their systems under both the IBM and Lenovo names at the same time (ie: both logos on the boxes).
The idea being they'll wean their customers into thinking of their brand name as being equivalent to the IBM brand name. They have five years to do so -- an eternity in Internet time.
The questions becomes -- will it be successful, or will five years from now people be talking about the "good old days" when IBM made their PCs with quality and usability in mind.
Lenovo is buying a lot of expertise for their money in this area, so maybe they'll be able to pull it off. Or maybe not. Personally, I'm an Apple guy now for my laptops, so I couldn't really care less :).
Yaz.
Which reminds me -- your new shipment of grass clippings and barber hair is ready for delivery.
Yaz.