Well, since Microsoft has already announced plans to try to topple Google as a search engine, I'm pretty much going to take anything that they say with a grain of salt, if I don't just ignore them completely.
Google does an excellent job with their primary searches, their news siphoning, and their froogle.google.com service. I've found more useful results through Google than I have through all of the other search engines that I've used over the years combined. Sometime I'll have to try out their newsgroup tool.
Well, having dealt with Qwest.net and Quest Communications, which are run as seperate companies, I can tell you that it is difficult to impossible to get the line provisioning part of the company to do something, even if the Internet/DSL portion wants it done. I used to do phone support for an Internet provider, and back when I was doing that, the ISPs were responsible for submitting DSL line requests and seeing what the outcome was from Qwest. We received very little explanation for why a line wouldn't qualify, and the only contact that we had to attempt to resolve things with was *surprise* in the Internet portion of the company, not in the raw equipment/line part of the company. Qwest has a hard enough time providing decent telephone service, and they're so focused on trying to convince the Arizona Corporation Commission and the Utility Regulatory Agency to allow them to sell long distance service that they're doing a piss-poor job with maintenance on their other services. The Spirit of Service indeed, in this case, 'spirit' must refer to the soul of something dead.
"Pair gain [bldrdoc.gov] does kill DSL, but don't assume you can't get DSL through Qwest until you talk to Qwest and they tell you you can't. They may switch your phone line to a new pair."
They won't. A friend of mine lived 7000 feet from the CO, and he tried asking, he tried three different phone lines, and they all were pair gain. His upstairs neighbour had DSL though, so that really made him mad that it was available there and yet they wouldn't do one little change that could have allowed them even more low-maintenance revenue...
... that someone here would work to implement this in the United States. It would mean that companies like Verizon and Qwest wouldn't have the stranglehold on broadband that they currently do...
In Phoenix, we have two different Cablemodem providers, with some fairly significant overlapping coverage, but all of the independent DSL line providers for residential closed except for Qwest, and Qwest still uses Pair Gain, which kills DSL.
well, I am a legally licensed user of the Linux source code according to the GPL. That license predates SCO's copyright filing by many years. My rights as a consumer are being tread upon.
Isn't about time that we as Linux users file a class action lawsuit against SCO for misuse of Linux source? If we demonstrate kernel source commits that date back far enough to show that SCO has known for quite a while that they were selling and distributing Linux with the code that they claim is a problem (and all System V code should not be available from the copyright office since it's been filed) that we would be able to demonstrate failure on their part as a business to properly handle their IP, and to ask the court to release it to the public domain?
If I write an applet and license it LGPL or GPL, what I'm saying is "Use this, modify this, just don't hide this if you change this". If one doesn't want to deal with this as an author of proprietary software, there's a simple solution. Don't depend on someone else's GPL'ed work. That's it. It's not exactly brain-surgery. If you need something that only exists in GPL, write it yourself. If you're too lazy to do so, well, that's why you're not making the big bucks as a developer.
If records are globally viewable, or easily accessed without particular trouble, curiousity might lead people who otherwise wouldn't look through something to peek. Granted, in the JFK/Hospital example, people really should no poke around, but in other Internet based examples, curiousity is common. Lock stuff up a bit if you want to keep the honest people out, it's much more legitimate than leaving it open yet without having business.
And before someone makes an analogy to leaving one's house's door unlocked, Like computers, I lock my front door unless I'm expecting company.
... since they have gotten subsidies in the form of taxes paid by consumers given to them for the purchases of blank media and drives.
Personally, I think that if this is the case, we should be allowed to duplicate all of the music that we want, since we are effectively being taxed on it before we even do the act.
Well, as much as those NASCAR vehicles cost, and as little money as is being put into hardware for most of the Mars missions, we're getting fairly close when it comes down to the bottom line...
I'm certainly not surprised. Between Microsoft, the newly created Mozilla Foundation, and the overabundance of programmers at this point in the first place, this was bound to happen for this specific instance, and it'll happen again, and again, and again, until there are more jobs than programmers. Hopefully this next time, people will realise that flooding the workplace with one specialized labour will cause that labour pool to spill over, and not so many people will try to become programmers anymore.
I think that I'll change my major to English, or swing dancing...
Well, unfortunately the companies mentioned didn't have a particular stake in web browsers before now. AOL lost theirs the instant that the jumped into bed with Microsoft, IBM never really had one of their own, Sun had "HotJava", which was what.. HTML 3.0 compliant? RedHat wrote a lot of cool stuff for Gnome 1.1, but never anything that was to compete. This group is cool, but will they actually understand what they're doing enough to do it better than it's been done so far?
Something to at least assist...
on
Funding Open Source?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Some of the open source projects deal directly with hardware. One of the things that we as OSS users can do is to contribute money and/or hardware to the developers, so that they can afford the equipment that they need in order to develop modules.
An example of this is the various 802.11* projects for different chipsets. Originally.11a was the goal, then the a/b chipsets were released. Then the b/g chipsets, and now the a/b/g chipsets. We still don't have an open.11a implementation, not to mention the others. Some of the projects, like the atheros chipset project, aren't terribly far off from.11a, but without more hardware, the variants won't be completed.
Get together on your mailing lists, and buy the developer some hardware. That way, they have more of what they need to work with in order to make use of their programming skills.
Okay, I'm really confused here. If there's a prior implementation, how can it be patented, especially when it's not like Apple can claim that they don't know about any competitors?
I really have liked where Apple has been going lately as far as the technical side of things goes, but if their management is going to become stupid, then they need a wakeup call.
That's the thing, though. I just don't bother at all with it anymore. I'll go to a coffee shop to listen to the live performer, or I'll go to a dance with a live band. They'll get tipped at these locations. Granted, they're not making a lot of money, but they're doing something that they like to do for an appreciative audience.
I used to listen to the radio, but the ClearChannelification of the radiowaves doesn't make for good music.
Yeah, I believe that the artists should be getting paid for what they do too. This is why I don't bother buying CDs, since they don't get paid for what they do anyway, the RIAA gets paid for what they do...
I can see a REALLY big problem with this approach, that will probably be difficult to properly instruct for, and that is inconsistencies, errors, and dangerous situations that could crop up, and the technician in question (though if they keep dumbing down the instruction, "technician" might no longer apply) might not be able to tell what is wrong or how severe it is.
Remember, for problems, textbooks usually have fairly lengthy descriptions of types of failures and things to look for, with some representative pictures, but predominately with descriptions. Descriptions allow for describing a blanket set of bad circumstances without having to show one specific circumstance, so the technician could fairly easily connect the condition of a part or assembly to the verbage that was in the textbook. In picture instruction, if the picture of the type of error doesn't look close enough to the actual error, the technician might not realise the severity of the problem, because it was never covered under the training video. Rather than being taught the theory behind what is occuring, (s)he is being taught the specific, one case implementation.
I'm not against training videos, but I believe strongly in training with more than just their use. Hands on training, as well as textbook training for theory offer a much more well-rounded way to learn, especially if the person being trained is going to be performing the same basic job for a long time on many different yet similar machines or models. Once the initial education has been bestowed, freshening of education for a newer model would be almost trivial.
So, would Total Annhilation, Warcraft II, Grand Theft Auto, Duke Nukem' 3d, Quake, or any other host of games impress you?
I don't play games because they're new. I play them because I like playing them. I've played Battlefield 1942 a few times. It's okay. Some interesting concepts for vehicles and team play, but nothing that I particularly require. Why should I chase something because it's the latest and greatest?
Folks, play what you enjoy playing. If you want to play the newest "If it moves, shoot it, if not, shoot it and see if it moves" first person shooter, go ahead. It's cool. If not, so what?
I even still occasionally load up DOOM on a computer with an FM Synth MIDI sound card, so I can run through the levels with my adrenaline pumping to that Overdriven Guitar synth, shooting at loud monsters.
I don't run Windows anymore unless I want to play Carmageddon II at home, and at work I only get into Windows if I need to use the custom workorder system that ties into Novell and MS Access. I can watch movies, play a few games, listen to music, surf, do email, and the like all without Bill and his Evil Empire.
We need to start new-to-computers people with non-MS operating systems. They'll be much more inclined to use anything handed to them, and they'll dislike the crashing problems, popups, and weird behaviour of Microsoft's OSes. I repair Windows machines at work for my job, and every time something goes awry, I don't think of it as normal anymore, I think of it as bloody annoying.
Being nearly Windows-free for the last three years or so has been really awesome. These things are tools, not cheap toys that break a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since Microsoft has already announced plans to try to topple Google as a search engine, I'm pretty much going to take anything that they say with a grain of salt, if I don't just ignore them completely.
Google does an excellent job with their primary searches, their news siphoning, and their froogle.google.com service. I've found more useful results through Google than I have through all of the other search engines that I've used over the years combined. Sometime I'll have to try out their newsgroup tool.
Well, having dealt with Qwest.net and Quest Communications, which are run as seperate companies, I can tell you that it is difficult to impossible to get the line provisioning part of the company to do something, even if the Internet/DSL portion wants it done. I used to do phone support for an Internet provider, and back when I was doing that, the ISPs were responsible for submitting DSL line requests and seeing what the outcome was from Qwest. We received very little explanation for why a line wouldn't qualify, and the only contact that we had to attempt to resolve things with was *surprise* in the Internet portion of the company, not in the raw equipment/line part of the company. Qwest has a hard enough time providing decent telephone service, and they're so focused on trying to convince the Arizona Corporation Commission and the Utility Regulatory Agency to allow them to sell long distance service that they're doing a piss-poor job with maintenance on their other services. The Spirit of Service indeed, in this case, 'spirit' must refer to the soul of something dead.
"Pair gain [bldrdoc.gov] does kill DSL, but don't assume you can't get DSL through Qwest until you talk to Qwest and they tell you you can't. They may switch your phone line to a new pair."
They won't. A friend of mine lived 7000 feet from the CO, and he tried asking, he tried three different phone lines, and they all were pair gain. His upstairs neighbour had DSL though, so that really made him mad that it was available there and yet they wouldn't do one little change that could have allowed them even more low-maintenance revenue...
... that someone here would work to implement this in the United States. It would mean that companies like Verizon and Qwest wouldn't have the stranglehold on broadband that they currently do...
In Phoenix, we have two different Cablemodem providers, with some fairly significant overlapping coverage, but all of the independent DSL line providers for residential closed except for Qwest, and Qwest still uses Pair Gain, which kills DSL.
well, I am a legally licensed user of the Linux source code according to the GPL. That license predates SCO's copyright filing by many years. My rights as a consumer are being tread upon.
Isn't about time that we as Linux users file a class action lawsuit against SCO for misuse of Linux source? If we demonstrate kernel source commits that date back far enough to show that SCO has known for quite a while that they were selling and distributing Linux with the code that they claim is a problem (and all System V code should not be available from the copyright office since it's been filed) that we would be able to demonstrate failure on their part as a business to properly handle their IP, and to ask the court to release it to the public domain?
I hope that you made some backups. That form of media doesn't exactly have an infinite shelf life.
Obviously you never heard someone from Fry's Electronics delivering their salespitch on an E-Machine...
When one attempts to get good, cheap, and fast all in one package, the first is the one that suffers the most...
If I write an applet and license it LGPL or GPL, what I'm saying is "Use this, modify this, just don't hide this if you change this". If one doesn't want to deal with this as an author of proprietary software, there's a simple solution. Don't depend on someone else's GPL'ed work. That's it. It's not exactly brain-surgery. If you need something that only exists in GPL, write it yourself. If you're too lazy to do so, well, that's why you're not making the big bucks as a developer.
If records are globally viewable, or easily accessed without particular trouble, curiousity might lead people who otherwise wouldn't look through something to peek. Granted, in the JFK/Hospital example, people really should no poke around, but in other Internet based examples, curiousity is common. Lock stuff up a bit if you want to keep the honest people out, it's much more legitimate than leaving it open yet without having business.
And before someone makes an analogy to leaving one's house's door unlocked, Like computers, I lock my front door unless I'm expecting company.
... since they have gotten subsidies in the form of taxes paid by consumers given to them for the purchases of blank media and drives.
Personally, I think that if this is the case, we should be allowed to duplicate all of the music that we want, since we are effectively being taxed on it before we even do the act.
Well, as much as those NASCAR vehicles cost, and as little money as is being put into hardware for most of the Mars missions, we're getting fairly close when it comes down to the bottom line...
I'm certainly not surprised. Between Microsoft, the newly created Mozilla Foundation, and the overabundance of programmers at this point in the first place, this was bound to happen for this specific instance, and it'll happen again, and again, and again, until there are more jobs than programmers. Hopefully this next time, people will realise that flooding the workplace with one specialized labour will cause that labour pool to spill over, and not so many people will try to become programmers anymore.
I think that I'll change my major to English, or swing dancing...
"...I'm driving from England, a 2400 mile round trip!"
Woah. You must have one helluva committed designated driver...
Well, unfortunately the companies mentioned didn't have a particular stake in web browsers before now. AOL lost theirs the instant that the jumped into bed with Microsoft, IBM never really had one of their own, Sun had "HotJava", which was what .. HTML 3.0 compliant? RedHat wrote a lot of cool stuff for Gnome 1.1, but never anything that was to compete. This group is cool, but will they actually understand what they're doing enough to do it better than it's been done so far?
Some of the open source projects deal directly with hardware. One of the things that we as OSS users can do is to contribute money and/or hardware to the developers, so that they can afford the equipment that they need in order to develop modules.
.11a was the goal, then the a/b chipsets were released. Then the b/g chipsets, and now the a/b/g chipsets. We still don't have an open .11a implementation, not to mention the others. Some of the projects, like the atheros chipset project, aren't terribly far off from .11a, but without more hardware, the variants won't be completed.
An example of this is the various 802.11* projects for different chipsets. Originally
Get together on your mailing lists, and buy the developer some hardware. That way, they have more of what they need to work with in order to make use of their programming skills.
Okay, I'm really confused here. If there's a prior implementation, how can it be patented, especially when it's not like Apple can claim that they don't know about any competitors?
I really have liked where Apple has been going lately as far as the technical side of things goes, but if their management is going to become stupid, then they need a wakeup call.
That's the thing, though. I just don't bother at all with it anymore. I'll go to a coffee shop to listen to the live performer, or I'll go to a dance with a live band. They'll get tipped at these locations. Granted, they're not making a lot of money, but they're doing something that they like to do for an appreciative audience.
I used to listen to the radio, but the ClearChannelification of the radiowaves doesn't make for good music.
Yeah, I believe that the artists should be getting paid for what they do too. This is why I don't bother buying CDs, since they don't get paid for what they do anyway, the RIAA gets paid for what they do...
That's the same computer that is also being sold under the Lindows brand.
I can see a REALLY big problem with this approach, that will probably be difficult to properly instruct for, and that is inconsistencies, errors, and dangerous situations that could crop up, and the technician in question (though if they keep dumbing down the instruction, "technician" might no longer apply) might not be able to tell what is wrong or how severe it is.
Remember, for problems, textbooks usually have fairly lengthy descriptions of types of failures and things to look for, with some representative pictures, but predominately with descriptions. Descriptions allow for describing a blanket set of bad circumstances without having to show one specific circumstance, so the technician could fairly easily connect the condition of a part or assembly to the verbage that was in the textbook. In picture instruction, if the picture of the type of error doesn't look close enough to the actual error, the technician might not realise the severity of the problem, because it was never covered under the training video. Rather than being taught the theory behind what is occuring, (s)he is being taught the specific, one case implementation.
I'm not against training videos, but I believe strongly in training with more than just their use. Hands on training, as well as textbook training for theory offer a much more well-rounded way to learn, especially if the person being trained is going to be performing the same basic job for a long time on many different yet similar machines or models. Once the initial education has been bestowed, freshening of education for a newer model would be almost trivial.
Maybe I should just leave it on top of my computer then...
Has Microsoft heard of this technology?
So, would Total Annhilation, Warcraft II, Grand Theft Auto, Duke Nukem' 3d, Quake, or any other host of games impress you?
I don't play games because they're new. I play them because I like playing them. I've played Battlefield 1942 a few times. It's okay. Some interesting concepts for vehicles and team play, but nothing that I particularly require. Why should I chase something because it's the latest and greatest?
Folks, play what you enjoy playing. If you want to play the newest "If it moves, shoot it, if not, shoot it and see if it moves" first person shooter, go ahead. It's cool. If not, so what?
I even still occasionally load up DOOM on a computer with an FM Synth MIDI sound card, so I can run through the levels with my adrenaline pumping to that Overdriven Guitar synth, shooting at loud monsters.
"Doesn't that imply that if you get your first wish, you will not have a job?"
Not when we're low-bid, and we get cheap, crappy hardware that blows out (like 3,200 DEER 250watt ATX Power supplies)
I don't run Windows anymore unless I want to play Carmageddon II at home, and at work I only get into Windows if I need to use the custom workorder system that ties into Novell and MS Access. I can watch movies, play a few games, listen to music, surf, do email, and the like all without Bill and his Evil Empire.
We need to start new-to-computers people with non-MS operating systems. They'll be much more inclined to use anything handed to them, and they'll dislike the crashing problems, popups, and weird behaviour of Microsoft's OSes. I repair Windows machines at work for my job, and every time something goes awry, I don't think of it as normal anymore, I think of it as bloody annoying.
Being nearly Windows-free for the last three years or so has been really awesome. These things are tools, not cheap toys that break a lot.