Nope, tourism in Britain won't die because, even if this madness came to pass as law (which it wouldn't), the European Court of Justice will throw it right out of the window as it runs against a fundamental EU notion of free movement of people and goods.
Now, go on you eurosceptics Brits and hate the EU some more...while all it does is create more checks and balances so that crazy stuff like this happen less often.
Hasan M. Elahi is Bangladeshi. He is not Arab, and does not speak Arabic. Elahi is a common surname in many Indo-Iranian languages meaning "celestial". That "El" is not the definite article as in Arabic, it's actually part of the word.
Do a bit of searching before basing your whole argument on the assumption that Elahi is person you were barely acquainted with called Elashi.
Things we wouldn't have (or wouldn't have had as early as we did) if it wasn't for Xerox:
Graphical User Interface Mouse Ethernet Object Oriented programming.....
I know we hate software patensts here and all, but calling Xeros an 'asshole' company only based on a single action, is rather feeble, don't you think?
Am I the only one around here who actually likes the ribbon interface?
First of all, I am a student in Australia, and right now I am downloading Office 2007 Ultimate after shelving out $75 of my hard earned cash. This I think, is the first time I am directly paying for software in my life, and I guess it's mainly because of how impressed I have become of Office 2007's interface. I had been using a pirated copy of Enterprise Edition for the past couple of weeks, but after seeing this offer, I realised that having a legitimate copy which can easily be validated and updated is worth $75.
I have used every version of Office since Office 97, and I have also used every version of OOo since it was Staroffice 5.x. Even after all these years, I always found myself looking for a specific option, and jumping from menu to the other menu. Let's face it, there is absolutely no logic why many of these items are where they are. It's just that we have become so accustomed with the interface that we have memorised where they are, and hence are able to use the product. Have you ever looked at a person who has never used any office product, trying to make sense out of Office? I have (my mother), and let me tell you that it is hugely frustrating, to say the least.
Ribbons just make the whole problem disappear. The whole functionality is now right in your face, and they have designed it in a way which takes less screen real space than all those menus and toolbars did. The whole interface is now more intuitive, and everything seems in its place. Now, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy here, but realistically, ribbons are a UI improvement over menus and toolbars. It took me perhaps 2-3 days to get accustomed to it, but after that I never looked back.
I agree that for 90% of the time, OOo is fine feature-wise, and does the job. However in the Real World (TM), people ask that you hand in your CV in "word format", and they don't even accept PDFs (don't ask me why). I am afraid I simply can't trust OOo's "save as MS Word" feature, for files which are critical to me. Not to mention that there are those of us who really need the extra functionality MS Office provides. It's not just Office's own functionality either, there are various 3rd party products that only integrate with MS Office, e.g., here in the University of Melbourne, we use a program called End Note X to manage our bibliographies and references when writing articles. Guess what word processing program it integrated with? (hint: not OOo). Now I myself probably won't trust Word (or any WYSIWYG program for that matter) for writing 100+ pages (I used LaTex for writing my Master's thesis), but LaTex is simply not an option for 99% of the population who have been brought up in a WYSIWYG world.
To say that all those paying for MS Office are ignorants who are not aware of alternatives is stupid. Ribbon is a very fine UI evolution, and I strongly suspect that in a couple of years time, all document generating programs will use the same interface. Not withstanding the technical superiority of MS Office over all other office suits at this time, it should also be noted that many of us have to use Office to ensure document compatibility with everyone else, as well as compatibility with a large number of 3rd party products which we rely on for our day to day life.
Now, I should probably get back to my thesis again, in LaTex...
Not a moment too soon indeed. I witnessed today that the Iranian govenrment is restricting access to Wikipedia (in all languages). While personally I use torpark (a version of Portable Firefox with Tor network integration built-in) and getting past their firewall takes a single click, I feel for the masses who are not very technologically adept, and have suffered heavily from these censorships. Indeed, Wikipedia was slowly but surely gaining momentum in Iran, and I was helping a group of university scholars who were mostly computer newbies and could hardly comprehend concepts such as an internet forum, not to mention a wiki, become familiar with wikipedia and contribute some of their articles to the Persian Wikipedia. We had identified and contacted 120 experts, in 38 categories, and we were hoping that with their contribution, Perian Wikipedia (which already has more than a 100,000 articles) would fill the void which has always existed in Persian libraries, a complete Encyclopaedia in Persian.
The other day, an official from the ministry of IT was telling the state TV that the number of websites banned in Iran are less than the number of a person's fingers! Well, at least when the Iraqi minister of information was lying in broad sunlight in everyone's face, we all got a good laugh out of it. Iranians OTOH are mostly completly free from any sense of humour!
The parent is right, the ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature. But as a long time Wikipedia contributor and donator, I have to remind people that the fact that this false information remained on the website for 132 days is a little disheartening.
Certainly I don't agree with Seigenthaler's accusations, but let's not forget that Wikipedia is far from perfect. Events like this might serve to lead us to further optimize Wikipedia's mechanisms.
You couldn't be more correct here. I speak 4 languages pretty fluently, Persian (my mother language), English (thanks to my parents for forcing me to learn it when I was a child), Turkish (having studied in the Turkish speaking North Cyprus) and French (Oui je parle francais aussi).
Of these, three are Indo-European languages (French, English and Persian). Grammatically, they all follow the same rules (more or less), and making sentences in them is pretty similar. The place of adjectives, verbs and nouns might change, but you are fairly confident that you will be dealing with the same structures, like nouns and verbs. Not so in Turkish which is a Turkic language and follows completely different sentence structure. In the Indo-European languages, you might use different prepositions for the same purpose, but you at least use prepositions. Not in Turkish, in which everything becomes a suffix and there are no prepositions (I have heard other languages like Finnish to be similar).
What is the key to be able to successfully speak different languages? Just as the parent mentioned, it is to be able to THINK in it. When learning a new language, if from time to time you find yourself making some sentences in your head in that foreign language, then you are on the correct path. It shows that you mind is willing to think in that way. Thinking in your own language and trying to translate it at run-time (using a little computer jargon), is a recipe for disaster. The best you can hope for is to be a mediocre speaker.
Adding to the difficulty of translation is the cultural weight that a language carries with itself. A Language, especially those like Persian and Turkish which are not as widespread as English for example, is a symbol of that country and stands for all that nation's aspirations, dreams and fears. You can't learn Persian without becoming familiar with some historical figures and legendary myths and Pagan beliefs that Iranians still commonly boast about. You can't learn Turkish without learning different kinds of Kebab, and drinking Ayran (A juice made from Yogurt), and of course Atatürk. You can't learn French without knowing what Café Créme is, without knowing the difference between a red from Bourgogne from one from Bordeaux, and of course without knowing the significance of the Bastille Day.
Can a machine deal with all these peculiarities of languages? Quite frankly, unless dramatic improvements are made in artificial intelligence, I would say the answer is a resounding NO. Translation can't be done by just following some rules and using a dictionary. That approach can at best become yet another Babelfish, and we know how useful that is. Knowing a language means being able to think in that language, and machines currently don't "think". And unless there are dramatic breakthroughs in AI, I say we are decades, if not centuries away from a useful machine translator.
I am able to fluently speak in these 4 languages, yet I become completely speechless when I am given the task of translating from one of them to the other. That's why I could never comprehend how the minds of those UN translators who translate important political speeches on the fly, work. Knowing a language certainly doesn't mean you can translate from/to it as well. Translation is an art. A machine can never be a good translator, for the same reason that a machine can never become an artistic painter, or a composer.
Correct you are my friend. Honestly, what did Ximian bring to Novel in terms of actual products? What happened to Ximian Desktop, that lovely modified Gnome with a devilish monkey wallpaper? Have you heard anything about it? No, it's been discontinued. Do you remember their Red Carpet? That usless shi!t that was supposed to unify software deployments? What happened to it? It turned out that Novel already had a similar product, and so RC has been discontinued. And you know what, as lovely as that crashoholic buggy Evolution is, and Mono (which is going for a long catch-up phase with the releaasse of C# 2.0 and the new.Net framework) these are bringing a total of $0.00 in terms of revenue for Novel.
Buying Ximian was a terrible mistake that Novel made during their hurry to jump into the Linux bandwagon. As if that was not enough, it seems that the Ximian guys now hold major positions in Novel, and have been put into positions to be able to kill SUSE's especial relationship with the KDE community. As other's have mentioned, SUSE was only strong in Europe, and in Europe, desktop Linux means KDE. I know that the Munich municipality is definitly going to have a strong word with SUSE about this.
I'm sure this won't affect KDE much. KDE just gets better with every release, and with 4.0, it will put all those usability criticisms to rest once and for all. But I do know that this will affect SUSE. The whole YAST2 is written with Qt, and it will be a massive redundant job to rewrite the whole thing in Gtk+. Also, this probably means that SUSE 10.0 was the last release that I bought, and I know I am not alone in this boat. Happy gconf hacking SUSE!
NS 4 nearly has no support for CSS. That's why the "new slashdot" (heh, never thought I would see that phrase) looks crap in it.
Seriously, don't you think it's time to drop support for NS 4? I mean this is the slashdot crowd, that has been saying for the last 8 years that developers should comply with standards and don't tune web pages for a specific browser, and now that finaly it is compliant with the standard, you are complaining that it looks bad in an ancient browser? You know, slashdot now also looks completely crap on BeOS's netpositive. should I complain about that as well?
Explicitly forbidding them from using Open Source software is both, against the spirit and the leter of the license. It is not even allowed by the license, as mention by the parent.
However the argument that the Samba team put forward when they objected to SCO's contiunued use of their software was that according to section 4 of the GPL, if for any reason you do not accept the license, the license is automatically terminated and you lose all the rights mentioned in it. Saying that the license is terminated (or is invalid) doesn't mean that the author loses his copyright and you can distribute the said software as if it were in public domain (as SCO thinks), but that the rights which the author has given to you in that license are revoked i.e, the user can no longer distribute and/or modify the said sofware. The SCO Group has publicly stated that the GNU GPL is not compatible with US copyright law (in their opinion), and thus the license is invalid. This would mean that they disagree with the license and hence automatically their GPL is terminated.
This in my opinion is a good argument, barring The SCO Group from using any GPL software. Of course IANAL and I don't know whether it would stand in a court of law. The fact that the Samba team did not pursue their claim means that either their lawyers advised against it, or that (more likely) they decided not to put the time and money to pursue the complaint legaly.
Well, with all respect to Google, but...
Talking about AI reminds of some othercompanies; you know, like the guys that made the Big Blue thingy that beat Kasparov.
In exactly which one of these above fields that you mention, is Google ahead of IBM, Siemens and Sony? (you know their Robots are pretty impressive, I guess these robots also DO have AI in them).
Google is in a very good position to tackle the MT problem, but don't be mistaken into thinking it is in a unique position. I am sure others will jump on board once they see commercial value in this business, and that is a good thing(TM)
Correct, however unless you have the basic fundamental principles of a democratic society, you won't have sustainable improvement.
I am talking from fist hand experience here. during 1970s, Iran was more or less in the same situation as UAE is today. People had money to burn, resorts were made in the Caspian sea which surprassed those in the Mediterranean; most of the population could easily afford a couple of vacations a year, and many multinational corporations had chosen Iran as their regional centre.
However, one thing was lacking, and that was democracy and the freedom that comes with it. History proves that without these, all other financial improvements are temporary. What happened in my country was that in a short period of time, a revolution happened, everything was turned upside down, economic bans and embargos followed and the economy was shaken and basically ruined. Add to that 8 years of consecutive war with a neighbour (Iraq) and you will understand why we are where we are today.
The situation in UAE is very similar here. They might seem prosperous today, but it's like a building which doesn't have basic correct foundations. You can build on top of it and make a skycrapper out of it, but all it takes to shake this skycrapper is a little push or a little social unrest, as in the case of UAE.
The argument that "We don't want democracy because our rulers are the best" has been proven to be false over and over during history.
true indeed, not to mention that the expatriaets are not allowed to own a business (they can have a maximum of %49 share) and are not even allowed to buy land or an apartment. I have known pakistanis there who have lived in that country for years, working 6 days a week and trying to raise a family; and yet they are not even allowed to buy a simple apartement there; while the Emiratis get free land from the government.
And the people who work at all the shops as clercks or sellers, at all the cinemas, hotels, bar maids, managers, corporate types, whores, DJs, etc are all foreigners. I am yet to see a single Emirati Arab actually "work" somewhere. I don't exactly know what does the 20% of this population which receive all the profits and money, do; aside from going up and down the street 10 times a day in their $200,000 cars.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Arabs, Over the years I have actualy met some very intelelctual and intelligent Arabs. But the realities of UAE are so drastically shocking, that leave me speechless.
This article is being published in the YRO section, but rest assured guys, no ones rights are being violated here. This device won't be installed in any of the Emirati's cars, and the others simply have no "rights" for it to be violated.
But as I said, you can't build a country like this. This situation has lasted for 20 years now, I wonder how much longer it can last. It is basically the 21st century equivalent of slavery.
Well, the technology is good, I can think of hundreds of useful applications for it. But the privacy issues just scare the hell out of me. And, where? in UAE? If it was in a civilized democratic country, where there are restrictions on what a government can do, where there are unions and institutions which care about citizens' rights, then maybe the use of these applications can be justified. But in UAE?
I lived in the UAE for more than 2 years. I had a very nice job there working at a multinational telecommunication company. Being and Iranian myself, it was a very good opportunity for me as my country was nearby and en route to other places, I could stop at my country a couple of times a year to say hello to my family. But there are things in that country which just scared the shit out of me. Things that eventually made me forget the job and the good opportunity it provided, and virtually escape from there.
In UAE, a car's plate number can have variable number of digits. No 1 is reserved for the Sultan of the province (there are 7 provinces there, Dubai being the biggest one). No 2 is usually the Sultan's brother, and the 1 digit numbers are all family members of the sultan. Cousins and close friends get 2 digit numbers, as well as their wives and their children. The 3 digit numbers are also relatives of the relatives of Sultan. Ordinary cars have 5 digits on their plates.
The situation is that no one can stand in the way of a lower-digit car. If you see a 2 or 3 digit car coming from the opposite direction, it doesn't matter if it's your line of road or not, you have to make way for him. The police can not issue tickets to these cars. They do not obey the speed limit; mostly they have Ferraris and Porches which easily pass the 180 mph, and no one can even stop them. Legally, the police can do nothing with them.
They have all the money of the world. They have built bridges longer and more modern than those in Japan and Sweden, they have made skyscrapers that make New York look like a village, they have cars which automobile manufacturers hand made for their special needs. They have made a heaven out there. And if you just want to have some holiday, get on the beech, go to a resort or something; it is a perfect place. But only if you care nothing about the political situation, and the mentality of the people.
There are no political parties. No Elections. No private newspaper, no private T.V channel, basically no free speech. The thing that surprised me was that unlike the people of my country, who also lack these things, but at least are fighting in order to get them; they even do not think about having a democratic society, having liberty, and privacy. It is as if these words do not exist in the dictionary of an ordinary Arab. They have been brought up with the mentality that you never question the ruler. They never criticize a single action of any governmental body; be it the municipality, or any other bureau. It was so shocking, and yet embarrassing to me.
If this technology was being deployed in a democratic country, you would have had many organizations and groups voicing concerns over it. If did not prevent the deployment of such technology, they would have at least made sure that the necessary checks and restrictions on the storage and usage of information about every single car exists. As it is in the UAE, I'm sure no one will even question this thing. No one will even think about how this technology can be used to violate their rights and privacy. It doesn't matter how much money and oil they have and what kind of gadgets they use to control their traffic; when a society lacks basic elements like freedom of speech; that society will not evolve in a positive manner.
Completly agree. I was once working at the IT section of one of the biggest outfit manufacturers of my country. In the IT section we all used Linux boxes to develop our Java applications, but all the rest of the company of course were using Windows desktops, with some Novell and some (recently installed) Linux servers. One day one of the employees had her computer gone for soem repair or something, and she came to the IT section to ask if we have any extra computers to give her for a couple of days, untill her computer is fixed. We looked around and couldn't find a windows box, but had plenty of extra Linux boxes around. I asked he what she does with her computer, and she told me mostly checking email and using messenger and these stuff. I said, OK, Linux can also do that, do you want to try it? She shrugged off, as if not knowing what I am talking about. Anyway, I gave her the system.
It was a Debian woody, Running KDE 3.1 IIRC. I never heard from her anymore, but a couple of days later, went to her room to see if how she was doing with the system. I looked at her desktop, and found out that she had customized Kicker, had gaim setup herself and was chatting happily with it. Had Kmail and many other applications setup herself, and I when I asked her if she liked Linux, she said she didn't see much difference, but that stability was it was better than windows (she used to use windows 98). Well, I tell you this was a person with no computer experience at all, who had problems pronouncing Linux correctly in the first place. Eventually she also replaced her home computer with Linux too.
The opposite can also happen, I am now a university students and one of my firends who is a Electrical Engineering undergraduate, couldn't even stand firefox. I installed it on his computer once, and he used it for a couple of days before deciding that IE is better. (something about IE showing pictures better or something). This from a person who knows C Programming, and is a very knowledgable in his own field (chip design and etc, which scare the sh*t out of me). To be honest, a couple of his favorite websites also didn't show up correctly in Firefox, we know that's it firefox's problems, but the end-user it is.
People are really different. Some hate change, any change in the way they do their work. Others are much more open to change, and don't mind it as long as they see the benefits. It doesn't have anything to do with hoe computer-literate people are. Yes, geeks master computer stuff more easily, but then again, many geeks are also resistant to change. If they get accustomed to one specific editor (vi), they go to any lenght to bash those who are using the other editor (emacs).
Frankly, I don't think any fortune 500 company can switch to a 100% Linux soloution anytime soon. Linux has its advantages on the desktop, as does Windows. An objective person would look at each tool, and use the right tool for the right task. I agree that perhaps 80% of the computers in corporate america can easily move to Linux (and they probably should because of the TCO) but I can understand that many of those so called knowledge-workers really need applications that simply are not available on Linux.
And BTW, amd I the only one who thinks slashdot is becomming more objective everyday? I was browing some 1998 and 1999 stories in slashdot the other day, and it seemed to me that at that time, we had much more trolls and these stuff. Sure we still have them today, but if you read stories at +4 or something, then you can actually see many knowledgable people who know what they are talking about.
The High Informatics Coucil (HIC) is an organisation which has been talking for a couple of years now, about this Open Source thing, this Linux thing, and ect, but really they haven't done anything. They even don't have a clue what they are talking about.
I am an Iranian and I used to work for a company which was the first to start doing some Linux activities in Iran. We started by designing a keyboard layout for Persian, and when GTK 2.0 and Qt 3.0 were released and had enough Unicode support to enable us to write Persian using them, we started the FarsiKDE project http://www.farsikde.org and with the release of KDE 3.1, our small handicapped and fully underresourced team was able to add Farsi as an official language to KDE. Next step, we launched a community-driven website http://www.linuxiran.org
to help build momentum around Linux in Iran. And then, we started building our own Debian-Based distribution called Shabdix, and it even had a couple fo limited releases. (all this was done in true Open Source fashion, free in both senses).
During all this time, the HIC did nothing to support us, althought they were fully aware of our program. The HIC is just so full of bearucracy, that it can't even decide what it wants to do, and which direction it wants to go. All they have done, with their massive resources and budget, is just publish a couple of already-available fonts as beta, and then also publish some meaningless Request For Comments to implement things that were implemented years ago (like UTF-8 support in toolkits such as Qt and GTK). They can't even decide on a standard keyboard layouy. The Persian Keyboard layout in Windows is a mess, it doesn't have comma, Persian numbers,... and the one in XFree86 is much better, but they can't even agree to use that keyboard layout. All these years, they have made many public announcements about deploying Linux systems in Iran, about how Linux is the future and blah blah, but they have yet to do a single meaningful action. And they failed to support the only group which was actually doing something and producing some actual code.
But Of course, they need to have the PR going, cause they need to get an increase in their budget next year, and well, PR is the best way to impress lawmakers to give them the budget. And Saying 'We won't even use Windows even if it was free' is certainly going to make headlines, and keep the PR machine going. While I personaly have been to HIC, and know that even they use pirated copies of Widnows all over the place, internaly.
Such a shame, so many resources is being wasted by this entity, for no use.
The parent wrote what is perhaps one of the most sensible things of have read at slashdot. It just amazes me, why no one has the guts to stand against W3C, and read the parent post clearly and loudly to them.
I don't know where the mess started, probably when the original W3C standard was so simple and created just very simple webpages, and then NS started adding their own proprietary tags and extensions. Others like MSIE ofcourse had to follow suit, and in the process they also made their own proprietary incompatible tags. The release of HTML 3.2 was a joke, it just standardized what NS developers had been using for a long time.
And then, HTML 4 got so complex and everybody started to cry for using tables under tables under tables, so W3C combined XML with HTML and addedd CSS to it (which is a novel idea) and thought they have solved the problem. Not only is the problem not solved, it is even worse now. First of all, CSS is designed very badly (why didn't they put me on the CSS designer's team?;-) At first sight when you read and learn CSS, it seems like the missing piece in web development, it seems so clean, so logical, so clear, that everybody falls in love with it. But this loving relationship only lasts untill you start developing some serious web sites with it. Then you realize that it is lacking hundereds of things, you can't align texts and other elements according to their container like div, (yes they are implementing it in CSS3 now, how long will it take untill CSS3 is fully implemented in mainstream browsers? 12 years?) and even when you do get the site the way you want, you will see that every single browser (Konqueror, Opera, IE, Gecko) shows the site the way it wants, cause their XHHTML and CSS implementation is so buggy, and so full of mistakes that you can't rely on any single one of them.
The site that I was designing was a simple House Finder website for our university, to help students eaily locate available accommodations. I do care about standards, about accessibility, about making universal websites etc, but in real world, you just can't do it. You can design simple webpages with complete CSS and without any tables (I hate tables), but only simple ones. If you just move one step forward, and try to design a proffesional looking website only with CSS, you will find out the limitations of CSS, and the buggy implementations in browsers. In my case, I ended up going back to HTML 4, and the site is currently using 17 tables just to show what is a simple web application. I hate tables, the code is unreadable, and maintaining it is hard, but what can I do? At least it shows correctly in nearly all browsers.
I was also teaching web design to a couple of students in the previous semester, I decided to only teach them XHTML and CSS, and leave out the legacy stuff. Well, after a couple of weeks, they started taking a look at the cource code of some websites, and found all these <b> and <i> <font> tags in them, and asked me about them. I had to then go on and give the a complete history of WWW to make them understand why we have so many overlapping redundant methods to do the same thing. It is frustrating, the whole web standard situation is frustating, and most of the blame falls on W3C.
Well, you might be right, I mean maybe IE would have won the browser wars even if NS 5 was released, but Scott Collins isn't saying that they would have beaten IE had NS 5 come out. He is saying that not releasing NS 5, just weeks before it was supposed to be released was a big mistake.
And what kind of a manager really decides to change the underlying engine of a software just weeks before it was supposed to be released, and when the product is nearly ready? The point is, Netscape would have lost nothing, if they had released NS 5 (even closed source) and after that, Open Source their browser and use Gecko as the engine for the next release. That was what they were supposed to do (and this strategy might have helped them in the browser wars) but someone just convinced the executives that they should change the engine in 3 months, and when all the engineers disagreed with the idea, they said" OK, we will Open Source it, and when every single programmer on this planet helps us, we will release it in 3 months". Stupid executives thought OSS is some kind of a magic potion, that can double the development speed.
There are many lessons to be learned from the story of Netscape and Mozilla. Every Civil Engeineer knows that you have to hire a certain amount of workers to build a house. After that certain number, each worker that you add will give you in diminitive (sp??) returns. Ask any Architect or Civil Engineer and they will swear that you can't build a house in one week, no matter how many workers you put on it.Same goes for software development, unfortunately software development is still a rather young industry, and many managers and executives still don't get these fundamental points. Developing software takes time, no matter how many developers you put on the project. You can't half your release time, by doubling the number of developers (it might actually increase your release time). It took Mozilla 4 years to get it right, and that was enough time to lose the borwer war. Maybe it could have been done in less than 4 years, but it certainly couldn't have been done in 3 or 6 months.
Only if some managers could put this into their head...
What are your opinions on the.Net platform, Microsoft's push of C#, and all these combined together that are in practice creating a new API for Windows Longhorn called WinFX? What will Wine and Codeweavers do when the new API replaces win32?
Also, as Wine is an implmentation of win32 API for x86, what will wine do now that Intel and AMD are both replacing this instruction set with the new AMD64? Is wine only going to rely on AMD64's ability to run x86 programs nativly? Or are there any plans to port wine to other platforms, namely AMD64 and IA-64?
I actually was looking for some daily ISO snapshots of debian sid reopsitory. Nevr heard of Gigablast before, so give it a shot and search for 'daily sid snapshot iso'. Gigablast found no results, Google found 785, and looking at the first 10 results, I was easily able to find what I was looking for.
C'mon, yes Google's interface is cool and stuff, Google's success isn't just it's interface. Their search algorithms are rock solid, their are continually improving them, and Google resturns the most relevant results, of any search engine.
I still think that Google's biggest advantage over others, are their search algorithms, and their method of indexing webpages. Everyone can copy the interface. But not everyone can build what Google has built: rock solid searching algorithms, a clustered scalable filesystem GFS, their own webserver GWS (albeit a modified Apache) and they are reportedly making their own OS, in which anyone can have an account on! Add to these, numerus useful facilities like thier Linux/BSD/MS/Mac search, their newsgroup search, their news section, etc, and you see why Google is succesful, and well, others aren't that much.
It's not 1996 anymore, when all you had to do was write a couple of perl scripts and install NCSA on a *Nix with a medicore DBMS, and viola, you had a search engine. These days, barriers to entry in the search engine field are very high. Google reportedly uses 100k servers. These days, it's a business that needs lots of capital, and knowledge, technical know-how, and labour, to start with.
Interestingly it is working perfectly well with Konqueror. I wonder what Konqueror has, that safari is lacking, that has forced them not to support Safari right now. Google Personalized seems to be using heavy use of JavaScript, and as far as I know, Konqueror and Safari both use KJS for as a JavaScript interpreter. So...
On a side note, I think I actualy like the idea of this personalized search. Someone up here mentioned that s/he prefers the traditional search engine, cause it is uncluttered. Well, I can't see how google's personalized pages are any more cluttered than the traditional search page. They look completely the same, just in the personalized page a scroll bar is added to the search result page.
I think this actually opens a new horizon in google. You can have the traditional original search, by just moving the scroll bar to the left, or you can get a specific seacrh on a specific topic that interests you.
They might seem totaly unrelated, but given the current technologies that are comming out of Google Labs, am I the only one who is being reminded of the golden ages of Bell Labs? If the Google guys really continue to push their innovation engine with this speed, I don't see how even a monopoly should be able to crush them.
I know, I sound like a fanboy, but who isn't a fan of google? really...
This technique was not new, and as I recall was the plot of a movie once
Yes, that movie is actually one of my favorite classical comedies. It's called The Hoenymoon Machine starring Steve McQueen. The movie tells the story of three navy men who develop a scheme to win at the roulette tables in a Venice casino. At first, their plan goes off without a hitch until Navy Admiral Fitch gets involved and suspects an invasion. It only complicates things that McQueen is dating the Admiral's daughter. Ofcourse, it's a 60s romantical comedy, so in the end everything goes fine and no know gets hurt or jailed or anything.
The Navy officers in the movie actually use a Radar scaner, and a phone to perdict how to win in the roulette. Considering that these guys that are being busted in the UK also more or less used the same technology, I wonder if they actualy got the idea from this movie.
Well,Goerge Boole proposed the basic principles of Boolean Algebra in 1854 in his trearise "An investigation of the laws of thought on Which to Found the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probablities". While admire Goerge Boole, and I certainly give hime credit for creating this branch of Algebra, it should be noted that Goerge Boole himself had nothing to do with computers or digital systems.In the middle of the 19th century, many mathematicians were working on something called "Principles of Logic". Their goal was to descibe the human thought, in pure mathematical format. They aimed to model the human logic, as a branch of science, and they wanted to formulate it and find the principles of human's way of thinking. If you have ever taken a Descrete Mathematic course, you certainly have seen nonsense statements that "If Today is Sunday" AND "if Betty is happy" THEN "The Sky is Red".
This was what those mathematicians were aiming for. Goerge Boole also proposed a set of principles, which at the time no one thought had any practical use. This branc of mathematics was a purely theoric one. Mathematicians mostly abondend this subject after it was proven by experience that the human thought can not be formulated in to some mathematical notations.
It wasn't untill in the 40s, when someone at the Bell Labs (forgot his name) suddenly found out that the Boolean Algebra can be used in digital systems, specifically in implementing digital circuits. Even the first computer built, the ENICA, used a decimal system, and didn't have anything to do with digital systems. It was only by an accident that it was found out that Boolean Algebra, which at the time was a completely useless and theoritic branch of math, found an application, and became a widely studied subject.
What I am trying to say, is that Goerge Boole himself, by no means had any interest in digital systems, in programming, in computers, or in anything even remotely related to electronics. While as I said, I we should all give him immense credit for his work on Boolean Algebra, it should be noted that many people, contributed much more to the computer and electrical science, than Goerge Boole. Charles Babage and Lady Ada were actually writing computer programs in the 19th century; their only problem was that they had no computer at that time! And certainly, the father of today's computer architecture, is von Neuman.
Give credit were credit is due, but over-crediting someone, like saying Goerge Boole invented the foundation of computers, is certainly not correct.
No they are different. As someone else pointed out, freedesktop.org is right now hosting two X servers. one is the X Server, which is what we have been hearing about in the last year. It is a very ingteresting X, not a fork of XFree86, and not mature yet. The other X, is this X.Org which is just a fork of XFree86 before the license change. This latter one is just a temporary soloution, untill the X Server becomes ready.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, tourism in Britain won't die because, even if this madness came to pass as law (which it wouldn't), the European Court of Justice will throw it right out of the window as it runs against a fundamental EU notion of free movement of people and goods.
Now, go on you eurosceptics Brits and hate the EU some more...while all it does is create more checks and balances so that crazy stuff like this happen less often.
Hasan M. Elahi is Bangladeshi. He is not Arab, and does not speak Arabic. Elahi is a common surname in many Indo-Iranian languages meaning "celestial". That "El" is not the definite article as in Arabic, it's actually part of the word.
Do a bit of searching before basing your whole argument on the assumption that Elahi is person you were barely acquainted with called Elashi.
Things we wouldn't have (or wouldn't have had as early as we did) if it wasn't for Xerox:
.....
Graphical User Interface
Mouse
Ethernet
Object Oriented programming
I know we hate software patensts here and all, but calling Xeros an 'asshole' company only based on a single action, is rather feeble, don't you think?
Am I the only one around here who actually likes the ribbon interface?
First of all, I am a student in Australia, and right now I am downloading Office 2007 Ultimate after shelving out $75 of my hard earned cash. This I think, is the first time I am directly paying for software in my life, and I guess it's mainly because of how impressed I have become of Office 2007's interface. I had been using a pirated copy of Enterprise Edition for the past couple of weeks, but after seeing this offer, I realised that having a legitimate copy which can easily be validated and updated is worth $75.
I have used every version of Office since Office 97, and I have also used every version of OOo since it was Staroffice 5.x. Even after all these years, I always found myself looking for a specific option, and jumping from menu to the other menu. Let's face it, there is absolutely no logic why many of these items are where they are. It's just that we have become so accustomed with the interface that we have memorised where they are, and hence are able to use the product. Have you ever looked at a person who has never used any office product, trying to make sense out of Office? I have (my mother), and let me tell you that it is hugely frustrating, to say the least.
Ribbons just make the whole problem disappear. The whole functionality is now right in your face, and they have designed it in a way which takes less screen real space than all those menus and toolbars did. The whole interface is now more intuitive, and everything seems in its place. Now, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy here, but realistically, ribbons are a UI improvement over menus and toolbars. It took me perhaps 2-3 days to get accustomed to it, but after that I never looked back.
I agree that for 90% of the time, OOo is fine feature-wise, and does the job. However in the Real World (TM), people ask that you hand in your CV in "word format", and they don't even accept PDFs (don't ask me why). I am afraid I simply can't trust OOo's "save as MS Word" feature, for files which are critical to me. Not to mention that there are those of us who really need the extra functionality MS Office provides. It's not just Office's own functionality either, there are various 3rd party products that only integrate with MS Office, e.g., here in the University of Melbourne, we use a program called End Note X to manage our bibliographies and references when writing articles. Guess what word processing program it integrated with? (hint: not OOo). Now I myself probably won't trust Word (or any WYSIWYG program for that matter) for writing 100+ pages (I used LaTex for writing my Master's thesis), but LaTex is simply not an option for 99% of the population who have been brought up in a WYSIWYG world.
To say that all those paying for MS Office are ignorants who are not aware of alternatives is stupid. Ribbon is a very fine UI evolution, and I strongly suspect that in a couple of years time, all document generating programs will use the same interface. Not withstanding the technical superiority of MS Office over all other office suits at this time, it should also be noted that many of us have to use Office to ensure document compatibility with everyone else, as well as compatibility with a large number of 3rd party products which we rely on for our day to day life.
Now, I should probably get back to my thesis again, in LaTex...
Not a moment too soon indeed. I witnessed today that the Iranian govenrment is restricting access to Wikipedia (in all languages). While personally I use torpark (a version of Portable Firefox with Tor network integration built-in) and getting past their firewall takes a single click, I feel for the masses who are not very technologically adept, and have suffered heavily from these censorships. Indeed, Wikipedia was slowly but surely gaining momentum in Iran, and I was helping a group of university scholars who were mostly computer newbies and could hardly comprehend concepts such as an internet forum, not to mention a wiki, become familiar with wikipedia and contribute some of their articles to the Persian Wikipedia. We had identified and contacted 120 experts, in 38 categories, and we were hoping that with their contribution, Perian Wikipedia (which already has more than a 100,000 articles) would fill the void which has always existed in Persian libraries, a complete Encyclopaedia in Persian.
The other day, an official from the ministry of IT was telling the state TV that the number of websites banned in Iran are less than the number of a person's fingers! Well, at least when the Iraqi minister of information was lying in broad sunlight in everyone's face, we all got a good laugh out of it. Iranians OTOH are mostly completly free from any sense of humour!
The parent is right, the ability for idiots to troll on Wikipedia is simply part of its nature. But as a long time Wikipedia contributor and donator, I have to remind people that the fact that this false information remained on the website for 132 days is a little disheartening.
Certainly I don't agree with Seigenthaler's accusations, but let's not forget that Wikipedia is far from perfect. Events like this might serve to lead us to further optimize Wikipedia's mechanisms.
You couldn't be more correct here. I speak 4 languages pretty fluently, Persian (my mother language), English (thanks to my parents for forcing me to learn it when I was a child), Turkish (having studied in the Turkish speaking North Cyprus) and French (Oui je parle francais aussi).
Of these, three are Indo-European languages (French, English and Persian). Grammatically, they all follow the same rules (more or less), and making sentences in them is pretty similar. The place of adjectives, verbs and nouns might change, but you are fairly confident that you will be dealing with the same structures, like nouns and verbs. Not so in Turkish which is a Turkic language and follows completely different sentence structure. In the Indo-European languages, you might use different prepositions for the same purpose, but you at least use prepositions. Not in Turkish, in which everything becomes a suffix and there are no prepositions (I have heard other languages like Finnish to be similar).
What is the key to be able to successfully speak different languages? Just as the parent mentioned, it is to be able to THINK in it. When learning a new language, if from time to time you find yourself making some sentences in your head in that foreign language, then you are on the correct path. It shows that you mind is willing to think in that way. Thinking in your own language and trying to translate it at run-time (using a little computer jargon), is a recipe for disaster. The best you can hope for is to be a mediocre speaker.
Adding to the difficulty of translation is the cultural weight that a language carries with itself. A Language, especially those like Persian and Turkish which are not as widespread as English for example, is a symbol of that country and stands for all that nation's aspirations, dreams and fears. You can't learn Persian without becoming familiar with some historical figures and legendary myths and Pagan beliefs that Iranians still commonly boast about. You can't learn Turkish without learning different kinds of Kebab, and drinking Ayran (A juice made from Yogurt), and of course Atatürk. You can't learn French without knowing what Café Créme is, without knowing the difference between a red from Bourgogne from one from Bordeaux, and of course without knowing the significance of the Bastille Day.
Can a machine deal with all these peculiarities of languages? Quite frankly, unless dramatic improvements are made in artificial intelligence, I would say the answer is a resounding NO. Translation can't be done by just following some rules and using a dictionary. That approach can at best become yet another Babelfish, and we know how useful that is. Knowing a language means being able to think in that language, and machines currently don't "think". And unless there are dramatic breakthroughs in AI, I say we are decades, if not centuries away from a useful machine translator.
I am able to fluently speak in these 4 languages, yet I become completely speechless when I am given the task of translating from one of them to the other. That's why I could never comprehend how the minds of those UN translators who translate important political speeches on the fly, work. Knowing a language certainly doesn't mean you can translate from/to it as well. Translation is an art. A machine can never be a good translator, for the same reason that a machine can never become an artistic painter, or a composer.
Correct you are my friend. Honestly, what did Ximian bring to Novel in terms of actual products? What happened to Ximian Desktop, that lovely modified Gnome with a devilish monkey wallpaper? Have you heard anything about it? No, it's been discontinued. Do you remember their Red Carpet? That usless shi!t that was supposed to unify software deployments? What happened to it? It turned out that Novel already had a similar product, and so RC has been discontinued. And you know what, as lovely as that crashoholic buggy Evolution is, and Mono (which is going for a long catch-up phase with the releaasse of C# 2.0 and the new .Net framework) these are bringing a total of $0.00 in terms of revenue for Novel.
Buying Ximian was a terrible mistake that Novel made during their hurry to jump into the Linux bandwagon. As if that was not enough, it seems that the Ximian guys now hold major positions in Novel, and have been put into positions to be able to kill SUSE's especial relationship with the KDE community. As other's have mentioned, SUSE was only strong in Europe, and in Europe, desktop Linux means KDE. I know that the Munich municipality is definitly going to have a strong word with SUSE about this.
I'm sure this won't affect KDE much. KDE just gets better with every release, and with 4.0, it will put all those usability criticisms to rest once and for all. But I do know that this will affect SUSE. The whole YAST2 is written with Qt, and it will be a massive redundant job to rewrite the whole thing in Gtk+. Also, this probably means that SUSE 10.0 was the last release that I bought, and I know I am not alone in this boat. Happy gconf hacking SUSE!
NS 4 nearly has no support for CSS. That's why the "new slashdot" (heh, never thought I would see that phrase) looks crap in it.
Seriously, don't you think it's time to drop support for NS 4? I mean this is the slashdot crowd, that has been saying for the last 8 years that developers should comply with standards and don't tune web pages for a specific browser, and now that finaly it is compliant with the standard, you are complaining that it looks bad in an ancient browser? You know, slashdot now also looks completely crap on BeOS's netpositive. should I complain about that as well?
Explicitly forbidding them from using Open Source software is both, against the spirit and the leter of the license. It is not even allowed by the license, as mention by the parent.
However the argument that the Samba team put forward when they objected to SCO's contiunued use of their software was that according to section 4 of the GPL, if for any reason you do not accept the license, the license is automatically terminated and you lose all the rights mentioned in it. Saying that the license is terminated (or is invalid) doesn't mean that the author loses his copyright and you can distribute the said software as if it were in public domain (as SCO thinks), but that the rights which the author has given to you in that license are revoked i.e, the user can no longer distribute and/or modify the said sofware. The SCO Group has publicly stated that the GNU GPL is not compatible with US copyright law (in their opinion), and thus the license is invalid. This would mean that they disagree with the license and hence automatically their GPL is terminated.
This in my opinion is a good argument, barring The SCO Group from using any GPL software. Of course IANAL and I don't know whether it would stand in a court of law. The fact that the Samba team did not pursue their claim means that either their lawyers advised against it, or that (more likely) they decided not to put the time and money to pursue the complaint legaly.
Well, with all respect to Google, but...
Talking about AI reminds of some othercompanies; you know, like the guys that made the Big Blue thingy that beat Kasparov.
In exactly which one of these above fields that you mention, is Google ahead of IBM, Siemens and Sony? (you know their Robots are pretty impressive, I guess these robots also DO have AI in them).
Google is in a very good position to tackle the MT problem, but don't be mistaken into thinking it is in a unique position. I am sure others will jump on board once they see commercial value in this business, and that is a good thing(TM)
Correct, however unless you have the basic fundamental principles of a democratic society, you won't have sustainable improvement.
I am talking from fist hand experience here. during 1970s, Iran was more or less in the same situation as UAE is today. People had money to burn, resorts were made in the Caspian sea which surprassed those in the Mediterranean; most of the population could easily afford a couple of vacations a year, and many multinational corporations had chosen Iran as their regional centre.
However, one thing was lacking, and that was democracy and the freedom that comes with it. History proves that without these, all other financial improvements are temporary. What happened in my country was that in a short period of time, a revolution happened, everything was turned upside down, economic bans and embargos followed and the economy was shaken and basically ruined. Add to that 8 years of consecutive war with a neighbour (Iraq) and you will understand why we are where we are today.
The situation in UAE is very similar here. They might seem prosperous today, but it's like a building which doesn't have basic correct foundations. You can build on top of it and make a skycrapper out of it, but all it takes to shake this skycrapper is a little push or a little social unrest, as in the case of UAE.
The argument that "We don't want democracy because our rulers are the best" has been proven to be false over and over during history.
true indeed, not to mention that the expatriaets are not allowed to own a business (they can have a maximum of %49 share) and are not even allowed to buy land or an apartment. I have known pakistanis there who have lived in that country for years, working 6 days a week and trying to raise a family; and yet they are not even allowed to buy a simple apartement there; while the Emiratis get free land from the government.
And the people who work at all the shops as clercks or sellers, at all the cinemas, hotels, bar maids, managers, corporate types, whores, DJs, etc are all foreigners. I am yet to see a single Emirati Arab actually "work" somewhere. I don't exactly know what does the 20% of this population which receive all the profits and money, do; aside from going up and down the street 10 times a day in their $200,000 cars.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Arabs, Over the years I have actualy met some very intelelctual and intelligent Arabs. But the realities of UAE are so drastically shocking, that leave me speechless.
This article is being published in the YRO section, but rest assured guys, no ones rights are being violated here. This device won't be installed in any of the Emirati's cars, and the others simply have no "rights" for it to be violated.
But as I said, you can't build a country like this. This situation has lasted for 20 years now, I wonder how much longer it can last. It is basically the 21st century equivalent of slavery.
Well, the technology is good, I can think of hundreds of useful applications for it. But the privacy issues just scare the hell out of me. And, where? in UAE? If it was in a civilized democratic country, where there are restrictions on what a government can do, where there are unions and institutions which care about citizens' rights, then maybe the use of these applications can be justified. But in UAE?
I lived in the UAE for more than 2 years. I had a very nice job there working at a multinational telecommunication company. Being and Iranian myself, it was a very good opportunity for me as my country was nearby and en route to other places, I could stop at my country a couple of times a year to say hello to my family. But there are things in that country which just scared the shit out of me. Things that eventually made me forget the job and the good opportunity it provided, and virtually escape from there.
In UAE, a car's plate number can have variable number of digits. No 1 is reserved for the Sultan of the province (there are 7 provinces there, Dubai being the biggest one). No 2 is usually the Sultan's brother, and the 1 digit numbers are all family members of the sultan. Cousins and close friends get 2 digit numbers, as well as their wives and their children. The 3 digit numbers are also relatives of the relatives of Sultan. Ordinary cars have 5 digits on their plates.
The situation is that no one can stand in the way of a lower-digit car. If you see a 2 or 3 digit car coming from the opposite direction, it doesn't matter if it's your line of road or not, you have to make way for him. The police can not issue tickets to these cars. They do not obey the speed limit; mostly they have Ferraris and Porches which easily pass the 180 mph, and no one can even stop them. Legally, the police can do nothing with them.
They have all the money of the world. They have built bridges longer and more modern than those in Japan and Sweden, they have made skyscrapers that make New York look like a village, they have cars which automobile manufacturers hand made for their special needs. They have made a heaven out there. And if you just want to have some holiday, get on the beech, go to a resort or something; it is a perfect place. But only if you care nothing about the political situation, and the mentality of the people.
There are no political parties. No Elections. No private newspaper, no private T.V channel, basically no free speech. The thing that surprised me was that unlike the people of my country, who also lack these things, but at least are fighting in order to get them; they even do not think about having a democratic society, having liberty, and privacy. It is as if these words do not exist in the dictionary of an ordinary Arab. They have been brought up with the mentality that you never question the ruler. They never criticize a single action of any governmental body; be it the municipality, or any other bureau. It was so shocking, and yet embarrassing to me.
If this technology was being deployed in a democratic country, you would have had many organizations and groups voicing concerns over it. If did not prevent the deployment of such technology, they would have at least made sure that the necessary checks and restrictions on the storage and usage of information about every single car exists. As it is in the UAE, I'm sure no one will even question this thing. No one will even think about how this technology can be used to violate their rights and privacy. It doesn't matter how much money and oil they have and what kind of gadgets they use to control their traffic; when a society lacks basic elements like freedom of speech; that society will not evolve in a positive manner.
Completly agree. I was once working at the IT section of one of the biggest outfit manufacturers of my country. In the IT section we all used Linux boxes to develop our Java applications, but all the rest of the company of course were using Windows desktops, with some Novell and some (recently installed) Linux servers. One day one of the employees had her computer gone for soem repair or something, and she came to the IT section to ask if we have any extra computers to give her for a couple of days, untill her computer is fixed. We looked around and couldn't find a windows box, but had plenty of extra Linux boxes around. I asked he what she does with her computer, and she told me mostly checking email and using messenger and these stuff. I said, OK, Linux can also do that, do you want to try it? She shrugged off, as if not knowing what I am talking about. Anyway, I gave her the system.
It was a Debian woody, Running KDE 3.1 IIRC. I never heard from her anymore, but a couple of days later, went to her room to see if how she was doing with the system. I looked at her desktop, and found out that she had customized Kicker, had gaim setup herself and was chatting happily with it. Had Kmail and many other applications setup herself, and I when I asked her if she liked Linux, she said she didn't see much difference, but that stability was it was better than windows (she used to use windows 98). Well, I tell you this was a person with no computer experience at all, who had problems pronouncing Linux correctly in the first place. Eventually she also replaced her home computer with Linux too.
The opposite can also happen, I am now a university students and one of my firends who is a Electrical Engineering undergraduate, couldn't even stand firefox. I installed it on his computer once, and he used it for a couple of days before deciding that IE is better. (something about IE showing pictures better or something). This from a person who knows C Programming, and is a very knowledgable in his own field (chip design and etc, which scare the sh*t out of me). To be honest, a couple of his favorite websites also didn't show up correctly in Firefox, we know that's it firefox's problems, but the end-user it is.
People are really different. Some hate change, any change in the way they do their work. Others are much more open to change, and don't mind it as long as they see the benefits. It doesn't have anything to do with hoe computer-literate people are. Yes, geeks master computer stuff more easily, but then again, many geeks are also resistant to change. If they get accustomed to one specific editor (vi), they go to any lenght to bash those who are using the other editor (emacs).
Frankly, I don't think any fortune 500 company can switch to a 100% Linux soloution anytime soon. Linux has its advantages on the desktop, as does Windows. An objective person would look at each tool, and use the right tool for the right task. I agree that perhaps 80% of the computers in corporate america can easily move to Linux (and they probably should because of the TCO) but I can understand that many of those so called knowledge-workers really need applications that simply are not available on Linux.
And BTW, amd I the only one who thinks slashdot is becomming more objective everyday? I was browing some 1998 and 1999 stories in slashdot the other day, and it seemed to me that at that time, we had much more trolls and these stuff. Sure we still have them today, but if you read stories at +4 or something, then you can actually see many knowledgable people who know what they are talking about.
The High Informatics Coucil (HIC) is an organisation which has been talking for a couple of years now, about this Open Source thing, this Linux thing, and ect, but really they haven't done anything. They even don't have a clue what they are talking about.
I am an Iranian and I used to work for a company which was the first to start doing some Linux activities in Iran. We started by designing a keyboard layout for Persian, and when GTK 2.0 and Qt 3.0 were released and had enough Unicode support to enable us to write Persian using them, we started the FarsiKDE project http://www.farsikde.org and with the release of KDE 3.1, our small handicapped and fully underresourced team was able to add Farsi as an official language to KDE. Next step, we launched a community-driven website http://www.linuxiran.org to help build momentum around Linux in Iran. And then, we started building our own Debian-Based distribution called Shabdix, and it even had a couple fo limited releases. (all this was done in true Open Source fashion, free in both senses).
During all this time, the HIC did nothing to support us, althought they were fully aware of our program. The HIC is just so full of bearucracy, that it can't even decide what it wants to do, and which direction it wants to go. All they have done, with their massive resources and budget, is just publish a couple of already-available fonts as beta, and then also publish some meaningless Request For Comments to implement things that were implemented years ago (like UTF-8 support in toolkits such as Qt and GTK). They can't even decide on a standard keyboard layouy. The Persian Keyboard layout in Windows is a mess, it doesn't have comma, Persian numbers,... and the one in XFree86 is much better, but they can't even agree to use that keyboard layout. All these years, they have made many public announcements about deploying Linux systems in Iran, about how Linux is the future and blah blah, but they have yet to do a single meaningful action. And they failed to support the only group which was actually doing something and producing some actual code.
But Of course, they need to have the PR going, cause they need to get an increase in their budget next year, and well, PR is the best way to impress lawmakers to give them the budget. And Saying 'We won't even use Windows even if it was free' is certainly going to make headlines, and keep the PR machine going. While I personaly have been to HIC, and know that even they use pirated copies of Widnows all over the place, internaly.
Such a shame, so many resources is being wasted by this entity, for no use.
The parent wrote what is perhaps one of the most sensible things of have read at slashdot. It just amazes me, why no one has the guts to stand against W3C, and read the parent post clearly and loudly to them.
;-) At first sight when you read and learn CSS, it seems like the missing piece in web development, it seems so clean, so logical, so clear, that everybody falls in love with it. But this loving relationship only lasts untill you start developing some serious web sites with it. Then you realize that it is lacking hundereds of things, you can't align texts and other elements according to their container like div, (yes they are implementing it in CSS3 now, how long will it take untill CSS3 is fully implemented in mainstream browsers? 12 years?) and even when you do get the site the way you want, you will see that every single browser (Konqueror, Opera, IE, Gecko) shows the site the way it wants, cause their XHHTML and CSS implementation is so buggy, and so full of mistakes that you can't rely on any single one of them.
I don't know where the mess started, probably when the original W3C standard was so simple and created just very simple webpages, and then NS started adding their own proprietary tags and extensions. Others like MSIE ofcourse had to follow suit, and in the process they also made their own proprietary incompatible tags. The release of HTML 3.2 was a joke, it just standardized what NS developers had been using for a long time.
And then, HTML 4 got so complex and everybody started to cry for using tables under tables under tables, so W3C combined XML with HTML and addedd CSS to it (which is a novel idea) and thought they have solved the problem. Not only is the problem not solved, it is even worse now. First of all, CSS is designed very badly (why didn't they put me on the CSS designer's team?
The site that I was designing was a simple House Finder website for our university, to help students eaily locate available accommodations. I do care about standards, about accessibility, about making universal websites etc, but in real world, you just can't do it. You can design simple webpages with complete CSS and without any tables (I hate tables), but only simple ones. If you just move one step forward, and try to design a proffesional looking website only with CSS, you will find out the limitations of CSS, and the buggy implementations in browsers. In my case, I ended up going back to HTML 4, and the site is currently using 17 tables just to show what is a simple web application. I hate tables, the code is unreadable, and maintaining it is hard, but what can I do? At least it shows correctly in nearly all browsers.
I was also teaching web design to a couple of students in the previous semester, I decided to only teach them XHTML and CSS, and leave out the legacy stuff. Well, after a couple of weeks, they started taking a look at the cource code of some websites, and found all these <b> and <i> <font> tags in them, and asked me about them. I had to then go on and give the a complete history of WWW to make them understand why we have so many overlapping redundant methods to do the same thing. It is frustrating, the whole web standard situation is frustating, and most of the blame falls on W3C.
Well, you might be right, I mean maybe IE would have won the browser wars even if NS 5 was released, but Scott Collins isn't saying that they would have beaten IE had NS 5 come out. He is saying that not releasing NS 5, just weeks before it was supposed to be released was a big mistake.
And what kind of a manager really decides to change the underlying engine of a software just weeks before it was supposed to be released, and when the product is nearly ready? The point is, Netscape would have lost nothing, if they had released NS 5 (even closed source) and after that, Open Source their browser and use Gecko as the engine for the next release. That was what they were supposed to do (and this strategy might have helped them in the browser wars) but someone just convinced the executives that they should change the engine in 3 months, and when all the engineers disagreed with the idea, they said" OK, we will Open Source it, and when every single programmer on this planet helps us, we will release it in 3 months". Stupid executives thought OSS is some kind of a magic potion, that can double the development speed.
There are many lessons to be learned from the story of Netscape and Mozilla. Every Civil Engeineer knows that you have to hire a certain amount of workers to build a house. After that certain number, each worker that you add will give you in diminitive (sp??) returns. Ask any Architect or Civil Engineer and they will swear that you can't build a house in one week, no matter how many workers you put on it.Same goes for software development, unfortunately software development is still a rather young industry, and many managers and executives still don't get these fundamental points. Developing software takes time, no matter how many developers you put on the project. You can't half your release time, by doubling the number of developers (it might actually increase your release time). It took Mozilla 4 years to get it right, and that was enough time to lose the borwer war. Maybe it could have been done in less than 4 years, but it certainly couldn't have been done in 3 or 6 months.
Only if some managers could put this into their head...
Janathan Schwartz is Sun's Cheif Operating Officer (COO) not CEO. Scott McNealy is still (and has always been) Sun't CEO.
What are your opinions on the .Net platform, Microsoft's push of C#, and all these combined together that are in practice creating a new API for Windows Longhorn called WinFX? What will Wine and Codeweavers do when the new API replaces win32?
Also, as Wine is an implmentation of win32 API for x86, what will wine do now that Intel and AMD are both replacing this instruction set with the new AMD64? Is wine only going to rely on AMD64's ability to run x86 programs nativly? Or are there any plans to port wine to other platforms, namely AMD64 and IA-64?
I actually was looking for some daily ISO snapshots of debian sid reopsitory. Nevr heard of Gigablast before, so give it a shot and search for 'daily sid snapshot iso'. Gigablast found no results, Google found 785, and looking at the first 10 results, I was easily able to find what I was looking for.
C'mon, yes Google's interface is cool and stuff, Google's success isn't just it's interface. Their search algorithms are rock solid, their are continually improving them, and Google resturns the most relevant results, of any search engine.
I still think that Google's biggest advantage over others, are their search algorithms, and their method of indexing webpages. Everyone can copy the interface. But not everyone can build what Google has built: rock solid searching algorithms, a clustered scalable filesystem GFS, their own webserver GWS (albeit a modified Apache) and they are reportedly making their own OS, in which anyone can have an account on! Add to these, numerus useful facilities like thier Linux/BSD/MS/Mac search, their newsgroup search, their news section, etc, and you see why Google is succesful, and well, others aren't that much.
It's not 1996 anymore, when all you had to do was write a couple of perl scripts and install NCSA on a *Nix with a medicore DBMS, and viola, you had a search engine. These days, barriers to entry in the search engine field are very high. Google reportedly uses 100k servers. These days, it's a business that needs lots of capital, and knowledge, technical know-how, and labour, to start with.
Interestingly it is working perfectly well with Konqueror. I wonder what Konqueror has, that safari is lacking, that has forced them not to support Safari right now. Google Personalized seems to be using heavy use of JavaScript, and as far as I know, Konqueror and Safari both use KJS for as a JavaScript interpreter. So...
On a side note, I think I actualy like the idea of this personalized search. Someone up here mentioned that s/he prefers the traditional search engine, cause it is uncluttered. Well, I can't see how google's personalized pages are any more cluttered than the traditional search page. They look completely the same, just in the personalized page a scroll bar is added to the search result page.
I think this actually opens a new horizon in google. You can have the traditional original search, by just moving the scroll bar to the left, or you can get a specific seacrh on a specific topic that interests you.
They might seem totaly unrelated, but given the current technologies that are comming out of Google Labs, am I the only one who is being reminded of the golden ages of Bell Labs? If the Google guys really continue to push their innovation engine with this speed, I don't see how even a monopoly should be able to crush them.
I know, I sound like a fanboy, but who isn't a fan of google? really...
This technique was not new, and as I recall was the plot of a movie once
Yes, that movie is actually one of my favorite classical comedies. It's called The Hoenymoon Machine starring Steve McQueen. The movie tells the story of three navy men who develop a scheme to win at the roulette tables in a Venice casino. At first, their plan goes off without a hitch until Navy Admiral Fitch gets involved and suspects an invasion. It only complicates things that McQueen is dating the Admiral's daughter. Ofcourse, it's a 60s romantical comedy, so in the end everything goes fine and no know gets hurt or jailed or anything.
The Navy officers in the movie actually use a Radar scaner, and a phone to perdict how to win in the roulette. Considering that these guys that are being busted in the UK also more or less used the same technology, I wonder if they actualy got the idea from this movie.
Well,Goerge Boole proposed the basic principles of Boolean Algebra in 1854 in his trearise "An investigation of the laws of thought on Which to Found the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probablities". While admire Goerge Boole, and I certainly give hime credit for creating this branch of Algebra, it should be noted that Goerge Boole himself had nothing to do with computers or digital systems.In the middle of the 19th century, many mathematicians were working on something called "Principles of Logic". Their goal was to descibe the human thought, in pure mathematical format. They aimed to model the human logic, as a branch of science, and they wanted to formulate it and find the principles of human's way of thinking. If you have ever taken a Descrete Mathematic course, you certainly have seen nonsense statements that "If Today is Sunday" AND "if Betty is happy" THEN "The Sky is Red".
This was what those mathematicians were aiming for. Goerge Boole also proposed a set of principles, which at the time no one thought had any practical use. This branc of mathematics was a purely theoric one. Mathematicians mostly abondend this subject after it was proven by experience that the human thought can not be formulated in to some mathematical notations.
It wasn't untill in the 40s, when someone at the Bell Labs (forgot his name) suddenly found out that the Boolean Algebra can be used in digital systems, specifically in implementing digital circuits. Even the first computer built, the ENICA, used a decimal system, and didn't have anything to do with digital systems. It was only by an accident that it was found out that Boolean Algebra, which at the time was a completely useless and theoritic branch of math, found an application, and became a widely studied subject.
What I am trying to say, is that Goerge Boole himself, by no means had any interest in digital systems, in programming, in computers, or in anything even remotely related to electronics. While as I said, I we should all give him immense credit for his work on Boolean Algebra, it should be noted that many people, contributed much more to the computer and electrical science, than Goerge Boole. Charles Babage and Lady Ada were actually writing computer programs in the 19th century; their only problem was that they had no computer at that time! And certainly, the father of today's computer architecture, is von Neuman.
Give credit were credit is due, but over-crediting someone, like saying Goerge Boole invented the foundation of computers, is certainly not correct.
No they are different. As someone else pointed out, freedesktop.org is right now hosting two X servers. one is the X Server, which is what we have been hearing about in the last year. It is a very ingteresting X, not a fork of XFree86, and not mature yet. The other X, is this X.Org which is just a fork of XFree86 before the license change. This latter one is just a temporary soloution, untill the X Server becomes ready.