Possibly, but not necessarily. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but just because you have an OEM CD and an OEM CD key, does not necessarily mean that they will work together, unless the key is actually the one that came with the CD. Your chances are better if it's from the same OEM, but even then it's not guaranteed it will work.
According to our sysadmin, who lent me the CD, it should work provided the key matches the version on the CD; but there aren't many versions. My parents have XP Home OEM, and I have an XP Home OEM CD, so it should work --- with luck.
But I'll be damned if I'm going to let them fork out for a complete new license when their old one is still perfectly valid.
The bigger problem comes with the computers I bought that only had those "Recovery" disks instead of actual Windows installation disks. The last time I dealt with one of those I actually went out and bought a copy of Windows (on top of the one that came with the system) and installed from the copy I purchased.
Couldn't you just borrow a OEM XP Home CD from someone and reinstall using the license key provided? (Which is exactly what I'm going to do to my parents' machine in a couple of weeks, in an attempt to sanitise it after a virus infection.)
There needn't be a winner in a format war. Remember MiniDisc v Digital Cassette? The winner then was MP3. Remember SACD v DVD-Audio? The winner in that war was, well, nobody really as neither format sells in large quantities.
Personally, I expect the winner is going to be likely to be EVD or FVD, the alternative Asian standards. If HDDVD and Blu-Ray keep faffing around like this, they're going to swamped by a tide of next-generation Asian electronics that will be cheap, flexible and Just Work. Which neither HDDVD or Blu-Ray do, reliably.
The other big "office suite" programs--word processing, email--have Unix alternatives that use a plain-text paradigm. The spreadsheet, at least to my knowledge, has no such Unix alternative. The closest things I can think of are awk and Gnuplot, but unlike LaTeX's ability to replace a word processor, I can't imagine using awk and Gnuplot in place of a spreadsheet.
Well, the user interface is intrinsic to the whole definition of a spreadsheet --- I don't think you could change the user interface without it no longer being a spreadsheet.
That said, you might want to have a look at sc, the traditional Unix spreadsheet (there's a Debian package). It's a simple (non-scripted) spreadsheet package that runs in a terminal and uses vi keybindings, saves its documents in plain text files, and is 256kB big on my system. What's not to like?
And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices.
Actually, no, they won't, because people here aren't stupid. To get digital TV, you buy a digital TV set-top-box for knock-down prices and plug the handy SCART cable into the back of your existing analogue TV. You can pick them up in supermarkets for next to nothing, and there are no subscription fees (at least in my country).
Where did this whole oh-noes-I-need-a-new-TV thing come from, anyway?
From what I've seen, the big advantages to using GWT are:
You get to write your logic in a language other than Javascript --- that is, one with type safety, compile time checking, sane syntax, and a reasonably consistent implementation.
You get to use the same form verification logic on the client and on the server, which means you don't have to implement it twice, which makes it much harder to get it wrong.
You completely avoid the horrific browser inconsistencies.
You get a real debugger.
For most tasks, the pain of connecting your front end to your back end is done for you.
I wouldn't say that GWT is a particularly nice solution to the problem --- it's doing some pretty damned foul things behind the scenes, you should look at the code it generates some time --- but it hides the foulness rather effectively. It basically lets me get the job done far more easily than I could otherwise, which makes it valuable to me.
As someone who has contributed bits and pieces of code here and there, and considering some bigger ideas to be released as GPL, I'm interested in why you'd prefer Apache 2 and MPL. It's all rather murky to me what the differences are. Mind elaborating?
If I'm a company, then if I use GPL software, I cannot modify it. This rather defeats the purpose of using open source software.
The reason why I can't modify GPL'd software is fairly simple: releasing in-house software as GPL is expensive. It requires legal oversight to make sure that we can relicense it, it requires infrastructure to allow us to give customers access to it, it requires us to support those customers --- if you're a real company, you can't get away with telling customers to piss off when they ask you questions --- it requires us to religiously differentiate between the GPL'd code and the non-GPL'd code to prevent license poisoning, and above all, it requires the process to manage the above. Using GPL'd software involves an entire management chain from legal downwards. Using BSD software doesn't.
Frequently, it's not worth the effort. It would be cheaper for us to find some sub-par non-GPL code and fix the bugs, or to write our own version from scratch. When I'm wearing my corporate hat and I'm looking for code, I'll frequently not even bother looking at it if it's GPL'd.
So just because they didn't have the money to invest we should leave them further behind in the dust instead of giving them the opportunity to better themselves?
Of course. That's what capitalism means, after all...
Alternatively:
We can't help people --- that would be socialism!
</sarcasm>
Re:Downloads page still stupid
on
Java SE 6 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
But as a user, it always amazes me how hard it is to navigate Java's downloads.
Yeah. Sun's Java web pages quite frankly are horrific beyond all reason. I dread every time I have to go and find something there --- and frequently I just fail. The last thing I tried to get was the Linux wireless toolkit for developing J2ME apps. I managed to find 2.4 (not supported by EclipseME, which I was using.) I managed to find 2.2. But could I find 2.3? Like hell.
If there's anyone from Sun listening, could you please find whoever is responsible for those web pages and fire them? It's this ghastly maze of long, meaningless product titles, menus that go in loops, undefined terms, endless minutely different product specs, pointless registration systems (which makes me very grateful for BugMeNot)... actually finding the useful information there is it's just too hard. If your web site is so complex and badly designed that people would rather give up than try and figure out, then, I'm afraid, you fail.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle. As the police become more willing to use force, their opponents will be more willing to use force, thus allowing the police to justify using even more force, and so on and so forth.
Yup. This is one of the reasons why the British police are so strongly against the idea of arming policemen on the beat. (And it's the beat policemen who feel this way, not the managers.) As soon as policemen become armed, they become more dangerous, which means that criminals have to respond by increasing the level of force, which means they become more dangerous, etc. If the police need deadly weapons, they're available; there's usually a police car permanently cruising the more dangerous areas, so that if they're called for they can respond within minutes. But by not arming police, they're reducing the overall threat level, which in fact makes the police safer.
At least, that's the idea, and it is working to a certain extent. Criminal gun use is rising anyway, in part due to gun culture being imported from the US. But at least it means that the overall threat level isn't rising as fast as it might otherwise be.
You can reject the initiation of force while reserving the right to defense.
Sure, except you cannot defend yourself with a gun --- they're purely offensive weapons. You can defend yourself with a sword against another sword, or a knife (if you're good) against another knife, but with a gun your only options are (a) to try to shoot someone (and therefore risk killing them) and (b) to not try to shoot them.
You can use a gun as a deterrent, but that's a drastically different thing, and frequently not a very useful one.
I'm wondering if such a thing would be cost effective over on your side of the pond or do people keep their POTS service?
Some people do, but you have to use your mobile a hell of a lot to make it worthwhile.
Also, there are other reasons to keep a POTS line. Emergencies, for one thing. The POTS network is (or is supposed to be) a hell of a lot more reliable and resilient than the mobile network. I keep one dumb line-powered phone specifically for when things go wrong, and I used it two days ago when there was a major power cut. The mobile network would have worked, of course, but if something really bad happens, the mobile network will almost certainly crash.
Plus it's good to have a backup. If your mobile dies, you still want to be able to make calls.
If you are going to follow that logic then what's the problem with billing for incoming calls? You are using airtime, which is theoretically a limited resource (only so many active calls per base station at a time), so why shouldn't you pay for incoming minutes?
Indeed, that's entirely reasonable, and here in the UK you can buy a 0845 number that do exactly this. But here, the default is to not allow other people to spend your money.
I have the cheapest plan that my provider offers: $39.99/mo. That translates into $0.015 per minute.
Yes, and that obviously works for you. But it wouldn't work for me, because I only use my mobile for three minutes a month, which means I'd end up paying $13/minute on your tariff.
This seems a little bit more fair -- why should I pay a surcharge to call somebody who lives next door to me just because they have a cell phone?
Because it uses more resources to call them over the cell phone network than it does over the POTS network?
I mean, it's not as if this comes as a surprise to anyone. All mobile numbers have the 07 prefix, so you know you're going to be charged extra before you call the number. If you have a mobile phone and you don't want people to be charged extra, you can buy a number where you pay part of the call fee. There's 0800 (which is free to the caller), 0845 (where the caller pays the same as local rate), 0870 (where the caller pays national rate), or 090 (where the caller pays extra and you get the difference). It's all clear and up front and means that third parties can spend your phone credit for you.
Sure, you save a lot of money if you use your phone 1-2 hours a day, but there's people that don't. Let's say you use a phone 3 hours a month.
Three hours? Good grief. I doubt I use mine for more than about five minutes a month. I use my phone for photos, a little data, sending the occasional text message --- not very often --- but, above all, I use it to receive calls. (We don't have the bizarre USian concept of charging people to receive incoming calls.)
I paid for the phone up-front; it cost me 40 UKP, about $80, I believe. It's a Lobster, a Virgin Mobile own brand. It's a small clamshell with reasonable battery life, camera, Java, GPRS, an MP3 player, an mini-SD card slot, it doubles as a mass storage USB device (with a proprietry cable, unfortunately), and it's got about twenty inane MIDI ring tones, all of which I've turned off. Construction quality's not great, but I'm very happy with it.
I dump twenty UKP into my phone account every nine months or so. There are no other costs.
I wrote my own greylister (<plug>Spey</plug>) and it works really well. (I will also point out that people who complain about it making email too slow have a major education problem --- email doesn't guarantee anything about delivery times. If they rely on the email being delivered within a certain amount of time, then they'll be screwed when that doesn't happen for completely legitimate reasons. But anyway.)
So far I've only had one false positive: Yahoo Groups. They have this brain-damaged system which probes to see if an email address is valid when you subscribe to a mailing list. Unfortunately, the probe mechanism, which is a bad idea at the best of times, is broken and doesn't retry after getting a 451 Try Again Later. This violates the RFC, of course. I've tried to complain, and find myself unable to contact an actual human. Whitelisting *@returns.groups.yahoo.com fixes this.
I, and all my immediate family members, and a few friends I know, all have one that doesn't require any additional power specifically for this reason.
All mains-powered phones here in the UK come with a big warning label that you should always have one line-powered phone in order to be able to make emergency calls.
Ohh and why not just put in a Dos with wp 5.1? Well do you still have the install discs lying around?
Caldera OpenDOS is available for free --- if you hunt around a bit --- and works pretty well. You may also want to give FreeDOS a try, it's probably decent enough to run WordPerfect.
Alternatively, you could give him one of the OLPC LiveCDs and see how he gets on with that!
I was blown-up. One million childs growing with Squeak. *That* would be a good idea.
Unfortunately, I loathe Squeak. Smalltalk is very cool, but Squeak have managed to wrap one of the greatest programming languages ever with a user interface designed by anally-retentive O/C monkeys. Admittedly, in this context the fact that it behaves like nothing else on earth isn't an issue, but Morphic still requires far too many weird CTRL+SHIFT+right mouse click+drag combinations to do simple things like moving windows around --- it's ergonomic hell, as well as being difficult to learn. By combining the process of constructing applications with using them, I believe that they've achieved something that does both very badly. Not to mention the fact that it looks like someone sneezed on the screen. (Literally. All those coloured blobs...)
Admittedly, the last time I used it was with the Croquet demo image. I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to make it do anything --- mainly trying to resize the Croquet window to fill the VM window --- and then gladly nuked it. It was an utterly loathsome experience.
I need to download the OLPC demo image and try it out and see if they've improved it any.
Because all the existing GUIs in the world today --- including System 6 --- are overweight, overcomplicated, way more powerful than are needed, fiddly, baroque, inconsistent, difficult to use, difficult to learn, and in fact are downright scary to people who aren't accustomed to computers.
KDE, Gnome, Windows, OSX, etc are all completely inappropriate for a machine of this nature.
(In fact, I still think they have a lot of work to do. The relationship between activities isn't particularly clear. Some applications, such as the word processor, still use popup menus, which is very bad. Etoys --- that's Squeak, isn't it? --- is visually inconsistent with the rest of the system. But at least they're heading in the right direction.)
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Possibly, but not necessarily. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but just because you have an OEM CD and an OEM CD key, does not necessarily mean that they will work together, unless the key is actually the one that came with the CD. Your chances are better if it's from the same OEM, but even then it's not guaranteed it will work.
According to our sysadmin, who lent me the CD, it should work provided the key matches the version on the CD; but there aren't many versions. My parents have XP Home OEM, and I have an XP Home OEM CD, so it should work --- with luck.
But I'll be damned if I'm going to let them fork out for a complete new license when their old one is still perfectly valid.
The bigger problem comes with the computers I bought that only had those "Recovery" disks instead of actual Windows installation disks. The last time I dealt with one of those I actually went out and bought a copy of Windows (on top of the one that came with the system) and installed from the copy I purchased.
Couldn't you just borrow a OEM XP Home CD from someone and reinstall using the license key provided? (Which is exactly what I'm going to do to my parents' machine in a couple of weeks, in an attempt to sanitise it after a virus infection.)
There needn't be a winner in a format war. Remember MiniDisc v Digital Cassette? The winner then was MP3. Remember SACD v DVD-Audio? The winner in that war was, well, nobody really as neither format sells in large quantities.
Personally, I expect the winner is going to be likely to be EVD or FVD, the alternative Asian standards. If HDDVD and Blu-Ray keep faffing around like this, they're going to swamped by a tide of next-generation Asian electronics that will be cheap, flexible and Just Work. Which neither HDDVD or Blu-Ray do, reliably.
The other big "office suite" programs--word processing, email--have Unix alternatives that use a plain-text paradigm. The spreadsheet, at least to my knowledge, has no such Unix alternative. The closest things I can think of are awk and Gnuplot, but unlike LaTeX's ability to replace a word processor, I can't imagine using awk and Gnuplot in place of a spreadsheet.
Well, the user interface is intrinsic to the whole definition of a spreadsheet --- I don't think you could change the user interface without it no longer being a spreadsheet.
That said, you might want to have a look at sc, the traditional Unix spreadsheet (there's a Debian package). It's a simple (non-scripted) spreadsheet package that runs in a terminal and uses vi keybindings, saves its documents in plain text files, and is 256kB big on my system. What's not to like?
is this java only, or can I use lisp?
Yes.
And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices.
Actually, no, they won't, because people here aren't stupid. To get digital TV, you buy a digital TV set-top-box for knock-down prices and plug the handy SCART cable into the back of your existing analogue TV. You can pick them up in supermarkets for next to nothing, and there are no subscription fees (at least in my country).
Where did this whole oh-noes-I-need-a-new-TV thing come from, anyway?
From what I've seen, the big advantages to using GWT are:
I wouldn't say that GWT is a particularly nice solution to the problem --- it's doing some pretty damned foul things behind the scenes, you should look at the code it generates some time --- but it hides the foulness rather effectively. It basically lets me get the job done far more easily than I could otherwise, which makes it valuable to me.
As someone who has contributed bits and pieces of code here and there, and considering some bigger ideas to be released as GPL, I'm interested in why you'd prefer Apache 2 and MPL. It's all rather murky to me what the differences are. Mind elaborating?
If I'm a company, then if I use GPL software, I cannot modify it. This rather defeats the purpose of using open source software.
The reason why I can't modify GPL'd software is fairly simple: releasing in-house software as GPL is expensive. It requires legal oversight to make sure that we can relicense it, it requires infrastructure to allow us to give customers access to it, it requires us to support those customers --- if you're a real company, you can't get away with telling customers to piss off when they ask you questions --- it requires us to religiously differentiate between the GPL'd code and the non-GPL'd code to prevent license poisoning, and above all, it requires the process to manage the above. Using GPL'd software involves an entire management chain from legal downwards. Using BSD software doesn't.
Frequently, it's not worth the effort. It would be cheaper for us to find some sub-par non-GPL code and fix the bugs, or to write our own version from scratch. When I'm wearing my corporate hat and I'm looking for code, I'll frequently not even bother looking at it if it's GPL'd.
So just because they didn't have the money to invest we should leave them further behind in the dust instead of giving them the opportunity to better themselves?
Of course. That's what capitalism means, after all...
Alternatively:
We can't help people --- that would be socialism!
</sarcasm>
But as a user, it always amazes me how hard it is to navigate Java's downloads.
Yeah. Sun's Java web pages quite frankly are horrific beyond all reason. I dread every time I have to go and find something there --- and frequently I just fail. The last thing I tried to get was the Linux wireless toolkit for developing J2ME apps. I managed to find 2.4 (not supported by EclipseME, which I was using.) I managed to find 2.2. But could I find 2.3? Like hell.
If there's anyone from Sun listening, could you please find whoever is responsible for those web pages and fire them? It's this ghastly maze of long, meaningless product titles, menus that go in loops, undefined terms, endless minutely different product specs, pointless registration systems (which makes me very grateful for BugMeNot)... actually finding the useful information there is it's just too hard. If your web site is so complex and badly designed that people would rather give up than try and figure out, then, I'm afraid, you fail.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle. As the police become more willing to use force, their opponents will be more willing to use force, thus allowing the police to justify using even more force, and so on and so forth.
Yup. This is one of the reasons why the British police are so strongly against the idea of arming policemen on the beat. (And it's the beat policemen who feel this way, not the managers.) As soon as policemen become armed, they become more dangerous, which means that criminals have to respond by increasing the level of force, which means they become more dangerous, etc. If the police need deadly weapons, they're available; there's usually a police car permanently cruising the more dangerous areas, so that if they're called for they can respond within minutes. But by not arming police, they're reducing the overall threat level, which in fact makes the police safer.
At least, that's the idea, and it is working to a certain extent. Criminal gun use is rising anyway, in part due to gun culture being imported from the US. But at least it means that the overall threat level isn't rising as fast as it might otherwise be.
You can reject the initiation of force while reserving the right to defense.
Sure, except you cannot defend yourself with a gun --- they're purely offensive weapons. You can defend yourself with a sword against another sword, or a knife (if you're good) against another knife, but with a gun your only options are (a) to try to shoot someone (and therefore risk killing them) and (b) to not try to shoot them.
You can use a gun as a deterrent, but that's a drastically different thing, and frequently not a very useful one.
I'm wondering if such a thing would be cost effective over on your side of the pond or do people keep their POTS service?
Some people do, but you have to use your mobile a hell of a lot to make it worthwhile.
Also, there are other reasons to keep a POTS line. Emergencies, for one thing. The POTS network is (or is supposed to be) a hell of a lot more reliable and resilient than the mobile network. I keep one dumb line-powered phone specifically for when things go wrong, and I used it two days ago when there was a major power cut. The mobile network would have worked, of course, but if something really bad happens, the mobile network will almost certainly crash.
Plus it's good to have a backup. If your mobile dies, you still want to be able to make calls.
If you are going to follow that logic then what's the problem with billing for incoming calls? You are using airtime, which is theoretically a limited resource (only so many active calls per base station at a time), so why shouldn't you pay for incoming minutes?
Indeed, that's entirely reasonable, and here in the UK you can buy a 0845 number that do exactly this. But here, the default is to not allow other people to spend your money.
I have the cheapest plan that my provider offers: $39.99/mo. That translates into $0.015 per minute.
Yes, and that obviously works for you. But it wouldn't work for me, because I only use my mobile for three minutes a month, which means I'd end up paying $13/minute on your tariff.
This seems a little bit more fair -- why should I pay a surcharge to call somebody who lives next door to me just because they have a cell phone?
Because it uses more resources to call them over the cell phone network than it does over the POTS network?
I mean, it's not as if this comes as a surprise to anyone. All mobile numbers have the 07 prefix, so you know you're going to be charged extra before you call the number. If you have a mobile phone and you don't want people to be charged extra, you can buy a number where you pay part of the call fee. There's 0800 (which is free to the caller), 0845 (where the caller pays the same as local rate), 0870 (where the caller pays national rate), or 090 (where the caller pays extra and you get the difference). It's all clear and up front and means that third parties can spend your phone credit for you.
A stripped-down, customised OSX variant for the Wii.
Hey, they're both white. It's an ideal match. You heard it here first...
Sure, you save a lot of money if you use your phone 1-2 hours a day, but there's people that don't. Let's say you use a phone 3 hours a month.
Three hours? Good grief. I doubt I use mine for more than about five minutes a month. I use my phone for photos, a little data, sending the occasional text message --- not very often --- but, above all, I use it to receive calls. (We don't have the bizarre USian concept of charging people to receive incoming calls.)
I paid for the phone up-front; it cost me 40 UKP, about $80, I believe. It's a Lobster, a Virgin Mobile own brand. It's a small clamshell with reasonable battery life, camera, Java, GPRS, an MP3 player, an mini-SD card slot, it doubles as a mass storage USB device (with a proprietry cable, unfortunately), and it's got about twenty inane MIDI ring tones, all of which I've turned off. Construction quality's not great, but I'm very happy with it.
I dump twenty UKP into my phone account every nine months or so. There are no other costs.
I wrote my own greylister (<plug>Spey</plug>) and it works really well. (I will also point out that people who complain about it making email too slow have a major education problem --- email doesn't guarantee anything about delivery times. If they rely on the email being delivered within a certain amount of time, then they'll be screwed when that doesn't happen for completely legitimate reasons. But anyway.)
So far I've only had one false positive: Yahoo Groups. They have this brain-damaged system which probes to see if an email address is valid when you subscribe to a mailing list. Unfortunately, the probe mechanism, which is a bad idea at the best of times, is broken and doesn't retry after getting a 451 Try Again Later. This violates the RFC, of course. I've tried to complain, and find myself unable to contact an actual human. Whitelisting *@returns.groups.yahoo.com fixes this.
I, and all my immediate family members, and a few friends I know, all have one that doesn't require any additional power specifically for this reason.
All mains-powered phones here in the UK come with a big warning label that you should always have one line-powered phone in order to be able to make emergency calls.
This Dead Ringers sketch, from the UK, is looking less and less funny and more and more accurate as time goes by...
You, sir or madam, are a sick puppy, and I salute you...
Ohh and why not just put in a Dos with wp 5.1? Well do you still have the install discs lying around?
Caldera OpenDOS is available for free --- if you hunt around a bit --- and works pretty well. You may also want to give FreeDOS a try, it's probably decent enough to run WordPerfect.
Alternatively, you could give him one of the OLPC LiveCDs and see how he gets on with that!
I was blown-up. One million childs growing with Squeak. *That* would be a good idea.
Unfortunately, I loathe Squeak. Smalltalk is very cool, but Squeak have managed to wrap one of the greatest programming languages ever with a user interface designed by anally-retentive O/C monkeys. Admittedly, in this context the fact that it behaves like nothing else on earth isn't an issue, but Morphic still requires far too many weird CTRL+SHIFT+right mouse click+drag combinations to do simple things like moving windows around --- it's ergonomic hell, as well as being difficult to learn. By combining the process of constructing applications with using them, I believe that they've achieved something that does both very badly. Not to mention the fact that it looks like someone sneezed on the screen. (Literally. All those coloured blobs...)
Admittedly, the last time I used it was with the Croquet demo image. I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to make it do anything --- mainly trying to resize the Croquet window to fill the VM window --- and then gladly nuked it. It was an utterly loathsome experience.
I need to download the OLPC demo image and try it out and see if they've improved it any.
Why is the GUI non-standard?
Because all the existing GUIs in the world today --- including System 6 --- are overweight, overcomplicated, way more powerful than are needed, fiddly, baroque, inconsistent, difficult to use, difficult to learn, and in fact are downright scary to people who aren't accustomed to computers.
KDE, Gnome, Windows, OSX, etc are all completely inappropriate for a machine of this nature.
(In fact, I still think they have a lot of work to do. The relationship between activities isn't particularly clear. Some applications, such as the word processor, still use popup menus, which is very bad. Etoys --- that's Squeak, isn't it? --- is visually inconsistent with the rest of the system. But at least they're heading in the right direction.)
That would be "so far, the EU has imposed fines of 497 MILLION and 280 MILLION onto Microsoft". Of course, it's still spare change for Microsoft.
Well, the value of the dollar has been slipping recently compared to the euro...