Faster broadband impacts me in making better shared speed available across my home LAN, better streaming, VOIP, faster downloads, etc. For 90% of my surfing, though, a 384k or 1.5 meg DSL/Cable line would do just as well as the 8 meg cable line I have now. But it's the other 10% that makes the difference and makes paying an extra $20 a month vs Dial-Up worthwhile.
<rant>Also, one thing that's VERY worth mentioning is that the Dial-Up accelerators do much of their acceleration at a proxy server level. They take graphics and compress them through a super-lossy algorithm to 1/5 or more the size of the graphic on the originating server. This causes many online graphics to look like crap.</rant>
For a second there, I thought they were discontinuing ActivePerl and almost got angry. I don't use it a lot, but it's nice to have it for Windows when I do. Then I realized that these are their Microsoft Visual Studio IDE plugins for the two languages and breathed a sigh of relief.
Personally, it's understandable that there wasn't enough demand to keep the products viable. Any Perl hacker I know either does their coding in a text editor or a different IDE than MS Visual Studio, since most of them are Linux/BSD buffs and only have Windows for gaming or to be able to run a specific Windows program for a client.
It's worth noting that they'll, upon customer request, replace each license for the Visual products with an equivalent license for their own Komodo IDE at no charge. And while they can't open source the ActivePerl products for VS2002 or VS2003, it looks like they're going to make them available for free. So if you feel no need to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005, you now have a new goodie as consolation.
I liked TFA's author's point that he was conflicted, wanting to love it for certain elements, but being seriously disappointed by the slow processor and limited RAM, which he says are probably a function of the low price point ($359). This is in contrast with something like OQO which looks to be very cool, but costs $1299 (MSRP).
Honestly, I'd like to see something OQO'ish in the $599 price point range that can run Linux. That would probably be the best of both worlds.
Private trackers are finding their torrents spread via the private DHT layer, allowing leechers to bypass ratios and download content freely.
And that means what in English?
Actually, it becomes a bit clearer when you read TFA. Apparently there are private torrent sharing communities that don't want to broadly distribute files, just share amongst themselves. This one BitTorrent client, BitComet, does not respect the keep-out signs, so such communities are having to be more proactive about keeping BitComet users from trespassing.
Now does this mean a race for everyone to try to grab the URL and place their favorite code there? I think rather than random zombie crap, someone should put up code that makes infected systems flash a simulated Blue Screen of Death telling users their PCs won't ever work again until they wipe Windows and install BeOS or Plan9 (I'd say Linux, but that's such a/. cliche now).
I resigned from my job in March. I gave them two weeks notice, but said I'd be glad to leave earlier (my son had just been born and it was a difficult birth with complications, so the earlier I could terminate and be home to help with the baby, the better). They let me go that day. I'd forgotten a few items at home, thus I had to come back later in the week to drop them off.
My manager arranged a farewell lunch on the day I came back. About 80% of my co-workers in my division met me in the lobby, my manager took us all out to a local restaurant. A lot of good wishes, hugs, and handshakes were exchanged.
Though most of my accounts were killed, my company ran a subscription based web-site and they left the free subscription I had as an employee active.
My resignation was no more professional than yours. My employer was just a lot cooler.
The one thing I did... I kept the resignation short and friendly. Said I was leaving to pursue some personal goals, valued the time I had been at the company, and would do what I could to help ensure a smooth transition. I never got negative, critical, or implied I could do better. I tried to make sure my departure was on a friendly note, so if I needed references at some future date, I hadn't burned any bridges.
IMO, if I'm not rolling a 20-sided die, it's virtual. Actually, even if I am rolling a 20-sided die, it's virtual.
If I think "real world" in relation to an RPG, I think of physically playing the game, such as an assasination game or something like that. To me, RPGs around a table or the flickering light of a monitor are virtual. Before I ever touched a computer, D&D was a form of VR where your imagination was the interface, a module was the software, and the dungeonmaster (along with a number of dice) was the CPU.
It seems to me that this is all aimed at P2P... publishing free P2P software or source code for it counts. It doesn't seem that they're going after sed/awk/grep and other free software.
Claria has threatened anyone anti-spyware company with massive lawsuits for classifying them as spyware. They've gone on a very offensive offensive to try to change public perception of their products by silencing their critics.
You think that prostitution and drug use can be comperedto child abuse? Doing something to yourself and something to someone else are same things? Man, you are fucked up in the head. Thank God most people aren't like you... do'h!
I just said they're all crimes people have tried to say God told them to commit and where the courts said the "God told me to" defense didn't wash. I never made any statement equating them in severity.
Better than arguing a Muslim woman should be able to have her face covered in her driver's license photo. Society has an interest in having a drivers license photo accurately picture the individual that overrides religious freedom.
Before you argue that no societal interest overrides religious freedom, please note that all of the following "crimes" have tried to use the religious freedom defense:
Prostitution
Possession and distribution of drugs
Child Molestation
Child Abuse
Letting children die of treatable ailments
In all of those cases, courts (up to the Supreme Court) said society's interest in prohibiting those crimes outweighed the First Amendment rights of the individuals.
The First Amendment is not absolute. You can't incite people to riot without punishment. You can't publish libelous accusations without punishment. You can't do anything you want and get away with it on the claim "God Says So".
While I admire the ACLU for taking on some contentious issues which are nasty, but have to be defended, most of their stuff seems to be things like forcing a nativity scene out of a city park or trying to make it possible for someone to mask their face in a driver's license photo.
This is always a tough question. The argument goes that the more surveilance power we give law enforcement, the more ability they have to prevent crime. OTOH, I'm probably mangling the quote, but "those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither" makes sense as well. The more power we give the government to invade our lives, the more they'll use it.
I know for a fact that in California impound lots MUST take credit cards. California vehicle code, section 22658, subsection K. I've got it memorized because I won a $559 judgement (4x towing and impound fees + court fees) in small claims court against a tow company for violating it. It was easy. They had a sign on the gate saying they didn't take cards. I merely took a picture of their gate and submitted the text of the law and the photo.
I've seen at least one retailer/service that charges you a $100 fee if you initiate a chargeback (challenge/cancel the charge) with your credit card company. They say this is because of the extra labor to fight your chargeback and that you have to deal with them to get refunds.
Personally, I look at the T&C of any retailer I make a large purchase from. That's how I spotted the $100 fee for the chargeback.
Essentially, gotchas like that are a clear sign not to do business with someone. If they're that worried about chargebacks or bad feedback that they try to penalize you for either in the T&C or EULA, run far away.
Is this topic really book-worthy? Seems like how to "just say no" to Microsoft could be covered in an article or two. Perhaps that's why the author spends so much time bashing Microsoft in the book... for filler.
And if you're going to just say no to Microsoft, Apple isn't necessarily the way to go. You're still locked into all sorts of proprietary software and apps.
Perhaps a more useful book would have been "Just Say Yes to OSS", detailing all of the neat replacements for popular closed-source software, not just Windows and Office. A lot of this stuff has been ported too, so you can phase yourself over, trying out various apps on your Windows box, getting more comfortable with OSS, and gradually moving toward a closed-source-free existence.
You can dress comfortably and fashionably at the same time. A pair of Old Navy khakis, a pair of rockport walking shoes, and a decent button down shirt is not a difficult ensemble to throw together and it looks more stylish than jeans and a t-shirt.
I've lived in/near Seattle for the last 6 years, working in the tech industry, and I've regularly seen people come to work in sweats or wearing shorts in the dead of winter (and it gets cold up here - we're only a 3 hour drive from Canada). The most disconcerting thing, though, is the growing presence of fat guys in kilts.
Who would be best poised to offer this? Which computer manufacturer has the best design/style sensibilities? Apple of course. Steve Jobs should put out a line of fashionable nerdwear with photos of electronic components on the interior labels.
Each line (named after cool-sounding components like "Capacitor", "Resistor", "North Bridge") has its own signature style and contains a 3 or 4 of each type of item (pants, shoes, shirts, sweaters, coats, blazers). Any combo within the line will look good. Buy two complete lines and you have a week's worth of outfits. Capacitor shirt, capacitor pants, capacitor shoes... you're color coordinated, looking good, and it took you no time at all.
Furthermore, they should have no complex care instructions (wash in warm, tumble dry regular), be seriously stain resistant, and be wrinkle resistant so they don't show the wrinkling effects of all-nighters. And most importantly, make them comfortable.
Technology is not the answer to every problem. Remember all those silly computer labs back in high schools in the '80s? Did anyone get any real educational value out of them?
Heck yeah. In 1984, our school computer lab was upgraded from Commodore PETs to Sperry PC clones. This allowed us to run Pascal and allowed the school to offer AP computer science.
Now, given, I did my actual homework on a Commodore 64 with Pascal. But being able to take AP Comp Sci had a huge educational value to me.
If, on the other hand, you're writing free software simply to get street cred, you should write for the people from whom you want respect. This means, if you want respect from Windows developers, write for Windows; if you want respect from Linux developers, write for Linux, if you want respect from everyone, write cross-platform.
There are some people who write neither for pay or cred. They do it because the product they want doesn't exist, so they create it, then they share it.
Personally, I'm a big fan of platform-independent open source. I run XP at home and built myself a WAMPP development platform, using Windows XP, Apache 2, PHP, Perl, and MySQL. It makes my life easier, because I can use all my comfort-zone editors (text, bitmap, vector) and integrate the results into the dev site on the fly.
Would I care if a project that was really useful to me on Windows wasn't viable on Linux? Yes and no. I think that platform independence is a HUGE plus in the FOSS world. It definitely earns you bonus points. It increases the level of freedom the users of that project have. BUT, users of that project are also free to port it to other platforms. I wouldn't be able to run my WAMPP environment if people hadn't ported the AMPP portion to Windows.
Using more proprietary foundations like.NET do limit the usefulness of an OSS project, but only until people get interested in developing ports. If nothing else, you can build a forked project that uses the best logic and functions that aren't platform dependent and merges them with a more platform independent underpinning.
If you're developing OSS for.NET, kudos on being open source, but you do miss the bonus points for being platform independent and don't whine about not getting the cred platform-independent projects of the same nature do. If you're an OSS user who sees this great project built on a proprietary stack and are pissed because it's not available for your platform, "port up or shut up".
The Gaming-tuned WINE variant is called Cedega. I've also read some comments that it kicks Crossover Office's butt on running productivity apps, but I haven't seen any reputable pubs do a head-to-head on them.
Slashdot Mirror
<rant>Also, one thing that's VERY worth mentioning is that the Dial-Up accelerators do much of their acceleration at a proxy server level. They take graphics and compress them through a super-lossy algorithm to 1/5 or more the size of the graphic on the originating server. This causes many online graphics to look like crap.</rant>
GoooooooooAOL!!!!
- Greg
Personally, it's understandable that there wasn't enough demand to keep the products viable. Any Perl hacker I know either does their coding in a text editor or a different IDE than MS Visual Studio, since most of them are Linux/BSD buffs and only have Windows for gaming or to be able to run a specific Windows program for a client.
It's worth noting that they'll, upon customer request, replace each license for the Visual products with an equivalent license for their own Komodo IDE at no charge. And while they can't open source the ActivePerl products for VS2002 or VS2003, it looks like they're going to make them available for free. So if you feel no need to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005, you now have a new goodie as consolation.
Honestly, I'd like to see something OQO'ish in the $599 price point range that can run Linux. That would probably be the best of both worlds.
- Greg
And that means what in English?
Actually, it becomes a bit clearer when you read TFA. Apparently there are private torrent sharing communities that don't want to broadly distribute files, just share amongst themselves. This one BitTorrent client, BitComet, does not respect the keep-out signs, so such communities are having to be more proactive about keeping BitComet users from trespassing.
Or at least that's what I think it means.
- Greg
Sorry, but when you give someone a straight line like that, it is unfair to expect them to resist.
- Greg
- Greg
My manager arranged a farewell lunch on the day I came back. About 80% of my co-workers in my division met me in the lobby, my manager took us all out to a local restaurant. A lot of good wishes, hugs, and handshakes were exchanged.
Though most of my accounts were killed, my company ran a subscription based web-site and they left the free subscription I had as an employee active.
My resignation was no more professional than yours. My employer was just a lot cooler.
The one thing I did... I kept the resignation short and friendly. Said I was leaving to pursue some personal goals, valued the time I had been at the company, and would do what I could to help ensure a smooth transition. I never got negative, critical, or implied I could do better. I tried to make sure my departure was on a friendly note, so if I needed references at some future date, I hadn't burned any bridges.
- Greg
IMO, if I'm not rolling a 20-sided die, it's virtual. Actually, even if I am rolling a 20-sided die, it's virtual.
If I think "real world" in relation to an RPG, I think of physically playing the game, such as an assasination game or something like that. To me, RPGs around a table or the flickering light of a monitor are virtual. Before I ever touched a computer, D&D was a form of VR where your imagination was the interface, a module was the software, and the dungeonmaster (along with a number of dice) was the CPU.
- Greg
It seems to me that this is all aimed at P2P... publishing free P2P software or source code for it counts. It doesn't seem that they're going after sed/awk/grep and other free software.
I just said they're all crimes people have tried to say God told them to commit and where the courts said the "God told me to" defense didn't wash. I never made any statement equating them in severity.
Better than arguing a Muslim woman should be able to have her face covered in her driver's license photo. Society has an interest in having a drivers license photo accurately picture the individual that overrides religious freedom.
Before you argue that no societal interest overrides religious freedom, please note that all of the following "crimes" have tried to use the religious freedom defense:
In all of those cases, courts (up to the Supreme Court) said society's interest in prohibiting those crimes outweighed the First Amendment rights of the individuals.
The First Amendment is not absolute. You can't incite people to riot without punishment. You can't publish libelous accusations without punishment. You can't do anything you want and get away with it on the claim "God Says So".
While I admire the ACLU for taking on some contentious issues which are nasty, but have to be defended, most of their stuff seems to be things like forcing a nativity scene out of a city park or trying to make it possible for someone to mask their face in a driver's license photo.
- Greg
Personally, I look at the T&C of any retailer I make a large purchase from. That's how I spotted the $100 fee for the chargeback.
Essentially, gotchas like that are a clear sign not to do business with someone. If they're that worried about chargebacks or bad feedback that they try to penalize you for either in the T&C or EULA, run far away.
And if you're going to just say no to Microsoft, Apple isn't necessarily the way to go. You're still locked into all sorts of proprietary software and apps.
Perhaps a more useful book would have been "Just Say Yes to OSS", detailing all of the neat replacements for popular closed-source software, not just Windows and Office. A lot of this stuff has been ported too, so you can phase yourself over, trying out various apps on your Windows box, getting more comfortable with OSS, and gradually moving toward a closed-source-free existence.
- Greg
Oh, no. Avoid the blue shirt. With the blue shirt you look like a Blockbuster asst. manager.
- Greg
I've lived in/near Seattle for the last 6 years, working in the tech industry, and I've regularly seen people come to work in sweats or wearing shorts in the dead of winter (and it gets cold up here - we're only a 3 hour drive from Canada). The most disconcerting thing, though, is the growing presence of fat guys in kilts.
- Greg
Who would be best poised to offer this? Which computer manufacturer has the best design/style sensibilities? Apple of course. Steve Jobs should put out a line of fashionable nerdwear with photos of electronic components on the interior labels.
Each line (named after cool-sounding components like "Capacitor", "Resistor", "North Bridge") has its own signature style and contains a 3 or 4 of each type of item (pants, shoes, shirts, sweaters, coats, blazers). Any combo within the line will look good. Buy two complete lines and you have a week's worth of outfits. Capacitor shirt, capacitor pants, capacitor shoes... you're color coordinated, looking good, and it took you no time at all.
Furthermore, they should have no complex care instructions (wash in warm, tumble dry regular), be seriously stain resistant, and be wrinkle resistant so they don't show the wrinkling effects of all-nighters. And most importantly, make them comfortable.
- Greg
Now, given, I did my actual homework on a Commodore 64 with Pascal. But being able to take AP Comp Sci had a huge educational value to me.
There are some people who write neither for pay or cred. They do it because the product they want doesn't exist, so they create it, then they share it.
- Greg
Would I care if a project that was really useful to me on Windows wasn't viable on Linux? Yes and no. I think that platform independence is a HUGE plus in the FOSS world. It definitely earns you bonus points. It increases the level of freedom the users of that project have. BUT, users of that project are also free to port it to other platforms. I wouldn't be able to run my WAMPP environment if people hadn't ported the AMPP portion to Windows.
Using more proprietary foundations like .NET do limit the usefulness of an OSS project, but only until people get interested in developing ports. If nothing else, you can build a forked project that uses the best logic and functions that aren't platform dependent and merges them with a more platform independent underpinning.
If you're developing OSS for .NET, kudos on being open source, but you do miss the bonus points for being platform independent and don't whine about not getting the cred platform-independent projects of the same nature do. If you're an OSS user who sees this great project built on a proprietary stack and are pissed because it's not available for your platform, "port up or shut up".
- Greg
- Greg
Yes, but then the "Linus Is God" subliminal message, coming every 35th frame, would go by too fast to register.