"The whole mentality here is that anybody can change the source of a project, submit it, and you never know what kind of compiled binary you're going to get."
Not if you can prove to your superiors that the source code you want to use is managed and moderated by code maintainers in order to review the code prior to it being submitted into a code branch...
... and that your superiors have a policy of only obtaining code from said moderators and code maintainers at officially announced places of acquisition of stable code branches.
This covers many popular free and open-source software from many organisations such as the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, the Linux Kernel Organisation, and others, whereby the contributor base is large enough for the code to be peer-reviewed and managed in ways that will prevent such malicious attempts at code pollution from ever becoming a reality. If you can show that the project belongs to an organisation that honours its reputation for the production of quality software, then it would make the rejection of the use of such software due to this argument much more difficult to justify.
While this doesn't cover every free or open-source project under the sun, it does cover many of the more popular major projects where a Windows build is available or supported.
Like how the original Apple Macintosh could have everything you could possibly need on one 400K floppy disk--operating system, an application or two, and some space for your documents. You could take that floppy to any Mac, boot it, and it'd be your own self-contained, mobile instance of a Macintosh system.
And if you wanted more applications, you'd make a new system disk and copy the applications to it. You could customize the system to only have the resources (like fonts and desk accessories) you need to actually make your applications run and be useful to you.
And now you're talking about having that on a USB stick? Man, how things come full-circle!
So what you are saying is that merely by commemorating that particular day, they are being DISRESPECTFULL to you ?
Not disrespectful, just inconsiderate.
I say go fuck yourself.
After you.
How is Veterans Day relevant to me?! Why would I be interested in Google's US patriotic exhibitions?!
Why not, then, does Google not have some memorabilia for ANZACS Day, or The Queen's Birthday, or even Melbourne Cup Day?!
The fact that Google is a US company is no excuse to ignore the fact that they are a part of the global community, and to treat all users of the Internet with respect, not just whinging US war veterans (sorry, but I had to say it, with all due respect to them). This does not mean that Google has to cater for everyone's customs, events and political agendas, but they could be at least mindful that not just Americans use the Internet.
And this goes for other US companies too... I'm sure!
Oh, if only I can actually write what I am thinking right about now.
The SI units have defined the prefixes to support base-10 representations of units: kilo = 10^3, mega = 10^6, giga = 10^9, etc. The reason why they invented kibi = 2^10, mibi = 2^20, gibi = 2^30, etc. is because they didn't want people to use the prefixes kilo, mega, giga, etc. for representing different quantities, especially when quantities in orders of magnitude higher are very much different between the unit quantifiers.
That is why SI have proposed those prefixes. Scientifically, the new rules make sense, and I am for one appreciative of these efforts.
>>How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)
>All of them can use FAT32, but case-sensitivity is eminently useful, and only ancient operating systems ignore case, so we keep it. > >All that, plus it's open-source
Actually, Mac OS X's HFS and HFS Plus filesystems* are case-conserving, case-insensitive filesystems, that exist in even today's version of Mac OS X. And you can find the source to the filesystem drivers in the Darwin source tree!
* not HFSX, which is actually a case-sensitive filesystem to replace the original NeXTStep UFS filesystem.
OmniWeb 5.1.3 doesn't pass the ACID2 test despite what you say about it being a WebKit application because OmniWeb uses an older version of WebCore (not WebKit) in the current build.
Omni Group have claimed that they are expected to fix this in the next major version of OmniWeb. However, I have no clue when that will be.
Repear after me...
AAC is an open media format.
AAC is an open media format.
AAC is an open media format.
AAC is an open media format.
AAC is an open media format.
AAC is an open media format.
MP3 is also an open (that is, public) media format no more than AAC is. But AAC is also superior, so why shouldn't it be used? It makes for a better music player in the end.
Yes, this has happened again. Back in the days of 10.2.6, I used to own an iBook, where upgrading from 10.2.5 to 10.2.6 using the Mac OS X 10.2.6 Combo Update reduced my battery's (reported) life from 4:35 to 2:05 hours. At that time, I didn't know why it happened.
Now I changed my iBook to a PowerBook G4, and upgraded 10.2.7 to 10.2.8, and the same thing has happened.
I did have one hiccup though -- the screen saver kicked in, causing the system to hang during optimisation where it could not start the selected Screen Effect to run as the screen saver. I was forced to restart the machine during a time an upgrade was taking place. But I don't think that this would have contributed to the problem since a replacement power management driver got written to the disk anyway, and the system would have taken that into account on the next startup.
So, I installed the upgrade again, in the hopes that the installer would just overwrite the relevant files. This time, the upgrade succeeded (because I disabled sleep and the screen saver).
LESSON 1: disable all system extensions that would disrupt the operation of the installer.
I learned from the iBook ordeal that the fault occurred during installation time, and that users who installed their systems on a full battery did not experience any unexpected changes to their battery life or capacity reporting, and I myself concluded that this would have to have been the case, given my experiences and the overwhelming evidence provided by the discussion group for iBook users.
LESSON 2: only apply a system update when the battery is fully charged.
I changed by battery under warranty to solve the problem... and it looks like I'll be doing it again unless a software solution to this problem can be found. A software issue caused this mess... surely a software fix can be formulated to deal with it.
My next step is to charge the battery to 100%, and re-run the update installer again to see if this "fixes" the battery calibration issues. I'll get back to this discussion and tell you the outcome.
For anyone who thinks I'm joking... here's evidence of the aftermath! I didn't mean to do it--I installed it without checking my battery charge at the time--but it's done, and is proof to me that the problem will be with us until an effort is made to find and fix the bugs in the system kernel code that deals with the maintenance of the battery, especially at module initialisation.
... go ahead and benchmark the industry-standard desktop operating system and its pathetic user interface, and leave the superior one alone!
In all honesty, Windows' user interface tries to do way too much for too little. It clutters up the interface with too many options and ways to do some of the same things, and makes what I'd like to call the "user interface map" too difficult to remember. It leads me to understand that:
the user interface controls of most importance are inaccessible to start with,
there are too many controls available to customize the system -- some options could be reduced by using intelligence where the operating system could deduce some parameters all by itself,
and the user interface makes users try to find access to controls by finding the context from which to access the controls rather than reveal from where to find the controls in the first place.
Too clumsy by design, in my opinion. It's a shame that KDE is trying to mimick a fundamentally flawed design rather than attempt at a superior one.
Slashdot Mirror
The author of the article says:
"The whole mentality here is that anybody can change the source of a project, submit it, and you never know what kind of compiled binary you're going to get."
Not if you can prove to your superiors that the source code you want to use is managed and moderated by code maintainers in order to review the code prior to it being submitted into a code branch...
... and that your superiors have a policy of only obtaining code from said moderators and code maintainers at officially announced places of acquisition of stable code branches.
This covers many popular free and open-source software from many organisations such as the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, the Linux Kernel Organisation, and others, whereby the contributor base is large enough for the code to be peer-reviewed and managed in ways that will prevent such malicious attempts at code pollution from ever becoming a reality. If you can show that the project belongs to an organisation that honours its reputation for the production of quality software, then it would make the rejection of the use of such software due to this argument much more difficult to justify.
While this doesn't cover every free or open-source project under the sun, it does cover many of the more popular major projects where a Windows build is available or supported.
--tonza
Like how the original Apple Macintosh could have everything you could possibly need on one 400K floppy disk--operating system, an application or two, and some space for your documents. You could take that floppy to any Mac, boot it, and it'd be your own self-contained, mobile instance of a Macintosh system.
And if you wanted more applications, you'd make a new system disk and copy the applications to it. You could customize the system to only have the resources (like fonts and desk accessories) you need to actually make your applications run and be useful to you.
And now you're talking about having that on a USB stick? Man, how things come full-circle!
Oh, and BTW, thanks for proving the point.
So what you are saying is that merely by commemorating that particular day, they are being DISRESPECTFULL to you ? Not disrespectful, just inconsiderate. I say go fuck yourself. After you.
Why not, then, does Google not have some memorabilia for ANZACS Day, or The Queen's Birthday, or even Melbourne Cup Day?!
The fact that Google is a US company is no excuse to ignore the fact that they are a part of the global community, and to treat all users of the Internet with respect, not just whinging US war veterans (sorry, but I had to say it, with all due respect to them). This does not mean that Google has to cater for everyone's customs, events and political agendas, but they could be at least mindful that not just Americans use the Internet.
And this goes for other US companies too... I'm sure!
--tonza
Oh, if only I can actually write what I am thinking right about now. The SI units have defined the prefixes to support base-10 representations of units: kilo = 10^3, mega = 10^6, giga = 10^9, etc. The reason why they invented kibi = 2^10, mibi = 2^20, gibi = 2^30, etc. is because they didn't want people to use the prefixes kilo, mega, giga, etc. for representing different quantities, especially when quantities in orders of magnitude higher are very much different between the unit quantifiers. That is why SI have proposed those prefixes. Scientifically, the new rules make sense, and I am for one appreciative of these efforts.
>>How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)
>All of them can use FAT32, but case-sensitivity is eminently useful, and only ancient operating systems ignore case, so we keep it.
>
>All that, plus it's open-source
Actually, Mac OS X's HFS and HFS Plus filesystems* are case-conserving, case-insensitive filesystems, that exist in even today's version of Mac OS X. And you can find the source to the filesystem drivers in the Darwin source tree!
* not HFSX, which is actually a case-sensitive filesystem to replace the original NeXTStep UFS filesystem.
OmniWeb 5.1.3 doesn't pass the ACID2 test despite what you say about it being a WebKit application because OmniWeb uses an older version of WebCore (not WebKit) in the current build.
Omni Group have claimed that they are expected to fix this in the next major version of OmniWeb. However, I have no clue when that will be.
-- tonza
Pffft! Except that Apple are actually making money, even in selling Macs (although, iPods are a clear winner for Apple this year).
Sun on the other hand... aren't... and that also includes for machines that fit markets that Apple don't sell to!
I second the notion! Grab a tiny, dinky processor and write machine language for it! Who the hell needs an operating system just to drive a watch?!
Repear after me... AAC is an open media format. AAC is an open media format. AAC is an open media format. AAC is an open media format. AAC is an open media format. AAC is an open media format. MP3 is also an open (that is, public) media format no more than AAC is. But AAC is also superior, so why shouldn't it be used? It makes for a better music player in the end.
Yes, this has happened again. Back in the days of 10.2.6, I used to own an iBook, where upgrading from 10.2.5 to 10.2.6 using the Mac OS X 10.2.6 Combo Update reduced my battery's (reported) life from 4:35 to 2:05 hours. At that time, I didn't know why it happened.
Now I changed my iBook to a PowerBook G4, and upgraded 10.2.7 to 10.2.8, and the same thing has happened.
I did have one hiccup though -- the screen saver kicked in, causing the system to hang during optimisation where it could not start the selected Screen Effect to run as the screen saver. I was forced to restart the machine during a time an upgrade was taking place. But I don't think that this would have contributed to the problem since a replacement power management driver got written to the disk anyway, and the system would have taken that into account on the next startup.
So, I installed the upgrade again, in the hopes that the installer would just overwrite the relevant files. This time, the upgrade succeeded (because I disabled sleep and the screen saver).
LESSON 1: disable all system extensions that would disrupt the operation of the installer.
I learned from the iBook ordeal that the fault occurred during installation time, and that users who installed their systems on a full battery did not experience any unexpected changes to their battery life or capacity reporting, and I myself concluded that this would have to have been the case, given my experiences and the overwhelming evidence provided by the discussion group for iBook users.
LESSON 2: only apply a system update when the battery is fully charged.
I changed by battery under warranty to solve the problem... and it looks like I'll be doing it again unless a software solution to this problem can be found. A software issue caused this mess... surely a software fix can be formulated to deal with it.
My next step is to charge the battery to 100%, and re-run the update installer again to see if this "fixes" the battery calibration issues. I'll get back to this discussion and tell you the outcome.
For anyone who thinks I'm joking... here's evidence of the aftermath! I didn't mean to do it--I installed it without checking my battery charge at the time--but it's done, and is proof to me that the problem will be with us until an effort is made to find and fix the bugs in the system kernel code that deals with the maintenance of the battery, especially at module initialisation.
... go ahead and benchmark the industry-standard desktop operating system and its pathetic user interface, and leave the superior one alone!
In all honesty, Windows' user interface tries to do way too much for too little. It clutters up the interface with too many options and ways to do some of the same things, and makes what I'd like to call the "user interface map" too difficult to remember. It leads me to understand that:
Too clumsy by design, in my opinion. It's a shame that KDE is trying to mimick a fundamentally flawed design rather than attempt at a superior one.