Re:Evil bit support
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
When I first tried a Mac it frustrated me that I didn't have the type of control that I was used to on Windows. I couldn't make a certain program open a file by renaming it. The icon of a file would change when it was saved by a different program. Because I was used to working with text documents that could be opened by a variety of programs, this really confused me.
Eventually I learned about the different meta-data types and how to edit them. If anything, I found that the Mac had several power user features too well hidden for me.
Open sourcing Mozilla was an act of desperation, and I'm sure glad Netscape went ahead and did it. After 5 years, Mozilla has a number of outside developers working on it. I read interviews with the thinkers in Netscape that were expecting to have their browser developed for them by open source developers and considerable cost saving. It certainly hasn't happened easily or quickly, but I think that Mozilla is at a point that it wouldn't die even if AOL pulled all support and funding from it.
For better or worse, other companies looking to open source their products have a data point. I'm hoping to see many other closed source products become open source and I'm hoping they have learned from Mozilla. It's not an easy road.
Mozilla is a great success, but it is also a great failure. When Netscape first open sourced Mozilla development they were disallusioned. They assumed that developers would flock to the open source development effort. Netscape was looking to win the browser war without spending any money. Not being able to compete against a free product, they were looking at ways to make their product free. It didn't work. Mozilla has only succeeded today becouse Netscape (now AOL) continues to pour money into the project. Most development on the browser is still done by paid employees.
Mozilla's successes have almost all been side effects. An open bug database is one of the most revolutionary development practices that I have ever seen. Because of Bugzilla, Mozilla has far more useful features than it otherwise would have. If users hadn't been able to get through to developers I doubt that Mozilla would have popup and image blocking.
Mozilla's release schedule with nightly builds has also been a huge sucess. Mozilla has more people testing very recent versions than any other peice of software I know. Mozilla is now the most stable browser I have ever used, and I don't doubt that the nightly builds (and some talented developers) are the reason.
Hopefully now that Mozilla is very popular it will attract enough outside developers so that Netscape's original dream of no cost development to win the browser war. There are still some hurdles for developers though. Mozilla is a complicated project with a significant learning curve. It relies on some specific technologies such as XUL and XCOM which don't yet have large numbers of developers.
In the case of Microsoft, the product names are probably the least slimy aspect. While Microsoft could have done better than to choose common descriptive terms for its products, their competitors shouldn't be afraid to do something bold and different.
They picked a name that is obviously supposed to resemble Windows. While they may legally be able to do this, it seems pretty slimeball to me. Especially since announcements like this make it clear that they are trying to compete head to head with Windows.
When I was working for a.com that was trying to choose a name, the marketing folks made some very strong points for why you don't have to choose something that people are familiar with. Given that we were promoting widgets, they recommended we not name ourselves widgets.com, ourwidgets.com, or ewidgets.com. Their argument was that if you have a good product you can create your own name. Does Yahoo! need the word "directory" in their name? Does Ebay need the word "Auctions" in its name? Using something wacky wasn't going to hurt you, and it would allow you to later branch out into other markets.
Software developers really need to look at this lesson. Repeat after me, "The name of your program doesn't have to start with 'Win', 'g', 'k', 'Java', or 'X'".
Somebody replied to a similar rant of mine here on slashdot. They said that if you wrote a program that browsed Ebay auctions, you should be allowed to put ebay in the name. Maybe you should be allowed to, but that might prevent you from also supporting Yahoo or some other auction site in the future. Its not a good idea.
In the case of Lindows, the fact that they are using the name of their competitor cheapens them. I have to wonder why they don't think they can't create their own hype. Is their product not good enough?
I wanted to offer some insight into why twin primes happen in the first place. If you are not familiar with the phenomenon, twin primes are pairs of primes which differ by two. The first twin primes are [3,5], [5,7], [11,13] and [17,19]. It has been conjectured (but never proven) that there are infinitely many twin primes. Very large twin primes have been found and these seem to occur consistently thoughout the known prime number.
One reason that it is intuitivly possible that there are an infinite number of twin primes is that it is possible to generate numbers that are relativily prime. For example, multiply the first three primes: 2,3, and 5. You get 30. Add or subtract one from 30 and you will get a number that is relatively primet to 2, 3, and 5. In this case you get 29 and 31. Both happen to be prime numbers. We've found a twin.
The hard part of proving there are an infinite number of twins is finding a way of showing that your relatively prime numbers are truely prime. IE, in this case that neither is divisible by a higher prime such as 7, or 11.
I recall having read about the discovery of a huge fungus several year ago. That one must have been a different organism as the page I linked to says its in Oregon. Interestingly, this page gives credit for the largest fungus found in 1992 in Washington state.
At the time of the original large fungus discoveries, I recall that the largest living organism was considered to be a tree. Actually, grove of aspen trees that all shared the same roots.
When the aspen trees were discovered, they replaced some giant sequoia which had long been considered both the largest and fastest growing organism on earth.
When I was in elementary school and Junior High, I learned some programming, mostly in Basic. I remember writing a program to print my name, and a few other such simple things. It wasn't all that exciting to me. I didn't really get into programming until high school when I had a ti-81 programmable graphics calculator. I discovered I could program it to do my homework. I also discoverd that I liked putting it in drawing mode and programming things to appear on the screen.
The graphical aspect of programming is what would probably draw kids in most quickly. As a kid, I wanted it to be simple, I wanted it to be flexible, I wanted instant results. The ideal programming environment for beginners would have graphics. It would have a powerful, but flexible API. I'm thinking that Flash, or something similar might be appropriate.
A general search of the internet is bound to turn up algorithms that some random develper has posted but which are in now code archive. Furthermore, individual sites with code repositories generally aren't as good at searching.
If your google search doesn't turn up any relavent hits, then going for the repositories might be a good idea, but which repository you turn to is likely to be language dependant. Depending on the subject matter you might even do well by picking up a book.
I know java best, so I'll give my favorite Java repository: The Giant Java Tree
This law would make it illegal to do several things that I currently do:
Run a proxy server at home and connect to it via ssl so that my employer can't tell what web pages I visit at work.
SSH chaining - Use ssh to log into a remote computer and use ssh to log into another computer since this makes both endpoints unaware of the address of the other.
Use a remailer as a whistleblower. A remailer stips all headers off a message before sending it out to a new specified sender. This provides anonymous mail which is important for people who are afraid of retribution if the note could be traced back.
I felt this way when I first looked at XML. I said, "Boy, XML isn't that exciting. Its a way of formatting data. Its human readable. Whoop-dee-doo."
The power of XML comes not out of its syntax but out of the tools that are there for it and what you can do with them.
The nice (if obvious) tool for XML is the parser. XML is specified so that any computer science undergrad could write one in a couple weeks. As a result, there are a lot of parsers out there and they all do the same thing. This makes XML easily read by machines as well as humans.
The limitation of XML that you will probably next notice that it does not assign any meaning to data. The same data could be structured in many different ways in a document. For example if you were to describe a zoo in XML, one developer would have animal tags nested within species tags nested within cage tags nested within area tags nested within a zoo tag. Another developer would just have animal tags nested within a zoo tag.
The beauty if XML is that both of the two developers above should have written a specification for the way they did it. Given this specification (in a standard form) you would be able to take a zoo file and verify (automatically) that it matches this specification. (Doesn't have any stray snackbar tags hanging off a lion).
Furthermore there are conversion tools that can convert between the tags used by one developer and tags used by the other developer. The name of this tool is XSLT and you can write transformation instructions that do a lot of work in just a couple lines.
After I knew about these few tools, I started to see why so many developers were excited about XML. There are lots of XML tools out there that I don't know about. I'm sure there are several that I could get even more exited about.
Even better, you and your friends will no longer have sneak over to the "red light" district to purchase one of these players. The players will soon be available in the safer, more upright, "blue light" special district (where you always get the best deal).
Critics may say that some people will try to use the new blue laser dvds to watch their old "red laser" content, thrust at them by the marketing engines of the sinful pornography industry, but we are working on new DMCA protected schemes so that you will not have to see this filth on your shiny new blue laser player.
I use mozilla to read my mail but not to send mail because mozilla does not allow me to use arbitrary from addresses. (Well you can, but you have to create an account for each one, not a great option if you have hundreds of addresses from which you want to send mail.)
Even though I use Mozilla mail, I still would like to be able to have mailto: links open in something else.
The original article triumphantly proclaimed that 40% of developers were focused on Linux, cleverly failing to mention that that 40% is among the subset of developers who develop for Linux... It's akin to saying that 99% of people are smokers...if you only include people with cigarettes in their pocket.
I think you have your analogy a little bit off, try this (added portions in bold again):
90% of people who smoke have a cigarette at least once a day.
A majority of Americans with at least a pound of metal in their pockets have at least $15.00 of change on them.
Most Texans who own a Ferrari make over $200,000 a year.
In each case, the stat was sensational (and wrong) with the omission.
If the article and the slashdot writeup had been written like the following, we would have never had to ask for so much clarification (added peices in bold):
Nicholas Petreley has a great article over at LinuxWorld explaining why it seems that Windows has such a high market share when 40% of developers
who use Linux are focusing primarily on Linux. From the summary: "There are dozens of reasons why people have underestimated how quickly Linux has been grabbing Windows' market share. Windows starts out with a false boost and maintains its illusory market share even as it gets replaced by Linux. In 2004, don't be surprised when Linux overtakes Windows to become the main focus for developers who sometimes use Linux."
The real problem with this approach is that Netscape 4 really barfs on many layouts. To go this approach you have to be willing to make sacrifices in the NS 4 department. Keep in mind than Netscape 4 still has about 3% of the browser market.
The big problem is that Netscape 4 thinks it understands CSS positionsing but it really doesn't. It will often fail to render properly, or even worse, crash.
It looks like these folks took the approach of not letting navigator on the site. I don't like this approach. Thankfully, there are some less severe approaches.
With my website, I put some javascript in to comment out the link to the style sheet if you are running ns4.
You could alse specify your style sheet link in a way that ns4 doesn't understand (I think there are a couple, but you lose the ability to provide a different style sheet for print media). You could also make your style sheet served dynamically and have an alternate or blank style sheet returned to NS4.
If NS 4 doesn't get a style sheet, the page is rendered as if it came out of the 1994 internet. But for folks who use an old browser, I say too bad.
The things I like to use most that NS4 doesn't like are floating elements (div {float:left;width200}) and borders (body {border:thick red}). For floating divs, in NS4 they don't float. NS renders them all on top of each other. For page borders, I find various versions of NS crash.
It seems to me that moving to a 64 bit instruction set has the potential to really slow down your computer. Every time you add extra bits, you add extra overhead for simple instructions.
I'd be interested to know how many operations on today's computers actually even use up all 32 bits available to them. I'd expect those situations to be rare: Matrix math operations, some addressing.
64 bit computing might speed up your data processing if you are a scientist, but it would probably slow down business applications.
In general, scientists that need high processing speeds can buy supercomputer time, or extra 32 bit machines. Why would we want to move to 64 bit on the desktop?
Hybrids are great. I have 36,000 miles on my insight at this point. The only problem I have is that my gas milage really falls in the Winter (Boston). As a result, I don't get the kind of milage advertised for my car.
Vehicle: Prius MPG Overall:MPG Summer:37MPG Winter:46 Comments: winter decline due to heater, cold batteries when start, oxygenated fuel in winter
Vehicle: Prius MPG Overall:MPG Summer:betterMPG Winter:MPG 40-45 Comments:
Vehicle: Civic MPG Overall:MPG Summer:46-48MPG Winter:low 40s Comments: winter decline due to: snow tires; when temp is below freezing, or heater on, engine doesn't shut off at a stop; driving shorter distances in winter.
Vehicle: Prius MPG Overall:MPG Summer:46MPG Winter:36 Comments: using heater makes a difference. Car not garaged at night.
Vehicle: Prius MPG Overall:MPG Summer:mid 40sMPG Winter:high 30s Comments: Season makes a big difference. One factor is short trips.
Vehicle: Prius MPG Overall:MPG Summer:45MPG Winter:35 Comments: MPG improves after warming up. Inflates tires to 42/40 rather than 35/33 Toyota recommends.
Vehicle: Insight MPG Overall:64 (3 years)MPG Summer:70-75MPG Winter:45-55 Comments: Also got worse in winter with Geo Metro: 45-50 summer, 38-45 winter.
Vehicle: Insight MPG Overall:62 MPG Summer:MPG Winter: Comments: Some dropoff in winter, but not much since "learned how to drive more consistently." Keeping tire pressure at 36/35 important; also driving slower - once drove to Cape keeping under 60 mph, and got 80 mpg.
Vehicle: Civic MPG Overall:MPG Summer:MPG Winter:about 27 Comments: do almost all city driving, mpg got worse in winter.
Vehicle: Civic MPG Overall:43.3MPG Summer:MPG Winter: Comments: driving at least 50% highway miles.
Fans of Berkeley Breathed's BLOOM COUNTY and OUTLAND will be amazed and delighted to hear that uclick has undertaken a unique and historic re-launch of these classic comic strips, which originally
ran from 1980-1995.
(emphasis added)
But you seem to be saying that the comics did not run continuously in this period. By your estimates of 8 years of comics, that would mean that would make the run 2.3 years for $30.
In any case, it will be a multiple year subscription and the site does not make the total cost apparent.
That all depends when it started in 1995 and when it ended in 1980, the page doesn't say.
If it started December 31, 1980 and ended January 1, 1995 that is closer to 14 years. In that case, All but a couple comics would fit in a four year subscription.
If it started early in 1980 and late in 1995, it would be closer to 16 years of comics.
The subscription of $10 is for one year. They say there are 15 years of comics and they will be released at a rate of one week every 2 days. That means that it will take 4.3 years to get through all of them and by the end you will have paid $50.
Number of comics = (15 Years of comics) * (365 comics / year) = 5475 comics.
Slashdot Mirror
Eventually I learned about the different meta-data types and how to edit them. If anything, I found that the Mac had several power user features too well hidden for me.
For better or worse, other companies looking to open source their products have a data point. I'm hoping to see many other closed source products become open source and I'm hoping they have learned from Mozilla. It's not an easy road.
Mozilla's successes have almost all been side effects. An open bug database is one of the most revolutionary development practices that I have ever seen. Because of Bugzilla, Mozilla has far more useful features than it otherwise would have. If users hadn't been able to get through to developers I doubt that Mozilla would have popup and image blocking.
Mozilla's release schedule with nightly builds has also been a huge sucess. Mozilla has more people testing very recent versions than any other peice of software I know. Mozilla is now the most stable browser I have ever used, and I don't doubt that the nightly builds (and some talented developers) are the reason.
Hopefully now that Mozilla is very popular it will attract enough outside developers so that Netscape's original dream of no cost development to win the browser war. There are still some hurdles for developers though. Mozilla is a complicated project with a significant learning curve. It relies on some specific technologies such as XUL and XCOM which don't yet have large numbers of developers.
In the case of Microsoft, the product names are probably the least slimy aspect. While Microsoft could have done better than to choose common descriptive terms for its products, their competitors shouldn't be afraid to do something bold and different.
When I was working for a .com that was trying to choose a name, the marketing folks made some very strong points for why you don't have to choose something that people are familiar with. Given that we were promoting widgets, they recommended we not name ourselves widgets.com, ourwidgets.com, or ewidgets.com. Their argument was that if you have a good product you can create your own name. Does Yahoo! need the word "directory" in their name? Does Ebay need the word "Auctions" in its name? Using something wacky wasn't going to hurt you, and it would allow you to later branch out into other markets.
Software developers really need to look at this lesson. Repeat after me, "The name of your program doesn't have to start with 'Win', 'g', 'k', 'Java', or 'X'".
Somebody replied to a similar rant of mine here on slashdot. They said that if you wrote a program that browsed Ebay auctions, you should be allowed to put ebay in the name. Maybe you should be allowed to, but that might prevent you from also supporting Yahoo or some other auction site in the future. Its not a good idea.
In the case of Lindows, the fact that they are using the name of their competitor cheapens them. I have to wonder why they don't think they can't create their own hype. Is their product not good enough?
One reason that it is intuitivly possible that there are an infinite number of twin primes is that it is possible to generate numbers that are relativily prime. For example, multiply the first three primes: 2,3, and 5. You get 30. Add or subtract one from 30 and you will get a number that is relatively primet to 2, 3, and 5. In this case you get 29 and 31. Both happen to be prime numbers. We've found a twin.
The hard part of proving there are an infinite number of twins is finding a way of showing that your relatively prime numbers are truely prime. IE, in this case that neither is divisible by a higher prime such as 7, or 11.
At the time of the original large fungus discoveries, I recall that the largest living organism was considered to be a tree. Actually, grove of aspen trees that all shared the same roots.
When the aspen trees were discovered, they replaced some giant sequoia which had long been considered both the largest and fastest growing organism on earth.
The graphical aspect of programming is what would probably draw kids in most quickly. As a kid, I wanted it to be simple, I wanted it to be flexible, I wanted instant results. The ideal programming environment for beginners would have graphics. It would have a powerful, but flexible API. I'm thinking that Flash, or something similar might be appropriate.
If your google search doesn't turn up any relavent hits, then going for the repositories might be a good idea, but which repository you turn to is likely to be language dependant. Depending on the subject matter you might even do well by picking up a book.
I know java best, so I'll give my favorite Java repository: The Giant Java Tree
Perl hackers will probably recommend CPAN
I'm sure you will get an different site from each developer on Slashdot.
The power of XML comes not out of its syntax but out of the tools that are there for it and what you can do with them.
The nice (if obvious) tool for XML is the parser. XML is specified so that any computer science undergrad could write one in a couple weeks. As a result, there are a lot of parsers out there and they all do the same thing. This makes XML easily read by machines as well as humans.
The limitation of XML that you will probably next notice that it does not assign any meaning to data. The same data could be structured in many different ways in a document. For example if you were to describe a zoo in XML, one developer would have animal tags nested within species tags nested within cage tags nested within area tags nested within a zoo tag. Another developer would just have animal tags nested within a zoo tag.
The beauty if XML is that both of the two developers above should have written a specification for the way they did it. Given this specification (in a standard form) you would be able to take a zoo file and verify (automatically) that it matches this specification. (Doesn't have any stray snackbar tags hanging off a lion).
Furthermore there are conversion tools that can convert between the tags used by one developer and tags used by the other developer. The name of this tool is XSLT and you can write transformation instructions that do a lot of work in just a couple lines.
After I knew about these few tools, I started to see why so many developers were excited about XML. There are lots of XML tools out there that I don't know about. I'm sure there are several that I could get even more exited about.
Critics may say that some people will try to use the new blue laser dvds to watch their old "red laser" content, thrust at them by the marketing engines of the sinful pornography industry, but we are working on new DMCA protected schemes so that you will not have to see this filth on your shiny new blue laser player.
Even though I use Mozilla mail, I still would like to be able to have mailto: links open in something else.
Now if they could go the other way and make mailto links in mozilla and phoenix open my preferred mail reader. (bugzill bug #11459).
90% of people who smoke have a cigarette at least once a day.
A majority of Americans with at least a pound of metal in their pockets have at least $15.00 of change on them.
Most Texans who own a Ferrari make over $200,000 a year.
In each case, the stat was sensational (and wrong) with the omission.
Netscape 4 still doesn't like it.
The big problem is that Netscape 4 thinks it understands CSS positionsing but it really doesn't. It will often fail to render properly, or even worse, crash.
It looks like these folks took the approach of not letting navigator on the site. I don't like this approach. Thankfully, there are some less severe approaches.
With my website, I put some javascript in to comment out the link to the style sheet if you are running ns4.
You could alse specify your style sheet link in a way that ns4 doesn't understand (I think there are a couple, but you lose the ability to provide a different style sheet for print media). You could also make your style sheet served dynamically and have an alternate or blank style sheet returned to NS4.
If NS 4 doesn't get a style sheet, the page is rendered as if it came out of the 1994 internet. But for folks who use an old browser, I say too bad.
The things I like to use most that NS4 doesn't like are floating elements (div {float:left;width200}) and borders (body {border:thick red}). For floating divs, in NS4 they don't float. NS renders them all on top of each other. For page borders, I find various versions of NS crash.
I'd be interested to know how many operations on today's computers actually even use up all 32 bits available to them. I'd expect those situations to be rare: Matrix math operations, some addressing.
64 bit computing might speed up your data processing if you are a scientist, but it would probably slow down business applications.
In general, scientists that need high processing speeds can buy supercomputer time, or extra 32 bit machines. Why would we want to move to 64 bit on the desktop?
Vehicle: Prius
MPG Overall: MPG Summer: 37 MPG Winter: 46
Comments: winter decline due to heater, cold batteries when start, oxygenated fuel in winter
Vehicle: Prius
MPG Overall: MPG Summer: better MPG Winter: MPG 40-45
Comments:
Vehicle: Civic
MPG Overall: MPG Summer: 46-48 MPG Winter: low 40s
Comments: winter decline due to: snow tires; when temp is below freezing, or heater on, engine doesn't shut off at a stop; driving shorter distances in winter.
Vehicle: Prius
MPG Overall: MPG Summer: 46 MPG Winter: 36
Comments: using heater makes a difference. Car not garaged at night.
Vehicle: Prius
MPG Overall: MPG Summer: mid 40s MPG Winter: high 30s
Comments: Season makes a big difference. One factor is short trips.
Vehicle: Prius
MPG Overall: MPG Summer: 45 MPG Winter: 35
Comments: MPG improves after warming up. Inflates tires to 42/40 rather than 35/33 Toyota recommends.
Vehicle: Insight
MPG Overall: 64 (3 years) MPG Summer: 70-75 MPG Winter: 45-55
Comments: Also got worse in winter with Geo Metro: 45-50 summer, 38-45 winter.
Vehicle: Insight
MPG Overall: 62 MPG Summer: MPG Winter:
Comments: Some dropoff in winter, but not much since "learned how to drive more consistently." Keeping tire pressure at 36/35 important; also driving slower - once drove to Cape keeping under 60 mph, and got 80 mpg.
Vehicle: Civic
MPG Overall: MPG Summer: MPG Winter: about 27
Comments: do almost all city driving, mpg got worse in winter.
Vehicle: Civic
MPG Overall: 43.3 MPG Summer: MPG Winter:
Comments: driving at least 50% highway miles.
This story is mirrored on mozilla.org.uk.
But you seem to be saying that the comics did not run continuously in this period. By your estimates of 8 years of comics, that would mean that would make the run 2.3 years for $30.
In any case, it will be a multiple year subscription and the site does not make the total cost apparent.
If it started December 31, 1980 and ended January 1, 1995 that is closer to 14 years. In that case, All but a couple comics would fit in a four year subscription.
If it started early in 1980 and late in 1995, it would be closer to 16 years of comics.
Number of comics = (15 Years of comics) * (365 comics / year) = 5475 comics.
Release rate = (7 Comics / 2 Days) * (365 days / year) = 1277 comics/year.
Release time = (5475 comics) / (1277 comics/year) = 4.3 years
Cost = (4.3 years) * ($10 / year) = $50 (assuming you can't pay for part of a year)