The perl thing is getting out of hand. The PTC is now campaiging for CPAN to be blocked at ISPs.
CPAN is the most smut ridden site I've ever seen. It is disgusting that this filth is freely available on the web.
I live in Dublin and consequently use Ryanair quite a bit. I used to like them. You got what you paid for, nothing more. Invariably, stuff ran on time (they can't really afford not to).
They used to have the least bad airline website out there, quick and easy to book. However, they now try and catch you for all sorts of extras as you go through the booking process. No doubt one big reason they don't want others doing that bit.
Recently, they have been encouraging online check-in, by charging less. This was convenient too, you can arrive later at the terminal.
Only one problem, when I went to check-in for my return flight, the site would only
At the weekend I put out some code for a Series 60 GPS mapping application I've been writing:
JohnJohn
Its in python, inspired by maemo-mapper + in its early stages, but already reasonably useful.
By default it uses openstreetmap.org as its source of maps, but you can configure it to use other repositories.
No documentation at all as yet, apart from the code, but hope to get a README out there soon.
Kudos to nokia here, I hope this shows the power of having phones you can write code for. Having python available on series60 is just the icing on the cake.
Looking at the patches Linus has provided they mostly relate to the window manager metacity.
I am 100% with Linus on this one. A few years back Gnome was using the sawfish window manager. Not only could this be configured to your hearts content, you could even write your own extensions for it. With sawfish windows could do some real magic.
Gnome saw sawfish and its configurability and decided it was bad -- and to some extent it was, there were a plethora of options. The right solution to this is to find a good set of default options and provide a configuration tool that presents just the options that people are most likely to configure + an advanced configuration dialogue for those that want to play with the more interesting options.
Gnome threw the baby out with the bath water when they went to metacity.
For a while I stopped using Gnome and used ratpoison as my window manager. Ratpoison shows the power of being able to do all your window manipulation from the keyboard (this is quite important for me, I have a neuromuscular disorder and so avoiding the mouse can make me much more productive -- metacity does not give me that option).
More recently I kept hearing about 3-D window managers and decided to give beryl a try. Now beryl comes with a plethora of options and has reasonably good support for keyboard navigation. Fingers crossed some gnome based linux distributions will go for beryl as their window manager.
Going from ratpoison to beryl is maybe going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but what the two have in common is configurability.
One big reason why suspend just works for apple is that they make both the OS and the hardware.
So they can actually test the software on the hardware it is being used on. Frankly, it would be a disgrace if stuff like this didn't just work on an apple.
In the PC world the software gets to run on all sorts of exciting combinations of hardware, a very different world.
Why would MS want to make it easier for customer's to dump MS Office?
The collaboration is on adding support for M$'s rival to open document format to OOo.
M$ wants to own the office format, hence its fear of open document. Having support for their own, xml-based, format in OOo is a good thing for them. Their format has enough proprietary stuff embedded in it that they can continue to ensure that open source office products don't render documents the same is M$ office.
This piece of collaboration is a no-brainer for M$.
A simple count of the number of vulnerabilities does not really tell the whole story.
A better measure would be vulnerability days. The idea would be to sum up across all exploits the number of days between the vulnerability being discovered and a patch being available.
This statistic could be refined by weighting each vulnerability according to its severity.
Of course, for IE we probably won't get good info on just when the vulnerability was discovered.
In fact, I would say increasing bandwidth makes Ajax more powerful, not less.
Since there is more bandwidth more data can be returned with a single round trip to the server in the same time. The Ajax interface can then interact with these larger data sets avoiding extra round-trips to the server.
Latency is something that you can't do a whole lot about without changing the laws of physics. What you can do is take advantage of extra bandwidth and each time the client asks for more information send it the data it asks for as well as your best guesses at what they might want next (cf google maps).
More bandwidth makes the AJAX approach much more attractive and powerful.
I find it quite ironic that this support issue is constantly raised regarding open source software.
One key advantage of OSS software is that, unlike proprietory stuff, the source code is available to anyone wanting to provide support for a package.
In the proprietory world you either have to go back to the company that wrote the stuff or else deal with a third party which has no access to the code.
OSS scales beautifully, if there is enough demand for support then there is an opportunity for someone to fill that need and profit. If that person can't satisfy the demand, others can fill the void.
However, the fact is that for most products google provides all the support you need.
I'd like to claim a new record.
This number only had 200 digits.
I've just factored a number with 2000 digits.
The number is 10^2000.
I'll leave the factorisation as an exercise.
This beta thing is just one aspect of version numbering nonesense.
I think the best you can hope for with version numbering is that you will see some consistency between products produced by the same organisation. One company's beta is another's version 6.3.2.
Open source projects generally care less about pushing up the version number (marketing droids tend to affect version numbers more than product features).
Unfortunately PHB's haven't yet figured out that what matters is not the version number, but how well the thing actually performs. I was quite shocked recently when a PHB said, 'now that firefox has reached 1.0, we have to consider it'.
Beta and version numbers 1.0 tend to indicate that API's might not have stabilised yet, although this might matter a lot less if the product is open source + a bit of research (eg looking at the project roadmap) ought to remove most fears you might have about the stability of the API.
This guy states that cost is comparable to windows. Note that the licence states he can install it on unlimited home computers for his/her personal use + one commercial machine. All for $89.
For that he gets a Debian based system which opens up all of the myriad of Debian packages for his use. Cheap at half the price.
From the Xandros licence:
A. Xandros Desktop ("Software Product") is a modular operating system made up of individual software components that were created by various individuals and entities ("Software Programs"). The End User may install the Software Product on unlimited home computers of his or hers for non-commercial use and one commercial use computer.
Imagine trying to tell your kids that the giant pocket watch that just came hurtling out of the sky isn't from Santa.
Some Martian nerd is having the Xmas of his life taking this thing apart. If we're lucky it will start working in a few days time when he puts it back together again.
SCO are on very weak ground complaining about XFS.
Groklaw had a reference to Caldera advertising how wonderful their Linux was, with features such as XFS.
Nor can SCO claim they were unaware that XFS was in Linux. Surely no Unix company can have missed the announcements in 1999 when SGI said they would be releasing this. SCO are a bit late getting round to complaining about this + in the meanwhile Caldera has been busy profiting from XFS (and actively advertising the fact).
If their beef with SGI is related to XFS they haven't got a let to stand on.
Thanks guys, we've been looking for a nice long list of linux users to sue. This is just what we needed.
Must get on to my stock broker to let him know we are about to announce 130,000 invoices being sent out.
Darl McLied
...because Windows provides them with everything they need
This is precisely why you need Linux. Windows provides everything you need, but you will, sooner or later, be forced into an upgrade to a more recent version of Windows.
You don't need the upgrade. Switch to Linux and you will upgrade when better tools are available, not when M$ want to extract another licence fee.
SCO: Linux contains Unix code. RMS: It is GNU/Linux if you please. Judge: What's this GNU thing? RMS: Gnu's Not Unix. Judge: So Linux is really GNU/Linux
and Gnu's not unix? RMS: Correct.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that partners call back the iphone users to arrange a repeat, but end up having so many dropped calls they just give up.
The perl thing is getting out of hand. The PTC is now campaiging for CPAN to be blocked at ISPs.
CPAN is the most smut ridden site I've ever seen. It is disgusting that this filth is freely available on the web.
I can't read silently, so I either breach the copyright or stop reading ;)
They used to have the least bad airline website out there, quick and easy to book. However, they now try and catch you for all sorts of extras as you go through the booking process. No doubt one big reason they don't want others doing that bit.
Recently, they have been encouraging online check-in, by charging less. This was convenient too, you can arrive later at the terminal.
Only one problem, when I went to check-in for my return flight, the site would only
Ryanair has lost the plot.
At the weekend I put out some code for a Series 60 GPS mapping application I've been writing: JohnJohn
Its in python, inspired by maemo-mapper + in its early stages, but already reasonably useful.
By default it uses openstreetmap.org as its source of maps, but you can configure it to use other repositories.
No documentation at all as yet, apart from the code, but hope to get a README out there soon.
Kudos to nokia here, I hope this shows the power of having phones you can write code for. Having python available on series60 is just the icing on the cake.
Here is a plugin hybrid that uses electricity and/or food to power it.
These sound interesting.. where can I find one?
Looking at the patches Linus has provided they mostly relate to the window manager metacity.
I am 100% with Linus on this one. A few years back Gnome was using the sawfish window manager. Not only could this be configured to your hearts content, you could even write your own extensions for it. With sawfish windows could do some real magic.
Gnome saw sawfish and its configurability and decided it was bad -- and to some extent it was, there were a plethora of options. The right solution to this is to find a good set of default options and provide a configuration tool that presents just the options that people are most likely to configure + an advanced configuration dialogue for those that want to play with the more interesting options.
Gnome threw the baby out with the bath water when they went to metacity.
For a while I stopped using Gnome and used ratpoison as my window manager. Ratpoison shows the power of being able to do all your window manipulation from the keyboard (this is quite important for me, I have a neuromuscular disorder and so avoiding the mouse can make me much more productive -- metacity does not give me that option).
More recently I kept hearing about 3-D window managers and decided to give beryl a try. Now beryl comes with a plethora of options and has reasonably good support for keyboard navigation. Fingers crossed some gnome based linux distributions will go for beryl as their window manager.
Going from ratpoison to beryl is maybe going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but what the two have in common is configurability.
Linus is right, one size fits all sucks.
Isn't that how they got into the problem in the first place?
Having said that, it will be excellent if this incident helps people to look at the alternatives to piracy.
So they can actually test the software on the hardware it is being used on. Frankly, it would be a disgrace if stuff like this didn't just work on an apple.
In the PC world the software gets to run on all sorts of exciting combinations of hardware, a very different world.
The collaboration is on adding support for M$'s rival to open document format to OOo.
M$ wants to own the office format, hence its fear of open document. Having support for their own, xml-based, format in OOo is a good thing for them. Their format has enough proprietary stuff embedded in it that they can continue to ensure that open source office products don't render documents the same is M$ office.
This piece of collaboration is a no-brainer for M$.
Quiet news day, or is someone just taking the piss?
A better measure would be vulnerability days. The idea would be to sum up across all exploits the number of days between the vulnerability being discovered and a patch being available.
This statistic could be refined by weighting each vulnerability according to its severity.
Of course, for IE we probably won't get good info on just when the vulnerability was discovered.
Since there is more bandwidth more data can be returned with a single round trip to the server in the same time. The Ajax interface can then interact with these larger data sets avoiding extra round-trips to the server.
Latency is something that you can't do a whole lot about without changing the laws of physics. What you can do is take advantage of extra bandwidth and each time the client asks for more information send it the data it asks for as well as your best guesses at what they might want next (cf google maps).
More bandwidth makes the AJAX approach much more attractive and powerful.
One key advantage of OSS software is that, unlike proprietory stuff, the source code is available to anyone wanting to provide support for a package.
In the proprietory world you either have to go back to the company that wrote the stuff or else deal with a third party which has no access to the code.
OSS scales beautifully, if there is enough demand for support then there is an opportunity for someone to fill that need and profit. If that person can't satisfy the demand, others can fill the void.
However, the fact is that for most products google provides all the support you need.
I'd like to claim a new record. This number only had 200 digits. I've just factored a number with 2000 digits. The number is 10^2000. I'll leave the factorisation as an exercise.
I think the best you can hope for with version numbering is that you will see some consistency between products produced by the same organisation. One company's beta is another's version 6.3.2.
Open source projects generally care less about pushing up the version number (marketing droids tend to affect version numbers more than product features).
Unfortunately PHB's haven't yet figured out that what matters is not the version number, but how well the thing actually performs. I was quite shocked recently when a PHB said, 'now that firefox has reached 1.0, we have to consider it'.
Beta and version numbers 1.0 tend to indicate that API's might not have stabilised yet, although this might matter a lot less if the product is open source + a bit of research (eg looking at the project roadmap) ought to remove most fears you might have about the stability of the API.
This guy states that cost is comparable to windows. Note that the licence states he can install it on unlimited home computers for his/her personal use + one commercial machine. All for $89.
For that he gets a Debian based system which opens up all of the myriad of Debian packages for his use. Cheap at half the price.
From the Xandros licence:
A. Xandros Desktop ("Software Product") is a modular operating system made up of individual software components that were created by various individuals and entities ("Software Programs"). The End User may install the Software Product on unlimited home computers of his or hers for non-commercial use and one commercial use computer.
Imagine trying to tell your kids that the giant pocket watch that just came hurtling out of the sky isn't from Santa. Some Martian nerd is having the Xmas of his life taking this thing apart. If we're lucky it will start working in a few days time when he puts it back together again.
Groklaw had a reference to Caldera advertising how wonderful their Linux was, with features such as XFS.
Nor can SCO claim they were unaware that XFS was in Linux. Surely no Unix company can have missed the announcements in 1999 when SGI said they would be releasing this. SCO are a bit late getting round to complaining about this + in the meanwhile Caldera has been busy profiting from XFS (and actively advertising the fact).
If their beef with SGI is related to XFS they haven't got a let to stand on.
Thanks guys, we've been looking for a nice long list of linux users to sue. This is just what we needed. Must get on to my stock broker to let him know we are about to announce 130,000 invoices being sent out. Darl McLied
What Neil Armstrong really said
M.B.A. from The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University
Am i the only one who thinks that the 'Fuck-you' school of business is appropriate for someone with M$ connections?
...because Windows provides them with everything they need This is precisely why you need Linux. Windows provides everything you need, but you will, sooner or later, be forced into an upgrade to a more recent version of Windows. You don't need the upgrade. Switch to Linux and you will upgrade when better tools are available, not when M$ want to extract another licence fee.
SCO: Linux contains Unix code.
RMS: It is GNU/Linux if you please.
Judge: What's this GNU thing?
RMS: Gnu's Not Unix.
Judge: So Linux is really GNU/Linux
and Gnu's not unix?
RMS: Correct.
Judge: So what are SCO on about? Case dismissed.