To go along with this, if anybody has open source shipping cost calculation software that they would like to recommend, many of us would appreciate it.
Intershipper.com has an open API, but they're unreliable, sadly.
UPS (and I think FedEx also) will allow you to download API documentation and reference source code to interface to their servers for realtime calculations. You have to register to get the download, and AFAIK the license does not allow you to incorporate it into an open source product. I have seen a PHP implementation floating around the net though...
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Re:Will GTK become Yet Another X?
on
GTK+ without X!
·
· Score: 1
you will experience deja vu.
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Re:Will GTK become Yet Another X?
on
GTK+ without X!
·
· Score: 1
Mandrake's graphical boot would be nicer if it didn't look like all the graphics were designed by a third-grade art class on Ecstasy using MS Paint. Happy pastel-colored penguins everywhere you look.
Also, it'd be nice if the runlevel menu worked with my USB trackball, and the graphical shutdown actually indicated when it was done shutting down.
Red Hat, Mandrake, and friends usually don't update packages after a distribution has released.
Sure, if there's a security bug found, they'll release an update, but that's pretty much it.
True, true.
That's my biggest beef with Mandrake. I'm running 7.2, and there are dozens of little glitches and bugs in the system and in various applications. Although I'm grateful to have easy access to security updates through MandrakeUpdate, I'd really like a way to use it to keep my system on the latest stable package releases. Cooker is too development-oriented, as I use my workstation for heavy PHP development and office-management type stuff, and can't afford to have it start flaking out.
I would happily shell out $5/month for a subscription version of MandrakeUpdate that would allow me to keep my system on the leading (but not bleeding) edge as easy as pointing and clicking. I have the ability to download and compile packages, or ferret out update RPMS, but I don't time to deal with that. Some people enjoy mucking around with the internals of their system all day, but I just want mine to work with as little fuss as possible, so I can use it to get my work done.
I wonder if the Eazel system updater thingy will fit the bill.
Old computers also force you to code well. I wrote a game on my Mac IIfx once, and went to great lengths to optimize it as much as possible just to get it to run acceptably on the fx. When I finally recompiled it for PowerPC... my god did it run fast. I ended up adding in a framerate setting so it could be played comfortably on everything from a IIfx to a G3.
Pisses me off too. Most of the time it seems to happen when the kid can't sit still in class, and the teacher suggests to the parents that the kid might have ADD and need to be put on Ritalin. That happened to me - I was on Ritalin for 2 weeks but Momz took me off it cause she didn't like the effect it had on me. She said it was a big mistake to put me on it in the first place, and I'm glad she recognized that.
I couldn't sit still in class because it was mad boring. Maybe rote learning works for some people, but I can't deal with it. I like to think and understand, not just memorize facts some monotone-talkin' teacher wrote on a chalkboard.
So yeah, it's downright unconscionable that such a large percentage of kids get doped up on Ritalin so they can pay attention in class. It's the schools that need to be fixed, not the kids.
Government schools are a stupid idea. I don't think the idea of having a school online is that great either.
Just give more money to the public school system, improve the quality of teaching from k12 to college (introduce computer science or coding ?) and you'll have better results!
The public school model is fundamentally and hopelessly flawed, and that won't change regardless of how much money is dumped into it. I'd rather see schools competing for students than the one size fits all, bureaucratic monopolies we have today in the U.S.
To do Arcnet you'd have to have Arcnet cards and drivers, which means ISA cards, which means jumpers and IRQ/base memory address settings.
10Base-2 aka 'thinwire' ethernet runs over RG-58 coax with BNC connectors on the ends, but i dunno how well cable TV coax would work - it's a different gauge.
It's probably easier to string a few Cat5 cables than to muck with any of this archaic stuff.
I know that many here despise corporate-funded media... but I have to say that I'm equally as perturbed by the idea of government-funded media. Having a radio station or newspaper that's an arm of the State is no better than one that's an arm of IBM or Toyota.
Seems to me that I've heard the same thing said about the Internet. Back in 1993 people were incredulous that something as complex as the Internet could self-organize out of virtual anarchy.
You'd have tons of people broadcasting over eachother, others just trying to scramble other peopel.
Would you, or wouldn't you? What would really happen if there was no powerful central authority like the FCC to dictate who was allowed to broadcast on what frequency? Would chaos rule, or would a spontaneous, distributed order arise?
IIRC, the concept of the government owning the spectrum and doling out licenses is based on the idea that it's a scarce resource and has to be rationed. What that fails to take into account is that scarcity breeds ingenuity. For example, compression was a huge deal back in the BBS days. There was serious competition among transfer protocols (ZModem, Hydra, YModem-G, etc.) and archive utilities (PKZIP, LHARC, ARJ, etc) to squeeze the absolute maximum out of the 2400-bps links of the day. Now that we have honking big fiber connections we don't worry as much with it.
So with regards to the scarcity issue, if there were no FCC the marketplace might have already evolved standards for digitizing and compressing audio broadcasts, to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of the spectrum.
Although I suspect there would be some jamming, it'd probably be on the same limited scale as the script-kiddie DOS stuff on the Internet. It simply isn't profitable or worthwhile for companies to try to jam each other (if it was, Yahoo and Excite would be sending ping floods and ICMP fragments at each other all day long.) The jammer kiddies could probably be thwarted for the most part by industrywide adoption of something like spread-spectrum in combination with public key authentication.
Perhaps packet radio (IP over ham radio - anyone else remember KA9Q?) would have taken off, and we'd have had a wireless Internet years ago.
Then again, it's also possible that the moon is made of green cheese.
Teach him about the ISO/OSI model of network layers. An understanding of abstraction layers can be applied to many things inside and outside the realm of computers and networking, including operating systems, markets, anthropology and (perhaps most importantly) lasagna.
Actually, unlike the misleading/. blurb, this would involve the creation of an "industry standard" that AOL-TW would have to adopt.
Am I the only person who is uneasy with the idea of the FTC/FCC dictating the creation or adoption of Internet protocol standards? Is there some problem with the voluntary IETF standards process that warrants U.S. federal intervention? To date we've done well by letting companies adopt the IETF standards as they please, but not forcing anyone to use them.
Email programs are intrinsicly susceptible to the same network effects as IM clients, yet the natural trend with email has been toward interoperability. Why should we treat IM any differently?
Sounds good to me. I mean, really, how many stupid datagram headers can you have anyhow? I implemented tftp recently, and that wasn't hard at all.
tftp rocks.
I say we do this the old-fashioned way. Draft a standard, and write an RFC. We shouldn't need more than 5-7 actual commands anyhow.
I agree. Let's create a standard through the IETF, not the FCC. AOL can hop on board or not.
With only about 5% of the world's population online there's still plenty of room for a new vendor-agnostic IM standard.
But that's *precisely* the problem with cable over here. Each company is granted a complete monopoly for a given area
That's precisely the problem here in the U.S. also.
We *really* need a national cable infrastructure, owned by a single company (and appropriately regulated, of course).
This would probably be better than the current situation, but why couldn't you/we take it a step further and have multiple competing local-loop providers?
There are already 3 wires coming into my house: cable, telephone and electric. In my area, all 3 of those companies are rolling out data services:
Cable modems are here, and my cable company is aggressively pursuing cable telephony
DSL is available in some areas, and is being rolled out to others (slowly)
My power company is investing millions to roll out data services over power lines in 2001.
On top of all that there's fixed wireless and satellite.
Seeing as how there are already multiple companies competing in the local loop market, wouldn't it make sense to get rid of all geographic franchise restrictions across the board, and let the competition play out to the benefit of the consumer?
*Everything* is moving to IP anyway - your television shows and phone calls are going to be data packets end-to-end before too long.
It seems to me that creating another regulated monopoly to handle the last loop would be a step backward, at least in my area. I'm not terribly familiar with your situation in Britain but it sounds similar.
because OpenBSD has established its purpose as a server OS. It does one thing very well, and the rest is not important. Sure, flexibility is nice, but do you really WANT the
same basic kernel running both your wristwatch and your render farm?
The way I see it, different Linux distros are filling somehwat different market niches. Red Hat is targeting the server, Mandrake is gung-ho about the desktop, and Caldera (for what they're worth) is all about the ISV channel. Lineo, Hard Hat and others are competing for the embedded market.
There's no reason different distros can't fill different niches. In fact, I would argue that they have to in order to differentiate themselves and survive.
I'm quite happy with the same basic kernel running both my wristwatch and my render farm, provided each has the appropriate modules loaded and compile-time options set. I would prefer that to having an entirely different OS for every device I own. Why reinvent the wheel?
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Re:My Initial experiences - posted from .6
on
Mozilla .6 Released
·
· Score: 2
Very much agreed. I've got 192M RAM on a K6-2/350, and it runs slower than a one-legged dog in the snow. Way too slow to use for my everyday browsing.
Can anyone speculate as to what makes the Linux version so much slower than the Windows version? I can see Mindcraft jumping all over that:)
Well if you will spin things at infinite speed, what do you expect? Hang on a sec, just how are you proposing to spin them up to infinite speed? With an infinitely powerfull motor, driven by an infinite watt power supply?
Don't be absurd He's going to use an infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of DECWriters, all hooked up to a big Willy Wonkaesque machine that not only produces an infinite amount of chocolate, but drives a spindle as well. It's all quite simple, really.
Slashdot Mirror
To go along with this, if anybody has open source shipping cost calculation software that they would like to recommend, many of us would appreciate it.
Intershipper.com has an open API, but they're unreliable, sadly.
UPS (and I think FedEx also) will allow you to download API documentation and reference source code to interface to their servers for realtime calculations. You have to register to get the download, and AFAIK the license does not allow you to incorporate it into an open source product. I have seen a PHP implementation floating around the net though...
--
you will experience deja vu.
--
you will experience deja vu.
--
Mandrake's graphical boot would be nicer if it didn't look like all the graphics were designed by a third-grade art class on Ecstasy using MS Paint. Happy pastel-colored penguins everywhere you look.
Also, it'd be nice if the runlevel menu worked with my USB trackball, and the graphical shutdown actually indicated when it was done shutting down.
--
Starbucks lattes are ass-nasty. Thank goodness there is no Starbucks in my town. I don't want one even near me.
--
Red Hat, Mandrake, and friends usually don't update packages after a distribution has released.
Sure, if there's a security bug found, they'll release an update, but that's pretty much it.
True, true.
That's my biggest beef with Mandrake. I'm running 7.2, and there are dozens of little glitches and bugs in the system and in various applications. Although I'm grateful to have easy access to security updates through MandrakeUpdate, I'd really like a way to use it to keep my system on the latest stable package releases. Cooker is too development-oriented, as I use my workstation for heavy PHP development and office-management type stuff, and can't afford to have it start flaking out.
I would happily shell out $5/month for a subscription version of MandrakeUpdate that would allow me to keep my system on the leading (but not bleeding) edge as easy as pointing and clicking. I have the ability to download and compile packages, or ferret out update RPMS, but I don't time to deal with that. Some people enjoy mucking around with the internals of their system all day, but I just want mine to work with as little fuss as possible, so I can use it to get my work done.
I wonder if the Eazel system updater thingy will fit the bill.
--
Old computers also force you to code well. I wrote a game on my Mac IIfx once, and went to great lengths to optimize it as much as possible just to get it to run acceptably on the fx. When I finally recompiled it for PowerPC... my god did it run fast. I ended up adding in a framerate setting so it could be played comfortably on everything from a IIfx to a G3.
--
Pisses me off too. Most of the time it seems to happen when the kid can't sit still in class, and the teacher suggests to the parents that the kid might have ADD and need to be put on Ritalin. That happened to me - I was on Ritalin for 2 weeks but Momz took me off it cause she didn't like the effect it had on me. She said it was a big mistake to put me on it in the first place, and I'm glad she recognized that.
I couldn't sit still in class because it was mad boring. Maybe rote learning works for some people, but I can't deal with it. I like to think and understand, not just memorize facts some monotone-talkin' teacher wrote on a chalkboard.
So yeah, it's downright unconscionable that such a large percentage of kids get doped up on Ritalin so they can pay attention in class. It's the schools that need to be fixed, not the kids.
--
This for profit school online is a stupid idea.
Government schools are a stupid idea. I don't think the idea of having a school online is that great either.
Just give more money to the public school system, improve the quality of teaching from k12 to college (introduce computer science or coding ?) and you'll have better results!
The public school model is fundamentally and hopelessly flawed, and that won't change regardless of how much money is dumped into it. I'd rather see schools competing for students than the one size fits all, bureaucratic monopolies we have today in the U.S.
--
No you shouldn't, but then, the people who would consider the security ramifications of that sort of thing usually run better distributions...
Or at the very least don't enable telnet...
--
To do Arcnet you'd have to have Arcnet cards and drivers, which means ISA cards, which means jumpers and IRQ/base memory address settings.
10Base-2 aka 'thinwire' ethernet runs over RG-58 coax with BNC connectors on the ends, but i dunno how well cable TV coax would work - it's a different gauge.
It's probably easier to string a few Cat5 cables than to muck with any of this archaic stuff.
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Perhaps some of this music would follow...
--
another mirror here
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NPR receives government money?
I know that many here despise corporate-funded media... but I have to say that I'm equally as perturbed by the idea of government-funded media. Having a radio station or newspaper that's an arm of the State is no better than one that's an arm of IBM or Toyota.
--
Then who the hell controls it?
Seems to me that I've heard the same thing said about the Internet. Back in 1993 people were incredulous that something as complex as the Internet could self-organize out of virtual anarchy.
You'd have tons of people broadcasting over eachother, others just trying to scramble other peopel.
Would you, or wouldn't you? What would really happen if there was no powerful central authority like the FCC to dictate who was allowed to broadcast on what frequency? Would chaos rule, or would a spontaneous, distributed order arise?
IIRC, the concept of the government owning the spectrum and doling out licenses is based on the idea that it's a scarce resource and has to be rationed. What that fails to take into account is that scarcity breeds ingenuity. For example, compression was a huge deal back in the BBS days. There was serious competition among transfer protocols (ZModem, Hydra, YModem-G, etc.) and archive utilities (PKZIP, LHARC, ARJ, etc) to squeeze the absolute maximum out of the 2400-bps links of the day. Now that we have honking big fiber connections we don't worry as much with it.
So with regards to the scarcity issue, if there were no FCC the marketplace might have already evolved standards for digitizing and compressing audio broadcasts, to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of the spectrum.
Although I suspect there would be some jamming, it'd probably be on the same limited scale as the script-kiddie DOS stuff on the Internet. It simply isn't profitable or worthwhile for companies to try to jam each other (if it was, Yahoo and Excite would be sending ping floods and ICMP fragments at each other all day long.) The jammer kiddies could probably be thwarted for the most part by industrywide adoption of something like spread-spectrum in combination with public key authentication.
Perhaps packet radio (IP over ham radio - anyone else remember KA9Q?) would have taken off, and we'd have had a wireless Internet years ago.
Then again, it's also possible that the moon is made of green cheese.
--
Teach him about the ISO/OSI model of network layers. An understanding of abstraction layers can be applied to many things inside and outside the realm of computers and networking, including operating systems, markets, anthropology and (perhaps most importantly) lasagna.
--
Actually, unlike the misleading /. blurb, this would involve the creation of an "industry standard" that AOL-TW would have to adopt.
Am I the only person who is uneasy with the idea of the FTC/FCC dictating the creation or adoption of Internet protocol standards? Is there some problem with the voluntary IETF standards process that warrants U.S. federal intervention? To date we've done well by letting companies adopt the IETF standards as they please, but not forcing anyone to use them.
Email programs are intrinsicly susceptible to the same network effects as IM clients, yet the natural trend with email has been toward interoperability. Why should we treat IM any differently?
Sounds good to me. I mean, really, how many stupid datagram headers can you have anyhow? I implemented tftp recently, and that wasn't hard at all.
tftp rocks.
I say we do this the old-fashioned way. Draft a standard, and write an RFC. We shouldn't need more than 5-7 actual commands anyhow.
I agree. Let's create a standard through the IETF, not the FCC. AOL can hop on board or not.
With only about 5% of the world's population online there's still plenty of room for a new vendor-agnostic IM standard.
--
That's precisely the problem here in the U.S. also.
We *really* need a national cable infrastructure, owned by a single company (and appropriately regulated, of course).
This would probably be better than the current situation, but why couldn't you/we take it a step further and have multiple competing local-loop providers?
There are already 3 wires coming into my house: cable, telephone and electric. In my area, all 3 of those companies are rolling out data services:
Cable modems are here, and my cable company is aggressively pursuing cable telephony
DSL is available in some areas, and is being rolled out to others (slowly)
My power company is investing millions to roll out data services over power lines in 2001.
On top of all that there's fixed wireless and satellite.
Seeing as how there are already multiple companies competing in the local loop market, wouldn't it make sense to get rid of all geographic franchise restrictions across the board, and let the competition play out to the benefit of the consumer?
*Everything* is moving to IP anyway - your television shows and phone calls are going to be data packets end-to-end before too long.
It seems to me that creating another regulated monopoly to handle the last loop would be a step backward, at least in my area. I'm not terribly familiar with your situation in Britain but it sounds similar.
--
I know I'm in a serious minority here, but I really don't understand what business the courts have interfering in voluntary contractual relationships.
This will accomplish little except to raise prices and take jobs away from people.
--
anything that causes your employees to divert their time and attention from the task at hand is a cost.
that said, dealing with licensing *is* a royal pain in the ass.
--
because OpenBSD has established its purpose as a server OS. It does one thing very well, and the rest is not important. Sure, flexibility is nice, but do you really WANT the
same basic kernel running both your wristwatch and your render farm?
The way I see it, different Linux distros are filling somehwat different market niches. Red Hat is targeting the server, Mandrake is gung-ho about the desktop, and Caldera (for what they're worth) is all about the ISV channel. Lineo, Hard Hat and others are competing for the embedded market.
There's no reason different distros can't fill different niches. In fact, I would argue that they have to in order to differentiate themselves and survive.
I'm quite happy with the same basic kernel running both my wristwatch and my render farm, provided each has the appropriate modules loaded and compile-time options set. I would prefer that to having an entirely different OS for every device I own. Why reinvent the wheel?
--
Very much agreed. I've got 192M RAM on a K6-2/350, and it runs slower than a one-legged dog in the snow. Way too slow to use for my everyday browsing.
:)
Can anyone speculate as to what makes the Linux version so much slower than the Windows version? I can see Mindcraft jumping all over that
--
Well if you will spin things at infinite speed, what do you expect? Hang on a sec, just how are you proposing to spin them up to infinite speed? With an infinitely powerfull motor, driven by an infinite watt power supply?
Don't be absurd He's going to use an infinite number of monkeys banging on an infinite number of DECWriters, all hooked up to a big Willy Wonkaesque machine that not only produces an infinite amount of chocolate, but drives a spindle as well. It's all quite simple, really.
--
Wasn't their SF office made up almost entirely of web designers that they hired right after their IPO, to flesh out redhat.com as a portal site?
I forget the name of the company they hired most of them away from, but it was covered here.
--
Yahoo is good for that sort of thing:
US overview here
State-by-state breakdown here
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