"Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. [...] The OpenOffice.org source code includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software."
I'd say attributing OpenOffice to Sun is pretty appropriate.
+1 for IntelliJ IDEA.
Its refactorings and intelligent features simply blow Eclipse away.
In my opinion, that's the difference between something that's been built for doing its one job extremely well (IDEA) and something that's been built to be a "platform", extensible with "plugins", more of a "framework", etc. (Eclipse).
If I'm faced with a stubborn screw, I want an extremely good screwdriver. Not a tool platform onto which a trurning assembly can be added, which can be extended with a screwdriver plugin - which can only be installed, if you've also got the Hammer Extension fitted, though.
Oh, and if this screwdriver costs a few quid, as opposed to the hamm-screwy-turny-platform thing, which my granny gives me for free, I'll still prefer the right tool for the right job any day.
-- OK - I'm finished; the soapbox is available again. Who needs it next?
Dan.
Australiam scientists? What's that? And what does excpet for the tissues of the brain mean? I guess, if the brain doesn't grow back, the mouse is an ex-pet. But why the "c"?
That's almost exactly what I was thinking, as well. They use the ispell dictionary for randomly generated searches. OK. Search-Engine Optimization SPAM and link farms use publicly available word lists (such as the ispell dictionary) to generate bogus pages containing combinations these words.
So - this study is absolutely NOT scientific. All they've proven is that spammers manage to pollute the Google search index quite effectively. More effectively than with the Yahoo! index.
.... but would it really be too much of an effort to include half a sentence (roughly) in the write-up telling us what the DARPA Grand Challenge actually IS ABOUT?
I know I could RTFA, but why should I be forced to, just to find out wether I would actually be interested?
This seems to be a recurring pattern on Slashdot posts. Which doesn't make it any better, it just makes it consistent.
OK, I'll take this step-by-step, based on my experience with SUSE Linux (currently 9.3, but been using it on a large number of machines at least since 7.3).
> When I want to plug in a USB mouse I have to hack the XF86Config.
Nope. That just works. Linux has full USB plug&play support. Unlike Win2k, it detected all my USB devices right away (HP scanner, Brother printer, USB mouse, keyboard) and installed them all right away, without the need to go through endless "new hardware detected" dialogs and forced reboots. Switching mice is no problem at all. It even has full "hot-plugging" support for removable devices such as USB sticks. Using a desktop environment like KDE, an icon for your flash memory will come up on the desktop as soon as you plug it in.
> When I want to change screen resolution I have to do the same thing.
Not true. I simply go into the control panel, change the resolution and restart the graphical system.
> Copy and paste is hopelessly broken as different applications seem to use independent copy-and-paste buffers.
I agree. That's my main gripe with Linux dekstop environments. KDE is doing a bit to solve the problem, but as long as I can't simply select a graphical region in GIMP and simply paste it as a graphical object into OpenOffice presentation program, that part of the desktop experience is a major hassle and Windows will be at an advantage.
> There's no consistency between one GUI application and the next.
True. But there are some pockets of inconsistency within Windows apps as well. And thinking of the totally inconsistent drag&drop on Windows makes me shudder. Why should I have to know wether a directory is a netowrk directory, is on another partition or on the same partition, as well as the TYPE of the file I'm dragging, simply to be able to figure out the semantics of drag&drop - i.e. is it copy, link, or move? And that's just WITHIN MS Explorer, forget about consistency across applications.
> The 'productivity' apps are very poor imitaions of Office lacking countless features useful in everyday life.
Nope, I disagree. OpenOffice/StarOffice blows MS office out of the water. It has a totally consistent GUI. Everything is where I'd expect it to be (unlike MS Office, wich, for instance, has formatting opations scattered across at least four menus). It has all the features I require and fixes a lot of things that are broken in MS Office (using lots of images in a large document, for example). PLUS, it comes with an aboslutely brilliant PDF export which is the best way to generate PDF from your Office documents, presentations, etc.
> Printer support is horrendous.
No, it's not. To my experience, printing just WORKS on Linux. I have a mix of local and network printers, a printer connected directly to the TCP network. Configuring these using YaST and CUPS on SUSE is an absolute breeze.
> Linux is not the most pleasant option for your desktop.
"Pleasant" is a highly subjective measure.
> At least in my company they have the sense to give admin staff Windows machines.
???? Where's the sense in that? What are they administering? If they're administering WIndows networks, well I'd give them Win boxes as well. But for anything else, I'd stick to Linux.
Apparently it's been registered in Germany since 1995! "Firefox" as a trademark for use in computer software, computer consulting, etc. (trademark group 42 in the German trademark system) has been registered in 1995 to "Firefox Communications Limited, Solihull, GB". Presumably these are the same folks holding the trademark in GB.
A short research in the publically searchable database of the German national patent and trademark registry (http://dpinfo.dpma.de/ would have shown that.
Since they trademarks have been registered in 1995, I find it highly unlikely (but not infinitely improbable) that they were registered in order to "cash in" on the Firefox browser popularity.
Mind you, "Firefox" has also been registered by Volkswagen in 2005. So watch out for the new VW Beetle Firefox (with tabbed driver's seat) at a car dealership near you:-))
Dan.
The guy either hasn't used Gnome in a long
time, is a troll, or is a moron
Isn't it funny how some people just have to start childish name-calling as soon as someone criticizes their desktop of choice or OS of choice? Never were the words "Anonymous Coward" more true.
Anyway - back to the subject. I certainly don't consider myself a moron. And I'm using GNOME (2.6.1) right here on my desktop machine. But I absolutely have NOT been able to figure out how to associate MP3 files with the MP3 player, without the annoying security warning popping up. I have read HOWTOs and newsgroup postings and so on.
So far, I have found - to the best of my recollection - three places in which I can edit seemingly disjunct sets of file extension to MIME type mapping, MIME type to application mapping, etc. I have edited them, adding and removing mappings for *.mp3, etc., but all to absolutely no effect.
The Problem appears to be - Nautilus insists on discovering the file type itself by checking the first couple of bytes. Then it comes with the wackiest error message I've seen in a long time (roughly translated from German): "The file name says that this is a file of type 'MP3 Audio' but it appears to be of type 'MP3 Audio'. Opening this file could pose a security risk.... " Well, if it's name says it's 'MP3 Audio' and it looks like 'MP3 Audio', then GO AHEAD AND PLAY THE DAMN THING WHEN I CLICK ON IT!!!
I gave up after about two days of reading news postings and fiddling with GNOME. And I insist that I'm not a moron.
As heise.de just reported, Google appears to now be suing froogles.com - claiming they are intending to cash in on Google's popularity (or the popularity of froogle.com) by using the name part "oogle" in their name.
Never mind that Froogles.com has a granted trademark that predates Google's use of froogle.com by two years.
There goes "don't be evil". But that was to be expected (as a shareholder, I would expect nothing else).
Yeah but no but yeah but no but the Doctor said it were just plastic and under control but he was soooo wrong and he didn't even know where the minillium wheel was - oh my goood. And anyway you shouldn't believe anything Rose says either 'cause she had one of the arms at home behind the sofa and anyway she's just a cow.
This sucks because of a number of interoperability/integration issues in the individual apps (which I use all the time), which were rejected in Bugzilla/Mozillazine dicsussions as to be solved by the integrated suite.
Issues that come to mind and which I sorely miss each and every day are small thing such as:
"Open in new window" popup menu option on Web links in emails in Thunderbird
CTRL-M shortcut in Firefox to send an email
The problem that sending a link via email from Firefox does not append the email signature
These small things were supposed to be addressed/solved by the integrated suite, so that each project could concentrate on its core project domain.
Now it looks like that won't happen. Pity!
D.
Re:Does not render properly in Firefox or Mozilla
on
MSN Search Has Arrived
·
· Score: 1
Works for me!
I'm using FF 1.0, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Has anyone figured out how to CLEAR the "Near" entry box, that automatically fills itself from whois info or something like that?
The bloody thing thinks I'm in "Darmstadt, IN", when I'm actually in "Darmstadt, Germany" and just want to give it a try without having to enter "Beergut, UT" or "Upchuck, IL".
Dan.
I'm German, you insensitive clod!
And just to torture you - look, more words
that must seem alien to Americans:
neighbour
doughnut
tonight
Christmas
democracy
Dan.
"Insightful", without even having RTFA?
Which part of the description "K-Meleon web browser for Windows" triggered the rant about KDE and ssh and what-have-you?
Geeez....
Pity there's never a mod point around when you really need one.
Dan.
Huh? Are you kidding?
Don't tell me you're not aware of patents on such things as clicking a button a bit longer (MS), selection palettes in dialogs (Adobe), etc. MANY software patents, esp. in the U.S. are *extremely* trivial.
Check this out:
http://webshop.ffii.org/
Dan.
Re:Faithful reproduction? Hardly.
on
Mechanical Pong
·
· Score: 1
> If you see the video, you might also notice
> they manage to return the ball even when it is
> way beyond the side of the paddle, which
> really should be a complete miss.
But if you watch *really* closely, the other player scores a point for that. i.e. the "ball" is continuously moving, even for misses.
Dan.
Would it really be too much to ask to simply include two or three words in the/. article telling us *what* Sunbird is? "stand-alone application" is not really very enlightening.
Dan.
Re:Whose task is copy&paste
on
The Power of X
·
· Score: 1
> BTW. Windows doesn't really copy/paste well though. Formatted copy in WOrd gives me a headache and Excel doesn't keep to Microsoft's own UI guidelines.
Oh yes, I know what you mean. Copying between different Word documents is a pain (who told Word that I want to copy the style information as well as the content? Thank g*d for the "paste special" command). And copying from IE to Word copies the HTML styles and lots of other formatting? What's that all about?
But STILL..... most Win apps can be expected to play well with each other through the system clipboard.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. [...] The OpenOffice.org source code includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software."
I'd say attributing OpenOffice to Sun is pretty appropriate.
Dan.
Oh, bloody hell! Somebody ate my formatting. While reading, please imagine the post had sensible paragraph breaks.
+1 for IntelliJ IDEA. Its refactorings and intelligent features simply blow Eclipse away. In my opinion, that's the difference between something that's been built for doing its one job extremely well (IDEA) and something that's been built to be a "platform", extensible with "plugins", more of a "framework", etc. (Eclipse). If I'm faced with a stubborn screw, I want an extremely good screwdriver. Not a tool platform onto which a trurning assembly can be added, which can be extended with a screwdriver plugin - which can only be installed, if you've also got the Hammer Extension fitted, though. Oh, and if this screwdriver costs a few quid, as opposed to the hamm-screwy-turny-platform thing, which my granny gives me for free, I'll still prefer the right tool for the right job any day. -- OK - I'm finished; the soapbox is available again. Who needs it next? Dan.
Australiam scientists? What's that? And what does excpet for the tissues of the brain mean? I guess, if the brain doesn't grow back, the mouse is an ex-pet. But why the "c"?
Dan.
So - this study is absolutely NOT scientific. All they've proven is that spammers manage to pollute the Google search index quite effectively. More effectively than with the Yahoo! index.
Dan.
I know I could RTFA, but why should I be forced to, just to find out wether I would actually be interested?
This seems to be a recurring pattern on Slashdot posts. Which doesn't make it any better, it just makes it consistent.
Dan.
> When I want to plug in a USB mouse I have to hack the XF86Config.
Nope. That just works. Linux has full USB plug&play support. Unlike Win2k, it detected all my USB devices right away (HP scanner, Brother printer, USB mouse, keyboard) and installed them all right away, without the need to go through endless "new hardware detected" dialogs and forced reboots. Switching mice is no problem at all. It even has full "hot-plugging" support for removable devices such as USB sticks. Using a desktop environment like KDE, an icon for your flash memory will come up on the desktop as soon as you plug it in.
> When I want to change screen resolution I have to do the same thing.
Not true. I simply go into the control panel, change the resolution and restart the graphical system.
> Copy and paste is hopelessly broken as different applications seem to use independent copy-and-paste buffers.
I agree. That's my main gripe with Linux dekstop environments. KDE is doing a bit to solve the problem, but as long as I can't simply select a graphical region in GIMP and simply paste it as a graphical object into OpenOffice presentation program, that part of the desktop experience is a major hassle and Windows will be at an advantage.
> There's no consistency between one GUI application and the next.
True. But there are some pockets of inconsistency within Windows apps as well. And thinking of the totally inconsistent drag&drop on Windows makes me shudder. Why should I have to know wether a directory is a netowrk directory, is on another partition or on the same partition, as well as the TYPE of the file I'm dragging, simply to be able to figure out the semantics of drag&drop - i.e. is it copy, link, or move? And that's just WITHIN MS Explorer, forget about consistency across applications.
> The 'productivity' apps are very poor imitaions of Office lacking countless features useful in everyday life.
Nope, I disagree. OpenOffice/StarOffice blows MS office out of the water. It has a totally consistent GUI. Everything is where I'd expect it to be (unlike MS Office, wich, for instance, has formatting opations scattered across at least four menus). It has all the features I require and fixes a lot of things that are broken in MS Office (using lots of images in a large document, for example). PLUS, it comes with an aboslutely brilliant PDF export which is the best way to generate PDF from your Office documents, presentations, etc.
> Printer support is horrendous.
No, it's not. To my experience, printing just WORKS on Linux. I have a mix of local and network printers, a printer connected directly to the TCP network. Configuring these using YaST and CUPS on SUSE is an absolute breeze.
> Linux is not the most pleasant option for your desktop.
"Pleasant" is a highly subjective measure.
> At least in my company they have the sense to give admin staff Windows machines.
???? Where's the sense in that? What are they administering? If they're administering WIndows networks, well I'd give them Win boxes as well. But for anything else, I'd stick to Linux.
Dan.
While it's all well and good that Tim B-L gets all that publicity, please don't forget Robert Cailliau, who worked with TBL on the WWW at CERN (and who is - by the way - a very decent chap!). He's also been awarded the 1995 ACM Software System Award by the ACM for his work on the WWW - see http://www.acm.org/awards/ss_citations/1995A.htmlt ml for more details. Or read http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-286207-3
See http://robert.cailliau.free.fr/ByLetter/M/Me/CV.h
Dan.
No, I think it's just you. Dan.
Apparently it's been registered in Germany since 1995! "Firefox" as a trademark for use in computer software, computer consulting, etc. (trademark group 42 in the German trademark system) has been registered in 1995 to "Firefox Communications Limited, Solihull, GB". Presumably these are the same folks holding the trademark in GB. :-))
A short research in the publically searchable database of the German national patent and trademark registry (http://dpinfo.dpma.de/ would have shown that.
Since they trademarks have been registered in 1995, I find it highly unlikely (but not infinitely improbable) that they were registered in order to "cash in" on the Firefox browser popularity.
Mind you, "Firefox" has also been registered by Volkswagen in 2005. So watch out for the new VW Beetle Firefox (with tabbed driver's seat) at a car dealership near you
Dan.
Well -- one would honestly hope that at least librarians would be able to spel beter then that.
Anyway, we both know the note would most likely only say "Ook!".
Dan.
Isn't it funny how some people just have to start childish name-calling as soon as someone criticizes their desktop of choice or OS of choice? Never were the words "Anonymous Coward" more true.
Anyway - back to the subject. I certainly don't consider myself a moron. And I'm using GNOME (2.6.1) right here on my desktop machine. But I absolutely have NOT been able to figure out how to associate MP3 files with the MP3 player, without the annoying security warning popping up. I have read HOWTOs and newsgroup postings and so on.
So far, I have found - to the best of my recollection - three places in which I can edit seemingly disjunct sets of file extension to MIME type mapping, MIME type to application mapping, etc. I have edited them, adding and removing mappings for *.mp3, etc., but all to absolutely no effect.
The Problem appears to be - Nautilus insists on discovering the file type itself by checking the first couple of bytes. Then it comes with the wackiest error message I've seen in a long time (roughly translated from German): "The file name says that this is a file of type 'MP3 Audio' but it appears to be of type 'MP3 Audio'. Opening this file could pose a security risk.... " Well, if it's name says it's 'MP3 Audio' and it looks like 'MP3 Audio', then GO AHEAD AND PLAY THE DAMN THING WHEN I CLICK ON IT!!!
I gave up after about two days of reading news postings and fiddling with GNOME. And I insist that I'm not a moron.
Dan.
Never mind that Froogles.com has a granted trademark that predates Google's use of froogle.com by two years.
There goes "don't be evil". But that was to be expected (as a shareholder, I would expect nothing else).
Dan.
Yeah but no but yeah but no but the Doctor said it were just plastic and under control but he was soooo wrong and he didn't even know where the minillium wheel was - oh my goood. And anyway you shouldn't believe anything Rose says either 'cause she had one of the arms at home behind the sofa and anyway she's just a cow.
- "Open in new window" popup menu option on Web links in emails in Thunderbird
- CTRL-M shortcut in Firefox to send an email
- The problem that sending a link via email from Firefox does not append the email signature
These small things were supposed to be addressed/solved by the integrated suite, so that each project could concentrate on its core project domain.Now it looks like that won't happen. Pity!
D.
Works for me!
I'm using FF 1.0, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Has anyone figured out how to CLEAR the "Near" entry box, that automatically fills itself from whois info or something like that? The bloody thing thinks I'm in "Darmstadt, IN", when I'm actually in "Darmstadt, Germany" and just want to give it a try without having to enter "Beergut, UT" or "Upchuck, IL". Dan.
I'm German, you insensitive clod! And just to torture you - look, more words that must seem alien to Americans: neighbour doughnut tonight Christmas democracy Dan.
> Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought it was just Jobs and Woz? OK. You're wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Macintosh
"Insightful", without even having RTFA? Which part of the description "K-Meleon web browser for Windows" triggered the rant about KDE and ssh and what-have-you? Geeez.... Pity there's never a mod point around when you really need one. Dan.
P.S. I'm well aware that the site I linked to in turn only links to EU patents. Since the original poster referred to the U.S., maybe this will help: http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/effects/index.en.htm l x .en.html (Amazon's one-click shopping patent).
Or this: http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/effects/1click/inde
Dan.
Huh? Are you kidding?
Don't tell me you're not aware of patents on such things as clicking a button a bit longer (MS), selection palettes in dialogs (Adobe), etc. MANY software patents, esp. in the U.S. are *extremely* trivial.
Check this out: http://webshop.ffii.org/
Dan.
> If you see the video, you might also notice > they manage to return the ball even when it is > way beyond the side of the paddle, which > really should be a complete miss. But if you watch *really* closely, the other player scores a point for that. i.e. the "ball" is continuously moving, even for misses. Dan.
Would it really be too much to ask to simply include two or three words in the /. article telling us *what* Sunbird is? "stand-alone application" is not really very enlightening.
Dan.
Oh yes, I know what you mean. Copying between different Word documents is a pain (who told Word that I want to copy the style information as well as the content? Thank g*d for the "paste special" command). And copying from IE to Word copies the HTML styles and lots of other formatting? What's that all about?
But STILL..... most Win apps can be expected to play well with each other through the system clipboard.
Dan.