Nice point. I wonder what $125 million could do if it were invested in open source (I wouldn't want to see it ALL go to the FSF). If you threw a million each into 125 projects like Mozilla, Perl, Apache, KDE, GNOME, etc.. you could pay for 20 full-time developers on each project at a livable $50k per annum (we free software folks are frugal sorts anyway). That $125 million could get 2500 developers working full time on open source projects for a year.. and that could certainly tip the scales for having Linux becoming the #1 desktop system.
Did you notice they only go up to 'Large' on Google Images now? Used to have 'wallpaper sized' as you say, but it doesn't seem to be there now (for me).
Similiaries to Netscape vs MS not unfounded
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Oddly, the writer or somebody out there, seems to think that Google v. Microsoft is analogous to Netscape v. Microsoft. I wasn't aware that you needed to download special software to run this Google search application.
This rather sarcastic remark somewhat misses the point. Not everyone is running Mozilla or a non-Microsoft OS. MS leapfrogged Netscape primarily because IE was 'good enough' (IE4 versus Netscape 4 was pretty even), it was quicker to load (thanks to MS integrating it into the OS), and because MS made it the default for everything.
Microsoft only has to make their new search 'good enough', and integrate it with Internet Explorer (or even as toolbars in other apps, like the Office suite), and Joe Public will use it just to make life simple.
In Microsoft Word you have your content, then you have your separate styles. It means you can change the style of your 'Heading 1's all in one go, etc. Many businesses rely on professionally supplied style sheets for many things, or roll out certain style sheets across the organization. It means the staff can work on the content, and the style is applied site-wide.
You can't really do that with vanilla HTML, which is a total PITA to change en-masse.
Are you on drugs? XHTML is easier than HTML overall. You only think it's not because you're used to the mess that is HTML. XHTML code is far cleaner as you put no presentational information in the code. It means a total dummy can make it, and then you just get a professional to make the CSS file for you. Bam, your whole site works.
I agree, although it's often more simple than that. I converted a client to Mozilla Firebird, which they used for a while without incident. Eventually they admitted they'd gone back to IE. Why? Because they preferred the look of the IE icon.
The Sun has a page online called Page3.com, which is an online version of the 'topless lady' page 3 in the newspaper. No, this is not a troll, check the link:-)
I've definitely noticed in the last few mnths that Microsoft seems to be REALLY ramping up its PR war against Linux. They've been talking about it for a while, and now we're seeing it.
On the/. story below this there was a link to e-week about the 2.7 Linux kernel, and guess who had a big ad on that page? Microsoft. And the ad tried to show that Microsoft Windows Server is 11-22% faster in '4 out of 5' workplace scenarios than Linux.
Even Slashdot has been running Microsoft ads, and almost any tech news site you go to is crawling with them. Microsoft has a definite advantage against Linux when it comes to ad budget, as only IBM seems to be really pushing Linux in terms of PR and advertising.. and even then it's more about IBM's solutions than Linux, which is not surprising really. And so Microsoft is going to continue funding studies and surveys, slightly tweaking the questions to favor them ("How easy do you find it to connect to an Active Directory from Linux?"), showing the world the results which are good, and dismissing the surveys which are bad.
I wonder if there are any Linux mad advertising zealots with deep pockets to get some ads on those sites, and to generally kick up a stink and get us lots more stories in the papers and magazines. This is a PR war, and if you're a Linux devotee, make sure you fight back against it in some way (even if it's just winning your clients over to Linux even more).
I'm talking Apple style dock here. You know, something you can pin to the side/top/bottom of the screen which is translucent, and magnifies when you roll over the scalable icons on it.
Gnome and KDE both have attempts at this, but they're always crappy small icons, no scaling, and no translucency.
I'd code one, and I even looked into it, but it seems X can't deal with translucency natively or something. I'm going to keep looking into it though, but I can't live without my docks on Windows now and I am dying to switch to Linux full-time.
I always thought the Slashdot 'nerd' was someone who was good with computers, a hacker, a programmer, a sysadmin, someone with computer science chops.
Not the typical definition of 'nerd' which is a fat Dungeons and Dragons player who drools over LOTR swilling coke all day and who can't stop eating at McDonald's.
I clearly must have the wrong definition of nerd. Do both types exist in one body?
But payment is somewhat mandatory for your system, otherwise.. well, duh, it'd be exactly the same as the system we have now.
Most people would leve this set to a low amount (five cents sounds good to me), but famous people might set the bar higher to reduce the amount of email they get. The server has a "white list" of people you won't charge for email; this will use digital signatures, not an easily-forged header field.
That means that most people will only accept your e-mail for free if they have whitelisted you. I routinely e-mail people I've never e-mailed before, but not with spam, but I don't want to pay 5 cents a pop for the privilege.
Who sets the payments? That's right, you do, for your server. You have the option of setting the fee to zero if you want.
In which case, you'll end up with a ton of spam, which is what your whole system was meant to reduce. So you're assuming most people will apply a charge, which then means most people won't be able to receive e-mail from people they've never heard of before. This goes against the entire ethos of e-mail. Your system makes people choose between these few options:
1) charge a few/many cents for all unknown incoming mail, so spam is reduced, but many good people won't bother to e-mail you anymore, and you become an Internet loner
2) charge 0 cents, and have a system no better than the one we already have
However, you could adapt your system to charging a variable number of cents based on the 'spamminess' of the mail (for example, using the SpamAssassin score). So a mail talking about viagra gets the option of paying 10 cents, but a mail which doesn't seem spammy at all, goes through free. Seems impractical to me, but more logical than without this twist.
The biggest weakness of this system is that it doesn't protect against some user's system sitting on a broadband DSL/Modem line that has a Trojan Horse used to e-mail the spam. AOL's system probably would only encourage more viruses/worm designed to make computers email relays.
Uh, but it'd all be going through AOL's mail server. I'm sure AOL could easily have systems in place that block users from sending mail if they send over a certain amount per hour/minute/whatever. Most Web hosting ISPs have this set up if they allow SMTP.
If payment becomes mandatory, all us geeks will end up having our own 'free' e-mail system.. and if people have to pay to use e-mail, then learn about our 'free' system, they'll start using that instead just to avoid paying a few cents here and there. It happens all the time. Look at the amount of companies going over to Linux, for example.
That said, I can't complain, since if MS does bring in micropayments for mail, they'll REALLY lose tons of people from THEIR e-mail clients, over to 'our' free secure system.
Uh, SMTP authentication already exists, and is supported by nearly all e-mail clients. I use it on my server, for example, although most ISPs use "POP3 auth before SMTP" instead.
Sir, ITTTWTISGPSNAYCOAOTBPUABII. (I Think That This Whole Thread Is Getting Pretty Silly Now As You Cannot Overload Acronyms Or They Become Pretty Unreadable And Become Initialisms Instead)
It can be easier to transcribe real time (or, rather, easier to get higher typing speeds) by getting a better keyboard, like a Natural one.. or, better, a Dvorak keyboard (on which most of the records are set).
I think it was Test Drive. It was always excellent at the arcades. Basically you start off, and you have two roads to choose from, straight on for a really basic course, and take a slip road on the right for the 'stunt' course.
When this game made it to consoles, it totally blew. Not just because you had no wheel, but because the graphics were insanely poor.
As an aside, I'm actually amazed they thought ANY games were good on the Atari 2600. You had to have a serious power of imagination to play ANY game on that thing...:-) Are those three green blocks a tree? Ah, yes...
Ben Folds is independent these days, and the iTMS is his main outlet (other than his own small personal label). He seems to be one of the better selling artists on there too.
I looked through their rules, and even on their entry form and it just says haiki in the 'traditional 3-line format'. But I see no rules over syllables. Many people mistakenly believe haiki should be a fixed number of syllables, i.e. 5, 7, and then 5 again. But this only applies to Japanese, where a syllable can punch a lot more weight than in English. 'Traditionally' haiki also feature an element of the weather.
Here's what the Oxford Dictionary folk have to say:
The Japanese haiku must include kigo (season word). This is a convention in the Japanese art of haiku. But English haiku has no such word. Moreover, composers of English haiku are not required to strictly observe the 17 syllable rule. The Japanese haiku is written in a single line, but the English haiku is divided into three lines.
It would have been nice if their rules could have had some tips for pedants like me. Do they demand 5/7/5? I am guessing not. If they wanted to get all traditional on our asses they could demand 17 kanji symbols, and I don't know how you can code:
It can produce games which look like the cheap ones in the bargain bin (which is good enough for a beginner!) and it doesn't require TOO much effort. A great stepping stone for a budding young programmer.
Fact 1) I've been using Photoshop since version 3, or for about eight years. It took at least five years for me to consider myself a 'master' of it, and yet I still learn tricks from people. So, I love Photoshop. It's really a rock.
Fact 2) I used Gimp a couple of years ago, and hated it.
Now forward to the present day.. these screenshots look EXCELLENT. Finally it looks like we're going places. The open source thing is paying off, and I can see some regular designers using this stuff in a year or two. Unrelated to geeks, but related to designers, Linux in these screenshots is actually beginning to look pretty sharp! I mean, this is no Mac OS X yet, or not even a Photoshop, but it's GETTING THERE.
What I don't get is why GNOME is so wasteful on toolbars. Why can't the menu for Gimp be on that top bar, where it says 'Actions'? Since all the tasks are on the bottom bar, it appears the top bar is kinda useless. Anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Nice point. I wonder what $125 million could do if it were invested in open source (I wouldn't want to see it ALL go to the FSF). If you threw a million each into 125 projects like Mozilla, Perl, Apache, KDE, GNOME, etc.. you could pay for 20 full-time developers on each project at a livable $50k per annum (we free software folks are frugal sorts anyway). That $125 million could get 2500 developers working full time on open source projects for a year.. and that could certainly tip the scales for having Linux becoming the #1 desktop system.
Did you notice they only go up to 'Large' on Google Images now? Used to have 'wallpaper sized' as you say, but it doesn't seem to be there now (for me).
Oddly, the writer or somebody out there, seems to think that Google v. Microsoft is analogous to Netscape v. Microsoft. I wasn't aware that you needed to download special software to run this Google search application.
This rather sarcastic remark somewhat misses the point. Not everyone is running Mozilla or a non-Microsoft OS. MS leapfrogged Netscape primarily because IE was 'good enough' (IE4 versus Netscape 4 was pretty even), it was quicker to load (thanks to MS integrating it into the OS), and because MS made it the default for everything.
Microsoft only has to make their new search 'good enough', and integrate it with Internet Explorer (or even as toolbars in other apps, like the Office suite), and Joe Public will use it just to make life simple.
In Microsoft Word you have your content, then you have your separate styles. It means you can change the style of your 'Heading 1's all in one go, etc. Many businesses rely on professionally supplied style sheets for many things, or roll out certain style sheets across the organization. It means the staff can work on the content, and the style is applied site-wide.
You can't really do that with vanilla HTML, which is a total PITA to change en-masse.
Are you on drugs? XHTML is easier than HTML overall. You only think it's not because you're used to the mess that is HTML. XHTML code is far cleaner as you put no presentational information in the code. It means a total dummy can make it, and then you just get a professional to make the CSS file for you. Bam, your whole site works.
You don't get much profit after being bought out by Microsoft. After all, Bill Gates didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks! :-)
I agree, although it's often more simple than that. I converted a client to Mozilla Firebird, which they used for a while without incident. Eventually they admitted they'd gone back to IE. Why? Because they preferred the look of the IE icon.
This is what we're dealing with out there.
The Sun has a page online called Page3.com, which is an online version of the 'topless lady' page 3 in the newspaper. No, this is not a troll, check the link :-)
I've definitely noticed in the last few mnths that Microsoft seems to be REALLY ramping up its PR war against Linux. They've been talking about it for a while, and now we're seeing it.
/. story below this there was a link to e-week about the 2.7 Linux kernel, and guess who had a big ad on that page? Microsoft. And the ad tried to show that Microsoft Windows Server is 11-22% faster in '4 out of 5' workplace scenarios than Linux.
On the
Even Slashdot has been running Microsoft ads, and almost any tech news site you go to is crawling with them. Microsoft has a definite advantage against Linux when it comes to ad budget, as only IBM seems to be really pushing Linux in terms of PR and advertising.. and even then it's more about IBM's solutions than Linux, which is not surprising really. And so Microsoft is going to continue funding studies and surveys, slightly tweaking the questions to favor them ("How easy do you find it to connect to an Active Directory from Linux?"), showing the world the results which are good, and dismissing the surveys which are bad.
I wonder if there are any Linux mad advertising zealots with deep pockets to get some ads on those sites, and to generally kick up a stink and get us lots more stories in the papers and magazines. This is a PR war, and if you're a Linux devotee, make sure you fight back against it in some way (even if it's just winning your clients over to Linux even more).
I'm talking Apple style dock here. You know, something you can pin to the side/top/bottom of the screen which is translucent, and magnifies when you roll over the scalable icons on it.
Gnome and KDE both have attempts at this, but they're always crappy small icons, no scaling, and no translucency.
I'd code one, and I even looked into it, but it seems X can't deal with translucency natively or something. I'm going to keep looking into it though, but I can't live without my docks on Windows now and I am dying to switch to Linux full-time.
I run three docks.
:-)
A permanent YzDock one at the bottom of the screen with most used programs.
A disappearing YzDock one at the right of the screen with most used folders.
A permanent ObjectDock one at the top left with all of the current running processes, and a Start Menu built in.
Take a look at ObjectDock sometime. It's free, just like YzDock, and can do tasks and start menu really cleanly
I always thought the Slashdot 'nerd' was someone who was good with computers, a hacker, a programmer, a sysadmin, someone with computer science chops.
Not the typical definition of 'nerd' which is a fat Dungeons and Dragons player who drools over LOTR swilling coke all day and who can't stop eating at McDonald's.
I clearly must have the wrong definition of nerd. Do both types exist in one body?
But payment is somewhat mandatory for your system, otherwise.. well, duh, it'd be exactly the same as the system we have now.
Most people would leve this set to a low amount (five cents sounds good to me), but famous people might set the bar higher to reduce the amount of email they get. The server has a "white list" of people you won't charge for email; this will use digital signatures, not an easily-forged header field.
That means that most people will only accept your e-mail for free if they have whitelisted you. I routinely e-mail people I've never e-mailed before, but not with spam, but I don't want to pay 5 cents a pop for the privilege.
Who sets the payments? That's right, you do, for your server. You have the option of setting the fee to zero if you want.
In which case, you'll end up with a ton of spam, which is what your whole system was meant to reduce. So you're assuming most people will apply a charge, which then means most people won't be able to receive e-mail from people they've never heard of before. This goes against the entire ethos of e-mail. Your system makes people choose between these few options:
1) charge a few/many cents for all unknown incoming mail, so spam is reduced, but many good people won't bother to e-mail you anymore, and you become an Internet loner
2) charge 0 cents, and have a system no better than the one we already have
However, you could adapt your system to charging a variable number of cents based on the 'spamminess' of the mail (for example, using the SpamAssassin score). So a mail talking about viagra gets the option of paying 10 cents, but a mail which doesn't seem spammy at all, goes through free. Seems impractical to me, but more logical than without this twist.
The biggest weakness of this system is that it doesn't protect against some user's system sitting on a broadband DSL/Modem line that has a Trojan Horse used to e-mail the spam. AOL's system probably would only encourage more viruses/worm designed to make computers email relays.
Uh, but it'd all be going through AOL's mail server. I'm sure AOL could easily have systems in place that block users from sending mail if they send over a certain amount per hour/minute/whatever. Most Web hosting ISPs have this set up if they allow SMTP.
You're right. You just can't make jokes about how it takes half a second more to do basic operations in OS X, but hey.. at least it doesn't BSOD.
Payment is a stupid idea full stop.
If payment becomes mandatory, all us geeks will end up having our own 'free' e-mail system.. and if people have to pay to use e-mail, then learn about our 'free' system, they'll start using that instead just to avoid paying a few cents here and there. It happens all the time. Look at the amount of companies going over to Linux, for example.
That said, I can't complain, since if MS does bring in micropayments for mail, they'll REALLY lose tons of people from THEIR e-mail clients, over to 'our' free secure system.
Uh, SMTP authentication already exists, and is supported by nearly all e-mail clients. I use it on my server, for example, although most ISPs use "POP3 auth before SMTP" instead.
Sir, ITTTWTISGPSNAYCOAOTBPUABII. (I Think That This Whole Thread Is Getting Pretty Silly Now As You Cannot Overload Acronyms Or They Become Pretty Unreadable And Become Initialisms Instead)
It can be easier to transcribe real time (or, rather, easier to get higher typing speeds) by getting a better keyboard, like a Natural one.. or, better, a Dvorak keyboard (on which most of the records are set).
I think it was Test Drive. It was always excellent at the arcades. Basically you start off, and you have two roads to choose from, straight on for a really basic course, and take a slip road on the right for the 'stunt' course.
:-) Are those three green blocks a tree? Ah, yes...
When this game made it to consoles, it totally blew. Not just because you had no wheel, but because the graphics were insanely poor.
As an aside, I'm actually amazed they thought ANY games were good on the Atari 2600. You had to have a serious power of imagination to play ANY game on that thing...
Ben Folds is independent these days, and the iTMS is his main outlet (other than his own small personal label). He seems to be one of the better selling artists on there too.
Is it because I is Jewish?
Here's what the Oxford Dictionary folk have to say:
The Japanese haiku must include kigo (season word). This is a convention in the Japanese art of haiku. But English haiku has no such word. Moreover, composers of English haiku are not required to strictly observe the 17 syllable rule. The Japanese haiku is written in a single line, but the English haiku is divided into three lines.
It would have been nice if their rules could have had some tips for pedants like me. Do they demand 5/7/5? I am guessing not. If they wanted to get all traditional on our asses they could demand 17 kanji symbols, and I don't know how you can code:in Kanji.
It can produce games which look like the cheap ones in the bargain bin (which is good enough for a beginner!) and it doesn't require TOO much effort. A great stepping stone for a budding young programmer.
Fact 1) I've been using Photoshop since version 3, or for about eight years. It took at least five years for me to consider myself a 'master' of it, and yet I still learn tricks from people. So, I love Photoshop. It's really a rock.
Fact 2) I used Gimp a couple of years ago, and hated it.
Now forward to the present day.. these screenshots look EXCELLENT. Finally it looks like we're going places. The open source thing is paying off, and I can see some regular designers using this stuff in a year or two. Unrelated to geeks, but related to designers, Linux in these screenshots is actually beginning to look pretty sharp! I mean, this is no Mac OS X yet, or not even a Photoshop, but it's GETTING THERE.
What I don't get is why GNOME is so wasteful on toolbars. Why can't the menu for Gimp be on that top bar, where it says 'Actions'? Since all the tasks are on the bottom bar, it appears the top bar is kinda useless. Anyone?