Well if he thought he only had so long to live, he might want the compensation to pay for all the things he did thinking he wouldn't have to face a more serious consequence than an early death.
Yet another Ask Slashdot submission with not enough information about your circumstances or reasoning to offer any kind of truly insightful response... except perhaps this one.
- What does the code do? Why is it important it is protected? - Do these students actually need root access, or is it just management laziness on your/your companies/the universities part? - Would these students actually care enough to bother doing anything with this code? - Have you considered a jail/sandbox/some kind of secure system emulator? - What is wrong with perl2exe (Windows only?) or the ActiveState compiler? - Why can you not get the students to sign a user (non-disclosure?) agreement in good faith (agree not use the box for malicious purposes, intentionally damage the system, or steal your code etc)? Is this not covered already by the unniversity network's user agreement?
I personally can't invision a program that could be SO mission critical that you are considering puting on an open box AT ALL. Presumeably it isn't that critical, so why not persaude your company to make an exception in licensing in this case and let it go. Who knows one of the students might find some obscure bug and make a suggestion on how you can fix it, or help you make some other such improvement.
It's now of course that I read you're a freelance designer.:} so hopefully I have made no crazy assumptions about your profession.
It strikes me that maybe we are viewing OSWD from different perspectives (me as a consumer and you as a critic (in a nice way) and probably potentially very skilled/experienced contributor).
I appreciate that a lot of people have put a lot of work into the designs that they've submitted to that site, so I'm trying not to be too harsh. But you and I must have very different ideas of what is a "reasonably high standard". The typical designs I saw on that site were garish beginner stuff in my opinion.
A lot of the stuff is quite old, dating back to late 2000 and there appears to be at least some correlation between age and quality, which is good. In terms of appreciable quality I'd say the standard of the contributions has been improving rapidly recently. Nearly all of the 'best of the best' designs you refer to are amongst the most recent.
There was talk a while back on the OSWD forums about throwing out old and low quality designs. I think the typical response was people have different opinions of what is good and bad and it would be a bit disrespectful to the early contributors to remove their work. This may happen as a consequence of the reformation of the site now anyway, as these designs are less likely to have been saved.
The designs were/are categorised to those that conformed to XHTML, CSS and those that conform to HTML4 (or earlier?).
Remember all the designs, in terms of $$$ if nothing else, are free. Hopefully you wouldn't expect to find top notch professional work. If the contributors had this level of skill, they'd surely be selling their efforts already (Admittedly, yes, alot of web design jobs rely on verbal reputation and having a good portfolio, but these free designs can theoretically be good publicity in themselves).
Most importantly, one of the great things about the community was anybody could contribute a design. A few the designs you or I might consider aweful may have a small feature or quality someone else finds inspiring. A few aren't even practical for the majority of sites, but are unconventional and interesting. Setting the entry bar too high could be damaging to the community. It's important the site doesn't just start pushing good designers as producers and Joe I. Blog as a consumer. Letting some pretty garish designs through the door can be necessary to the learning curve. The OSWD forums have had quite a few 'What do you guys think of my first submission?' like posts. Having several entry points, good categorisation, management and a rating system has the potential to create a welcoming compromise. OSWD needed/needs work in these areas, it's not an easy task, and a much greater one than a single PHP developer can provide come moderator can provide.
Lets see what happens, at the least you have pushed some ideas out there. oswd.org has an announcement at the moment from Frank, the whole thing seems petty and misguided.
OSWD has stumbled because most of the work was falling on one person, who didn't have access to all of the resources need to keep the site going. There was no open source effort.
The reason months went by with no designs being approved was because this guy was away. But just before the site went down it was buzzing with new designs daily, most of which were of a reasonably high standard, XHTML, CSS etc.Follow the link in the main article via the blog and you will see some pretty 'professional' designs.
I believe designs had to validate and look 'right' in ALL of the big browsers too (Thank Firefox's popularity for that).
Copyrighting a layout or a visual style is somewhat difficult, there is a certain level of inspiration that can be obtained under the scope copyright laws. I believe one of the complaints from OSWD contributors was people 'ripping off' their designs without any acknowledgement, most ask for atleast some acknowledgement of their work or of OSWD.
You make some good bullet points about improving the system, let's hope it'll be reborn with some of them.
It's on slashdot because there is a huge overlap between web geeks (mostly PHP,Perl,Ruby scripters) and/.ers. Alot of these web geeks tend to have poor web design skills (just click on alot of the commenters homepage links and you will see), hence the need for web templates.
Quite frankly OSWD.org was/is the best free web template website i've found. It has/had a nice little community, an neat interface and creative contributors who actually cared about standards like XHTML and CSS.
Most of the time the light would still be operating on the good old light speed. But for it to work in computers you still would have to slow it down in places and even stop it. For example to let another beam of light to pass before it can go through.
I don't quite see where you're getting this idea from. It's a bit barmy to imagine current electonic processors firing two lines at the same time and then having an 'electron traffic light' to let one signal pass by making another wait. This may sound like a switch but it's not, because at no point are you actually 'stopping' electrons. If you don't produce a voltage your electrons aren't going to move in a current, so you haven't stopped them because you never fired them to start with. As i'm sure you realise, in digital electronics data transmission is acheived by voltage state. Changing state from 0 to 1 happens because you apply a voltage, and 0 to 1 because you stop applying it. With photonics, the equivalent must be turning the source on and off?
It may be beyond my knowledge of physic's but slowing down light within an optical processor (to better interface with other devices or traditional electronics or whatever) sounds like an alternative to having light signals running at a lower frequency (more time spent in each state so peripherals can spot signals). Slowing down light and introducing a delta velocity surely means we need a way to buffer light, much like a capacitor stores charge?
There is a fundamental difference. The apps you mention look like they do because the programmer decided to use custom widgets, and it's easy for this programmer to provide a simple checkbox to disable these custom drawn widgets. Developing cross-toolkit applications on *nix is alot more work and requires more consideration. Windows has a standard fall back look provided by 'window styles' that match the users (albeit rather limited) choice of theme for their Windows environment.
Having a natively available GUI 'toolkit', that is guarentueed to be available is the advantage. *nix (ok so technically Linux and BSD) by it's nature not being a fully fledged OS & environment just can't guarentee or seem to care about this. And there are too many distros to co-ordinate such an effort, even if alot of them did want to take part.
I'm a new fBSD/XFCE (GTK based) user, and find it very frustrating how I have only QTConfig (which I got as a.deb, and converted to.tar) to configure the appearance of my QT/KDE apps. It has no clear instruction on how to install new widget styles or even a way to change various colours for 3D objects, scrollbars, text, etc manually like you can on Windows. Unless you happen to run a distro (Linux) where it's been done for you (thereby giving you the same limited choice Windows offers, doesn't Fedora only have 3 toolkit consistant themes?) you're pretty much left to your own devices to do it via very unfriendly methods.
The XFCE window manager widgets can be customised in a painting app fairly easily if you have the time but there is no XFCE provided interface to do so. It's a shame because *nix and the open source community has the most potential motivation to get the tools for each desktop environment to do these things developed.
It's one thing not to want all Linux desktops having a default grey or fisher-price interface, but even more ridiculous to have the user have choose themes for every toolkit individually and not provide them with the tools to customise all these styles in a easy universal way.
I'm relatively new to unix-OS's. I tried almost a dozen Linux distros and ended up getting annoyed with the sheer amount of 'choice'. (Off on a tangent I reckon Windows Vista with umpteen versions could suffer in the same manner).
I'm used to picking up an OS CD, installing it and having a base to work with that's minimal. No matter what distro of Linux I try I feel like i'm using somebody elses machine, not mine. With FreeBSD I started from scratch installed X, a desktop environment (XFCE) and all my apps. I felt it was a good comprimise between a a Linux distro and Linux from Scratch. The FreeBSD handbook guided me through a kernel recompile with no hassle and everything I needed to get going in the first 2 days. To me this was alot less confusing and worthwhile (in terms of actually learning something) than all the Linux distributions I tried. It's a "Here's how you get going with FBSD" experience as opposed to "Here's your Linux machine, enjoy!" one. It wasn't as satisfying going into the plethora of open source software out there without that.
Sure there probably are Linux distro's that have package managers as good ad FBSD's ports tree, and FBSD of course owes alot to Linux, but all the time FreeBSD runs everything I try labelled Linux that I try and all the time the OS gives me no hassle, i'm going to keep using it.
FreeBSD 6.0 is on the way with improved wireless support (apparently) and after the other day's post of FUSE (file system in user space) on Linux I looked it up for FreeBSD..and hey it has FUSE to (i haven't tried it).
I'd say my FreeBSD/Windows usage is about 70/30 atm, and increasing.
"an environment where they have control over and visibility into every aspect of their computing environment."...and yet I can't find a window manager, desktop manager, generally a gui system that I really like that will run well (atleast quite as well as MS Explorer, which still seems more responsive) on old hardware. I appreciate..no..i really like the philosophy behind, and the diversity of, the unix-like environment, but until such a beast exists I will not be joining the unix fanclub.
p.s. Currently dual booting Win2k with FreeBSD 5.4 + XFCE + fluxbox combi (and not particularly loving it)
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 1
It amuses me that on your machine has a OO startup time is "5-7 seconds". I just tried it on an old Windows 2000 machine with 128MB's of RAM with a PII 233 Mhz gut. It took 21 seconds from being clicked to being completely ready and disk silence.
These processes of course have a lot of influencing factors, but I'd say a 10 fold increase in the number of clock cycles (not forgetting new instruction sets and processing tricks) and 8x the (hopefully) available RAM, for only a 3 fold increase in application loading time, is a definate indication that the bottleneck lies in software.
I'm perfectly happy with office application performance on that box (yes of course I have another more duper machine), it's rather worrying how minimum specs have increased for a huge number of apps that IMHO, don't need the processing power. Perhaps it's just that programmers are becoming (by nurture or by nature?) sloppier or more reliant on huge (possibly unnecessary?) abstract layers of code.
P.S. For the record, MS Word 2003 starts in 7 secs. This means all the time you're using OO and i'm using Word, my P2 is just as satisfying as your much more beefy machine? Worrying indeed.
The HTTP protocol does not place any a priori limit on the length of
a URI. Servers MUST be able to handle the URI of any resource they
serve, and SHOULD be able to handle URIs of unbounded length if they
provide GET-based forms that could generate such URIs. A server
SHOULD return 414 (Request-URI Too Long) status if a URI is longer
than the server can handle (see section 10.4.15).
Note: Servers ought to be cautious about depending on URI lengths
above 255 bytes, because some older client or proxy
implementations might not properly support these lengths.
Anonymous political discussion is surely very small part of any noteworthy political movement. Anyone can criticise the government but it usually takes someone with balls to take bold and public action before anyone actually cares enough to bring about change.
The ideal network for such things is a normal one which isn't known to to the opposition (the authorities) and has a trust system built around it. Simple as that. If you create an solely anonymous network like freenet, you're begging for negative attention. Eventually someone will come to the conclusion that this thing is more bad than good and shut it down/firewall it (China style, I doubt there is a P2P protocol out there that can't be blocked more easily than such a block can be evaded).
If you can't ensure your network is going to stay secret your only real defense is to load it up with good stuff so it becomes infeasible to shutdown. Commercial interests are ideal for this. There is alot of nasty shit on the net, but you can't get rid of it all for sheer volume without interferring with the 'good' stuff too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, thiiss more Joe size from the film Mighty Joe Young.
Well if he thought he only had so long to live, he might want the compensation to pay for all the things he did thinking he wouldn't have to face a more serious consequence than an early death.
Yet another Ask Slashdot submission with not enough information about your circumstances or reasoning to offer any kind of truly insightful response... except perhaps this one.
- What does the code do? Why is it important it is protected?
- Do these students actually need root access, or is it just management laziness on your/your companies/the universities part?
- Would these students actually care enough to bother doing anything with this code?
- Have you considered a jail/sandbox/some kind of secure system emulator?
- What is wrong with perl2exe (Windows only?) or the ActiveState compiler?
- Why can you not get the students to sign a user (non-disclosure?) agreement in good faith (agree not use the box for malicious purposes, intentionally damage the system, or steal your code etc)? Is this not covered already by the unniversity network's user agreement?
I personally can't invision a program that could be SO mission critical that you are considering puting on an open box AT ALL. Presumeably it isn't that critical, so why not persaude your company to make an exception in licensing in this case and let it go.
Who knows one of the students might find some obscure bug and make a suggestion on how you can fix it, or help you make some other such improvement.
designers typically like dark colour schemes and small font sizes much more than everybody else
;D
I quite like white and greys myself. With splashings of colour. But then again, I suck
Why yes...yes it is.
Noone bother explaining the composition of Mac OSX AGAIN. Look it up if you're curious, it's like +5 redundant already.
It's now of course that I read you're a freelance designer. :} so hopefully I have made no crazy assumptions about your profession.
It strikes me that maybe we are viewing OSWD from different perspectives (me as a consumer and you as a critic (in a nice way) and probably potentially very skilled/experienced contributor).
Lets see what happens, at the least you have pushed some ideas out there. oswd.org has an announcement at the moment from Frank, the whole thing seems petty and misguided.
OSWD has stumbled because most of the work was falling on one person, who didn't have access to all of the resources need to keep the site going. There was no open source effort.
The reason months went by with no designs being approved was because this guy was away. But just before the site went down it was buzzing with new designs daily, most of which were of a reasonably high standard, XHTML, CSS etc.Follow the link in the main article via the blog and you will see some pretty 'professional' designs.
I believe designs had to validate and look 'right' in ALL of the big browsers too (Thank Firefox's popularity for that).
Copyrighting a layout or a visual style is somewhat difficult, there is a certain level of inspiration that can be obtained under the scope copyright laws. I believe one of the complaints from OSWD contributors was people 'ripping off' their designs without any acknowledgement, most ask for atleast some acknowledgement of their work or of OSWD.
You make some good bullet points about improving the system, let's hope it'll be reborn with some of them.
It's on slashdot because there is a huge overlap between web geeks (mostly PHP,Perl,Ruby scripters) and /.ers. Alot of these web geeks tend to have poor web design skills (just click on alot of the commenters homepage links and you will see), hence the need for web templates.
Quite frankly OSWD.org was/is the best free web template website i've found. It has/had a nice little community, an neat interface and creative contributors who actually cared about standards like XHTML and CSS.
You insensitive clod.
Most of the time the light would still be operating on the good old light speed. But for it to work in computers you still would have to slow it down in places and even stop it. For example to let another beam of light to pass before it can go through.
I don't quite see where you're getting this idea from. It's a bit barmy to imagine current electonic processors firing two lines at the same time and then having an 'electron traffic light' to let one signal pass by making another wait. This may sound like a switch but it's not, because at no point are you actually 'stopping' electrons. If you don't produce a voltage your electrons aren't going to move in a current, so you haven't stopped them because you never fired them to start with. As i'm sure you realise, in digital electronics data transmission is acheived by voltage state. Changing state from 0 to 1 happens because you apply a voltage, and 0 to 1 because you stop applying it. With photonics, the equivalent must be turning the source on and off?
It may be beyond my knowledge of physic's but slowing down light within an optical processor (to better interface with other devices or traditional electronics or whatever) sounds like an alternative to having light signals running at a lower frequency (more time spent in each state so peripherals can spot signals). Slowing down light and introducing a delta velocity surely means we need a way to buffer light, much like a capacitor stores charge?
Fear not the great uncleansed will be impressed with IE7. You may even be surprised how many firefox users it pulls back...
There is a fundamental difference. The apps you mention look like they do because the programmer decided to use custom widgets, and it's easy for this programmer to provide a simple checkbox to disable these custom drawn widgets. Developing cross-toolkit applications on *nix is alot more work and requires more consideration. Windows has a standard fall back look provided by 'window styles' that match the users (albeit rather limited) choice of theme for their Windows environment.
.deb, and converted to .tar) to configure the appearance of my QT/KDE apps. It has no clear instruction on how to install new widget styles or even a way to change various colours for 3D objects, scrollbars, text, etc manually like you can on Windows. Unless you happen to run a distro (Linux) where it's been done for you (thereby giving you the same limited choice Windows offers, doesn't Fedora only have 3 toolkit consistant themes?) you're pretty much left to your own devices to do it via very unfriendly methods.
Having a natively available GUI 'toolkit', that is guarentueed to be available is the advantage. *nix (ok so technically Linux and BSD) by it's nature not being a fully fledged OS & environment just can't guarentee or seem to care about this. And there are too many distros to co-ordinate such an effort, even if alot of them did want to take part.
I'm a new fBSD/XFCE (GTK based) user, and find it very frustrating how I have only QTConfig (which I got as a
The XFCE window manager widgets can be customised in a painting app fairly easily if you have the time but there is no XFCE provided interface to do so. It's a shame because *nix and the open source community has the most potential motivation to get the tools for each desktop environment to do these things developed.
It's one thing not to want all Linux desktops having a default grey or fisher-price interface, but even more ridiculous to have the user have choose themes for every toolkit individually and not provide them with the tools to customise all these styles in a easy universal way.
I'm relatively new to unix-OS's. I tried almost a dozen Linux distros and ended up getting annoyed with the sheer amount of 'choice'. (Off on a tangent I reckon Windows Vista with umpteen versions could suffer in the same manner).
I'm used to picking up an OS CD, installing it and having a base to work with that's minimal. No matter what distro of Linux I try I feel like i'm using somebody elses machine, not mine. With FreeBSD I started from scratch installed X, a desktop environment (XFCE) and all my apps. I felt it was a good comprimise between a a Linux distro and Linux from Scratch. The FreeBSD handbook guided me through a kernel recompile with no hassle and everything I needed to get going in the first 2 days. To me this was alot less confusing and worthwhile (in terms of actually learning something) than all the Linux distributions I tried. It's a "Here's how you get going with FBSD" experience as opposed to "Here's your Linux machine, enjoy!" one. It wasn't as satisfying going into the plethora of open source software out there without that.
Sure there probably are Linux distro's that have package managers as good ad FBSD's ports tree, and FBSD of course owes alot to Linux, but all the time FreeBSD runs everything I try labelled Linux that I try and all the time the OS gives me no hassle, i'm going to keep using it.
FreeBSD 6.0 is on the way with improved wireless support (apparently) and after the other day's post of FUSE (file system in user space) on Linux I looked it up for FreeBSD..and hey it has FUSE to (i haven't tried it).
I'd say my FreeBSD/Windows usage is about 70/30 atm, and increasing.
Then the programmers should say it'll take a week when it'll only really take a day ;).
Ah yes but the 12.5 million (5%) embracing science have an ample supply of orbital brain lasers
This whole article assumes of course that it's even possible to define or benchmark 'intelligence'.
"an environment where they have control over and visibility into every aspect of their computing environment." ...and yet I can't find a window manager, desktop manager, generally a gui system that I really like that will run well (atleast quite as well as MS Explorer, which still seems more responsive) on old hardware. I appreciate..no..i really like the philosophy behind, and the diversity of, the unix-like environment, but until such a beast exists I will not be joining the unix fanclub.
p.s. Currently dual booting Win2k with FreeBSD 5.4 + XFCE + fluxbox combi (and not particularly loving it)
It amuses me that on your machine has a OO startup time is "5-7 seconds". I just tried it on an old Windows 2000 machine with 128MB's of RAM with a PII 233 Mhz gut. It took 21 seconds from being clicked to being completely ready and disk silence.
These processes of course have a lot of influencing factors, but I'd say a 10 fold increase in the number of clock cycles (not forgetting new instruction sets and processing tricks) and 8x the (hopefully) available RAM, for only a 3 fold increase in application loading time, is a definate indication that the bottleneck lies in software.
I'm perfectly happy with office application performance on that box (yes of course I have another more duper machine), it's rather worrying how minimum specs have increased for a huge number of apps that IMHO, don't need the processing power. Perhaps it's just that programmers are becoming (by nurture or by nature?) sloppier or more reliant on huge (possibly unnecessary?) abstract layers of code.
P.S. For the record, MS Word 2003 starts in 7 secs. This means all the time you're using OO and i'm using Word, my P2 is just as satisfying as your much more beefy machine? Worrying indeed.
Great so when they whop up the knob on their microwave radiator your hair catches fire.
From RFC2616 (HTTP/1.0):
The HTTP protocol does not place any a priori limit on the length of
a URI. Servers MUST be able to handle the URI of any resource they
serve, and SHOULD be able to handle URIs of unbounded length if they
provide GET-based forms that could generate such URIs. A server
SHOULD return 414 (Request-URI Too Long) status if a URI is longer
than the server can handle (see section 10.4.15).
Note: Servers ought to be cautious about depending on URI lengths
above 255 bytes, because some older client or proxy
implementations might not properly support these lengths.
You are aware that RFC valid URL's have a maximum length..right?
I can't be arsed to look it up but off the top of my head I think it's =256 characters.
Anonymous political discussion is surely very small part of any noteworthy political movement. Anyone can criticise the government but it usually takes someone with balls to take bold and public action before anyone actually cares enough to bring about change.
The ideal network for such things is a normal one which isn't known to to the opposition (the authorities) and has a trust system built around it. Simple as that. If you create an solely anonymous network like freenet, you're begging for negative attention. Eventually someone will come to the conclusion that this thing is more bad than good and shut it down/firewall it (China style, I doubt there is a P2P protocol out there that can't be blocked more easily than such a block can be evaded).
If you can't ensure your network is going to stay secret your only real defense is to load it up with good stuff so it becomes infeasible to shutdown. Commercial interests are ideal for this. There is alot of nasty shit on the net, but you can't get rid of it all for sheer volume without interferring with the 'good' stuff too.
"The binary opposite of the color 'black' is 'not black'."
That would be the boolean opposite of black, not the binary opposite/two's complement of black. Whatever you define black to be.
Why can you create an account using the API anyway? Is this a necessity?
Even if there is a good reason for this capability, surely just throwing in a image (or sound) verification stage will make your problem will go away?
If I invented Data i'd patent it too.