I sort of agree. Grammar checkers are often inaccurate in the situations when you need them the most -- i.e. when you're using advanced or unusual grammar constructs. Also, people tend to trust their grammar checker when they're unsure -- even if the suggestions are incorrect.
OTOH, grammar checkers can be very useful when you're not writing in your native language, especially if the language is highly inflexive (and regular).
Actually, currently 156 states have signed the Berne Convention. I can't find a list of non-signees, but at least Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Ethiopia and Somaila are missing. Anyway, I doubt there are many non-Berne countries with any significant computer usage.
Of course, signing a convention and actually complying it are two different things...
Actually, I think it's pretty useful that cell phones warns you when your battery is running low. At least on the Nokias I've used, the warning sound means you have a few more seconds to go, meaning you can end the conversation in a meaningful way. Or say stuff like "My cell phone is dying, call Alice inst...".
Of course, the warning signal shouldn't be loud enough to make you deaf...
Maybe, maybe not. As computer usage becomes more common, the number of users who don't know English well enough increases. Besides, even though non-English users might not have any problem with English user interfaces, it sucks pretty bad if you can't e.g. write/display documents in your own language.
I'm sure you would love writing emails to your friends in English, but using the Cyrillic alphabet...
When Microsoft bought Entropic, they released the source code for ESPS under a BSD-type license. ESPS is a very cool speech processing toolkit that used to be heavily used in research. Unfortunately, AFAIK the code doesn't compile out of the box. Some of the code from ESPS is however used in Snack/Wavesurfer.
Whatever, the version number ain't nothin' but a number. The only thing that matters is that it increases for every release. Of course, the easiest thing would be to just skip the minor number and increment the major number for every release.
[...]the fact that Joey Hess quit as release manager just recently[...]
AFAIK, Joey Hess was never release manager. OTOH, Anthony Towns, the previous RM recently resigned. I don't know why he chose to resign, but I'm guessing that it has to do with the fact that being RM is an extremly stressful position, and there's been various incidents, e.g. the discussion about the inclusion of non-free non-software in sarge, the attempt to force amd64 into sarge, etc. I don't know.
Has Debian hit the ceiling in terms of what a volunteer org. can acheive?
I don't see any reason to believe that.
It took *forever* for Sarge to come out[...]
So did woody. Woody was delayed because d-i wasn't anywhere near finished, and they had to pick up boot-floppies and hack it into something installable. Sarge was delayed because d-i took a while to finish -- in part because very little work was done while boot-floppies was worked on for woody.
I wonder if Joey Hess did say anything (interview, somewhere?) about all of this.
Joey has a blog where you can read his thoughts. Of course, I'm guessing you're really interested in aj's comments.
Um, in what way are they the same? They're both curses based, but in what way do pretty graphics make inte easier to install an OS?
There are many alternative ways to install Debian, if the default one doesn't suit your needs. Debian needs an installer that is flexible, powerful and portable in order to be usable by all the diverse users of Debian, not to mention the dozen or so different architectures Debian runs on.
Of course, the Debian developers could have delayed the next release a year or so in order to get a pretty graphical installer working on some platforms. I guess their priorities are different.
This one was posted in January 1999. Note that the replies are mostly along the line "Dude, that makes no sense", rather than "Enough already with all these stupid Beowulf comments!"
Just imagine, you spend years coming up with something that ou think is great. Some big company sees it and copies it. They have the money to promote it and they corner the market.
Okey, lets hypothetically assume that you have a software-related idea that's taken you years to come up with -- as opposed to most software patents in reality, which are mostly obvious solutions to the problems they solve.
So, you patent your idea and turn it into a product. However, some big company comes along and "steals" you idea. You contact your lawyer, who contacts their lawyer to get Big Company to pay for a license fee. Unfortunately, it turns out that your own product infringes on 53 of Big Company's patents, so your lawyers agree that the best solution is a cross-licensing deal, where they get to use your patent, and you get to use their 53. In the end, the only winner is: patent lawyers.
Most of the patent litigation that gets reported on slashdot is usually the other way around, heck most of it is just the potential of a patent to be used in a bad way, but there are cases where the little guy that poured his heart and soul into something was able to prevent a bigger company from ripping him off.
Have any such examples? One?
Remember, patents exist to promote innovation -- to allow inventors to spend their time working on inventions that wouldn't be possible if you couldn't prevent others from copying it. What kind of software innovation is only possible thanks to software patents?
The Gnome System Tools are separated in frontends and backends. The backends are system specific, but the frontends are supposed to basically be the same on all system. Also, this separation means that it would be possible to create a non-Gnome interface (although I don't think one exists).
If you abolish copyright, you also abolish Free Software (if there's no copyright, there's no GPL).
While it's true that eliminating copyright would also eliminate the GPL, the original idea behind copyleft was to create an environment that emulated a world without copyright. Kind of fighting copyright with copyright. Of course, the GPL has the added benifit that it requires the source code to be open.
I believe that an author should have right to his creation - I don't want to see my stuff signed by someone else. So I believe in copyright (some of it).
Well, there are two aspects to copyright: The economic rights (the right to make money off your work, and preventing others from doing the same) and the moral rights -- attribution and the right to control how your work is use, in what context etc.
The Anglosaxon style copyright has mostly been concerned with the economical aspects of copyright. Copyright is seen as a tool to promote the creation of intellectual works. The copyright tradition in Continental Europe (droit d'auteur in French), has been more concerned with the moral rights of the author to be recognized as the creator and to decide how the work is used.
It would be possible to abolish the economic monopoly of copyright, but still keep the moral rights. Of course, AFAICT The moral rights of software authors seem to be pretty limited in most countrys compared to other forms of copyrighted works.
Actually it's the other way around, Aardvark doesn't support ALSA. Had they supplied the ALSA people with sufficient specs, I'm sure your Q10 would be working in Linux right now. Have you contacted Aardvark and told them that you would be interested in support for ALSA?
[...]but there is really zero support for most of the established professional audio interfaces (i.e. Motu, Audigy, etc.).
The problem is that Motu haven't been willing to release necessary documentation. Audigy? Are you talking about Creative Labs's SoundBlaster Audigy? And using it in the same sentance as professional?
There is support in ALSA for decent audio hardware from e.g. RME (who have been very supportive of the ALSA developers), M-Audio, Echo and others. The problem is that many of the hardware makers won't release documentation, so knowing how to write a Linux driver won't help you much. The real challange is lobbying/infiltrating/black mailing the hardware makers and convince them that it isn't always a bad idea to let your customers know how to use the devices you sell them.
I believe the main difference is that components are more independent of each other. Instead of having to create a release of all the gazillion packages in the distribution simultaniously, each component can be released (more or less) independently.
Read thesetwo mailing-list postings from Ian explaining it somewhat more. But really, the Progeny guys have been really bad at actually explaining exactly what "Componentized Linux" is all about. Even though it sounds cool.
A lot of people are still on dial-up, and I suspect it'll stay that way -- especially if you look outside the developed world. Also, as someone mentioned, we'll probably see people streaming music to their cell phones or other wireless devices with limited bandwidth. Besides, regardless of how much bandwidth you have, you might not always want to use up all of it on background music. Lower bitrate audio also means that a server can serve a higher number of simutaneous listeners (assuming bandwidth is finite).
Um, Slovenia is also a very small country (with a population of ~2 million), so it's not terribly surprising that there isn't a Slovenian Nokia or such. Finland has a population of about 5 million and the land area is a lot bigger than Slovenia. In 2002 the GDP per capita was $18,000, which is the same as in Taiwan and Portugal.
It should also be noted that Slovenia was always the wealthies part of Yugoslavia.
Java is not just a compiler. There already are free Java compilers and JVMs. The important part is the class library. Reimplementing all the classes and keeping compatible is a huge task (which GNU Classpath is working on).
My point is, a free, forkable implementation of Java will happen -- with or without support from Sun. If free software people could use Sun's classes, the risk of having incompatible versions of Java (because of subtle differences in implementations or because some classes haven't been implemented yet) would be lower than it is now.
Besides, having a complete and free Java environment perhaps could keep some free software developers away from C#/.Net
Um, there are lots of ways to do this in an efficient way:
Use the same method as in Windows -- highlight text and Control-c in the first window to copy it to the clipboard and then highligt the url in the browsers localtion bar (this will copy the old url to the primery selection but leave the clipboard alone), paste with control-v.
Highlight the url, switch to the browser window, middle click anywhere in the browser window to go to the url.
Highlight url, switch to browser, press control-l (Mozilla &co) to go to the location bar, delete/backspace/control-U/control-K to delete existing url, middle click in location bar.
Highlight url, switch to browser, paste the new url before the old one (middle click), press control-k to delete the old one.
Konqueror and Firefox both have a button next to the location bar, that erases the current contents of the location bar.
If the primary selection confuses you, just dont use it! All modern applications should support copying and pasting with the clipboard.
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OTOH, grammar checkers can be very useful when you're not writing in your native language, especially if the language is highly inflexive (and regular).
Of course, signing a convention and actually complying it are two different things...
Of course, the warning signal shouldn't be loud enough to make you deaf...
I'm sure you would love writing emails to your friends in English, but using the Cyrillic alphabet...
When Microsoft bought Entropic, they released the source code for ESPS under a BSD-type license. ESPS is a very cool speech processing toolkit that used to be heavily used in research. Unfortunately, AFAIK the code doesn't compile out of the box. Some of the code from ESPS is however used in Snack/Wavesurfer.
Yeah, but you know, there are like, people living in the UK who aren't UK citizens.
Easy, just use wget to post the form, extract the returned URL with grep/sed/whatever, wget that URL, and then use LAME to encode the WAV file to MP3.
Whatever, the version number ain't nothin' but a number. The only thing that matters is that it increases for every release. Of course, the easiest thing would be to just skip the minor number and increment the major number for every release.
There are many alternative ways to install Debian, if the default one doesn't suit your needs. Debian needs an installer that is flexible, powerful and portable in order to be usable by all the diverse users of Debian, not to mention the dozen or so different architectures Debian runs on.
Of course, the Debian developers could have delayed the next release a year or so in order to get a pretty graphical installer working on some platforms. I guess their priorities are different.
So, you patent your idea and turn it into a product. However, some big company comes along and "steals" you idea. You contact your lawyer, who contacts their lawyer to get Big Company to pay for a license fee. Unfortunately, it turns out that your own product infringes on 53 of Big Company's patents, so your lawyers agree that the best solution is a cross-licensing deal, where they get to use your patent, and you get to use their 53. In the end, the only winner is: patent lawyers.
Have any such examples? One?Remember, patents exist to promote innovation -- to allow inventors to spend their time working on inventions that wouldn't be possible if you couldn't prevent others from copying it. What kind of software innovation is only possible thanks to software patents?
The Gnome System Tools are separated in frontends and backends. The backends are system specific, but the frontends are supposed to basically be the same on all system. Also, this separation means that it would be possible to create a non-Gnome interface (although I don't think one exists).
The Anglosaxon style copyright has mostly been concerned with the economical aspects of copyright. Copyright is seen as a tool to promote the creation of intellectual works. The copyright tradition in Continental Europe (droit d'auteur in French), has been more concerned with the moral rights of the author to be recognized as the creator and to decide how the work is used.
It would be possible to abolish the economic monopoly of copyright, but still keep the moral rights. Of course, AFAICT The moral rights of software authors seem to be pretty limited in most countrys compared to other forms of copyrighted works.
Actually it's the other way around, Aardvark doesn't support ALSA. Had they supplied the ALSA people with sufficient specs, I'm sure your Q10 would be working in Linux right now. Have you contacted Aardvark and told them that you would be interested in support for ALSA?
There is support in ALSA for decent audio hardware from e.g. RME (who have been very supportive of the ALSA developers), M-Audio, Echo and others. The problem is that many of the hardware makers won't release documentation, so knowing how to write a Linux driver won't help you much. The real challange is lobbying/infiltrating/black mailing the hardware makers and convince them that it isn't always a bad idea to let your customers know how to use the devices you sell them.
Read these two mailing-list postings from Ian explaining it somewhat more. But really, the Progeny guys have been really bad at actually explaining exactly what "Componentized Linux" is all about. Even though it sounds cool.
I doubt that it's Java that uses all that cpu time. Java is only used for the GUI etc. Try running matlab -nojava
Regardless of whether those "facts" are true or not, exactly how is that terrorism? Where is the terror?
A lot of people are still on dial-up, and I suspect it'll stay that way -- especially if you look outside the developed world. Also, as someone mentioned, we'll probably see people streaming music to their cell phones or other wireless devices with limited bandwidth. Besides, regardless of how much bandwidth you have, you might not always want to use up all of it on background music. Lower bitrate audio also means that a server can serve a higher number of simutaneous listeners (assuming bandwidth is finite).
Well, this one comes pretty close...
It should also be noted that Slovenia was always the wealthies part of Yugoslavia.
My point is, a free, forkable implementation of Java will happen -- with or without support from Sun. If free software people could use Sun's classes, the risk of having incompatible versions of Java (because of subtle differences in implementations or because some classes haven't been implemented yet) would be lower than it is now.
Besides, having a complete and free Java environment perhaps could keep some free software developers away from C#/.Net
- Use the same method as in Windows -- highlight text and Control-c in the first window to copy it to the clipboard and then highligt the url in the browsers localtion bar (this will copy the old url to the primery selection but leave the clipboard alone), paste with control-v.
- Highlight the url, switch to the browser window, middle click anywhere in the browser window to go to the url.
- Highlight url, switch to browser, press control-l (Mozilla &co) to go to the location bar, delete/backspace/control-U/control-K to delete existing url, middle click in location bar.
- Highlight url, switch to browser, paste the new url before the old one (middle click), press control-k to delete the old one.
- Konqueror and Firefox both have a button next to the location bar, that erases the current contents of the location bar.
If the primary selection confuses you, just dont use it! All modern applications should support copying and pasting with the clipboard.