If they did not do this, they would be pissing in their own soup and Microsoft would never talk to them again.
Well considering how difficult Linux is for the average user who has been using Windows all their life if they started endorsing Linux they might have something to write about. I remember that I had a subscription to them for a year and the only thing I ever would read was the latest Dvorak rant.
It's just the latest spam attack on slashdot. I would be real surprised if their slashdot spaming got them even one recurring visiter. It'll end, they always do.
I'm no radio expert but from what I understand of electronics yes there is a very good reason. Sine waves are the natural building blocks of waves. When using Fourier Analysis you can see any wave as a sum of sine waves. So when you make a perfect square wave it comes up as in infinite number of different sine waves. Band-pass filters are the way that electronics can select the bandwith it uses from the air. The section of waves is a section of sine waves. Basically anything that is not a sine wave is a bunch of sine waves and it will introduce noise in to other band widths.
I remember reading somewhere about what Nintendo had to say about the shortage. It went something along the lines that knew it was coming but to prevent it they would have to open up a new factory. If the shortage is only for this holiday the cost of opening a new factory would not out weigh the money they would make. Also the factory would only be able to open after the holidays. So they went with taking the conservative road on it by not opening a new and hoping for the best. At the moment they are at full production. You can see that because if you REALLY need one you can get it, after going through the normal holiday hell. You will have to either camp out on expected ship days, get a bundle, or neurotically check web sites. I have a friend who just got one by going the web site route.
More importantly you have to make the Light to Electricity transfer. Since this will be highly costly you need to have far more energy coming in then before. I'm guessing the reason they are still looking at this is because light disperses easier then electricity. Electricity can build up and then spark. Light only heats up as far as I know. So as long as the tank can cool it should be ok.
Just a random thought here but thinking along the lines of the Futurama reasoning for "Don't date Robots!!!" and mixing in Idiocracy evolution logic two wrongs might make a right. If you give all the stupid people robots to have sex with they can't make more stupid people. Hell for the real stupid people we can just recycle the robots.
I would love to see some better TV out there but I get the feeling that WGA writers are not to blame for shitty TV. A lot of the shows that I like such as the Daily show, House, Family guy and the Simpsons are down from the WGA strike but other shitty shows are still up and running. It seems like WGA writers make for better TV not worse.
First generation - packet filters...
it filters each packet based only on information contained in the packet itself (most commonly using a combination of the packet's source and destination address, its protocol, and, for TCP and UDP traffic, which comprises most internet communication, the port number).
Second generation - "stateful" filters...
Thats form http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall. So basically what you and MS are saying is that because the firewall system they have is so out dated you can't even call it a firewall anymore? So is a car with out an Air conditioner not a car? What about a laptop with no wireless?
The result is that our code ONLY works right in IE.
It's just that I have experimented with other browsers and found so many major issues.
On a side note there is still a major problem with designing for IE. If IE has a problem with something you want to do you have no idea of how to fix it. You have to just take shots in the dark until you find some wacky setup that works. With anything else you can look at the spec. But with IE it's more like Voodoo then programing.
You are right. The part that might surprise you is that I think Opera is counting on that. I am currently doing some web development work. The biggest problem we run in to is the weird crazy shit that IE does. I run our pages on IE, FireFox, Safari, and Opera. By far IE is the BIGGEST pain in the ass. Why? It does not follow the standards at all. It just laughs at you. "oh you want that over there. Haha that's funny. Keep dreaming." It flat out ignores some HTML. Your code can be fucking perfect according to the W3C standards but IE just does not care. So what happens? People have started to code to IE and just IE. I know for a fact that I am the only person here who even tried to use Safari and Opera on our pages. The result is that our code ONLY works right in IE. This is why FireFox dominates the alternate browser market. It's slower, bigger and just not as cool as Opera but it can work like IE to the point where finding a page that it does not render correctly is a rare thing. The problem with IE's browser dominance is not that other browsers want to get shipped with Windows but that they get thrown to the side for doing the right thing.
The DS chat works very well. The problem is that it's local. You can only chat with people in the same room as you. People who are so close you have no reason to talk to them. In addition they need to be sitting and waiting in the chat room for someone to talk to. Not a lot of fun so no one does it. The only time I have used it for any kind of real reason was to talk to my friends in class with out bugging the prof. But after about 2 minutes on it we all would just say fuck it and start a game of Mario kart. The only story of it's use that makes any real sense to me is at cons. Where you are looking to randomly start talking to people you don't know. And even then it's kind of dumb.
I'm sure the OLPC chat is just a normal chat program. I'm sure it has a server somewhere and can work all across the world with just an internet connection, Just like AIM or gTalk. I'm willing to bet it can also do the local talk thing like the DS. Since it was designed with the idea of giant mesh networks in mind it should work way better.
I know it's a minor point but it then changes who you blame for the issue. Currently it's Open Office that does not work right. You can't argue it. The spec is 'work like MS office' and it does not. But OOXML has a spec. So when the MS software deviates the MS software will be provably wrong. Like with the acid 2 test. When Firefox 3 comes out IE will be the only browser that does not correctly support HTML. And when they can't pass the OOXML acid 2 test equivalent there will be extra egg on there face for having written the standard in the first place. The people who wrote the OOXML standard not being able to implement it will show just how bad it is.
It's been my experience that does not support office formats well. Mostly for images and tables. I have had many experiences where I open up a.doc only to find that the images are on top of each other. With any luck a formal spec, as convoluted and stupid as it is, would help fix this problem. I commonly recommend that people try using Open Office before they run out a buy MS Office. Half of them end up having so many problems with.docs that they have to get MS Office anyway. I am not saying that it's a good standard just that MS making an open standard at all is a benefit for Linux adaption in the long run. I'm also giving Miguel the benefit of the doubt here by saying that he might be supporting MS standards so that a switch from Windows to Linux becomes easier for people.
This should help. A quick bit of text from Miguel him self from the link on his endorsement of OOXML that the article refers to.
I made that comment on my blog because that reflects my personal opinion. You really need to obsess over something else.
And before someone brings up the Microsoft connection, you should know that Novell official policy is to actively endorse ODF and that Novell's position on OOXML is neutral.
So it looks like Novell works on implementing Microsoft stuff but does not officially think you should use it. Miguel thinks that MS does a good job every so often and Linux should work with MS standards.
I don't agree with the good job part but think about it. If MS switches over to OOXML and Linux can support it just as well as Windows who needs Windows? The same logic works with.NET. I am aware that this is easier said then done but it has been done before
I am currently working on code that was written in just that environment. It's a mess. All the people who would know how the code works left because they just could not take it anymore. The code is also very buggy and tends to have massive issues all the time. Every few weeks there is a new crisis. The problem with this style is not how the code is now but how the code will be in 3 years. Even if you wrote it you are not likely to remember every part of it after that amount of time. And comments? It's rare that you can find one. When you do it's always from the same few people. You can actually tell who wrote something just on the formating alone. It gives you an idea of how painful something will be ahead of time. If we did not recently get a new boss who knows what hes doing there would likely have been no chance to recover. "Get it out the door yesterday" means your code will crumble tomorrow.
True but considering that Wikipedia is run by the Wikipedia foundation and the current 'ruling class' is not necessarily part of that foundation I think the idea applies here. How ever it seems that while no official ties exist both are very buddy buddy. So for change to happen knowledge of these admin abuses would need to become common, for example a major story in the NY Times. If this happened Jimbo might need to consider a massive change to keep things going and to keep the donations coming. Remember we keep Wikipedia running by donating to it and supporting it. The more stories like this I hear about the more I will start telling people to go elsewhere for information. No viewers means no donations means no Wikipedia.
Yes but Java does the same kind of thing and is considered a programing language by most. While it seems obvious to a lot of people where the lines are a lot of other people are going to war over a few square feet. Hypothetical arguments are the worst kind of argument, no one can ever win.
Yeah. I think the best solution is to put a 'ruling class' in place but to make sure all of their communication is public. If it's found that people are discussing Wikipedia not on Wikipedia they get a temp ban. It's by no means a perfect fix but with out someone in charge somewhere people will form their own little gangs. It just seems to be human nature.
On a side note, I would love to see Jimbo himself make comment on all this. He seems to have totally given up on Slashdot with his last post. It would be nice to know what is going in the depth of Wikipedia land from it's creator.
You're right. So I say give it to them in the next model and watch them dig their own hole. It'll be as funny as Vista is. The thing will run like a rock and be a total disaster. It'll be expensive for Microsoft trying to get it to work and expensive for the people who fall for their crap. As an added comedic bonus once people realize that they can't get Windows to work well on these computers the Gates Foundation might end up paying for Linux OLPCs. In any case it'll give people just experiencing computers for the first time a true idea of what Windows is like in comparison to Linux.
you could have bought just about anything you needed at the student discount prices
Nope. We just had computer labs everywhere. They were open from 7:00am to 2:30am. Yes that is 2:30AM. I should know, i usually worked that shift. There were also a few labs that you could get in to with a key code you got the first day of that class. But those were class specific and rare. Lastly there was a central Unix server that (for select classes) we had to submit our work to via SSH. Some professors set up their own crazy set ups too. One set up about 20 different *nix flavors so we could log in to each one and test how well our code compiled and ran on different types of systems.
I was doing both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. I loved both so I ended up taking as many classes in as many different things as I could. I ended up graduating with 209 credits when I only needed 126. The Electrical Engineering software was several thousand dollars for one piece of software that I would only use for one class. The best I was able to do was ever able to do was to get a matlab competitor from the school. Since we were learning matlab it honestly was not much help. In the end I ignored it and just did all the work in the computer labs. On the other hand all the Computer Science software was free and mostly Open Source. The end result was that I gradually did more and more CS classes and ignored EE. I could set up what ever I needed on my laptop and work were and when I wanted. In the end the EE classes were just not as fun. It was too hard to play with what I was learning in my free time.
I think the key is that he/she is trying to teach. I just recently graduated from college and had to use A LOT of very expensive impressive software. I would have loved to do some of it from home and to continue to learn about things on my own. But I was not going to spend $1000 to play with some software. So the result? I STOPPED LEARNING THAT STUFF. Go for things the kids can continue to learn from on their own. Plus when working on my own I've gotten better (and free) help on Open Source stuff then on other types of software. So unless you plan to be their only teacher on the subject, use as much Open Source as you can. Only if you cant find an Open Source version should you use the pay for stuff.
I am a separate Digg reader. Yes I do. Keep in mind there is also a lot stories on there that bash the hell out of MS and show off cool new things in Linux. It's like the vegan argument being made elsewhere. Yes I know that Digg has ties to things I wish it did not but if I always let things like that stop me then I would be living in a far more restricted life on the net. Hell, I remember seeing advertisements for MS studio on Slashdot. They might not have been from MS but since it's supporting MS in slightest should I have turned away?
Yeah I know the feeling. Their OS sucks in such a weird way. It's not that it can't do things it's just that it's so unpleasant when ever you use it to do anything. I had a friend who was moving to Verizon a little after I made the same move. We were both in positions where we HAD to switch to Verizon. I warned him that I got the env and while the phone it self is ok but the OS sucks and is almost all their phones. I showed him the phone and he did not think it was that bad. But the day he got it he called me to tell me how much he hated it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just the latest spam attack on slashdot. I would be real surprised if their slashdot spaming got them even one recurring visiter. It'll end, they always do.
I'm no radio expert but from what I understand of electronics yes there is a very good reason. Sine waves are the natural building blocks of waves. When using Fourier Analysis you can see any wave as a sum of sine waves. So when you make a perfect square wave it comes up as in infinite number of different sine waves. Band-pass filters are the way that electronics can select the bandwith it uses from the air. The section of waves is a section of sine waves. Basically anything that is not a sine wave is a bunch of sine waves and it will introduce noise in to other band widths.
I remember reading somewhere about what Nintendo had to say about the shortage. It went something along the lines that knew it was coming but to prevent it they would have to open up a new factory. If the shortage is only for this holiday the cost of opening a new factory would not out weigh the money they would make. Also the factory would only be able to open after the holidays. So they went with taking the conservative road on it by not opening a new and hoping for the best. At the moment they are at full production. You can see that because if you REALLY need one you can get it, after going through the normal holiday hell. You will have to either camp out on expected ship days, get a bundle, or neurotically check web sites. I have a friend who just got one by going the web site route.
More importantly you have to make the Light to Electricity transfer. Since this will be highly costly you need to have far more energy coming in then before. I'm guessing the reason they are still looking at this is because light disperses easier then electricity. Electricity can build up and then spark. Light only heats up as far as I know. So as long as the tank can cool it should be ok.
They said two. Your just reading in the wrong base.
Just a random thought here but thinking along the lines of the Futurama reasoning for "Don't date Robots!!!" and mixing in Idiocracy evolution logic two wrongs might make a right. If you give all the stupid people robots to have sex with they can't make more stupid people. Hell for the real stupid people we can just recycle the robots.
I would love to see some better TV out there but I get the feeling that WGA writers are not to blame for shitty TV. A lot of the shows that I like such as the Daily show, House, Family guy and the Simpsons are down from the WGA strike but other shitty shows are still up and running. It seems like WGA writers make for better TV not worse.
The list of hurting shows
On a side note there is still a major problem with designing for IE. If IE has a problem with something you want to do you have no idea of how to fix it. You have to just take shots in the dark until you find some wacky setup that works. With anything else you can look at the spec. But with IE it's more like Voodoo then programing.
You are right. The part that might surprise you is that I think Opera is counting on that. I am currently doing some web development work. The biggest problem we run in to is the weird crazy shit that IE does. I run our pages on IE, FireFox, Safari, and Opera. By far IE is the BIGGEST pain in the ass. Why? It does not follow the standards at all. It just laughs at you. "oh you want that over there. Haha that's funny. Keep dreaming." It flat out ignores some HTML. Your code can be fucking perfect according to the W3C standards but IE just does not care. So what happens? People have started to code to IE and just IE. I know for a fact that I am the only person here who even tried to use Safari and Opera on our pages. The result is that our code ONLY works right in IE. This is why FireFox dominates the alternate browser market. It's slower, bigger and just not as cool as Opera but it can work like IE to the point where finding a page that it does not render correctly is a rare thing. The problem with IE's browser dominance is not that other browsers want to get shipped with Windows but that they get thrown to the side for doing the right thing.
The DS chat works very well. The problem is that it's local. You can only chat with people in the same room as you. People who are so close you have no reason to talk to them. In addition they need to be sitting and waiting in the chat room for someone to talk to. Not a lot of fun so no one does it. The only time I have used it for any kind of real reason was to talk to my friends in class with out bugging the prof. But after about 2 minutes on it we all would just say fuck it and start a game of Mario kart. The only story of it's use that makes any real sense to me is at cons. Where you are looking to randomly start talking to people you don't know. And even then it's kind of dumb.
I'm sure the OLPC chat is just a normal chat program. I'm sure it has a server somewhere and can work all across the world with just an internet connection, Just like AIM or gTalk. I'm willing to bet it can also do the local talk thing like the DS. Since it was designed with the idea of giant mesh networks in mind it should work way better.
I know it's a minor point but it then changes who you blame for the issue. Currently it's Open Office that does not work right. You can't argue it. The spec is 'work like MS office' and it does not. But OOXML has a spec. So when the MS software deviates the MS software will be provably wrong. Like with the acid 2 test. When Firefox 3 comes out IE will be the only browser that does not correctly support HTML. And when they can't pass the OOXML acid 2 test equivalent there will be extra egg on there face for having written the standard in the first place. The people who wrote the OOXML standard not being able to implement it will show just how bad it is.
It's been my experience that does not support office formats well. Mostly for images and tables. I have had many experiences where I open up a .doc only to find that the images are on top of each other. With any luck a formal spec, as convoluted and stupid as it is, would help fix this problem. I commonly recommend that people try using Open Office before they run out a buy MS Office. Half of them end up having so many problems with .docs that they have to get MS Office anyway. I am not saying that it's a good standard just that MS making an open standard at all is a benefit for Linux adaption in the long run. I'm also giving Miguel the benefit of the doubt here by saying that he might be supporting MS standards so that a switch from Windows to Linux becomes easier for people.
I don't agree with the good job part but think about it. If MS switches over to OOXML and Linux can support it just as well as Windows who needs Windows? The same logic works with
I am currently working on code that was written in just that environment. It's a mess. All the people who would know how the code works left because they just could not take it anymore. The code is also very buggy and tends to have massive issues all the time. Every few weeks there is a new crisis. The problem with this style is not how the code is now but how the code will be in 3 years. Even if you wrote it you are not likely to remember every part of it after that amount of time. And comments? It's rare that you can find one. When you do it's always from the same few people. You can actually tell who wrote something just on the formating alone. It gives you an idea of how painful something will be ahead of time. If we did not recently get a new boss who knows what hes doing there would likely have been no chance to recover. "Get it out the door yesterday" means your code will crumble tomorrow.
True but considering that Wikipedia is run by the Wikipedia foundation and the current 'ruling class' is not necessarily part of that foundation I think the idea applies here. How ever it seems that while no official ties exist both are very buddy buddy. So for change to happen knowledge of these admin abuses would need to become common, for example a major story in the NY Times. If this happened Jimbo might need to consider a massive change to keep things going and to keep the donations coming. Remember we keep Wikipedia running by donating to it and supporting it. The more stories like this I hear about the more I will start telling people to go elsewhere for information. No viewers means no donations means no Wikipedia.
Yes but Java does the same kind of thing and is considered a programing language by most. While it seems obvious to a lot of people where the lines are a lot of other people are going to war over a few square feet. Hypothetical arguments are the worst kind of argument, no one can ever win.
Yeah. I think the best solution is to put a 'ruling class' in place but to make sure all of their communication is public. If it's found that people are discussing Wikipedia not on Wikipedia they get a temp ban. It's by no means a perfect fix but with out someone in charge somewhere people will form their own little gangs. It just seems to be human nature.
On a side note, I would love to see Jimbo himself make comment on all this. He seems to have totally given up on Slashdot with his last post. It would be nice to know what is going in the depth of Wikipedia land from it's creator.
Once as a boy I was told something about absolute power...now how did that go again?
You're right. So I say give it to them in the next model and watch them dig their own hole. It'll be as funny as Vista is. The thing will run like a rock and be a total disaster. It'll be expensive for Microsoft trying to get it to work and expensive for the people who fall for their crap. As an added comedic bonus once people realize that they can't get Windows to work well on these computers the Gates Foundation might end up paying for Linux OLPCs. In any case it'll give people just experiencing computers for the first time a true idea of what Windows is like in comparison to Linux.
I was doing both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. I loved both so I ended up taking as many classes in as many different things as I could. I ended up graduating with 209 credits when I only needed 126. The Electrical Engineering software was several thousand dollars for one piece of software that I would only use for one class. The best I was able to do was ever able to do was to get a matlab competitor from the school. Since we were learning matlab it honestly was not much help. In the end I ignored it and just did all the work in the computer labs. On the other hand all the Computer Science software was free and mostly Open Source. The end result was that I gradually did more and more CS classes and ignored EE. I could set up what ever I needed on my laptop and work were and when I wanted. In the end the EE classes were just not as fun. It was too hard to play with what I was learning in my free time.
I think the key is that he/she is trying to teach. I just recently graduated from college and had to use A LOT of very expensive impressive software. I would have loved to do some of it from home and to continue to learn about things on my own. But I was not going to spend $1000 to play with some software. So the result? I STOPPED LEARNING THAT STUFF. Go for things the kids can continue to learn from on their own. Plus when working on my own I've gotten better (and free) help on Open Source stuff then on other types of software. So unless you plan to be their only teacher on the subject, use as much Open Source as you can. Only if you cant find an Open Source version should you use the pay for stuff.
I am a separate Digg reader. Yes I do. Keep in mind there is also a lot stories on there that bash the hell out of MS and show off cool new things in Linux. It's like the vegan argument being made elsewhere. Yes I know that Digg has ties to things I wish it did not but if I always let things like that stop me then I would be living in a far more restricted life on the net. Hell, I remember seeing advertisements for MS studio on Slashdot. They might not have been from MS but since it's supporting MS in slightest should I have turned away?
Yeah I know the feeling. Their OS sucks in such a weird way. It's not that it can't do things it's just that it's so unpleasant when ever you use it to do anything. I had a friend who was moving to Verizon a little after I made the same move. We were both in positions where we HAD to switch to Verizon. I warned him that I got the env and while the phone it self is ok but the OS sucks and is almost all their phones. I showed him the phone and he did not think it was that bad. But the day he got it he called me to tell me how much he hated it.