Don't forget that the sizes are larger than most places serve... Here's another true story...
Cust (in a jovial tone): I'd like a large coffee! Me: Alright sir, how large of a coffee would you like? Cust: The biggest you've got! *I show him the 20-oz cup* Cust: Well, maybe not that big. *I show him the 16-oz cup* Cust: Ehhh..... *I show him the 12-oz cup, the smallest we have* Cust: Perfect!
Didn't entirely work for me either. I wonder if this is just a bug in their exploit code? Either way, I'm on a Macbook, so I wonder if this is Intel-specific.
dan@Reykjavik:~/Desktop$ ruby MOAB-01-01-2007.rb MOAB-01-01-2007.rb:58:in `close': closed stream (IOError)
from MOAB-01-01-2007.rb:58:in `open'
from MOAB-01-01-2007.rb:58 dan@Reykjavik:~/Desktop$/Applications/QuickTime\ Player.app/Contents/MacOS/QuickTime\ Player pwnage.qtl sh: -c: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"' sh: -c: line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of file Illegal instruction
For what it's worth, the glossy screen on the Macbooks is far superior to the matte screen available previously. Colours are crisper and more vivid, the screen is brighter, and I've never been in a situation where glare has been in an issue, whether in coffee shops, at work, on the couch at home, in the kitchen, in bed, or outdoors.
People knock the glossy screen, but in real-life use, it's far superior.
The C code shown in the movie was code from the GNOME project as well, afaik. That movie also featured cameos by Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems, as did Miguel de Icaza (who designed a lot of the screenshots used in the movie).
Ironically enough, one thing the movie does get wrong is pumping gas - by law you can't pump your own gas in Oregon, which the main characters do. I guess you can't hit all the bullseyes.;)
On my server, I use greylisting and RBLs, as well as other checks. In the span of one week, we received 128,000 e-mail attempts, 5000 of which were successful. The checks below block huge amounts of spam, to the point where I've actually removed spamassassin because the only messages it gets a chance to check are all legitimate.
For anyone who's wondering, here's what we've got going on, plus amavisd/clamav doing virus scanning. This blocks all spam I get (used to be 30-200 messages per day that Spamassassin would catch).
I recently upgraded from a Core Duo Macbook to a Core 2 Duo Macbook. Now I'm running a 64-bit chip (in 32-bit mode). When Leopard comes out, I'll be running 64-bit.
I don't notice now, because 64-bit doesn't really give me anything extra. I won't notice then either, because I can't fit more than 2G in this thing anyway. The only benefit I could see would be the ability to mmap() large files, thanks to the larger memory space. Woo.
Facetious though this post may be, when you're grepping 8.2 gigs of logs, those milliseconds add up.
On top of that, another trick that no one ever uses is alternate grep modes - fgrep specifically. When you're just grepping for a string and not a regex, use 'fgrep' or 'grep -F', and grep will just do simple string matching instead of regular expression matching. On huge logfiles, this can result in some pretty astonishing speed increases.
As with the rest of the article, it's another example of being aware of your tools, and learning to optimise your workflow.
The problem with that theory is that it doesn't make any sense. Even in the Debian world, I'll come across.deb packages that need manhandling (instalation, removal, retrieval), and the debian command-line utilities (e.g. dpkg) are always simple to use when I need to. 'dpkg -i' to install, 'dpkg -r' to remove, 'dpkg -l' to list matching packages, and 'dpkg -S' to find out what owns a file.
If you look at the output from 'dpkg --help' and compare it to RPM's, RPM provies a much longer list of options, the vast majority of which no one ever uses, burying the commonly-used functionality in a sea of terse explanation.
The RPM tool needs to be replaced - possibly with another version of the tool, but removing all the extra cruft from the way it's used. It makes no sense to say 'Well, of course it's messy because you shouldn't be using it'. If the tool exists, it should be usable.
Even with the APT frontend picking up the slack, Debian has managed to keep dpkg easily usable and keep the help options straightforward, to the point where I rarely have to dig for what I need to do. When I go to work and have to work with the package management tools on Fedora (yum on our workstations) or RHEL (RPM on our servers), I hear nothing but complaints about usability, speed, and reliability from coworkers.
RPM needs an overhaul, badly, but I doubt it'll get the one it needs.
The one thing that Microsoft does extremely well is document and provide tools to develop software for windows.(free tools such as visual c# express offer non-commercial developers a cheap IDE). It's why there is a much larger number of applications written for windows than for Unix like systems.
You must be new here. Until very recently, even the entry-level development tools were expensive and cumbersome to use. The vast majority of people who created apps for MS OSes when I was in school could only afford it because they pirated it, or (for a legit software developer friend) picked up the educational discount.
Microsoft documentation has always been necessary because their APIs are ludicrously complex and ridiculously cumbersome. One function call from the Win16 API is identical in Win32, except for subtle differences in one or two parameters, requiring developers migrating up to study the documentation like the bible to figure out where things are going wrong and why.
Microsoft is finally getting it right, and I applaud them for that, but they'd be a shining beacon of hope and joy in the world if that policy had been there for any length of time. As it is, they're just starting to get it right, but they're not there yet - after all, I can write any OS X app I like without buying any extra software to get extra features, and likewise on *NIX.
The reason there are more apps for Windows is that there's a bigger market, nothing more.
Think more along the lines of the Quake/Unreal engine licensing. Instead of every company that wants to make a game ending up with a new and usually mediocre engine offering, game designers can move their focus from doing the heavy backend coding (networking, graphics, clustering) and focus their energies on making the best game availble.
Would Half Life have been made (or made as well) if they had to write 100% of their code from scratch instead of using the Quake 2 engine? Or Call of Duty without the Quake 3 engine? Could Ubisoft have focussed their energies on making Splinter Cell a solid stealth action game if they didn't have the Unreal engine to work with?
It's the same issue here. Instead of focussing on all the nitty-gritty, down-dirty junk, they can put their time and effort into the content and the gameplay. The millions that Blizzard has dumped into infrastructure could have gone into making the content more appealing than the mine-and-grind that it's become, and/or filled Blizzard's coffers even further overfull than they already are. Either way, it makes for an interesting possibility.
So basically what this study is saying is that by leaning back, putting my feet up on my computer, and moving my keyboard to my lap, I'm not only the most laid-back free-thinking rebel at the office, I'm also the most health-conscious? My boss will be glad to hear it!
You're ignoring a few big questions. First, how much of this current content is HD? How much of it will be available in HD by 20 years from now? That can cause a tenfold (or more) increase in file size. On top of that, how much content is going to be created between now and 20 years from now? And how much of that content is going to be HD?
20 years from now, we'll still be looking at the state of things and saying 'One day, we'll have one storage solution that can store all of this.'
The worst part is that this is actually valid grammar and sounds fine when said properly, it's just quite awkward in print (and arguably is missing a comma after 'asked' depending on whose style guidelines you're following).
Any laptop user will tell you important basic difference between Sleep and Hibernate - Sleep is quick and still uses significant amount of power (yet takes less than 1 sec to power up), while hibernate takes 10-15 seconds to restore but uses very small amount of power.
Well I'm a laptop user, and I'll tell you that for me, there is no difference. When I close the lid of my Macbook (or my Powerbook), it goes to sleep instantly. When I open it, it wakes up within a few seconds. On newer systems, however (newer than my Powerbook, including my Macbook) it also writes memory out to the disk. That means that instead of choosing whether I want to sleep or hibernate (which the average user won't understand anyway), the system takes care of it for me.
As for the battery issue, perhaps Macs are just more effciient. I left my Powerbook sleeping in my bag for eight hours one day, and it went from a full charge to 97%. My Macbook could easily sleep through a trans-pacific flight, and would have no problem sleeping from Montreal to Sydney if it needed to.
The thing that you seem to miss is that the 'Lock' and 'Power' buttons don't necessarily tell the average user what's going to happen. 'Power', for example, puts the system to sleep. What Joel is saying is that we shouldn't need to have 9 different options for how to walk away from our computer, when in reality, it could be reduced to just one - 'I'm leaving' - and let the system take care of the rest. For end users, this would be ideal. For power users, it could be an option in one of the control panel.
You seem to suggest that you would have to be a moron in order to understand why options are bad. I'd like to suggest that perhaps this is, in fact, the reason why you don't understand. Users don't want choices, they want ease of use. They don't want to choose between Sleep and Hibernate and Power Off and Lock and Log Out, and god knows what else. They just want to finish what they're doing with the computer and go watch The Price Is Right. Excessive and pointless choices confuse users and make user interfaces difficult to use. Perhaps this is what you don't understand.
That's why the various message styles differentiate what you said and what the other person said, usually by different colours in your usernames, by adding spaces of their own, by 'blocking off' each distinct set of messages, or some other visual, automatic method.
Let's face it, typing an extra newline to let someone know you're done only makes any sense if all parties can see what every other party types as they type it. Otherwise, you know that someone's done typing when they hit the enter key.
It's not 1980 anymore, you're a little behind. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to adapt to the changing times.
You say you need 'at least 4 Mbit' - but is that hard to find? I suppose it might be in some locations, but here in Montreal, I have 10 megabit internet from my cable provider, I could have chosen 20, and a local DSL ISP is about to roll out 24 Mbit ADSL2+ for only about $40/mo.
This might not be instant-on accessible to everyone, but if it's instant-on to some people and buffer-on to other people, then I'm fine with that.
Your father might not understand why his TV shows have to 'buffer', but then again, is your father going to buy his television shows online? The whole affair is more complex than just a normal television, and chances are that someone who doesn't want part of that complexity isn't going to want any of the complexity. The market here isn't the old fogies who lived through World War II, it's the young, hip trendsters with disposable income. The tech-heads, the movie buffs, and the hardcore geeks.
How about we actually help people become better-organized by, oh, I don't know...teaching them some useful organizational skills?!
Having recently taken a job where I'm forced (yes, forced; I'd rather not) to use Linux on my workstation, and having tried various desktop environments, window managers, etc., I don't think this is the problem.
Rather than 'teaching [me] some useful organisational skills', how about designing a desktop environment that just gets the heck out of my way and lets me do my work? The biggest complaint I have about XP is that it seems as though there's always something jumping up in my face saying 'Hey, let me help you!', which kicks me out of menus, steals my focus, or blocks the window I'm trying to read. Moving to Linux, I've found that the new iterations of GNOME and KDE (which I haven't used since version 1.x and 2.x respectively) are adopting the same attitude.
KDE's annoying little yellow notification bubbles that get sent up by apps like Kopete just get in my way, and I have to click to get rid of them, which takes focus away from what I'm doing. Then I have to click back on the app I was working on so I can get back to work.
So to the designers of desktop environments, be ye GNOME, KDE, or Miscellaneous, I say this: Make software that stays out of my way until I ask for it, and gets out of my way when I'm done with it! Give me notifications that I can ignore, alerts I can shrug off, apps that stay put, and dialogs that don't pop up. If you're going to try to be a commercial UI, be OS X, not Windows.
You may actually be able to do the job with common office or household equipment. If you work at a hospital or clinic, for example, try running them through the MRI. Not only will the data not be forensically recoverable, but the disk should be sufficiently bent so as to discourage any attempt regardless. Also works well with floppy disks, VHS tapes, and metalheads.
I think the main reason that (F)OSS is still having trouble competing (despite the widespread acceptance amoungst industry experts) is because of budget.
In this case, the budget to get a piece of software properly certified.
There are many aspects of creating software that require non-technical administrative personell to handle. I don't remember ever hearing about OSA (Open Source Accountants);) These people cost money. And it's one thing to freely dedicate your time to devlopment, but it's quite another to freely donate large sums of personal money.
It is truly inpspiring that so many can work together so well towards a common goal, and it is truly stunning to take in the vast amount of software available which is written pretty much completely philanthropically.
But the problem is that few actually get paid to do this, it is done in spare time.
In fact, a large majority of truly successful open-source projects are backed by a commercial or large not-for-profit entity. Apache, for example, has the Apache Foundation, PHP has Zend, MySQL has MySQL AB, GNOME has Novell, and Firefox has the Mozilla Foundation (and Mozilla Corporation). These organisations pay people for their time to do development work on these projects, because it benefits them directly. Most other open-source projects don't have the backing of such organisations, and thus don't have the time, money, or resources of their larger bretheren.
In my conversation I wondered how else software writers could make money, besides the tried and tested subscription and serial-activation systems in widespread use today. How else could programmers, who are doing some of the most mind-bending, skillful crafting of any career, get compensated for their work?
I'd be hesitant to make a claim like this. There are a lot of far more brilliant, far more skillful people out there doing far more interesting work that would make the average programmer's head spin. Most of the complex work I see programmers doing is implementing complex math (e.g. three-dimensional math, compression algorithms, etc) or mapping complex structures like protiens, DNA, etc., which I guess makes mathematicians, nuclear biologists, etc. the ones that do all the real work. The average nobodies that pound out GTK interfaces to mkisofs aren't doing anything worth praise or fanfare, in the grand scheme of things.
Wouldn't it be great if AMD, Intel, ASUS - or indeed any large electronics manufacturer - would offer up a pool to develop software?
The trick would of course be that the software should of course be standards compliant and thus run even on competitors hardware. But maybe AMD could have a certification that says, "written for and extensively tested on AMD hardware".
Software seems that it should be freely available - it just seems the nature of all information in general - but there is that problem that the programmer needs to make money.
It just seems to me that logically the consumer should buy the hardware - the physical, tangiable thing - and that it should be up to the hardware manufacturers to make hardware as a whole more useful.
Now this sounds like you're suggesting that the entire computing industry should be funded by the companies that make hardware - so the hardware makers become the software makers. The problem with that logic is that that will get you into a monopoly situation. You say 'should of course be standards compliant', but what standards are there, really? The x86 architecture is essentially managed by whoever happens to add a feature that everyone else copies. It's not an ISO or ANSI standard, and so there aren't any standards to base it off of. If Intel was funding people to write software for Intel machines, it would be trivial for them to make it ONLY work on Intel machines - edging AMD out of the market. Microsoft is notorious for doing this (take Lotus Notes a
Every time I hear someone asking for that, they're more interested in being buzzword compliant than anything else.
Or, in my company's case, is in the medical fields, and thus is required by law to be ISO compliant (as well as CSA-compliant, etc.) in order to do business. Being and staying ISO9000-compliant isn't a cakewalk - you have to have documented procedures for everything you do, and your employees have to know (or know how to find) those procedures. I'd wager that most companies that become compliant do so not because it 'looks good', but because the law requires it of them directly, or because they want to be able to sell to companies with restrictions like the original poster's.
Granted, being compliant doesn't mean that the procedures are useful or easy - a lot of companies fuck their procedures up, developing them by committee, spewing out 20-page procedures for the simplest of tasks, but that has nothing to do with ISO - that's just bad management, and that bad management will reflect in other aspects of the company as well.
I could easily play an hour of GTA without killing a single NPC.
I'm impressed. I can't get two blocks without killing at least half a dozen pedestrians, stealing two cars, and getting a three-star wanted rating. I don't know how I do it, I just do.:/
Once upon a time, Bill Gates said we would never "need" more than 640K.
I dunno about anyone else, but I'm getting pretty tired of hearing people attribute to him something he's never said. Point of fact is that the 640k limit descends from the 20-bit memory addressing of the 8088, of which IBM reserved 384k for system use, leaving 640k over for the user.
I suppose people think they're being funny by quoting this, but making up words to put in someone's mouth (or using someone else's made-up words) doesn't help you make a point, it just makes you look ignorant.
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Don't forget that the sizes are larger than most places serve... Here's another true story...
Cust (in a jovial tone): I'd like a large coffee!
Me: Alright sir, how large of a coffee would you like?
Cust: The biggest you've got!
*I show him the 20-oz cup*
Cust: Well, maybe not that big.
*I show him the 16-oz cup*
Cust: Ehhh.....
*I show him the 12-oz cup, the smallest we have*
Cust: Perfect!
For what it's worth, the glossy screen on the Macbooks is far superior to the matte screen available previously. Colours are crisper and more vivid, the screen is brighter, and I've never been in a situation where glare has been in an issue, whether in coffee shops, at work, on the couch at home, in the kitchen, in bed, or outdoors.
People knock the glossy screen, but in real-life use, it's far superior.
The C code shown in the movie was code from the GNOME project as well, afaik. That movie also featured cameos by Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems, as did Miguel de Icaza (who designed a lot of the screenshots used in the movie).
;)
Ironically enough, one thing the movie does get wrong is pumping gas - by law you can't pump your own gas in Oregon, which the main characters do. I guess you can't hit all the bullseyes.
He's not kidding - it's a good book too, I'd highly recommend it if you're doing web programming.
For anyone who's wondering, here's what we've got going on, plus amavisd/clamav doing virus scanning. This blocks all spam I get (used to be 30-200 messages per day that Spamassassin would catch).
I recently upgraded from a Core Duo Macbook to a Core 2 Duo Macbook. Now I'm running a 64-bit chip (in 32-bit mode). When Leopard comes out, I'll be running 64-bit.
I don't notice now, because 64-bit doesn't really give me anything extra. I won't notice then either, because I can't fit more than 2G in this thing anyway. The only benefit I could see would be the ability to mmap() large files, thanks to the larger memory space. Woo.
Facetious though this post may be, when you're grepping 8.2 gigs of logs, those milliseconds add up.
On top of that, another trick that no one ever uses is alternate grep modes - fgrep specifically. When you're just grepping for a string and not a regex, use 'fgrep' or 'grep -F', and grep will just do simple string matching instead of regular expression matching. On huge logfiles, this can result in some pretty astonishing speed increases.
As with the rest of the article, it's another example of being aware of your tools, and learning to optimise your workflow.
The problem with that theory is that it doesn't make any sense. Even in the Debian world, I'll come across .deb packages that need manhandling (instalation, removal, retrieval), and the debian command-line utilities (e.g. dpkg) are always simple to use when I need to. 'dpkg -i' to install, 'dpkg -r' to remove, 'dpkg -l' to list matching packages, and 'dpkg -S' to find out what owns a file.
If you look at the output from 'dpkg --help' and compare it to RPM's, RPM provies a much longer list of options, the vast majority of which no one ever uses, burying the commonly-used functionality in a sea of terse explanation.
The RPM tool needs to be replaced - possibly with another version of the tool, but removing all the extra cruft from the way it's used. It makes no sense to say 'Well, of course it's messy because you shouldn't be using it'. If the tool exists, it should be usable.
Even with the APT frontend picking up the slack, Debian has managed to keep dpkg easily usable and keep the help options straightforward, to the point where I rarely have to dig for what I need to do. When I go to work and have to work with the package management tools on Fedora (yum on our workstations) or RHEL (RPM on our servers), I hear nothing but complaints about usability, speed, and reliability from coworkers.
RPM needs an overhaul, badly, but I doubt it'll get the one it needs.
You must be new here. Until very recently, even the entry-level development tools were expensive and cumbersome to use. The vast majority of people who created apps for MS OSes when I was in school could only afford it because they pirated it, or (for a legit software developer friend) picked up the educational discount.
Microsoft documentation has always been necessary because their APIs are ludicrously complex and ridiculously cumbersome. One function call from the Win16 API is identical in Win32, except for subtle differences in one or two parameters, requiring developers migrating up to study the documentation like the bible to figure out where things are going wrong and why.
Microsoft is finally getting it right, and I applaud them for that, but they'd be a shining beacon of hope and joy in the world if that policy had been there for any length of time. As it is, they're just starting to get it right, but they're not there yet - after all, I can write any OS X app I like without buying any extra software to get extra features, and likewise on *NIX.
The reason there are more apps for Windows is that there's a bigger market, nothing more.
Think more along the lines of the Quake/Unreal engine licensing. Instead of every company that wants to make a game ending up with a new and usually mediocre engine offering, game designers can move their focus from doing the heavy backend coding (networking, graphics, clustering) and focus their energies on making the best game availble.
Would Half Life have been made (or made as well) if they had to write 100% of their code from scratch instead of using the Quake 2 engine? Or Call of Duty without the Quake 3 engine? Could Ubisoft have focussed their energies on making Splinter Cell a solid stealth action game if they didn't have the Unreal engine to work with?
It's the same issue here. Instead of focussing on all the nitty-gritty, down-dirty junk, they can put their time and effort into the content and the gameplay. The millions that Blizzard has dumped into infrastructure could have gone into making the content more appealing than the mine-and-grind that it's become, and/or filled Blizzard's coffers even further overfull than they already are. Either way, it makes for an interesting possibility.
So basically what this study is saying is that by leaning back, putting my feet up on my computer, and moving my keyboard to my lap, I'm not only the most laid-back free-thinking rebel at the office, I'm also the most health-conscious? My boss will be glad to hear it!
You're ignoring a few big questions. First, how much of this current content is HD? How much of it will be available in HD by 20 years from now? That can cause a tenfold (or more) increase in file size. On top of that, how much content is going to be created between now and 20 years from now? And how much of that content is going to be HD?
20 years from now, we'll still be looking at the state of things and saying 'One day, we'll have one storage solution that can store all of this.'
The worst part is that this is actually valid grammar and sounds fine when said properly, it's just quite awkward in print (and arguably is missing a comma after 'asked' depending on whose style guidelines you're following).
Well I'm a laptop user, and I'll tell you that for me, there is no difference. When I close the lid of my Macbook (or my Powerbook), it goes to sleep instantly. When I open it, it wakes up within a few seconds. On newer systems, however (newer than my Powerbook, including my Macbook) it also writes memory out to the disk. That means that instead of choosing whether I want to sleep or hibernate (which the average user won't understand anyway), the system takes care of it for me.
As for the battery issue, perhaps Macs are just more effciient. I left my Powerbook sleeping in my bag for eight hours one day, and it went from a full charge to 97%. My Macbook could easily sleep through a trans-pacific flight, and would have no problem sleeping from Montreal to Sydney if it needed to.
The thing that you seem to miss is that the 'Lock' and 'Power' buttons don't necessarily tell the average user what's going to happen. 'Power', for example, puts the system to sleep. What Joel is saying is that we shouldn't need to have 9 different options for how to walk away from our computer, when in reality, it could be reduced to just one - 'I'm leaving' - and let the system take care of the rest. For end users, this would be ideal. For power users, it could be an option in one of the control panel.
You seem to suggest that you would have to be a moron in order to understand why options are bad. I'd like to suggest that perhaps this is, in fact, the reason why you don't understand. Users don't want choices, they want ease of use. They don't want to choose between Sleep and Hibernate and Power Off and Lock and Log Out, and god knows what else. They just want to finish what they're doing with the computer and go watch The Price Is Right. Excessive and pointless choices confuse users and make user interfaces difficult to use. Perhaps this is what you don't understand.
That's why the various message styles differentiate what you said and what the other person said, usually by different colours in your usernames, by adding spaces of their own, by 'blocking off' each distinct set of messages, or some other visual, automatic method.
Let's face it, typing an extra newline to let someone know you're done only makes any sense if all parties can see what every other party types as they type it. Otherwise, you know that someone's done typing when they hit the enter key.
It's not 1980 anymore, you're a little behind. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to adapt to the changing times.
You say you need 'at least 4 Mbit' - but is that hard to find? I suppose it might be in some locations, but here in Montreal, I have 10 megabit internet from my cable provider, I could have chosen 20, and a local DSL ISP is about to roll out 24 Mbit ADSL2+ for only about $40/mo.
This might not be instant-on accessible to everyone, but if it's instant-on to some people and buffer-on to other people, then I'm fine with that.
Your father might not understand why his TV shows have to 'buffer', but then again, is your father going to buy his television shows online? The whole affair is more complex than just a normal television, and chances are that someone who doesn't want part of that complexity isn't going to want any of the complexity. The market here isn't the old fogies who lived through World War II, it's the young, hip trendsters with disposable income. The tech-heads, the movie buffs, and the hardcore geeks.
Having recently taken a job where I'm forced (yes, forced; I'd rather not) to use Linux on my workstation, and having tried various desktop environments, window managers, etc., I don't think this is the problem.
Rather than 'teaching [me] some useful organisational skills', how about designing a desktop environment that just gets the heck out of my way and lets me do my work? The biggest complaint I have about XP is that it seems as though there's always something jumping up in my face saying 'Hey, let me help you!', which kicks me out of menus, steals my focus, or blocks the window I'm trying to read. Moving to Linux, I've found that the new iterations of GNOME and KDE (which I haven't used since version 1.x and 2.x respectively) are adopting the same attitude.
KDE's annoying little yellow notification bubbles that get sent up by apps like Kopete just get in my way, and I have to click to get rid of them, which takes focus away from what I'm doing. Then I have to click back on the app I was working on so I can get back to work.
So to the designers of desktop environments, be ye GNOME, KDE, or Miscellaneous, I say this: Make software that stays out of my way until I ask for it, and gets out of my way when I'm done with it! Give me notifications that I can ignore, alerts I can shrug off, apps that stay put, and dialogs that don't pop up. If you're going to try to be a commercial UI, be OS X, not Windows.
I'm inclined to agree. It seems this so-called 'donut theory' has a hole in it.
You may actually be able to do the job with common office or household equipment. If you work at a hospital or clinic, for example, try running them through the MRI. Not only will the data not be forensically recoverable, but the disk should be sufficiently bent so as to discourage any attempt regardless. Also works well with floppy disks, VHS tapes, and metalheads.
In fact, a large majority of truly successful open-source projects are backed by a commercial or large not-for-profit entity. Apache, for example, has the Apache Foundation, PHP has Zend, MySQL has MySQL AB, GNOME has Novell, and Firefox has the Mozilla Foundation (and Mozilla Corporation). These organisations pay people for their time to do development work on these projects, because it benefits them directly. Most other open-source projects don't have the backing of such organisations, and thus don't have the time, money, or resources of their larger bretheren.
I'd be hesitant to make a claim like this. There are a lot of far more brilliant, far more skillful people out there doing far more interesting work that would make the average programmer's head spin. Most of the complex work I see programmers doing is implementing complex math (e.g. three-dimensional math, compression algorithms, etc) or mapping complex structures like protiens, DNA, etc., which I guess makes mathematicians, nuclear biologists, etc. the ones that do all the real work. The average nobodies that pound out GTK interfaces to mkisofs aren't doing anything worth praise or fanfare, in the grand scheme of things.
Now this sounds like you're suggesting that the entire computing industry should be funded by the companies that make hardware - so the hardware makers become the software makers. The problem with that logic is that that will get you into a monopoly situation. You say 'should of course be standards compliant', but what standards are there, really? The x86 architecture is essentially managed by whoever happens to add a feature that everyone else copies. It's not an ISO or ANSI standard, and so there aren't any standards to base it off of. If Intel was funding people to write software for Intel machines, it would be trivial for them to make it ONLY work on Intel machines - edging AMD out of the market. Microsoft is notorious for doing this (take Lotus Notes a
Every time I hear someone asking for that, they're more interested in being buzzword compliant than anything else.
Or, in my company's case, is in the medical fields, and thus is required by law to be ISO compliant (as well as CSA-compliant, etc.) in order to do business. Being and staying ISO9000-compliant isn't a cakewalk - you have to have documented procedures for everything you do, and your employees have to know (or know how to find) those procedures. I'd wager that most companies that become compliant do so not because it 'looks good', but because the law requires it of them directly, or because they want to be able to sell to companies with restrictions like the original poster's.
Granted, being compliant doesn't mean that the procedures are useful or easy - a lot of companies fuck their procedures up, developing them by committee, spewing out 20-page procedures for the simplest of tasks, but that has nothing to do with ISO - that's just bad management, and that bad management will reflect in other aspects of the company as well.
1. What is your name?
2. What is your quest?
3. What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen gryphon?
I'm impressed. I can't get two blocks without killing at least half a dozen pedestrians, stealing two cars, and getting a three-star wanted rating. I don't know how I do it, I just do.
I dunno about anyone else, but I'm getting pretty tired of hearing people attribute to him something he's never said. Point of fact is that the 640k limit descends from the 20-bit memory addressing of the 8088, of which IBM reserved 384k for system use, leaving 640k over for the user.
I suppose people think they're being funny by quoting this, but making up words to put in someone's mouth (or using someone else's made-up words) doesn't help you make a point, it just makes you look ignorant.