I would have no problem whatsoever if Opera eventually disappeared, but don't worry. Opera has all kinds of things going on. For example, Adobe is using the Opera rendering engine for its HTML preview in GoLive CS2 (which means that the WYSIWYG aspect of it really IS WYG). This, and other strategic deals, will help them in the long run.
Did anyone else read the title as Firefox Extension for Applied Social engineering?
The possibilities started flowing through my brain at a rapid pace. I envisioned a 'pretend to be a technician' wizard ('Do you know the name of the contractor which the target company uses for technical support?' 'Do technicians wear overalls to service calls?'), perhaps a research assistant, a disguise toolbar (a la Sims 2), maybe a letterhead forging wizard...
This story is probably one of the biggest letdowns in the entire term of my Slashdot patronage.
(1) Desktop Linux distros come with hundreds of quality desktop applications
Desktop Linux distros come with hundreds of applications. That being said, how many users use LaTeX? Or one of a half-dozen browsers based off Gecko? Or take advantage of both of the desktop environments? Kwrite? Gnotepad? Kvim? Gvim? Linux has hundreds of applications because no one can agree on whether the menu item for enabling syntax highlighting should go in Edit or View, so they make a different one.
Here's a tip: people don't want hundreds of applications. People want a small amount of applications. They want one MP3 player, they want one office suite, they want one browser, they want one mail client. They don't want to try ten of each and pick the best. Linux's desktop diversity in that respect is not only a waste of effort, it is a hindrance to Linux's ease of use. Oh, and just for the record, most of them aren't quality. Most of them aren't even close..
(2) Linux will run on a TON of hardware, including old hardware
Oh really? How much memory do I need to run KDE or GNOME comfortably? Maybe 256 megs? That's what I hear thrown around a lot. What if I want to run a lot of applications? What if I want to use GNOME, but also want to use one KDE application? Or vice-versa? Suddenly I have most libs for both loaded into memory. Not looking so good on the older hardware. Believe it or not, OS X runs better on my Powerbook than Linux ever did, and don't let the Gentoo folks sway your thoughts - optimizations wouldn't have helped.
(4) Linux, as a kernel, is hyper-configurable. You can strip it down or compile everything in.
OS X, as the parent mentions, just works. Here's the thing: the only benefit custom-compilations of your kernel provides is the ability to determine what, if any, drivers are loaded. OS X does this automatically, without the user having to figure out what hardware they have. Even for a sysadmin, it can be an adventure trying to get everything tuned. The only benefit Linux has in this area is that you can set it so that modules can't be loaded - which kind of sucks later on when you want to add one.
(5) The "slick GUI" advantage of OS X will rapidly disappear
And when it does, people will realize what they really liked about the OS X GUI - usability. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but when Linux achieves the same level of visual polish and eye candy that OS X can claim, they'll realize what they were missing - a pretty face has little to do with a pleasant user experience.
Installation in OSX is drag and drop (or the winders "click-click-click"), I'm sure server applications behave similarly.
The MySQL installation, for example, is a trivial matter. It even comes with a preference pane so that you can start/stop it automatically, as well as decide if you want it to start at boot or not.
(7) The typical Linux environment is highly, highly scriptable.
I used Automator last night to build an action. What the action would do is do a CVS update, build the project, make a package out of it, put it in a zip archive, upload it to an FTP server, and then e-mail the changelog and (if I wanted to/if I had one) the build log to a mailing list. Took me about two minutes to fill in the rough parts, and I didn't even have an idea of what I was making until I was done. Sure, I could do 'cd/usr/local/src/dir && cvs -z3 update && make clean && make && make installpkg && scp tarball-glibc-i386.tar.gz server.example.com:/var/www/dev/nightly && cat changelog buildlog | mail -s "Nightly build `date`" list@lists.example.com', and that's all well and good... but most people couldn't.
Linux is highly scriptable by programmers and sysadmins, but OS X is highly scriptable by real users, by people who don't want to know how the system works, they just want to
It depends on your preference, but if I were completing my Master's degree (in anything), my first course of action afterwards would be to get my Ph.D. Why? Because, in Computer Science especially, there's a lot of fun to be had in studying/creating the new technologies, which you get to do working as a professor/researcher at universities. Essentially, you can come out of eight years (ideally) and go right back in, training the new generation of smelly upstart well-illusioned geeks, while at the same time creating the technologies that 90% of your class will never understand outside of reading a few posts on Slashdot. I think I'd actually enjoy it.
If you can't reconcile someone telling you to do something that is logically impossible, you aren't going to get very along very well with your managers... At least, you wouldn't get along well with mine.
Actually, this brings up an interesting point that I was telling a friend about. Apple isn't about using one single GUI to access everything you do. It's about having a consistent interface across all programs, so that it seems like you have one single GUI.
For example, I added a friend into my address book today, because I wanted to send him an e-mail. In the address book entry, I added his MSN username. Then I went back to Adium, which now had started displaying his real name instead of his screen name, and dragged his avatar from Adium into Address Book.
Once that was done, I sent him the e-mail. Now when he replies, I will not only see his name (and be able to spotlight for him), but it will also show his picture in the 'header' section, so I can see at a glance who it's from.
All of these are separate programs, but they interoperate in such a manner as to work together flawlessly. So a GUI to tie anything together in OS X? Not going to happen. A consistent user experience? Guaranteed.
My first impression of Pages came just recently, and I think the best way to sum up my initial reaction to the way it worked was 'Holy crap, it's a Pagemaker clone with attitude!' I used to use Pagemaker back ten to fourteen years ago, and Pages strikes me as startlingly similar to how it worked back then. The placement, flowing of text, text boxes, columns, it's like an easy-to-use Apple-ized DTP rewrite. What a fantastic program.
Haven't used Keynote yet, but I intend to. Looking forward to Numbers. Maybe I'll get lucky and Apple will release a personal accounting package. It'd probably be called 'Accounts' or 'Finances', since 'Money' is already taken.
Among other things, better IPv6 support (haha! I bet it still sucks though), better wireless support (this makes a HUGE difference, especially with SP2), better bluetooth and USB support (it doesn't while when you pull a USB drive out, for example).
If you're using the latest and greatest technologies, XP makes a world of difference. If not, it doesn't really change anything.
One major thing they could do is to use EFI. EFI can boot the system straight into 32-bit mode from the start. Requiring that OS X be booted from EFI would eliminate the vast majority of hardware right off the bat, not to mention having a host of other benefits.
Programmer: 'Take this source code, but beware! It carries a terrible curse!' Judge: 'That's bad.' Programmer: 'But it's optimized for PowerPC!' Judge: 'That's good!' Programmer: 'PowerPC is also cursed.' Judge: 'That's bad.' Programmer: 'But you get your choice of operating systems!' Judge: 'That's good!' Programmer: 'The operating systems run on Intel.' *pause* 'That's bad.' Judge: 'Can I go now?'
The standard preamble for GNU-licensed software is along the lines of 'this product and source code may be distributed under the terms of the General Public License, either version 2, or, at your option, any later version'.
Thus, if you have someone's GPL2 source, you may change the license to GPL3 and redistribute it under those terms, or you may continue to distribute it under the terms of the GPL2 license.
You'll get more accomplished if you write a well-worded letter to your MP than from a rally. All rallies do are make people watching the news think that you're a bunch of whiners that are never happy with anything (which is largely true about protests). See PCU for my personal take on the whole affair.
Write your MP. We have a system, and the system doesn't work because no one uses it. Write your MP and tell them that you don't like this, and etc. etc. Write your MP, because they're the ones that are going to listen.
I think what is unfortunately happening here is that you are missing the subtleties. The first few episodes were geared towards showing who The Doctor is and what he does, but there was more to it than that.
Lots of references are made through the first few episodes - the tree-being in the second episode who consoles the Doctor on his loss when she finds out what race he is, for example. That eventually builds up into him telling Rose that his race, and his planet, were both destroyed in a terrible war.
Later, in Dalek, we learn that they died to destroy the Daleks, that they were the antagonists in the war, and that the Time Lords and Daleks destroyed each other, with no-one-knows how many other planets destroyed in the meantime. This is leading somewhere, not just backstory.
All through the series, there are references that viewers have managed to catch. The Nestene Consciousness from the first episode screams 'Bad Wolf' when it sees the TARDIS. A child spraypaints the same on the side of the TARDIS. The space station exploding is a 'typical bad wolf scenario'. 'Bad Wolf' is written in graffiti on a poster for a rave in the 1980s. A telepath sees the big bad wolf in Rose's mind.
Hit up google and see what you find. The episodes may seem... well, episodic... but they're not. There's another subtext that keeps running through all the episodes, and it's going to come to light who - or what - the 'bad wolf' is in this Saturday's episode - titled 'Bad Wolf'.
Perhaps it's not as obvious as the first series, with its constant cliffhangers between one episode and the next, but the problem with that is that you can't miss an episode or you don't know what's happened. With this, however, there's a subtext, there's a vein that travels through the episodes, and you're not missing anything overt if you miss an episode - it's all meant to be missed, meant to be pieced together after it suddenly clicks one day. If you miss an episode, you miss that story, which stands on its own, and you miss that subtext, but nothing in the next episode is going to rely on your knowledge of the previous (and if it does, they'll show clips at the start to refresh your memory).
Personally, I would rather have it this way. I get the resolution of one story, but I get to look forward to the continuation of the story arc in the next episode. Personally, I can't wait for Saturday to arrive, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way.
Ah, but you miss the point of OS X's simplicity. The standard OS X development environment provides the vast majority of functionality that programmers require to make all but the most complex applications. There's no mucking about with 'this application requires libpng 0.4.20b and libpcap 2.1.2' as on Linux, or 'this application requires msvbvr70.dll'. An application requires Mac OS X Panther or Tiger or 10.2 or somesuch.
If developers DO require more functionality, they can put that extra code into libraries that are inside the application bundle. Since it's usually very application-specific code, it's not going to be something that other apps are going to need/want, so there's no issues with wasted space due to non-dynamic libraries.
Thus is the beauty of OS X's design - provide a set of tools that provide what the majority of developers need, and you won't have to worry about the user having this dependancy or that, or installing this dependancy or that, and for those unixey ports, there's always fink, which is very handy indeed.
Even ignoring wireless, laptops are obsecenely handy for a lot of technical work. I'm writing this on a 12" Powerbook, light and easy to carry around, UNIX so I can do what I need to do on it.... but most importantly, I'm sitting in the colo right now. I can do all of my diagnostics from inside the firewall, check routes, and have multiple terminals doing multiple things without needing a monitor/keyboard/etc. in our rack. Pretty handy. No wireless in the rack, but that would be a dumb idea anyway.
Whenever I install the 'gnome' package on Debian, it keeps installing udev (which is a dependancy, for some idiotic reason). udev creates entries in/dev/ based on hotplug kernel events - and deletes any entries that aren't created by hotplug events.
Thus, the very act of installing gnome not only breaks pretty much every program I use, it also means that anything redirected to/dev/null is instead logged on the drive, and can then be read.
This is news because it's not just a bunch of hackers doing it, it's Earthlink. You have to ask yourself then, why does Earthlink want to spend time and money on making working firmware with IPv6 support for Linksys routers? Maybe because they want IPv6 to succeed? Maybe they're going to roll it out themselves?
For the average Linksys owner, replacing their firmware with another, then logging in and running commands, that's less than an ideal situation. If Earthlink is going to patch the thing to do it easily and effectively, then huzzah, and perhaps this will be a step in the right direction for IPv6 support.
Yeah, if I could create a tornado in downtown Montreal and watch it in realtime, that would be awesome. Or imagine causing an earthquake in the west island. Property prices go up, and I sell out.
This has a lot of potential in the server market. Imagine an IDS that monitors certain files for changes and notifies the sysadmin immediately whenever a static file is updated. The system could have scheduled periods for upgrades, during which it doesn't send a thousand warnings to you, but other than that, it could monitor all disk activity at a low level without being subverted by e.g. changing the IDS's file hashes before it does its next check.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have no problem whatsoever if Opera eventually disappeared, but don't worry. Opera has all kinds of things going on. For example, Adobe is using the Opera rendering engine for its HTML preview in GoLive CS2 (which means that the WYSIWYG aspect of it really IS WYG). This, and other strategic deals, will help them in the long run.
Did anyone else read the title as Firefox Extension for Applied Social engineering ?
The possibilities started flowing through my brain at a rapid pace. I envisioned a 'pretend to be a technician' wizard ('Do you know the name of the contractor which the target company uses for technical support?' 'Do technicians wear overalls to service calls?'), perhaps a research assistant, a disguise toolbar (a la Sims 2), maybe a letterhead forging wizard...
This story is probably one of the biggest letdowns in the entire term of my Slashdot patronage.
0.5 year Powerbook user and 8 year Linux user...
/usr/local/src/dir && cvs -z3 update && make clean && make && make installpkg && scp tarball-glibc-i386.tar.gz server.example.com:/var/www/dev/nightly && cat changelog buildlog | mail -s "Nightly build `date`" list@lists.example.com', and that's all well and good... but most people couldn't.
(1) Desktop Linux distros come with hundreds of quality desktop applications
Desktop Linux distros come with hundreds of applications. That being said, how many users use LaTeX? Or one of a half-dozen browsers based off Gecko? Or take advantage of both of the desktop environments? Kwrite? Gnotepad? Kvim? Gvim? Linux has hundreds of applications because no one can agree on whether the menu item for enabling syntax highlighting should go in Edit or View, so they make a different one.
Here's a tip: people don't want hundreds of applications. People want a small amount of applications. They want one MP3 player, they want one office suite, they want one browser, they want one mail client. They don't want to try ten of each and pick the best. Linux's desktop diversity in that respect is not only a waste of effort, it is a hindrance to Linux's ease of use. Oh, and just for the record, most of them aren't quality. Most of them aren't even close..
(2) Linux will run on a TON of hardware, including old hardware
Oh really? How much memory do I need to run KDE or GNOME comfortably? Maybe 256 megs? That's what I hear thrown around a lot. What if I want to run a lot of applications? What if I want to use GNOME, but also want to use one KDE application? Or vice-versa? Suddenly I have most libs for both loaded into memory. Not looking so good on the older hardware. Believe it or not, OS X runs better on my Powerbook than Linux ever did, and don't let the Gentoo folks sway your thoughts - optimizations wouldn't have helped.
(4) Linux, as a kernel, is hyper-configurable. You can strip it down or compile everything in.
OS X, as the parent mentions, just works. Here's the thing: the only benefit custom-compilations of your kernel provides is the ability to determine what, if any, drivers are loaded. OS X does this automatically, without the user having to figure out what hardware they have. Even for a sysadmin, it can be an adventure trying to get everything tuned. The only benefit Linux has in this area is that you can set it so that modules can't be loaded - which kind of sucks later on when you want to add one.
(5) The "slick GUI" advantage of OS X will rapidly disappear
And when it does, people will realize what they really liked about the OS X GUI - usability. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but when Linux achieves the same level of visual polish and eye candy that OS X can claim, they'll realize what they were missing - a pretty face has little to do with a pleasant user experience.
Installation in OSX is drag and drop (or the winders "click-click-click"), I'm sure server applications behave similarly.
The MySQL installation, for example, is a trivial matter. It even comes with a preference pane so that you can start/stop it automatically, as well as decide if you want it to start at boot or not.
(7) The typical Linux environment is highly, highly scriptable.
I used Automator last night to build an action. What the action would do is do a CVS update, build the project, make a package out of it, put it in a zip archive, upload it to an FTP server, and then e-mail the changelog and (if I wanted to/if I had one) the build log to a mailing list. Took me about two minutes to fill in the rough parts, and I didn't even have an idea of what I was making until I was done. Sure, I could do 'cd
Linux is highly scriptable by programmers and sysadmins, but OS X is highly scriptable by real users, by people who don't want to know how the system works, they just want to
It depends on your preference, but if I were completing my Master's degree (in anything), my first course of action afterwards would be to get my Ph.D. Why? Because, in Computer Science especially, there's a lot of fun to be had in studying/creating the new technologies, which you get to do working as a professor/researcher at universities. Essentially, you can come out of eight years (ideally) and go right back in, training the new generation of smelly upstart well-illusioned geeks, while at the same time creating the technologies that 90% of your class will never understand outside of reading a few posts on Slashdot. I think I'd actually enjoy it.
If you can't reconcile someone telling you to do something that is logically impossible, you aren't going to get very along very well with your managers... At least, you wouldn't get along well with mine.
a GUI to tie them all together.
Actually, this brings up an interesting point that I was telling a friend about. Apple isn't about using one single GUI to access everything you do. It's about having a consistent interface across all programs, so that it seems like you have one single GUI.
For example, I added a friend into my address book today, because I wanted to send him an e-mail. In the address book entry, I added his MSN username. Then I went back to Adium, which now had started displaying his real name instead of his screen name, and dragged his avatar from Adium into Address Book.
Once that was done, I sent him the e-mail. Now when he replies, I will not only see his name (and be able to spotlight for him), but it will also show his picture in the 'header' section, so I can see at a glance who it's from.
All of these are separate programs, but they interoperate in such a manner as to work together flawlessly. So a GUI to tie anything together in OS X? Not going to happen. A consistent user experience? Guaranteed.
I'll stop using swearwords in my code when my manager stops using ridiculous buzzwords like 'bandwidth' and 'drill down'.
We'll have to touch base to talk about this interesting paradigm.
My first impression of Pages came just recently, and I think the best way to sum up my initial reaction to the way it worked was 'Holy crap, it's a Pagemaker clone with attitude!' I used to use Pagemaker back ten to fourteen years ago, and Pages strikes me as startlingly similar to how it worked back then. The placement, flowing of text, text boxes, columns, it's like an easy-to-use Apple-ized DTP rewrite. What a fantastic program.
Haven't used Keynote yet, but I intend to. Looking forward to Numbers. Maybe I'll get lucky and Apple will release a personal accounting package. It'd probably be called 'Accounts' or 'Finances', since 'Money' is already taken.
*hope*
Among other things, better IPv6 support (haha! I bet it still sucks though), better wireless support (this makes a HUGE difference, especially with SP2), better bluetooth and USB support (it doesn't while when you pull a USB drive out, for example).
If you're using the latest and greatest technologies, XP makes a world of difference. If not, it doesn't really change anything.
One major thing they could do is to use EFI. EFI can boot the system straight into 32-bit mode from the start. Requiring that OS X be booted from EFI would eliminate the vast majority of hardware right off the bat, not to mention having a host of other benefits.
Programmer: 'Take this source code, but beware! It carries a terrible curse!'
Judge: 'That's bad.'
Programmer: 'But it's optimized for PowerPC!'
Judge: 'That's good!'
Programmer: 'PowerPC is also cursed.'
Judge: 'That's bad.'
Programmer: 'But you get your choice of operating systems!'
Judge: 'That's good!'
Programmer: 'The operating systems run on Intel.' *pause* 'That's bad.'
Judge: 'Can I go now?'
This isn't your father's trilogy
The standard preamble for GNU-licensed software is along the lines of 'this product and source code may be distributed under the terms of the General Public License, either version 2, or, at your option, any later version'.
Thus, if you have someone's GPL2 source, you may change the license to GPL3 and redistribute it under those terms, or you may continue to distribute it under the terms of the GPL2 license.
You'll get more accomplished if you write a well-worded letter to your MP than from a rally. All rallies do are make people watching the news think that you're a bunch of whiners that are never happy with anything (which is largely true about protests). See PCU for my personal take on the whole affair.
Write your MP. We have a system, and the system doesn't work because no one uses it. Write your MP and tell them that you don't like this, and etc. etc. Write your MP, because they're the ones that are going to listen.
I think what is unfortunately happening here is that you are missing the subtleties. The first few episodes were geared towards showing who The Doctor is and what he does, but there was more to it than that.
Lots of references are made through the first few episodes - the tree-being in the second episode who consoles the Doctor on his loss when she finds out what race he is, for example. That eventually builds up into him telling Rose that his race, and his planet, were both destroyed in a terrible war.
Later, in Dalek, we learn that they died to destroy the Daleks, that they were the antagonists in the war, and that the Time Lords and Daleks destroyed each other, with no-one-knows how many other planets destroyed in the meantime. This is leading somewhere, not just backstory.
All through the series, there are references that viewers have managed to catch. The Nestene Consciousness from the first episode screams 'Bad Wolf' when it sees the TARDIS. A child spraypaints the same on the side of the TARDIS. The space station exploding is a 'typical bad wolf scenario'. 'Bad Wolf' is written in graffiti on a poster for a rave in the 1980s. A telepath sees the big bad wolf in Rose's mind.
Hit up google and see what you find. The episodes may seem... well, episodic... but they're not. There's another subtext that keeps running through all the episodes, and it's going to come to light who - or what - the 'bad wolf' is in this Saturday's episode - titled 'Bad Wolf'.
Perhaps it's not as obvious as the first series, with its constant cliffhangers between one episode and the next, but the problem with that is that you can't miss an episode or you don't know what's happened. With this, however, there's a subtext, there's a vein that travels through the episodes, and you're not missing anything overt if you miss an episode - it's all meant to be missed, meant to be pieced together after it suddenly clicks one day. If you miss an episode, you miss that story, which stands on its own, and you miss that subtext, but nothing in the next episode is going to rely on your knowledge of the previous (and if it does, they'll show clips at the start to refresh your memory).
Personally, I would rather have it this way. I get the resolution of one story, but I get to look forward to the continuation of the story arc in the next episode. Personally, I can't wait for Saturday to arrive, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way.
Ah, but you miss the point of OS X's simplicity. The standard OS X development environment provides the vast majority of functionality that programmers require to make all but the most complex applications. There's no mucking about with 'this application requires libpng 0.4.20b and libpcap 2.1.2' as on Linux, or 'this application requires msvbvr70.dll'. An application requires Mac OS X Panther or Tiger or 10.2 or somesuch.
If developers DO require more functionality, they can put that extra code into libraries that are inside the application bundle. Since it's usually very application-specific code, it's not going to be something that other apps are going to need/want, so there's no issues with wasted space due to non-dynamic libraries.
Thus is the beauty of OS X's design - provide a set of tools that provide what the majority of developers need, and you won't have to worry about the user having this dependancy or that, or installing this dependancy or that, and for those unixey ports, there's always fink, which is very handy indeed.
Well, given that Dvorak happened to guess once, I guess he figures why not try again? Too bad he wasn't guessing about doughnuts.
Dude, seriously... I clicked on the 'reply to this' link to make some pseudo-witty comment, and I got a 503 error. I'm scared. :(
Even ignoring wireless, laptops are obsecenely handy for a lot of technical work. I'm writing this on a 12" Powerbook, light and easy to carry around, UNIX so I can do what I need to do on it.... but most importantly, I'm sitting in the colo right now. I can do all of my diagnostics from inside the firewall, check routes, and have multiple terminals doing multiple things without needing a monitor/keyboard/etc. in our rack. Pretty handy. No wireless in the rack, but that would be a dumb idea anyway.
First, you ask yourself "Was this film made for movie critics?"
It's not for you.
Whenever I install the 'gnome' package on Debian, it keeps installing udev (which is a dependancy, for some idiotic reason). udev creates entries in /dev/ based on hotplug kernel events - and deletes any entries that aren't created by hotplug events.
/dev/null is instead logged on the drive, and can then be read.
Thus, the very act of installing gnome not only breaks pretty much every program I use, it also means that anything redirected to
Idiotic bug, humorous side effects.
This is news because it's not just a bunch of hackers doing it, it's Earthlink. You have to ask yourself then, why does Earthlink want to spend time and money on making working firmware with IPv6 support for Linksys routers? Maybe because they want IPv6 to succeed? Maybe they're going to roll it out themselves?
For the average Linksys owner, replacing their firmware with another, then logging in and running commands, that's less than an ideal situation. If Earthlink is going to patch the thing to do it easily and effectively, then huzzah, and perhaps this will be a step in the right direction for IPv6 support.
Yeah, if I could create a tornado in downtown Montreal and watch it in realtime, that would be awesome. Or imagine causing an earthquake in the west island. Property prices go up, and I sell out.
I don't know how you could call "a network of 192 laser beams", 'the world's largest laser'....
Maybe they got tired of all the posts about 'Imagine a beowulf cluster of these' and went out and built one.
This has a lot of potential in the server market. Imagine an IDS that monitors certain files for changes and notifies the sysadmin immediately whenever a static file is updated. The system could have scheduled periods for upgrades, during which it doesn't send a thousand warnings to you, but other than that, it could monitor all disk activity at a low level without being subverted by e.g. changing the IDS's file hashes before it does its next check.
Interesting idea.