It's lovely that you respect your monarch and won't say anything less than lovely about him, but you can't expect the rest of the world to follow that. The divine right to be king is a divine right to live under the world's scrutiny.
Say I hate to think what would happen if someone drew Mohammed as a monkey near some feet.
So if I download some software for the first time, and it's faulty, I'm to blame for not having downloaded it and filed bug reports in a past life?
On bugzilla.mozilla there was a feature that allowed users to vote for particular bugs they felt required attention. However the mozilla developers *never* responded except to close the bug (unfixed or unimplemented) at the bottom of two hundred pleas. The only exception was to implement the suggestion of the high-vote bug to 'remove the voting system from bugzilla' as it gave the false impression that users had any influence on development.
Documentation comes with maturity. Many [younger] free software projects move at such a pace (compare the Hagunenon evolution of Mozilla Thunderbird to the rock-steady Microsoft Outlook) that the documentation lags behind a version. Young projects have fewer users, and short intervals between releases with major changes, giving few man hours for the documentation to be updated. It's not yet in the developer's interest to produce complete accurate documentation; many intended features are yet to be introduced while current features are to be changed or removed completely.
Documentation is a target for/after the 1.0 release. A larger userbase of less experienced users demands complete documentation. Developers demand [API] documentation to allow extension. Major releases are rarer, more users have more time to complete documentation, for a stable feature-complete application.
This explains why no other project has documentation superior to perl's at perldoc. Check it out, it's exemplary. http://perldoc.perl.org/
Of course, at 1.30 per song, iTunes' DRM-free AAC cost about 6 times as much as eMusic DRM-free MP3, I've never bought music online. I find it most bizarre that services charge different amounts depending on format, discriminating by codec and bitrate. If they sell windows media audio.wma, or apple's codec.aac for less than more compatible formats (mp3, ogg) then this is discriminating against users of other platforms. As all the competitors are selling exactly the product, I wonder how they can possibly compete and why their prices don't tend to the royalty owed to the musicians plus a penny profit.
And in response to your comment > When will open source advocates learn to delegate the graphic design aspect of their work to professionals? if only the programming types in charge of these projects would admit they're better at making code than graphics. You seem to have missed the point. The article is about free software that can be used by professional and non-professional alike to create some hot graphics. Perhaps you're referring to the ugliness of the original tux logo? It's not 1995, and developers aren't resigned to producing their own graphics. If you look all free software houses pushing their brand use professional designers. Think of the firefox logo (2004) http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/branding-fire fox or of ubuntu and gnome's curves, and check out the tango project http://tango.freedesktop.org/ Desktop linux has never looked so sexy.
Of course it's a crisis! The United States must immediately launch a mission to Sun crewed by Hollywood stereotypes to drop a nuclear missile into the sun to restore the oxygen balance. Of course a nuclear missile couldn't do that, that's why they have to fly through a narrow gulley around the equator and drop the missle into a special hole.
Of course the laptop can't run Vista. That's a hilarious suggestion. It would never work.
Microsoft aren't going to ship an ancient unsupported distribution (98, 2000), which leaves only versions of XP. XP was first sold in 2001, and Microsoft intend it to be usurped by this years Vista. Production of XP is due to be phased out in 2008 (that's next year folks), and retail and OEM licenses won't be available from January 31, 2008 (that's nine months away) according to their following page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default .mspx
They can't stick to that date. Dell customers have shown the demand for XP remains; Dell's profits dropped the months it wasn't available. So it's no surprise Microsoft choose to bundle XP for $3 over Vista. The truth is Vista, their more expensive, more recent product that they really want to push is less desirable to most users, and this a consequence of Microsoft's own policies. Microsoft succeeded in creating the ultimate lock-in system with XP, and this has now hit them hard. Most XP users see the system as perfectly functional, they've become incredibly accustomed to even the dysfunctional parts and many of them don't remember or never experienced previous upgrades (they've had XP for six years). It's true that upgrading will only introduce hardware problems, the trouble of data migration, loss of settings, and fewer compatible applications.
If they do phase out XP, I'm going to stockpile discs to sell with filament lightbulbs the months after the stores dry up.
When I used wordpress (a year and a half ago) I found the same problem. I was trying to get a consistent design across all my website (which included static pages, a wiki, and a wordpress installation). Hopefully they've improved upon the theming engine since, when I used wordpress there were few themes available. My major issue with such CMS is that all the sites look the same, it numbs the mind and you can't tell where you are.
Does anyone understand why the make or break of a new OS this year is whether you can view different workspaces (multiple desktops, whatever you call them) imposed onto a cube which you can twist about? This seems completely dysfunctional. You can't possibly view observe all six faces at once, so it's going to be very difficult to find anything, and you'll get quite disorientated looking. If you perform the wrong transformations, desktops will come out upside down, or rotated 90 or 270 degrees. Most people have 4:3 or 16:9 ratio screens, so you can't possibly map six of these onto the faces of a cube without distorting them terribly. If you had four or nine desktops, then you could split the screen to display them all in a rectangular grid, which would make finding applications easy: this would be planar rather than 3D. There's no need to make the desktop something from Half-Life 2, or I'd staple six screens together and send myself to space.
Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance. I think the figures for relative performance should be 1.500000000000000 and 1 respectively.
What it could really do with is I/O prioritisation. Bandwidth is often in short supply and I/O-bound applications can choke a system and make interactive processes a pain in the ass to use. I'd like to see some way of reserving and limiting bandwidth to particular services for particular uses. Are you talking about the internet? Avast you scurvy opponent of net neutrality!
omgzz they've patented standing your computer up? Quick, everyone flip your towers over before the patent police get to you. They have equipment that can detect the orientation of your motherboard from outside your home.
If it ain't broke, break it. Fix it. Understand it.
Here's some things to try: Compile mplayer. Build a firefox package for your distro. Download, patch and compile a kernel. Add a cronjob to delete some files at random. Forget about it. Try and restore them. (ext2 does not delete file pointers in inodes). Create an LVM group. Siphon disk space between disks and partition. Try a file system written by someone suspected of murder. Post on a linux-devel list and join Linus in slagging off Gnome. Try KDE and XFCE and decide no-one needs a desktop environment. Try some ultra minimal *box window manager. Live in the terminal for a week. Log in to your computer using SSH from afar and wonder why when you play music you can't hear it. Rsync something. Write your own superior syncing script. Write some perl scripts. Python. Add a RAID. Try an old 2.4 kernel..
Cafe owners are in trouble, and users who made online purchases may be next
VALVe's STEAM content distribution system has been the target of no small share of bad press since it was created, with complaints ranging from apathetic customer service to the inability to play legitimately purchased games online. Some users have had their accounts locked, deleted, or hijacked - but a hacker known only as "MaddoxX" has just opened a rather sizeable can of worms.
According to a posting made on an anti-STEAM website, MaddoxX has bypassed VALVe's security system and accessed a significant chunk of data, including:
* Screenshots of internal VALVe web pages
* A portion of VALVe's Cafe directory
* Error logs
* Credit card information of customers
* Financial information on VALVe
While only the Cafe owners appear to be in immediate danger, MaddoxX claims to "have shell access everywhere" and has posted a list of login details for accounts on the VALVe servers, and private certificates for "People with a little bit (sic) experience... create their own 'fake' but working cafe / certificate."
It's not currently known how far-reaching the credit card breach is, but STEAM users who have purchased products online for electronic delivery would do well to keep an eye on their credit card statements for the next while, especially if MaddoxX makes good on a promise to release a "spreadsheet."
STEAM cafe owners worldwide are more than a little upset with the information already leaked. MaddoxX has posted emails received from cafe owners and operators:
Believe me, nobody wants to 'stick it to Valve' more than those currently in the cafe program. We're rubbing pennies together trying to make it from month to month, while Valve is making millions off of us... All I ask is that you make some effort to edit cafe numerical details from any future release.
Please don't release the CC information, for the sake of the centers who are less informed.
MaddoxX does make one thing quite clear in his electronic manifesto:
If you want me to remove these files you can e-mail me at (address removed) and I prefer you come with something good unless you want me to expose ALL of the customers their information.
It seems that VALVe is being held for ransom. If this is true, VALVe may be in trouble, as California Senate Bill 1386 requires that credit card holders be informed of any breach of their information, and MaddoxX already knows exactly how much money they have available.
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It's lovely that you respect your monarch and won't say anything less than lovely about him, but you can't expect the rest of the world to follow that. The divine right to be king is a divine right to live under the world's scrutiny.
Say I hate to think what would happen if someone drew Mohammed as a monkey near some feet.
So if I download some software for the first time, and it's faulty, I'm to blame for not having downloaded it and filed bug reports in a past life?
On bugzilla.mozilla there was a feature that allowed users to vote for particular bugs they felt required attention. However the mozilla developers *never* responded except to close the bug (unfixed or unimplemented) at the bottom of two hundred pleas. The only exception was to implement the suggestion of the high-vote bug to 'remove the voting system from bugzilla' as it gave the false impression that users had any influence on development.
Talking about the Church of Emacs, Richard Stallman was asked whether it was a sin to use vi.
No, it's a penance
Documentation comes with maturity. Many [younger] free software projects move at such a pace (compare the Hagunenon evolution of Mozilla Thunderbird to the rock-steady Microsoft Outlook) that the documentation lags behind a version. Young projects have fewer users, and short intervals between releases with major changes, giving few man hours for the documentation to be updated. It's not yet in the developer's interest to produce complete accurate documentation; many intended features are yet to be introduced while current features are to be changed or removed completely.
Documentation is a target for/after the 1.0 release. A larger userbase of less experienced users demands complete documentation. Developers demand [API] documentation to allow extension. Major releases are rarer, more users have more time to complete documentation, for a stable feature-complete application.
This explains why no other project has documentation superior to perl's at perldoc. Check it out, it's exemplary.
http://perldoc.perl.org/
Those charts look pretty hot to me. Did you look at the chart in the page? http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/l ibrary/os-perlgdchart/pie_step1_step2.gif :]
c tive_Pie_Chart.gif. odc_vststockallocation2003_fig03(en-us,office.11). gif
e fox
). Anti-aliased lines and text
Let's compare this to what I'd get if I asked most professionals for a chart. (These were the first ones from google). The lack of anti-aliasing hurts one's eye, these all look like they're from 1995.
http://support.alphasoftware.com/images/XD_Intera
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa192481
(the second one is 3d)
And in response to your comment
> When will open source advocates learn to delegate the graphic design aspect of their work to professionals? if only the programming types in charge of these projects would admit they're better at making code than graphics.
You seem to have missed the point. The article is about free software that can be used by professional and non-professional alike to create some hot graphics. Perhaps you're referring to the ugliness of the original tux logo? It's not 1995, and developers aren't resigned to producing their own graphics. If you look all free software houses pushing their brand use professional designers. Think of the firefox logo (2004)
http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/branding-fir
or of ubuntu and gnome's curves, and check out the tango project http://tango.freedesktop.org/
Desktop linux has never looked so sexy.
Why so sour, AC?
Thawte was developed by Mark Shuttleworth. He sold it for $560 million in 1999. He's now responsible for Ubuntu.
Of course it's a crisis! The United States must immediately launch a mission to Sun crewed by Hollywood stereotypes to drop a nuclear missile into the sun to restore the oxygen balance. Of course a nuclear missile couldn't do that, that's why they have to fly through a narrow gulley around the equator and drop the missle into a special hole.
Of course the laptop can't run Vista. That's a hilarious suggestion. It would never work.
t .mspx
Microsoft aren't going to ship an ancient unsupported distribution (98, 2000), which leaves only versions of XP. XP was first sold in 2001, and Microsoft intend it to be usurped by this years Vista. Production of XP is due to be phased out in 2008 (that's next year folks), and retail and OEM licenses won't be available from January 31, 2008 (that's nine months away) according to their following page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/defaul
They can't stick to that date. Dell customers have shown the demand for XP remains; Dell's profits dropped the months it wasn't available. So it's no surprise Microsoft choose to bundle XP for $3 over Vista. The truth is Vista, their more expensive, more recent product that they really want to push is less desirable to most users, and this a consequence of Microsoft's own policies. Microsoft succeeded in creating the ultimate lock-in system with XP, and this has now hit them hard. Most XP users see the system as perfectly functional, they've become incredibly accustomed to even the dysfunctional parts and many of them don't remember or never experienced previous upgrades (they've had XP for six years). It's true that upgrading will only introduce hardware problems, the trouble of data migration, loss of settings, and fewer compatible applications.
If they do phase out XP, I'm going to stockpile discs to sell with filament lightbulbs the months after the stores dry up.
Hotplug CPU support? That must burn.
It's okay, the discs they are selling are re-writeable.
When I used wordpress (a year and a half ago) I found the same problem. I was trying to get a consistent design across all my website (which included static pages, a wiki, and a wordpress installation). Hopefully they've improved upon the theming engine since, when I used wordpress there were few themes available. My major issue with such CMS is that all the sites look the same, it numbs the mind and you can't tell where you are.
With 243 copies purchased in China, Vista really has security by obscurity, if by no other means.
Does anyone understand why the make or break of a new OS this year is whether you can view different workspaces (multiple desktops, whatever you call them) imposed onto a cube which you can twist about? This seems completely dysfunctional. You can't possibly view observe all six faces at once, so it's going to be very difficult to find anything, and you'll get quite disorientated looking. If you perform the wrong transformations, desktops will come out upside down, or rotated 90 or 270 degrees. Most people have 4:3 or 16:9 ratio screens, so you can't possibly map six of these onto the faces of a cube without distorting them terribly. If you had four or nine desktops, then you could split the screen to display them all in a rectangular grid, which would make finding applications easy: this would be planar rather than 3D. There's no need to make the desktop something from Half-Life 2, or I'd staple six screens together and send myself to space.
The word *actually* is only used by teenagers, and it means 'not'. eg
"No teacher, the dog *actually* ate my homework"
"They *actually* had sex in a bush"
"I hear they *actually* published Duke Nukem Forever."
omgzz they've patented standing your computer up? Quick, everyone flip your towers over before the patent police get to you. They have equipment that can detect the orientation of your motherboard from outside your home.
"What's good for M&M enterprises is good for the country."
If it ain't broke, break it. Fix it. Understand it.
Here's some things to try:
Compile mplayer. Build a firefox package for your distro. Download, patch and compile a kernel. Add a cronjob to delete some files at random. Forget about it. Try and restore them. (ext2 does not delete file pointers in inodes). Create an LVM group. Siphon disk space between disks and partition. Try a file system written by someone suspected of murder. Post on a linux-devel list and join Linus in slagging off Gnome. Try KDE and XFCE and decide no-one needs a desktop environment. Try some ultra minimal *box window manager. Live in the terminal for a week. Log in to your computer using SSH from afar and wonder why when you play music you can't hear it. Rsync something. Write your own superior syncing script. Write some perl scripts. Python. Add a RAID. Try an old 2.4 kernel..
Cafe owners are in trouble, and users who made online purchases may be next
... create their own 'fake' but working cafe / certificate."
... All I ask is that you make some effort to edit cafe numerical details from any future release.
VALVe's STEAM content distribution system has been the target of no small share of bad press since it was created, with complaints ranging from apathetic customer service to the inability to play legitimately purchased games online. Some users have had their accounts locked, deleted, or hijacked - but a hacker known only as "MaddoxX" has just opened a rather sizeable can of worms.
According to a posting made on an anti-STEAM website, MaddoxX has bypassed VALVe's security system and accessed a significant chunk of data, including:
* Screenshots of internal VALVe web pages
* A portion of VALVe's Cafe directory
* Error logs
* Credit card information of customers
* Financial information on VALVe
While only the Cafe owners appear to be in immediate danger, MaddoxX claims to "have shell access everywhere" and has posted a list of login details for accounts on the VALVe servers, and private certificates for "People with a little bit (sic) experience
It's not currently known how far-reaching the credit card breach is, but STEAM users who have purchased products online for electronic delivery would do well to keep an eye on their credit card statements for the next while, especially if MaddoxX makes good on a promise to release a "spreadsheet."
STEAM cafe owners worldwide are more than a little upset with the information already leaked. MaddoxX has posted emails received from cafe owners and operators:
Believe me, nobody wants to 'stick it to Valve' more than those currently in the cafe program. We're rubbing pennies together trying to make it from month to month, while Valve is making millions off of us
Please don't release the CC information, for the sake of the centers who are less informed.
MaddoxX does make one thing quite clear in his electronic manifesto:
If you want me to remove these files you can e-mail me at (address removed) and I prefer you come with something good unless you want me to expose ALL of the customers their information.
It seems that VALVe is being held for ransom. If this is true, VALVe may be in trouble, as California Senate Bill 1386 requires that credit card holders be informed of any breach of their information, and MaddoxX already knows exactly how much money they have available.