GnuCash runs fine under a KDE desktop, a TWM desktop, or any desktop you care to name provided you've got the right libraries installed. I really wish people would put this hoary old chestnut away.
The reason why we used the GNOME libraries is that they provide a bunch of stuff that otherwise would have to be recoded by the developers. Is that so hard to grasp? I am befuddled why anyone would develop Un*x end-user apps without taking advantage of the facilities that GNOME or KDE provide.
Please go and have a look at the GnuCash codebase before slagging the developers off.
It is not perfect, and maintaining documentation is hard work, but compared to many other projects the GnuCash codebase is extremely clean and relatively well documented, unless it's deteriorated horribly since I last looked which I doubt.
GnuCash's user documentation has always been pretty good, though I may be biased because I had a major hand in writing the docs in 1.6. The big problem with documenting GnuCash is that most people not only need to learn how the program works, to use any accounting software they need a tutorial in accounting 101, which is not simple and varies greatly from country to country and business to business.
AFAICT the biggest issue is simply the lack of people coding on it. Maybe people get scared off by Scheme, maybe it's lack of sexiness of accounting software, maybe it's that people assumed that Gnumatic/LDG were still funding development, maybe it's just that none of the GnuCash developers (except maybe myself at the time;) )are fame-seeking publicity hounds. In any case, here's hoping some enthusiastic newcomers will help out.
First, I should add that whilst I was a GnuCash developer for a time, I have not been actively involved for nearly two years (though seeing the call to arms it might be time to roll up the sleeves againn. But there are very good reasons why GnuCash made some of the design decisions you mentioned:
GtkHTML -- do you really need a HTML parser in an accounting program?Why not just use Mozilla to display your HTML?
Just using Mozilla isn't good enough. Using GtkHTML makes the GUI far, far cleaner and lets us embed graphs in ways you simply can't do using Mozilla.
Gnome XML No one NEEDS to save their accounting data in some XML file format? What's wrong with the standard Quicken format that everyone is used to or even a nice, simple text file that I can munge with vi?
There are so many things wrong with the standard Quicken format that your comment is almost comical - chief amongst them being that there is no standard Quicken format. It is a complete clusterfsck, and I take my hat off the developers who managed to make head or tail of it. As for a text format, that's what XML is, and parsing it is a no-brainer in just about any language you care to name. Perhaps you'd care to write a robust parser for your wonderful error-free format?
As to the general thrust of your comments, yes, it would be nice if a few gnome libraries were merged IMHO, and in hindsight maybe Python would have been a better choice as a scripting language (not because of the merits or otherwise of Scheme - Scheme is a wonderful language) but because it would have lowered the barriers to entry for GnuCash development. But back when I was a developer, the general view was that it was our job to write software, and it was the job of distributions to package it up so that Joe Average didn't need to compile it himself. Debian always managed to make it a no-brainer install. Why can't every other friggin' distro manage it?
Well, doesn't a sentence like "electronics on this fighter is poor but the rest is OK" resemble me something like "It's a great TV-set, just the screen quality is poor"?...
No, what I meant was that they were sometimes awkward to use, but they were effective enough.
I did some googling on this topic, and the conclusion seemed to be that the difference between the MiG-29 and F-16 was small enough that the determining factor was the pilot quality.
The MiG engines were shitty things to maintain, though, which may be the reason why air forces don't like them very much.
From what I've read, the MiG-29 was about as good as the F-16 in combat, and that Russian missile systems may have been better. Sure, the electronics on the MiG were a pain in the arse, but they apparently worked OK.
Care to cite a reference for your version of events?
I am a postgraduate student (hopefully) not that far away from finishing. I have been a casual tutor for years at two different universities; I am also on the board of a university-affiliated institution (an "academic college"). I've been involved in some very nasty catfights, so I've been around the block.
If you decide to pursue the route of getting something done about it, I'd suggest:
don't even discuss the idea of a quid pro quo, be it monetary or academic. It makes you sound like you're trying to blackmail your university or the companies involved. Unless that's what you want to do, of course...in which case I hope you enjoy a short and unsuccessful career as a criminal.
Get somebody with muscle and who understands the situation on your side. A tenured academic who understands the technology and the geek ethic is ideal. If you don't know them directly, maybe a TA or another more advanced student that you do know directly will.
They may want it solved on the quiet. Will you be prepared to accept that, or do you want glory?
If it doesn't get solved, then you might consider taking it to the student paper. All journalists love a juicy story, and most student papers (if they've got enough editorial independance) love sticking it to the uni admins, so they are a good option. If that's not an option, there is the local media, but if it goes that far you really want help - you can never be sure which way a journo is going to spin a story, particularly one like this, and a professor sounds a whole lot more credible on TV than a scruffy college student. I know that's not fair, but that's the way it works.
Sure, there is a large segment of the population that's paranoid about risk, but there's another section of the population for whom risk is not only not a deterrent, it's somewhat of an encouragement.
Across the world, how many people ride motorcross bikes? Jump out of planes? Go rock-climbing? Or, if you're arguing that the people that like those kinds of activities can't afford $100,000 to go to space, how many rich dilettantes like to race Porsches - an activity that can easily chew up well over $100,000 in a single season.
I would argue that there are plenty of rich people who will view the risks phlegmatically enough to keep a space tourism operation expanding for a while.
You've got it right conceptually (unlike the parent poster), but your terminology isn't quite right. Intractable==can't solve it in a reasonable amount of time (where reasonable==before the heat death of the universe for non-trivial instances of the problem). NP-complete problems are intractable, but they're not the only ones. The halting problem is not intractable, it's undecidable, which means that there is no algorithm that will give you an answer for all cases, no matter how long you're prepared to wait...
Whilst K&R is a masterpiece of prose, and Stroustrup, well, isn't, the real reason why K&R is small and Strstroup is both large and incomplete is that C is a clean, small language, where C++, well, isn't.
Why does he need to travel all the way to Nevada for that particular experience? In many states of Australia, there are legal brothels all over the place. Heck, we even have one listed (well, sorta) on the stock exchange.
The Democrats aren't talking about making open source solutions mandatory.
The point of this exercise is to look at how much the Australian government spends on Microsoft licenses (at a guess, multiple tens of millions of dollars annually), and ask whether it would be a better use of those funds to enhance open source software so that it meets government requirements. Tens of millions of dollars annually employs a lot of people...
I haven't seen the pictures of this one, but my former boss (hey Bill, if you're still reading/.), had an older generation of Picturebook. They are much smaller than a Picturebook, or indeed anything else with a (sorta) full-size keyboard. Depending on what you intend to do with a notebook computer, the extra portability (you can shove one in a backpack and still have plenty of room for other stuff) makes them an alternative worth looking at.
First, it is correct that old clunkers put out way of the smog-inducing pollutants, unburnt hydrocarbons, and whatnot than a modern SUV. So, in terms of the local environment, the SUV driver is doing better.
However, in terms of carbon dioxide emission, which most scientists regard as the primary cause of global warming and most Americans stick their head in the sand over, the clunker will be way better.
And, finally, have you considered the possibility that the polluntants created in manufacturing a new car for our clunker-driving might be lower the extra pollution of its continued operation when compared to a new car?
I hate to resort to capital letters BUT YOU ARE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY WRONG.
In this case, security from script kiddies is neither here nor there. The best way to keep your system secure is have as many white hats as possible try and find holes in it, and the best way to do that is to publish the details of the system. That way, you can be confident that the system is secure, even if the source code is leaked.As to your comment about OpenBSD, that is almost completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter how secure the base OS is if the software it's running is insecure.
Which do you trust more? A system where the proponents say, "Trust Us" or a system where you can look for yourself. I know which I prefer.
Obscurity is almost *never* helpful in designing a secure system, because any system that relies on keeping the details of its workings secret is going to be vulnerable to anybody that *does* learn those workings. Just as importantly, if the system is open to public scrutiny, it can be checked for flaws, whereas if it is kept secret security holes that were missed by the developers can be left wide open.
The mind boggles. How many people are going to accept a system that lets their insurance company track everywhere they drive? Yes, I'm surely more obsessive about this kind of thing than Joe Average, but surely you don't have to be a privacy nut to have some issues with this.
Both sides in Israel's civil war want peace and accept each others terms pretty much except for some details like compensation for siezed property and water allocation.
I don't think this is correct. Aside from the water rights and compensation issues, as I understand it there's a really big stumbling block called the "right of return". The Palestinians want the right to return to their pre-1948 places of residence in Israel proper. There's no way in the world the Israelis are going to agree to this, because it would mean that Jews would become a minority in Israel, a situation which they find totally unacceptable.
Additionally, you've got a minority of Israelis - the settler movement - who apparently want to expel the Palestinian population from the occupied territories and create a "Greater Israel", and a large number of (but it's not exactly clear how many) Palestinians who want to wipe Israel off the map. Whilst you might eventually get majorities on both sides to accept a peace deal, dealing with the hardliners on both sides is going to be a struggle (case in point: the IRA and the Unionist militias in Northern Ireland).
Albert Einstein's latter career was largely a bust, IIRC, and the point of the discussion was that great scientists ceased to do much *after* they got married and had kids.
Let's think laterally for a minute here. The point of this may not be to listen to cellphones at all.
By announcing publicly that they're going to be tapping everyone's cellphone for the next day or two, they will have denied Al-Queda or whomever it is they are worried about the ability to make secure phonecalls. So maybe, if the organisation was about to pull a terrorist attack, they wouldn't be able to coordinate their actions and would have to abandon the attack. Alternatively, maybe the point of the exercise is that the people of concern would be forced to use alternative, more vulnerable means of communication (landlines or face-to-face meetings).
I can't find the specs on the site, but I very much doubt that this system can output video at anywhere near 1920x1080 anyway.
In any case, is there anywhere except off a HDTV broadcast or demos like that one you have pointed to where you can actually obtain video at that high a resolution?
I thought even a relative slug like this laptop would be fast enough to decode just about anything in software these days. My P3/733 with a Matrox G400 decodes MPEG-4 just fine.
There are several reasons why it's reasonable to assume that the NSA may have had (and may still have) a very substantial lead over the open world in secure communications technology:
Modern cryptography didn't really become important until the 1960's and 70's in the open world. The NSA, its predecessors, and its sister agencies (GCHQ, DSD, and so on) have been working on it very hard since World War II.
They have huge financial resources, so they could afford to build a DES brute-force cracker well before the open world could justify the expense (I have heard they had such a thing in the 1980's).
They hire a lot of people, and whilst the money might not have been brilliant I'd imagine that for some people a combination of some or all of: knowing secret stuff, serving one's country, the chance to work with copious amounts of the best tech you can buy (and some you can't), and having the world's best Usenet archive, would be highly attractive:)
I don't know, but I'd imagine that the NSA, particularly in the Cold War years, would have had a real sense of mission. That would tend to help with the leadership problem.
They can attack the problem of message interception in a lot of ways that aren't of much interest to the open world - for instance, anything that requires a spy satellite is not of much interest to the rest of us.
They are probably in a position to have classified anything that they think would "risk US national security".
Slashdot Mirror
Problems like this is why the call for help went out.
The reason why we used the GNOME libraries is that they provide a bunch of stuff that otherwise would have to be recoded by the developers. Is that so hard to grasp? I am befuddled why anyone would develop Un*x end-user apps without taking advantage of the facilities that GNOME or KDE provide.
It is not perfect, and maintaining documentation is hard work, but compared to many other projects the GnuCash codebase is extremely clean and relatively well documented, unless it's deteriorated horribly since I last looked which I doubt.
GnuCash's user documentation has always been pretty good, though I may be biased because I had a major hand in writing the docs in 1.6. The big problem with documenting GnuCash is that most people not only need to learn how the program works, to use any accounting software they need a tutorial in accounting 101, which is not simple and varies greatly from country to country and business to business.
AFAICT the biggest issue is simply the lack of people coding on it. Maybe people get scared off by Scheme, maybe it's lack of sexiness of accounting software, maybe it's that people assumed that Gnumatic/LDG were still funding development, maybe it's just that none of the GnuCash developers (except maybe myself at the time ;) )are fame-seeking publicity hounds. In any case, here's hoping some enthusiastic newcomers will help out.
Just using Mozilla isn't good enough. Using GtkHTML makes the GUI far, far cleaner and lets us embed graphs in ways you simply can't do using Mozilla.
There are so many things wrong with the standard Quicken format that your comment is almost comical - chief amongst them being that there is no standard Quicken format. It is a complete clusterfsck, and I take my hat off the developers who managed to make head or tail of it. As for a text format, that's what XML is, and parsing it is a no-brainer in just about any language you care to name. Perhaps you'd care to write a robust parser for your wonderful error-free format?
As to the general thrust of your comments, yes, it would be nice if a few gnome libraries were merged IMHO, and in hindsight maybe Python would have been a better choice as a scripting language (not because of the merits or otherwise of Scheme - Scheme is a wonderful language) but because it would have lowered the barriers to entry for GnuCash development. But back when I was a developer, the general view was that it was our job to write software, and it was the job of distributions to package it up so that Joe Average didn't need to compile it himself. Debian always managed to make it a no-brainer install. Why can't every other friggin' distro manage it?
No, what I meant was that they were sometimes awkward to use, but they were effective enough.
I did some googling on this topic, and the conclusion seemed to be that the difference between the MiG-29 and F-16 was small enough that the determining factor was the pilot quality. The MiG engines were shitty things to maintain, though, which may be the reason why air forces don't like them very much.
Care to cite a reference for your version of events?
There are arguments both ways, but it's not a laydown misere.
If you decide to pursue the route of getting something done about it, I'd suggest:
Across the world, how many people ride motorcross bikes? Jump out of planes? Go rock-climbing? Or, if you're arguing that the people that like those kinds of activities can't afford $100,000 to go to space, how many rich dilettantes like to race Porsches - an activity that can easily chew up well over $100,000 in a single season.
I would argue that there are plenty of rich people who will view the risks phlegmatically enough to keep a space tourism operation expanding for a while.
Sorry to nitpick...
Paging Dr Freud...
Whilst K&R is a masterpiece of prose, and Stroustrup, well, isn't, the real reason why K&R is small and Strstroup is both large and incomplete is that C is a clean, small language, where C++, well, isn't.
Why does he need to travel all the way to Nevada for that particular experience? In many states of Australia, there are legal brothels all over the place. Heck, we even have one listed (well, sorta) on the stock exchange.
The point of this exercise is to look at how much the Australian government spends on Microsoft licenses (at a guess, multiple tens of millions of dollars annually), and ask whether it would be a better use of those funds to enhance open source software so that it meets government requirements. Tens of millions of dollars annually employs a lot of people...
I haven't seen the pictures of this one, but my former boss (hey Bill, if you're still reading /.), had an older generation of Picturebook. They are much smaller than a Picturebook, or indeed anything else with a (sorta) full-size keyboard. Depending on what you intend to do with a notebook computer, the extra portability (you can shove one in a backpack and still have plenty of room for other stuff) makes them an alternative worth looking at.
However, in terms of carbon dioxide emission, which most scientists regard as the primary cause of global warming and most Americans stick their head in the sand over, the clunker will be way better.
And, finally, have you considered the possibility that the polluntants created in manufacturing a new car for our clunker-driving might be lower the extra pollution of its continued operation when compared to a new car?
In this case, security from script kiddies is neither here nor there. The best way to keep your system secure is have as many white hats as possible try and find holes in it, and the best way to do that is to publish the details of the system. That way, you can be confident that the system is secure, even if the source code is leaked.As to your comment about OpenBSD, that is almost completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter how secure the base OS is if the software it's running is insecure.
Which do you trust more? A system where the proponents say, "Trust Us" or a system where you can look for yourself. I know which I prefer.
Obscurity is almost *never* helpful in designing a secure system, because any system that relies on keeping the details of its workings secret is going to be vulnerable to anybody that *does* learn those workings. Just as importantly, if the system is open to public scrutiny, it can be checked for flaws, whereas if it is kept secret security holes that were missed by the developers can be left wide open.
The mind boggles. How many people are going to accept a system that lets their insurance company track everywhere they drive? Yes, I'm surely more obsessive about this kind of thing than Joe Average, but surely you don't have to be a privacy nut to have some issues with this.
I don't think this is correct. Aside from the water rights and compensation issues, as I understand it there's a really big stumbling block called the "right of return". The Palestinians want the right to return to their pre-1948 places of residence in Israel proper. There's no way in the world the Israelis are going to agree to this, because it would mean that Jews would become a minority in Israel, a situation which they find totally unacceptable.
Additionally, you've got a minority of Israelis - the settler movement - who apparently want to expel the Palestinian population from the occupied territories and create a "Greater Israel", and a large number of (but it's not exactly clear how many) Palestinians who want to wipe Israel off the map. Whilst you might eventually get majorities on both sides to accept a peace deal, dealing with the hardliners on both sides is going to be a struggle (case in point: the IRA and the Unionist militias in Northern Ireland).
Albert Einstein's latter career was largely a bust, IIRC, and the point of the discussion was that great scientists ceased to do much *after* they got married and had kids.
By announcing publicly that they're going to be tapping everyone's cellphone for the next day or two, they will have denied Al-Queda or whomever it is they are worried about the ability to make secure phonecalls. So maybe, if the organisation was about to pull a terrorist attack, they wouldn't be able to coordinate their actions and would have to abandon the attack. Alternatively, maybe the point of the exercise is that the people of concern would be forced to use alternative, more vulnerable means of communication (landlines or face-to-face meetings).
What do you guys think?
In any case, is there anywhere except off a HDTV broadcast or demos like that one you have pointed to where you can actually obtain video at that high a resolution?
Or is this machine even more poky than that?