Well, to be fair, many people would say that those initial concerns about gmail have turned out to be true. I'm partly basing my concerns about this on their previous track record with gmail. But yes, I see that there are other possible driving factors here, so I'll wait and see.
Google offering to proxy the web for everyone cannot make sense unless they're planning to make a lot of money from your personal browsing records. In all honesty, and without wanting to sound like a troll, I think "Don't be evil" just died.
I think a lot of things in Subversion could be improved, but for a project that is supposed to take the mindshare from a previous tool, subversion is the perfect name, imho. If all open source projects (or even just other version control tools) chose names that well, they'd probably be more successful.
Hmm. I'm not convinced that geeks lack testosterone, despite their usual small size. After all, geeks are generally male, so there must be some connection there with male hormones. Also, some geeks consider themselves slightly autistic, and autism is sometimes considered to be a form of "extreme male brain".
It's feature deadlines that lead to bad software: sales-oriented people telling the public that the next version will have some whoop-bang feature, and it'll be ready in two month's time (which happens to perfectly coincide with the christmas shopping spree).
A number of Free Software/Open Source projects recently have had success with a different approach, which is to set a Release Deadline. The difference is that, with a release deadline, only features which are ready by the freeze date make it in. Otherwise, they're held off until next time.
Unfortunately, Debian (and apparently, Wine) haven't been managing this, and instead, the releases slip until Feature X is ready. Open Source and Free Software can be developed quickly, but on the other hand, when you're depending on Free Software's constantly evolving featureset, any particular "Feature X" can take a LONG time.
Well, OS X is still bitmapped, afaik. So right away, scaleable graphics have a big advantage over it. Also, I haven't seen or heard anything about OS X allowing 3D in buttons and stuff like that.
Ideally, for fully-capable graphical interface, I'd want at least the following:
3D and 2D integrated
Everything vector-based and FULL resolution independence, so that apps have no need to consider what screen size they're displaying on, and a better monitor simply means better quality.
Video integrated seamlessly
Full animation support, so that any effects can be handled by one desktop-level animation controller
No "hard" boundaries: a window's animations can flow into the wallpaper; a button's animations can flow out of the button; a mouse pointer can truly "grab" and pull and bend buttons, etc.
I don't know how much of that is possible on OS X, but I have used it, and I haven't seen that much beyond bending windows and nice screensavers.
Avalon seems to be closer to all this. GTK certainly shows potential, with the funky GTL buttons demoed recently. But I think integration is the crucial aspect here, and it sounds like windows is doing more in that direction so far.
Didn't I hear the same "no rebooting" line with Win2k and with WinXP?
Win 2K and XP do seem to manage this on some (rare) occasions. The architecture seems to be there to support it, so I wouldn't be too surprised if Longhorn does what they say.
More importantly, though... it looks like Longhorn's graphics capabilities really are set to stand out from the Linux (and even OS X) crowd. It's a pity that Linux graphic teams haven't managed to unify and focus on getting an integrated "product" out. We have Xorg, and Cairo/SVG, and maybe GTK or Qt, but not a complete, end-to-end platform with established animation APIs etc. Hopefully we'll catch up before we start to look too old.
Milliseconds before impact, the entire windshields and all the windows go blue.
Haven't experienced much windows frustration, have you?
Hours before impact, the entire windshield and all the windows go blue. As your new, ultra-expensive machine hurtles towards final, crushing defeat, you can't help but wonder if problems like this have destroyed people's livelihoods in the past...
I'm not sure how the Release Manager in Debian works, but a lot can probably be learned from Debian here. They (of course) have developers all over the globe, and they use a debian keyring for signing packages, as I understand it.
Since Debian is deliberately open and accountable in all aspects, you should be able to go back in their mailing lists and find the discussions that took place for different options etc.
Bittorrent is a three-stage download process (search/read site, download torrent, download via bittorrent), and two-stage upload process (generate torrent, share) at least. By contrast, most p2p apps are two-stage download (search, download), and one stage upload (share file, or drop in a folder). It's simple common sense to streamline the process with previously available technology.
'the fuck you care? If that's what they need to do their work, so be it!
Well, ignoring your ill manners:
They needed no such thing for the project. It was a case of a client-server website, that could have been done in standards-compliant HTML and in fact would have been better for it.
This is MY government. As a result of choosing an unnecessarily limited solution, they not only locked in themselves (ie, my public services), but also every company that works for them, and possibly contractors and suppliers further down the line.
In short, government is no place for proprietary software -- certainly not when they're demanding that other citizens comply with their choice of proprietary software. Go read up on Brazil and Free Software, if you still don't understand.
That's normal. In case you haven't noticed, governments don't actually attract the best and brightest
Seems to me that the most obvious way to decentralise bittorrent would be to just have a separate gnutella network solely for.torrent files, along with a hack in the client that automatically runs bittorrent on the downloaded files.
Gnutella has progressed over the years, and is the fastest P2P app I know for small files. It would handle searching etc. too, and if you've tried a client like gtk-gnutella, you know that high-quality filtering is no problem.
This has been happening for a while now, in different countries. Unfortunately, governments seem to have difficulty making the reality in low-level department branches match up with their official national policies. Branches in the UK still actively demand Microsoft Windows, despite policies of equal consideration for open source, for example.
The GPL is about Free Software, not open source. I don't mean to whine pointlessly, but it's an important distinction. Open Source folk wouldn't like it if you called their work "shareware", so please try to use the correct terminology.
Never worked in a large software house have you? Every group will have it's own standards, heaven help you if you have to look at another group's code.
Actually, I look at different coding types all the time.
Your tab specifications sound very arbitrary, so I'll agree to disagree on that. If you're basing those numbers on a study or something, though, I'd be interested to hear about it:)
Nothing in the Act approved June 19, 1936, known as the Robinson-Patman Antidiscrimination Act, shall apply to purchases of their supplies for their own use by schools,
Hmm.. am I reading that wrong, or does it only apply to things that socially beneficial bodies buy for their own use? It seems to say nothing about what they produce.
Personally, I think this whole idea of GPL being a price-fixing scheme is ridiculous. I wouldn't give it a second thought, if I hadn't watched SCO drag things so far.
But... if the FSF are exempt, that would worry me more. I trust the FSF to handle such a case wisely more than I trust independent organisations to fight for the GPL rather than cave under pressure.
I always wondered what motivation robots have for "learning". Humans are driven by various needs (e.g. shelter/sex/food/beer) - what needs do the robots have?
AI motivation is very simple: it'll value whatever you program it to value, or a more complex derivative of multiple values you give it.
For example, if you program a character in a game to value moving towards and destroying a target, then that's the decision it will take, when comparing the value of possible actions.
In another example, genetic algorithms are given a set of values, and they evolve the ones with the most value.
So this stuff is really the core of AI, rather than an abstract concept that needs to be guessed at.
Aye, but speaking only for myself, that's precisely what I can't relate to. "Making your mark in the universe" strikes me as a very selfish concept. It seems to me that a new species achieving interstellar travel should be trying to learn from older races and establishing peaceful relations, rather than trying to prove themselves better than others. But maybe that's just me.
No, I'm aware of that. And of how the original Star Trek was the first show to include inter-racial kissing. I did watch the original series, but nonetheless... for me, Star Trek: TNG was the one that affected me, and got me hooked. And that had a quite different meaning for me, as explained above.
Personally, I would rather governments be entirely open. There really is no reason for a government to keep secrets if it's doing the right thing. I mean, the Iraq war wasn't even considered right by most, but yet Saddam knew long before he was attacked that we were coming. I'm aware that soldiers need to be protected in the line of duty, but I have to wonder if we'd find a better, more honest way of approaching problems, if only we'd quit the games and really look for another way.
Yep, they really should keep kids away from computers until the kids go to school and learn about them. But I guess it'll be a few generations yet before we start to realise that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to be fair, many people would say that those initial concerns about gmail have turned out to be true. I'm partly basing my concerns about this on their previous track record with gmail. But yes, I see that there are other possible driving factors here, so I'll wait and see.
Google offering to proxy the web for everyone cannot make sense unless they're planning to make a lot of money from your personal browsing records. In all honesty, and without wanting to sound like a troll, I think "Don't be evil" just died.
My advice? Go work for a sane company :)
I think a lot of things in Subversion could be improved, but for a project that is supposed to take the mindshare from a previous tool, subversion is the perfect name, imho. If all open source projects (or even just other version control tools) chose names that well, they'd probably be more successful.
Hehh, well, I didn't mean that the marketing types were saying it right now ;)
Actually, after looking at the photo, I won't even agree with the abnormal body suggestion. They all look like normal males to me.
Hmm. I'm not convinced that geeks lack testosterone, despite their usual small size. After all, geeks are generally male, so there must be some connection there with male hormones. Also, some geeks consider themselves slightly autistic, and autism is sometimes considered to be a form of "extreme male brain".
It's feature deadlines that lead to bad software: sales-oriented people telling the public that the next version will have some whoop-bang feature, and it'll be ready in two month's time (which happens to perfectly coincide with the christmas shopping spree).
A number of Free Software/Open Source projects recently have had success with a different approach, which is to set a Release Deadline. The difference is that, with a release deadline, only features which are ready by the freeze date make it in. Otherwise, they're held off until next time.
Unfortunately, Debian (and apparently, Wine) haven't been managing this, and instead, the releases slip until Feature X is ready. Open Source and Free Software can be developed quickly, but on the other hand, when you're depending on Free Software's constantly evolving featureset, any particular "Feature X" can take a LONG time.
Well, OS X is still bitmapped, afaik. So right away, scaleable graphics have a big advantage over it. Also, I haven't seen or heard anything about OS X allowing 3D in buttons and stuff like that.
Ideally, for fully-capable graphical interface, I'd want at least the following:
I don't know how much of that is possible on OS X, but I have used it, and I haven't seen that much beyond bending windows and nice screensavers.
Avalon seems to be closer to all this. GTK certainly shows potential, with the funky GTL buttons demoed recently. But I think integration is the crucial aspect here, and it sounds like windows is doing more in that direction so far.
Win 2K and XP do seem to manage this on some (rare) occasions. The architecture seems to be there to support it, so I wouldn't be too surprised if Longhorn does what they say.
More importantly, though... it looks like Longhorn's graphics capabilities really are set to stand out from the Linux (and even OS X) crowd. It's a pity that Linux graphic teams haven't managed to unify and focus on getting an integrated "product" out. We have Xorg, and Cairo/SVG, and maybe GTK or Qt, but not a complete, end-to-end platform with established animation APIs etc. Hopefully we'll catch up before we start to look too old.
I'm not sure how the Release Manager in Debian works, but a lot can probably be learned from Debian here. They (of course) have developers all over the globe, and they use a debian keyring for signing packages, as I understand it.
Since Debian is deliberately open and accountable in all aspects, you should be able to go back in their mailing lists and find the discussions that took place for different options etc.
Bittorrent is a three-stage download process (search/read site, download torrent, download via bittorrent), and two-stage upload process (generate torrent, share) at least. By contrast, most p2p apps are two-stage download (search, download), and one stage upload (share file, or drop in a folder). It's simple common sense to streamline the process with previously available technology.
- They needed no such thing for the project. It was a case of a client-server website, that could have been done in standards-compliant HTML and in fact would have been better for it.
- This is MY government. As a result of choosing an unnecessarily limited solution, they not only locked in themselves (ie, my public services), but also every company that works for them, and possibly contractors and suppliers further down the line.
In short, government is no place for proprietary software -- certainly not when they're demanding that other citizens comply with their choice of proprietary software. Go read up on Brazil and Free Software, if you still don't understand. I didn't claim it was abnormal.Seems to me that the most obvious way to decentralise bittorrent would be to just have a separate gnutella network solely for .torrent files, along with a hack in the client that automatically runs bittorrent on the downloaded files.
Gnutella has progressed over the years, and is the fastest P2P app I know for small files. It would handle searching etc. too, and if you've tried a client like gtk-gnutella, you know that high-quality filtering is no problem.
This has been happening for a while now, in different countries. Unfortunately, governments seem to have difficulty making the reality in low-level department branches match up with their official national policies. Branches in the UK still actively demand Microsoft Windows, despite policies of equal consideration for open source, for example.
The GPL is about Free Software, not open source. I don't mean to whine pointlessly, but it's an important distinction. Open Source folk wouldn't like it if you called their work "shareware", so please try to use the correct terminology.
Hmm.. am I reading that wrong, or does it only apply to things that socially beneficial bodies buy for their own use? It seems to say nothing about what they produce.
Personally, I think this whole idea of GPL being a price-fixing scheme is ridiculous. I wouldn't give it a second thought, if I hadn't watched SCO drag things so far.
But... if the FSF are exempt, that would worry me more. I trust the FSF to handle such a case wisely more than I trust independent organisations to fight for the GPL rather than cave under pressure.
AI motivation is very simple: it'll value whatever you program it to value, or a more complex derivative of multiple values you give it.
For example, if you program a character in a game to value moving towards and destroying a target, then that's the decision it will take, when comparing the value of possible actions.
In another example, genetic algorithms are given a set of values, and they evolve the ones with the most value.
So this stuff is really the core of AI, rather than an abstract concept that needs to be guessed at.
Aye, but speaking only for myself, that's precisely what I can't relate to. "Making your mark in the universe" strikes me as a very selfish concept. It seems to me that a new species achieving interstellar travel should be trying to learn from older races and establishing peaceful relations, rather than trying to prove themselves better than others. But maybe that's just me.
Yep, I have to agree with most of those comments about the acting etc. :D
No, I'm aware of that. And of how the original Star Trek was the first show to include inter-racial kissing. I did watch the original series, but nonetheless... for me, Star Trek: TNG was the one that affected me, and got me hooked. And that had a quite different meaning for me, as explained above.
Personally, I would rather governments be entirely open. There really is no reason for a government to keep secrets if it's doing the right thing. I mean, the Iraq war wasn't even considered right by most, but yet Saddam knew long before he was attacked that we were coming. I'm aware that soldiers need to be protected in the line of duty, but I have to wonder if we'd find a better, more honest way of approaching problems, if only we'd quit the games and really look for another way.
Yep, they really should keep kids away from computers until the kids go to school and learn about them. But I guess it'll be a few generations yet before we start to realise that.