Seriously though, between all the great open source code he has written and the fact that he has now publicly told ESR to go and die, what's not to love?
Not that I completely agree with the grand parent post, but who cares if they aren't main stream languages that are in extremely heavy use? PHP is a language lots of people use and it's a total piece of shit. Sure, Haskell, OCaml, Lisp etc. might not be used for writing the majority of simplistic CRUD web applications, but all of the languages the grand parent mentioned are seeing use in some of the more interesting areas of programming. For example, lots of the really interesting AI research right now is being done with Lisp. Personally, I'd rather be doing stuff like that instead of pumping out basic CRUD web applications with the "main stream" languages (Java, C#, PHP etc.) like the majority of programmers are currently doing.
P.S. I use Haskell at work daily and it's quite nice.
Cops are people.
There are good people and there are bad people.
Therefore, there are good cops and bad cops.
While I agree with some of what you've said, the argument quoted above is not a logical one. Following the two premises, it would still be completely within the realm of possibility that all cops belong to the set of people who are bad. The conclusion "Therefore, there are good cops and bad cops." does not logically follow from the two premises that you've presented.
After reading the IRC logs, what bothers me the most is that Novell doesn't even seem to consider why Microsoft is interested in this deal. They only talk about how they will work on interoperability and that Microsoft is "acknowledging" Linux. Microsoft has never been worried about getting sued by Novell over patent infringement, so what exactly do they think Microsoft's motives are? If Microsoft simply wants better integration with Linux, they have all the means to do so without pursuing any patent deals.
It seems that Microsoft's true motive was shown only a few days after the deal when Ballmer continued to throw FUD about patent issues regarding Linux. Only now, he can claim that Novell has acknowledged the patent issues in an effort to make the claims appear to be more legitimate.
It's trivial to replace the task manager with one that only shows certain processes, and this technique is used regularly by malware. If the security of your system has been breached the task manager isn't a reliable source of information.
You know who's really not an authoritative source on technical innovation?
People who compare strace to dtrace. In this case, the Wall Street Journal knows a hell of a lot more than both you and the grand parent poster.
Re:Should Congressional Action Be Warranted?
on
UnBox Calls Home, A Lot
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You and fotbr are exactly right. Unfortunately, most people aren't willing to make any sacrifices whatsoever and instead prefer to whine about it incessantly. I'm so sick of hearing people say that they don't have a choice. I stopped watching TV and mainstream movies completely just over a year ago and there are plenty of alternative forms of entertainment to keep me amused.
I have no problems with people who choose to partake in these forms of entertainment, however, I do have a problem with people who whine constantly about having no choice in the matter. Especially those who advocate that the government or groups like the EFF should step in and force the media companies to deliver the content in a manner that they personally prefer.
I've switched to Xfce and don't use GNOME anymore, but if I recall correctly you can paste a URL into the file selector by pressing Ctrl-L. It's definitely not very convenient or obvious but the feature is there. In my opinion, GNOME has become unusable because of lack of available options and the mentality that they know the way you want to do things.
You raise some interesting points, however, I'd be interested to know how many people would even be interested in listening to other peoples music while working out at the gym or on a commute. I know that when I'm at the gym, I simply throw on my play list and let it play. I have no interest in finding other people that have similar tastes in music and listening to their song selection. Since this music is being streamed by a very small player where battery life is a big concern, I also imagine that you won't have the capability to skip songs that are being streamed. So even if you happen to be in a place where lots of other people have Zunes, you'll probably end up wading through a lot of music that you don't like. Also, as you pointed out, it's going to be crippled with DRM to some degree.
I would bet that the vast majority of people that own an mp3/ogg/whatever player simply put their own music on it and want a simple interface to play and sort that music. These people, myself included, simply don't care about any additional features. With all these additional features I'd also be concerned about the battery life.
Apple got it right with the iPod. A slick design, easy to operate, plenty of space, decent battery life and a successful marketing campaign. Just having a ton of additional features, that most people probably won't use, isn't going to capture the market like the iPod has and this has been shown repeatedly by other players that already exist.
Note: I don't even have an iPod, I have an old, cheap little Nexxtech flash based mp3 player and it works fine for my needs.
In all honesty, I'm not sure if distributing patches would be acceptable, I do have my doubts about that though. You'd have to really study the entire license to be sure of that, and unfortunately due to the way the license is written it would probably be best to check directly with Sun or a lawyer who handles software licenses regularly to be sure.
Hopefully, Sun will choose an open source license which resolves most of these uncertainties.
That might work if Microsoft had any interest in being standards compliant. They don't want everything to work perfectly in all browsers since being incompatible in some areas helps them retain their monopoly. This is one of the biggest and wealthiest corporations on the planet, if they really wanted to achieve compliance with the current set of standards they have every means to do so. Instead they choose to be way behind and create proprietary extensions that only work on their OS.
Ahh, I understand the issue you're having now and I definitely agree that the conversions both ways are really ugly and a pain. If you're able to use a third party API you might want to check out Joda; that is of course, if you haven't already. Cheers.
Then change the format using the SimpleDateFormat constructor or through the applyPattern method. For example, the first format you provided (2005-04-23T12:13:15-0600) could be achieved like this:
SimpleDateFormat dFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd\'T\'HH:mm:ssZ");
See the SimpleDateFormat Javadocs here for a complete explanation of how it works including the symbols used in the formatting.
Date date = cal.getTime(); SimpleDateFormat dFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd"); String sDate = dFormat.format(date);
Where cal is the reference to your Calendar object. If that's not exactly the format you want look at the Javadocs for SimpleDateFormat. You can adjust the format accordingly in the above constructor or through the applyPattern method. You can also use the parse method in SimpleDateFormat to parse Date objects from a String. If you then want those Date objects converted to Calendar objects use the setTime(Date) method in Calendar. Hope that helps.
First of all, Thunderbirds spam filters don't need be "reconfigured" every time you install Thunderbird on another machine. Secondly, most people aren't going to setup a box just for server-side mail filtering... Honestly, why would anyone go through all of the trouble of setting up another box for server-side filtering when practically nothing makes it past the default Thunderbird filters? If you need better filtering than what the default Thunderbird settings provide you can alter the filter settings and save them for use elsewhere. Not to mention that server-side mail filtering requires the use of a daemon which is open to security exploits.
I also switched from Evolution to Thunderbird simply because the spam filtering in Evolution is horrible. Furthermore, the regular work around of running all mail through spam assassin is terribly slow.
I've updated my main development box and I really like it so far. The only issue I had was getting the Nvidia drivers installed, however after a little bit of research even that was quite easy. I'm currently in the process of installing it on my laptop and that has also gone fairly smooth. Practically, everything has worked by default and the only issues on the laptop so far have been that I had to use ndiswrapper to get the wireless drivers working, which I also had to do under Debian and Ubuntu, and the ATI drivers aren't as easy to install as they could be.
If you're a developer or just love tinkering with software and your OS I would highly recommend it. The install is fairly straight forward and it has a lot of bleeding edge software available. The yum repositories are also quite full for it only being released a few days ago.
If you don't have the patience or the ability to install a kernel and the ATI or Nvidia drivers, I would simply recommend waiting a few weeks while the How To's and the repositories get updated with the new packages. If you're new to Linux, obviously, this isn't the distribution for you and you'd probably be better off trying to use something like Ubuntu. In my opinion, Fedora is and always will be for developers and hobbyists.
After browsing the site a little bit more it's come to my attention that you need to register for some sections and not others. I'm not exactly sure what they base this on, but it's definitely a good way to ensure that I won't be returning to the Washington Post anytime soon. I was still able to read the linked story without any registration though.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, between all the great open source code he has written and the fact that he has now publicly told ESR to go and die, what's not to love?
Not that I completely agree with the grand parent post, but who cares if they aren't main stream languages that are in extremely heavy use? PHP is a language lots of people use and it's a total piece of shit. Sure, Haskell, OCaml, Lisp etc. might not be used for writing the majority of simplistic CRUD web applications, but all of the languages the grand parent mentioned are seeing use in some of the more interesting areas of programming. For example, lots of the really interesting AI research right now is being done with Lisp. Personally, I'd rather be doing stuff like that instead of pumping out basic CRUD web applications with the "main stream" languages (Java, C#, PHP etc.) like the majority of programmers are currently doing.
P.S. I use Haskell at work daily and it's quite nice.
After reading the IRC logs, what bothers me the most is that Novell doesn't even seem to consider why Microsoft is interested in this deal. They only talk about how they will work on interoperability and that Microsoft is "acknowledging" Linux. Microsoft has never been worried about getting sued by Novell over patent infringement, so what exactly do they think Microsoft's motives are? If Microsoft simply wants better integration with Linux, they have all the means to do so without pursuing any patent deals.
It seems that Microsoft's true motive was shown only a few days after the deal when Ballmer continued to throw FUD about patent issues regarding Linux. Only now, he can claim that Novell has acknowledged the patent issues in an effort to make the claims appear to be more legitimate.
RIP lilo. You will be missed and I wish your family all the best.
It's trivial to replace the task manager with one that only shows certain processes, and this technique is used regularly by malware. If the security of your system has been breached the task manager isn't a reliable source of information.
You know who's really not an authoritative source on technical innovation?
People who compare strace to dtrace. In this case, the Wall Street Journal knows a hell of a lot more than both you and the grand parent poster.
You and fotbr are exactly right. Unfortunately, most people aren't willing to make any sacrifices whatsoever and instead prefer to whine about it incessantly. I'm so sick of hearing people say that they don't have a choice. I stopped watching TV and mainstream movies completely just over a year ago and there are plenty of alternative forms of entertainment to keep me amused.
I have no problems with people who choose to partake in these forms of entertainment, however, I do have a problem with people who whine constantly about having no choice in the matter. Especially those who advocate that the government or groups like the EFF should step in and force the media companies to deliver the content in a manner that they personally prefer.
I've switched to Xfce and don't use GNOME anymore, but if I recall correctly you can paste a URL into the file selector by pressing Ctrl-L. It's definitely not very convenient or obvious but the feature is there. In my opinion, GNOME has become unusable because of lack of available options and the mentality that they know the way you want to do things.
You raise some interesting points, however, I'd be interested to know how many people would even be interested in listening to other peoples music while working out at the gym or on a commute. I know that when I'm at the gym, I simply throw on my play list and let it play. I have no interest in finding other people that have similar tastes in music and listening to their song selection. Since this music is being streamed by a very small player where battery life is a big concern, I also imagine that you won't have the capability to skip songs that are being streamed. So even if you happen to be in a place where lots of other people have Zunes, you'll probably end up wading through a lot of music that you don't like. Also, as you pointed out, it's going to be crippled with DRM to some degree.
I would bet that the vast majority of people that own an mp3/ogg/whatever player simply put their own music on it and want a simple interface to play and sort that music. These people, myself included, simply don't care about any additional features. With all these additional features I'd also be concerned about the battery life.
Apple got it right with the iPod. A slick design, easy to operate, plenty of space, decent battery life and a successful marketing campaign. Just having a ton of additional features, that most people probably won't use, isn't going to capture the market like the iPod has and this has been shown repeatedly by other players that already exist.
Note: I don't even have an iPod, I have an old, cheap little Nexxtech flash based mp3 player and it works fine for my needs.
In all honesty, I'm not sure if distributing patches would be acceptable, I do have my doubts about that though. You'd have to really study the entire license to be sure of that, and unfortunately due to the way the license is written it would probably be best to check directly with Sun or a lawyer who handles software licenses regularly to be sure.
Hopefully, Sun will choose an open source license which resolves most of these uncertainties.
IIRC you can modify it as much as you like for your own personal use but you can't redistribute it.
Piracy must be the answer! It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the quality of the film...
I wouldn't watch that crap if you paid me.
That might work if Microsoft had any interest in being standards compliant. They don't want everything to work perfectly in all browsers since being incompatible in some areas helps them retain their monopoly. This is one of the biggest and wealthiest corporations on the planet, if they really wanted to achieve compliance with the current set of standards they have every means to do so. Instead they choose to be way behind and create proprietary extensions that only work on their OS.
I'd still be a little concerned that they need an imaginary friend to tell them not to kill...
Ahh, I understand the issue you're having now and I definitely agree that the conversions both ways are really ugly and a pain. If you're able to use a third party API you might want to check out Joda; that is of course, if you haven't already. Cheers.
First of all, Thunderbirds spam filters don't need be "reconfigured" every time you install Thunderbird on another machine. Secondly, most people aren't going to setup a box just for server-side mail filtering... Honestly, why would anyone go through all of the trouble of setting up another box for server-side filtering when practically nothing makes it past the default Thunderbird filters? If you need better filtering than what the default Thunderbird settings provide you can alter the filter settings and save them for use elsewhere. Not to mention that server-side mail filtering requires the use of a daemon which is open to security exploits.
I also switched from Evolution to Thunderbird simply because the spam filtering in Evolution is horrible. Furthermore, the regular work around of running all mail through spam assassin is terribly slow.
The post you replied to did not compare the behavior of China to Microsoft.
I've updated my main development box and I really like it so far. The only issue I had was getting the Nvidia drivers installed, however after a little bit of research even that was quite easy. I'm currently in the process of installing it on my laptop and that has also gone fairly smooth. Practically, everything has worked by default and the only issues on the laptop so far have been that I had to use ndiswrapper to get the wireless drivers working, which I also had to do under Debian and Ubuntu, and the ATI drivers aren't as easy to install as they could be.
If you're a developer or just love tinkering with software and your OS I would highly recommend it. The install is fairly straight forward and it has a lot of bleeding edge software available. The yum repositories are also quite full for it only being released a few days ago.
If you don't have the patience or the ability to install a kernel and the ATI or Nvidia drivers, I would simply recommend waiting a few weeks while the How To's and the repositories get updated with the new packages. If you're new to Linux, obviously, this isn't the distribution for you and you'd probably be better off trying to use something like Ubuntu. In my opinion, Fedora is and always will be for developers and hobbyists.
"I wouldn't even wipe my dog's ass with it."
You wipe your dog's ass?
That's a very convenient extension. Thank you.
After browsing the site a little bit more it's come to my attention that you need to register for some sections and not others. I'm not exactly sure what they base this on, but it's definitely a good way to ensure that I won't be returning to the Washington Post anytime soon. I was still able to read the linked story without any registration though.