I've used Agent under Wine, and it works pretty well, although I haven't been that thorough. The only limitation I've run into is the autoplay settings so you can click on a Wav, JPG, etc. and have a viewer program come up immediately. It may be possible to do this by changing preferences, I just haven't tried.
>Instead of porting our tools (egcs) to uncommon architectures developers are expected to spend additional time on writing the program.
Unfortunately, they want the final thing to run on Windows 3.1. Who wants to port egcs to that? Not me, that's for sure. So apparently some Mozillers have to suffer using Visual C++ 1.5 and Windows 3.1, ick! I believe Borland 4.5 built Windows 3.1 stuff, so I'm not sure what made them choose Visual.
(I use Visual C++ 5.0 and 6.0 every day (no MFC, wizards, etc), and must admit it's perfectly respectable as a straightforward development platform.)
>Temporary patches aren't going to fill up that God-shaped hole in your heart. Only one thing can fill that hole.
Yup, sacramental wine. Or kosher wine...
Those "old-time" religions have their drug too.
"Send"...Kinda like IE 5 "Go" button
on
UNIX for Moms
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· Score: 1
>Microsoft had to add a "Go" button next to the address bar with Internet Explorer v5.0 because people didn't know that after hand-typing a URL, they had to hit enter !
Note that it's also handy for "mouse-vegging" -- sitting back in a chair surfing and such with a cordless mouse -- since you can paste an address cut from elsewhere using just the mouse, and then hit the go button. Otherwise I have to get the keyboard out just to hit one key. Sheer laziness, of course, but after working all day and dealing with the kids until they go to bed, one can get rather lazy...
Information that I might find useful or informative is being produced far faster than I could ever read it/view it. I must self-censor, simply by choosing not to partake of a particular source. A ShutUp list strikes me as the same as simply not choosing to watch a particular channel.
Now, if I'm looking for feedback to something I've created (and JK clearly falls in this category a lot), I think I do have more of an obligation to listen to responses than I do in simply selecting what's worth reading. However, even then I reserve the right not to let a particular person command most of my attention.
I'd like to e-mail Logitech and tell them what a good move this is, and that it should keep me buying Logitech products. Anyone have an address for them? I would go through their customer support thing, but it just asks too many danged questions.
> it just irrtates me that someone [...] gets paid $60K-$120K a year while I'm [getting] a whopping $25K per year.
Then find another job. It's not you who should be irritated by them, it's they at you for doing what you do for such a piddling wage and bringing the pay average down. It is not immoral or disloyal to leave a place where you are underpaid and overworked.
And if you're young, a certain amount of job-switching is good for you. You'll get a better sense of what work environments there are, you'll find that your best pay raises are when you change jobs, and you'll make useful contacts. Also, once you've left school, work is one of the major places to meet people, both for friends and potential mates. And it can be problematic to get involved with the latter while still working for the same company.
I switched from putting the curly brace at the end of the line after fixing one too many compile problems where I thought there was a brace but there wasn't or where I thought there wasn't a brace but there was. Give me if (...) { ... } any day.
I agree with you on the 80 columns bit though, long lines mean too danged much resizing. And cygwin doesn't like to resize width-wise.
>You know, you can't just obsolete every TV set in the nation and tell people "Oh, you have to upgrade your set or not watch TV anymore."
Actually, that is the FCC plan. However, a converter box will make the TV useful again (and of course VCRs aren't going away that soon.) If PC converter cards are $300 now, the converters should be pretty cheap once they're mass-marketed. Even on a regular set, the digital picture should be an improvement over analog broadcasts.
Cool. Now where are the cheap MPEG2 capture cards?
on
Low Cost HDTV Cards
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· Score: 1
For your first question, look at the ATI All-In-Wonder 128. I believe Sharky Extreme did a review of it, including its MPEG-2 capture abilities.
>To really do a consumer version of Linux, there are a few issues that simply need to be addressed:
And horrible as they are, I think WinModem support in Linux would be useful. Having to spend $100+ for a new modem is a real deterrent to people who are considering trying it out.
>Where I come from, 64K is a pretty huge chunk of code to waste on something that doesn't add any functionality.
Oh, enough about this. You know why there's a flight simulator in Excel? It's because some of the programmers who worked on the project wanted to sign their name to their work, something the artists of old always got to do. But now that we're corporate cogs, that seems to be taboo. So they sneaked in the simulator, which if you play with it, you'll note has a scrolling list of a lot of people who worked on Excel. I've been involved in a similar sneak to get around PHBs. (My current employer, the CEO being a programmer himself, puts the programmers' names on the product "About" box.)
It's a small act of revolution by some Microsoft programmers, and should be recognized as such, not continually brought up as a golden example of Microsoft wastefulness.
Note that you can also power said plants by mirrors heating water-filled pipes or focussing onto a much smaller set of solar panels; I believe there's a test plant somewhere that already does the former. (This really just reduces your manufacturing and wiring costs, raw silicon is cheap and plentiful (sand)) With the right mirror, you might even reflect only the wavelengths of light that plants don't use (they are green, which means they reflect green light), and thus still have vegetation growing in your solar collection field. You could also mix in wind power-based systems using the same land with only a marginal impact on efficiency.
Combine this with fuel cells and geothermal heat pumps, and we could really reduce our use of fossil fuels. But with oil costs so low now, the incentive is small.
Note that neither the Gnu folks nor the Open Sourcers require that all software be distributed to be moral or approved. Heck, the GPL allows you to make a modification to gcc or egcs (say, one that provides a significant speed improvement), and then have people send you source code and you send them back super-optimized source.
I don't think Mozilla has failed, it just hasn't succeeded yet. It has to go head-to-head with the largest "free beer" effort by the largest software company in the world, and that makes it a real challenge. That it hasn't succeeded in a year isn't failure in my mind. jwz got burned out, it happens.
>People need to quit acting like CatB is some immutable law.
It meshes well with my personal situation -- I have a couple of things I might add to a working mozilla, but I haven't because of the current state -- so I use it as reinforcement. I think CatB is wrong is several places; for example, "Linus's Law." I don't think it's that bugs become shallow, it's that open source software means that the person most affected by the bug has the opportunity to fix it and the situation to test it. In commercial software, the person who can fix the bug often is simply unable to duplicate it because of differences in test platforms, and the bug may not be nearly as important to the potential fixer as it is to the person it affects. I think this law doesn't work nearly as well for open source where the users aren't technically savvy.
>Sometimes I really believe that if you don't think about it, it's really not a threat.
In the last sixty million years, it seems like there has been at most one truly planet-affecting asteroid collision: the one that may have doomed the dinosaurs. More recently, there was a doozy that carved a sizeable crater in Arizona about 50,000 years ago, and one in Siberia about 100 years ago; no doubt there were a number of others over that same time period. There's no reason to believe that asteroid collisions will change in their frequency, so a truly world-affecting asteroid should be an extremely rare event based on previous history. A Siberia class one is rather more likely, but the question is just how much of our resources do we devote to something that we may not be able to detect in time anyway, may not be able to stop anyway, and may have the unfortunate side-effect of making us even better at killing each other? Reagan's Star Wars speech was in 1983, and 16 years and billions of dollars later it still hasn't come close to realization. I can't see a system that has to go far out into space and blow up something huge (and spread the debris far and wide) doing a whole lot better.
At last, Gecko, but what about OpenSource?
on
Gecko under Review
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· Score: 3
30 developers is actually a pretty decent amount, if they are making significant contributions. But the biggest reason is that Mozilla still hasn't achieved basically working status. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" mentions that this is a necessary state to attract more developers. Developers often get hooked into making bigger mods to a program by making a simple improvement, which just isn't possible without working code.
Part of the problem is that people have been oversold on the supposed speed of open source development. Open source projects *aren't* generally that fast, they just have the inexorability of a glacier. It's only the quick fixes that open source does quickly. Expecting magic from a large project that has been redesigned from the ground up is a bit too optimistic.
>Explain to us how hydrogen [...] is simply a storage medium?
How do we produce hydrogen? Generally by breaking the bonds in water molecules, I believe. To do so requires energy in, at least as much as you'll get out when you combine it with oxygen to create energy and water. So for that process you're simply using hydrogen to store the energy you used to break it apart in the first place. It may be abundant, but uncombined hydrogen is not in the right place -- and would be rather dangerous if it was.
Why hydrogen? Fuel cells that work with more conventional fuels are just about as clean, highly efficient, and don't have the handling problem of hydrogen. A gasoline-powered fuel cell would more than double the average car's miles per gallon.
Another tech that could significantly reduce fuel bills and is here today is geothermal heat pumps. Drill a few 50 foot deep trenches and bury a loop of pipe in them. Then route the ends of the pipe to a heat pump. Since the earth temperature is fairly constant, the pump has to work a lot less hard than one that works with air. You'll get a 30-50% reduction in energy bills for something like $2000 extra in up-front costs. Take out a loan for it and the energy savings should more than pay for the loan payments.
My personal favorite for power generation, not looking at cost per kilowatt for the moment, is wind power on pillars planted offshore. The pillars will serve as an artificial reef for fishes so the ecological effect is actually positive. And of course it's clean. The only negative is the probable difficulty of maintenance.
>If I were to create a new Linux distribution, and call it "Windows X" in all the press releases and press briefings
Trademark law protects name identification of products. Naming your operating system product the same name as mine leads to confusion as to whether it's a new product of mine. Clearly you would be violating the Windows trademark if you named your product in that way. There's no open source "product" to protect, so trademark law is irrelevant.
Open Source is a certification mark. That means if I claim something is *certified* as Open Source and if the SPI hasn't approved it, they have legal grounds for a complaint. That's not what Microsoft is claiming.
Now, you might argue that Microsoft's use of the term implies certification. But the term is just too close to plain English for that to stick. When you first heard the term, did you have at least some impression about what it meant? If the term was "Tux Approved", then yes, Microsoft saying "we're thinking of creating Tux approved software, by which we mean..." then you would have grounds for complaint for diluting a certification.
Ok, Microsoft is trying to leverage some of the buzz surrounding the open source movement. But fundamentally, they're still using english words in a conversational way. While Microsoft has a trademark on Windows used as a name for a commercial OS, you and I can talk or write about windows in another GUI without ever having to acknowledge the Microsoft trademark. How is Microsoft to refer to what they're planning to do? To trademark a fairly generic term and then claim all uses of that term must refer to a specific set of conditions strikes me as a bigger assault on freedom than anything Microsoft has ever done. A trademark doesn't allow you to define the language.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used Agent under Wine, and it works pretty well, although I haven't been that thorough. The only limitation I've run into is the autoplay settings so you can click on a Wav, JPG, etc. and have a viewer program come up immediately. It may be possible to do this by changing preferences, I just haven't tried.
>Instead of porting our tools (egcs) to uncommon
architectures developers are expected to spend additional time on writing the program.
Unfortunately, they want the final thing to run on Windows 3.1. Who wants to port egcs to that? Not me, that's for sure. So apparently some Mozillers have to suffer using Visual C++ 1.5 and Windows 3.1, ick! I believe Borland 4.5 built Windows 3.1 stuff, so I'm not sure what made them choose Visual.
(I use Visual C++ 5.0 and 6.0 every day (no MFC, wizards, etc), and must admit it's perfectly respectable as a straightforward development platform.)
>The next paragraph it talks about the scroll wheel... Am I missing something?
Yes. There are two versions, the IntelliEye and the Intellimouse Explorer. The former does not have a wheel and thus has no moving parts at all.
I'd love one if it was cordless. I just wish I'd picked up another Logitech cordless when they were having a rebate on them last month.
P.S. Red Hat Linux 5.2, the boxed version, is less than $10 at CompUSA this week.
>Temporary patches aren't going to fill up that God-shaped hole in your heart. Only one thing can fill that hole.
Yup, sacramental wine. Or kosher wine...
Those "old-time" religions have their drug too.
>Microsoft had to add a "Go" button next to the address bar with Internet Explorer v5.0 because people didn't know that after hand-typing a URL, they had to hit enter !
Note that it's also handy for "mouse-vegging" -- sitting back in a chair surfing and such with a cordless mouse -- since you can paste an address cut from elsewhere using just the mouse, and then hit the go button. Otherwise I have to get the keyboard out just to hit one key. Sheer laziness, of course, but after working all day and dealing with the kids until they go to bed, one can get rather lazy...
>how are artists/record companies going to make money selling music for just $10?
They don't gross $10 on CD sales now, since the retailer takes a significant cut. And the net is even less, with the cost of the CD, labels, etc.
Information that I might find useful or informative is being produced far faster than I could ever read it/view it. I must self-censor, simply by choosing not to partake of a particular source. A ShutUp list strikes me as the same as simply not choosing to watch a particular channel.
Now, if I'm looking for feedback to something I've created (and JK clearly falls in this category a lot), I think I do have more of an obligation to listen to responses than I do in simply selecting what's worth reading. However, even then I reserve the right not to let a particular person command most of my attention.
I'd like to e-mail Logitech and tell them what a good move this is, and that it should keep me buying Logitech products. Anyone have an address for them? I would go through their customer support thing, but it just asks too many danged questions.
Anyway, way to go Logitech!
> it just irrtates me that someone [...] gets paid $60K-$120K a year while I'm [getting] a whopping $25K per year.
Then find another job. It's not you who should be irritated by them, it's they at you for doing what you do for such a piddling wage and bringing the pay average down. It is not immoral or disloyal to leave a place where you are underpaid and overworked.
And if you're young, a certain amount of job-switching is good for you. You'll get a better sense of what work environments there are, you'll find that your best pay raises are when you change jobs, and you'll make useful contacts. Also, once you've left school, work is one of the major places to meet people, both for friends and potential mates. And it can be problematic to get involved with the latter while still working for the same company.
I switched from putting the curly brace at the end of the line after fixing one too many compile problems where I thought there was a brace but there wasn't or where I thought there wasn't a brace but there was. Give me
...
if (...)
{
}
any day.
I agree with you on the 80 columns bit though, long lines mean too danged much resizing. And cygwin doesn't like to resize width-wise.
>You know, you can't just obsolete every TV set in the nation and tell people "Oh, you have to upgrade your set or not watch TV anymore."
Actually, that is the FCC plan. However, a converter box will make the TV useful again (and of course VCRs aren't going away that soon.) If PC converter cards are $300 now, the converters should be pretty cheap once they're mass-marketed. Even on a regular set, the digital picture should be an improvement over analog broadcasts.
For your first question, look at the ATI All-In-Wonder 128. I believe Sharky Extreme did a review of it, including its MPEG-2 capture abilities.
>To really do a consumer version of Linux, there are a few issues that simply need to be addressed:
And horrible as they are, I think WinModem support in Linux would be useful. Having to spend $100+ for a new modem is a real deterrent to people who are considering trying it out.
>Where I come from, 64K is a pretty huge chunk of code to waste on something that doesn't add any functionality.
Oh, enough about this. You know why there's a flight simulator in Excel? It's because some of the programmers who worked on the project wanted to sign their name to their work, something the artists of old always got to do. But now that we're corporate cogs, that seems to be taboo. So they sneaked in the simulator, which if you play with it, you'll note has a scrolling list of a lot of people who worked on Excel. I've been involved in a similar sneak to get around PHBs. (My current employer, the CEO being a programmer himself, puts the programmers' names on the product "About" box.)
It's a small act of revolution by some Microsoft programmers, and should be recognized as such, not continually brought up as a golden example of Microsoft wastefulness.
>Solar panels are made up of silicon.
Note that you can also power said plants by mirrors heating water-filled pipes or focussing onto a much smaller set of solar panels; I believe there's a test plant somewhere that already does the former. (This really just reduces your manufacturing and wiring costs, raw silicon is cheap and plentiful (sand)) With the right mirror, you might even reflect only the wavelengths of light that plants don't use (they are green, which means they reflect green light), and thus still have vegetation growing in your solar collection field. You could also mix in wind power-based systems using the same land with only a marginal impact on efficiency.
Combine this with fuel cells and geothermal heat pumps, and we could really reduce our use of fossil fuels. But with oil costs so low now, the incentive is small.
Note that neither the Gnu folks nor the Open Sourcers require that all software be distributed to be moral or approved. Heck, the GPL allows you to make a modification to gcc or egcs (say, one that provides a significant speed improvement), and then have people send you source code and you send them back super-optimized source.
I don't think Mozilla has failed, it just hasn't succeeded yet. It has to go head-to-head with the largest "free beer" effort by the largest software company in the world, and that makes it a real challenge. That it hasn't succeeded in a year isn't failure in my mind. jwz got burned out, it happens.
>People need to quit acting like CatB is some immutable law.
It meshes well with my personal situation -- I have a couple of things I might add to a working mozilla, but I haven't because of the current state -- so I use it as reinforcement. I think CatB is wrong is several places; for example, "Linus's Law." I don't think it's that bugs become shallow, it's that open source software means that the person most affected by the bug has the opportunity to fix it and the situation to test it. In commercial software, the person who can fix the bug often is simply unable to duplicate it because of differences in test platforms, and the bug may not be nearly as important to the potential fixer as it is to the person it affects. I think this law doesn't work nearly as well for open source where the users aren't technically savvy.
>Sometimes I really believe that if you don't think about it, it's really not a threat.
In the last sixty million years, it seems like there has been at most one truly planet-affecting asteroid collision: the one that may have doomed the dinosaurs. More recently, there was a doozy that carved a sizeable crater in Arizona about 50,000 years ago, and one in Siberia about 100 years ago; no doubt there were a number of others over that same time period. There's no reason to believe that asteroid collisions will change in their frequency, so a truly world-affecting asteroid should be an extremely rare event based on previous history. A Siberia class one is rather more likely, but the question is just how much of our resources do we devote to something that we may not be able to detect in time anyway, may not be able to stop anyway, and may have the unfortunate side-effect of making us even better at killing each other? Reagan's Star Wars speech was in 1983, and 16 years and billions of dollars later it still hasn't come close to realization. I can't see a system that has to go far out into space and blow up something huge (and spread the debris far and wide) doing a whole lot better.
30 developers is actually a pretty decent amount, if they are making significant contributions. But the biggest reason is that Mozilla still hasn't achieved basically working status. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" mentions that this is a necessary state to attract more developers. Developers often get hooked into making bigger mods to a program by making a simple improvement, which just isn't possible without working code.
Part of the problem is that people have been oversold on the supposed speed of open source development. Open source projects *aren't* generally that fast, they just have the inexorability of a glacier. It's only the quick fixes that open source does quickly. Expecting magic from a large project that has been redesigned from the ground up is a bit too optimistic.
>Explain to us how hydrogen [...] is simply a storage medium?
How do we produce hydrogen? Generally by breaking the bonds in water molecules, I believe. To do so requires energy in, at least as much as you'll get out when you combine it with oxygen to create energy and water. So for that process you're simply using hydrogen to store the energy you used to break it apart in the first place. It may be abundant, but uncombined hydrogen is not in the right place -- and would be rather dangerous if it was.
Why hydrogen? Fuel cells that work with more conventional fuels are just about as clean, highly efficient, and don't have the handling problem of hydrogen. A gasoline-powered fuel cell would more than double the average car's miles per gallon.
Another tech that could significantly reduce fuel bills and is here today is geothermal heat pumps. Drill a few 50 foot deep trenches and bury a loop of pipe in them. Then route the ends of the pipe to a heat pump. Since the earth temperature is fairly constant, the pump has to work a lot less hard than one that works with air. You'll get a 30-50% reduction in energy bills for something like $2000 extra in up-front costs. Take out a loan for it and the energy savings should more than pay for the loan payments.
My personal favorite for power generation, not looking at cost per kilowatt for the moment, is wind power on pillars planted offshore. The pillars will serve as an artificial reef for fishes so the ecological effect is actually positive. And of course it's clean. The only negative is the probable difficulty of maintenance.
My four year old son thinks a window is a hole in a wall. I doubt he's the only one...
>If I were to create a new Linux distribution, and call it "Windows X" in all the press releases and press briefings
Trademark law protects name identification of products. Naming your operating system product the same name as mine leads to confusion as to whether it's a new product of mine. Clearly you would be violating the Windows trademark if you named your product in that way. There's no open source "product" to protect, so trademark law is irrelevant.
Open Source is a certification mark. That means if I claim something is *certified* as Open Source and if the SPI hasn't approved it, they have legal grounds for a complaint. That's not what Microsoft is claiming.
Now, you might argue that Microsoft's use of the term implies certification. But the term is just too close to plain English for that to stick. When you first heard the term, did you have at least some impression about what it meant? If the term was "Tux Approved", then yes, Microsoft saying "we're thinking of creating Tux approved software, by which we mean..." then you would have grounds for complaint for diluting a certification.
>Remember when Compton's tried unsuccesfully to trademark "multimedia"??
Compton's were granted a patent (later overthrown based on prior art) to multimedia, not a trademark.
>How many M$ executives does it take to change the definition of a word?
Trademarks are identifiers for products, not licenses to set definitions.
...I find the alternative even more scary.
Ok, Microsoft is trying to leverage some of the buzz surrounding the open source movement. But fundamentally, they're still using english words in a conversational way. While Microsoft has a trademark on Windows used as a name for a commercial OS, you and I can talk or write about windows in another GUI without ever having to acknowledge the Microsoft trademark. How is Microsoft to refer to what they're planning to do? To trademark a fairly generic term and then claim all uses of that term must refer to a specific set of conditions strikes me as a bigger assault on freedom than anything Microsoft has ever done. A trademark doesn't allow you to define the language.