On a more serious note, even if you think that global warming is a pile of horse manure, why would anyone object to the measures that are being suggested? Unless they owned a coal mine of course...
There's a lot of sense in heavy investment in nuclear, solar and wind power plus hybrid, diesel and electric vehicles even in a situation where the world isn't going wrong. Same with switching to CFLs and generally improving efficiency of resource usage etc... it's not like there are people who find clean air offensive... or at least I hope not.
He is one of my favourite writers, oddly enough. I think it's because he is so right wing he ended up being a bit of a leftie with common sense. The moon is a harsh mistress is a perfect demonstration of why regulation is key to human survival, on top of a really outstanding story.
It's fairly vital that commercial and legal are involved in selecting acceptable component licenses. To that end I have tried to lay out the key points in commercial language to make it easier for engineering to gain mindshare and buy in while synergistically buzzwording the proactive antelope.
I seem to have lost my gadget for finding lost or stolen gadgets. I wonder where I left it? All I need to do is find my gadget for finding lost or stolen gadgets and then...
Countries that would get most by method one:
We like method 1!
Countries that would get most by method two:
No, method 2 is better!
Repeat every 6 years until the whole thing melts and/or people realise that country borders are arbitrary and their first responsibility should be to the human race.
How did this get tagged slownewsday *before* there were any comments? Are Slashdot now selling tags to partisan groups? If so I wish to buy a large supply of 'thistagisnotatag' tags. Not for any real reason, I just like to confuse people.
Given that Dell has started selling Ubuntu, and Intel has written real OSS 3D drivers for it's hardware (along with decent wifi drivers, making laptop support trivial for many, many people) maybe they think that any goodwill which previously kept them out of the hardware business is no longer an issue.
If you are dedicated it's possible to pull your appointments from an exchange server, covert to iCal, and then import them into Sunbird.
I still prefer KOrganiser, not least because it has an exchange plug in. Integration with the mail client is also better in my opinion.
In fact Kontact is overall a fantastic piece of software. My only gripe is the fact that it's handling of IMAP mailboxes is horrific, but I believe that is slated for a total revamp in KDE4.
One day the US will normalise relations with Cuba. The process might not happen until after the current generation of ex-Cubans in Forida is dead, but that's hardly _never_.
In the mean time they could just funnel shipments through a neutral third party. Creative accountants can manage to hide billions from the IRS, why shouldn't they be able to do something socially useful like vanish a couple of shipping containers of laptops.
Not the actual CSS which is, with five minutes of practice, very easy to use. Much better than tables all over the place. The headache comes from IE dang 6 and below.
Since I can't legally test in IE6 (no Windows license, and browsershots.org takes a 4 hour round trip for Windows screenshots) making IE6 specific tweaks is a pain in the backside. I'll finish up eventually I'm sure, in the mean time I plan to just turn off CSS for those users.
As a side note CSSED is really nice for those of you who like editing their CSS by hand.
I used to do wireless mesh network algorythm development and we had (with 802.11b) acceptable, AES encrypted, coverage of a motor factory (think *lots* of wire and EM) with nodes running on 200mhz arm systems and 64mb of ram. No problems with VOIP either. You just need to do some (ok, expensive) system design and there's no reason why it wont work. In the demo system the nodes updated their routing tables using a ropey bash script even:)
Expecting that off the shelf gear can magically set itself up is the problem, not the protocol itself (which can be worked around in many interesting ways).
There are some really bad applications out there - one of the worst is superkaramba because it's easy to load the CPU heavily if you don't manage the timers properly.
Based on that kind of thing it wouldn't surprise me if real gains were possible in battery life - at the very least for applications with user generated modifications and plugins. The more unpopular Firefox plugins are certainly notorious for lack of QA.
I posted this exact same conspiracy theory yesterday! I should have posted it to an add laden blog so Slashdot would whore it for me;).
Anyway, It's not just 64 bit platform users who are benefitting, the open source flash efforts are now working on PPC which makes a nice change. My old powerbook is now much more useful for web browsing than before.
I remain convinced that part of the reason that Microsoft is attempting to push it's own alternative to Flash is because Linux support is finally decent.
Not only is there the binary client but some of the free alternatives can now handle YouTube. Development was getting a little closer to cross platform content and entertainment that the internet promised rather than the platform locking that was looking likely at one point.
Anyway I installed swfdec today on a PPC machine and documented the steps. The results are very good for an application in such an early stage of development. While you might think the internet *with* Flash is annoying, you try living without it for a while and see how much the Firefox "you need more plugins to view this page" bar bugs you.
The good: It can't remote root your webserver. The bad: It can make your webserver appear to be hosting arbitrary content if you are hosting any PDF files and the user is using Acrobat reader. The solution: Delete every PDF file hosted by your webserver OR configure your httpd to throw nasty errors for any requests that contain a string after the.pdf.
MOL is a true work of genius. Even on pretty old PPC hardware it functions with almost no slowdown. (Linux host, OS X and Linux clients). Compared to contemporaries it had no equal - the current generation of products on x86 are just starting to catch up. I'm most impressed with the way my powerbook can sleep (close the lid) under Linux and all of the hosted sessions quietly pause themselves with no problems. They even resume a network connection perfectly on waking up.
It'm glad to see similar happening on x86, finally, as it's one of the things that really made PPC based machines special. (There is some documentation for MOL and Kubuntu here.)
Do you use focus follows mouse (Linux way) or focus under mouse (Solaris way)? The difference is that the former gives focus to an application when you move over it (so if the mouse is over no app the last one you moved over has focus), the latter is much stricter.
The former is really useful. It lets you type in windows that are partially obscured and is a massive productivity boost for power users. The latter sucks ass and leads to the things that usually puts users off focus follows mouse such as moving the cursor out of the way onto the background so they can see what they are typing causing a loss of focus from all applications.
A while a go I posted my list of things that I didn't like about OSX and I got some good responses that fixed a few.
The good news (for me) is that now Linux on powerbooks is very, very good - not only do all the key things like wireless (with WPA), suspend, sound, 3d acceleration etc work perfectly but with Beryl installed it actually looks far better than OS X. I was sitting in an internet cafe yesterday and people were being awed by OS X... except it wasn't OS X at all. I said almost two years ago that Linux was catching up with OS X for look and feel... well, now it has. Even with Gnome apps mixed into a KDE desktop the behavior (thanks to an awful lot of work by the Kubuntu/Ubuntu guys) is more consistant across applications than anything you will find on OS X or Windows.
Oh, and with MOL installed (so it's one button press to switch to/from full screen OS X almost as fast as on native hardware) there really are no downsides.
Apple controls fairplay, which is used in the number one music store, and refuses to license it. It got that monopoly by virtue of the fact that they control the DRM formats that can be played by their music play, which has an overwhelming share of the market.
So, now they are going to expand that - by virtue of large existing music collections - into a sizeable market for a mp3 playing phone. There will be only Apple's phone choice for these people who are already brought into the music store. They are then going to turn that into further lock in for the Mac platform by offering Mac only features rather than generic APIs to the hardware features.
As far as I can see the only difference between this and the office/windows lockin that Microsoft has going is that it's illegal to try and break Apple's DRM format. At least you can *try* and make an Office clone. This is not good news for customers!
I have no doubt that Apple will make a good, compelling product. I just wish that they would get slapped hard with respect to their degree of integration which is rapidly turning into lock in. It's actually easier to return Windows than an OSX license for example - that kind of thing should be enough of a warning sign already.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
On a more serious note, even if you think that global warming is a pile of horse manure, why would anyone object to the measures that are being suggested? Unless they owned a coal mine of course...
There's a lot of sense in heavy investment in nuclear, solar and wind power plus hybrid, diesel and electric vehicles even in a situation where the world isn't going wrong. Same with switching to CFLs and generally improving efficiency of resource usage etc... it's not like there are people who find clean air offensive... or at least I hope not.
There's nothing that excites gamers like statistics; pie charts and graphs
That's just outreach to all the hardcore gamers in accounting, obviously. Feel welcome guys!
Because he is dead. Sorry.
He is one of my favourite writers, oddly enough. I think it's because he is so right wing he ended up being a bit of a leftie with common sense. The moon is a harsh mistress is a perfect demonstration of why regulation is key to human survival, on top of a really outstanding story.
It's fairly vital that commercial and legal are involved in selecting acceptable component licenses. To that end I have tried to lay out the key points in commercial language to make it easier for engineering to gain mindshare and buy in while synergistically buzzwording the proactive antelope.
I seem to have lost my gadget for finding lost or stolen gadgets. I wonder where I left it? All I need to do is find my gadget for finding lost or stolen gadgets and then...
Ack.
Countries that would get most by method one:
We like method 1!
Countries that would get most by method two:
No, method 2 is better!
Repeat every 6 years until the whole thing melts and/or people realise that country borders are arbitrary and their first responsibility should be to the human race.
How did this get tagged slownewsday *before* there were any comments? Are Slashdot now selling tags to partisan groups? If so I wish to buy a large supply of 'thistagisnotatag' tags. Not for any real reason, I just like to confuse people.
Given that Dell has started selling Ubuntu, and Intel has written real OSS 3D drivers for it's hardware (along with decent wifi drivers, making laptop support trivial for many, many people) maybe they think that any goodwill which previously kept them out of the hardware business is no longer an issue.
Pull from exchange to iCal with e2i and then import from iCal into whatever calendar system you like.
If you are dedicated it's possible to pull your appointments from an exchange server, covert to iCal, and then import them into Sunbird.
I still prefer KOrganiser, not least because it has an exchange plug in. Integration with the mail client is also better in my opinion.
In fact Kontact is overall a fantastic piece of software. My only gripe is the fact that it's handling of IMAP mailboxes is horrific, but I believe that is slated for a total revamp in KDE4.
One day the US will normalise relations with Cuba. The process might not happen until after the current generation of ex-Cubans in Forida is dead, but that's hardly _never_.
In the mean time they could just funnel shipments through a neutral third party. Creative accountants can manage to hide billions from the IRS, why shouldn't they be able to do something socially useful like vanish a couple of shipping containers of laptops.
Is a drug that turns people into mice and 99% of diseases will be a solved problem.
Not the actual CSS which is, with five minutes of practice, very easy to use. Much better than tables all over the place. The headache comes from IE dang 6 and below.
Since I can't legally test in IE6 (no Windows license, and browsershots.org takes a 4 hour round trip for Windows screenshots) making IE6 specific tweaks is a pain in the backside. I'll finish up eventually I'm sure, in the mean time I plan to just turn off CSS for those users.
As a side note CSSED is really nice for those of you who like editing their CSS by hand.
According to the
Nonetheless the literacy rate is over 90% and the average GDP (PPP) is $1,200... so combined with the inequality between rich and poor you can expect to find some well educated people in the cities. Probably enough for Google's needs, or else they wouldn't be building there!
Investment is also one way to boost the economy of a country. Give them jobs and skills, the rest will follow. Even a market for adwords.
News at 11.
:)
I used to do wireless mesh network algorythm development and we had (with 802.11b) acceptable, AES encrypted, coverage of a motor factory (think *lots* of wire and EM) with nodes running on 200mhz arm systems and 64mb of ram. No problems with VOIP either. You just need to do some (ok, expensive) system design and there's no reason why it wont work. In the demo system the nodes updated their routing tables using a ropey bash script even
Expecting that off the shelf gear can magically set itself up is the problem, not the protocol itself (which can be worked around in many interesting ways).
There are some really bad applications out there - one of the worst is superkaramba because it's easy to load the CPU heavily if you don't manage the timers properly.
A couple of very small changes to themes can cut CPU use from 30% to 1% (with pic).
Based on that kind of thing it wouldn't surprise me if real gains were possible in battery life - at the very least for applications with user generated modifications and plugins. The more unpopular Firefox plugins are certainly notorious for lack of QA.
I posted this exact same conspiracy theory yesterday! I should have posted it to an add laden blog so Slashdot would whore it for me ;).
Anyway, It's not just 64 bit platform users who are benefitting, the open source flash efforts are now working on PPC which makes a nice change. My old powerbook is now much more useful for web browsing than before.
I remain convinced that part of the reason that Microsoft is attempting to push it's own alternative to Flash is because Linux support is finally decent.
Not only is there the binary client but some of the free alternatives can now handle YouTube. Development was getting a little closer to cross platform content and entertainment that the internet promised rather than the platform locking that was looking likely at one point.
Anyway I installed swfdec today on a PPC machine and documented the steps. The results are very good for an application in such an early stage of development. While you might think the internet *with* Flash is annoying, you try living without it for a while and see how much the Firefox "you need more plugins to view this page" bar bugs you.
A broadcast on the BBC about Florida and a rather barmy woman on her way to Disney (World|Land|Empire) who gave the quote:
"Wouldn't America be a better place if Disney were running it."
I contend that the correct response to this statement would have been involuntary entry to an organ donation programme.
The good: It can't remote root your webserver. .pdf.
The bad: It can make your webserver appear to be hosting arbitrary content if you are hosting any PDF files and the user is using Acrobat reader.
The solution: Delete every PDF file hosted by your webserver OR configure your httpd to throw nasty errors for any requests that contain a string after the
MOL is a true work of genius. Even on pretty old PPC hardware it functions with almost no slowdown. (Linux host, OS X and Linux clients). Compared to contemporaries it had no equal - the current generation of products on x86 are just starting to catch up. I'm most impressed with the way my powerbook can sleep (close the lid) under Linux and all of the hosted sessions quietly pause themselves with no problems. They even resume a network connection perfectly on waking up.
It'm glad to see similar happening on x86, finally, as it's one of the things that really made PPC based machines special. (There is some documentation for MOL and Kubuntu here.)
I have never lied to *anyone* who has worked for me.
Do you use focus follows mouse (Linux way) or focus under mouse (Solaris way)? The difference is that the former gives focus to an application when you move over it (so if the mouse is over no app the last one you moved over has focus), the latter is much stricter.
The former is really useful. It lets you type in windows that are partially obscured and is a massive productivity boost for power users. The latter sucks ass and leads to the things that usually puts users off focus follows mouse such as moving the cursor out of the way onto the background so they can see what they are typing causing a loss of focus from all applications.
A while a go I posted my list of things that I didn't like about OSX and I got some good responses that fixed a few.
The good news (for me) is that now Linux on powerbooks is very, very good - not only do all the key things like wireless (with WPA), suspend, sound, 3d acceleration etc work perfectly but with Beryl installed it actually looks far better than OS X. I was sitting in an internet cafe yesterday and people were being awed by OS X... except it wasn't OS X at all. I said almost two years ago that Linux was catching up with OS X for look and feel... well, now it has. Even with Gnome apps mixed into a KDE desktop the behavior (thanks to an awful lot of work by the Kubuntu/Ubuntu guys) is more consistant across applications than anything you will find on OS X or Windows.
Oh, and with MOL installed (so it's one button press to switch to/from full screen OS X almost as fast as on native hardware) there really are no downsides.
Apple controls fairplay, which is used in the number one music store, and refuses to license it. It got that monopoly by virtue of the fact that they control the DRM formats that can be played by their music play, which has an overwhelming share of the market.
So, now they are going to expand that - by virtue of large existing music collections - into a sizeable market for a mp3 playing phone. There will be only Apple's phone choice for these people who are already brought into the music store. They are then going to turn that into further lock in for the Mac platform by offering Mac only features rather than generic APIs to the hardware features.
As far as I can see the only difference between this and the office/windows lockin that Microsoft has going is that it's illegal to try and break Apple's DRM format. At least you can *try* and make an Office clone. This is not good news for customers!
I have no doubt that Apple will make a good, compelling product. I just wish that they would get slapped hard with respect to their degree of integration which is rapidly turning into lock in. It's actually easier to return Windows than an OSX license for example - that kind of thing should be enough of a warning sign already.