Recent Posts

876

Living Room / Re: Apple Attacks Adobe

« Last post by zridling on April 14, 2010, 07:51 PM »

Aren't Apple's "i-devices" virtually a monopoly with regard to marketshare? Surely iPods and iPhones are. How simpler the world would be if open source hardware and software were the law of the land. Instead we get:

- I am Apple.
- I have a gated community, and
- You may not enter!

With the money I saved/never spent on those devices, I just remodeled and renovated my bathroom. Hey, and no monthly fees! Feels good.

The worst part is that Apple gets 30% off the top for every app sold in its App Store and 100% off of free apps. Phuck you, Apple.

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Living Room / Re: "The More You Use Google, the More Google Knows about you"

« Last post by zridling on April 09, 2010, 10:26 PM »

So the answer is, stop using Google? If so, you're cutting yourself off from a lot of the web. And contrary to the article, Google does not own your content. Point is, if your current computing consists of interacting with a big corporation, you're pretty much screwed.  Lots of "could be's" and "cans" in the article. Yet it's still a fair treatment by the author. Trust no one.

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Living Room / Re: First iPad Reviews Are In

« Last post by zridling on April 08, 2010, 05:33 PM »

Is it only about the money and "instant cool" though? I can't recall Jobs doing anything charitable on any scale with his company or his gadgets. Whatever I may think of Mr. Gates's company, the man has spent the last decade giving back around the globe in demonstrable ways. It's like the guy (Arnold?) who went out and bought the biggest Hummer made just to show that he could burn more gas than your biggest SUV. Or perhaps the rich lady who spends tens of thousands of dollars on a special purse to carry their fluffy dog around with them in airports. And SuperboyAC, most of the Apple people I know are on my teevee, telling me how great their new shiny toy is. No matter how hard I try, I can't respect CNBC's Erin Burnett.

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Living Room / Re: First iPad Reviews Are In

« Last post by zridling on April 08, 2010, 10:08 AM »

I love Stephen Fry. Like most Apple folks, they're consumed with novelty. I have a professor friend who, like Fry, has bought every single thing Apple has ever made. He has entire rooms of his house filled with old Apple hardware; he could open a museum. And he's spent his entire annual salary doing it year after year. He's definitely had fun, but just as I don't want to be tied to Google or Microsoft, I also don't want to be chained to Apple's latest whimsy. A private college here in Missouri just announced that all incoming Freshmen this fall will receive iPads. Bad idea to hitch your academic life to proprietary software (and hardware)!

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Living Room / Re: First iPad Reviews Are In

« Last post by zridling on April 05, 2010, 02:03 AM »

I second y0himba and 40hz's (Doctorow's) responses. It will definitely kill the Kindle based on the fact that Apple will allow publishers to charge any price they want for their ebooks. The iPad is primarily a consumption device built to deliver content (and get paid handsomely for it).

The larger problem I see is that the net is quickly being carved up and fenced off while the snapperheads in the media are WOWEE'd! by anything Jobs tosses out, reflecting his narrow vendor concerns (lock-in, no content transfers, proprietary batteries, chargers, etc.). It's really weird to see one after another talk show host get orgasmic over this thing. Already there are 40 governments around the globe that filter the web, and with ACTA coming along with the DMCA and endless patent pissing matches, most information use we enjoy now will suddenly be criminalized to protect influential industries. Soon you'll have to pay a gatekeeper like Rupert Murdoch, Apple, or Microsoft just to get online, taking us back to the old Compuserve/AOL days. Pay-per-view devices like the iPad would drain oceans of information we find now, leaving only highly-policed canals.

An iPad is like building your own private prison -- pay us to lock you in and lock your content down. As long as the media is approved by Apple and makes it into the iPad app store, you're free to use your iPad, that is, as long as their Safari browser will play it. If Apple doesn't approve -- and they're notorious for what appears to be god-based censorship -- neither your app nor its content will ever find you, the consumer. bleh.

881

General Software Discussion / Re: Today is Document Freedom Day! (March 31)

« Last post by zridling on April 05, 2010, 01:36 AM »

OOo, the program, sucks. Office2007 is somewhat of a heavy pig, but even that is faster and more comfortable to work with than OOo.

-f0dder (April 01, 2010, 10:32 AM)

Can't argue with personal preference.

As for ODF, that sucks as well. A bit less than MS's OOXML, but it still sucks. Just as OOXML, it's basically a messy memory dump, it's not super compatible between versions, and it's not properly documented - one of the developers working on gnumeric has a bunch of nice details about this. Also, it's outright insane using zip+xml based documents for anything but document exchange... which you'll realize as soon as you're working on anything larger than a "dear mum" letter.

Hmm, well that's complete bull. Let's take a look at how OOXML and ODF represent a staple of document formats: text color and alignment. If I created six documents: word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics, in OOXML and ODF formats. In each case I entered one simple string "This is red text." In each case I made the word "red" red, and right aligned the entire string. The following table shows the representation of this formatting instruction in OOXML and ODF, for each of the three application types:



ODF uses the W3C’s XSL-FO vocabulary for text styling, and uses this vocabulary consistently. OOXML’s representation, on the other hand, appears incompatible with any deliberate design methodology. Instead, it's obvious this accurately reflects the internals of Microsoft Office, and shows how these three applications were developed by three different, isolated teams. Heckuva job, Microsoft!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Today is Document Freedom Day! (March 31)

« Last post by zridling on April 02, 2010, 11:16 PM »

@zridling: You might not realise this, but you have just duplicated the link I had already provided above, where I wrote:

Now I do, IainB. Sorry about that. I added it without reading the last two posts. My apologies.

-IainB (April 02, 2010, 05:23 AM)

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Living Room / Re: First iPad Reviews Are In

« Last post by zridling on April 02, 2010, 10:45 PM »

To do anything with it, it appears you'll have to pay for every little page view. I'm cheap. I pay for online access, but not for content. I don't need rupert murdoch's insanity for that.

884

Developer's Corner / Re: Smashing Magazine: A Short Guide To Open-Source And Similar Licenses

« Last post by zridling on April 02, 2010, 02:15 AM »

Nice! And with followup links at the end of the article. Thanks.

885

General Software Discussion / Re: Today is Document Freedom Day! (March 31)

« Last post by zridling on April 02, 2010, 02:02 AM »

On a related note, a detailed account of how Microsoft failed its own MS-OOXML standard this week:
http://www.adjb.net/...-Standards-Test.aspx

886

General Software Discussion / Windows 8 Requests

« Last post by zridling on April 02, 2010, 01:39 AM »

It might get noticed by someone, and it's never too early in the beta stage to ask for your most requested change or improvement in the next version of Windows.

Mine? End sudden forced reboots by Windows Update's autoupdates.

887

Living Room / Re: Yea, I won't be getting an iPad anytime soon

« Last post by zridling on March 31, 2010, 11:37 PM »

And then there's How You'll Inevitably Shatter Your iPad!

888

Living Room / Re: Cheers as Large Hadron Collider smashes atoms

« Last post by zridling on March 31, 2010, 11:32 PM »

And on the software side, it runs Linux. Woohoo! 

889

Living Room / Re: Apple’s Market Cap Passes $210 Billion, Now Within $50 Billion of You-Know-Who

« Last post by zridling on March 31, 2010, 09:16 PM »

Novell won over SCO! Thanks to one big heroine: Pamela Jones.
http://blog.linuxtod...groklaw-how-one.html

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General Software Discussion / Re: Today is Document Freedom Day! (March 31)

« Last post by zridling on March 31, 2010, 08:47 PM »

And here's a better explanation document freedom by a Microsoft job offer -- http://stop.zona-m.net/node/138

"The reason for point 2 is that if you control office productivity software you can control the format of the files produced, distributed and accepted (even if only by inertia) by all the users of that software. What happens if you, in practice, also own that file format, meaning that no other software can decode it 100% of the times because it's either secret or uselessly complicated?

"The result is that you don't need to be good to win: all your initial users will be stuck to your office software (otherwise they'll lose access to their documents) and will force everybody else who needs those files to use the same office software and only the operating systems compatible with that office software."

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General Software Discussion / Re: Today is Document Freedom Day! (March 31)

« Last post by zridling on March 31, 2010, 08:34 PM »

Understand that the ODF (format) is just that, a file format. While originally based on OpenOffice, it's not tied to that program, which itself reads various versions of the ODF spec. Well over 20 programs use ODF as their native file format. It's not a must by any measure. It's an [open] option not owned and controlled by a single corporation. In the end, I want control of my data; I don't want a corporation's (or a government's) permission to view, access, change, save, share, or archive my documents.

892

General Software Discussion / Today is Document Freedom Day! (March 31)

« Last post by zridling on March 31, 2010, 12:37 PM »

via rob weir:



Today is Document Freedom Day.  In the five years since Open Document Format (ODF) first was approved in OASIS we have certainly made progress, but there is still work remaining to be done.  How will we know when we have arrived?  At what point can we declare victory and say “Free at last”?  I think that when we  can agree that all of the following statements are true, then at that point we have achieved the substantial benefits of document freedom.

• I can create documents on the platform of my choice, using the software of my choice.
• I can migrate to another editing environment (application or operating system) without losing high-fidelity access to my existing documents.
• I can send my documents to anyone and know that they can read them without requiring the purchase of new software.
• I can receive documents from anyone and know that I can read them without requiring the purchase of new software.
• I have confidence that the documents I create today can be read and understood, 10, 25 or 50 years from now.
• Programmers can write and distribute software that reads and writes documents without paying royalties to anyone.
• I have confidence that the document format standard is being evolved in a way that guarantees the above rights equally for all users and vendors.

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General Software Discussion / Re: The state of the Internet OS feels like 1980 all over again (Tim O'Reilly)

« Last post by zridling on March 29, 2010, 10:36 PM »

As mouser has long warned: the last thing I want to do is get out of one monopoly (Microsoft) only to fall into another (Google or Apple).

894

General Software Discussion / The state of the Internet OS feels like 1980 all over again (Tim O'Reilly)

« Last post by zridling on March 29, 2010, 10:33 PM »

Tim O'Reilly talks about the State of the Internet Operating System in a must-read post.



"Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet?

"On a standalone computer, operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux manage the machine's resources, making it possible for applications to focus on the job they do for the user. But many of the activities that are most important to us today take place in a mysterious space between individual machines. Most people take for granted that these things just work, and complain when the daily miracle of instantaneous communications and access to information breaks down for even a moment.

"But whichever technique is being used, the application is relying on network-available facilities, not just features of your phone itself. And increasingly, it's hard to claim that all of these intertwined features are simply an application, even when they are provided by a single company, like Google. Keep following the plot. What mobile app (other than casual games) exists solely on the phone? Virtually every application is a network application, relying on remote services to perform its function.

"Where is the "operating system" in all this? Clearly, it is still evolving. Applications use a hodgepodge of services from multiple different providers to get the information they need.

"But how different is this from PC application development in the early 1980s, when every application provider wrote their own device drivers to support the hodgepodge of disks, ports, keyboards, and screens that comprised the still emerging personal computer ecosystem? Along came Microsoft with an offer that was difficult to refuse: We'll manage the drivers; all application developers have to do is write software that uses the Win32 APIs, and all of the complexity will be abstracted away.

"It was. Few developers write device drivers any more.  That is left to device manufacturers, with all the messiness hidden by "operating system vendors" who manage the updates and often provide generic APIs for entire classes of device. Those vendors who took on the pain of managing complexity ended up with a powerful lock-in. They created the context in which applications have worked ever since.

"This is the crux of my argument about the internet operating system. We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise."

895

Living Room / Re: Apple’s Market Cap Passes $210 Billion, Now Within $50 Billion of You-Know-Who

« Last post by zridling on March 29, 2010, 05:37 PM »

Ha!! Good one, Josh.   Here's that story that should finally end for good soon, now that a jury has it:
http://blogs.compute...this_the_end_for_sco

896

Living Room / Apple’s Market Cap Passes $210 Billion, Now Within $50 Billion of You-Know-Who

« Last post by zridling on March 29, 2010, 05:19 PM »

MG Siegler writes: it’s now a question of when Apple will pass Microsoft in value, not if. Looks like the iPad will put it over the top. Turns out that [for now] gadgets, not software is where the cash is.



Because of it's proprietary/DRM nature, cost, and the fact that it doesn't yet mow the yard, I still won't be getting one until the desktop is outlawed.
______________________________________
PS: Isn't it time Apple paid Microsoft that $150mn lifeline of cash it threw its way back in the mid-90s?

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General Software Discussion / Re: JDK install problem in sun virtualbox ubuntu image - PROBLEM SOLVED

« Last post by zridling on March 26, 2010, 02:26 AM »

Cool, so how did you solve it? Figure there's a quick answer over at the Ubuntu Forums.

898

Living Room / Re: Facebook 'linked to rise in syphilis'

« Last post by zridling on March 26, 2010, 02:23 AM »

Remember, most traditional media sees the "internets" as a threat. Just as spurious polls are headlined daily -- "Salt will cut 15 years off your life!" "Eggs will cause heart disease!" -- it further reinforces the notion not to trust anything online as real or true.

Too bad the internet keeps an archive!

899

Living Room / Facebook 'linked to rise in syphilis'

« Last post by zridling on March 24, 2010, 10:28 PM »

"A Facebook spokesman said: users should "take precautions" and be careful when meeting up with anyone they have met online."
http://www.telegraph...ise-in-syphilis.html



Who knew that banging just anyone wouldn't be totally safe?   (picture unrelated; I just liked it)

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Living Room / Re: Any long-time DC members near a MicroCenter?

« Last post by zridling on March 24, 2010, 09:48 PM »

You lucky bastards!