Slashdot Mirror

There is an interesting story behind the Dilbert thread, that is cataloged at the Ex-Googlers blog. They approached Scott Adams as a similiar counter-culture spirit to do some logos, but then his original submissions had to be revamped, reduxed, and taken to the pointy-haired bosses within Google.

Part I, Part II, and Part III.

It may be the reason Dilbert took numerous pot-shots at Google in some recent strips.

Interesting writeup from an XGoogler about how that turned out ..

Seconded. Here's an account of my first use of Shark (and XCode) that helped me speed up a program by a factor of 4: http://constc.blogspot.com/2006/01/taking-out-pain -from-c-development-on.html

http://neverendinglists.blogspot.com/2006/07/five- oddities-from-wal-marts-hub.html

1. This site brought to you by Exxon Mobil
This one weirded me out, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation: all images are hosted at exxonmobil.download.akamai.com. Paranoid meter now officially ON.

Hopefully you guys will have ABSOLUTELY NO problem with my nickname. I'm not a physicist; I'm only a high-school student with an interest in both physics and parapsychology, and I'd like to join the fray.... (Scientific American November 2005 and Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe, 1991) Holographic physics takes the idea of holograms and applies it to the entire universe as a whole. The universe can be regarded as a hologram, which can store pretty much as much information as you can in a tiny space using lasers and advanced optical stuff. If you cut a hologram of an apple into small pieces, you can still regenerate the entire image of the apple with only a single piece, albeit the image is much less clear - but you can still distinguish that it's an apple. Every single piece of the hologram contains all the informatioin contained in the entire piece of hologram. This way, a person (somehow) can tap into this reservoir of information in the space-time fabric and (somehow) gain information through what we call "telepathy" or "clairvoyance" or "precognition". So no information is sent from anyone to anyone else, and thus quantum entanglement is not required, and special relativity is not violated either. If you are interested, you can come to my blog at http://mtelepathic.blogspot.com/ Also, someone said that there's ABSOLUTELY NO evidence of ESP WHATSOEVER. Please; every single SAT review book says that "ALWAYS AVOID STRONG PHRASES LIKE 'EVERY' OR 'ABSOLUTELY'". If one hasn't checked all the information about every single experiment conducted in every single nook and cranny of the world, one should never say that there is no evidence whatsoever. That is a fumblerule.

a link

Apple annouces that it's all its Intel Macs have Treacherous Computing chips in them. So Apple could use "Remote attestation" to tell whether you have modified your hardware or software, or whether you are running "approved" software or not, and if not, their servers refuse to talk to you. Wasn't that nice of them? Big Brother chip and hardware DRM. All it needs is a simple software update to enable all this.

Apple fans rejoice. The boy-god Jobs has removed temptation from you. You can sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that all the nasty choices have been removed.

But it's rather long. I posted the detailed reasons in my blog.

In a nutshell:
- Intel has put lots of optimizations into the actual CPU. The author did not account for those.
- Future proof - C is a simple language, for which it is simple to write complex optimizers.

Shachar

I had to laugh when I read this comment. I know that my experience is very skewed, and that it isn't at all like the rest of the world. I have 2 cars right now. One from the US, one from Europe. I have a 1997 Geo Metro with a 1.0L 3cyl engine. My other car is a 1979 Porsche 928 with a 4.5L V8. It seems to me that it's not the area that the car is made, but the market that the car is aimed at. I'm sure the culture around influences greatly the types of cars manufactured in a certain area, but there's a little bit of everything everywhere. I don't know about Europe as much, but in the US, your car is a status symbol. It's a competition, like so much of everything here. I can't take full credit for this idea, as it's based on a friend's blog post about eating as a competition, but it seems to fit. I can't play innocent, as I drive my Porsche around, never bringing it up to top speed, and usually even following the speed limits. It's wasteful, but it seems to be part of our culture. Personally, I'm indecisive about whether that's a good thing.

Millions in engineering and they overlooked that little detail. Time to pack it up and go back to the drawing board.

Of course it would do damage. Just like it would do damage to a conventional space station, the Hubble, shuttle orbiter or anything else in LEO. You'd be lucky if it was only going a few hundred mph. More likely it would be thousands of mph and the effect would be spectacular regardless of what it hits. Anything the size you describe is probably already being tracked, along with burned out motors, dead satellites, wrenches, and pieces of insulation. What's harder to track are paint chips and debris from collisions. One dead Russian sat is leaking blobs of liquid metal.

Here's a good blog on space junk. One proposed solution are satellite robot junk collectors that snag space junk and then deorbit to dispose of it. Make a couple of those a part of every mission. For the big stuff all that's required is slowing it down a few meters per second and the atmosphere takes care of it for you. The problem are things too small to track.

It's funny how people like to sit behind their computers and criticize the business tactics of the most powerful corporation on the planet. I am not implying that I agree with their methods, but to assume a "lack of understanding" from a company that generates more than $40 billion (billion with a "b") in annual sales, and whose executives are among the richest men and women in the world...that shows a lack of understanding. Arrogant...sure, ignorant, FAR from it. You can afford some arrogance when you can buy and sell half the world's countries with your annual sales.

Oh, really?

If anything, Microsoft's arrogance will contribute to their downfall. You can't flout a Government forever; they come for you, eventually. With pitchforks.

Not to mention that Microsoft did not rise to power on arrogance; Microsoft rose to power based upon imitation and brilliant (aggressive?) marketing. Look at sectors driven by Microsoft's "arrogance".

Is the Xbox making money, or gaining marketshare proportional to MS's investment?
Is MSN making money, or gaining marketshare proportional to MS's investment?
How about Windows Defender? Or Microsoft Passport? How about the variety of MS Home Entertainment (Media Center, Media Keyboard, MS Remote control, WinCE for DVD players, etc . . .) offerings?

Take a look

MS has tons of money; but they aren't generating revenue on their "new businesses". They rake in monopoly profits using unfair marketing tactics (and they've been found guilty of these actions in court, domestically and internationally), and plow that into other sectors of the market, hoping to distort them the same way they've managed to distort the OS and Office markets. This does not demonstrate business acumen; on the other hand, it demonstrates that they suck, real bad, at developing new markets. If Microsoft didn't have billions in the bank its new product offerings would not even blip on the radar.

Take a look at their 5 year share price

Make no mistake; Microsoft is doing something wrong, and me, the GP poster, and the stock market know this. Why do you still have your head stuck up your ass?

Previous financial success does not guarantee future success. It certainly helps, and can be a necessary condition, but is not sufficient. Making statements on how you "own" a market (enterprise search) in which you have no product offerings versus established competitors implies that your delusions are growing worse, not better. These coarse statements by a policy maker at Microsoft should not, and will not, make shareholders comfortable.

Depends on how well you can shrug :) According to Darwin, that is highly dependent on the genetic anal retentiveness of your nationality :D

Google can now index SharePoint, as of a few weeks ago: Google Enterprise Blog We did limited testing on our intranet so far and are fairly pleased.

Firefox has reached sufficient popularity and code maturity that it doesn't need to encourage evangelism. Sure, I use Firefox and I'd recommend it to most Explorer users, and I've already converted those close to me. However, I'm not going to go on a Firefox Crusade as that would stink of zealotry and probably hurt the cause. As other posters have said, Mozilla should put their efforts into bug fixes and usability issues. Yes, I know this isn't a zero-sum game, but we'd all be more likely to recommend Firefox if they could clear up the excessive memory usage 'feature' and the odd keyboard scrolling problem that took me ages to figure out.

"Not entirely accurate." ... Isn't that synonymous with "found on the internet"? ;-)

the deal would put the court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in the unusual position of deciding whether the wiretapping program is a legitimate use of the president's power to fight terrorism.

While reading the posts I took a look at that blog he has going.

If you look on the right, at the bottom, there is a header called "Archives." Under this header there is only one entry: July 2006.

Mere speculation, but perhaps July isn't all he's packing.

Reading http://browserfun.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com], it looks like he submitted these on March 6. He is publically reporting them in July. That's three months.


Ok, but don't you think 3 months could even be a little short?

Take the distribution cycle of an average product. (Think outside MS for a second and imagine getting updates out to clients? Ouch.) Ok, back to Microsoft, even with Microsoft's Update Site and Automation, the rollout of an update like this would be a couple of weeks for users that were connected. Then you have corporate 'dimwit' policy, when they only do monthly updates to systems. So this adds to the timecycle to a week to a month depending on release.

So in real world, this gives MS two months to find the exploit, see if it is a design flaw, bug, etc, and find a fix that may or may not affect a mass of other interdependancies...

So what if this were not a 'browser' bug, but something that was later found to be a lower level exploit in the kernel level. (Heck even remember the Win32 WMF exploit?)

So if you have something at a low level, take even something that can move fast, pick your favorite *nix, do you honestly see a widespread 'major' kernel update getting done, tested, out to all the distributions, tested again, and out in three months?

In this senerio MS or any vendor would have a HELL of a lot of testing even after the exploit is tied up, and lot of vendors to report back and confirm that the majority of applications businesses depend on don't break because of a major change.

Also remember in terms of compatibility, you aren't just dealing with the main vendor like MS or Sun or Apple, you are dealing with every CRAZY 3rd party application that might be dependant or poking its head into that portion of the OS even if it shouldn't be.

I'm not truly saying your wrong here, just questioning if 3 months should really be seen as a 'long timespan' in the scope of things? Again, someone outside the vendor would not know how deep the exploit might go.

In reference to 'if the bug exists people are at risk' thinking, this is a statistics issue. Sure the vulnerability 'potentially' exists for millions of users, but widespread knowledge of 'how to use the exploit' is where damage really occurs. It is like the Sony Rootkit joke here, some 'hackers' never even thought down that road to root below and OS level, yet the widespread knowledge may have done more harm than the potential exploit would ever have in the first place.

There is a statistical difference between a wide known exploit with documentation of how to use it maliciously, and a conceptual exploit or potential exploit. Again, back to numbers and risk assessment. And if you go with just Stats, the guy pointing out the bug before the vendor creates a fix has just blown the numbers to the other side of the argument.

I concpetually do agree with the public disclosure might move vendors to act faster, but that is more of a perfect world ideal that I would like to see vendors live up to, but when reality hits, I'm not so sure it would be enough of a shift.

All it would take is one massive bug the vendor couldn't get patched fast enough to destory a portion of the computing industry. And one slipping through is our reality and not the perfect world I wish it was.

This less than perfect world, is also where I see a flaw in the open source model at times, just because most of us working in open source projects don't want to harm our own interests, does not mean there are people out that don't exist that would just to gain a bit of fame or revenge. So far the odds have been on the side of getting the patch out, but all it takes is one on enough in use computers and bingo, massive effects.

As you can tell in my response, I'm still knocking this marble around in my head, and the more debate on this we all can have the better off the industry will be by the people that don't stop thinking about this here.

Crap! Here's a good link: http://kd7lrj.blogspot.com/2006/07/dell-laptop-bat tery-trouble-at-novell.html

A friend of mine sent me a note and some pictures about another Dell D600 which experienced "Venting with Flame." I compiled the pictures on my blog: http://kd7lrj.blogspot.com/2006/07/dell-laptop-bat tery-trouble-at-novell.html/.

Reading http://browserfun.blogspot.com/, it looks like he submitted these on March 6. He is publically reporting them in July. That's three months.

Microsoft has had 3 months notification that they need to fix a list of bugs which are findable with publically available tools, and some of which are being actively exploited by the blackhat community.

Without this publicity, the blackhat community would continue exploiting machines indefinitely. With it there is at least a fighting chance that Microsoft will fix their bugs and force the blackhat community to look for some new bugs and write new tools. I have a hard time thinking of this public disclosure as anything but beneficial.

As for the open source bugs, there is no way to report bugs to those projects without making them public. However their development is fast enough, and they are small enough targets, that I don't see these releases as being a problem for them.

http://browserfun.blogspot.com/

Here's the link to the list of Moore's browser exploits, the ones that the article is talking about.

At one time I kept my linux-based PC powered on 365 days a year. I had a little web server on there, email server, network backup service, etc. It was just a commodity Athlon-based computer running at 1.4 GHz or so.

But then I noticed that my home power bill was growing. I used a watt-meter - a "kill-o-watt" - and saw that the PC alone was consuming over 125 watts of power at idle - and even more when the CPU was pegged and the disks were cranking. And remember, this doesn't include the monitor - just the PC itself.

In all, the 365 day-a-year, 24 hour-per-day operation of this PC alone was costing me about $160 (at $0.15 per KWh). I have a little computer energy consumption comparison here.

My servers at work cost even more - with all their redundant fans, power supplies, quad CPUs and so on, ... well, it adds up quickly. Beyond that, high density computing can easily exceed 6 KW per RACK! And that makes a lot of heat, and so you have to cool the data center 365 days a year - and that's even MORE power consumption. A $1 million dollar electricity bill per year for a data center ain't out of line. And remember, commercial energy costs are less than residential.

The federal government is one of the worst polluters in the country. The Congress is partially responsible for this because they're too busy getting their rocks off with lobbyists to do their jobs. We need a new law that says that grand-standing in public by a Congresscritter is automatic grounds for a FBI investigation into all of their personal and campaign finances, gifts received, contacts and trips. Who wants to bet that there isn't almost a 1:1 correlation between the grand-standers and those who are too busy getting graft to do their job?

• Avoiding RSI
• Some tips
• Preventing and healing* Carpal Tunnel Syndrome & Repetitive Stress Injuries
• Posture for a Healthy Back

Read this paper: SubVirt: Implementing malware with virtual machines (and my blog if it won't print for you). VMWare/Virtual PC won't necessarily prevent rookits from infecting the host OS (though to date I haven't heard of any VM Rootkits).. just a matter of time, most likely.

Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 uses rootkit-like techniques to hide encrypted files from the Win32 API. I wrote a little about it in
my blog a few days ago.

Now, there are currently no unpatched remote exploits or program-runs-crap-by-itself bugs I'm aware of. In other words: You have to start it!

Oh, really?

Not to mention that if they have to implement double-digits worth of patches a month you have to suspect that there are, indeed, unknown (by the public) security holes to be found, and which may have already been found by blackhats.

Antimalware tools are akin to snake oil and herbal remedies. No sane system should need that kind of overhead, and I've said it before: once you're infected, the only way of going back to a "known clean" configuration is a wipe and restore from "known good" media, or a complete checksum of binary signatures from a read-only known-good boot medium. The only thing antimalware does is make you feel safe, much like the Windows Security Center logo. Once your system is infected, a good root-kit is unremovable, and even garden variety uncommon malware may not be detected by the popular virus scanners; this is exactly what happened to Valve with the Half-Life 2 code theft. Someone designed a custom worm to penetrate their network and e-mail out important corporate files, and they got away with it.

I'm sure this is no more than a red herring to get people to swallow more draconian, fascist, Constitution trashing 'laws' to allow them to "protect us" from these cyber-terrorists.
Happened to notice that they're charging everyone with 'terrorism' these days? Even guys that hold up convenience stores.

http://tachspot.blogspot.com/

First if you install Windows into a VM from a legit Windows XP CD and try to download any updates the Genuine Windows Advantage test fails. So MS already knows if you're running VMware.

I think MS wants you to buy multiple copies of Windows if you're planning to run in a VM as well as on the real silicon.

I would say that the effort has been a good faith effort. Guys have been working nearly 24x7 to get our protocols (not APIs) documented now that we have an idea what format the EU wants.

Well ... I'm happy to see what might actually be a response with inside knowledge. However ... first of all I'm afraid that, given its public record in the area of "honesty" and "fair dealing", Microsoft is facing rather serious credibility challenge here.

Could it really be that bad?

So ... are we to understand that Microsoft really had no documentation of its main client-server interaction protocol (whether API or protocol description) that it could use to produce documentation for the EU? Do you really expect us to believe that?

Well ... sadly enough we might, because we remember the efforts by Jim Allchin to put Microsoft's Windows development on a more systematic footing (see: http://asay.blogspot.com/2005/09/news-microsoft-ad mits-its-development.html). So if that holds for Windows development as a whole, then might it not hold as well for something like a communication protocol? *shrugs* Ok ... I give up. It might be that Microsoft as a company really hadn't got a clue what it's most important client-server communication protocol looks like. So ... yes. If you had to dig through mountains of Windows source code to figure out all instances where client-server interaction can occur (because you don't have a clue really) it could take a lot of time. But even if that were so, why didn't Microsoft warn the EU that it wouln't be able to finish withing the alotted time? Perhaps that is why it got the extra year to complete its documentation. But even so why keep mum and come up with hollow-sounding excuses about "formats" at the latest possible time? Could it be that whoever was in charge of this project didn't know how to manage it?

Unfortunately the choice seems to be between

(a) downright incompetence (the project manager in charge of producing the documentation couldn't count and couldn't read a calender)

(b) the problem was too big (we ain't got no docs anywhere boss, honest, only source), or

(c) stonewalling.

Forgive me for being just the tiniest bit sceptical of Microsoft's good intentions and good faith (with Microsoft's long history of outright chicanery in mind whenever things didn't suit them).

So ... the EU caused Microsoft to miss its delivery target for Windows?

And please ... if your company had to actually interrupt its work on Vista to introduce disciplined software engineering, do you really expect me to lend credence to claims that delays in Vista delivery aren't 100% self-inflicted? And all those vanishing features ... caused by the EU's interference as well, yes? I'm sorry, but if you're saying that Microsoft really didn't have its act together when it comes to software engineering, it's very hard for me to lend credence to any claims that the EU's requirements has cause Vista to be delayed by even a single day.

Formats as fig-leaves?

And secondly ... sorry if I sound a bit grumpy, but this "now that we have an idea what format the EU wants" sounds like a poor cop-out. What do you care what format the EU wants? They specified an effect, not a procedure. They didn't specify a format in order not to impose undue constraints on you. If other developers can use your specs to produce something that will be intereoperable, the EU is satisfied. And sorry but if you knew your business, you ought to know what a workable specification looks like. So pushing the EU for a precise definition seems either:

- fishing for an excuse to produce unworkable documentation ("we

Proposed solution: http://kassemi.blogspot.com/2006/06/killing-intern et-explorer.html

As for the web statistics, these were only posted because they're relevant to the story about increased Firefox usage. I want to try the 2.0 Beta, but last time I tried a Firefox beta I couldn't use any of my extensions and I therefore wasn't able to use Firefox in the way I like using Firefox (since without the extensions its only an okay browser). I don't know if I'll switch to Firefox 2.0 when it comes out though, as currently I'm really fond of Opera 9.

There is a bit more information here and here about SPHERES including images and video at MIT.

These puppies are not quite "bowling ball" shaped.

Where did I find this? On an ANSWER forum? The Democratic National Committee's speeches? A letter from Marx?

None of them. The above letter is actually an *auto-generated* complaint from this website: http://www.pakin.org/complaint/

Granted, I typed in Bush under the "company" box rather than the box to complain about a person (which is why it writes "Bush sticking its proboscis" instead of "his"), but still, it's eerily similar to the daily frothing at the mouth rants that Leftists spew out about the President. Is this how war protesters write their speeches? By using auto-generators?

I wouldn't put it past them, considering that they've been repeating the same things over and over again, that they are flailing for originality.

OK. I'll watch my temper. And I'll stipulate that you're not ignorant because you're stupid. You're just uninformed. Let's fix that.

Do something about it. Watch this:

http://f4d3r.blogspot.com/2006/03/911-documentary. html

You can see the outgassings; the professor calls them out and they are patently obvious. The Pentagon impact is detailed. The reports on the problems with the idea that the steel failed are detailed. The questions you asked about the 757 are raised -- there are some answers, though not nearly enough.

Your call. Watch or don't watch; remain uninformed or learn something. Remember: This is just one of the works out there that examines the many anomolies involved with 9/11. If you can examine all of them and come up unconvinced, that would really be something. However, I know you have not — because just about everyone who has looked even a little knows about the sequenced outgassings. You don't. You will after you watch that video. Now, you may have a theory that accounts for them, and I'd be interested to read it. But saying you don't know just means you are unaware of some of the really obvious things that went on that day, and you should probably fix that. At least, if you want to be taken seriously as an advocate for the mundane explanation.

What you're saying, essentially, is that...

No. I'm not saying anything of the kind. I'm saying there are serious discrepancies and they don't match well with the story the government has put out. I've not drawn a conclusion. I don't think I have enough information to draw a conclusion. What I do have enough information for is to suspend my belief that the story we've been told is 100% true.

[16 feet] Which is larger than the width of the fuselage of a 757.

Ok. Look. Try to visualize. The 757 has two huge Pratt & Whitney PW2037 or PW2040, or Rolls-Royce RB211-535E4 or RB211-535E4B engines. They're mounted on the wings, OK? They're about 40 feet apart, or another way to look at it is they're 20 feet from the centerline of the aircraft. These engines are very dense compared to the fuselage. There is no third engine mounted on the centerline. These are all simple facts. Please visit the Boeing website if you feel the need to double check; I did.

Now. There was one hole in the Pentagon. Fact. The one and only hole was 16 feet wide. Fact. The engines were 20 feet off center, left and right. Fact. Another way to look at this is that they were at least twelve feet outside, horizontally, the maximum radius of the hole. Fact.

Now, ignoring the particular type of engine that was found (which was not a 757 engine, and is weird enough a fact as is), you tell me what your theory is as to how that jet engine got inside the Pentagon without there being an additional hole 20 feet from the center of the impact. The engine is very heavy, moving very fast, and it will either (as you intimate) disintigrate on contact, which I don't neccesarily have a problem with, or it'll breach the wall, which I also don't have a problem with, as it is denser than any other part of the aircraft. However, there was no hole except for the center one, and there was an engine, amazingly undamaged (as in, the turbine was still intact) inside the hole. So: how did the engine get in there? The obvious, and easy answer is that the engine was a centerline mounted engine. But if it was, then this wasn't a 757, which is a twin engine, wing mounted aircraft. But we were told this was a 757.

This leaves me, at least, with various unanswered questions. Now perhaps you are way, way smarter than me, and you see the answer or answers. I'd very much like to hear them. Please feel free to elaborate. Otherwise, watch the video and go snoop around the various sites asking these

The above poster gives the classic example for why you should not pretend that reading popularized arguments teaches you a damned thing about the actual physics. http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/2006/05/ant hropic-dogma.html www.anthropic-principle.ORG

One of my biggest turnoffs from World of Warcraft is the patching system. You have to run an external client to download mandatory patches. A quick glance reveals that this is a bittorrent client that cannot be configured.

I tried WoW twice - once during beta and once again recently. In the beta the BT client maxed my bandwidth 100% - maximum uprate and downrate - for a 4.5GB file. The heavy load made my made my modem reset every 20 or 30 seconds and it took me days of dedicated transferring to download the game. When I tried it again a couple of weeks ago they'd eased up somewhat, allowing a maximum downrate accompanied by 20KB/s uprate. When I installed the client it detected that I had an old version and it downloaded the old patches very quickly. However, when a new patch came out (about 160MB) it took over 5 hours to download! Considering I get over 600KB/s down from my ISP it should only have taken a couple of minutes! And, of course, I couldn't play the game until I patched.

I find this really despicable. Not only do you have to pay $15/m for the game, you also have to pay with your own bandwidth. By comparison, Guild Wars, a game with no monthly fees, offers direct downloads (HTTP or FTP I guess) that always come in at top speed. Even Anarchy Online, a free MMORPG with optional for-pay expansions, offers free HTTP downloads for patches.

I seem to recall the Real online music store, if it still exists, doing something similar. Music purchasers would automatically upload songs to other purchasers while the client was running. Customers with faster uprates uploaded more, but saw no share of Real's cost savings.

Few ISPs offer unlimited bandwidth these days. In the case of the WoW beta I sacrificed an additional 2.5GB (over 50%) bandwidth to download the installer. This is really unprofessional in theory, but wouldn't be so bad in practise if it at least worked as reliably as HTTP download.

Yeah - the Libretto is great...

That's why I went and got a second-hand one off of Ebay and put Linux on it!

http://librettoalive.blogspot.com/

OK, so I'm still tinkering with it, but it's great! Very portable and fast enough to run X (although I must admit I use it mostly as a terminal with display on the framebuffer).

Okay, guys, I'm really confused about something. Linux is growing in blades. Everyone knows it. So, is it growing in market share too, or what? I can't make sense out of these conflicting statements:

Gartner says 75% of blade servers run Linux in 2003:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-984010.html

IDC says 50% of blade servers run Linux in 2005:
http://jkobielus.blogspot.com/2005/01/fyi-linux-co ntinues-inroads-into.html

So what happened? Did Linux market share _decrease 25%_ IN A MARKET IN WHICH IT IS GAINING IN REVENUE? Is IDC stupid and Gartner was right, or vice versa? What the hell is this?

      ---a confused Linux user and advocate

The big problem with Wikipedia that depsite its mass inaccuaracies, still comes up top in many search results, which lead many naive web users who do not know the Wikitruth being fulled into thinking Wikipedia is actually an authoitative source.

We, in order to take back the search engines need to start taking action. Willy on Wheels has written a guide to filtering and blocking Wikipedia when using Firefox.

If Wikipedia is removed from the search results then it would lose most of its traffic and would soon self-implode with all the edit wars and vandals that remain, and the Internet would become useful again.

Has your friend who is blind tried the Shuffle? If you do not install iTunes, it just looks like a thumb drive to a PC. Perfectly accessible, except for the low battery indicator. Yes, many of us are hoping Apple keeps improving accessibility, and iPods and iTunes are high on the wish list. That said, I think this patent is just about the shoes and there is no good reason to be optimistic. I hope I am wrong about that. Anyway, isn't this old news?

FZ> Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message.

Pb> Yeah, they might actually make sense.

One often has to dumb things down for clueless Lefties...to the least common denominator -- it is usually safe to assume they have a pulse. But even their dead often vote often in some locales, just not wisely.

Ayn Rand's novels are meant to convey some very strong, obviously controversial messages. They also happen to be really good works of fiction that have been turned into feature films and could be made into great modern movies now that Hollywierd has the ability to handle the FX and is better able to deal with the SciFi format (see "Gattaca", "The Matrix", "Independence Day", etc.) I suspect the trustees of Ayn Rand's estate would not let you buy a million copies of one of her novels, edit them down for safe consumption by mindless socialists, and sell them as cheap thrillers. I hope not, anyway. The problem is, that could be done. You could take the message out of either of those novels and still have a great book or movie.

Just hacking out words or scenes to suit prissy people's sensibilities is taking the original creators' images and ideas out of context. Do you want me republishing things you post and quoting YOU out of context while crediting you as the author? Trust me, the results would be entertaining...but probably not for you.

I have no problem with the notion of you selling parodies of someone else's work, labelled as such if it isn't glaringly obvious (think "Bored of the Rings"). Even buying a zillion copies and bowdlerizing them for your drooling kiddies and overly sensitive friends, as long as you do not redistribute them for profit or given them away as being anything like the original works is fine by me. Taking such actions and distributing the results widely (especially for profit) to people who might not realize they are not reading the original, without the author's or artist's permission seems like plagiarism and/or fraud to me.

Copyrighted works can be kept out of the public domain until long after the creators' deaths. That is why you probably won't see George Orwell's "1984" or "Animal Farm" distorted and redistributed as pro-government propaganda pieces anytime soon, I think.

FractalZone http://esotriv.blogspot.com/

developers will be temporarily left in the cold again. That said, a prototype of designer in Eclipse has been done, and in principal that is a major step towards it working in Linux http://mvgirl.blogspot.com/2006/05/my-working-hear ts-desire.html

Apple have already implemented this technology! This so called news is two months old. Those snipping about patent abuse are way off target. I initially thought: Great, something for the Blind! That was naive. It is all about the shoes. Nothing to see here, please move along. Disappointing on several levels.

I've been fiddling (my blog) with wiki's to see if they can work at work to tackle knowledge management problems that I'm experiencing in a large organisation. I came to the following points why wiki's can work there:

        * They center work on a topic around a group of webpages
        * They are easy to use. Socialtext is just a double click on a page
        * They open up information to the entire organization through simple searches
        * Information entered into them for the benefit of the project group is immediately also of benefit to others. So when doing my job, I unintended also help others
        * They enable sending e-mail to and from pages, enabling e-mail repositories and lists of useful links on the relevant page.
        * By sending an e-mail to the relevant project page, you add both metadata to the page and to the e-mail.
        * They are free form, but can be structured
        * If one co-worker doesn't update his page, because of time constraints or just being dead, others can.
        * They can be about such highly critical information as: Best restaurants in Berlin, travel suggestions to Kiev, the latest law and its implications, biographies of important people, a list of insultants, the next project meeting or the office Christmas party, without requiring a central command and control structure.
        * They don't assume where knowledge is in the organization.

For a review of Jotspot, Socialtext and Wetpaint see here

I've been fiddling (my blog) with wiki's to see if they can work at work to tackle knowledge management problems that I'm experiencing in a large organisation. I came to the following points why wiki's can work there:

        * They center work on a topic around a group of webpages
        * They are easy to use. Socialtext is just a double click on a page
        * They open up information to the entire organization through simple searches
        * Information entered into them for the benefit of the project group is immediately also of benefit to others. So when doing my job, I unintended also help others
        * They enable sending e-mail to and from pages, enabling e-mail repositories and lists of useful links on the relevant page.
        * By sending an e-mail to the relevant project page, you add both metadata to the page and to the e-mail.
        * They are free form, but can be structured
        * If one co-worker doesn't update his page, because of time constraints or just being dead, others can.
        * They can be about such highly critical information as: Best restaurants in Berlin, travel suggestions to Kiev, the latest law and its implications, biographies of important people, a list of insultants, the next project meeting or the office Christmas party, without requiring a central command and control structure.
        * They don't assume where knowledge is in the organization.

For a review of Jotspot, Socialtext and Wetpaint see here

I've always thought they needed to fill in the old advertisement area on the right side of the "main bar".
From what I am looking at now in Opera 9.01, the buttons only fill in about 40% or less of the main bar area. and they are all over on the left side.

I do have Opera 9.01 in my Knoppix Remaster, and am using the "shared-qt" version. I did have a problem with the "static-qt" version in tests, it was not compatable with the 7 kde-look.org mouse cursor themes I have built-in to the remaster.
Everything mouse-cursor-wise is fine now, Opera will display the theme chosen, in the browser. Before you got a very small cursor inside the browser, when downloading a web page, and Opera would only use your default cursor theme, not any other you switched to, even if you closed Opera and started again.

They have a lot of nice features in Opera 9.01, in KDE, you get an Opera icon next to the clock that you can click to instantly minimize/maximize the Opera window.

I put 13 RSS news feeds in Opera, and there is a short delay in the response of the browser on older computers while the feeds download the stories, immediately on bootup of Opera. That happens also when they get more stories. Very nice, however, you can have something to look at while a web page downloads. You get a small picture with some of the stories, and that takes extra bandwidth, but is a nice touch. You did not get the pictures with Opera 8.54. I did drop my default "df" /ramdisk useage to compensate for the extra space that the Opera 9.01 ~/.opera will take to handle all those feeds.

For those of you using another flavor of livecd linux, I have a short howto for trying out Opera, with a link to the Opera "weekly", at my blog here. That how-to should work with Kanotix Linux, although I have not tried it there. I often save the Opera directory and the ~/.opera to a usb memory stick, for use next time or on another box. It is a temporary way to test Opera without actually "installing" it.

-Rapidweather

This case is another example of a NH police force gone mad, and as you can read in the comments section to my post, it is not the first time, as I note in this post:

http://christopher-king.blogspot.com/2006/07/kingc ast-presents-police-beat-down-in.html

Nor is it the first time that NH officials have applied arcane laws to try to screw a little guy.

Fact: They tried to do it with trespassing statutes to nail undocumented workers. http://christopher-king.blogspot.com/2005/08/nh-po lice-chiefs-busted-on-immigration.html

Fact: They tried to do it with a ridiculous reading of an extortion statute to indict me for writing a Demand Letter from the NAACP regarding an incident of police abuse. That case, in Cheshire County Superior, has shattered and continues to fall apart. http://christopher-king.blogspot.com/2006/06/kingc ast-presents-syllabus-of-court.html

Fact: They tried to bring in police spy cameras out in Monadnock; seems its okay for them to monitor us but when we monitor them we get a problem, yo. http://christopher-king.blogspot.com/2006/03/monad nock-residents-reject-police-spy.html

So with respect to my situation, I'm retaliating by video taping everything that happens in the case, using a professional film maker, some of which you can see at KingCast.net.

Peace.