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I see two features and no misfeatures.

Some people see two misfeatures and no features.

Some people don't like or don't understand X. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, any of the X configuration programs do this, but...

Please explain to me how [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[+/-] is not easy. What could be easier? Is [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del] particularly difficult for you under Windows? Or is [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Backspace] hard to remember under X?

I agree that it has somewhat different effects than resizing the desktop under Windows or Macintosh, but it's still *incredibly* easy!

Also, I don't see how it's that easy on Windows/Mac. For the average user, it goes something like this (realize there are many inconsistent ways to do the same task, too):

"First, go to the Control Panel."
"What's the Control Panel?"
"Okay, click on the menu. (Start / Apple / Whatever)"
"Okay."
"Now go to Controls."
"Okay."
"Now go to Display. (preferences / monitor / whatever)"
"Okay."
"Now pick your resolution."
"So is 800x600 bigger? How many colors do I need? Why would I want 32 colors instead of 256?"
"*sigh*"

For a novice user, they have to learn *something* first, but navigating a maze of menus seems rather harder than pressing a key combination, at least to me... And remember, once you learn it, it's easy! You must have learned the wrong 'easy' way to do things first...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I think the UI Designers and the Hackers do a fair amount of self-selection, and the programs they create are popular in their own circles. I use mpg123; Joe A. User can use XMMS.

I change my 'display settings' by hitting CTRL+ALT+'+' and CTRL+ALT+'-'. And really, why would I want 8-bit color? :)

But seriously, it would be cool to have a box that could do this in GNOME or KDE, but I'd appreciate it if it didn't have to be integrated into X. Just being root and rewriting XF86Config while showing a pretty dialog to the user and saying "Now Restarting X..." would be good enough, IMO.

(don't listen to me, though, I'm one of those "hackers" that your design teacher warned you about! :)

I *do* appreciate it when programs support multiple ways to get help. For 'Joe A. User', it sounds like it should be "The Help Menu". (Command line? What's that?) However, it should *always* be "man prog". I don't *care* if there is alternate documentation available, there should always always ALWAYS be a man page for it, too.

Source and a configure script, or a package for the right platform, or both, is pretty standard these days. And your distro can probably find packages for anything that "Joe A. User" would ever find out about. ("for everything else, there's rpmfind.net"... :)

Would you consider "crashing" to impede ease-of-use? I wouldn't consider Netscape terribly easy to use on Linux because sometimes it just plain doesn't work. But even if Netscape gets a 5/10 on Linux, IE gets a 0/10 on Linux, and bringing down the whole OS on Windows is even more serious in my book... IE 3.0 under Wine is reasonable; it has some Wine-related glitches, and doesn't support some things because it's old... but it's fast. Probably like running Netscape 3.0 on Linux. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This was predicted in the last story, that someone would wonder about this, and there would be an "Ask Slashdot" on precisely this topic.

I'm amused. :)

However, NSI does suck, their policies are evil and their business practices absurd. So I'm all for it; vote with your money, vote with your feet!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't know why I reply to these things, but...

Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it. I'm currently using Netscape with fvwm2 on Solaris, but it looks the same on Linux, and it hasn't changed any (for me!) for the past four years or so.

The interface looks at about the level of Windows 3.1, except that it has menus on the root window, four virtual desktops, (no pager; I access them through Ctrl+Arrow Keys) and all the features and misfeatures of X. (running graphical programs on other machines on the network, no integration of graphics into the kernel, etc.) Also, if I wanted it to look or act different, I could change it easily. :)

If I wanted an integrated desktop environment, there are several to choose from. Heck, if all I ever needed was a few Windows applications, and the interface was good enough for me, I could run those too, either with Wine or VMWare, or with some Windows-esque window manager, (qvwm, fvwm2-95, icewm, whatever) or even the Mac with mlvwm (Gack!).

My interface is so good, I use the command line all the time. I just wish I had a three-button mouse, 'cause having a dedicated button for pasting is really handy. For that matter, a 10-button mouse might be reccomended for die-hard Emacs users, or people who like chorded keyboards, but they aren't readily available, or popular.

I would love to have a Lego-based UI. That would be a pretty cool component-building interface, and Windows, GNOME and KDE all seem to be getting pretty component-happy. And as Logo was based on LISP, there are some Window Managers and programs that have similar groundings in their extension language. (sorry folks, no turtle. You could add it to The Gimp, but then it'd be in Scheme. :)

Windows 3.1 is an okay GUI, but an xterm is still much more intuitive. And a terminal still meets or exceeds the Win '95 shell. But if I want slow graphical eye-candy, I can always grab the latest 10MB themes for Enlightenment, run it with GNOME, install all the latest apps, run them all at once, take a screenshot, and gloat. And then change the theme, and watch the Windows users say "WTF??!!! How did you change that???!!!!"...

Of course, I'd rather get work done. I hate to break it to you, but that's what that "User Interface" is for: to get stuff done.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

More like twelve, if you ask me.

But why are we arguing about exactly what mythical creatures looked like? If I ever see them, I'll let you know, OK? :)

So, anyone want to make comparisons between Hercules, Jesus, or Bacchus? Half a god is better than none, that's what I always say....
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh man, that would drive the market for blank tapes, at least. If you wanted to have a good copy of a show, and you kept using the same tape for everything and taping over it, that tape would wear out *really* fast.

I guess if I wanted to keep a copy of a show, I'd have to use more than one tape? :)

When it comes to technology, people seem to love and enjoy anything that seems useful or cool provided they don't have to think about it. I'd suggest the "Web-Zapper": a DOOM-like interface to web censoring; if you see something on the web you *never* want to see again, shoot it! (But be careful, if you don't use a powerful enough weapon, it might re-spawn!) Great for ads, Java pop-up windows, goatse.cx, (don't go there!) or just a tough day at work... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Thank you, that actually clears things up a lot in my mind.

I guess the short answer to my question is, everything is unlawful, but if you do it on the Internet, it's probably illegal too, and then you're a malicious pirate, profiteering on the backs of others...

I suppose some other new technology will appear for people to hate and fear soon enough, and then we can all record our movies in peace once again. :)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Since many here have mentioned that their school isn't going to do Linux, I thought I'd offer a bit of good news. I work at North Carolina State University in one of the largest computer labs on campus. (100 Leazar Hall) Our setup is based on Athena at MIT. (Kerberos, AFS, zephyrs) This lab is currently using SPARCstations running Solaris that are begining to show their age. Well, anyways...

We are replacing most of the 200 or so machines in this lab with Dell PCs beginning Monday and ending in August. And they will be running EOS Linux. First new realm client being added to the system in a long time. I think its great and long overdue.

So some schools do have a clue... Yeah, we have smaller labs running NT4 for some of the apps. But NT on our system is a support nightmare. (NT needs to be really screwed with on this Athena setup) So I'm happy the main Computer Science teaching lab isn't going to mess with Windows NT4. =)

http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/labs/map/rooms/Proposed_le z.html

I don't care if people use Linux for business.

That doesn't mean *I* have to do it.

(hey, if 20 people you know run Windows, does that mean you should too? :)

If I found another free Unix system I liked *much* better, sure, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

I used to run DOS and Windows 3.1, because I didn't know better, and there wasn't a widely-available free Unix clone that didn't *suck*; I wasn't about to switch to Win '95, since it was so much less powerful, dumbed down, less stable, and more annoying. Windows 3.1 couldn't exploit the power of even my P133. People stopped writing as much good stuff for DOS. Hello, Linux!

I tried installing BeOS briefly; it looked cool, but didn't support my (generic Trident TGUI9660) video card. I didn't want to read Slashdot in grayscale --> bye, bye, BeOS.

As for the *BSD's, I haven't really tried them, but it doesn't look that different. I'd have to install the GNU tools, of course, (I know them too well--I'm addicted!) and learn about the partitioning, but it sounds remarkably similar...

Many companies try to build a proprietary business plan with Linux at the core. It hasn't worked. The community has correctly taught Red Hat, Caldera, and Corel how it works, and all of these companies have been responsive and clueful in their co-operation. Kudos to Red Hat and Caldera, for weeding out some of that proprietary software. Thanks, Corel, for improving Wine so much! Any company that doesn't do this isn't going to be accepted by the community. They might find a niche market, but that's it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, I'm not really happy with that decision either, but apparently that's the law, this week.

Well, die-hard fans would probably still want the VHS tapes, but that's a very good point. To comply with the spirit of the law, I think you'd need to make sure that your users could only record programming that they already have access to, and there's no really good way to do that on the internet. (my idea was to use the zip-code on a credit-card billing address, and to only record local programming...)

I doubt it's great quality, but it could be. In this case, it can't be better than VHS, because it sounds like that's how they record shows in the first place. It doesn't matter, though, 'cause RealPlayer 7 doesn't do sound correctly on my Linux box. I need to reinstall it... :|
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

You're right about those first two points, but there's got to be a better way...

First, they *can't* "develop closed formats that cannot be copied and put onto the internet", without making them completely useless. If you can view it on your computer in any way, shape or form, you can copy it *back* onto your computer. Also, open formats will always be more popular because even though any closed format can be hacked, and open format will be more widely used, and therefore more widely distributed.

I remember when I had a CD-ROM drive that could not rip CD's. At the time this was difficult anyhow, because it would generate large files, in excess of 30MB... So of course I wanted to get samples, sound clips, songs, etc., from my CDs to put onto my computer. At first, I just used a patch cord to feed the output back into the line-in, or something similar, and I could record things that way. But once I got a new computer, I just bought a drive that could rip it directly.

The analogue, mp3 files, seem pretty popular. I haven't seen that many vqf files lately, and *no* abc, a2b, or whatever-they-are-called-this-week 31337-protected-music-filez, but I'm sure they've all been converted to mp3's. :)

As it stands, many people don't have the bandwidth to copy this stuff around over a network, but I'm sure lots of people know someone who could burn a CD for them (and soon a DVD) so protection by sheer density of information won't work for long, either.

I think the only real solution is to be economically competitive and attentive to the needs of the customers. If "Master of Puppets" was like $5, (and it should be--it's old! :) I'd pick it up to fill out my collection. Maybe I'd grab it at a pawn shop and rip it when I get my new hard drive. But until then, people are lazy, they'll just trade over the internet, or trade CD's of mp3's.

Notice that the music industry is scared shitless. NO ONE has said "hey, we could have an electronic 'Best of Metallica' collection on one disk, charge $40, sell a CD and a book, and make money", they've just ignored the technology. They're afraid, and they don't know what to do with it.

Remember, folks, mp3's don't skip, and cdparanoia is *excellent* at recovering damaged CD's. It would be far cheaper to buy a used CD, dump the entire CD to disk and burn it onto a blank CD than to buy a new copy; heck, destroy the original and sell the new copy that isn't scratched. I'm sure that's illegal, but I don't know why. Is there no warranty, no rights to the information you paid for? Even a one-user license?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've seen it. Read the Super Bowl Party post in this thread and hash it out with that guy. I think "rebroadcasting" is a completely different animal from "personal use".

These people aren't rebroadcasting, they aren't broadcasting at all! They're making a copy of a show that you could tape available to you at a later time. And as long as that's *all* they're doing, (it doesn't look like it is, unfortunately) then this sort of thing should be legal. Banner ads have nothing to do with the contents of the TV show from those times; as long as that doesn't get changed, they're okay there.

The part to watch out for, IMO, is the "show you could tape" part; that needs to be verified. I'd wager that anything over the airwaves in their area is fair game, so this could be done by zip-code, credit card # billing address, or something similar.

However, even if it isn't legal now, it will be someday. I'm sure some clever company will eventually use the Internet, or their technology to implement a broadcast system, and someone will pay the licensing fees and undercut the competition. If people can make phone calls for free over the Internet, something like this is an obvious next target.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

1+2) Okay. So according to you, I can't tape anything on TV and watch it later, unless there's a disclaimer? So why do VCRs have a "Record" button?

3) How is VCR+ different here than '1+2'? You're contradicting yourself... And why give numbers for programs I can't tape? I don't believe that.

4) Yeah, everyone wants to jump in, legislate, and slash and burn the new virgin territories. I heard that they're going to try to prosecute the creator of the ILOVEYOU virus (once they identify who did it...) under a law about misuse of a commerce device, or something. If e-mail is a "commerce device", then I'm Al Gore, and apparently the Spammers of the world are all friendly entrepeneurs or something. I want to see some laws designed for the future, with provisions for direct analogues in other media. (For instance, since copying is not the same as stealing, those laws shouldn't apply. Trade secrets and copyright are much closer, but "credit card fraud" or "mail fraud" are right out...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I completely agree.

Also, that's why I don't agree with the banner ad argument: the signal in question is not being altered in any way! People are still watching the shows, and the advertisements...

But I've learned not to expect much from the government and the media conglomerates; I don't expect them to point out their own shortcomings either, seeing as how they control the news. *sigh*
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yay, MEEPT!

Anyone else want to talk about copyright issues and censorship, 'cause it's all applicable, and there hasn't been much "News For Nerds" lately.

Hey, who wants to post a copy of "The Matrix" on Slashdot? (or would it consider uuencoding ASCII-art, or too many capital letters?)

Sure, it's all old news, but that doesn't stop the media, much less Slashdot...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hmm. I knew the Satellite companies had a big fight over this, and would pay certain stations money for licensing their shows to get the networks, but couldn't get local programming.

I don't know how this has changed, but as long as these shows are recorded off the air, I don't see a problem. Bringing the cable companies into it would probably be a bad idea, but if they don't provide an alternative, it will happen without them, regardless.

If the content providers don't leverage the technology, then someone will, and they will get left behind.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't believe any commercials are inserted into the RealVideo file. What's the argument now?

Also, if you can't find South Park on RealVideo, you haven't been paying attention. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't buy the banner ad argument. I've heard it a lot, and it doesn't sound right. I don't know what people do with those banner ads, or why someone would get paid for it, but I do know that I don't have to download them to see the content.

Every web browser since the dawn of time either hasn't supported some images, or has had the option to disable them. Also, there are programs which will filter out ads in the first place. (I need to reinstall Junkbuster...)

And on this particular page, the ads are at the bottom to start with. What kind of advertising is that, when no one sees them? And if they're being paid per click-through then I *really* don't see a problem with it, as I never look at the ads. :)

So, since I don't buy the banner ad argument...

As long as they aren't actually selling the programs, aren't providing any services that anyone couldn't already get for free, and still see their programs with the commercials in them, I don't see why anyone should complain. Then it's just another issue about convenience and control.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hmm. Scary.

So if I can convince a machine to do it, it's okay, but if a *person* pushes the button, suddenly they're doing something evil. Oh well, I'm just waiting for sentient robots or sane legislation, we'll see which one comes first.

One thing I would consider illegal is using this service to record programs you couldn't normally get, like if I recorded something from Cable when in fact I don't pay for Cable. They don't seem to check this sufficiently. But if this only offered local network programming, I can't see that it would be a problem.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

MEEPT is back! All Hail MEEPT!

Please moderate the parent up. (only moderate my plea down after moderating the parent up, or ignoring my post and moderating nothing)

Why?

Because now that slashdot is censoring trolls and other fun-loving individuals, (try posting something with "First Post" in the subject line, too many capital letters, too much punctuation, etc., etc. and see what snide replies you get) a good way to combat this would be "intelligent trolling".

...and if you don't remember him, MEEPT is the king of intelligent trolling.

So please, let him post with a default score of 0 or 1 just so the funny ones have a chance of being moderated up more, and I can see his posts more often! (and look through his history, moderate the good posts up to +5!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why is this illegal?

Let's say I record a program. I record a baseball game, Murder She Wrote, it doesn't matter. I watch it for my own personal use. It's all legal so far.

I like TV, but I don't know how to program a VCR, so when I'm out of town I ask my friend to tape shows for me. When I get back, he gives me the tape, I watch my show, no media execs were harmed in the making of this tape, etc., etc. Sounds pretty legal still.

Then my friend moves away, and since the Internet is my last remaining friend:

I go to recordtv,
tell them what I want to see,
and they tape it for me,
so now I'm happy...

Nothing really destructive or subversive going on yet, not the downfall of civilization as we know it...

Okay, at one point there might be *two* copies of a show, but that's legal too, right? "For Archival Purposes"? After all, the real tape is just a backup, and I'm sure it will get written over. The copy *I* want to see is a RealVideo file, and that's *my* copy, that my friend recordtv made for me.

So, before you all start pointing fingers, first tell me:

1) How is this illegal?
2) If so, *WHY* is this illegal?
3) Why isn't VCR+ illegal?
4) What makes the Internet so special, that once the same thing is done there, everything is suddenly illegal, patentable, etc., etc.?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

You're completely wrong.

There are many materials that glow in the dark because they were exposed to light, absorbed it, and now are emitting it.

Also, as light is radiation, it's exposing you to radiation by glowing in the dark!

Ack! Public Paranoia! Ban glow-in-the-dark shirts! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No; Apple keeps the Sorensen codec proprietary, and promote movies in exclusively that format; (Episode I Trailer, for example) look it up, this has been discussed on Slashdot before.

Yes, I agree that MPEG is not a good format for editing; you'd want to use something else for that. But at that level, I'm sure there are expensive, proprietary formats that are designed for this. (Amiga MODs for Video, I suppose...)

Also, I just want to see the movies. :)

Anything Apple is a strong supporter of never becomes the great success it should have been. Witness The Macintosh, Taligent, the Power PC Architecture, System 8, Rhapsody, etc. I hope Mac OS X changes things for them, but they have a long history of spoiling good ideas in favor of making them more proprietary. Sure, it gives them more control, but wouldn't they want to be popular too, and get their message out?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I too hate Apple *and* Quicktime for their insistence on and promotion of proprietary codecs. The same goes for Microsoft *and* AVI files. Microsoft at least tried to make their NetShow player run under Linux, and maybe they'll port Media Player. (maybe their applications people will do it once they realize the potential captive audience involved :)

What's the point of making a format if it's just a container for other, new, unsupported codecs? (okay, this can have *some* value, but then why make more than one? How about a generic container format, if we have to have them...) Then you can't reliably even make a player and say that it "plays AVIs" or "plays MOVs".

You can make an mp3 player and say it "plays MP3s". That's because the file format specifies this. The same goes for the other MPEG variants. I'd be happy as a clam if everyone would just ditch their proprietary video formats and collaborate on one. Then websites wouldn't have two or three copies of different video formats, (that all seem to play fine on Mac and Windows anyhow, and *still* don't often work on Linux) and everyone would have a better file format, at both low and high bitrates...

Of course, this is never going to happen as the situation is now. Hopefully free alternatives will eventually win out, but I doubt it. Incidentally, mtvp is a pretty good, free-beer player, and RealPlayer 7 really sucks on my Linux box, and I'd love to be able to play .ASF files under Linux....
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's really scary. It isn't new, lots of Christians have tried to modernize things, or justify them in the current framework. St. Augustine did this too. But it still frightens me.

"The creation was only the first of three major events that have affected the world."

Oh man, I could *never* be that arrogant. I knew I wasn't cut out to be a Creationist.

Something else that is scary is to think that Noah lived long enough ago to allow sufficient time for speciation within the animals on the ark, despite the limited gene pool...

Also, Creationists *do* have rigid preconceptions. They also can't agree on anything, either. :)

Here's some conjecture for all you creationists out there... Originally, the Universe and God, whatever there was, was the same entity. Then, God said the word, and there was light: The Big Bang. It created the Universe, therefore creating darkness, and in exploding, divided the light from the darkness. By the fourth day, all this was in place. And what is a Day to God? Well, I'd wager its a long time. Look, guys, by leveraging existing science, and appending "GOD" to the beginning, you can generate reasonable theories! Wow! (this is what I meant about Occam's Razor, too... :)

I find it very amusing that everything Creationists do can be divided into three categories, at all times. Is that intentional, because I've seen it before in their literature...

This guy is rational enough to admit the shortcomings of "Creationist Science", at least. I wonder how he manages to live with the rest of it, or how he puts up with his peers...

Ah, the Design Argument! Familiar ground, that. Here's a thought, guys: isn't it odd that we're here? We're alive, and we're here. Well, obviously we must be somewhere that supports life, which is such a fragile thing, considering all the places that do not support it. And assuming evolution, that we all grew up together over a very very long time, shouldn't we share some similarities? Shouldn't it in fact be striking first how similar everything is at the root (so we could all live here, and because we all came from the same origins) and how externally different it all seems? We must have been here a long time.. I love it how Creationists find evidence of God in anything they don't understand. We Atheists must truly be blessed...

What's this "young universe" crap? Don't they realize that by this model, the Jews and the Greeks were on Earth before it was created? It boggles the mind. Take a history course. I can't stand the stuff, but I at least know more than that! Truly, I don't think that "Satan created false documents of the Greeks to torture you". See, then he wouldn't have burned the Library at Alexandria... Oh wait, maybe the secrets to Creationist Science were locked away in there....

The comet argument is interesting, but first it doesn't put them anywhere near a creation date of a few thousand years ago, and second I don't see why comets had to be created at the time of the formation of the solar system. Could they have been influenced by our gravity, or could there be a large belt of decimated ice-balls floating around nearby for some other reason? I don't know, but in a big Universe, it could certainly be a local anomoly, so a local cloud or belt would be a good theory. Also, perhaps they're just meteors that got caught in our gravity, like anything else. We only notice the brighter ones in elliptical orbits, and we only see them because of their contents. That would make this a self-selecting process...

I've heard the "lunar dust" argument... Hey, could a young moon explain both the extinction of the dinosaurs and the great flood? Creationists would love that, even if they can't explain the dinosaurs yet... Oh, okay, he gets to this. Well, yeah, the ocean floor *has* changed, and maybe you can date it, there's basically a magnetic record of its age and the polar shifts at the time on the ocean floor...

Of course, if the moon were created elsewhere, and ended up here 1.5Gyrs ago, I'd expect a significant amount of wear and tear... :)

Hmm. Keeping track of anything far away in the Universe is a tricky business. Remember that any supernovae in other galaxies are not only far away, but also were long ago, in fact many different long agos... As to how long Supernova Remnants stay around, well, I'd say that would depend on the size of the Supernova. I'm pretty sure that there was one involved in the formation of our Solar System, but we don't see a remnant, now do we? Oh wait, expanding gas. Yeah, I guess there's a lot of that in the Universe... Hey, would that help any in the formation of a new star, or solar system? Would all that raw material help form a "dust cloud"? I guess we could study the compositions of the other planets, or try to figure out where and when a supernova would have to be to allow for these mineral compositions, and why its distributed this way. (anyone else have an explanation as to why Uranium occurs in nature on Earth?)

The White Hole model is a pretty interesting theory for other reasons. Then the real question is, who created the Universe (if you're a creationist), or where did the matter come from (if you're not). One answer would be, "elsewhere". Another question would be, "Could the Universe exist in a closed loop of time of some sort", or "could the destruction of the Universe (or any other event in its history) create a white hole that caused the creation of the Universe?"... Great stuff for Science Fiction, if not Science...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hmm. The Register article is interesting.

Of course Slashdot has editorial control over its content, but...

1) They didn't post this document as a story.

2) Reader's posts are never intentionally deleted. (why attribute to malice what can be more easily blamed on a very strange MySQL configuration?)

3) Just because you *have* editorial control doesn't mean you *use* it. Any ISP can censor their users; AOL does. The trick is not to do it, so you won't be responsible for it...

4) I still haven't figured out how Napster is different here. Waiting for someone to sue Microsoft for their "Network Neighborhood", though, since that's all college kids use it for anyway. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh heh, "on online clubhouse for Microsoft haters". It's interesting to see what spin the mainstream media ("an online clubhouse for Microsoft lackeys?") attempt to put on this issue. Of course, Salon and Wired are necessarily kinder in their reviews. (Salon actually has some real, decent quotes! Yay!)

"Open source postings"? Hmm, that's an idea.

This post is released under the LGPL. By replying to this post, you are giving me the right to modify and incorporate your replies into my later posts. As this is the LGPL, you can "link" to this thread for any use. You can find this thread on Slashdot; gosh, I hope they keep it available for three years...

"Slashdot readers improperly posted specifications for the Windows 2000 operating system"?? What'chu talkin' 'bout, Willis? W2K is *way* too big for that. I guess technically they're adding their Kerberos stuff to W2K, but that's just some confusion there.

At least the news.com article got the facts right on the "trade secret" issue. Their lawyers are far superior than their technical people, apparently...

Hey, Microsoft, if your program is in an ".EXE" file, and I have to run Wine to run it, is that reverse engineering? Are we circumventing a protection device (the .EXE file format)? Ooo, sue us under the DMCA, I'd love to see that get struck down because of you...

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Of course, it's easier to say that there is a God, I just see no reason to do so. My point was, as I've seen no evidence, it would be superfluous to add something as complex and unlikely as a God into the picture.

Example: "Dr. Science, how does Thunder work?"

Answer 1: "Well, it's complicated, but we think it has something to do with polar charges that build up during storms, friction, the way sound travels, etc. etc."

Answer 2: "The Thunder God gets angry and likes to throw Thunderbolts during Thunderstorms."

Of course, Answer 2 is much simpler, and I think Thor is very cool and all, but if I don't know the answer, I'm not going to hide behind a God unless I've found some evidence for the God, and not just because I don't know the answer. That's what I call a "cop-out". I could invent a God for anything I don't understand, and just blame the whole situation on him. I'm cursing the Lisp God right now...

Also, why a causality "problem"? Couldn't the Universe be its own cause, or be eternal, or exist in a closed loop? Doesn't a God have a similar causality problem, or are Gods just more special than Universes in that they don't need to be created?

(Compare "In the beginning, there was a big chunk of stuff that exploded, and we don't really know where it came from" versus "In the beginning, there was God, and we don't really know where he came from, but he created the Universe, so that solves that problem!"; I don't think it makes things any better.)

Thanks for the link, though; I've seen a lot of lousy books in the same vein, and I'd love to see some Christian "argument" that doesn't rely on assumption, rhetoric, and miscategorizations. (I've got a copy of "More Than A Carpenter" right here, and I'm not impressed...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Again, not to start a flame war, but...

What would you accept as real proof of the non-existence of a God? I don't want to believe because I haven't seen any proof yet, and because by Occam's Razor that means God isn't in the picture. If I later find proof to his existence, then I'll believe in him.

...or is the existence of babelfish.altavista.com good enough? :)

Also, on topic... I was skeptical of this article too, until I got to the bottom. Radiometric dating is something else that is very well-proven, yet many Fundamentalist Christians won't accept it because they don't want to... It's a shame, really, considering how many Scientists are religious, that there are still many religious people who can't accept what their peers are doing.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow, that looks really cool, thanks. You're right that there's a lot of "GNOME is cool" stuff on Slashdot--it must be us loyal RedHat users driving it, I guess. :)

I could care less about GNOME *or* KDE, but I do like to hear about what progress they've made, and try them occasionally.

If I ever hack on this stuff, you can bet I'll be working towards the "minimal" configurations, until all the apps look a whole lot like fvwm, elm, pico, etc., etc., and the only thing that themes really change are the fonts, borders, and titlebars. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's fine, I've been continually impressed with the progress that GNOME and the other desktop environment and user interface projects have been making under Linux and UNIX in general.

My rant was targeted towards the frequently changing libraries that seem indicative of these projects; GTK is just a convenient example. (other people could rant about Qt and how hard it was to get Troll to fix bugs, but that's another flamewar for another day... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Please be aware that Evolution depends on a large number of unreleased and rapidly-changing libraries. Some of these libraries in turn depend on other unreleased and rapidly-changing libraries

I'm not terribly surprised, I'm sure someone would do it just for the hack value. After all, you can play MAME games on some digital cameras...

Also, a message to everyone who thinks this is illegal in some way:

I understand the PSX2 (not the PS/2!) is going to do the same thing. In hardware. So pipe down, already...

Now if only the PSX2 could emulate the Dreamcast emulating the PSX...

So what then, you say? Well, then you can hack on PS-ZX, and not rest until you can play DEFENDER!!!

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, I'm a criminal.

I know how to "surf the web" with telnet.

Lock me up, already, I have forbidden knowledge.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

"Lies, damn lies, and autogenerated reports." -- Peter Baylies, 5/9/00

Or, if you don't believe me, just remember that
"united states government as represented by the" is responsible for 305,338 lines of code, 200k in the Linux Kernel, 100k in OSKit, and 10% of the Linux Surfboard Driver. Go, US!

...and bow down and worship Gordon Matzigkeit. One day, every child in America will be able to spell his last name, and recognize him as the unsung hero of the free software revolution...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

AOL is pure evil.

NSI is pure evil!

Sounds good to me.

Now give me my copy of Netscape 6, don't screw it up this time, and pardon me if I get my web pages and ISP service elsewhere....
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Okay. I read that DMCA summary, and from what I know about Napster, it doesn't violate any of these provisions.

All they do is store info about which computers are connected, and allow them to search each other. They store no mp3's. It's about as illegal as the "Microsoft Network Neighborhood".

I can't believe that any person who knows about Napster and is following this legal interpretation could make a different decision, but I'd love to hear their reasoning...

Hey, here's an idea, guys: share your mp3 directory on your Windows box. If anyone bugs you about it, tell them to sue Microsoft! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Once you get past the event horizon, it *does* look suspiciously like Australia. I got there through L-space once, purely by accident. There I was, in the back of a Barnes & Noble, browsing the Terry Pratchett section, and before I knew it, BLAM! There I was in a rather demented futuristic Australian Outback. I know it was a black hole because they worshipped people from the movie. Needless to say, I found the nearest local bookseller, and got back home before dinner got cold.

It's probably the space time flux caused by that wandering entity who likes to add on bits to worlds that look like Australia retroactively that causes the black holes in the first place. Just another case of Science imitating Science Fiction...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I was thinking that perhaps these viruses would be more successful if they were somewhat subtler in their approach.

If, say, the ILOVEYOU virus professed to be some sort of chain Valentine's day greeting, and it showed some heart animation or something while it busily churned away sending and writing copies of itself, maybe it would have been even more successful.

Or, for that matter, if it were some sort of executable greeting that changed a few Windows system settings for later use, and perhaps just told users to forward it too, it could be successful at infecting and escape detection for a longer period of time.

The only real solution I can see here is to restrict what the attached program or the user can do in the first place. I see a lot of people suggesting virtual machines. I still don't see why VBScript attachments should be allowed to copy files, or edit the registry. I have a feeling Microsoft's answer will be "upgrade to W2K!" :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Moderate this up, it's what I would have posted anyhow. :)

How would the WINE project cope with an NDA? They release lots of source and documentation for all to see. Hopefully the legal muscle in this case will stop Microsoft from unfairly restricting their Windows API info this time...

If WINE did improve markedly as a result, maybe I could run that copy of "Microsoft Visual J++ 6.0 Professional Edition" I won the other day. But as it stands, I'd rather just return it for the money. If I can get $549 for it, I'll be one happy computer geek. Sorry, WINE, I want the money! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, I think I mentioned before that I thought this was possible. Now I don't have to do the research, though. :)

Actually, it looked like some outputted keystrokes (VT100 escape codes in there somewhere, probably) allowed the file to press keys in elm. Then you'd view the file, and it would do its magic, probably typing something like

!
/bin/sh

(or whatever, elm lets you execute shell commands with '!', just like everything else.)

...also, this virus would be multi-platform. Include some misunderstood attachment that executes first in elm, (or whatever Unix mail readers do the same thing) and have the Windows exploit in the message, or in another attachment...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Cool, I didn't get the virus. (No one loves me. :)

I've heard that it could be automatically launched by Outlook. Just citing that it wasn't for you isn't proof, but there's some conflict on this issue.

However, another virus could be written that *would* be automatically launched, and that's much more scary. (Just like the Melissa virus didn't do that much damage, but it's trivial to change the payload, like so...)

I blame Microsoft for VBScript, their Macros in Office, and their horrible security model.

I could run a perl script right now, and it could search through the hard drive, find all the files of a certain type, and try to delete them. But it would fail.

It could still spread itself, but it wouldn't be nearly as dangerous. And whoever gets it would say to themselves, "what is this, and how do I run it, again?" because there's no handy link to click. I don't think the average user is going to run it if they have to download and configure Perl first. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It sounds like an interesting idea, but how are they going to help assemble solar cells?

At least this is a step towards having small, autonomous robots that can do useful tasks humans can't... work on it for another 10 or 20 years, and we might start get to work on nanotech and humanoid robots again... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, but it's a lot harder to fool me when I can read the text first, and say "what the hell is that?" That's because it doesn't just have a "link" that says "Click Here" and does everything without telling me.

I blame people who write e-mail programs that don't just send text, or try to run applications. Elm never does this to me. Heck, I could know absolutely *nothing* about computer security, and elm would *still* never do this to me because it can't do it, and that's the way it should be.

(although I got an e-mail the other day that was encoded in base-64, and elm tried to uudecode it or something, and I got gibberish, and it managed to execute a random command. I'd love to know how it did that. If I figure it out, I might have an "elm e-mail exploit" to post to BugTraq. :)

Also, the "Elementary Security" Information that Microsoft provides on their website seems woefully inadequate to protect against this style of exploit. And educating the user base is not the ultimate answer--because by and large, it's impossible. There have to be better security measures and design methodologies that can be used to minimize the damage.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yay, a real reply! Thank you, korpiq! :)

I agree, and also make sure that nobody owns nothing.

(or, possibly, have two groups, "own no evil", and "run no evil", cause there's no point in making "nobody" own all the files, and running programs as "nobody". :)

Hopefully once Microsoft releases a popular consumer version of Windows based on W2K and users make individual accounts and installations use a separate account, this will be possible. It might require carefully designing the installer, though.

(I don't know how it actually works now, but I'd give the user the right to Add/Remove Programs, but not the ownership of the files themselves)

People want to send "cool stuff" to each other. What you really need is a popular, crippled "cool stuff" format that doesn't have the ability to cause trouble. Something like Flash, I'd hope.

(Flash can't execute arbitrary commands yet, right?)

I agree, this is a very important subject, and it scares me how little attention this gets. If the media could perceive that these are serious security issues that the vendor (Microsoft) needs to address.... well, if they *ever* could have done that, we might not be having these problems. ...or we might be using Solaris by now! ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh heh. You really don't want to know about *that*, but suffice it to say that my self-esteem is fine.

I guess I didn't intend for the focus of that message to be about the moderation so much as the lack of discussion.

But I still really hate that "Overrated" tag, and don't think it should be used. (or at least it should be officially deprecated, or subject to meta-moderation)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, you're right about that, and I'd accept that as a reason for the moderation too.

But I'd *really* rather get some discussion going, and this is apparently the wrong place to do it, as usual.

(But who has their threshold set to +5? Shouldn't that moderator be moderating someone *else* up instead? And why would they do it, after the discussion is essentially dead anyhow? I tend mistrust the moderators who go back through later and mark things that are +5 as "Overrated", that tends to be more personal than helpful.)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

For the record, I don't *care* whether you moderate my comment up or down as long as you have a *reason*.

This is supposed to be a *discussion forum*. If my comment were indeed so gosh darn interesting or insightful, I'd expect other people to think about it, and reply. If it's overrated, then I'd expect people to tell me why. If I'm moderated up, but no one says *anything*, then there's something wrong. (or someone posted a new story. ooo, get karma instead of posting real comments! ;)

Incidentally, thanks a lot for the anonymous reply. I just wish it could have been to my original message, and on-topic. That's what I really wanted...

Moderate me down, mark me as Troll, Flamebait, or whatever you like, if you feel it's justified. But never use a moderation like "Overrated" that offers no feedback at all when you could be moderating up another post and giving them a good reason why.

Or, to make a long story short, read my sig if you haven't yet. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'll accept other people's shortcomings, until it starts affecting what I do.

Microsoft is left squarely out of this.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.