Typical theaters may not work well for this concept, but the Alamo Draft House has table seating for movie goers, so they can order drinks and food while watching the movie. So Internet use would not add anything more to the tolerated commotion that already exists with wait staff taking and delivering orders to the crowd.
If I had a PDA or laptop in there you probably couldn't hear it over the chewing and slurping noises, and the more beer people drink the more likely they are to chatter noisily.
In other words, I won't be going to see Episode II anywhere that has the words "Draft House" in the name.
All that being said, I do believe that the DMCA does go too far at times. I do not, however, disagree with the underlying motive of reducing copyright infringement.
The problem with the DMCA is that it is overly broad: you don't have to be accused of infringing copyright, you don't have to be accused even of thinking about infringing copyright, you can be accused of having the tools that would allow you to infringe copyright. If those tools have another, legal use, well, too bad.
To be precise, the DMCA forbids you to have anything that can be used to break digital rights management. If we accept the idea that someone might use Enigma to encode content to protect their digital rights, then we can argue that a movie which shows how to crack enigma is illegal under the DMCA. This is preposterous, of course, which is why the DMCA itself is preposterous.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the DMCA does not forbid the Enigma movie now... but if someone were to use Enigma to protect content, then the movie could arguably become contraband under the DMCA. If you really worried about the DMCA, you had better not ever crack any encryption of any sort, or talk about it. Now that's what I call a "chilling effect" on free speech!
By the way, it isn't maybe such a stretch to think that someone might use Enigma to protect content; the laughably weak ROT13 scheme has already been used to "protect" PDF files. Dmitry Skylarov spent some time in prison in the US, and part of the reason was that he presented a lecture on how to crack the ROT13 protection on a PDF file.
steveha
Re:Offtopic: web page in Japanese
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Sony PCG-U1
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· Score: 2
Secondly, if they invent a Japanese word for a technical term, then they more or less have to invent (or choose) Kanji for the term, too.
I am pretty sure this is not true. I don't believe there is a kanji for "ramen" noodles; they just always write that in katekana. (Or sometimes hiragana.)
Kanjis can be used in pairs, and the pairing alters the meaning. You are literate in Japanese if you can read 2000 kanjis, and there are way more than 2000 nouns and concepts. They would probably come up with a new pair of kanjis to represent the new word.
steveha
Re:Offtopic: web page in Japanese
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Sony PCG-U1
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
You know, it bemuses me how much French and Latin there is in the English language...
English steals shamelessly from any language. English has Germanic words, French words, acronyms, jargon and slang, all tossed in and as good as any other. (Compare with the French; they don't like "le computer" so the Academie Francaise invents new words like "l'ordinateur".)
Japan seems to steal more specificially from English. I remember puzzling out the Katekana on a sign at a restaurant, and discovering that it was advertising a "Ladies' Lunch" ("raidisu ranchi" or something like that).
It isn't that hard to learn Katekana (51 base characters and a few variations) and if you know it there are so many Japanese things you can read!
it's precisely the other way around: there's no "r", it's all "l".
Every textbook and dictionary I have seen tells me that it's "ra" "ri" "ru" "re" "ro". Thus my comment that Japanese has "r" but not "l". However, my Japanese sensei taught me to pronounce the letters as "la" "di" "lu" "le" "lo" (where the "d" in "di" is sort of part way between an "l" and a "d"). However, I have met Japanese people who definitely use an "r" sound in their speech. I just figure it has something to do with where you learned your Japanese, or something, and I don't pretend to understand it.
I also don't understand how they know when to swallow the "u" sound and when not to. My name, "Steve", comes out "Sutiibu", but Japanese speakers reading the Katekana will say something like "S'teeb" which is pretty close.
By the way, and wayyyy off topic, my Japanese sensei and her white American husband have a daughter named Lori. Sensei has some trouble pronouncing "Lori" correctly, since it has both an "r" and an "l", causing her maximum confusion. Years of practice have helped her to learn "Lori" but when I introduced my brother Larry she had great trouble with his name. "Lori" and "Larry" sound very similar to me, but she had trouble with it. (But her English is very much better than my Japanese!)
steveha
Offtopic: web page in Japanese
on
Sony PCG-U1
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· Score: 4, Offtopic
I took Japanese classes a few years ago. I tried looking at some web sites in Netscape 4.x on a Windows system. I even downloaded a few fonts to try to get it to work better. It never looked good.
Just now, using Galeon, I clicked on the link to the Japanese page, and oh my gosh wow! The whole thing looks like it should. Hiragana, katekana, kanji, English text, it's all there and it all looks like it should.
Kudos to the Mozilla and Galeon developers.
By the way, it still bemuses me how the Japanese like English words so much. They will use their Katekana phonetic alphabet and spell out English words by sound.
Their phonetic spellings look odd to English-speakers. In Japanese, the consonant sounds don't appear alone; you can never have just "k", it has to be "ka", "ki", "ku", "ke", or "ko". The sole exceptions are "m" and "n" (e.g. "Nisan" can end with just "n" instead of "nu"). There is no "l", so they use "r" for "l" when doing foreign words. They often swallow or drop the "u" sound, so a Japanese speaker pronouncing the word "mobairu" will say something like "mobile" (i.e. he will get it pretty much correct, even though the spelling looks odd to us).
Examples on that page: "katarogu PDF" is the link to the PDF Catalog; "rainuppu" is the link to the "lineup"; and the picture showing two hand thumb-typing says "mobairu gurippu sutairu" (mobile grip style).
Note that the name "Vaio" is very difficult for the Japanese to pronounce; the phonetic spelling is "Baio", much easier for them. Japanese doesn't have a "v" sound.
steveha
Re:Mistranslation (Re:gibberish)
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Sony PCG-U1
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The English trademark "my first Vaio" gives a different impression of the device, at least to native English speakers, but native English speakers are not the primary audience for this.
Don't forget that in Japan, English is "cool". They will use English phrases, without necessarily understanding the phrases fully.
I think Kanji is "cool", and I would love to have a T-shirt with a few Kanji characters on it. Same thing with them, only with English. Most Japanese may not even care what "My First Vaio" means.
I suggest you ignore all the advice to do something behind everyone's back and then lie about it. If you get caught once in a lie, everyone views you as a liar. This is tactially unsuccessful, quite aside from moral issues.
You really ought to set up a good firewall and Squid proxy server, though. That's just common sense; you don't want people hacking in to the school, and when a whole class hits a web site, you want 1 person to load the cache and 29 people to read the cache (not 30 people pulling down the web page from the site). That will give you a good position if and when you do get the authority to set a policy: instead of saying "Don't do X", you make it very difficult to do X. It's better to make it hard to do the wrong thing, than to try to punish those who do the wrong thing.
You could suggest a really strong firewall, with only specific ports opened, and require a request in writing to open any other ports. Like someone else suggested, you could write up a proposal for what you want, and see if you can get someone above you to say "go ahead and do that".
If your superiors require you to let the teachers continue to run riot, just get a good paper trail going: get your orders from above in writing, document in writing all the time you have to spend running around putting out fires. When it's time for your performance review, pull out the paperwork and say that you have been doing the job they ordered you to do; you don't want them to give you a poor performance rating because you didn't get much else done while you were running around putting out fires.
The big question on my mind is whether this will really be a Doom game with modern technology, or whether it will really be another Quake with some scary trappings.
To me, the defining features that make Doom are:
Dozens of monsters swarming you all at once
Monsters that can be tricked into killing each other
Light and music providing atmosphere
All this talk of how pretty Doom III will be, and how you will need a GeForce 4 or Radeon 8500 to play it, are making me worry that maybe you will only see a small handful of monsters at a time (like Quake). I'm not too worried about the other points.
By the way, the screenshots reminded me a lot of the movie Aliens (the James Cameron sequel to Alien). I hope someone does a total conversion, or maybe they use the Doom III engine for an Aliens Vs. Predator game.
"and no one (including Miguel) really cares whether you like to use it or not."
Ahh, that's where I was confused - I though *I* was the center of the world. Thanks for setting things straight. And to think, I was just participating in a discussion.
I apologize. There was no need for me to be that snippy. I didn't actually mean to be rude; I wrote that poorly.
My problems with Evolution are three fold:
Well, as for me, Evolution has some really wonderful features, and I am not aware of any other email client that offers all of these:
Display of HTML mail, rendering passive tags only (bold, italics, fonts, etc.) and not putting any hits on web servers. (Putting a hit on a server allows spammers to detect that your email address is valid and alive.) And of course Evolution will display the full message, images and all, if you give the command.
Seamless integration of GPG for message signing, message signature verification, and sending/receiving encrypted messages.
Seamless use of an IMAP server with messages left on the server. (When I delete a message, I want it to go into the IMAP server's Trash directory, not one on the hard disk, and I don't want the message to still appear in my Inbox with a little 'X' next to it.) There are some quirks, but I am living with them easily enough, and I know that future versions will smooth them out.
Actually, Evolution also has the potential to replace JPilot as my Linux "Palm Desktop" program. It just needs a couple of extensions and I could run my life in it.
So, you don't want anything it offers, but I want several things it offers.
Note that Evolution is the only free software currently anywhere near Outlook's feature set. Anyone who uses Outlook heavily and who wants to use a *NIX OS will be grateful that Evolution exists.
Miguel/Ximian has sucessfully created copies of two existing applications.
Well, that's one way to look at it. But would you say that WordPerfect for Windows is a copy of Word for Windows? When you are solving similar problems, you will get similar features. And when your intended user base already knows how to work a competing program, it behooves you to not be gratuitously incompatible with the competing program. (I'm glad that all cars have the gas pedal and the brake pedal in similar places...)
Before you can advance the state of the art, you must first catch up to the state of the art. Both Evolution and Gnumeric are 1.x versions. Over time they will improve, and not always in ways identical to the MS programs.
Besides, your point isn't fully true even today. Evolution has several cool features Outlook doesn't have. I'm less familiar with Gnumeric, but I'm sure that is true there as well.
Miguel isn't responsible for 100% of it, and from my perspective he hasn't had much to do with recent development.
I stand by my statement. He won't be responsible for 100% of Mono either, and probably at some point he will leave Mono and do yet again something else. But it is not fair to dismiss him as a talentless hack who only copies Microsoft ideas, and it is premature to dismiss Mono as a bad idea.
"Am I the only person that wonders why MS hasn't sued the crap out of Ximian yet?"
Give MS their props: they don't randomly sue people, like some other companies *cough* Apple *cough*. They have never sued anyone over "look and feel"; that's an Apple idea. (MS has done some stuff I don't approve of, most recently with their ever-more-constricting EULAs, but they haven't tried to use lawsuits to bludgeon their competition.)
I have a strong dislike of Outlook's UI, and so there's no chance I'm going to use Evolution - it looks exactly the same as it's non-free competitor. Yiick!
If you have a strong dislike of Outlook's UI, okay, I can understand that. But why would you care that it looks like a non-free program? I don't care anymore what MS's programs look like; you shouldn't care either.
I want programs that I find easy-to-use, and Evolution is easy to use for me. I love the built-in support for GPG signatures and encrypted messages; this is exactly what I have been fervently wishing for in a mail client ever since I first saw PGP.
And it is much easier to wean people from Windows if we have apps that work similar to their familiar Windows apps. I understand that some people really use all the features of Outlook; you can take those people and move them to Evolution with minimal retraining. I don't know about you, but to me that is a good thing.
By the way, it would be much less work to add some tweaks to the UI for Evolution than it would be to create a whole new email client from scratch. If your problems with Evolution are minor, maybe you can get some customization options put in so you can make it do what you want.
Finally, there are plenty of other mail clients; you are probably not in the intended audience for Evolution anyway, and no one (including Miguel) really cares whether you like to use it or not.
Doesn't Gnumeric also use a VB-like scripting language? I know the function library is very similar.
One of the big features of Gnumeric is that it can import Excel spreadsheets. That means they need a similar function library to Excel! That is also why they are interested in a VB-ish language.
GNOME Basic is currently at version 0.0.20, and I'm pretty sure Gnumeric doesn't use it for anything yet. (I fired up Gnumeric on my home system, and one of my active plugins is the Python plugin, but I didn't see anything anywhere about GNOME Basic.)
Then there's the whole Mono/.NET thing.
I have read Miguel's comments on Mono. He thinks that a common back end with lots of assorted front ends is going to be a good thing, and he thinks MS has figured out some good stuff. He has no plans to slavishly copy every change MS ever makes to.NET CLR, and he has no interest in Hailstorm or anything else. I personally don't know whether the Java runtime is significantly better, worse, or the same compared to the C# backend... but as long as I can write Python and it will work with Mono, I'm happy.
Anyone taking bets on Ximian's next product? An IE clone based on Gecko? A shoddy OS based on Linux? Sendmail with GUI just like Exchange's?
This is mildly funny but uncalled-for. GNOME, Evolution, and Gnumeric are all truly great programs, and they all were needed IMHO. I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude about Mono, but Miguel's track record so far is pretty damn impressive.
Couldn't the SRB's be separated from the shuttle prematurely, assuming that was functioning in the event of a situation with the orbiter engines?
No. The problem with solid rockets is they don't have an "off" switch; you must wait for them to finish burning (run out of the solid fuel) before you can separate from them. The connection between the SRB and the Shuttle is under a lot of stress while the SRBs are firing, and it is very nontrivial to cleanly break that connection under load; and then you have the problem that the exhaust coming from the SRB's will probably destroy the Shuttle (the external tank is sort of like a big bomb).
Liquid boosters would have been a lot safer, and should have done the job well. I don't remember why NASA went with the solid boosters. It may have had something to do with which Congressional district the SRBs are built in.
It is hard to tell how much a Shuttle launch costs. The numbers are so embarassingly large that NASA cooks the books to try to make them look better.
Almost all of the costs for the Shuttle are salaries for the huge army of people NASA employs. According to Henry Spencer, the Shuttle program's costs are nearly constant: they stay pretty much the same, no matter how many or few launches happen in a year. (So you might as well launch stuff.)
You are absolutely correct: NASA should have taken the working Apollo designs and incrementally improved them. If they had kept up a good improve/test/fly schedule, we would probably have several cool 2001-ish space stations and a moon base by now. But for whatever reason, NASA developed the Shuttle in a massive paper design exercise, to be a giant leap forward in spacecraft. No need to build X vehicles and test them! Just build the Shuttle, perfect the first time!
Maybe BDB is the answer. Maybe SSTO (single stage to orbit, a completely re-usable spacecraft) is the answer. I don't know. But I do know that NASA is past its useful life, and the answer simply will not come out of NASA.
What the government should do is promise to buy X launches at Y tons of payload per launch, perhaps with special tax credits or other bonuses. Then wait for launch vehicles to appear. The money will never be spent if working vehicles don't appear, and if they do appear they will be cheaper than anything the modern NASA can create.
Airbreathing engines do you no good anywhere but during the first few minutes of takeoff; after that, they are extra mass you have to push around. Also, a design with both airbreathing engines and rockets is more complicated than a design with just rockets.
Liquid oxygen is cheap. It takes up little room onboard. Carrying a bit extra is no big deal.
You want a design that will work every time. A multiple-engine rocket, with enough engines that you can handle one or two engines failing, is what we need.
Note that in a two-stage design, it might make sense for the first stage to be air-breathing.
And that is all I know about air-breathing engines on spacecraft. I gleaned this by reading sci.space.* newsgroups on USENET.
What about the increasing surveillance of employees? We need to hear about the bad parts too.
The traditional way to make sure employees are working is to require them to go to work in an office, where you have managers to crack a whip over them. Do you actually feel that the deal JetBlue is offering its phone agents is worse than this?
It only makes sense to monitor calls to ensure good customer service. Companies will monitor their phone agents even if they force the agents to work in an office. It isn't really any different from retail stores sending "secret shoppers" to shop anonymously at stores to make sure customers are being treated well.
They have only 10% turnover rate. Their employees are happy.
Where does their IT actually improve their product?
Read the article. When you call JetBlue to make a reservation, the agent you are talking to is working from home. JetBlue doesn't have the overhead of office space for their agents; their agents are happier; they have lower turnover among their agents. In short, they have lower overhead costs.
A company like JetBlue competes by offering good service for a lower price; cutting their overhead helps them keep their ticket prices lower. Happy employees helps keep the service good. It's good business any way you look at it.
Note that your first bullet point was "Their ticket prices are very reasonable." So we could say that lower overhead contributes directly to making their product better.
P.S. Older, more rigid Theory X companies don't like telecommuting. They want employees in an office where it is easy to keep an eye on them and crack a whip over them. I'm happy to see another example of why Theory X isn't needed.
I have the Sams Teach Yourself Linux in 10 Minutes book. I figure either book would work. My comments will of course cover the Linux book, not the UNIX one, since the Linux one is what I have. But probably the two books are similar.
This book is structured exactly the way I would have done it. Chapter 1 (7 pages) covers how to login, and logout again. Chapter 2 then immediately covers how to get help (man, info, HOWTO files, web pages, etc.) A motivated smart person could bootstrap himself into *NIX with just these two chapters!
Chapter 3: how to use X windows (e.g., how X takes advantage of the three expected mouse buttons). Chapter 4: the file system, file permissions, etc.
Later chapters cover shells, regular expressions, pipelines, etc. It even covers simple shell scripts, and a little bit of system admin stuff.
The radio, about the size of a can of beer, extends the wire line and connects with any mobile devices
"...the size of a can of beer"? I love it! Let's keep this going.
Mobile devices can use a PCMCIA card, slightly smaller than a Hershey chocolate bar. Pocket computers can use a CompactFlash WiFi modem, slightly bigger than a "Fun Size" Hershey bar.
The WiFi base station connects to your computer, which of course is bigger than a bread box.
The wire line is your telephone line, which is about the size of a really, really long strand of spaghetti. This connects to the telephone office, which is about the size of a telephone office. This in turn connects you to the Internet, which is sort of hard to measure the size of... let's just say it is the size of the whole world and be done with it.
Hope this helps.
P.S. I wonder what percent of Slashdot readers actually know how big a bread box is?
If a site doesn't even let you in, it's not worth your visit.
Oh, come on. That's very easy to say, but there really are worthwhile sites with dumb browser policies.
It would be best, however, if we then pester the webmasters: "I'm using Mozilla 0.9.9 and your site works perfectly. Could you please change your dumb browser policy?"
I have to think that it will be more effective to say "I'm using it now and it works" rather than to say "I'm sure it would work if you just let me in."
By the way, my specific example: www.ups.com won't let you ship packages with Mozilla, but with my fake user agent string it works. The "sorry" page says that they put the limit on their page because Netscape 6 couldn't print the shipping labels correctly.
I use Mozilla or Galeon everywhere now. Some web sites detect which browser you are using, and if they don't see "IE" or "Netscape" they won't let you in.
So I have changed my user agent string, and both Mozilla and Galeon now claim to be Netscape 4.0. Given how buggy and crash-prone 4.0 was, everyone is using 4.7x if they are really using Netscape, so "Netscape 4.0" ought to be a red flag in a server log.
Here is my user agent string for Mozilla:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Mozilla 0.9.9; Debian GNU/Linux;)
So there is at least a chance that if webmasters look at the server logs, they can see that I'm actually using Mozilla. If they just use scripts to tally what browsers have visited their sites, and the scripts ignore the "compatible" remark, my visits will show up as Netscape 4.0... oh well, no trick is perfect.
Here is what you put into prefs.js to set the user agent string this way:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Mozilla 0.9.9; Debian GNU/Linux;)")
Mozilla can handle every web site I care about, if it can get in. This trick lets it in.
Maybe Mozilla should have a feature that lets you set the user agent string on a per-site basis! That way we could be leaving "Mozilla" in the logs on most sites, and only lying to the sites that won't let Mozilla in.
steveha
Re:Linux needs drivers for Creative's MPEG-2 PVR
on
PVR For Linux
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· Score: 2
Linux drivers would be nice: they could just capture in MPEG-2 in a single pass.
But given your comments, I'll probably stick with my first plan: get the newest model of Radeon All-In-Wonder, the one with the digital TV tuner, and run under Linux. (When the drivers are available; I don't think they are, yet.) I don't really care what format it captures in, as long as the picture is nice and it can be recompressed overnight into real MPEG-2.
By the way, the 640x480 probably really is full quality. The 720x480 size of DVDs only includes about 640x480 of viewable picture info; see the DVD FAQ for more details.
Too bad about the 32 kHz though.
steveha
Re:Linux needs drivers for Creative's MPEG-2 PVR
on
PVR For Linux
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· Score: 2
Have you been pleased with the quality? If it makes nice, clean MPEG-2 streams, I'll be buying one of these.
Also, the GNU Public License (GPL) requires you to release source code when you release a binary package. The.DEB source packages comply with this requirement.
Also, the Debian project has mirror servers all throughout the world. If I made some package that went into Debian, I would want the world to use Debian servers to grab the source, rather than having the whole world beat on my FTP server every time I came out with something new.
I see no purpose of duplicating the source in a so-called "deb" file, when all users of every Unix including Mac OS X can get the Pine source in it's raw, unaldultered form from the official site
Let's say you want the sources for six different packages. Let's also say you want to keep them current.
With Debian source packages, you use "apt-get" or some other tool to subscribe to those packages, and then every time you update your system, you get the latest versions of those packages. (The latest versions in Debian, of course.) I update my system at least once per week; would you prefer to run an updating tool once per week, or would you prefer to visit six different FTP servers once per week?
And the source packages always reflect the source used to build the matching binary packages. If there were no source packages, and you wanted to build a package yourself, you would need to seek out the exact version on your system. Maybe you just want the newest version, so it may be no problem, but what if you have a computer running an older version and you just want that source version?
Debian's "stable" version has stable packages. If the "raw, unadulterated version from the official site" has a bug introduced in a new version, you will get that bug if you get the new version; with Debian, you won't get that bug in the "stable" version of the system because people will check it out and will not include it. (If you really want it, you can pull it in from the "unstable" version of Debian. So there is no down side.)
it will be included with the next release of debian, woody, which should happen real soon now
Sorry to have to say this, but you are mistaken. Woody will ship with the same installer Debian already uses for Potato. The same one that most of the world seems to hate.
The next version after Woody should have an improved installer, very possibly based on the Progeny installer.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had a PDA or laptop in there you probably couldn't hear it over the chewing and slurping noises, and the more beer people drink the more likely they are to chatter noisily.
In other words, I won't be going to see Episode II anywhere that has the words "Draft House" in the name.
steveha
All that being said, I do believe that the DMCA does go too far at times. I do not, however, disagree with the underlying motive of reducing copyright infringement.
The problem with the DMCA is that it is overly broad: you don't have to be accused of infringing copyright, you don't have to be accused even of thinking about infringing copyright, you can be accused of having the tools that would allow you to infringe copyright. If those tools have another, legal use, well, too bad.
To be precise, the DMCA forbids you to have anything that can be used to break digital rights management. If we accept the idea that someone might use Enigma to encode content to protect their digital rights, then we can argue that a movie which shows how to crack enigma is illegal under the DMCA. This is preposterous, of course, which is why the DMCA itself is preposterous.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the DMCA does not forbid the Enigma movie now... but if someone were to use Enigma to protect content, then the movie could arguably become contraband under the DMCA. If you really worried about the DMCA, you had better not ever crack any encryption of any sort, or talk about it. Now that's what I call a "chilling effect" on free speech!
By the way, it isn't maybe such a stretch to think that someone might use Enigma to protect content; the laughably weak ROT13 scheme has already been used to "protect" PDF files. Dmitry Skylarov spent some time in prison in the US, and part of the reason was that he presented a lecture on how to crack the ROT13 protection on a PDF file.
steveha
Secondly, if they invent a Japanese word for a technical term, then they more or less have to invent (or choose) Kanji for the term, too.
I am pretty sure this is not true. I don't believe there is a kanji for "ramen" noodles; they just always write that in katekana. (Or sometimes hiragana.)
Kanjis can be used in pairs, and the pairing alters the meaning. You are literate in Japanese if you can read 2000 kanjis, and there are way more than 2000 nouns and concepts. They would probably come up with a new pair of kanjis to represent the new word.
steveha
You know, it bemuses me how much French and Latin there is in the English language...
English steals shamelessly from any language. English has Germanic words, French words, acronyms, jargon and slang, all tossed in and as good as any other. (Compare with the French; they don't like "le computer" so the Academie Francaise invents new words like "l'ordinateur".)
Japan seems to steal more specificially from English. I remember puzzling out the Katekana on a sign at a restaurant, and discovering that it was advertising a "Ladies' Lunch" ("raidisu ranchi" or something like that).
It isn't that hard to learn Katekana (51 base characters and a few variations) and if you know it there are so many Japanese things you can read!
it's precisely the other way around: there's no "r", it's all "l".
Every textbook and dictionary I have seen tells me that it's "ra" "ri" "ru" "re" "ro". Thus my comment that Japanese has "r" but not "l". However, my Japanese sensei taught me to pronounce the letters as "la" "di" "lu" "le" "lo" (where the "d" in "di" is sort of part way between an "l" and a "d"). However, I have met Japanese people who definitely use an "r" sound in their speech. I just figure it has something to do with where you learned your Japanese, or something, and I don't pretend to understand it.
I also don't understand how they know when to swallow the "u" sound and when not to. My name, "Steve", comes out "Sutiibu", but Japanese speakers reading the Katekana will say something like "S'teeb" which is pretty close.
By the way, and wayyyy off topic, my Japanese sensei and her white American husband have a daughter named Lori. Sensei has some trouble pronouncing "Lori" correctly, since it has both an "r" and an "l", causing her maximum confusion. Years of practice have helped her to learn "Lori" but when I introduced my brother Larry she had great trouble with his name. "Lori" and "Larry" sound very similar to me, but she had trouble with it. (But her English is very much better than my Japanese!)
steveha
I took Japanese classes a few years ago. I tried looking at some web sites in Netscape 4.x on a Windows system. I even downloaded a few fonts to try to get it to work better. It never looked good.
Just now, using Galeon, I clicked on the link to the Japanese page, and oh my gosh wow! The whole thing looks like it should. Hiragana, katekana, kanji, English text, it's all there and it all looks like it should.
Kudos to the Mozilla and Galeon developers.
By the way, it still bemuses me how the Japanese like English words so much. They will use their Katekana phonetic alphabet and spell out English words by sound.
Their phonetic spellings look odd to English-speakers. In Japanese, the consonant sounds don't appear alone; you can never have just "k", it has to be "ka", "ki", "ku", "ke", or "ko". The sole exceptions are "m" and "n" (e.g. "Nisan" can end with just "n" instead of "nu"). There is no "l", so they use "r" for "l" when doing foreign words. They often swallow or drop the "u" sound, so a Japanese speaker pronouncing the word "mobairu" will say something like "mobile" (i.e. he will get it pretty much correct, even though the spelling looks odd to us).
Examples on that page: "katarogu PDF" is the link to the PDF Catalog; "rainuppu" is the link to the "lineup"; and the picture showing two hand thumb-typing says "mobairu gurippu sutairu" (mobile grip style).
Note that the name "Vaio" is very difficult for the Japanese to pronounce; the phonetic spelling is "Baio", much easier for them. Japanese doesn't have a "v" sound.
steveha
The English trademark "my first Vaio" gives a different impression of the device, at least to native English speakers, but native English speakers are not the primary audience for this.
Don't forget that in Japan, English is "cool". They will use English phrases, without necessarily understanding the phrases fully.
I think Kanji is "cool", and I would love to have a T-shirt with a few Kanji characters on it. Same thing with them, only with English. Most Japanese may not even care what "My First Vaio" means.
steveha
I suggest you ignore all the advice to do something behind everyone's back and then lie about it. If you get caught once in a lie, everyone views you as a liar. This is tactially unsuccessful, quite aside from moral issues.
You really ought to set up a good firewall and Squid proxy server, though. That's just common sense; you don't want people hacking in to the school, and when a whole class hits a web site, you want 1 person to load the cache and 29 people to read the cache (not 30 people pulling down the web page from the site). That will give you a good position if and when you do get the authority to set a policy: instead of saying "Don't do X", you make it very difficult to do X. It's better to make it hard to do the wrong thing, than to try to punish those who do the wrong thing.
You could suggest a really strong firewall, with only specific ports opened, and require a request in writing to open any other ports. Like someone else suggested, you could write up a proposal for what you want, and see if you can get someone above you to say "go ahead and do that".
If your superiors require you to let the teachers continue to run riot, just get a good paper trail going: get your orders from above in writing, document in writing all the time you have to spend running around putting out fires. When it's time for your performance review, pull out the paperwork and say that you have been doing the job they ordered you to do; you don't want them to give you a poor performance rating because you didn't get much else done while you were running around putting out fires.
steveha
To me, the defining features that make Doom are:
Dozens of monsters swarming you all at once
Monsters that can be tricked into killing each other
Light and music providing atmosphere
All this talk of how pretty Doom III will be, and how you will need a GeForce 4 or Radeon 8500 to play it, are making me worry that maybe you will only see a small handful of monsters at a time (like Quake). I'm not too worried about the other points.
By the way, the screenshots reminded me a lot of the movie Aliens (the James Cameron sequel to Alien). I hope someone does a total conversion, or maybe they use the Doom III engine for an Aliens Vs. Predator game.
steveha
Ahh, that's where I was confused - I though *I* was the center of the world. Thanks for setting things straight. And to think, I was just participating in a discussion.
I apologize. There was no need for me to be that snippy. I didn't actually mean to be rude; I wrote that poorly.
My problems with Evolution are three fold:
Well, as for me, Evolution has some really wonderful features, and I am not aware of any other email client that offers all of these:
Display of HTML mail, rendering passive tags only (bold, italics, fonts, etc.) and not putting any hits on web servers. (Putting a hit on a server allows spammers to detect that your email address is valid and alive.) And of course Evolution will display the full message, images and all, if you give the command.
Seamless integration of GPG for message signing, message signature verification, and sending/receiving encrypted messages.
Seamless use of an IMAP server with messages left on the server. (When I delete a message, I want it to go into the IMAP server's Trash directory, not one on the hard disk, and I don't want the message to still appear in my Inbox with a little 'X' next to it.) There are some quirks, but I am living with them easily enough, and I know that future versions will smooth them out.
Actually, Evolution also has the potential to replace JPilot as my Linux "Palm Desktop" program. It just needs a couple of extensions and I could run my life in it.
So, you don't want anything it offers, but I want several things it offers.
Note that Evolution is the only free software currently anywhere near Outlook's feature set. Anyone who uses Outlook heavily and who wants to use a *NIX OS will be grateful that Evolution exists.
Miguel/Ximian has sucessfully created copies of two existing applications.
Well, that's one way to look at it. But would you say that WordPerfect for Windows is a copy of Word for Windows? When you are solving similar problems, you will get similar features. And when your intended user base already knows how to work a competing program, it behooves you to not be gratuitously incompatible with the competing program. (I'm glad that all cars have the gas pedal and the brake pedal in similar places...)
Before you can advance the state of the art, you must first catch up to the state of the art. Both Evolution and Gnumeric are 1.x versions. Over time they will improve, and not always in ways identical to the MS programs.
Besides, your point isn't fully true even today. Evolution has several cool features Outlook doesn't have. I'm less familiar with Gnumeric, but I'm sure that is true there as well.
Miguel isn't responsible for 100% of it, and from my perspective he hasn't had much to do with recent development.
I stand by my statement. He won't be responsible for 100% of Mono either, and probably at some point he will leave Mono and do yet again something else. But it is not fair to dismiss him as a talentless hack who only copies Microsoft ideas, and it is premature to dismiss Mono as a bad idea.
steveha
"Am I the only person that wonders why MS hasn't sued the crap out of Ximian yet?"
.NET CLR, and he has no interest in Hailstorm or anything else. I personally don't know whether the Java runtime is significantly better, worse, or the same compared to the C# backend... but as long as I can write Python and it will work with Mono, I'm happy.
Give MS their props: they don't randomly sue people, like some other companies *cough* Apple *cough*. They have never sued anyone over "look and feel"; that's an Apple idea. (MS has done some stuff I don't approve of, most recently with their ever-more-constricting EULAs, but they haven't tried to use lawsuits to bludgeon their competition.)
I have a strong dislike of Outlook's UI, and so there's no chance I'm going to use Evolution - it looks exactly the same as it's non-free competitor. Yiick!
If you have a strong dislike of Outlook's UI, okay, I can understand that. But why would you care that it looks like a non-free program? I don't care anymore what MS's programs look like; you shouldn't care either.
I want programs that I find easy-to-use, and Evolution is easy to use for me. I love the built-in support for GPG signatures and encrypted messages; this is exactly what I have been fervently wishing for in a mail client ever since I first saw PGP.
And it is much easier to wean people from Windows if we have apps that work similar to their familiar Windows apps. I understand that some people really use all the features of Outlook; you can take those people and move them to Evolution with minimal retraining. I don't know about you, but to me that is a good thing.
By the way, it would be much less work to add some tweaks to the UI for Evolution than it would be to create a whole new email client from scratch. If your problems with Evolution are minor, maybe you can get some customization options put in so you can make it do what you want.
Finally, there are plenty of other mail clients; you are probably not in the intended audience for Evolution anyway, and no one (including Miguel) really cares whether you like to use it or not.
Doesn't Gnumeric also use a VB-like scripting language? I know the function library is very similar.
One of the big features of Gnumeric is that it can import Excel spreadsheets. That means they need a similar function library to Excel! That is also why they are interested in a VB-ish language.
GNOME Basic is currently at version 0.0.20, and I'm pretty sure Gnumeric doesn't use it for anything yet. (I fired up Gnumeric on my home system, and one of my active plugins is the Python plugin, but I didn't see anything anywhere about GNOME Basic.)
Then there's the whole Mono/.NET thing.
I have read Miguel's comments on Mono. He thinks that a common back end with lots of assorted front ends is going to be a good thing, and he thinks MS has figured out some good stuff. He has no plans to slavishly copy every change MS ever makes to
Anyone taking bets on Ximian's next product? An IE clone based on Gecko? A shoddy OS based on Linux? Sendmail with GUI just like Exchange's?
This is mildly funny but uncalled-for. GNOME, Evolution, and Gnumeric are all truly great programs, and they all were needed IMHO. I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude about Mono, but Miguel's track record so far is pretty damn impressive.
steveha
Couldn't the SRB's be separated from the shuttle prematurely, assuming that was functioning in the event of a situation with the orbiter engines?
No. The problem with solid rockets is they don't have an "off" switch; you must wait for them to finish burning (run out of the solid fuel) before you can separate from them. The connection between the SRB and the Shuttle is under a lot of stress while the SRBs are firing, and it is very nontrivial to cleanly break that connection under load; and then you have the problem that the exhaust coming from the SRB's will probably destroy the Shuttle (the external tank is sort of like a big bomb).
Liquid boosters would have been a lot safer, and should have done the job well. I don't remember why NASA went with the solid boosters. It may have had something to do with which Congressional district the SRBs are built in.
steveha
It is hard to tell how much a Shuttle launch costs. The numbers are so embarassingly large that NASA cooks the books to try to make them look better.
Almost all of the costs for the Shuttle are salaries for the huge army of people NASA employs. According to Henry Spencer, the Shuttle program's costs are nearly constant: they stay pretty much the same, no matter how many or few launches happen in a year. (So you might as well launch stuff.)
You are absolutely correct: NASA should have taken the working Apollo designs and incrementally improved them. If they had kept up a good improve/test/fly schedule, we would probably have several cool 2001-ish space stations and a moon base by now. But for whatever reason, NASA developed the Shuttle in a massive paper design exercise, to be a giant leap forward in spacecraft. No need to build X vehicles and test them! Just build the Shuttle, perfect the first time!
Maybe BDB is the answer. Maybe SSTO (single stage to orbit, a completely re-usable spacecraft) is the answer. I don't know. But I do know that NASA is past its useful life, and the answer simply will not come out of NASA.
What the government should do is promise to buy X launches at Y tons of payload per launch, perhaps with special tax credits or other bonuses. Then wait for launch vehicles to appear. The money will never be spent if working vehicles don't appear, and if they do appear they will be cheaper than anything the modern NASA can create.
steveha
No.
Airbreathing engines do you no good anywhere but during the first few minutes of takeoff; after that, they are extra mass you have to push around. Also, a design with both airbreathing engines and rockets is more complicated than a design with just rockets.
Liquid oxygen is cheap. It takes up little room onboard. Carrying a bit extra is no big deal.
You want a design that will work every time. A multiple-engine rocket, with enough engines that you can handle one or two engines failing, is what we need.
Note that in a two-stage design, it might make sense for the first stage to be air-breathing.
And that is all I know about air-breathing engines on spacecraft. I gleaned this by reading sci.space.* newsgroups on USENET.
steveha
SOT is a little odd, but the one that got me was Bunch of Helpful Fixes (BOHF). When I saw BOHF I immediately thought "Bastard Operator from Hell".
Maybe the first BOHF will add Back Orifice functionality to SOT Office, so you can take over all the MS boxes on your net. And an exuses database.
steveha
What about the increasing surveillance of employees? We need to hear about the bad parts too.
The traditional way to make sure employees are working is to require them to go to work in an office, where you have managers to crack a whip over them. Do you actually feel that the deal JetBlue is offering its phone agents is worse than this?
It only makes sense to monitor calls to ensure good customer service. Companies will monitor their phone agents even if they force the agents to work in an office. It isn't really any different from retail stores sending "secret shoppers" to shop anonymously at stores to make sure customers are being treated well.
They have only 10% turnover rate. Their employees are happy.
steveha
Where does their IT actually improve their product?
Read the article. When you call JetBlue to make a reservation, the agent you are talking to is working from home. JetBlue doesn't have the overhead of office space for their agents; their agents are happier; they have lower turnover among their agents. In short, they have lower overhead costs.
A company like JetBlue competes by offering good service for a lower price; cutting their overhead helps them keep their ticket prices lower. Happy employees helps keep the service good. It's good business any way you look at it.
Note that your first bullet point was "Their ticket prices are very reasonable." So we could say that lower overhead contributes directly to making their product better.
P.S. Older, more rigid Theory X companies don't like telecommuting. They want employees in an office where it is easy to keep an eye on them and crack a whip over them. I'm happy to see another example of why Theory X isn't needed.
steveha
I have the Sams Teach Yourself Linux in 10 Minutes book. I figure either book would work. My comments will of course cover the Linux book, not the UNIX one, since the Linux one is what I have. But probably the two books are similar.
This book is structured exactly the way I would have done it. Chapter 1 (7 pages) covers how to login, and logout again. Chapter 2 then immediately covers how to get help (man, info, HOWTO files, web pages, etc.) A motivated smart person could bootstrap himself into *NIX with just these two chapters!
Chapter 3: how to use X windows (e.g., how X takes advantage of the three expected mouse buttons). Chapter 4: the file system, file permissions, etc.
Later chapters cover shells, regular expressions, pipelines, etc. It even covers simple shell scripts, and a little bit of system admin stuff.
The final chapter is how to pick a distro!
Highly recommended.
steveha
From the article:
The radio, about the size of a can of beer, extends the wire line and connects with any mobile devices
"...the size of a can of beer"? I love it! Let's keep this going.
Mobile devices can use a PCMCIA card, slightly smaller than a Hershey chocolate bar. Pocket computers can use a CompactFlash WiFi modem, slightly bigger than a "Fun Size" Hershey bar.
The WiFi base station connects to your computer, which of course is bigger than a bread box.
The wire line is your telephone line, which is about the size of a really, really long strand of spaghetti. This connects to the telephone office, which is about the size of a telephone office. This in turn connects you to the Internet, which is sort of hard to measure the size of... let's just say it is the size of the whole world and be done with it.
Hope this helps.
P.S. I wonder what percent of Slashdot readers actually know how big a bread box is?
steveha
If a site doesn't even let you in, it's not worth your visit.
Oh, come on. That's very easy to say, but there really are worthwhile sites with dumb browser policies.
It would be best, however, if we then pester the webmasters: "I'm using Mozilla 0.9.9 and your site works perfectly. Could you please change your dumb browser policy?"
I have to think that it will be more effective to say "I'm using it now and it works" rather than to say "I'm sure it would work if you just let me in."
By the way, my specific example: www.ups.com won't let you ship packages with Mozilla, but with my fake user agent string it works. The "sorry" page says that they put the limit on their page because Netscape 6 couldn't print the shipping labels correctly.
steveha
I use Mozilla or Galeon everywhere now. Some web sites detect which browser you are using, and if they don't see "IE" or "Netscape" they won't let you in.
So I have changed my user agent string, and both Mozilla and Galeon now claim to be Netscape 4.0. Given how buggy and crash-prone 4.0 was, everyone is using 4.7x if they are really using Netscape, so "Netscape 4.0" ought to be a red flag in a server log.
Here is my user agent string for Mozilla:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Mozilla 0.9.9; Debian GNU/Linux;)
So there is at least a chance that if webmasters look at the server logs, they can see that I'm actually using Mozilla. If they just use scripts to tally what browsers have visited their sites, and the scripts ignore the "compatible" remark, my visits will show up as Netscape 4.0... oh well, no trick is perfect.
Here is what you put into prefs.js to set the user agent string this way:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Mozilla 0.9.9; Debian GNU/Linux;)")
Mozilla can handle every web site I care about, if it can get in. This trick lets it in.
Maybe Mozilla should have a feature that lets you set the user agent string on a per-site basis! That way we could be leaving "Mozilla" in the logs on most sites, and only lying to the sites that won't let Mozilla in.
steveha
Linux drivers would be nice: they could just capture in MPEG-2 in a single pass.
But given your comments, I'll probably stick with my first plan: get the newest model of Radeon All-In-Wonder, the one with the digital TV tuner, and run under Linux. (When the drivers are available; I don't think they are, yet.) I don't really care what format it captures in, as long as the picture is nice and it can be recompressed overnight into real MPEG-2.
By the way, the 640x480 probably really is full quality. The 720x480 size of DVDs only includes about 640x480 of viewable picture info; see the DVD FAQ for more details.
Too bad about the 32 kHz though.
steveha
Have you been pleased with the quality? If it makes nice, clean MPEG-2 streams, I'll be buying one of these.
steveha
Also, the GNU Public License (GPL) requires you to release source code when you release a binary package. The .DEB source packages comply with this requirement.
Also, the Debian project has mirror servers all throughout the world. If I made some package that went into Debian, I would want the world to use Debian servers to grab the source, rather than having the whole world beat on my FTP server every time I came out with something new.
steveha
I see no purpose of duplicating the source in a so-called "deb" file, when all users of every Unix including Mac OS X can get the Pine source in it's raw, unaldultered form from the official site
Let's say you want the sources for six different packages. Let's also say you want to keep them current.
With Debian source packages, you use "apt-get" or some other tool to subscribe to those packages, and then every time you update your system, you get the latest versions of those packages. (The latest versions in Debian, of course.) I update my system at least once per week; would you prefer to run an updating tool once per week, or would you prefer to visit six different FTP servers once per week?
And the source packages always reflect the source used to build the matching binary packages. If there were no source packages, and you wanted to build a package yourself, you would need to seek out the exact version on your system. Maybe you just want the newest version, so it may be no problem, but what if you have a computer running an older version and you just want that source version?
Debian's "stable" version has stable packages. If the "raw, unadulterated version from the official site" has a bug introduced in a new version, you will get that bug if you get the new version; with Debian, you won't get that bug in the "stable" version of the system because people will check it out and will not include it. (If you really want it, you can pull it in from the "unstable" version of Debian. So there is no down side.)
steveha
it will be included with the next release of debian, woody, which should happen real soon now
Sorry to have to say this, but you are mistaken. Woody will ship with the same installer Debian already uses for Potato. The same one that most of the world seems to hate.
The next version after Woody should have an improved installer, very possibly based on the Progeny installer.
steveha