I'm not just an abortion supporter, I'm an enthusiast.
If that's what you think, then we might need to step outside. I know this is way OT, but you can't surely be enthusiastic about putting people through a medical procedure with risks of mortality (death) and morbidity (serious illness) to the mother, and the premature termination of a (albeit considered by many only potential) life? Even the most pro-abortion people I've come across would consider it a reluctant but occasional neccesity, not something to be enthusiastic about.
taskbar - no way, I have my Gnome set up Mac-style
integrated filesystem/internet browser - you have to be kidding: what has web browsing got to do with my filesystem? I use Firefox for the web.
C# and.NET - I don't use either of them, but if C# is a half-decent language I don't object to apps being written in it
Remind me again what Linux has actually innovated first?
tabbed browsing and popup blocking integrated into the browser (Firefox/Mozilla)
XML file formats in a mainstream office suite (Openoffice)
decent package management with automatic dependency resolution (apt/urpmi)
run-anywhere live CDs with persistence (MandrakeMove etc.)
seamless virtual desktops (MS now has a Powertoy that does this, but it sucks)
true seamless USB hotplugging - it's still broken in XP
OK, I know that much of the above doesn't impact on the regular user most of the time, but it's worth remembering that the taskbar idea was stolen from RISCOS, integrated filesystem and web browser is a stupid idea anyway - about the only real innovation in GUIs from MS was the Start menu. It's good - but one true GUI innovation in 20 years from a multi-billion dollar company really isn't that great.
The problem is: intuitive UIs are quick to learn and get something done, but they don't get much quicker after that. Take a simple example: it's intuitive to click the italic-I button in a wordprocessor to start writing in italic, but if you're writing an essay with lots of latin words it's really not efficient to have to keep clicking that button. Then someone tells you that you can turn on italic with CTRL-I and your typing speeds up dramatically.
I often end up navigating Word and its clones using menu shortcut keys, learning that ALT-ABC gives me the particular formatting function that I want. It would be much better if the software had sensible shortcuts in the first place, or some sort of mode system that brought common tasks to keyboard shortcuts - just like the function key overlays from the DOS days.
I don't know about US law, but here's what I did in the UK. 50 of us living in a student hall, the only comms are a couple of payphones. I thought - it's OK for a business to share an internet connection with however many employees, and there's nothing stopping a business using a residential service - you just don't get such a good service level agreement. So I set up a 'computer society' of which we all became mutual members, with a society bank account. That society ran a wireless network sharing 500kb and later 1mb of broadband.
I can't see any reason why you can't form a 'society' with your neighbours, open a society bank account, and lease broadband in the society's name. When other people in your street get interested, let them join too. One word of advice: be very clear about what you are offering - I ended up giving a lot of free tech support before putting my foot down and explaining that getting the connection working at the users' end was their deal.
I can't remember the exact wording, but there's a dialog in win9x that I think came up when the computer was restarted with jobs in the print queue. It had 'yes,no,cancel' as the buttons, and the text above actually gave meanings to the buttons, something like 'press yes to delete the items, no to print them, and cancel to leave them in the queue'. Absoluely crazy.
When I set up a proxy at an organisation I used to work for, I used an auth module to make users re-type their password - not really necessary, but as a reminder that they're using the web and certain rules apply. After not being able to access something one day, the head of the organisation demanded *all* of the passwords to the "server". I gave him the root password, typed on the sheet, with an explanation of why it was incredibly important to keep the password safe and not use it without me or another IT guy knowing. He called me into his office one day saying he couldn't get on the internet. He had typed the server's root password into the proxy auth dialog.
I tend to pronounce "they're" slightly differently to "their" and "there" precisely because I'm aware that "they're" is a contraction of "they are". What's worrying isn't that people 'think phonetically' but that the majority appear blissfully unaware that these homophones are radically different words. I can understand confusion over "practice" and "practise" because it's subtle (and, IIRC, Americal English doesn't even make the distinction; in British English, -ice is the noun: "a band practice" and -ise is the verb: "the band were practising") but to confuse "their", "there" and "they're", and especially the last, is to be completely unaware of what one is actually saying.
Are you saying that you need plausible deniability for messages sent between different rooms in your house? I can recommend a good family therapist if that would help...
Because, in the big scheme of things, it's relatively low risk. The population in general is far more likely to get killed from road traffic accidents, smoking, suicide, and in the US accidentally setting off their own weapons.
Yes: the terrorist threats are real, but if half the time and money spent on anti-terrorism went into improving road safety or healthcare the Western world would be a much happier place. Terrorism is used as a political tool because it's big scarey, and very conveniently ill-defined.
Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
I've heard this one a few times before (well, without the bread bit) and it's always amused me. There's no reason to suppose that 50% of people would be below average - unless we're talking about a median average, but most people are thinking about the mean when they say 'average'. It's perfectly possible with a mean for the curve to be skewed one way or the other so that a lot more people are to one side of the mean than the other - all it takes are a few extremes that are not excluded as outliers.
You're right: it's not really a bug, and it's very easy to fix. The authors of "secure" sites should simply add a string to the end of the pop-up window's name, that's unique for each session.
This "bug" only works because the pop-up window's name is known. To put a "fix" in to the browser would be very difficult without breaking standards - at the moment any Javascript can reference any open browser window AFAIK.
I'm finding this discussion about self built machines quite bizarre. Are you really telling me that most linux shops have their IT staff building boxes with hotswap RAID, redundant PSUs etc. into beige boxes rather than buying off-the-shelf server-spec machines from HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell etc.? Or are we talking about very small shops that don't mind having their data on non-redundant systems with single IDE hard drives?
I tend to buy second-hand Compaq hardware from e-bay. You can pick up a dual PII 400 Proliant for around GBP 200 with hotswap SCSI RAID and redundant PSUs. These are rock-solid and just sit there and work. If you want spare parts, just buy another one and keep it on a shelf. For shops that need more CPU power, they really should be buying off-the-shelf.
Of course, this doesn't solve the issue of how to know who is using linux. I have my servers registered with The Linux Counter although I don't think this is popular enough to be very useful. Perhaps if the big distros included it as an (optional) part of their installation software we could get a much better idea of what is being used and why.
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If that's what you think, then we might need to step outside. I know this is way OT, but you can't surely be enthusiastic about putting people through a medical procedure with risks of mortality (death) and morbidity (serious illness) to the mother, and the premature termination of a (albeit considered by many only potential) life? Even the most pro-abortion people I've come across would consider it a reluctant but occasional neccesity, not something to be enthusiastic about.
tee hee
a start menu - OK, I use that sometimes
taskbar - no way, I have my Gnome set up Mac-style
integrated filesystem/internet browser - you have to be kidding: what has web browsing got to do with my filesystem? I use Firefox for the web.
C# and .NET - I don't use either of them, but if C# is a half-decent language I don't object to apps being written in it
Remind me again what Linux has actually innovated first?
OK, I know that much of the above doesn't impact on the regular user most of the time, but it's worth remembering that the taskbar idea was stolen from RISCOS, integrated filesystem and web browser is a stupid idea anyway - about the only real innovation in GUIs from MS was the Start menu. It's good - but one true GUI innovation in 20 years from a multi-billion dollar company really isn't that great.
I often end up navigating Word and its clones using menu shortcut keys, learning that ALT-ABC gives me the particular formatting function that I want. It would be much better if the software had sensible shortcuts in the first place, or some sort of mode system that brought common tasks to keyboard shortcuts - just like the function key overlays from the DOS days.
Not obvious, I hate VI, but if you remember that then at least you can quit and find something better.
I can't see any reason why you can't form a 'society' with your neighbours, open a society bank account, and lease broadband in the society's name. When other people in your street get interested, let them join too. One word of advice: be very clear about what you are offering - I ended up giving a lot of free tech support before putting my foot down and explaining that getting the connection working at the users' end was their deal.
open osurce software - I like the sound of that, what's your philosophy? What kind of beard do I have to grow?
I can't remember the exact wording, but there's a dialog in win9x that I think came up when the computer was restarted with jobs in the print queue. It had 'yes,no,cancel' as the buttons, and the text above actually gave meanings to the buttons, something like 'press yes to delete the items, no to print them, and cancel to leave them in the queue'. Absoluely crazy.
When I set up a proxy at an organisation I used to work for, I used an auth module to make users re-type their password - not really necessary, but as a reminder that they're using the web and certain rules apply. After not being able to access something one day, the head of the organisation demanded *all* of the passwords to the "server". I gave him the root password, typed on the sheet, with an explanation of why it was incredibly important to keep the password safe and not use it without me or another IT guy knowing. He called me into his office one day saying he couldn't get on the internet. He had typed the server's root password into the proxy auth dialog.
you hoopy frood
you hoopy frood
Me too!
Waiting for the chain-yanking...
I tend to pronounce "they're" slightly differently to "their" and "there" precisely because I'm aware that "they're" is a contraction of "they are".
What's worrying isn't that people 'think phonetically' but that the majority appear blissfully unaware that these homophones are radically different words. I can understand confusion over "practice" and "practise" because it's subtle (and, IIRC, Americal English doesn't even make the distinction; in British English, -ice is the noun: "a band practice" and -ise is the verb: "the band were practising") but to confuse "their", "there" and "they're", and especially the last, is to be completely unaware of what one is actually saying.
Are you saying that you need plausible deniability for messages sent between different rooms in your house? I can recommend a good family therapist if that would help...
In Soviet Russia, new memes search for YOU.
Does this mean that you're in the middle of inventing a new, much more efficient, cell? Exciting...!
I've been doing that for years! I find I get better colour fastness by mixing in some orange juice: Bucks Fizz seems to work best.
Yes: the terrorist threats are real, but if half the time and money spent on anti-terrorism went into improving road safety or healthcare the Western world would be a much happier place. Terrorism is used as a political tool because it's big scarey, and very conveniently ill-defined.
Me too!!!
Wait a minute...
I've heard this one a few times before (well, without the bread bit) and it's always amused me. There's no reason to suppose that 50% of people would be below average - unless we're talking about a median average, but most people are thinking about the mean when they say 'average'. It's perfectly possible with a mean for the curve to be skewed one way or the other so that a lot more people are to one side of the mean than the other - all it takes are a few extremes that are not excluded as outliers.
This "bug" only works because the pop-up window's name is known. To put a "fix" in to the browser would be very difficult without breaking standards - at the moment any Javascript can reference any open browser window AFAIK.
I think those sentences make a lot of sense. The cars here are filled with baked beans.
I tend to buy second-hand Compaq hardware from e-bay. You can pick up a dual PII 400 Proliant for around GBP 200 with hotswap SCSI RAID and redundant PSUs. These are rock-solid and just sit there and work. If you want spare parts, just buy another one and keep it on a shelf. For shops that need more CPU power, they really should be buying off-the-shelf.
Of course, this doesn't solve the issue of how to know who is using linux. I have my servers registered with The Linux Counter although I don't think this is popular enough to be very useful. Perhaps if the big distros included it as an (optional) part of their installation software we could get a much better idea of what is being used and why.