So you're suggesting we make it illegal to use phones designed to work anywhere only when we are in our own homes? Yeah, sounds like a great idea.
Re:Spotify Not Available to Me
on
LimeWire Lives Again
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Because you don't live in the very small section of the world where Spotify is allowed [wikipedia.org]? Also, LimeWire is GPL where as Spotify is proprietary (what are they storing about you?).
Us europeans will stop pretending Spotify is available everywhere when all the americans realize that those of us over here can't download TV shows through the iTunes store and that Hulu blocks access as well (well, there are always US iTunes accounts and proxies but it's a serious PITA).
I know I'm replying to a troll here but what the hell...
Theft and violating a software license are not the same thing.
A more apt (although still flawed) analogy would be if Toyota started manufacturing cars containing stolen components (although they had not done so previously) and these were then sold on to retailers. The retailers would have no reason to suspect that the cars contained components that had been stolen and in most jurisdictions they would at worst be forced to give up the cars or at least the stolen components and be reimbursed by Toyota for their costs. Of course, as I already stated this analogy is also flawed.
Oh, and an addendum about intersections and the lights. When I was in school I took some courses that involved coding 68HC11 asm and apparently one of the teachers had worked on systems for controlling the lights at intersections and according to him the main reason almost all of them worked as I described in my previous post was because the fear of people getting confused if they worked better.
Now, on top of this he also told us of some interesting quirks that would normally not be used but very occasionally were, one neat one that I've tested and actually found to be in use in a few intersections is that if you press the "walk" buttons on both sides of the road the lights will switch immediately under certain conditions (either no cars detected approaching or cars only detected from one direction).
I also carried out some experiments on the timing of the sensors under the street at night with an old moped when I was younger. On one stretch of street in my hometown that had a speed limit of 50 km/h with a 30 km/h right after it the timing was such that if you came at the lights at exactly 50 km/h they would actually turn back to red before you reached the light, didn't really make sense to me (those lights were all-red at night until a vehicle approached or someone pressed a button).
What bugs me is that a lot of these behaviors are undocumented and the reasons for the choice in how the lights operate aren't always clear, sometimes it just seems like someone decided on "standard" timings without thinking things through, other times you'll have intersections with a lot of traffic where the time for pedestrians to cross is way too short (I walk fairly fast and I'm also quite tall and I can have trouble making it across some intersections before the light turns red again) and then there are those intersections where the lights are painfully slow all the time (especially fun for the motorists at night who have to stop at red lights on abandoned streets, am I the only one who thinks this might cause people to become less reluctant to run red lights?).
All these examples seem a bit specific or they assume the people affected are all too dumb to realize someone's trying to fool them...
'In most elevators installed since the early 1990s, the 'close door' button has no effect. Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact to the Wall Street Journal in 2003.
Around here most elevators don't even seem to have a "close" button, they do have an "open" button though. And if you press one of the "go to floor #n" buttons the doors tend to close immediately. As an example, in the building I live in the best way to get the doors to close quickly is to pass through the elevator door and make sure you're clear of the "don't squish the humans" sensor and then hit a floor button, door closes immediately and elevator gets going.
Similarly, many office thermostats are dummies, designed to give workers the illusion of control. "You just get tired of dealing with them and you screw in a cheap thermostat," said Illinois HVAC specialist Richard Dawson. "Guess what? They quit calling you."
Duh. Of course people stop calling you, they're sweating their asses off and you show up and say "nothing wrong here" half a dozen times and then you install a thermostat that doesn't work. Most likely they just end up figuring out how to disable the alarm connected to the windows so they can get some relief that way (seriously, I've seen this problem in several workplaces, the building maintenance guys swear up and down that the ventilation system is fine yet one office which isn't even facing the sun most of the day has stuffy air and a constant temperature above 25 C, in the latest case they finally installed a thermostat that did nothing, we just stopped calling them about the issue (the thermostat was clearly not connected to anything)).
In 2004 the New York Times reported that more than 2,500 of the 3,250 "walk" buttons in New York intersections do nothing. "The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on."'"
Here in.se the buttons do work. In fact, if you don't press the button the light never turns green. You still have to wait until the lights for the cars are right though (which kind of sucks, it just switches the light for pedestrians from a default "you're not allowed to cross" to "please wait your turn".
...Maya (a 3D application made by the same folks who make 3dsmax)...
Well, technically Maya used to be owned and developed by Alias (previously known as Alias|Wavefront which used to be separate companies etc.), Alias was sold off by SGI to a couple of random companies and then sold on to Autodesk who already owned 3dsmax (previously known as 3D Studio MAX and just 3D Studio before that).
Also, for people outside of the video game biz I suspect that Maya is actually more well-known than 3dsmax when it comes to 3D. It's pretty much the "standard" 3D suite for movies (at least it was a couple of years ago, I haven't really kept up with the trends).
I'm assuming that not everyone is as obsessed with the "paper trail" as some fanatics are (really, data is data whether it's on a paper or stored digitally, if your vote is anonymous it can still be tampered with).
Why not a basic e-ID system (we have several here in Sweden although the most popular is simply called BankID) which is used to login to the voting website/voting machine. When logged in you get to create a new username and password for the actual voting. Your real identity gets marked as "has an id" and the new account is completely disconnected from your regular identity, you can now use the new username+password to cast your vote. This system even opens up the possibility to change your vote before the end of the election period.
For all I know this could be the solution suggested in this video, I just couldn't be bothered watching a video right now, does anyone have a good transcript?
Quicktime/Quicktime X doesn't even have a playlist, something which actually annoys me since it's a much nicer video player for when I want to watch something on part of one monitor while doing something else (like watching old episodes of MASH while coding). The reason it beats VLC and just about all others is because Quicktime X when playing covers its entire window area with the video, no borders at all unless you move your mouse pointer over the window...
What makes VLC more specifically tied to the warez scene than any other video player?
When obnoxious teenage 1337 w4r3z d00dz upload poorly encoded video or video encoded with some retarded codec that almost no one uses the standard reply to "why won't this play?" is "Use VLC, it plays fine there." because VLC plays almost anything (and for those things that don't play in VLC there's always Mplayer).
Basically, the reason VLC is popular with downloaded content is because it tends to play a lot of formats that other software doesn't understand.
Now *SOAP*, layered on top of HTTP, is truly a Rube Goldberg invention with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Yet a lot of times it's the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective, more elegant solutions often require a lot more work while the majority of your systems can somewhat easily be made to work with SOAP. Not trying to defend it, it's still pretty ugly but connecting to different systems using SOAP is often faster than using something elegant, and the boss doesn't care about "elegant" (I'm sure there are exceptions and I'd love to work for someone like that, most don't though).
I'm a huge fan of the aluminum Apple keyboards, especially the wireless model since it's just the right since to quickly move around (from desk to lap, from lap to shelf next to me, back to lap, then desk etc..), most 3rd party wireless keyboards I've used have been more like battleships, giant constructions with two dozen "media" buttons, maybe a touchpad or a volume control knob and a few LEDs, not really the kind of thing that becomes easier to handle just because it's wireless...
Ditch the shitty keyboard that came with your Dell or your Mac and get something that works well.
I've actually found that the Apple "aluminum" keyboards are very good, short key travel distance while having just the right amount of tactile feedback.
I used to alternate between an old Model M from 1984 and an SGI "granite" keyboard but the latest-gen Apple keyboards are my new favorites.
Now, the previous "transparent with white keys" Apple keyboards OTOH, those were horrendous, the keys had a spongy feel to them and it often felt like I had to press just a little too hard to get them to register...
Yes, I have also been forced to compile kernels on FreeBSD on occasion but my point was that these days there's really little need for the vast majority of (power) users to wait anxiously for the next minor release just so they can compile a new kernel.
Sure, it was almost sort of fun back then to configure a kernel "perfectly" with just the things you needed, watching it compile, rebooting and feeling the joy of finally getting some piece of hardware to function properly. These days it just isn't necessary most of the time though.
This is especially true for standalone desktops, for a server, desktop image or lab environment you may want to customize things a bit but there is rarely any good reason to do this for a regular desktop/workstation (unless you're using some esoteric hardware that requires you to patch the actual kernel source in order to get it to work, and the last time I had to do that was probably four or five years ago with a webcam where the only driver available wasn't in the kernel and only available as a patch for a specific kernel version).
The root thing was in contrast to the "OMGZ APPLE SI TEH EVÜL GIFZ NOES ROOT TO OWNARZ OF COMPUTAR!!!1" that's going around in every thread about anything Apple.
The meaning wasn't "All users are admins" but rather "They're not keeping you from using sudo".
I hope you don't still routinely compile your own kernels, I thought that was a thing of the 90s, or maybe it's because I moved on from Slackware 3.x to FreeBSD and OS X that I no longer see the need to constantly recompile my kernel (oh the horrors of downloading the 2.0.x and 2.2.x source using a v.90 modem only to have the download get interrupted by someone trying to use the phone)...
95 - 2000 - 2004 - 2010 -- Version numbers are confusing.
1004 - 1010 - 1102 -- yymm
20100321 - 20100512 - 20101202 -- yyyymmdd
"Second digit denotes stable/unstable"
And many many more.
And even if we stick to the regular x.y.z version numbering there seems to be little consensus on what each number means, especially when it comes to smaller projects that can suddenly jump a major version for no reason or go through complete rewrites while only going from x.y.z to x.y.(z+1)...
Just out of curiosity, to what extent does "DLL hell" - or, perhaps, ".so hell" - occur on Linux distributions? How often does downloading package X cause updated versions of packages Y and Z to be downloaded, with package W now failing to work because the version you have installed also uses either or both of packages Y and Z and won't work with the updated versions?
Well, these days I rarely run into problems with package mangling software just telling me that I can choose between breaking apps x, y and z by upgrading a lib or not installing the software I want to install.
However, there is still the issue of/usr/lib or/usr/local/lib slowly growing to contain versions 0.9.2, 0.9.12, 1.0.4a, 1.2.0, 1.4.1, 2.0.1 and so on of a lib...
Sweden was practically surrounded by Germany, in order to not risk an invasion our government deicded to cooperate as much as necessary. The government was by no means pro-nazi (if you refute this then it is painfully obvious that you are trolling).
As for the eugenics, not all that unusual for europe in the early 20th century and was hardly a pro-Hitler thing.
I take it you're deliberately ignoring that Sweden listened in on all german communications going through Sweden and forwarded anything interesting to the british...
Or that the swedish army helped danish and norwegian troops with equipment and training. Although officially those troops were just "police", police with artillery...
Or the rescue of nearly all of the 8,000 jews living in Denmark.
Not to mention the work of Count Folke Bernadotte and Raoul Wallenberg who worked to save concentration camp prisoners.
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So you're suggesting we make it illegal to use phones designed to work anywhere only when we are in our own homes? Yeah, sounds like a great idea.
Because you don't live in the very small section of the world where Spotify is allowed [wikipedia.org]? Also, LimeWire is GPL where as Spotify is proprietary (what are they storing about you?).
Us europeans will stop pretending Spotify is available everywhere when all the americans realize that those of us over here can't download TV shows through the iTunes store and that Hulu blocks access as well (well, there are always US iTunes accounts and proxies but it's a serious PITA).
I know I'm replying to a troll here but what the hell...
Theft and violating a software license are not the same thing.
A more apt (although still flawed) analogy would be if Toyota started manufacturing cars containing stolen components (although they had not done so previously) and these were then sold on to retailers. The retailers would have no reason to suspect that the cars contained components that had been stolen and in most jurisdictions they would at worst be forced to give up the cars or at least the stolen components and be reimbursed by Toyota for their costs. Of course, as I already stated this analogy is also flawed.
Oh, and an addendum about intersections and the lights. When I was in school I took some courses that involved coding 68HC11 asm and apparently one of the teachers had worked on systems for controlling the lights at intersections and according to him the main reason almost all of them worked as I described in my previous post was because the fear of people getting confused if they worked better.
Now, on top of this he also told us of some interesting quirks that would normally not be used but very occasionally were, one neat one that I've tested and actually found to be in use in a few intersections is that if you press the "walk" buttons on both sides of the road the lights will switch immediately under certain conditions (either no cars detected approaching or cars only detected from one direction).
I also carried out some experiments on the timing of the sensors under the street at night with an old moped when I was younger. On one stretch of street in my hometown that had a speed limit of 50 km/h with a 30 km/h right after it the timing was such that if you came at the lights at exactly 50 km/h they would actually turn back to red before you reached the light, didn't really make sense to me (those lights were all-red at night until a vehicle approached or someone pressed a button).
What bugs me is that a lot of these behaviors are undocumented and the reasons for the choice in how the lights operate aren't always clear, sometimes it just seems like someone decided on "standard" timings without thinking things through, other times you'll have intersections with a lot of traffic where the time for pedestrians to cross is way too short (I walk fairly fast and I'm also quite tall and I can have trouble making it across some intersections before the light turns red again) and then there are those intersections where the lights are painfully slow all the time (especially fun for the motorists at night who have to stop at red lights on abandoned streets, am I the only one who thinks this might cause people to become less reluctant to run red lights?).
All these examples seem a bit specific or they assume the people affected are all too dumb to realize someone's trying to fool them...
'In most elevators installed since the early 1990s, the 'close door' button has no effect. Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact to the Wall Street Journal in 2003.
Around here most elevators don't even seem to have a "close" button, they do have an "open" button though. And if you press one of the "go to floor #n" buttons the doors tend to close immediately. As an example, in the building I live in the best way to get the doors to close quickly is to pass through the elevator door and make sure you're clear of the "don't squish the humans" sensor and then hit a floor button, door closes immediately and elevator gets going.
Similarly, many office thermostats are dummies, designed to give workers the illusion of control. "You just get tired of dealing with them and you screw in a cheap thermostat," said Illinois HVAC specialist Richard Dawson. "Guess what? They quit calling you."
Duh. Of course people stop calling you, they're sweating their asses off and you show up and say "nothing wrong here" half a dozen times and then you install a thermostat that doesn't work. Most likely they just end up figuring out how to disable the alarm connected to the windows so they can get some relief that way (seriously, I've seen this problem in several workplaces, the building maintenance guys swear up and down that the ventilation system is fine yet one office which isn't even facing the sun most of the day has stuffy air and a constant temperature above 25 C, in the latest case they finally installed a thermostat that did nothing, we just stopped calling them about the issue (the thermostat was clearly not connected to anything)).
In 2004 the New York Times reported that more than 2,500 of the 3,250 "walk" buttons in New York intersections do nothing. "The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on."'"
Here in .se the buttons do work. In fact, if you don't press the button the light never turns green. You still have to wait until the lights for the cars are right though (which kind of sucks, it just switches the light for pedestrians from a default "you're not allowed to cross" to "please wait your turn".
"Sum up idiots and summer for twenty less". Also, that sentence doesn't really make sense...
(Google translate: "Add up the idiots and summer for the twenty less")
The BIOS wasn't, it was reverse engineered by clone makers.
Actually, "Add meatballs and simmer for 20 minutes" would translate to something like "Lägg i köttbullar och låt sjuda i 20 minuter.".
...Maya (a 3D application made by the same folks who make 3dsmax)...
Well, technically Maya used to be owned and developed by Alias (previously known as Alias|Wavefront which used to be separate companies etc.), Alias was sold off by SGI to a couple of random companies and then sold on to Autodesk who already owned 3dsmax (previously known as 3D Studio MAX and just 3D Studio before that).
Also, for people outside of the video game biz I suspect that Maya is actually more well-known than 3dsmax when it comes to 3D. It's pretty much the "standard" 3D suite for movies (at least it was a couple of years ago, I haven't really kept up with the trends).
Well then, if that's a worry how about a similar system but only allow voting on-site?
I'm assuming that not everyone is as obsessed with the "paper trail" as some fanatics are (really, data is data whether it's on a paper or stored digitally, if your vote is anonymous it can still be tampered with).
Why not a basic e-ID system (we have several here in Sweden although the most popular is simply called BankID) which is used to login to the voting website/voting machine. When logged in you get to create a new username and password for the actual voting. Your real identity gets marked as "has an id" and the new account is completely disconnected from your regular identity, you can now use the new username+password to cast your vote. This system even opens up the possibility to change your vote before the end of the election period.
For all I know this could be the solution suggested in this video, I just couldn't be bothered watching a video right now, does anyone have a good transcript?
Quicktime/Quicktime X doesn't even have a playlist, something which actually annoys me since it's a much nicer video player for when I want to watch something on part of one monitor while doing something else (like watching old episodes of MASH while coding). The reason it beats VLC and just about all others is because Quicktime X when playing covers its entire window area with the video, no borders at all unless you move your mouse pointer over the window...
What makes VLC more specifically tied to the warez scene than any other video player?
When obnoxious teenage 1337 w4r3z d00dz upload poorly encoded video or video encoded with some retarded codec that almost no one uses the standard reply to "why won't this play?" is "Use VLC, it plays fine there." because VLC plays almost anything (and for those things that don't play in VLC there's always Mplayer).
Basically, the reason VLC is popular with downloaded content is because it tends to play a lot of formats that other software doesn't understand.
Now *SOAP*, layered on top of HTTP, is truly a Rube Goldberg invention with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Yet a lot of times it's the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective, more elegant solutions often require a lot more work while the majority of your systems can somewhat easily be made to work with SOAP. Not trying to defend it, it's still pretty ugly but connecting to different systems using SOAP is often faster than using something elegant, and the boss doesn't care about "elegant" (I'm sure there are exceptions and I'd love to work for someone like that, most don't though).
I'm a huge fan of the aluminum Apple keyboards, especially the wireless model since it's just the right since to quickly move around (from desk to lap, from lap to shelf next to me, back to lap, then desk etc..), most 3rd party wireless keyboards I've used have been more like battleships, giant constructions with two dozen "media" buttons, maybe a touchpad or a volume control knob and a few LEDs, not really the kind of thing that becomes easier to handle just because it's wireless...
Ditch the shitty keyboard that came with your Dell or your Mac and get something that works well.
I've actually found that the Apple "aluminum" keyboards are very good, short key travel distance while having just the right amount of tactile feedback.
I used to alternate between an old Model M from 1984 and an SGI "granite" keyboard but the latest-gen Apple keyboards are my new favorites.
Now, the previous "transparent with white keys" Apple keyboards OTOH, those were horrendous, the keys had a spongy feel to them and it often felt like I had to press just a little too hard to get them to register...
You lucky bastard, it's pretty much winter here (Sweden), we've only had snowfall twice so far though...
Yes, I have also been forced to compile kernels on FreeBSD on occasion but my point was that these days there's really little need for the vast majority of (power) users to wait anxiously for the next minor release just so they can compile a new kernel.
Sure, it was almost sort of fun back then to configure a kernel "perfectly" with just the things you needed, watching it compile, rebooting and feeling the joy of finally getting some piece of hardware to function properly. These days it just isn't necessary most of the time though.
This is especially true for standalone desktops, for a server, desktop image or lab environment you may want to customize things a bit but there is rarely any good reason to do this for a regular desktop/workstation (unless you're using some esoteric hardware that requires you to patch the actual kernel source in order to get it to work, and the last time I had to do that was probably four or five years ago with a webcam where the only driver available wasn't in the kernel and only available as a patch for a specific kernel version).
The root thing was in contrast to the "OMGZ APPLE SI TEH EVÜL GIFZ NOES ROOT TO OWNARZ OF COMPUTAR!!!1" that's going around in every thread about anything Apple.
The meaning wasn't "All users are admins" but rather "They're not keeping you from using sudo".
I hope you don't still routinely compile your own kernels, I thought that was a thing of the 90s, or maybe it's because I moved on from Slackware 3.x to FreeBSD and OS X that I no longer see the need to constantly recompile my kernel (oh the horrors of downloading the 2.0.x and 2.2.x source using a v.90 modem only to have the download get interrupted by someone trying to use the phone)...
The core of the system was and is open source.
You have root terminal access by default.
It's a lot more open than Windows.
because you should change the major version number if you break binary compatibility with older versions of the library).
Except of course the fact that there are roughly a gazillion different ways to handle version numbers.
And even if we stick to the regular x.y.z version numbering there seems to be little consensus on what each number means, especially when it comes to smaller projects that can suddenly jump a major version for no reason or go through complete rewrites while only going from x.y.z to x.y.(z+1)...
Just out of curiosity, to what extent does "DLL hell" - or, perhaps, ".so hell" - occur on Linux distributions? How often does downloading package X cause updated versions of packages Y and Z to be downloaded, with package W now failing to work because the version you have installed also uses either or both of packages Y and Z and won't work with the updated versions?
Well, these days I rarely run into problems with package mangling software just telling me that I can choose between breaking apps x, y and z by upgrading a lib or not installing the software I want to install.
However, there is still the issue of /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib slowly growing to contain versions 0.9.2, 0.9.12, 1.0.4a, 1.2.0, 1.4.1, 2.0.1 and so on of a lib...
Nice troll there.
Sweden was practically surrounded by Germany, in order to not risk an invasion our government deicded to cooperate as much as necessary. The government was by no means pro-nazi (if you refute this then it is painfully obvious that you are trolling).
As for the eugenics, not all that unusual for europe in the early 20th century and was hardly a pro-Hitler thing.
I take it you're deliberately ignoring that Sweden listened in on all german communications going through Sweden and forwarded anything interesting to the british...
Or that the swedish army helped danish and norwegian troops with equipment and training. Although officially those troops were just "police", police with artillery...
Or the rescue of nearly all of the 8,000 jews living in Denmark.
Not to mention the work of Count Folke Bernadotte and Raoul Wallenberg who worked to save concentration camp prisoners.