Gnome used to be my favorite window manager, until I realized that the focus model is totally wrong, and there is no way to fix it. It lies in this principle,
No window should ever steal focus... ever. Don't even do it if the computer will blow up, or the world will end, if I fail to respond.
If you are trying to maximize your computing efficiency, focus stealing is your worst enemy. It's entire purpose is to slow you down.
Focus stealing breaks flow and can also be a security issue. Let's say you are typing away in a text editor and some other application decides it needs you to make a decision in the form of a pop-up window. Just as you are hitting enter in your text editor, the window pops-up, grabs your return keystroke and accepts it as your answer, doing whatever the default action is. Or the case where you are typing a password and a dialog steals focus and you type part of your password out in plain sight into the dialog.
A lot of this can be blamed on Windows for having a really shitty focus model, which everyone else tries to emulate in order to appeal to mouse-driven Windows users, I guess. I have noticed that Vista has a slightly improved focus over XP, but still very wrong. This focus model is the same attitude that gets you the Windows update manager that bugs you every 10 minutes by stealing focus, or worse, automatically rebooting while you aren't even at the machine (this is simply unforgivable).
Unfortunately, if you switch to a reasonable focus model, you will break poorly designed applications that are used to the broken focus models (OpenOffice, Matlab, any IDE, to name a few). These are applications that use a lot of pop-ups that don't "disable" the main window, which is when it is ok. For example, save dialogs are just fine for pop-ups: you can't have the main window in focus, so the change in focus to the dialog is natural and doesn't have a negative effect (it's not actually focus stealing).
However, pop-up text-searching is always absolutely wrong, for reasons beyond focus stealing too*. You will find that removing focus stealing will (correctly) not give these search boxes focus, which really breaks things for these applications. (Firefox wins here, maintaining its fairly good usability, with the integrated, incremental search bar.)
KDE does actually have a setting that can strictly stop focus stealing, in the form of a sliding bar. This works most of the time, but it's not perfect. New windows do in fact steal focus for a few milliseconds. This is enough to occasionally steal a keystroke, but I can live with it for now.
At work, I only get to choose between Gnome and KDE, so some other window manager out there may get this 100% right and I haven't explored it. At home I use IceWM, which also has a broken, unfixable focus model. However, the software I use at home is better behaved, making it less of an issue.
* Side rant here. For seasoned Emacs users, the incremental search function is frequently used for navigation (see item 4). If I need to move the point by more than a few characters or words, I start a text search (C-s, C-r) and type some text at the point I want to go. I do this all the time without even thinking about it. This doesn't work in a pop-up text search, even ignoring the fact that the aren't incremental either. When you bring it up, usually ctrl+f, there is always a delay to the window coming up. If I start typing my search right away, as I am used to in Emacs, it will go into my document rather than the search box. I find this incredibly annoying. I shouldn't be waiting for the computer like that.
Yeah, don't let the browser store your bank and e-mail passwords.
But your/. account, where logins are done in plaintext rather than https? Go for it. As soon as you log in wirelessly you have broadcasted your password to the world anyway. The password manager is not the weak link here.
Plus, you know, it's only your/. account, not your life savings. The consequences for losing the password are small, so shifting the trade-off towards convenience will be more reasonable.
Actually, you are wrong in your math. When using significant digits, as the parent was doing -- because the $80 difference has absolutely no effect on the argument -- parent is correct: $0.99 * 8000 = $8000.
Why must living things always be driven by the need to reproduce?
Because only species that reproduce can even exist, otherwise they would be gone after one generation.
It's really simple. If an individual is really good at reproducing it passes on its traits of being good at reproducing to many children. Animals that do very poorly at reproduction won't be passing on these traits, so they don't exist.
It's not about some subconscious will to survive. Clouds don't stay in the sky because they will themselves there. These are just the mechanisms of the system in action.
perhaps humans are "evolving" and each time we do we're compared with the final form
Evolution is a process. There is no overall direction towards some final end state. In the big picture, there is no "more evolved" or "less evolved". It is a feedback mechanism that causes animals to change over many generations to become more suited to surviving in their changing environments.
The comparison to the final image in TFA is just the fitness function. The real world fitness function is the measure of how many surviving babies you can make before you die. The Mona Lisa isn't a final state of evolution; it is a measure of survivability, like measuring the thickness of a fur coat in cold climates.
It looks like Websense just added this particular Wikipedia URL under the category "sex", meaning it is blocked by every corporate filter that uses Websense. However, just like the IWF, they botched it: they only block the page's history! The image and article are unblocked but the article's history is not viewable.
Also note this sort of block is easily defeated using the secure https version.
I note that the fools from the article don't actually want to destroy the Earth
You are exactly right. The editor for the summary (the article is much more vague) wasn't paying attention. Actually destroying the Earth is difficult, and well beyond the ability of human beings at the moment. Your linked article, How to destroy the Earth, explains this.
In TFA, methods 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 all fail to actually destroy the Earth.
Almost, but not quite. The GNU C library, for example, will use mmap to allocate larger requests, and, when freed, will give that memory back to the system and allow the process to shrink.
There is also the issue that car maintenance requires the facilities to do it. I live in an apartment and if I wanted to change the oil myself I would have to do it in a parking lot, which isn't reasonable or safe (I don't want to be under my car with strangers driving around me!). Or worse, parking at my last apartment was in a parking garbage. It is simply not possible for me to do car maintenance. I have changed the oil + filter myself before when I had the proper facilities (i.e. in a garage), but it is simply not possible now. Also the fact, as you said, that I would much rather just pay someone 25 bucks to deal with it for me anyway while I read a book. This is extremely convenient.
Computer maintenance requires, at most, a screwdriver and a few extra square feet of space around the computer, assuming you are even dealing with hardware.
These sorts of attacks are nothing new. If you are running an SSH server directly accessible from the Internet, check your/var/log/auth.log log sometime. You may be alarmed by the surprisingly large number of attacks you get every day, even if it is your home IP with no sort of domain name associated.
I like to run DenyHosts on my machines, which watches this log file and adds suspicious IPs to your/etc/hosts.deny. I generally have several new IPs added daily. Also disable remote root logins, because then the attacker has to guess a username and a password: an extra few bits of security (they try "root", then go on to "tester", "tester1",... , "guest", "guest1", etc.). And, of course, use strong passwords for SSH accounts. In your logs you will find attackers employing dictionary attacks (which DenyHosts will quickly cut off).
The instructions say you are moderating the comments, not the moderation. So it is not really meta-moderation anymore, but it is still called such. This is why it is confusing... and stupid.
AND the rights of the rightsholders to be fairly compensated and to reasonably punish/recover from wrongdoers*.
In the US, where the article takes place, there is no right for writers/artists/developers to be "fairly" compensated**. None whatsoever. In fact, it is quite the opposite: it is our right to share culture freely. The purpose of copyright, as described by the US constitution, is meant to serve the public by encouraging the growth of the public domain. The public temporarily waives their natural rights to freely share their culture in order to encourage writers/artists/developers to write/sing/develop. Before the digital age, this was a right individual people couldn't even exercise in the first place, so they were getting a real bargain out of it.
The problem is that the temporary part is gone. Copyright terms are way too long, longer than human lifetimes. We really should be legally allowed to freely share everything from (at least) the 80's and before. All these works should be in the public domain by now. This is why you might see this slant on/., because copyright is way out of balance and unconstitutional. It needs to serve the public again. I bet you will find that many, if not most, works on P2P networks would be legal to share if we had reasonable copyright terms.
* As a side note, you said "wrongdoers" to describe people breaking laws. Please don't mix up right/wrong with legal/illegal. These are completely unrelated.
** In other countries authors may actually have rights that don't exist in the US. For example, in the UK there are a set of non-transferable "moral rights" for authors. Since I live in the US I don't have to worry much about this, though.
I think the original photo shown is not the same quality as the original photo that was modified. The details are way too crisp to have created the second from the low quality first image.
But yeah, I don't see anything wrong with the quality of the shop. They just need something to criticize. Hell, the AP people didn't even realize it was doctored, to the point that they even published it.
Octave actually got the language parser right too, which MathWorks has totally failed at. Matlab is really, really bad at anything beyond the simplest expressions. For example, try this code, which references elements in the given expressions, in Matlab,
[5:9](2) magic(4)(2:3,2:3)
It won't work, or anything like this, with Matlab. However, Octave nails it, handling it exactly as it should. Matlab also limits variable name lengths (currently 63 characters). Hello, Mathworks, this is the 21st century, not some 1970's version of Fortran!
If you are used to Perl with its expressiveness, doing things in Matlab can feel quite painful. Although, really, the Matlab language overall, including any implementation, is pretty poorly designed.
Normal people violating copyright isn't being scumbagish at all. Copyright is supposed to serve the public, not corporations or even artists and writers.
Men and women are different and, in general, will be more proficient at different abilities. Get a bunch of your friends, male and female, to take the BBC Sex ID Test. You will probably find that women will tend to score on the feminine side and more men will tend to score on the masculine side.
Men and women should still, of course, have equal rights regardless of these differences.
I disagree with the notion that computer science is more important (higher pay) than the care of human beings
Higher pay does not mean more important. People who collect the garbage are extremely important, but their pay isn't very high. It's more of a supply and demand thing.
Slashdot Mirror
[...] you pedantic git.
Hey, leave the version control systems out of this, ok? You're just going to make it worse.
If you ever played Rome: Total War, just once, you wouldn't even bother asking this question. You would be asking if they forced you keep it. :-P
if you don't accept the GPL contract and redistribute the work
The GPL is a license, not a contract. Except for that wording, you basically have the right idea on the GPL.
Actually, put a mask on the back of your head so the billboard collects false viewing data.
Gnome used to be my favorite window manager, until I realized that the focus model is totally wrong, and there is no way to fix it. It lies in this principle,
No window should ever steal focus ... ever. Don't even do it if the computer will blow up, or the world will end, if I fail to respond.
If you are trying to maximize your computing efficiency, focus stealing is your worst enemy. It's entire purpose is to slow you down.
Focus stealing breaks flow and can also be a security issue. Let's say you are typing away in a text editor and some other application decides it needs you to make a decision in the form of a pop-up window. Just as you are hitting enter in your text editor, the window pops-up, grabs your return keystroke and accepts it as your answer, doing whatever the default action is. Or the case where you are typing a password and a dialog steals focus and you type part of your password out in plain sight into the dialog.
A lot of this can be blamed on Windows for having a really shitty focus model, which everyone else tries to emulate in order to appeal to mouse-driven Windows users, I guess. I have noticed that Vista has a slightly improved focus over XP, but still very wrong. This focus model is the same attitude that gets you the Windows update manager that bugs you every 10 minutes by stealing focus, or worse, automatically rebooting while you aren't even at the machine (this is simply unforgivable).
Unfortunately, if you switch to a reasonable focus model, you will break poorly designed applications that are used to the broken focus models (OpenOffice, Matlab, any IDE, to name a few). These are applications that use a lot of pop-ups that don't "disable" the main window, which is when it is ok. For example, save dialogs are just fine for pop-ups: you can't have the main window in focus, so the change in focus to the dialog is natural and doesn't have a negative effect (it's not actually focus stealing).
However, pop-up text-searching is always absolutely wrong, for reasons beyond focus stealing too*. You will find that removing focus stealing will (correctly) not give these search boxes focus, which really breaks things for these applications. (Firefox wins here, maintaining its fairly good usability, with the integrated, incremental search bar.)
KDE does actually have a setting that can strictly stop focus stealing, in the form of a sliding bar. This works most of the time, but it's not perfect. New windows do in fact steal focus for a few milliseconds. This is enough to occasionally steal a keystroke, but I can live with it for now.
At work, I only get to choose between Gnome and KDE, so some other window manager out there may get this 100% right and I haven't explored it. At home I use IceWM, which also has a broken, unfixable focus model. However, the software I use at home is better behaved, making it less of an issue.
* Side rant here. For seasoned Emacs users, the incremental search function is frequently used for navigation (see item 4). If I need to move the point by more than a few characters or words, I start a text search (C-s, C-r) and type some text at the point I want to go. I do this all the time without even thinking about it. This doesn't work in a pop-up text search, even ignoring the fact that the aren't incremental either. When you bring it up, usually ctrl+f, there is always a delay to the window coming up. If I start typing my search right away, as I am used to in Emacs, it will go into my document rather than the search box. I find this incredibly annoying. I shouldn't be waiting for the computer like that.
It depends on the account type.
Yeah, don't let the browser store your bank and e-mail passwords.
But your /. account, where logins are done in plaintext rather than https? Go for it. As soon as you log in wirelessly you have broadcasted your password to the world anyway. The password manager is not the weak link here.
Plus, you know, it's only your /. account, not your life savings. The consequences for losing the password are small, so shifting the trade-off towards convenience will be more reasonable.
Actually, you are wrong in your math. When using significant digits, as the parent was doing -- because the $80 difference has absolutely no effect on the argument -- parent is correct: $0.99 * 8000 = $8000.
That's like 9th grade math, bud.
Why must living things always be driven by the need to reproduce?
Because only species that reproduce can even exist, otherwise they would be gone after one generation.
It's really simple. If an individual is really good at reproducing it passes on its traits of being good at reproducing to many children. Animals that do very poorly at reproduction won't be passing on these traits, so they don't exist.
It's not about some subconscious will to survive. Clouds don't stay in the sky because they will themselves there. These are just the mechanisms of the system in action.
perhaps humans are "evolving" and each time we do we're compared with the final form
Evolution is a process. There is no overall direction towards some final end state. In the big picture, there is no "more evolved" or "less evolved". It is a feedback mechanism that causes animals to change over many generations to become more suited to surviving in their changing environments.
The comparison to the final image in TFA is just the fitness function. The real world fitness function is the measure of how many surviving babies you can make before you die. The Mona Lisa isn't a final state of evolution; it is a measure of survivability, like measuring the thickness of a fur coat in cold climates.
The rest of your post is really just blabbering.
It looks like Websense just added this particular Wikipedia URL under the category "sex", meaning it is blocked by every corporate filter that uses Websense. However, just like the IWF, they botched it: they only block the page's history! The image and article are unblocked but the article's history is not viewable.
Also note this sort of block is easily defeated using the secure https version.
I note that the fools from the article don't actually want to destroy the Earth
You are exactly right. The editor for the summary (the article is much more vague) wasn't paying attention. Actually destroying the Earth is difficult, and well beyond the ability of human beings at the moment. Your linked article, How to destroy the Earth, explains this.
In TFA, methods 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 all fail to actually destroy the Earth.
Yes, and to compare some sort of "cyberwar" to Pearl Harbor, where, you know, many people actually died, is a bit extreme. It's fear-mongering.
Almost, but not quite. The GNU C library, for example, will use mmap to allocate larger requests, and, when freed, will give that memory back to the system and allow the process to shrink.
What I do NOT understand is why those peole cannot see that if everyone does what they do, no new content will be produced.
You're right. It will be just like the thousands of years before copyright, when no one ever wrote or created anything.
Right on.
There is also the issue that car maintenance requires the facilities to do it. I live in an apartment and if I wanted to change the oil myself I would have to do it in a parking lot, which isn't reasonable or safe (I don't want to be under my car with strangers driving around me!). Or worse, parking at my last apartment was in a parking garbage. It is simply not possible for me to do car maintenance. I have changed the oil + filter myself before when I had the proper facilities (i.e. in a garage), but it is simply not possible now. Also the fact, as you said, that I would much rather just pay someone 25 bucks to deal with it for me anyway while I read a book. This is extremely convenient.
Computer maintenance requires, at most, a screwdriver and a few extra square feet of space around the computer, assuming you are even dealing with hardware.
Just tell TSA it is cooled by saline solution, which has no limitations. 'Cause, ... uh ... you keep your contact lenses inside your computer.
These sorts of attacks are nothing new. If you are running an SSH server directly accessible from the Internet, check your /var/log/auth.log log sometime. You may be alarmed by the surprisingly large number of attacks you get every day, even if it is your home IP with no sort of domain name associated.
I like to run DenyHosts on my machines, which watches this log file and adds suspicious IPs to your /etc/hosts.deny. I generally have several new IPs added daily. Also disable remote root logins, because then the attacker has to guess a username and a password: an extra few bits of security (they try "root", then go on to "tester", "tester1", ... , "guest", "guest1", etc.). And, of course, use strong passwords for SSH accounts. In your logs you will find attackers employing dictionary attacks (which DenyHosts will quickly cut off).
The instructions say you are moderating the comments, not the moderation. So it is not really meta-moderation anymore, but it is still called such. This is why it is confusing ... and stupid.
AND the rights of the rightsholders to be fairly compensated and to reasonably punish/recover from wrongdoers*.
In the US, where the article takes place, there is no right for writers/artists/developers to be "fairly" compensated**. None whatsoever. In fact, it is quite the opposite: it is our right to share culture freely. The purpose of copyright, as described by the US constitution, is meant to serve the public by encouraging the growth of the public domain. The public temporarily waives their natural rights to freely share their culture in order to encourage writers/artists/developers to write/sing/develop. Before the digital age, this was a right individual people couldn't even exercise in the first place, so they were getting a real bargain out of it.
The problem is that the temporary part is gone. Copyright terms are way too long, longer than human lifetimes. We really should be legally allowed to freely share everything from (at least) the 80's and before. All these works should be in the public domain by now. This is why you might see this slant on /., because copyright is way out of balance and unconstitutional. It needs to serve the public again. I bet you will find that many, if not most, works on P2P networks would be legal to share if we had reasonable copyright terms.
* As a side note, you said "wrongdoers" to describe people breaking laws. Please don't mix up right/wrong with legal/illegal. These are completely unrelated.
** In other countries authors may actually have rights that don't exist in the US. For example, in the UK there are a set of non-transferable "moral rights" for authors. Since I live in the US I don't have to worry much about this, though.
Moving the Earth might have move us out of the way of that intergalactic highway that is being planned.
I think the original photo shown is not the same quality as the original photo that was modified. The details are way too crisp to have created the second from the low quality first image.
But yeah, I don't see anything wrong with the quality of the shop. They just need something to criticize. Hell, the AP people didn't even realize it was doctored, to the point that they even published it.
Octave actually got the language parser right too, which MathWorks has totally failed at. Matlab is really, really bad at anything beyond the simplest expressions. For example, try this code, which references elements in the given expressions, in Matlab,
It won't work, or anything like this, with Matlab. However, Octave nails it, handling it exactly as it should. Matlab also limits variable name lengths (currently 63 characters). Hello, Mathworks, this is the 21st century, not some 1970's version of Fortran!
If you are used to Perl with its expressiveness, doing things in Matlab can feel quite painful. Although, really, the Matlab language overall, including any implementation, is pretty poorly designed.
I can tell you why /.ers aren't interested in that article: no pictures.
Normal people violating copyright isn't being scumbagish at all. Copyright is supposed to serve the public, not corporations or even artists and writers.
Men and women are different and, in general, will be more proficient at different abilities. Get a bunch of your friends, male and female, to take the BBC Sex ID Test. You will probably find that women will tend to score on the feminine side and more men will tend to score on the masculine side.
Men and women should still, of course, have equal rights regardless of these differences.
I disagree with the notion that computer science is more important (higher pay) than the care of human beings
Higher pay does not mean more important. People who collect the garbage are extremely important, but their pay isn't very high. It's more of a supply and demand thing.