Orrin Hatch really is so deep in the **AA's pockets[...]
What I haven't figured out is how the heck these people (if you can call them that) can claim to be representing THEIR constituents with bills like this. California legislators (especially those in Southern California districts) I can understand, and maybe some of the New York ones...but as far as I can tell, Utah is about as dependent on Big Media for their economy as South Carolina (i.e. Fritz Hollings) is...This particular senator's wild-eyed berserk enthusiasm for grossly overeager "Copyright Protection(tm)" particularly baffles me in light of the fact that it puts him AGAINST the "Clean Flicks"** people in their case, and his state especially seems to like those.
Is it really just that "The Two Parties(tm)" really ARE the Disneycrats and Ruperticans* as I've been calling them for the past several years, run by their respective media masters?
(* - as in Rupert Murdoch/Fox Network, in case anyone didn't guess that...)
(** - "Clean Flicks" is a company that buys original media, then edits out the "objectionable" parts that might offend the delicate sensibilities of viewers, especially in the Utah/Idaho area, such as naked people, discussions of icky things, and bad words. While my personal feelings towards this attitude range from contempt to disgust to anger, it is for philosophical/artistic reasons, and I nonetheless think that they are FIRMLY within what ought to be obviously legal actions within the doctrines of "Fair Use" and "First Sale" to anyone that isn't being paid off by media lobbyists...or at least that's my opinion.)
How many of those things do you hear fall out of the sky on the news every week?
Somewhere between 0 and 0, I think...
Seriously - I'm under the impression that most of the smaller, lighter planes like this can actually glide just fine for a long way (and many [most?] Ultralights are light enough that they carry an emergency parachute - for the whole plane, not just for the passenger - in case of catastrophic failure of some kind.)
I think nearly all LIGHT aircraft accidents are caused by either sheer negligence or other failures on the part of a human being, rather than surprise mechanical failure.
I can verify that - I've used KDE's webdav:// and webdavs:// ioslaves to access "folders" on a Microsoft(r) Exchange(r) server before.
The reason I'd hesistate and look long and hard at an MS project for this is standards support. MS's WebDAV/"Web Folders" support appears to have a number of quirks (what a surprise), so it MAY not interoperate properly with anything else. (Someone else has already mentioned the licensing concerns over using MS's schema as well).
(I actually submitted an "Ask Slashdot" yesterday regarding making MS-version services - e.g. SharePoint(r)'s version of WebDAV - interoperate with anything else, though I have a sneaking suspicion that it'll get auto-rejected. If not, hopefully some people will post in it about getting MS to interoperate with WebDAV and perhaps some commentary about how standards-compliant their XML schema are.)
Perhaps instead, a "business method" patent on running a Trademark developement and registration company wherein said trademarks always take the form of two words combined into one with each word's first letter Capitized?
With our patented new SueEveryone(r) IntellectualProperty(r) LitigationModel(r) BusinessModel we will rule TheWorld(r)!
(Seriously, that TwoWord(r) trademark thing seems to be the current fad right now...)
That is, make sure your design isn't dependent on pixel-level control of everyone's browser as far too many web developers (and damned "content-generator" programs) seem to insist on.
Or in other words, always remind yourself that The Web is Not a Print Medium (Highly recommended, if slightly "fluffy", article). Most of the "hey, it doesn't work/look right in this OTHER browser" problems I've ever seen boil down to the web designer having a pressing attitude that they need to control the users' browsers down to the minutest pixel, and have a pile of browser-specific tricks that depend on recognizing the specific "brand name" of the browser and behaving in a different quirky manner depending on which (of the listed ones) it recognizes.
Many others have already posted the good advice to just "stick to the standards". In case it isn't obvious, that most especially means "don't reference any 'browser quirks' anywhere in your design." Even IE seems to have reasonable support for "standards compatibility mode", so if you stick to standards, you will greatly cut down the potential problems that necessitate testing your pages in 10+ different browsers on 4+ different platforms in the first place.
(The rare individual that really DOES require iron-fisted dictatorial control of the pixel-by-pixel layout of their page shouldn't be using HTML anyway - that's what PDF is for...)
The Averatec "3150H" that I'm posting from here has been a pretty nice little machine. Small and light, and (most importantly for me) every single component has Linux drivers available - including the software-driven modem (drivers developed by the modem company themselves, no less).
The downside is that their support blows. I reported an annoying BIOS problem (if the "Auto-dim" feature [which automatically dims the screen when you disconnect from AC and switch to battery] is turned on, the touchpad stops working when you disconnect (or, if you started off of battery, when you connect) the AC adapter. Yes, I checked it in Windows, too - it happens there as well. No response from them at all, and the BIOS download has never been updated.
Their newer systems, sadly, also use "Broadcomm" (or was that "Broadcom"?) chipsets for the built-in wireless. Naturally - the company with the most contemptuous attitude (among wifi-chipset manufacturers) towards linux users is the one they pick...
That said, though, The "Athlon XP-M 1600+" in this machine chugs along just fine. I can't exactly play Unreal Tournament 2004 on it (While I have the DRI CVS drivers for hardware accelerated 3D installed, the "S3 ProSavage/DDR" is not known for its high performance...) but for just about everything else it's been great.
The DRI CVS includes a working S3 Savage driver - at least it gives my laptop passable hardware-accelerated 3D. Of course, you have to compile it yourself...
I'm hoping the upcoming next X.org release includes it...
That's just what I was thinking - I think EVERY bittorrent link I've ever seen has been for a legitimate use (legally available media, datasets, software...).
Not to say that I'm sure I couldn't find copyright-violating torrents if I TRIED, but the point it that bittorrent, especially, seems to be getting a lot of completely legitimate use these days.
Yes I can confirm. We [...] are working with Sun on the JSR 223. The result will be a Sun reference implementation [...] which defines what the interface between PHP [...] and Java will look like.
(Sorry - just trimming for space). Very nifty! Is there any timeline (however rough) for this, or at least a website or mailing list where interested parties might watch for news?
(My own backstory - I'm one of those "learn by doing" types. Copying pointless or irrelevant code out of a manual teaches me nothing, so in order to learn, I need to have a real use for what I'm doing [and I have absolutely no use whatsoever for a simplistic "employee tracking database" or "change making program" in Java...]. I currently have no need for a completely-java project, but I'd like to learn Java, so I'd find it useful to be able to interface Java with PHP - which I use very frequently - to play with it. Using Java modules to speed up e.g. mathematical calculations or image handling...or for GUI interfaces...would be useful. Or so *I* think, anyway.)
I thought I was the only person that used php for scripting too.
Me too - I've been using PHP for command-line stuff at least as much as I have for web interfaces, and even then I tend to try to design the PHP code so that as much as possible of it can be useful outside of a "web page" context.
So, how much longer until someone writes a whole shell in PHP?...
I can vouch that, to the extent that I've been trying it, all of my PHP4-developed code has been working fine with the PHP5 interpreter so far. As andig suggests above, I suspect that only a few cases where someone relies heavily on 4.x "quirks" will cause a problem.
I was slightly disappointed to find that the "native Java/PHP integration" support was quietly dropped from PHP5 - I'd been wanting to play with that. Oh well.
He had noted that the "genius" geeks he is familiar with are all skilled in math.
Bah. I think that's only because geeks who aren't "math-n-physics-n-star-trek" geeks don't LOOK like geeks as often to other people. Mathematics impresses people as "geeky" because most (so-called) normal people don't spend the time to go too far beyond the basics - face it, even a lot of basic science work requires no more than introductory algebra (and when was the last time you actually had a practical use for "synthetic division" personally?)
While mathematics does tend to be under-appreciated in many contexts, I think some of its fans tend to be a bit too disconnected from the "real world" most of the time. I remember some of those bizarrely-contrived "word problems". And far too many people think that numbers are THINGS. (When, out here in the real world, a number is more like an adjective than a noun - i.e. a number by itself, without something to describe, is meaningless...)
I tend to think that people who are over-awed at mathematics are the same sort of people who think that being a chess master automatically makes someone qualified to command a real-world military force...
I further think that to have a "mathematics" academic department separate from its applications makes about as much sense as having "adjectives and verbs" as a subject separate from "language and communication". I'd be much happier to see mathematics taught in the contexts where it is used ("Pure numbers" math "geeks" can still exist - they belong in the "philosophy" department.)
Ironically, the most enjoyable math class I've had thus far was Statistics, which I thought EVERYONE was supposed to hate. Go figure. (Deep down, I think it's because Statistics is where they finally admit "Okay, mathematicians don't REALLY know what's going on in the real world, but we HAVE developed a decent system for making good guesses...")
In addition, it apparently only works on the "Pro" or server versions of Windows(r), so anyone with a 'mere' "Home Edition" that came bundled with their machine will need to pay for a "Pro" or higher license and do a reinstall......unless there's some sort of "registry hack" or something that will allow SFU to work?...
I think you're right. I've noticed this, too, and I'm perversely amused by it, as it's exactly the reverse of the way things USUALLY seem to be stated (i.e. normally it's "We European types get free service from The Government(tm), whereas you Yanks have your Government(tm) selling out to rich corporations!"... I suppose a study of the sociological forces at work in this isolated role-reversal would be kind of interesting - any sociologists/political scientists out there looking for a thesis topic?...)
That's silly, everyone knows that REAL open-source geeks read road maps directly from the source code, not some wussy precompiled map! (That is, if census.gov gets its act together - for some reason I can't get to this page at the moment. Probably running some proprietary OS or something...)
Seriously though - there are two open-source "road map"-type programs that I know of...
GPSDrive is a 'general purpose' map display program. It doesn't render roads, etc. "on the fly" (though it WILL render NASA satellite images on-the-fly if you have the gigantic raw data file for it) but does have built-in downloading of maps from online sources or importing your own. (It also interfaces with Kismet for wardriving if you are set up for it).
There IS a project for generating roadmaps on-the-fly called Roadmap, though I've not yet tried it out. (I did, of course, just download the sourcecode so that I could...)
The new PARANOIA XP edition emphasizes the Alpha Complex sort-of economy and a new consumerism very much in tune with THX-1138. You can follow the development of the game on the PARANOIA development blog.
Please note that the referenced information is clearance "Red". Infrared laborers and traitors are requested not to read it.
Thank you.
(For comparison purposes, you can consider "THX-1138" to be the takes-itself-a-little-too-seriously predecessor to the "Paranoia" setting...)
It's not obvious from what I've been able to connect to so far that isn't slashdotted as to whether you can connect to a Windows box from a Linux box (the orangecrate.com article linked further down shows a connection going from a windows box to a linux box)
That's actually 2 questions, though - "Does the technology support it" AND "does the LICENSE allow it?"
I'm assuming that the technical capability is there (just as it is in VNC)...
Last time I saw the EULA for a recent Windows version I saw in infamous "you may not connect with 3rd-party tools" clause in the license. Is that still there? Is using FreeNX (or VNC or anything else) to connect to a windows box remotely still a violation of the license?
Slashdot Mirror
What I haven't figured out is how the heck these people (if you can call them that) can claim to be representing THEIR constituents with bills like this. California legislators (especially those in Southern California districts) I can understand, and maybe some of the New York ones...but as far as I can tell, Utah is about as dependent on Big Media for their economy as South Carolina (i.e. Fritz Hollings) is...This particular senator's wild-eyed berserk enthusiasm for grossly overeager "Copyright Protection(tm)" particularly baffles me in light of the fact that it puts him AGAINST the "Clean Flicks"** people in their case, and his state especially seems to like those.
Is it really just that "The Two Parties(tm)" really ARE the Disneycrats and Ruperticans* as I've been calling them for the past several years, run by their respective media masters?
(* - as in Rupert Murdoch/Fox Network, in case anyone didn't guess that...)
(** - "Clean Flicks" is a company that buys original media, then edits out the "objectionable" parts that might offend the delicate sensibilities of viewers, especially in the Utah/Idaho area, such as naked people, discussions of icky things, and bad words. While my personal feelings towards this attitude range from contempt to disgust to anger, it is for philosophical/artistic reasons, and I nonetheless think that they are FIRMLY within what ought to be obviously legal actions within the doctrines of "Fair Use" and "First Sale" to anyone that isn't being paid off by media lobbyists...or at least that's my opinion.)
Not sure if it still works, but Here's a link for that...
Somewhere between 0 and 0, I think...
Seriously - I'm under the impression that most of the smaller, lighter planes like this can actually glide just fine for a long way (and many [most?] Ultralights are light enough that they carry an emergency parachute - for the whole plane, not just for the passenger - in case of catastrophic failure of some kind.)
I think nearly all LIGHT aircraft accidents are caused by either sheer negligence or other failures on the part of a human being, rather than surprise mechanical failure.
Kinda makes me wonder how long it'll be before someone starts putting out viruses that infect WinModem(r) drivers...
I can verify that - I've used KDE's webdav:// and webdavs:// ioslaves to access "folders" on a Microsoft(r) Exchange(r) server before.
The reason I'd hesistate and look long and hard at an MS project for this is standards support. MS's WebDAV/"Web Folders" support appears to have a number of quirks (what a surprise), so it MAY not interoperate properly with anything else. (Someone else has already mentioned the licensing concerns over using MS's schema as well).
(I actually submitted an "Ask Slashdot" yesterday regarding making MS-version services - e.g. SharePoint(r)'s version of WebDAV - interoperate with anything else, though I have a sneaking suspicion that it'll get auto-rejected. If not, hopefully some people will post in it about getting MS to interoperate with WebDAV and perhaps some commentary about how standards-compliant their XML schema are.)
Perhaps instead, a "business method" patent on running a Trademark developement and registration company wherein said trademarks always take the form of two words combined into one with each word's first letter Capitized?
With our patented new SueEveryone(r) IntellectualProperty(r) LitigationModel(r) BusinessModel we will rule TheWorld(r)!
(Seriously, that TwoWord(r) trademark thing seems to be the current fad right now...)
We really, REALLY need "+1 - Bad Pun" (and "-1 - Bad Pun") moderation options...
That is, make sure your design isn't dependent on pixel-level control of everyone's browser as far too many web developers (and damned "content-generator" programs) seem to insist on.
Or in other words, always remind yourself that The Web is Not a Print Medium (Highly recommended, if slightly "fluffy", article). Most of the "hey, it doesn't work/look right in this OTHER browser" problems I've ever seen boil down to the web designer having a pressing attitude that they need to control the users' browsers down to the minutest pixel, and have a pile of browser-specific tricks that depend on recognizing the specific "brand name" of the browser and behaving in a different quirky manner depending on which (of the listed ones) it recognizes.
Many others have already posted the good advice to just "stick to the standards". In case it isn't obvious, that most especially means "don't reference any 'browser quirks' anywhere in your design." Even IE seems to have reasonable support for "standards compatibility mode", so if you stick to standards, you will greatly cut down the potential problems that necessitate testing your pages in 10+ different browsers on 4+ different platforms in the first place.
(The rare individual that really DOES require iron-fisted dictatorial control of the pixel-by-pixel layout of their page shouldn't be using HTML anyway - that's what PDF is for...)
The Averatec "3150H" that I'm posting from here has been a pretty nice little machine. Small and light, and (most importantly for me) every single component has Linux drivers available - including the software-driven modem (drivers developed by the modem company themselves, no less).
The downside is that their support blows. I reported an annoying BIOS problem (if the "Auto-dim" feature [which automatically dims the screen when you disconnect from AC and switch to battery] is turned on, the touchpad stops working when you disconnect (or, if you started off of battery, when you connect) the AC adapter. Yes, I checked it in Windows, too - it happens there as well. No response from them at all, and the BIOS download has never been updated.
Their newer systems, sadly, also use "Broadcomm" (or was that "Broadcom"?) chipsets for the built-in wireless. Naturally - the company with the most contemptuous attitude (among wifi-chipset manufacturers) towards linux users is the one they pick...
That said, though, The "Athlon XP-M 1600+" in this machine chugs along just fine. I can't exactly play Unreal Tournament 2004 on it (While I have the DRI CVS drivers for hardware accelerated 3D installed, the "S3 ProSavage/DDR" is not known for its high performance...) but for just about everything else it's been great.
The DRI CVS includes a working S3 Savage driver - at least it gives my laptop passable hardware-accelerated 3D. Of course, you have to compile it yourself...
I'm hoping the upcoming next X.org release includes it...
That's just what I was thinking - I think EVERY bittorrent link I've ever seen has been for a legitimate use (legally available media, datasets, software...).
Not to say that I'm sure I couldn't find copyright-violating torrents if I TRIED, but the point it that bittorrent, especially, seems to be getting a lot of completely legitimate use these days.
(Sorry - just trimming for space). Very nifty! Is there any timeline (however rough) for this, or at least a website or mailing list where interested parties might watch for news?
(My own backstory - I'm one of those "learn by doing" types. Copying pointless or irrelevant code out of a manual teaches me nothing, so in order to learn, I need to have a real use for what I'm doing [and I have absolutely no use whatsoever for a simplistic "employee tracking database" or "change making program" in Java...]. I currently have no need for a completely-java project, but I'd like to learn Java, so I'd find it useful to be able to interface Java with PHP - which I use very frequently - to play with it. Using Java modules to speed up e.g. mathematical calculations or image handling...or for GUI interfaces...would be useful. Or so *I* think, anyway.)
Too late...
AUGH! And now I've violated your copyright by creating a derivative work by replying to your post without permission!
(I'll stop now. It's just too easy to make fun of the current interpretations of "Intellectual Property"...)
Me too - I've been using PHP for command-line stuff at least as much as I have for web interfaces, and even then I tend to try to design the PHP code so that as much as possible of it can be useful outside of a "web page" context.
So, how much longer until someone writes a whole shell in PHP?...
I can vouch that, to the extent that I've been trying it, all of my PHP4-developed code has been working fine with the PHP5 interpreter so far. As andig suggests above, I suspect that only a few cases where someone relies heavily on 4.x "quirks" will cause a problem.
I was slightly disappointed to find that the "native Java/PHP integration" support was quietly dropped from PHP5 - I'd been wanting to play with that. Oh well.
Bah. I think that's only because geeks who aren't "math-n-physics-n-star-trek" geeks don't LOOK like geeks as often to other people. Mathematics impresses people as "geeky" because most (so-called) normal people don't spend the time to go too far beyond the basics - face it, even a lot of basic science work requires no more than introductory algebra (and when was the last time you actually had a practical use for "synthetic division" personally?)
While mathematics does tend to be under-appreciated in many contexts, I think some of its fans tend to be a bit too disconnected from the "real world" most of the time. I remember some of those bizarrely-contrived "word problems". And far too many people think that numbers are THINGS. (When, out here in the real world, a number is more like an adjective than a noun - i.e. a number by itself, without something to describe, is meaningless...)
I tend to think that people who are over-awed at mathematics are the same sort of people who think that being a chess master automatically makes someone qualified to command a real-world military force...
I further think that to have a "mathematics" academic department separate from its applications makes about as much sense as having "adjectives and verbs" as a subject separate from "language and communication". I'd be much happier to see mathematics taught in the contexts where it is used ("Pure numbers" math "geeks" can still exist - they belong in the "philosophy" department.)
Ironically, the most enjoyable math class I've had thus far was Statistics, which I thought EVERYONE was supposed to hate. Go figure. (Deep down, I think it's because Statistics is where they finally admit "Okay, mathematicians don't REALLY know what's going on in the real world, but we HAVE developed a decent system for making good guesses...")
In addition, it apparently only works on the "Pro" or server versions of Windows(r), so anyone with a 'mere' "Home Edition" that came bundled with their machine will need to pay for a "Pro" or higher license and do a reinstall... ...unless there's some sort of "registry hack" or something that will allow SFU to work?...
I think you're right. I've noticed this, too, and I'm perversely amused by it, as it's exactly the reverse of the way things USUALLY seem to be stated (i.e. normally it's "We European types get free service from The Government(tm), whereas you Yanks have your Government(tm) selling out to rich corporations!"... I suppose a study of the sociological forces at work in this isolated role-reversal would be kind of interesting - any sociologists/political scientists out there looking for a thesis topic?...)
That's silly, everyone knows that REAL open-source geeks read road maps directly from the source code, not some wussy precompiled map! (That is, if census.gov gets its act together - for some reason I can't get to this page at the moment. Probably running some proprietary OS or something...)
Seriously though - there are two open-source "road map"-type programs that I know of...
GPSDrive is a 'general purpose' map display program. It doesn't render roads, etc. "on the fly" (though it WILL render NASA satellite images on-the-fly if you have the gigantic raw data file for it) but does have built-in downloading of maps from online sources or importing your own. (It also interfaces with Kismet for wardriving if you are set up for it).
There IS a project for generating roadmaps on-the-fly called Roadmap, though I've not yet tried it out. (I did, of course, just download the sourcecode so that I could...)
Please note that the referenced information is clearance "Red". Infrared laborers and traitors are requested not to read it.
Thank you.
(For comparison purposes, you can consider "THX-1138" to be the takes-itself-a-little-too-seriously predecessor to the "Paranoia" setting...)
You're not supposed to understand it, you just play it!
I enjoyed that game immensely, despite a lack of stoned'ness, but then, I've always had a taste for the surreal...
Isn't that a bit like asking what you do if someone with herpes won't sleep with you?...
It's not obvious from what I've been able to connect to so far that isn't slashdotted as to whether you can connect to a Windows box from a Linux box (the orangecrate.com article linked further down shows a connection going from a windows box to a linux box)
That's actually 2 questions, though - "Does the technology support it" AND "does the LICENSE allow it?"
I'm assuming that the technical capability is there (just as it is in VNC)...
Last time I saw the EULA for a recent Windows version I saw in infamous "you may not connect with 3rd-party tools" clause in the license. Is that still there? Is using FreeNX (or VNC or anything else) to connect to a windows box remotely still a violation of the license?
I've already GOT an operating system, why would I want another one?....
(insert obligatory "it's just a joke" disclaimer here...)