As long as the applications that people want to run (office, quicken, etc.) REQUIRE windows to be installed
They want to run office, but do they need to run Microsoft Office® brand office as opposed to OpenOffice.org brand office? They want to run personal finance, but do they need to run Quicken® brand personal finance as opposed to GnuCash brand personal finance?
The choice is not adding another operating system to my computer. The choice is choosing NOT to buy a second operating system.
Well, LindowsOS ($100) is less than one-third the price of Windows XP Professional retail ($300), which is important to those building PCs for their friends and family either from parts or from a $400 naked PC from Wal*Mart.
We need to keep in mind, as Hormel pointed out, that a trademark is a "Proper Pronoun."
Wrong. According to Hormel's page, "a trademark is a formal adjective and as such, should always be followed by a noun.".According to Apple's page, "Trademarks are adjectives used to modify nouns; the noun is the generic name of a product or service." For example: Windows operating system, Linux kernel, Disney movies, Alpine stereo, SPAM luncheon meat, Macintosh computer, etc.
Speaking of "Precious" and "Moment", what exactly does Precious Moments Inc. own? I understand it owns a trademark on the phrase "PRECIOUS MOMENTS" in many markets and a sculpture copyright on the specific appearance of each of the figurines, but does it own any monopoly on the slightly more general concept of super deformed (SD) characters with teardrop-shaped eyes?
Indeed, if you look at Lindows' about page [lindows.com], it is obvious that the name is a mixture of Windows and Linux, and doesn't derive from another language.
Almost, but drop the W, and you have "Lindos," which means "pretty ones" in Spanish.
I'm sorry, but Microsoft or the PC vendor has never made anyone keep the original OS on it.
Yes they have. A PC has been sold whose BIOS verifies that the OS is Windows. It's called the Xbox. I know the Xbox is a game console, but it's only the beginning.
But now youre talking about a not so tech-savvy user, and youre assuming that they'll use Apache for a www server?
What about a tech-savvy user telling a not-so-tech-savvy user "if you want to share a few files, and you don't want to be subject to the security holes in both Windows's built-in file sharing and IIS Personal Edition, why not use this program?" That's the audience I was talking about.
It's an apples to oranges comparison because both companies didn't start development on their product simultaneously and therefore can't be compared in "coding speed" to each other.
Yes they did. I always thought Netscape Navigator (up to 4.x) was based on NCSA Mosaic, which became Spyglass Mosaic, which became Microsoft Internet Explorer (see IE's about box). After the Netscape fork of Mosaic (i.e. Mozilla Classic) began to show its limitations, development began on its replacement -- Gecko -- around which Mozilla.org built its next generation Internet browser.
It happens to me with Windows 98 with IE, but W2K with IE does not exhibit the same problem.
Under Windows 95, 98, and ME, the USER.EXE and GDI.EXE resource heaps are each limited to 64 kilobytes. (Windows NT, 2000, and XP have no such limit.) This bites me in the butt on K5 too.
Talk about cheap, I mean really. They _give_ you the server, and have the unmitigated gall to ask you to pay less than one dinner for two at a nice restaurant for the software that lets you author media for it.
QuickTime is not portable software. It runs only on PowerPC-based Macintosh computers and x86-based PCs; if you want to use an Alpha or Sun box as an encode server, tough shit. Bochs doesn't count because video encoding is arithmetic-heavy, and Bochs doesn't dynamically recompile. That must be a really nice restaurant for a dinner for two to equal the cost of a low-end new PC.
[DataGlyphs] appears to be more robust than raw encoding and thus must have smaller capacity per inch.
Each DataGlyphs bit-cell is 5x5 pixels. With this 1200 dpi printer you speak of, an 8x10 inch printable area can hold 4608000 bit-cells. Given 10 bits per byte (including Reed-Solomon error correction), 450 KB per page (900 KB per double sided page) is still a lot of machine-readable data.
Out of an office of about 30 people only two of us could hear the silly thing. It gave me massive headaches until we could figure out what the heck was going on. So yeah, there could be something in the higher or maybe lower ranges of a recording that some of us might find valuable.:-P
You're probably not hearing >19 kHz audio but rather stuff in 5-20 kHz. Those annoying toys often have DACs that operate at about 8 kHz, which leaves aliasing artifacts all over the spectrum from 4 kHz up. (4 kHz is about the frequency of the highest note on a standard piano.) They also tend to have cheap analog filters that don't do a good job of killing the aliasing.
Also on the Scope i was using was set to just connect the dots and not to do any kind of shaping of the wave.
Most DACs are sample'n'hold (turning waves at half sample rate into square waves), but "oversampling" DACs operate at 88 kHz or higher, using various methods of interpolation and convolution to drive the aliasing artifacts well into the high frequencies (30 kHz and above) where analog filters can easily take care of them. Some DACs (called "sigma-delta" or "1-bit") use only 1 bit per channel but run in the near-MHz range, letting the analog filters remove the dithering.
I think I read somewhere that the video game industry is bigger than hollywood, and they don't seem to b*ch nearly as much, while their medium is solely computers.
Nintendo has threatened to sue those who distribute legitimate homebrew GBA development hardware.
Of course [ch* is] an access control mechanism. It allows the network or system administrator to control access to the files. What else would you call it? What it is not is a DRM technology because it still leaves the administrator in control.
However, unlike SDMI and similar proposals, chmod/chown/chgrp is not DRM and doesn't attempt to prevent the administrator from elevating her privileges to the point where she can access the contents of the files. The use of the words "access control" confused me because the language of the DMCA treats "access control" almost as a synonym for DRM.
The very notion that there is some process/account/structure that must bestow permission to an administrator, even if it is their own account, redefines the role of administrator to something else.
The point is that the administrator has full access to such process/account/structure that elevates her privileges. The safeguards are in there to prevent users from inadvertently f***ing up their $BIGNUM system.
The point is that the administrator should have permission to do anything, without any redundant "grant permission to myself" process involved.
No, it's a concession to the fact that administrators are human beings. Think of it as analogous to the safety on a firearm.
I think you meant to say that the Japanese language become obsolete when computers were introduced. Seriously, after the typewriter they had plenty of warning
No. Typewriters using kana (the Japanese phonetic script) and bopomofo (the Chinese native phonetic script, which superficially resembles katakana) had been around for a while. So had typewriters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. However, ASCII (a 7-bit standard which defines only 95 printable characters) doesn't support kana, bopomofo, Greek, or Cyrillic. Heck, ASCII doesn't even support Italian, Spanish, French, German, Finnish, Swedish, or any other Latin-alphabet-based language whose writing system uses diacritic marks.
International support is why NTFS and FAT32 use Unicode UTF-16 to represent file names on disk.
P.S. Don't call people "consumers". Even if they are Windows users, it's not nice.:-)
Then what is the correct term for people who go into Best Buy, buy a PC, and use only the operating system that Microsoft forced the PC vendor to pre-install because the buyer doesn't know better? I used "consumer" to refer to those who use Windows on their home computers not by choice but by ignorance of other options or by lack of drivers for proprietary devices.
Until a finished, free (for commercial as well as noncommercial use!) VBA interpreter is available, nobody'll handle Microsoft documents *quite* the way Microsoft's apps do.
If you want this, conribute to GNOME Basic by submitting patches or buying Ximian products.
The Robotcop download page states that no binaries are available for versions of Apache HTTP Server designed for M$ Windows, and the binaries that do exist (for Red Hat Linux x86 and FreeBSD x86) aren't very compatible with mod_ssl.
"So compile it yourself!" For one thing, according to the compilation instructions, those who want to compile Robotcop for Windows will have to wait a year (estimated) until Apache 2.0 is no longer eta but Released. For another, not everybody can afford a license for M$ Visual Studio, which is required to build Apache HTTP Server; apparently, this popular Win32 version of GCC doesn't cut it.
In other words, Robotcop won't work for consumers who serve web pages from their home workstation that runs Windows.
That way even the most hardcore human reader (or group of more casual readers behind a NAT) can click on 30-40 links in a minute
What about over 20 Million Members on one ISP's proxy? A story circulating around several tech news sites (about the high likelihood of AOL 8 using Mozilla's Gecko engine) places AOL's U.S. market share at about 30%. Do you really want to drive away 30% of your audience? What about the billion-plus people behind China's NAT?
There are infinite variations on this theme, like the transparent gif you mentioned, which makes it very difficult for evil spiders to avoid them. Just make sure you test with lynx/w3m first.
Just make sure that it takes at least two steps to get from content to the honeypot. This way, it becomes much more difficult to accidentally tab to a link and activate it, shutting off an entire ISP's proxied access to the web server.
1. This text based format is known as "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" (AKA "ASCII")
ASCII became obsolete the day the first PC was imported into Japan. Better use a Unicode encoding such as UTF-8, which has full backwards compatibility with ASCII.
I agree, but the only I see to really allow for good backwards compatibility while simultaneously allowing for new features would be maybe have the document file carry two copies of the document, one formatted in a way that the older one can read, and another with all the pretty formatting when needed.
Yes. Place all the *text* of the document in one area and the styles in another. (SimpleText on Mac OS 7.5 through 9.x did this.) Then you can go in with fscking Notepad (which doesn't have the 32 KB restriction under NT systems) and recover the text.
Depends. I almost get the impression they want to make the data entirely self-describing (think XML)
M$ can't make the data entirely self-describing. If M$ did, each document would contain a DOCTYPE that points to the specification of the format, and Microsoft would no longer be able to lock Office users into Office.
especially since it's illegal to figure out anything but what they tell you
This applies to Microsoft too. The DMCA (17 USC 1201(i)) permits circumvention of measures that collect a user's personal information. If Windows Media Player begins to phone home too much, a decent lawyer will note subsection (i), and any rational judge throw the DMCA out the window for that case.
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As long as the applications that people want to run (office, quicken, etc.) REQUIRE windows to be installed
They want to run office, but do they need to run Microsoft Office® brand office as opposed to OpenOffice.org brand office? They want to run personal finance, but do they need to run Quicken® brand personal finance as opposed to GnuCash brand personal finance?
The choice is not adding another operating system to my computer. The choice is choosing NOT to buy a second operating system.
Well, LindowsOS ($100) is less than one-third the price of Windows XP Professional retail ($300), which is important to those building PCs for their friends and family either from parts or from a $400 naked PC from Wal*Mart.
We need to keep in mind, as Hormel pointed out, that a trademark is a "Proper Pronoun."
Wrong. According to Hormel's page, "a trademark is a formal adjective and as such, should always be followed by a noun.".According to Apple's page, "Trademarks are adjectives used to modify nouns; the noun is the generic name of a product or service." For example: Windows operating system, Linux kernel, Disney movies, Alpine stereo, SPAM luncheon meat, Macintosh computer, etc.
>Senior Moment
Precious, precious.
Speaking of "Precious" and "Moment", what exactly does Precious Moments Inc. own? I understand it owns a trademark on the phrase "PRECIOUS MOMENTS" in many markets and a sculpture copyright on the specific appearance of each of the figurines, but does it own any monopoly on the slightly more general concept of super deformed (SD) characters with teardrop-shaped eyes?
Indeed, if you look at Lindows' about page [lindows.com], it is obvious that the name is a mixture of Windows and Linux, and doesn't derive from another language.
Almost, but drop the W, and you have "Lindos," which means "pretty ones" in Spanish.
I'm sorry, but Microsoft or the PC vendor has never made anyone keep the original OS on it.
Yes they have. A PC has been sold whose BIOS verifies that the OS is Windows. It's called the Xbox. I know the Xbox is a game console, but it's only the beginning.
But now youre talking about a not so tech-savvy user, and youre assuming that they'll use Apache for a www server?
What about a tech-savvy user telling a not-so-tech-savvy user "if you want to share a few files, and you don't want to be subject to the security holes in both Windows's built-in file sharing and IIS Personal Edition, why not use this program?" That's the audience I was talking about.
It's an apples to oranges comparison because both companies didn't start development on their product simultaneously and therefore can't be compared in "coding speed" to each other.
Yes they did. I always thought Netscape Navigator (up to 4.x) was based on NCSA Mosaic, which became Spyglass Mosaic, which became Microsoft Internet Explorer (see IE's about box). After the Netscape fork of Mosaic (i.e. Mozilla Classic) began to show its limitations, development began on its replacement -- Gecko -- around which Mozilla.org built its next generation Internet browser.
It happens to me with Windows 98 with IE, but W2K with IE does not exhibit the same problem.
Under Windows 95, 98, and ME, the USER.EXE and GDI.EXE resource heaps are each limited to 64 kilobytes. (Windows NT, 2000, and XP have no such limit.) This bites me in the butt on K5 too.
Talk about cheap, I mean really. They _give_ you the server, and have the unmitigated gall to ask you to pay less than one dinner for two at a nice restaurant for the software that lets you author media for it.
QuickTime is not portable software. It runs only on PowerPC-based Macintosh computers and x86-based PCs; if you want to use an Alpha or Sun box as an encode server, tough shit. Bochs doesn't count because video encoding is arithmetic-heavy, and Bochs doesn't dynamically recompile. That must be a really nice restaurant for a dinner for two to equal the cost of a low-end new PC.
[DataGlyphs] appears to be more robust than raw encoding and thus must have smaller capacity per inch.
Each DataGlyphs bit-cell is 5x5 pixels. With this 1200 dpi printer you speak of, an 8x10 inch printable area can hold 4608000 bit-cells. Given 10 bits per byte (including Reed-Solomon error correction), 450 KB per page (900 KB per double sided page) is still a lot of machine-readable data.
Out of an office of about 30 people only two of us could hear the silly thing. It gave me massive headaches until we could figure out what the heck was going on. So yeah, there could be something in the higher or maybe lower ranges of a recording that some of us might find valuable. :-P
You're probably not hearing >19 kHz audio but rather stuff in 5-20 kHz. Those annoying toys often have DACs that operate at about 8 kHz, which leaves aliasing artifacts all over the spectrum from 4 kHz up. (4 kHz is about the frequency of the highest note on a standard piano.) They also tend to have cheap analog filters that don't do a good job of killing the aliasing.
Also on the Scope i was using was set to just connect the dots and not to do any kind of shaping of the wave.
Most DACs are sample'n'hold (turning waves at half sample rate into square waves), but "oversampling" DACs operate at 88 kHz or higher, using various methods of interpolation and convolution to drive the aliasing artifacts well into the high frequencies (30 kHz and above) where analog filters can easily take care of them. Some DACs (called "sigma-delta" or "1-bit") use only 1 bit per channel but run in the near-MHz range, letting the analog filters remove the dithering.
I think I read somewhere that the video game industry is bigger than hollywood, and they don't seem to b*ch nearly as much, while their medium is solely computers.
Nintendo has threatened to sue those who distribute legitimate homebrew GBA development hardware.
After all, it's their network. If you don't like it, go to another ISP.
For $200,000? Give me a break. Sometimes, an ISP may have a monopoly in a given geographical area.
Of course [ch* is] an access control mechanism. It allows the network or system administrator to control access to the files. What else would you call it? What it is not is a DRM technology because it still leaves the administrator in control.
However, unlike SDMI and similar proposals, chmod/chown/chgrp is not DRM and doesn't attempt to prevent the administrator from elevating her privileges to the point where she can access the contents of the files. The use of the words "access control" confused me because the language of the DMCA treats "access control" almost as a synonym for DRM.
The very notion that there is some process/account/structure that must bestow permission to an administrator, even if it is their own account, redefines the role of administrator to something else.
The point is that the administrator has full access to such process/account/structure that elevates her privileges. The safeguards are in there to prevent users from inadvertently f***ing up their $BIGNUM system.
The point is that the administrator should have permission to do anything, without any redundant "grant permission to myself" process involved.
No, it's a concession to the fact that administrators are human beings. Think of it as analogous to the safety on a firearm.
I think you meant to say that the Japanese language become obsolete when computers were introduced. Seriously, after the typewriter they had plenty of warning
No. Typewriters using kana (the Japanese phonetic script) and bopomofo (the Chinese native phonetic script, which superficially resembles katakana) had been around for a while. So had typewriters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. However, ASCII (a 7-bit standard which defines only 95 printable characters) doesn't support kana, bopomofo, Greek, or Cyrillic. Heck, ASCII doesn't even support Italian, Spanish, French, German, Finnish, Swedish, or any other Latin-alphabet-based language whose writing system uses diacritic marks.
International support is why NTFS and FAT32 use Unicode UTF-16 to represent file names on disk.
P.S. Don't call people "consumers". Even if they are Windows users, it's not nice. :-)
Then what is the correct term for people who go into Best Buy, buy a PC, and use only the operating system that Microsoft forced the PC vendor to pre-install because the buyer doesn't know better? I used "consumer" to refer to those who use Windows on their home computers not by choice but by ignorance of other options or by lack of drivers for proprietary devices.
Until a finished, free (for commercial as well as noncommercial use!) VBA interpreter is available, nobody'll handle Microsoft documents *quite* the way Microsoft's apps do.
If you want this, conribute to GNOME Basic by submitting patches or buying Ximian products.
The Robotcop download page states that no binaries are available for versions of Apache HTTP Server designed for M$ Windows, and the binaries that do exist (for Red Hat Linux x86 and FreeBSD x86) aren't very compatible with mod_ssl.
"So compile it yourself!" For one thing, according to the compilation instructions, those who want to compile Robotcop for Windows will have to wait a year (estimated) until Apache 2.0 is no longer eta but Released. For another, not everybody can afford a license for M$ Visual Studio, which is required to build Apache HTTP Server; apparently, this popular Win32 version of GCC doesn't cut it.
In other words, Robotcop won't work for consumers who serve web pages from their home workstation that runs Windows.
That way even the most hardcore human reader (or group of more casual readers behind a NAT) can click on 30-40 links in a minute
What about over 20 Million Members on one ISP's proxy? A story circulating around several tech news sites (about the high likelihood of AOL 8 using Mozilla's Gecko engine) places AOL's U.S. market share at about 30%. Do you really want to drive away 30% of your audience? What about the billion-plus people behind China's NAT?
There are infinite variations on this theme, like the transparent gif you mentioned, which makes it very difficult for evil spiders to avoid them. Just make sure you test with lynx/w3m first.
Just make sure that it takes at least two steps to get from content to the honeypot. This way, it becomes much more difficult to accidentally tab to a link and activate it, shutting off an entire ISP's proxied access to the web server.
1. This text based format is known as "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" (AKA "ASCII")
ASCII became obsolete the day the first PC was imported into Japan. Better use a Unicode encoding such as UTF-8, which has full backwards compatibility with ASCII.
I agree, but the only I see to really allow for good backwards compatibility while simultaneously allowing for new features would be maybe have the document file carry two copies of the document, one formatted in a way that the older one can read, and another with all the pretty formatting when needed.
Yes. Place all the *text* of the document in one area and the styles in another. (SimpleText on Mac OS 7.5 through 9.x did this.) Then you can go in with fscking Notepad (which doesn't have the 32 KB restriction under NT systems) and recover the text.
Depends. I almost get the impression they want to make the data entirely self-describing (think XML)
M$ can't make the data entirely self-describing. If M$ did, each document would contain a DOCTYPE that points to the specification of the format, and Microsoft would no longer be able to lock Office users into Office.
especially since it's illegal to figure out anything but what they tell you
This applies to Microsoft too. The DMCA (17 USC 1201(i)) permits circumvention of measures that collect a user's personal information. If Windows Media Player begins to phone home too much, a decent lawyer will note subsection (i), and any rational judge throw the DMCA out the window for that case.