Multiply by rolling it out to 250 users when your departments already seen several budget reversions this fiscal year. The state is not doing well financially right now and msaccess is already paid for.
I would assume they'd do something like locate does, where you build the database of files first and that speeds up the searches. Combine locate's generally nice ease of use with full text searching and you could have a nice project. Even better combine it with software that let's you search your pictures based on another picture or a picture you draw. I forget the name of this software, but it's installed on my home computer and it's really cool. It indexes your pictures and then you draw a picture of what you are looking for and it will find matches based on your drawing or based on another picture.
This picture matching and the Neuros's HISI feature that will search for songs based on a 30 second snippet are the real future of search on the desktop. The big ticket is still video search, but that won't be needed on the home desktop for a couple of years.
There's plenty of processor downtime that could be used to inventory and index all the files on a computer. Many programs do this now. The only real difference is that this time it's built in to the wm. Microsoft's fast find for office, and indexing service does this as does WordPerfect's Quick Find. I find these 3 products annoying though. Mainly because they aren't (or at least weren't) smart about doing their indexing during low usage periods.
Didn't Redhat suffer a similar problem a year or so ago by including the Taiwanese flag, implying that they were a separate country?
It's the cost of doing business internationally. You wouldn't build a manufacturing plant in another country without investigating applicable local laws for zoning, environmental impact, building codes, why would you release software internationally without doing similar checking?
Why don't you just use remote desktop instead of VNC? Or if you're still on w2k, encrypted(such as it is) netmeeting? Then there's nothing to install at the other end.
The past couple of days I've not only been getting a lot of time outs when connecting to Slashdot, I've also been getting re-directed to microsoft.com when I try to go to Newsforge. Usually happens once or twice the first thing in the morning then never again for the rest of the day.
Don't know if it's something messed up at the dns servers here or what. I keep hoping Newsforge or Slashdot might actually have an article addressing the problems, but nothing yet.
Sure. But try running much of that code for DOS, Win 3.11, or even Windows 95/98 on your XP box.
Unfortunately from a support standpoint, a lot of legacy code runs just fine on 2000/xp. So we couldn't use incompatability as a reason to move people off of things like WordPerfect 5.1 for Dos and WP 6.0 for dos.
Even the little things I did in Visual Basic for Dos ran just fine.
It is interesting to note that the facial expressions are not changed from picture to picture, but the robot appears to be displaying quite different emotions.
Um, no. I didn't see any difference in the face at all in the pictures. The only slight difference I noticed was in the last one where the lighting was better and I could see the full eyes. I hope the science that comes out of this is objective and useful.
actual pageview analysis from their (large) customer base
Which means that it is just a sample of all browser users, and not a random sample at that.
From the story:
WebSideStory's estimates are based on a daily survey of about 30 million browsers hitting thousands of different Web sites that use the company's Web analytics software, Johnston said.
So it only measures visitors to sites that have specifically installed the software. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that those sites that would install such software tend to be more computer oriented and thus visited by more tech savvy visitors, people pre-disposed to have an alternative browser. That may not be the case of course, but in no way is this a true random sample of websurfers.
This is more akin to the cnn poll on the cnn home page. There's no control in place to assure a random sample.
Even if this were a true random sample, which it isn't, since this is only a subset of all computer users, there would be a margin of error. The margin of error would be dependent on the total number of websurfers world wide and the total number of unique surfers in the sample.
The best that can be said for this is that visitors to a set number of sites might be trending to Mozilla.
Actually, I had a hard time playing Black and White and the difference between moving up and down and moving back and forth was part of it. I found some of the moves that needed to be made cumbersome and got frustrated. The game just didn't seem worth the effort of learning the interface.
I never claimed to have good eye/hand coordination. I'm probably around average for someone who didn't grow up playing fps games. Which means there are a lot people that will have the same manipulation problems I do.
So just how hard is it to manipulate a 3D environment on a 2D display with a 2D input device? I've had minor problems rotating objects in apps like Poser. I can only imagine how difficult some of this could be for people with impaired movement.
Not having had the opportunity to actually try this interface, I was wondering if it take a lot of practice to get good at rotating windows and moving the object around the environment.
How does the os know that I want to move an object up along the y axis instead of "back" along the z axis?
No, because humans want and need to know more about what's going on than just bare facts. Facts with no context aren't helpful. Saying that 10 men killed 100 men has no context. Why did they kill them? Who were the killers, who were the dead?
Here's another example:
10 men killed 100 men. The same 10 men drove into town.
10 men killed 100 men. The killers drove into town.
10 US soldiers killed 100 men. The killers drove into town.
Suddenly the word killer in the third example takes on a different meaning. Are "our boys" killers? Of course not! But "killers" is certainly an objective word in the second sentences. Because in the third example, assuming you're an American who supports our troops and I'm not claiming I am, by giving us more accurate information about the people who killed, suddenly a purely objective word in the second sentence takes on a negative connotation. People generally don't like the word "killer" applied to someone they support.
Think about how Fox news and CNN differ in their reporting of people who set off a bomb to specifically kill other people and purposely die in the act. CNN calls them "suicide bombers" indicating that they are people who kill others and commit suicide at the same time. Fox calls them homicide bombers, which I think is less accurate because it does not indicate that the bomber was committing suicide on purpose in the process.
But both descriptions tell us more about what happened then "an individual set off a bomb and purposefully died". Because we know that the words "suicide bomber" and "homicide bomber" have a particular political bias, and that knowledge gives us more information, not only about what happened but about the people presenting the news.
Everything else, while interesting to a human who can have a 'viewpoint' or stance, is irrelevant.
Hardly irrelevant when humans are the ones parsing the events and reacting to them. What you say may very well true in an academic discussion, but we're talking about the real world. We need to know more information to put it into context.
There are more elaborate examples than the suicide bomber/homicide bomber distinction. For example, what do you call the island approximately 120 miles southeast of China? Do you call it Taiwan or do you call it the Republic of China? The name you choose tells us about your politics. Or if you were doing an article about it would you refer to it as "That Island off the Coast of China" to avoid the various human viewpoints? http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/1671.cfm has more information about the name change.
Why do people think that a documentary must be a completely objective, facts only movie? Some of the greatest documentaries in film and print have been made from a social or political motive. Silent Spring and The Jungle spring to mind. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the Cousteau documentaries on sea life had an agenda.
The problem is that in dealing with social events, presenting events with no spin at all makes the report virtually worthless. Take these hoary old examples:
1) 10 men killed 100 men. 2) 10 patriots successfully defeated a horde of barbarous invaders, killing 100 of them. 3) We regret to report that 100 freedom fighters were killed by government thugs today. 10 members of the government's death squad brutally murdered 100 loyalists.
All three of those statements are true and they all describe the same event. But the most purely objective tells us nothing about what really happened.
Yes, but in the moral analogy they are supposed to be like terrorists. Just like Frank Gorshin wasn't African American, but the struggle in that episode was analagous to the Civil Rights struggle. Sort of.
The idea of having to cross the line when the stakes are high, including the use of torture, is central to the whole 3rd season. I think you just missed it
It wasn't that I missed the ideas, what I said was missing was the debate. In other ST shows, there would have been more exploration from various characters about the decisions being made. It seemed like very few people, except for Phlox who got little screen time most episodes, actually questions and debated Archer and his actions.
I'll admit I only watched the episodes once and that was months ago, so I'm not right up there with every thing.
Since we're talking about this in comparison to JMS and B5, it reminds me of a B5 episode. In it, a child has an easily cured disease that requires surgery. In his culture, have surgery means the child is demonically cursed and his soul will spend eternity in Hell. Like some Earth religions oppose blood transfusions. The episode revolves around Dr. Franklin's desire to cure the child via a minor surgery (think appendicitis -- easy to fix, but deadly if not treated). There's a great debate about medical ethics, respect for culture, etc. The Star Trek version is the one with David Ogden Stiers who falls in love with Troi's mother (can't spell her name) but has to commit ritual suicide in a month because his people do that on their 60th birthday.
In B5, the doctor performs the surgery thinking that the loving parents would be happy to have their child back and would forget their silly religious objections. Nope. They kill their son to save his soul.
These two episodes really discussed and explored the issues from multiple perspectives and showed the debate.
I just thought that exploration was missing from Enterprise. Maybe it's that I disagreed with the Enterprise message. Nothing Archer did came back to haunt him. No matter what moral precept he violated for the greater good, he continued to succeed. He destroyed the weapon with relatively minimal loss of life and it didn't look like he'd ever face the consequences of torturing prisoners and murdering innocents.
If they make the episodes topical to today's world issues they should certainly stir more interest
What's worse, is that they did make it topical, but never actually explored the moral implications that arose from the situation. This last season's arc was about what was essentially a terrorist act that destroyed half of Florida.
So you can see where they were trying to be topical. They just didn't do a good job of exploring the moral implications of Archer's actions, such as torture, theft, and possibly even murder, but I can't remember. All in the pursuit of the terrorists. The ethical debate on the use of torture is even more important now, and that debate was simply missing.
I wanted to see some actual ramifications, some thoughts, possibly even some regret that it had come to this. The Federation as presented in TOS, TNG,DS9, and even Voyager would be appalled at those actions. A lot of people disliked Voyager, but at least the discussion of the morals and ethics of the Federation in that situation. That was horribly missing in Enterprise.
I'll admit that they did at least show that some of the Xindi were compassionate individuals who were trying to protect their people.
A better analogy would be the post office deciding what does and doesn't get delivered.
The US Post Office already does this. There are numerous examples, valid and invalid, of the post office censoring mail, prosecuting people based on what they send through the mail, and just confiscating packages. google is a good start to read up on it.
I'm not saying its right, because obviously in some cases there were political reasons for the USPS's censorship. I'm just saying that the internet shouldn't necessarily be treated differently simply by virtue of it being the internet.
there is a legitimate reason to fear this slippery slope.
Is it really a slippery slope though? In the real world, the lack of kiddie porn at my local adult bookstore certainly hasn't had a chilling effect on the various types of porn I can buy. For a smallish midwestern town, there is apparently a strong demand for transvestites that like water sports and DP, etc. The current real world filter on kiddie porn doesn't seem to have had much effect here. About the only thing you can't buy in the store (at least that my admittedly limited imagination can think of) is bestiality.
I've seen some argue that it's okay to filter all illegal content of the internet.
That's not what BT is proposing. They won't be censoring the internet, they'll be blocking direct access to known kiddie porn web sites. That's why I said that the IT literate pedophile will be able to get around this by using the freely available means.
This appears to be a way to block pay for kiddie porn web sites from making money. And if they can't make money, maybe they won't produce it.
The warning lights should start flashing at that very instant. Different things are legal in different parts of the world. If we follow through with that argument, we should respect chinas right to filter out content they don't like. We should respect every single countrys right to filter out what they arbitrarily has defined as illegal.
Again, this already happens in real life. Try bringing a pound of pot into the US from a country where it is legal. We also ban the importation of various foods, plants, and animals as well as books as videos all of which are perfectly legal in their country of origin, but are illegal for importation into the US.
Do you honestly think that real world borders are as open as you'd like the internet to be?
Before everyone does the kneejerk censorhip response, this seems no different than what goes on in real life. Access to child pornography is blocked in real life. Your local Kwik-E-Mart is not going to be carrying Russian Lolitas Monthly next to the Playboys and Penthouses. Nor should they.
The only issue to be concerned with is whether or not the list of blocked sites is accurate or not.
And of course, this will not stop the knowledgable pedophile, but if it can keep some companies from earning money via paid subscriptions, good for BT.
joe bob can pickup a car manual and take apart[rebuild] an engine
Ah, but the problem with that analogy, besides the condescending name, is that Joe didn't just decide one day to rebuild his engine without ever looking under the hood before. He probably started out as a small kid helping his father change the oil, then did work on his own car in high school to save money, etc. In other words, he had experience with the system before undertaking the complicated task of rebuilding the engine. Most computer owners, like most car owners, have only ever driven, not been responsible for maintenance.
I wonder if a better analogy would be that this book is trying to teach people how to change their oil. Fedora and Mandrake are pretty user friendly distros. The install isn't complicated. But like changing your oil, there's still the possibility that when you are done, the thing won't run if you screw up badly enough. Odds are you won't though.
And once you get through this a couple of times, you'll feel more confident about rebuilding the engine or setting up that redundant clustering solution.
Ok, am I the only one who thinks that we should not be encouraging the Rutans? Sure, they were enemies of the Sontarans, but that doesn't make them our friends. Just ask Leela.
Yes. Yes, it does. Mandrakemove is a cd distribution designed to specifically to run from a cd. Buy the boxed edition and it stores your settings on the included usb key.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Public universities are especially problematic when it comes to security. First, you get the attitude from the faculty (and rightly in my opinion) that education should be free and open, so you get a lot of people fighting security except on student data. Second, as a public U, part of your mission is to act as a resource for the general public. Which means that for the most part, anyone off the street can walk into any building at any time. This is even worse in libraries, which actively encourage people to walk in and wander around.;)
True. In the example, I didn't want to get in to the details of deciding how close colors are to each other. But since you ask. If the designers feel that they don't want to let the user pick colors that might make the screen completely unreadable, there are two ways to handle it, both better than not letting them pick colors at all.
1) Limit the choices to the 216 so-called web safe colors. Then you can just make a list of colors that are too close to use as text/background combos and disallow them programmatically.
For example, in psuedocode:
if ( $new_text is in $current_background's kill file || $new_text is in $new_background's kill file ) {
message("These colors are too close and will make the screen unreadable."); } else {
$current_text=$new_text; }
2) Alternately, you could use a color matching algorithm and let the user choose from a full 32 bit color palatte. A little more work to run down a good algorithm than to just pick colors you don't think work together, but overall more flexible.
First, I'm not sure I agree with his statement that having folders open in the same window is the better way to do things. If I'm moving or copying a file from one folder to its parent, having two windows open is more efficient for me. It's easier for me to just drag the file between two open windows than to highlight the file, say Cut, then move up a level and say Paste.
The latest version Gnome does seem rather sparse to me. But that can also be a good thing for newbies.
One thing I noticed in the Ars Technica review at http://www.ars-technica.com/reviews/004/software/g nome-2.6/gnome-2.6-2.html, which really praised Gnome, was that when you open a window for the first time, the review said that the scroll bar can be in a random place. "[I]t doesn't know where you left the window last time, so it places them in seemingly random places." Huh? That's just silly. Make the default to select the first file in the window the first time a folder is opened. So there's a lot of work to be done on usability.
If this paraphrase from Petreley is accurate, then the Gnome coders do have a lot to learn about ease of use: "For example, one GNOME developer says there's a good reason why users can't change individual colors in desktop themes: Someone might accidentally make both the text and background white, thus rendering the text unreadable."
Um, if you're concernd about people setting text and background to the same color, just do a simple check before applying the color and prompt the user if the two colors match.
Petreley may have some good points, but he's made them in an unhelpful way. The same way the article submitter showed a lack of objectivity with the comment about pc world being a mainstream rag.
Slashdot Mirror
Multiply by rolling it out to 250 users when your departments already seen several budget reversions this fiscal year. The state is not doing well financially right now and msaccess is already paid for.
I just wish there was a free windows version.
There's also the KDE based Kexi which, when it gets actually usable, looks to be sweet.
I would assume they'd do something like locate does, where you build the database of files first and that speeds up the searches. Combine locate's generally nice ease of use with full text searching and you could have a nice project. Even better combine it with software that let's you search your pictures based on another picture or a picture you draw. I forget the name of this software, but it's installed on my home computer and it's really cool. It indexes your pictures and then you draw a picture of what you are looking for and it will find matches based on your drawing or based on another picture.
This picture matching and the Neuros's HISI feature that will search for songs based on a 30 second snippet are the real future of search on the desktop. The big ticket is still video search, but that won't be needed on the home desktop for a couple of years.
There's plenty of processor downtime that could be used to inventory and index all the files on a computer. Many programs do this now. The only real difference is that this time it's built in to the wm. Microsoft's fast find for office, and indexing service does this as does WordPerfect's Quick Find. I find these 3 products annoying though. Mainly because they aren't (or at least weren't) smart about doing their indexing during low usage periods.
Didn't Redhat suffer a similar problem a year or so ago by including the Taiwanese flag, implying that they were a separate country?
It's the cost of doing business internationally. You wouldn't build a manufacturing plant in another country without investigating applicable local laws for zoning, environmental impact, building codes, why would you release software internationally without doing similar checking?
Why don't you just use remote desktop instead of VNC? Or if you're still on w2k, encrypted(such as it is) netmeeting? Then there's nothing to install at the other end.
The past couple of days I've not only been getting a lot of time outs when connecting to Slashdot, I've also been getting re-directed to microsoft.com when I try to go to Newsforge. Usually happens once or twice the first thing in the morning then never again for the rest of the day.
Don't know if it's something messed up at the dns servers here or what. I keep hoping Newsforge or Slashdot might actually have an article addressing the problems, but nothing yet.
Sure. But try running much of that code for DOS, Win 3.11, or even Windows 95/98 on your XP box.
Unfortunately from a support standpoint, a lot of legacy code runs just fine on 2000/xp. So we couldn't use incompatability as a reason to move people off of things like WordPerfect 5.1 for Dos and WP 6.0 for dos.
Even the little things I did in Visual Basic for Dos ran just fine.
It is interesting to note that the facial expressions are not changed from picture to picture, but the robot appears to be displaying quite different emotions.
Um, no. I didn't see any difference in the face at all in the pictures. The only slight difference I noticed was in the last one where the lighting was better and I could see the full eyes. I hope the science that comes out of this is objective and useful.
actual pageview analysis from their (large) customer base
Which means that it is just a sample of all browser users, and not a random sample at that.
From the story:
WebSideStory's estimates are based on a daily survey of about 30 million browsers hitting thousands of different Web sites that use the company's Web analytics software, Johnston said.
So it only measures visitors to sites that have specifically installed the software. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that those sites that would install such software tend to be more computer oriented and thus visited by more tech savvy visitors, people pre-disposed to have an alternative browser. That may not be the case of course, but in no way is this a true random sample of websurfers.
This is more akin to the cnn poll on the cnn home page. There's no control in place to assure a random sample.
Even if this were a true random sample, which it isn't, since this is only a subset of all computer users, there would be a margin of error. The margin of error would be dependent on the total number of websurfers world wide and the total number of unique surfers in the sample.
The best that can be said for this is that visitors to a set number of sites might be trending to Mozilla.
Actually, I had a hard time playing Black and White and the difference between moving up and down and moving back and forth was part of it. I found some of the moves that needed to be made cumbersome and got frustrated. The game just didn't seem worth the effort of learning the interface.
I never claimed to have good eye/hand coordination. I'm probably around average for someone who didn't grow up playing fps games. Which means there are a lot people that will have the same manipulation problems I do.
So just how hard is it to manipulate a 3D environment on a 2D display with a 2D input device? I've had minor problems rotating objects in apps like Poser. I can only imagine how difficult some of this could be for people with impaired movement.
Not having had the opportunity to actually try this interface, I was wondering if it take a lot of practice to get good at rotating windows and moving the object around the environment.
How does the os know that I want to move an object up along the y axis instead of "back" along the z axis?
No, because humans want and need to know more about what's going on than just bare facts. Facts with no context aren't helpful. Saying that 10 men killed 100 men has no context. Why did they kill them? Who were the killers, who were the dead?
Here's another example:
10 men killed 100 men. The same 10 men drove into town.
10 men killed 100 men. The killers drove into town.
10 US soldiers killed 100 men. The killers drove into town.
Suddenly the word killer in the third example takes on a different meaning. Are "our boys" killers? Of course not! But "killers" is certainly an objective word in the second sentences. Because in the third example, assuming you're an American who supports our troops and I'm not claiming I am, by giving us more accurate information about the people who killed, suddenly a purely objective word in the second sentence takes on a negative connotation. People generally don't like the word "killer" applied to someone they support.
Think about how Fox news and CNN differ in their reporting of people who set off a bomb to specifically kill other people and purposely die in the act. CNN calls them "suicide bombers" indicating that they are people who kill others and commit suicide at the same time. Fox calls them homicide bombers, which I think is less accurate because it does not indicate that the bomber was committing suicide on purpose in the process.
But both descriptions tell us more about what happened then "an individual set off a bomb and purposefully died". Because we know that the words "suicide bomber" and "homicide bomber" have a particular political bias, and that knowledge gives us more information, not only about what happened but about the people presenting the news.
Everything else, while interesting to a human who can have a 'viewpoint' or stance, is irrelevant.
Hardly irrelevant when humans are the ones parsing the events and reacting to them. What you say may very well true in an academic discussion, but we're talking about the real world. We need to know more information to put it into context.
There are more elaborate examples than the suicide bomber/homicide bomber distinction. For example, what do you call the island approximately 120 miles southeast of China? Do you call it Taiwan or do you call it the Republic of China? The name you choose tells us about your politics. Or if you were doing an article about it would you refer to it as "That Island off the Coast of China" to avoid the various human viewpoints? http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/1671.cfm has more information about the name change.
Why do people think that a documentary must be a completely objective, facts only movie? Some of the greatest documentaries in film and print have been made from a social or political motive. Silent Spring and The Jungle spring to mind. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the Cousteau documentaries on sea life had an agenda.
The problem is that in dealing with social events, presenting events with no spin at all makes the report virtually worthless. Take these hoary old examples:
1) 10 men killed 100 men.
2) 10 patriots successfully defeated a horde of barbarous invaders, killing 100 of them.
3) We regret to report that 100 freedom fighters were killed by government thugs today. 10 members of the government's death squad brutally murdered 100 loyalists.
All three of those statements are true and they all describe the same event. But the most purely objective tells us nothing about what really happened.
The Xindi are open aggressors, not terrorists.
Yes, but in the moral analogy they are supposed to be like terrorists. Just like Frank Gorshin wasn't African American, but the struggle in that episode was analagous to the Civil Rights struggle. Sort of.
The idea of having to cross the line when the stakes are high, including the use of torture, is central to the whole 3rd season. I think you just missed it
It wasn't that I missed the ideas, what I said was missing was the debate. In other ST shows, there would have been more exploration from various characters about the decisions being made. It seemed like very few people, except for Phlox who got little screen time most episodes, actually questions and debated Archer and his actions.
I'll admit I only watched the episodes once and that was months ago, so I'm not right up there with every thing.
Since we're talking about this in comparison to JMS and B5, it reminds me of a B5 episode. In it, a child has an easily cured disease that requires surgery. In his culture, have surgery means the child is demonically cursed and his soul will spend eternity in Hell. Like some Earth religions oppose blood transfusions. The episode revolves around Dr. Franklin's desire to cure the child via a minor surgery (think appendicitis -- easy to fix, but deadly if not treated). There's a great debate about medical ethics, respect for culture, etc. The Star Trek version is the one with David Ogden Stiers who falls in love with Troi's mother (can't spell her name) but has to commit ritual suicide in a month because his people do that on their 60th birthday.
In B5, the doctor performs the surgery thinking that the loving parents would be happy to have their child back and would forget their silly religious objections. Nope. They kill their son to save his soul.
These two episodes really discussed and explored the issues from multiple perspectives and showed the debate.
I just thought that exploration was missing from Enterprise. Maybe it's that I disagreed with the Enterprise message. Nothing Archer did came back to haunt him. No matter what moral precept he violated for the greater good, he continued to succeed. He destroyed the weapon with relatively minimal loss of life and it didn't look like he'd ever face the consequences of torturing prisoners and murdering innocents.
If they make the episodes topical to today's world issues they should certainly stir more interest
What's worse, is that they did make it topical, but never actually explored the moral implications that arose from the situation. This last season's arc was about what was essentially a terrorist act that destroyed half of Florida.
So you can see where they were trying to be topical. They just didn't do a good job of exploring the moral implications of Archer's actions, such as torture, theft, and possibly even murder, but I can't remember. All in the pursuit of the terrorists. The ethical debate on the use of torture is even more important now, and that debate was simply missing.
I wanted to see some actual ramifications, some thoughts, possibly even some regret that it had come to this. The Federation as presented in TOS, TNG,DS9, and even Voyager would be appalled at those actions. A lot of people disliked Voyager, but at least the discussion of the morals and ethics of the Federation in that situation. That was horribly missing in Enterprise.
I'll admit that they did at least show that some of the Xindi were compassionate individuals who were trying to protect their people.
A better analogy would be the post office deciding what does and doesn't get delivered.
The US Post Office already does this. There are numerous examples, valid and invalid, of the post office censoring mail, prosecuting people based on what they send through the mail, and just confiscating packages. google is a good start to read up on it.
I'm not saying its right, because obviously in some cases there were political reasons for the USPS's censorship. I'm just saying that the internet shouldn't necessarily be treated differently simply by virtue of it being the internet.
there is a legitimate reason to fear this slippery slope.
Is it really a slippery slope though? In the real world, the lack of kiddie porn at my local adult bookstore certainly hasn't had a chilling effect on the various types of porn I can buy. For a smallish midwestern town, there is apparently a strong demand for transvestites that like water sports and DP, etc. The current real world filter on kiddie porn doesn't seem to have had much effect here. About the only thing you can't buy in the store (at least that my admittedly limited imagination can think of) is bestiality.
I've seen some argue that it's okay to filter all illegal content of the internet.
That's not what BT is proposing. They won't be censoring the internet, they'll be blocking direct access to known kiddie porn web sites. That's why I said that the IT literate pedophile will be able to get around this by using the freely available means.
This appears to be a way to block pay for kiddie porn web sites from making money. And if they can't make money, maybe they won't produce it.
The warning lights should start flashing at that very instant. Different things are legal in different parts of the world. If we follow through with that argument, we should respect chinas right to filter out content they don't like. We should respect every single countrys right to filter out what they arbitrarily has defined as illegal.
Again, this already happens in real life. Try bringing a pound of pot into the US from a country where it is legal. We also ban the importation of various foods, plants, and animals as well as books as videos all of which are perfectly legal in their country of origin, but are illegal for importation into the US.
Do you honestly think that real world borders are as open as you'd like the internet to be?
Before everyone does the kneejerk censorhip response, this seems no different than what goes on in real life. Access to child pornography is blocked in real life. Your local Kwik-E-Mart is not going to be carrying Russian Lolitas Monthly next to the Playboys and Penthouses. Nor should they.
The only issue to be concerned with is whether or not the list of blocked sites is accurate or not.
And of course, this will not stop the knowledgable pedophile, but if it can keep some companies from earning money via paid subscriptions, good for BT.
joe bob can pickup a car manual and take apart[rebuild] an engine
Ah, but the problem with that analogy, besides the condescending name, is that Joe didn't just decide one day to rebuild his engine without ever looking under the hood before. He probably started out as a small kid helping his father change the oil, then did work on his own car in high school to save money, etc. In other words, he had experience with the system before undertaking the complicated task of rebuilding the engine. Most computer owners, like most car owners, have only ever driven, not been responsible for maintenance.
I wonder if a better analogy would be that this book is trying to teach people how to change their oil. Fedora and Mandrake are pretty user friendly distros. The install isn't complicated. But like changing your oil, there's still the possibility that when you are done, the thing won't run if you screw up badly enough. Odds are you won't though.
And once you get through this a couple of times, you'll feel more confident about rebuilding the engine or setting up that redundant clustering solution.
Ok, am I the only one who thinks that we should not be encouraging the Rutans? Sure, they were enemies of the Sontarans, but that doesn't make them our friends. Just ask Leela.
but does it have a Live CD sampler?
Yes. Yes, it does. Mandrakemove is a cd distribution designed to specifically to run from a cd. Buy the boxed edition and it stores your settings on the included usb key.
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/mandrakemove/
Possibly. Much wildlife photography presented as being "real" is faked. Some of the most egregious examples are from the old Disney nature shows.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Public universities are especially problematic when it comes to security. First, you get the attitude from the faculty (and rightly in my opinion) that education should be free and open, so you get a lot of people fighting security except on student data. Second, as a public U, part of your mission is to act as a resource for the general public. Which means that for the most part, anyone off the street can walk into any building at any time. This is even worse in libraries, which actively encourage people to walk in and wander around. ;)
True. In the example, I didn't want to get in to the details of deciding how close colors are to each other. But since you ask. If the designers feel that they don't want to let the user pick colors that might make the screen completely unreadable, there are two ways to handle it, both better than not letting them pick colors at all.
1) Limit the choices to the 216 so-called web safe colors. Then you can just make a list of colors that are too close to use as text/background combos and disallow them programmatically.
For example, in psuedocode:
if ( $new_text is in $current_background's kill file || $new_text is in $new_background's kill file )
{
message("These colors are too close and will make the screen unreadable.");
}
else
{
$current_text=$new_text;
}
2) Alternately, you could use a color matching algorithm and let the user choose from a full 32 bit color palatte. A little more work to run down a good algorithm than to just pick colors you don't think work together, but overall more flexible.
First, I'm not sure I agree with his statement that having folders open in the same window is the better way to do things. If I'm moving or copying a file from one folder to its parent, having two windows open is more efficient for me. It's easier for me to just drag the file between two open windows than to highlight the file, say Cut, then move up a level and say Paste.
g nome-2.6/gnome-2.6-2.html, which really praised Gnome, was that when you open a window for the first time, the review said that the scroll bar can be in a random place. "[I]t doesn't know where you left the window last time, so it places them in seemingly random places." Huh? That's just silly. Make the default to select the first file in the window the first time a folder is opened. So there's a lot of work to be done on usability.
The latest version Gnome does seem rather sparse to me. But that can also be a good thing for newbies.
One thing I noticed in the Ars Technica review at http://www.ars-technica.com/reviews/004/software/
If this paraphrase from Petreley is accurate, then the Gnome coders do have a lot to learn about ease of use: "For example, one GNOME developer says there's a good reason why users can't change individual colors in desktop themes: Someone might accidentally make both the text and background white, thus rendering the text unreadable."
Um, if you're concernd about people setting text and background to the same color, just do a simple check before applying the color and prompt the user if the two colors match.
Petreley may have some good points, but he's made them in an unhelpful way. The same way the article submitter showed a lack of objectivity with the comment about pc world being a mainstream rag.