Re:Improvement over Netscape, but barely
on
Mozilla M8 Released
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I suspect that they intend to put this behavior in, and just haven't done it yet. It exists (alebeit with some problems, especially with pages that have big complex tables, slashdot sometimes being one of them) in the current releases of Netscape, and has for some time. I doubt that they would remove this feature, as many users (myself included) would bitch quite a bit about it until they fixed it.
I have a friend who works at Digital/Compaq. The 1.5 GHz chips are a reality, although they may not be quite into production. Digital is putting out prototype systems that, when the design is completed, will support 256 1.4 GHz Alphas with multiple gigs of ram per chip. That will be one sweet assed machine!
I have read a couple things recently (one was a recent article on slashdot) that have indicated that the 'authorities,' in the USA at least, have been very unsuccessful at getting any useful information out of confiscated computers, even without crypto. They just don't know how to find the info among the other crap on the computer. Wanna make it so that they really can't find your stuff? Just bury it in a directory along with a few thousand half scrambled copies of the anarchist's cookbook, some phone phreaking texts, and other legal but suspicious info. If you do it well, it would seem that there's a significant chance that the 'authorities' wouldn't be able to sift the stuff you're hiding from the other crap.
Who needs 128 bit crypto when you can have a haystack for free? Who needs to restrict crypto when the restrictions do absolutely nothing, even when nobody breaks them? Why perpetuate the ineffectual restrictions when they're hurting your own domsetic businesses?
I learned C/C++ with the beautiful TC 3.0 environment. People look at the colors I set up in other editors like I'm daft. I'm not daft, I just envision all syntax highliting as being the way it was in that editor. Easy to read, colors contrasted well. As far as where they've gone in the future, A while a go (back in the closing days of win 3.1), I used Borland C++ 4.51, which was a windows version of their IDE. It felt and behaved the same way good old TC did, it just ran in windows. I didn't have to relearn any hotkeys, didn't have to fix the colors. It had a **GREAT** debugger (makes all other debuggers I've ever seen look like utter crap). It didn't do well with 32-bit environments, though, and so I had to ditch it. I struggled on with it for a little while, after I tried to use VC++ (poor old 1.0 which was really a pile of diarhea) and was horrified. Seeing VC 1 was enough to convince myself that I could work with BC++ until I found something better. Then Borland didn't put out new versions for a while. Then BC 5 was horribly buggy. Then VisualStudio came out, and Borland was left in the dust. Sadly, OWL more or less went with it. One code wizard I talked to made the point that, from his expertise, OWL was definitely superior to MFC (or at least what MFC was at that point), but Borland's failure to deliver product updates and bugfixes caused many customers to switch over to Visual Studio, and things have never been the same since. Now, after long last, I have made friends with gcc and make, but it isn't the same. I would love to have an IDE that actually worked. There's a handful of half-functional ones around now, but nothing that I would want to use on a daily basis. At this point, I have done more linux software development using UltraEdit on a windows box editing files over FTP, with a telnet session open to run make, and another one to debug in (command line debuggers are the bane of a programmer's work, gdb is no exception).
Anyways, if Borland/Inprise came out with a really spiffy IDE for linux, I would probably make it one of the only pieces of software I've actually bought (other notables have been my RedHat cds and a copy of Matlab (I didn't buy it myself, but it was paid for legitimately)).
Lots of sites have their routers block ICMP packets because so many DoS attacks use ICMP, and you don't generally need ICMP for anything besides ping and traceroute, so they don't lose much of any functionality. Blocking ICMP is actually a reasonably intelligent solution if you're stuck using products that don't fix their vulnerabilities for months (gee, who might I be talking about there?).
$ diff -u VNC_OR_SOME_GOOD_REMOTE_CONTROL_PROG BO2K - bloat + speed - tell the user you installed it
I never understood why people thought BO was a security exploit. It's a quiet remote control app. The fact that people have coded silent installers is not a security hole, either. I could probably, in a couple hours, write a little proggie to silently install VNC on someone's computer. Or any other remote control app for that matter (VNC would be easy because it's GPL'd).
I have installed both RedHat 5.2 and Debian 2.1, and, while neither of them was particularly difficult for me, I found the Debian install to be incredibly tedious. It took me over an hour just to go through the package selection process. Granted, I would scream bloody murder if the installer took away the ability to select individual packages, but I much prefer RedHat's heirarchical package selection system. If I have disk space, and I know what I want to do with the system, I can just select a group of packages by what they do, and then go in and remove the stupid little programs that I'll never use.
Also, in case you couldn't tell from the previous statement, I'm a fan of trees (real and electronic), and of heirarchical organizations withing my computer. Subdirectories are a good thing. I much prefer RedHat's organization of having all the init stuff in/etc/rc.d/ rather than just in/etc. And having the rc scripts have intelligent names makes things much easier when you're glancing at something and want to be able to pull out info quickly. It also makes things easier on a newbie. For example, it only took me a couple minutes to find where the system init script was. The fact that it had sysinit in its filename made it that much easier.
As far as package management after the install, I could give a flying rat's a$$. I haven't used RPM since I installed linux (and that was a first time install for me). I have downloaded a few gigs (yes, GB) of sources in.tar.gz since I installed Linux in January, though.
I think this may have to do with the mind set of people who tend to use WindowMaker (this is true for me, and I suspect I am not alone in this). WMaker is a simple, slick, and fast interface. No extraneous googaws, bells, nor whistles. It's a good window manager that does what it needs to do to be useful and effective, it's very configurable (and configuration is a damn sight easier than with E). People who want this kind of interface are less likely to want all the googeegawgaws of a desktop suite. I used KDE for a while, but found the windowmanager was a big sluggish. I tried running WMaker as the window manager inside KDE, but it didn't work very well. So I adjusted the WMaker startup scripts to launch just the KDE file manager in the background (I found I didn't need the panel, esp. since it didn't work with WindowMaker). After a while, I realized that I never really used the KDE file manager, so I turned that off. So now I'm back to where I started (sort of) with window managers from when I started with Linux. I just have a much cooler looking color scheme, and lots of hotkeys mapped to the windows key (xkeycaps is fun). The only part of KDE I still use is the application menu tree (I have use a perl script that converts it on the fly into WMaker menu format) and a couple of the applications.
The bottom line is that the type of person who is attracted to WindowMaker's advantages doesn't need the extra overhead of a full desktop suite.
While I don't think it has anything to do with the "Open Source" term, I would have to agree with ESR that the GNU/Free-Software/OpenSource community has taken off in the last year or two.
I looked at Linux before, and concluded that, while it was a stable system that could do most things I wanted, there were a couple important pieces that were missing that would cause me to be jumping back and forth between Windows and Linux. I did not (and still don't) want to be jumping back and forth between OS's, at least not on a single computer.
However, in the past year, the "gaps" in linux have been filled, some of them by commercial software, others by Free/OpenSource software. Thus it came to be that, in January, after Christmas break, I bought a new hard drive (the simplest solution to the partitioning problem) and a copy of RedHat and installed Linux.
I have not had Windows running for any appreciable amount of time since then except to do two things:
1) Play Starcraft (grin) 2) Rip CD's to MP3's
The only reason I do the latter in Windows is because I have a sensitive ear (when you play violin for 12+ years, you either get a sensitive ear, or you play violin badly), and the Fraunhoffer codec for windows off of #warez_is_31337_script_kiddie_d00d is much better and a good bit faster than bladenc. Since I tend to leave my computer alone while I'm ripping cd's, it doesn't really matter what OS I'm running, as long as it doesn't crash in the middle. The exception to this is when I was serving files off my computer. When that was important, I would rip the cd's in linux to wav files (which works just fine) and then encode them in VMWare. Sure, it would take longer, but I didn't have to bring my system down.
Now, look back two years. Look at the software I mentioned using. Granted, it wasn't the real reason I didn't switch over to Linux sooner, but how much of the software I mentioned was very mature two years ago. Now look at the two categories of software that determined my switch: wordprocessors, and IDE's. Sure, there have been commercial IDE's around for a while, but I wasn't about to pay for one of them. Now I can play around with a couple different IDE's that are functional at least. They're not as spiffed up as I'd like (You have to admit, M$ Visual Studio is a pretty good tool), but they work. And Corel came out with a $free$ version of WordPerfect for Linux, so that arena is solved. Of course, when KOffice becomes reasonably stable, I will probably switch over to using it. But for the time being, I don't write enough papers for the defficiencies in WP8 to bother me.
Of course, my experience with Linux has been better than many. I avoided the whole disk partitioning issue by buying a second hard drive explicitly for Linux. I read (past and present tense) man pages, HOWTO's, README's, INSTALL docs, and all manner of other documentation before I give up or ask for help. I meddle around, carefully, but thoroughly, assuming that whatever I want to do can probably be done if I can only find the program/command-line-option to do it. Thus, after a month or two of using Linux, I found my self giving help to people who had used it for much longer than I.
The catch with linux is that there's nobody to file suit against. Linux isn't 'owned' by any one person. Trying to file suit against Linux is somewhat like a house builder trying to sue Habitat for Humanity. Not only would it not work, but it would be ludicrous too.
I think you are in a small minority in your method of using the internet to purchase things. While many people still don't order things directly through the web, that is changing. And most people who mailorder stuff use a credit card, if only because it's simpler and faster. Many places now are starting to have online ordering be the *only* method of ordering they accept.
However, I do agree with your final statement regarding taxing interstate transactions. The states clearly can't tax this type of thing (constitution explicitly prohibits states taxing trade across their borders). As you said,.gov will have to tax all or no interstate transactions. And how much do you want to bet that if they tax all interstate transactions, then they have to tax all intrastate transactions too, or go back to none at all?
The very nature of the internet resists regulation, restriction, and censorship. Any attempt at any of these will have to fight a very up hill battle. If a government is going to operate at all, it does have to collect some taxes and tariffs, but taxing everything is not the right thing. Other ahenglanderhem countries have gone down the road of taxing anything and everything to the point of ridiculousness ahemciderahem before, and shit came down. Any person who has some common sense and does not have a vested interest in government getting bigger can tell you that it is better and more reasonable to work on cutting crap out of the current budget[1] than it is to just keep on taxing things more and more. If you think about it a bit, taxes are probably (I am in no way an economist...) a significant cost of inflation. Tax goods, their price goes up, so people need to be paid more so that they can afford things. Tax incomes more, same result. Tax businesses more and they need to raise the price of their goods to maintain their profit margin. Tax property, and people need more income to pay for it. Etc. ad nauseam.
[1] 'crap' not including funding for schools, medicare/aid, sceience grants, NASA, etc., but most definitely including making the military budget more reasonable. While multi-billion dollar NASA projects are a bit excessive, NASA has shown that it can make things more economical wit ha smaller budget. Now give them their money back and watch them flourish! I would wager that the vast majority of technological advancements in the last 30 years or so have been greatly affected (positively) by NASA, if not driven entirely by them.
Wow, that rant diverged from where it started a long ways!
I have the exact same motherboard, and I simply filled up all the on board controllers and needed more hard drive space. I got the Promise Ultra33 card, and it works wonderfully. With it, I can even boot off of hde3! If you want a *lot* of drives, the Promise card is well behaved enough that you can have more than one of them in your system and they won't step on each other. I highly recommend it!
Granted I don't want people listening in to my phone conversations (although 99.99% of the time I don't say anything that I would really care if someone else heard), and thus my cordless phone uses spread spectrum stuff. However, how can you make it illegal to listen to a broadcast that is *everywhere*? What if I developed an organ that allowed me to sense radio transmissions? Would *I* be illegal? The radio transmissions are going right through me and you and everyone else! Banning the sale of recievers that can pick up these frequencies is pointless. I am in favor of the laws that prohibit disclosure, but not the ones that ban listening. I don't want people to listen to me, but I am also aware of how ridiculous it is to say that you can't listen to the signals that are passing through the air all around you. In summary, listen, but don't tell, although that sounds about as ridiculous as don't sense the radiation passing through your body...
The vast majority of the human populat lives within a hundred miles or so of the coast. Africa is no exception. I suspect (no data to back it up except logic based on geographical conditions) that in Africa, the percentage within 100 miles of the coast is larger than in most other continents. Thus, while it will not provide easy access for those that live a ways inland, it will provide access for the majority of the population.
Also one might ask why they don't run the cable around the coast underground instead of undersea. I suspect this too is related to geographic constraints. Africa's coast is very rocky, and is a cliff in a lot of places. Laying an underground cable in stone is rather expensive. Also, it requires that all the governments along the coast give you permission and land to lay the cable all at once, and they have to agree on where you can lay the cable at the borders. Not exactly a fun set of negotiations I suspect, nor an easy one. If you lay the cable undersea, all you have to do is negotiate with each individual country independently where they want their link(s) to come in from the ocean.
As far as the 1,2$$,$$$,$$$ is concerned, there is a lot of money in the oil industry in Africa. I suspect that, at least indirectly, the oil industry is funding most of this, since at the very least, the oil industry is the prime source of revenue for many, if not most or all African governments.
Well, your experience with diamond is much different from mine. I have never had a diamond product whose drivers worked well *Except* their cards with the S3 chipsets on them.
In my experience with many computers, I have had many bad experiences with Phoenix BIOS, and many good experiences with AMIBIOS (American Megatrends). The AMIBios on my 486 from 1993 has a better configuration utility than the Phoenix BIOS on my parent's P166 from '95 or '96 (I don't remember). Don't you love it when your BIOS lets Windows reconfigure your serial ports when you have told Windows not to do so, and told the bios not to be Plug'n'Pray? This is just one more way in which Phoneix BIOS will suck.
As far as their statistics, from looking at separate motherboards, I think that most of them still have AMIBIOS on them. It is the prefab machines (Dell, Micron, etc.) that tend to have Phoenix on them. As long as component mobos have a good bios like AMI, and as long as it is possible for me to build my computer from components, I will do just that, and have a superior machine for a lot less money (case in point: my most recent machine cost me $2500 to make from parts. An equivalent machine from any prefab place would have cost me at least $3500! The M$ tax does not make that big a price difference.)
In regards to filling the capacity of the human brain:
I am inclined to agree with another reply to this comment that nobody really uses anywhere near the full theoretical capacity of their brain. However, I don't think anyone could survive even coming close, so that's a moot point.
Just like people don't let their computer drives fill up completely, the same thing happens in our brain. When concious memory and whatnot get even a little bit full, things get dumped into longer term memory. As long term memory starts to have some stuff in it, you start forgetting unimportant things. Anyone who has had kids or a sibling that is much younger than them (I have a brother 10 years younger than me) has quite likely noticed how good a child's memory is. My parents told me that once, when I was about 3, we were looking to meet someone to go on a canoe trip. My parents were trying to remember what color the canoe was. I immediately said it was yellow. Now, nobody in the family had seen these people for over a year, yet, for me as a young child, it clearly didn't require much digging through memories to find what I was looking for. Memory and/or storange in any for does not perform well when it is full. Judging by certain aspets of the speed of human responses, our memory needs to be quite empty to perform well.
As someone else pointed out, also, if you remember too much, it can drive you insane. If you look at your own memory, you can probably find memories that are nearly as vivid as what you experience at the moment. The human brain clearly has the capacity to store a LOT of very vivid memories. Now, imagine if you could remember a LOT as vividly as if it were happening. How could you tell what was real and what was memory intruding on your senses? You would quickly go insane, and probably do your best to kill yourself, or at least do something to yourself so drastic that it would be sure to bring you out of memory. Of course, you would remember that, and next time have to do something even worse.
Forgetting is necessary not only for individual survival, but also for survival of society. Imagine how much everyone would hate everyone else if they remembered vividly ever unkind thing anyone else had ever done or said to them or their friends? Society relies on people forgetting.
There was a Sliders episode which, like most of the recent Sliders episodes, was cheezy, but also dealt with some of the heart of this issue. I imagine that it would be much, much more difficult to clone just a leg, than to clone a whole person. The problem is, what do you do with the rest of the body. It is a clone of you, and thus, by any sane reasoning, has all the rights and protections you should have. Sure, you can never educate them, other than to impregnate in their mind that they exist to provide you with replacement body parts. Self sacrifice to save someone else's life always has been a noble purpose, but conditioning thousands, if not millions of people that self-sacrifice is their only purpose in life is definitely cruel. Cloning a genius after they die could prove to be a great boon for technology, but it would also, no doubt, make the clone's life hell. They would spend their whole life trying to live up to what their previous self did. It would be far better, I think, to track traits of people, and encourage geniuses to breed together. You also might argue that one should encourage geniuses to breed with morons. Again, either way has serious moral difficulties. One way favors the production of an elite class, which would certainly bring discrimination and unrest. The other way might raise the intelligence of many people, but also might slow, or even reverse, evolutionary progress if practiced for a long time. It would be a good experiment into how much of intelligence and such things is genetic, and how much is innate, although I doubt that any human would ever be capable of treating it in a sufficiently objective way so as to get accurate results out of it.
What's the bottom line? Any kind of messing with the way evolution naturally procedes can cause serious practical and moral problems. Not to say that the pursuit of this kind of knowledge should be avoided, but its use should be thought out carefully. Research laboratories should not be shot up like abortion clinics occaisonally have, but they also shouldn't go crazy with putting this kind of technology into every aspect of our lives.
Lesson #1 in computing: When all else fails, RTFM, or in this case, the FAQ, which, if you bothered to look, is linked from every single stats page right at the top, and contains full instructions for how to join a team. As for the username, you answered your own question. If the only thing it asked for was an e-mail address, then it's a fairly safe guess that your e-mail address is your username, and you have to go fill in a password somewhere (that is answered by the FAQ)
Not to quibble about semi-irrelevant things, but Tesla invented the radio before Marconi did, and even got the Supreme Court to rule in his favor on the patent.
I think many companies are sidling up beside RedHat for a couple simple reasons: * RedHat has a well known name * RedHat is the most commonly used distribution, especially for people that lean towards Joe Schmoe Desktop User, which is the type of person many of these companies are developing for * RedHat is the largest and most dense concentration of Linux developers, etc. and has money to throw at them. While there may be other, 'more dense' spots, they tend not to be as concrete an entity as RedHat, and few of them actively throw as much money at Linux development as RedHat does.
So, I would watch RedHat to make sure they don't start doing bad things, I would start from the assumption that they are going to keep up their past track record, which has been, on net, very beneficial for the Linux community.
In order to develop commercially supported software, you need a standard base to support it on. While I am not very knowledgeable on the subject, my impression is that, while the LSB (Linux Standard Base) is a good thing and is moving along, it is still too nebulous and incomplete a standard for a commercial entity to 'support' it. Until the LSB is mature, RedHat is probably a company's best choice for a standard base to support.
I think one of the big reasons for PPC linux is one of the same ones that shows up for x86 users. They want to run linux on the hardware they already have and know. PC's may be cheaper, but hardware you already own is free. Also, many many people who use linux (I might even dare to say a majority of them) dual boot. The reasons for dual booting a PC exist in the same for for Mac users. While I may not like the MacOS interface, I can understand and respect that, if someone has lots of software they already know how to use, and lots of documents they have created with them, they won't want to give up their original OS. I run linux 99% of the time, but I still have a Windows partition because there are some apps that don't exist yet for linux, or at least not in a form that I find acceptable. I've booted Windows less than a dozen times this year, but I still have it there.
If they were really pulling it out of good taste, and didn't want to show it, then why did it air in Canada? This isn't about good and bad taste, it is about avoiding bad press, which they have, for the most part, done.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that they intend to put this behavior in, and just haven't done it yet. It exists (alebeit with some problems, especially with pages that have big complex tables, slashdot sometimes being one of them) in the current releases of Netscape, and has for some time. I doubt that they would remove this feature, as many users (myself included) would bitch quite a bit about it until they fixed it.
I have a friend who works at Digital/Compaq. The 1.5 GHz chips are a reality, although they may not be quite into production. Digital is putting out prototype systems that, when the design is completed, will support 256 1.4 GHz Alphas with multiple gigs of ram per chip. That will be one sweet assed machine!
I have read a couple things recently (one was a recent article on slashdot) that have indicated that the 'authorities,' in the USA at least, have been very unsuccessful at getting any useful information out of confiscated computers, even without crypto. They just don't know how to find the info among the other crap on the computer. Wanna make it so that they really can't find your stuff? Just bury it in a directory along with a few thousand half scrambled copies of the anarchist's cookbook, some phone phreaking texts, and other legal but suspicious info. If you do it well, it would seem that there's a significant chance that the 'authorities' wouldn't be able to sift the stuff you're hiding from the other crap.
Who needs 128 bit crypto when you can have a haystack for free?
Who needs to restrict crypto when the restrictions do absolutely nothing, even when nobody breaks them?
Why perpetuate the ineffectual restrictions when they're hurting your own domsetic businesses?
I learned C/C++ with the beautiful TC 3.0 environment. People look at the colors I set up in other editors like I'm daft. I'm not daft, I just envision all syntax highliting as being the way it was in that editor. Easy to read, colors contrasted well. As far as where they've gone in the future, A while a go (back in the closing days of win 3.1), I used Borland C++ 4.51, which was a windows version of their IDE. It felt and behaved the same way good old TC did, it just ran in windows. I didn't have to relearn any hotkeys, didn't have to fix the colors. It had a **GREAT** debugger (makes all other debuggers I've ever seen look like utter crap). It didn't do well with 32-bit environments, though, and so I had to ditch it. I struggled on with it for a little while, after I tried to use VC++ (poor old 1.0 which was really a pile of diarhea) and was horrified. Seeing VC 1 was enough to convince myself that I could work with BC++ until I found something better. Then Borland didn't put out new versions for a while. Then BC 5 was horribly buggy. Then VisualStudio came out, and Borland was left in the dust. Sadly, OWL more or less went with it. One code wizard I talked to made the point that, from his expertise, OWL was definitely superior to MFC (or at least what MFC was at that point), but Borland's failure to deliver product updates and bugfixes caused many customers to switch over to Visual Studio, and things have never been the same since. Now, after long last, I have made friends with gcc and make, but it isn't the same. I would love to have an IDE that actually worked. There's a handful of half-functional ones around now, but nothing that I would want to use on a daily basis. At this point, I have done more linux software development using UltraEdit on a windows box editing files over FTP, with a telnet session open to run make, and another one to debug in (command line debuggers are the bane of a programmer's work, gdb is no exception).
Anyways, if Borland/Inprise came out with a really spiffy IDE for linux, I would probably make it one of the only pieces of software I've actually bought (other notables have been my RedHat cds and a copy of Matlab (I didn't buy it myself, but it was paid for legitimately)).
Lots of sites have their routers block ICMP packets because so many DoS attacks use ICMP, and you don't generally need ICMP for anything besides ping and traceroute, so they don't lose much of any functionality. Blocking ICMP is actually a reasonably intelligent solution if you're stuck using products that don't fix their vulnerabilities for months (gee, who might I be talking about there?).
Agreed...
$ diff -u VNC_OR_SOME_GOOD_REMOTE_CONTROL_PROG BO2K
- bloat
+ speed
- tell the user you installed it
I never understood why people thought BO was a security exploit. It's a quiet remote control app. The fact that people have coded silent installers is not a security hole, either. I could probably, in a couple hours, write a little proggie to silently install VNC on someone's computer. Or any other remote control app for that matter (VNC would be easy because it's GPL'd).
I have installed both RedHat 5.2 and Debian 2.1, and, while neither of them was particularly difficult for me, I found the Debian install to be incredibly tedious. It took me over an hour just to go through the package selection process. Granted, I would scream bloody murder if the installer took away the ability to select individual packages, but I much prefer RedHat's heirarchical package selection system. If I have disk space, and I know what I want to do with the system, I can just select a group of packages by what they do, and then go in and remove the stupid little programs that I'll never use.
/etc/rc.d/ rather than just in /etc. And having the rc scripts have intelligent names makes things much easier when you're glancing at something and want to be able to pull out info quickly. It also makes things easier on a newbie. For example, it only took me a couple minutes to find where the system init script was. The fact that it had sysinit in its filename made it that much easier.
.tar.gz since I installed Linux in January, though.
Also, in case you couldn't tell from the previous statement, I'm a fan of trees (real and electronic), and of heirarchical organizations withing my computer. Subdirectories are a good thing. I much prefer RedHat's organization of having all the init stuff in
As far as package management after the install, I could give a flying rat's a$$. I haven't used RPM since I installed linux (and that was a first time install for me). I have downloaded a few gigs (yes, GB) of sources in
I think this may have to do with the mind set of people who tend to use WindowMaker (this is true for me, and I suspect I am not alone in this). WMaker is a simple, slick, and fast interface. No extraneous googaws, bells, nor whistles. It's a good window manager that does what it needs to do to be useful and effective, it's very configurable (and configuration is a damn sight easier than with E). People who want this kind of interface are less likely to want all the googeegawgaws of a desktop suite. I used KDE for a while, but found the windowmanager was a big sluggish. I tried running WMaker as the window manager inside KDE, but it didn't work very well. So I adjusted the WMaker startup scripts to launch just the KDE file manager in the background (I found I didn't need the panel, esp. since it didn't work with WindowMaker). After a while, I realized that I never really used the KDE file manager, so I turned that off. So now I'm back to where I started (sort of) with window managers from when I started with Linux. I just have a much cooler looking color scheme, and lots of hotkeys mapped to the windows key (xkeycaps is fun). The only part of KDE I still use is the application menu tree (I have use a perl script that converts it on the fly into WMaker menu format) and a couple of the applications.
The bottom line is that the type of person who is attracted to WindowMaker's advantages doesn't need the extra overhead of a full desktop suite.
Umm... How often do women have sex with their bra on?
I looked at Linux before, and concluded that, while it was a stable system that could do most things I wanted, there were a couple important pieces that were missing that would cause me to be jumping back and forth between Windows and Linux. I did not (and still don't) want to be jumping back and forth between OS's, at least not on a single computer.
However, in the past year, the "gaps" in linux have been filled, some of them by commercial software, others by Free/OpenSource software. Thus it came to be that, in January, after Christmas break, I bought a new hard drive (the simplest solution to the partitioning problem) and a copy of RedHat and installed Linux.
I have not had Windows running for any appreciable amount of time since then except to do two things:
1) Play Starcraft (grin)
2) Rip CD's to MP3's
The only reason I do the latter in Windows is because I have a sensitive ear (when you play violin for 12+ years, you either get a sensitive ear, or you play violin badly), and the Fraunhoffer codec for windows off of #warez_is_31337_script_kiddie_d00d is much better and a good bit faster than bladenc. Since I tend to leave my computer alone while I'm ripping cd's, it doesn't really matter what OS I'm running, as long as it doesn't crash in the middle. The exception to this is when I was serving files off my computer. When that was important, I would rip the cd's in linux to wav files (which works just fine) and then encode them in VMWare. Sure, it would take longer, but I didn't have to bring my system down.
Now, look back two years. Look at the software I mentioned using. Granted, it wasn't the real reason I didn't switch over to Linux sooner, but how much of the software I mentioned was very mature two years ago. Now look at the two categories of software that determined my switch: wordprocessors, and IDE's. Sure, there have been commercial IDE's around for a while, but I wasn't about to pay for one of them. Now I can play around with a couple different IDE's that are functional at least. They're not as spiffed up as I'd like (You have to admit, M$ Visual Studio is a pretty good tool), but they work. And Corel came out with a $free$ version of WordPerfect for Linux, so that arena is solved. Of course, when KOffice becomes reasonably stable, I will probably switch over to using it. But for the time being, I don't write enough papers for the defficiencies in WP8 to bother me.
Of course, my experience with Linux has been better than many. I avoided the whole disk partitioning issue by buying a second hard drive explicitly for Linux. I read (past and present tense) man pages, HOWTO's, README's, INSTALL docs, and all manner of other documentation before I give up or ask for help. I meddle around, carefully, but thoroughly, assuming that whatever I want to do can probably be done if I can only find the program/command-line-option to do it. Thus, after a month or two of using Linux, I found my self giving help to people who had used it for much longer than I.
The catch with linux is that there's nobody to file suit against. Linux isn't 'owned' by any one person. Trying to file suit against Linux is somewhat like a house builder trying to sue Habitat for Humanity. Not only would it not work, but it would be ludicrous too.
I think you are in a small minority in your method of using the internet to purchase things. While many people still don't order things directly through the web, that is changing. And most people who mailorder stuff use a credit card, if only because it's simpler and faster. Many places now are starting to have online ordering be the *only* method of ordering they accept.
.gov will have to tax all or no interstate transactions. And how much do you want to bet that if they tax all interstate transactions, then they have to tax all intrastate transactions too, or go back to none at all?
However, I do agree with your final statement regarding taxing interstate transactions. The states clearly can't tax this type of thing (constitution explicitly prohibits states taxing trade across their borders). As you said,
The very nature of the internet resists regulation, restriction, and censorship. Any attempt at any of these will have to fight a very up hill battle. If a government is going to operate at all, it does have to collect some taxes and tariffs, but taxing everything is not the right thing. Other ahenglanderhem countries have gone down the road of taxing anything and everything to the point of ridiculousness ahemciderahem before, and shit came down. Any person who has some common sense and does not have a vested interest in government getting bigger can tell you that it is better and more reasonable to work on cutting crap out of the current budget[1] than it is to just keep on taxing things more and more. If you think about it a bit, taxes are probably (I am in no way an economist...) a significant cost of inflation. Tax goods, their price goes up, so people need to be paid more so that they can afford things. Tax incomes more, same result. Tax businesses more and they need to raise the price of their goods to maintain their profit margin. Tax property, and people need more income to pay for it. Etc. ad nauseam.
[1] 'crap' not including funding for schools, medicare/aid, sceience grants, NASA, etc., but most definitely including making the military budget more reasonable. While multi-billion dollar NASA projects are a bit excessive, NASA has shown that it can make things more economical wit ha smaller budget. Now give them their money back and watch them flourish! I would wager that the vast majority of technological advancements in the last 30 years or so have been greatly affected (positively) by NASA, if not driven entirely by them.
Wow, that rant diverged from where it started a long ways!
I have the exact same motherboard, and I simply filled up all the on board controllers and needed more hard drive space. I got the Promise Ultra33 card, and it works wonderfully. With it, I can even boot off of hde3! If you want a *lot* of drives, the Promise card is well behaved enough that you can have more than one of them in your system and they won't step on each other. I highly recommend it!
Granted I don't want people listening in to my phone conversations (although 99.99% of the time I don't say anything that I would really care if someone else heard), and thus my cordless phone uses spread spectrum stuff. However, how can you make it illegal to listen to a broadcast that is *everywhere*? What if I developed an organ that allowed me to sense radio transmissions? Would *I* be illegal? The radio transmissions are going right through me and you and everyone else! Banning the sale of recievers that can pick up these frequencies is pointless. I am in favor of the laws that prohibit disclosure, but not the ones that ban listening. I don't want people to listen to me, but I am also aware of how ridiculous it is to say that you can't listen to the signals that are passing through the air all around you. In summary, listen, but don't tell, although that sounds about as ridiculous as don't sense the radiation passing through your body...
The vast majority of the human populat lives within a hundred miles or so of the coast. Africa is no exception. I suspect (no data to back it up except logic based on geographical conditions) that in Africa, the percentage within 100 miles of the coast is larger than in most other continents. Thus, while it will not provide easy access for those that live a ways inland, it will provide access for the majority of the population.
Also one might ask why they don't run the cable around the coast underground instead of undersea. I suspect this too is related to geographic constraints. Africa's coast is very rocky, and is a cliff in a lot of places. Laying an underground cable in stone is rather expensive. Also, it requires that all the governments along the coast give you permission and land to lay the cable all at once, and they have to agree on where you can lay the cable at the borders. Not exactly a fun set of negotiations I suspect, nor an easy one. If you lay the cable undersea, all you have to do is negotiate with each individual country independently where they want their link(s) to come in from the ocean.
As far as the 1,2$$,$$$,$$$ is concerned, there is a lot of money in the oil industry in Africa. I suspect that, at least indirectly, the oil industry is funding most of this, since at the very least, the oil industry is the prime source of revenue for many, if not most or all African governments.
Well, your experience with diamond is much different from mine. I have never had a diamond product whose drivers worked well *Except* their cards with the S3 chipsets on them.
In my experience with many computers, I have had many bad experiences with Phoenix BIOS, and many good experiences with AMIBIOS (American Megatrends). The AMIBios on my 486 from 1993 has a better configuration utility than the Phoenix BIOS on my parent's P166 from '95 or '96 (I don't remember). Don't you love it when your BIOS lets Windows reconfigure your serial ports when you have told Windows not to do so, and told the bios not to be Plug'n'Pray? This is just one more way in which Phoneix BIOS will suck.
As far as their statistics, from looking at separate motherboards, I think that most of them still have AMIBIOS on them. It is the prefab machines (Dell, Micron, etc.) that tend to have Phoenix on them. As long as component mobos have a good bios like AMI, and as long as it is possible for me to build my computer from components, I will do just that, and have a superior machine for a lot less money (case in point: my most recent machine cost me $2500 to make from parts. An equivalent machine from any prefab place would have cost me at least $3500! The M$ tax does not make that big a price difference.)
In regards to filling the capacity of the human brain:
I am inclined to agree with another reply to this comment that nobody really uses anywhere near the full theoretical capacity of their brain. However, I don't think anyone could survive even coming close, so that's a moot point.
Just like people don't let their computer drives fill up completely, the same thing happens in our brain. When concious memory and whatnot get even a little bit full, things get dumped into longer term memory. As long term memory starts to have some stuff in it, you start forgetting unimportant things. Anyone who has had kids or a sibling that is much younger than them (I have a brother 10 years younger than me) has quite likely noticed how good a child's memory is. My parents told me that once, when I was about 3, we were looking to meet someone to go on a canoe trip. My parents were trying to remember what color the canoe was. I immediately said it was yellow. Now, nobody in the family had seen these people for over a year, yet, for me as a young child, it clearly didn't require much digging through memories to find what I was looking for. Memory and/or storange in any for does not perform well when it is full. Judging by certain aspets of the speed of human responses, our memory needs to be quite empty to perform well.
As someone else pointed out, also, if you remember too much, it can drive you insane. If you look at your own memory, you can probably find memories that are nearly as vivid as what you experience at the moment. The human brain clearly has the capacity to store a LOT of very vivid memories. Now, imagine if you could remember a LOT as vividly as if it were happening. How could you tell what was real and what was memory intruding on your senses? You would quickly go insane, and probably do your best to kill yourself, or at least do something to yourself so drastic that it would be sure to bring you out of memory. Of course, you would remember that, and next time have to do something even worse.
Forgetting is necessary not only for individual survival, but also for survival of society. Imagine how much everyone would hate everyone else if they remembered vividly ever unkind thing anyone else had ever done or said to them or their friends? Society relies on people forgetting.
There was a Sliders episode which, like most of the recent Sliders episodes, was cheezy, but also dealt with some of the heart of this issue. I imagine that it would be much, much more difficult to clone just a leg, than to clone a whole person. The problem is, what do you do with the rest of the body. It is a clone of you, and thus, by any sane reasoning, has all the rights and protections you should have. Sure, you can never educate them, other than to impregnate in their mind that they exist to provide you with replacement body parts. Self sacrifice to save someone else's life always has been a noble purpose, but conditioning thousands, if not millions of people that self-sacrifice is their only purpose in life is definitely cruel. Cloning a genius after they die could prove to be a great boon for technology, but it would also, no doubt, make the clone's life hell. They would spend their whole life trying to live up to what their previous self did. It would be far better, I think, to track traits of people, and encourage geniuses to breed together. You also might argue that one should encourage geniuses to breed with morons. Again, either way has serious moral difficulties. One way favors the production of an elite class, which would certainly bring discrimination and unrest. The other way might raise the intelligence of many people, but also might slow, or even reverse, evolutionary progress if practiced for a long time. It would be a good experiment into how much of intelligence and such things is genetic, and how much is innate, although I doubt that any human would ever be capable of treating it in a sufficiently objective way so as to get accurate results out of it.
What's the bottom line? Any kind of messing with the way evolution naturally procedes can cause serious practical and moral problems. Not to say that the pursuit of this kind of knowledge should be avoided, but its use should be thought out carefully. Research laboratories should not be shot up like abortion clinics occaisonally have, but they also shouldn't go crazy with putting this kind of technology into every aspect of our lives.
Lesson #1 in computing: When all else fails, RTFM, or in this case, the FAQ, which, if you bothered to look, is linked from every single stats page right at the top, and contains full instructions for how to join a team. As for the username, you answered your own question. If the only thing it asked for was an e-mail address, then it's a fairly safe guess that your e-mail address is your username, and you have to go fill in a password somewhere (that is answered by the FAQ)
Distributed.net Stats FAQ
Not to quibble about semi-irrelevant things, but Tesla invented the radio before Marconi did, and even got the Supreme Court to rule in his favor on the patent.
I think many companies are sidling up beside RedHat for a couple simple reasons:
* RedHat has a well known name
* RedHat is the most commonly used distribution, especially for people that lean towards Joe Schmoe Desktop User, which is the type of person many of these companies are developing for
* RedHat is the largest and most dense concentration of Linux developers, etc. and has money to throw at them. While there may be other, 'more dense' spots, they tend not to be as concrete an entity as RedHat, and few of them actively throw as much money at Linux development as RedHat does.
So, I would watch RedHat to make sure they don't start doing bad things, I would start from the assumption that they are going to keep up their past track record, which has been, on net, very beneficial for the Linux community.
In order to develop commercially supported software, you need a standard base to support it on. While I am not very knowledgeable on the subject, my impression is that, while the LSB (Linux Standard Base) is a good thing and is moving along, it is still too nebulous and incomplete a standard for a commercial entity to 'support' it. Until the LSB is mature, RedHat is probably a company's best choice for a standard base to support.
I think though that the first working digital computer goes to a german blokey in the late 30's. Part mechanical I think.
Hmm... Babbage's computer was digital, it was also pretty much ALL mechanical... not to make a petty point, but...
I think one of the big reasons for PPC linux is one of the same ones that shows up for x86 users. They want to run linux on the hardware they already have and know. PC's may be cheaper, but hardware you already own is free. Also, many many people who use linux (I might even dare to say a majority of them) dual boot. The reasons for dual booting a PC exist in the same for for Mac users. While I may not like the MacOS interface, I can understand and respect that, if someone has lots of software they already know how to use, and lots of documents they have created with them, they won't want to give up their original OS. I run linux 99% of the time, but I still have a Windows partition because there are some apps that don't exist yet for linux, or at least not in a form that I find acceptable. I've booted Windows less than a dozen times this year, but I still have it there.
If they were really pulling it out of good taste, and didn't want to show it, then why did it air in Canada? This isn't about good and bad taste, it is about avoiding bad press, which they have, for the most part, done.