The thing that jumped out at me the most in the article was this quote:
If you have an installation on which some third-party driver has hosed the registry, the Recovery Console will allow you to attempt to fix it.
I'm so glad that the only thing I have to worry about is a third-party driver. I also find it intertaining to read about the problem always being anyone else's fault but microsoft when the registry or something on the system is borked up.
Close, but no cigar. As others have pointed out, America is supposed to be a republic. It is unfortunate that this condition didn't last. If you bring up a copy of the constitution in your browser (there are countless copies out there) you'll find the word "guarantee" and "republic" used exactly once each. You'll not find any hint of the word 'democracy' or it's several various forms.
Article IV, Section 4:
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep getting together and deciding what is for lunch. The folks who founded this nation were very aware of the dangers and evils of democracy. Look up the phrase "Sparta must be destroyed" sometime for a small example of same. You might also enjoy reading the "federalist papers" and the "letters from a federal farmer" sometime. They talk about this quite a bit.
If I were to pin down the point in time when we ceased being a republic, I'd have to point to the 17th amendment to the constitution, in which the direct election of senators was allowed. Some would go further back and point to the civil war. I can't say that I entirely disagree with that either.
I think you miss the entire point of the electoral college. It was designed to make sure that anyone anyone elected president would have the support of the majority of the majority of states. Otherwise you would end up with the 5 or so most populous states (or large urban areas) weilding far too much power in elections. Take a look at the county-by-county election results of the last presidential race. You'll see that with the exception of the major urban areas, most of the rest of the country went for Bush.
If the electoral college were to be done away with, I seriously doubt you'd ever see a democrat running for president campaign anywhere but the top 10 cities in the nation. This would probably make things easier on them, but I don't think such a situation would do the republic much good in the long run.
One reform of the electoral college system that I'd support would be to have more states divide their electors according to vote percentages. The practice of awarding all EC votes to the candidate who gets 50%+1 vote doesn't seem terribly reasonable to me. Then again, the practice might be one of the last remaining vestigages of federalism left in our system.
The practice of awarding the EC votes in this manner is set by the states. If you want to change it, you should go to your state legislature.
I've seen several folks say that this interview is terribly old news and should thus be heavily discounted. There is some truth to that but here's the problem...
In the last few years, I've heard (well, seen in print) several interviews with Gates where he essentially says the same thing about upgrading for bugfixes is not a valid reason to upgrade. He always gives it the standard MS spin about the great new and shiny features with new releases, but almost always disclaimed bugfixes as the reason people should upgrade.
I'm sure some enterprising individual can locate a few similar quotes with google. I searched a bit last night but got tired of the search, and didn't much see the point since I specifically recall having seen it on more than just a couple of occasions.
Your comments about the uses of such a device in servers is perceptive. I see stories about Solid-State Hard Disks(SSHD) a few times a year. Like many other technology topics, it's either cyclic, or brought out in slow news days.
Just about everywhere I've seen them discussed in any real depth though, server applications are the ones most commonly brought up. There are 2 main reasons for this. The first is that businesses are much less sensitive to price overall than your average Joe looking for a nice system to do email with. For the forseeable future (or until a fundamental change of technology), these SSHDs are going to be really expensive, especially when you compare them to magnetic media like hard disks. ($1/meg as opposed to $1/gig).
That's where the performance comes in. For sheer performance, you can't beat memory speeds. Even the 10k RPM drives are pokey by comparison to the access and transfer you can achieve in properly engineered SS hardware. Historically, we've seen, in general, a 1000x difference between disks and memory. (I'll probably get slammed on my numbers)
So, if you have an application that really needs a bunch of speed in randomly accessing a great deal of data, you might be willing to pay for it if you need it badly enough. You get 1000 times the speed at about 1000 times the price.
Personally, I'd think there are better solutions for this though. Rather than having a SSHD, you could just use more main memory and cache the hell out of your data. I used to work at a place where we had a multi-GB database, that was read into memory on boot, and then accessed from there. This was necessary due to the extreme time-sensitive nature of responses to queries necessary on the device. Disk reads of any kind would have pushed us beyond the required response times, so we just didn't have them. Sure made the system slow to boot up though:-)
many WIN users i see, only use email, the web and word. they can barely use those because they don't even know how to use a file system, let alone something more fancy.
Ain't it the truth! MS would do us all a world of good if they could include a tutorial on filesystem fundamentals with their systems. I'm sure many of you know how exasperating it is to have so many users who have one directory for everything, then when they accidently put something somewhere else, they totally freak out and think the computer has somehow eaten their data.
When I was a LAN admin several years ago, I used to try to inoculate myself against such things by providing a tutorial (both live and as a website) on what I called The Fully Qualified Filename. I would demonstrate in simple terms exactly what a directory tree was, and how you could make it work for you (re: grouping similar documents together, or grouping my topic). I would also show that everything on the computer was a file, and how to make that work for you as well.
Understanding your filesystem is fundamental to having less troublesome computing.
Thanks for the link. That looks like an interesting program, bookmarked for reference when I have time to look at it in detail.
It seems kind of similar to what I do now. I have a whitelist of people/mailing lists that make it to my inbox. The rest get automatically dumped to a 'SPAM' folder that I look at every few days to make sure I haven't missed anything important, and add any address to my whitelist if it is a new address that I want to read mail from.
How does it work with mailing lists or similar orgs that I might sign up to get email for? Since there is no real person sending from that address, or a majordomo of some kind, I would think you might inadvertantly gum up the operation of such things.
After taking the time to read the proposed law concerning spam, I have to say that it seems to be fairly well thought out (with one exception that I'll get to in a second). The requirement that there be a subject line beginning with either 'ADV:' or 'ADULTADV' is spot on what I would like to see more than anything else. If such a requirement could be enforced, it would be incredibly simple for ISPs to allow you to configure your email account so that any message with such a subject line be automatically deleted, or better yet, rejected by the mailserver as delivery is attempted. I'm not sure exactly how the latter would work with standard mail daemons, but I'm sure someone would code for it.
The other requirements and restrictions mentioned are perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned, but subject line requirements would go a long way towards relieving the burden of both users and ISP who have to prrocess mail.
I'd also like to see open mail relays be made illegal , but the technical challenges of writing such a law in a way that didn't unintentionally totally screw things up beyond belief is probably too bug a hurdle for legislators to deal with.
The main problem with laws such as these is that they just will not work. Forged 'from' headers (also dealt with by the law) exist in spam because it is so universally hated. It is dangerous to post spam from your real address. This is why many spammers make use of unsecured overseas servers to spew their garbage. Without the cooperation of the foreign countries, it is going to be difficult, if not impossible to police or enforce this without the rest of us falling prey to unintended consequences like some ISPs disallowing the use of mailing lists because they are afraid of some nebulous FUD that will be spread about the consequences of such a law no matter what it actually says.
I hate spam as much or more than anyone, but it is my firm opinion that national laws are no more than mere annoyances on the internet.
I'd have to second this guy's recommendation. Several years ago one of my co-workers and I went to what was billed (by DEC) as a beginners VMS class. Once we got to class though, the instructor informed us that the class had been restructured at a intermediate/semi-advanced level. She offered to refund our money or schedule us for another class at a later date. I told her to give us about half an hour and we'd tell her if that would be necessary. The first thing I did was type 'help' (which was how the online documentation was referenced on the MPE systems we were both highly proficient in). After browsing through the help system for a while, and testing out a few simple commands we were able to proceed with the course fairly well.
For a long time I used to think of the various operating systems as different languages that had to be learned in order to make the computers work for you. Over time I've come to the conclusion that they are actually more like dialects of the same language. The most important paradigm (did I really use that word???) to me when working with unfamiliar systems is that on most computers it is demonstratively true that "everything is a file". Learning the equivalent of the 'cd' command and how to view, move, copy, and delete files actually goes a long way towards understanding peculiarities of the given dialect being learned.
With Unix(all flavours), DOS, VMS, MPE, RTE, windows, and several others that don't immediately come to mind, there is a way to use the equivalent of the 'copy' command to simulate the 'cat' or 'type' command to display the contents of a file to your monitor. Knowing how an operating system represents and deals with the various special types of files, i.e., directories, files, programs, and devices, can really help you to get a quick handle on how things are done.
One of the really nice things about VMS IMO is the built-in versioning system. This makes for easy recovery in case of stupid mistakes in deleting/changing files in many circumstances. VMS is a cool OS, but I unfortunately haven't been in a position to spend as much time with it as I'd have liked.
Every ISP needs an easy method for the submittal of zombie addresses. We could clean up all of our networks pretty quickly if we could just scan our logs for worm traffic and sumbit it to an ISP by email in an agreed upon structured format.
I wouldn't think it would be too terribly difficult for an ISP to have a process that checks the network traffic for the submitted addresses to verify that they are spewing and take appropriate measures.
When the lUsers call to complain that their connections are down, the ISP can inform them it was shut down for cause and that once their system is patched, they will be automatically turned back on as the ISP periodically re-checks blocked IPs.
Speaking specifically on the topic at hand, I'd have to say that I can understand the guy wanting to attack back. I'd like to have a script to physically shut down the zombie boxes after a certain threshold of attacks was reached. I'm still getting nimda/codered attacks on my boxes more than a year after there should be no excuse for this. At this point, anyone who gets infected by either of these programs needs to be just shut down by the attackees... I'd pretty much be willing to go so far as say that they deserve a quick fdisk as well. They've had plenty of time to protect themselves. It is equivalent to
Sure! Try Baen.com. Baen is a commercial site that has found the free distribution of e-books has improved it's bottom line in sales of its dead-tree versions.
They treat their (potential) customers like honest folk and deserve everyone's support IMO.
This displays really well as source in Phoenix.5. There is a blurb at the top that says "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."... Then it displays it as prettily formatted (though fairly useless) code.
I'd like to see a clean HTML version of the same. It might make it somewhat easier to understand more or less what it is doing
As recently as 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the jury has an " unreviewable and irreversible power... to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge.... (US vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972))
Or as this same truth was stated in a earlier decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Maryland: "We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision." (US vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969)).
The power of the Jury to judge both the facts of the case at hand and the law itself was widely recognised and indeed lauded by the founders of this nation. I've got some documentation on it, but don't really feel like looking further at the moment. I'm sure others on this thread will.
I use the prefbar extension to control some of the features of mozilla and phoneix.I'd like to know if anyone out there would know what you would enter in the configuration to make a button that would simulate the "ctrl+" and "ctrl-" keystrokes?
The options when creating new buttons are:
id:
label
onclick
Some might disdain the use of a button when there is a keystroke alternative, but I'd say that it would be useful to have both options instantly available. Sometimes using the keyboard makes more sense, and sometimes a button is more convienient.
I, too, have had had similar discussions with coworkers and others about the "dying mainframes". What it really boils down to is that many people don't really understand that exactly what the mainframe is capable of (even fairly old machines). They similarly have overblown expectations of the capabilities of PC-type hardware.
I've said for quite a long time that there is a place in the world for mainframes, minicomputers and PCs. Each fills a particular niche in the varying needs people have for computational devices.
I don't expect a PC to serve a large oracle database. Similarly, I don't think a minicomputer would be a good choice to use for someone just wanting to read email and surf the web. At the same time, I don't think there are many minis that have the kind of rock-solid stability and managability of a mainframe that is necessary to run real-time stock transactions for NASDAQ or the NYSE. I've worked with Stratus systems a bit and like them a lot for their ability to hot-swap anything on the system but the backplane itself, but I still probably wouldn't deploy it in a situation where literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions occur daily. They work great in telco settings where you need 5-nine reliability though (which is where I dealt with them).
Like I said, there is a place for everything and everything has its place. When deciding what to deploy, you analyze to what uses it will be made, figure in growth, look at your options, then take what best suits your situation, operational capabilities and budget.
Anyone who says that 'mainframes are dinosaurs' is uninformed.
My standard response to requests for tech support has, over the past couple of years, changed to 2 brief sentances.
I don't do windows.
If you'd like for me to wipe your computer clean and install Linux, I can do that.
Even my wife no longer gets windoze support from me. I'm not wasting my time with it any more. I figure people should either upgrade to a real OS, or live in the filth they so obviously prefer.
"The breakthrough came with Chandra's ability to clearly distinguish the two nuclei, and measure the details of the X-radiation from each nucleus," said Guenther Hasinger, also of the Planck Institute and the paper's co-author.
I find the use of the term nucleus to be interesting in light of the subject matter. When I think of a nucleus, I think of the particles at the center of an atom, not the remnants of multiple stars sucking in everything around them.
Yes, I'm aware the term is used in other ways, such as the 'nucleus' of a cell. It still jumped out at me a bit.
Is the US government really that transparently corrupt?
Unfortunately, yes. It is. This kind of thing actually happens all the time. It is similar to the way that patents are awarded that were developed with public funds (IMO)
I use Linux at home exclusively and as much as I am able to at work, but I don't have any problem with paying for a product that performs well and is well engineered.
Given the nature of the way things work in the Linux world though, If you are trying to sell me a product that already exists in open form, it had better be much better designed or supported than open source alternatives. It had better have good documentation too, or I'll just puzzle through the piss-poor excuse for documentation that comes with many (if not most) open source projects instead.
Back in the days when I was DOS-bound though, pkzip was an excellent utility. My favourite feature was disk spanning, meaning I could create single volumes that consisted of multiple floppies. Back when removable media was mostly limited to 1.44M floppies, that was an invaluable tool.
For a long time I was (probably still am for that matter) the only person I personally knew with a legitimately registered copy of PKZip.
PGP uses the same algorythm to compress files as pkzip. I've always thought that if a known-plaintext attack is ever discovered for the crypto algorythms used in PGP, the known plaintext of the pkzip header might well be the bits to use in an attack.
I used both DR-DOS and PC-DOS. Both were way better than anything MS ever came out with. PC-DOS also had support for REXX, which I found to be extremely cool at the time. Just imagine, with PC-DOS, you actually had the ability to write truely powerful and productive scripts!
Admittedly, REXX probably isn't as powerful as some of the capabilities we now have with shell scripts, Perl, Expect and the like, but I remember writing some pretty decent front-ends for brain dead users in visual Rexx.
Note that Windows still doesn't come with a decent scripting language. Batch files are a joke, though you can do some interesting things with errorlevels.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that jumped out at me the most in the article was this quote:
I'm so glad that the only thing I have to worry about is a third-party driver. I also find it intertaining to read about the problem always being anyone else's fault but microsoft when the registry or something on the system is borked up.
Close, but no cigar. As others have pointed out, America is supposed to be a republic. It is unfortunate that this condition didn't last. If you bring up a copy of the constitution in your browser (there are countless copies out there) you'll find the word "guarantee" and "republic" used exactly once each. You'll not find any hint of the word 'democracy' or it's several various forms.
Article IV, Section 4:
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep getting together and deciding what is for lunch. The folks who founded this nation were very aware of the dangers and evils of democracy. Look up the phrase "Sparta must be destroyed" sometime for a small example of same. You might also enjoy reading the "federalist papers" and the "letters from a federal farmer" sometime. They talk about this quite a bit.
If I were to pin down the point in time when we ceased being a republic, I'd have to point to the 17th amendment to the constitution, in which the direct election of senators was allowed. Some would go further back and point to the civil war. I can't say that I entirely disagree with that either.
I think you miss the entire point of the electoral college. It was designed to make sure that anyone anyone elected president would have the support of the majority of the majority of states. Otherwise you would end up with the 5 or so most populous states (or large urban areas) weilding far too much power in elections. Take a look at the county-by-county election results of the last presidential race. You'll see that with the exception of the major urban areas, most of the rest of the country went for Bush.
If the electoral college were to be done away with, I seriously doubt you'd ever see a democrat running for president campaign anywhere but the top 10 cities in the nation. This would probably make things easier on them, but I don't think such a situation would do the republic much good in the long run.
One reform of the electoral college system that I'd support would be to have more states divide their electors according to vote percentages. The practice of awarding all EC votes to the candidate who gets 50%+1 vote doesn't seem terribly reasonable to me. Then again, the practice might be one of the last remaining vestigages of federalism left in our system.
The practice of awarding the EC votes in this manner is set by the states. If you want to change it, you should go to your state legislature.
I've seen several folks say that this interview is terribly old news and should thus be heavily discounted. There is some truth to that but here's the problem...
In the last few years, I've heard (well, seen in print) several interviews with Gates where he essentially says the same thing about upgrading for bugfixes is not a valid reason to upgrade. He always gives it the standard MS spin about the great new and shiny features with new releases, but almost always disclaimed bugfixes as the reason people should upgrade.
I'm sure some enterprising individual can locate a few similar quotes with google. I searched a bit last night but got tired of the search, and didn't much see the point since I specifically recall having seen it on more than just a couple of occasions.
Your comments about the uses of such a device in servers is perceptive. I see stories about Solid-State Hard Disks(SSHD) a few times a year. Like many other technology topics, it's either cyclic, or brought out in slow news days.
Just about everywhere I've seen them discussed in any real depth though, server applications are the ones most commonly brought up. There are 2 main reasons for this. The first is that businesses are much less sensitive to price overall than your average Joe looking for a nice system to do email with. For the forseeable future (or until a fundamental change of technology), these SSHDs are going to be really expensive, especially when you compare them to magnetic media like hard disks. ($1/meg as opposed to $1/gig).
That's where the performance comes in. For sheer performance, you can't beat memory speeds. Even the 10k RPM drives are pokey by comparison to the access and transfer you can achieve in properly engineered SS hardware. Historically, we've seen, in general, a 1000x difference between disks and memory. (I'll probably get slammed on my numbers)
So, if you have an application that really needs a bunch of speed in randomly accessing a great deal of data, you might be willing to pay for it if you need it badly enough. You get 1000 times the speed at about 1000 times the price.
Personally, I'd think there are better solutions for this though. Rather than having a SSHD, you could just use more main memory and cache the hell out of your data. I used to work at a place where we had a multi-GB database, that was read into memory on boot, and then accessed from there. This was necessary due to the extreme time-sensitive nature of responses to queries necessary on the device. Disk reads of any kind would have pushed us beyond the required response times, so we just didn't have them. Sure made the system slow to boot up though :-)
many WIN users i see, only use email, the web and word. they can barely use those because they don't even know how to use a file system, let alone something more fancy.
Ain't it the truth! MS would do us all a world of good if they could include a tutorial on filesystem fundamentals with their systems. I'm sure many of you know how exasperating it is to have so many users who have one directory for everything, then when they accidently put something somewhere else, they totally freak out and think the computer has somehow eaten their data.
When I was a LAN admin several years ago, I used to try to inoculate myself against such things by providing a tutorial (both live and as a website) on what I called The Fully Qualified Filename. I would demonstrate in simple terms exactly what a directory tree was, and how you could make it work for you (re: grouping similar documents together, or grouping my topic). I would also show that everything on the computer was a file, and how to make that work for you as well.
Understanding your filesystem is fundamental to having less troublesome computing.
Thanks for the link. That looks like an interesting program, bookmarked for reference when I have time to look at it in detail.
It seems kind of similar to what I do now. I have a whitelist of people/mailing lists that make it to my inbox. The rest get automatically dumped to a 'SPAM' folder that I look at every few days to make sure I haven't missed anything important, and add any address to my whitelist if it is a new address that I want to read mail from.
How does it work with mailing lists or similar orgs that I might sign up to get email for? Since there is no real person sending from that address, or a majordomo of some kind, I would think you might inadvertantly gum up the operation of such things.
After taking the time to read the proposed law concerning spam, I have to say that it seems to be fairly well thought out (with one exception that I'll get to in a second). The requirement that there be a subject line beginning with either 'ADV:' or 'ADULTADV' is spot on what I would like to see more than anything else. If such a requirement could be enforced, it would be incredibly simple for ISPs to allow you to configure your email account so that any message with such a subject line be automatically deleted, or better yet, rejected by the mailserver as delivery is attempted. I'm not sure exactly how the latter would work with standard mail daemons, but I'm sure someone would code for it.
The other requirements and restrictions mentioned are perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned, but subject line requirements would go a long way towards relieving the burden of both users and ISP who have to prrocess mail.
I'd also like to see open mail relays be made illegal , but the technical challenges of writing such a law in a way that didn't unintentionally totally screw things up beyond belief is probably too bug a hurdle for legislators to deal with.
The main problem with laws such as these is that they just will not work. Forged 'from' headers (also dealt with by the law) exist in spam because it is so universally hated. It is dangerous to post spam from your real address. This is why many spammers make use of unsecured overseas servers to spew their garbage. Without the cooperation of the foreign countries, it is going to be difficult, if not impossible to police or enforce this without the rest of us falling prey to unintended consequences like some ISPs disallowing the use of mailing lists because they are afraid of some nebulous FUD that will be spread about the consequences of such a law no matter what it actually says.
I hate spam as much or more than anyone, but it is my firm opinion that national laws are no more than mere annoyances on the internet.
I'd have to second this guy's recommendation. Several years ago one of my co-workers and I went to what was billed (by DEC) as a beginners VMS class. Once we got to class though, the instructor informed us that the class had been restructured at a intermediate/semi-advanced level. She offered to refund our money or schedule us for another class at a later date. I told her to give us about half an hour and we'd tell her if that would be necessary. The first thing I did was type 'help' (which was how the online documentation was referenced on the MPE systems we were both highly proficient in). After browsing through the help system for a while, and testing out a few simple commands we were able to proceed with the course fairly well.
For a long time I used to think of the various operating systems as different languages that had to be learned in order to make the computers work for you. Over time I've come to the conclusion that they are actually more like dialects of the same language. The most important paradigm (did I really use that word???) to me when working with unfamiliar systems is that on most computers it is demonstratively true that "everything is a file". Learning the equivalent of the 'cd' command and how to view, move, copy, and delete files actually goes a long way towards understanding peculiarities of the given dialect being learned.
With Unix(all flavours), DOS, VMS, MPE, RTE, windows, and several others that don't immediately come to mind, there is a way to use the equivalent of the 'copy' command to simulate the 'cat' or 'type' command to display the contents of a file to your monitor. Knowing how an operating system represents and deals with the various special types of files, i.e., directories, files, programs, and devices, can really help you to get a quick handle on how things are done.
One of the really nice things about VMS IMO is the built-in versioning system. This makes for easy recovery in case of stupid mistakes in deleting/changing files in many circumstances. VMS is a cool OS, but I unfortunately haven't been in a position to spend as much time with it as I'd have liked.
Every ISP needs an easy method for the submittal of zombie addresses. We could clean up all of our networks pretty quickly if we could just scan our logs for worm traffic and sumbit it to an ISP by email in an agreed upon structured format.
I wouldn't think it would be too terribly difficult for an ISP to have a process that checks the network traffic for the submitted addresses to verify that they are spewing and take appropriate measures.
When the lUsers call to complain that their connections are down, the ISP can inform them it was shut down for cause and that once their system is patched, they will be automatically turned back on as the ISP periodically re-checks blocked IPs.
Speaking specifically on the topic at hand, I'd have to say that I can understand the guy wanting to attack back. I'd like to have a script to physically shut down the zombie boxes after a certain threshold of attacks was reached. I'm still getting nimda/codered attacks on my boxes more than a year after there should be no excuse for this. At this point, anyone who gets infected by either of these programs needs to be just shut down by the attackees... I'd pretty much be willing to go so far as say that they deserve a quick fdisk as well. They've had plenty of time to protect themselves. It is equivalent to
Never mind. wget is creating one for me. What a great tool!
I'd like to mirror this site. Does anyone know if there is a tar of this page that can be extracted and used on a website?
If somone with info about this could please contact me at z e u g m a @ p o b o x . c o m, I'd appreciate it.
Sure! Try Baen.com. Baen is a commercial site that has found the free distribution of e-books has improved it's bottom line in sales of its dead-tree versions.
They treat their (potential) customers like honest folk and deserve everyone's support IMO.
This displays really well as source in Phoenix .5. There is a blurb at the top that says "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below." ... Then it displays it as prettily formatted (though fairly useless) code.
I'd like to see a clean HTML version of the same. It might make it somewhat easier to understand more or less what it is doing
From The Juror's Handbook as published by Fully Informed Jury Association
The power of the Jury to judge both the facts of the case at hand and the law itself was widely recognised and indeed lauded by the founders of this nation. I've got some documentation on it, but don't really feel like looking further at the moment. I'm sure others on this thread will.
I use the prefbar extension to control some of the features of mozilla and phoneix.I'd like to know if anyone out there would know what you would enter in the configuration to make a button that would simulate the "ctrl+" and "ctrl-" keystrokes?
The options when creating new buttons are:
Some might disdain the use of a button when there is a keystroke alternative, but I'd say that it would be useful to have both options instantly available. Sometimes using the keyboard makes more sense, and sometimes a button is more convienient.
I use my bookmarks page as my startup page. With any luck, this should make for a faster load as well.
I've set up several people like this and they seem to like it.
I, too, have had had similar discussions with coworkers and others about the "dying mainframes". What it really boils down to is that many people don't really understand that exactly what the mainframe is capable of (even fairly old machines). They similarly have overblown expectations of the capabilities of PC-type hardware.
I've said for quite a long time that there is a place in the world for mainframes, minicomputers and PCs. Each fills a particular niche in the varying needs people have for computational devices.
I don't expect a PC to serve a large oracle database. Similarly, I don't think a minicomputer would be a good choice to use for someone just wanting to read email and surf the web. At the same time, I don't think there are many minis that have the kind of rock-solid stability and managability of a mainframe that is necessary to run real-time stock transactions for NASDAQ or the NYSE. I've worked with Stratus systems a bit and like them a lot for their ability to hot-swap anything on the system but the backplane itself, but I still probably wouldn't deploy it in a situation where literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions occur daily. They work great in telco settings where you need 5-nine reliability though (which is where I dealt with them).
Like I said, there is a place for everything and everything has its place. When deciding what to deploy, you analyze to what uses it will be made, figure in growth, look at your options, then take what best suits your situation, operational capabilities and budget.
Anyone who says that 'mainframes are dinosaurs' is uninformed.
My standard response to requests for tech support has, over the past couple of years, changed to 2 brief sentances.
Even my wife no longer gets windoze support from me. I'm not wasting my time with it any more. I figure people should either upgrade to a real OS, or live in the filth they so obviously prefer.
"The breakthrough came with Chandra's ability to clearly distinguish the two nuclei, and measure the details of the X-radiation from each nucleus," said Guenther Hasinger, also of the Planck Institute and the paper's co-author.
I find the use of the term nucleus to be interesting in light of the subject matter. When I think of a nucleus, I think of the particles at the center of an atom, not the remnants of multiple stars sucking in everything around them.
Yes, I'm aware the term is used in other ways, such as the 'nucleus' of a cell. It still jumped out at me a bit.
Is the US government really that transparently corrupt?
Unfortunately, yes. It is. This kind of thing actually happens all the time. It is similar to the way that patents are awarded that were developed with public funds (IMO)
I use Linux at home exclusively and as much as I am able to at work, but I don't have any problem with paying for a product that performs well and is well engineered.
Given the nature of the way things work in the Linux world though, If you are trying to sell me a product that already exists in open form, it had better be much better designed or supported than open source alternatives. It had better have good documentation too, or I'll just puzzle through the piss-poor excuse for documentation that comes with many (if not most) open source projects instead.
That is true.
Back in the days when I was DOS-bound though, pkzip was an excellent utility. My favourite feature was disk spanning, meaning I could create single volumes that consisted of multiple floppies. Back when removable media was mostly limited to 1.44M floppies, that was an invaluable tool.
For a long time I was (probably still am for that matter) the only person I personally knew with a legitimately registered copy of PKZip.
PGP uses the same algorythm to compress files as pkzip. I've always thought that if a known-plaintext attack is ever discovered for the crypto algorythms used in PGP, the known plaintext of the pkzip header might well be the bits to use in an attack.
I used both DR-DOS and PC-DOS. Both were way better than anything MS ever came out with. PC-DOS also had support for REXX, which I found to be extremely cool at the time. Just imagine, with PC-DOS, you actually had the ability to write truely powerful and productive scripts!
Admittedly, REXX probably isn't as powerful as some of the capabilities we now have with shell scripts, Perl, Expect and the like, but I remember writing some pretty decent front-ends for brain dead users in visual Rexx.
Note that Windows still doesn't come with a decent scripting language. Batch files are a joke, though you can do some interesting things with errorlevels.