I've been wondering the same thing about the unresponsiveness of the Windows Shell, and I think I finally got the answer. I attended some Windows driver training a couple of months ago, and the instructor had worked as a contractor for Microsoft for several years. He's personally acquainted with several of the lead developers there, so he has a lot of inside knowledge. The way he explains it is that when Win9x development was halted, a lot of those developers were moved into IE, Explorer, and Office development. Unfortunately, they brought a lot of the poor coding practices from 9x with them, which accounts for the unresponsiveness, instability, and poor security. Explorer doesn't make use of threading and asynchronous I/O, so it is prone to hangs due to unresponsive hardware and slow network connections. The instructor said that the kernel and shell developers don't get along very well, because the kernel developers see the shell as giving their OS a bad name. I guess under all the Explorer cruft, the core OS actually works pretty well. They've made a lot of improvements for Vista that were sorely needed, and that make it a much better OS. Sadly, the normal user will never see them, since they're buried under a steaming pile of Explorer.
Microsoft needs to stop putting in more eye-candy and make their core components stable and responsive. I'd buy that over another unnecessary interface change.
Re:Where to get a three-butten mouse with no rolle
on
Top Mice Compared
·
· Score: 1
I got a couple of Belkin 3-button optical mice from Dell a few months ago, and I'm very happy with them. They're nice, fairly inexpensive, and don't gum up like ball mice. I'm leary of Belkin products in general, but I haven't had any problems with these. I have more information at http://k-lug.org/~griswold/mouse.html.
Basically, this is the same nonsense as the "no printing" option.
I've found that ps2pdf from the ghostscript package is useful in this situation. If you try saving a PDF with document restrictions as a PostScript file, it embeds some extra code in the PostScript file. This code has a stern warning that removing the code is illegal, and it causes ps2pdf to not work right. However, ps2pdf also happily accepts PDF files as input, it doesn't check the document restrictions, and all of the features are allowed in the PDF files it creates.
Re:Discussed on LWN concerning Adobe Acrobat 7
on
PDF Tracking On the Way
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There is a bug (in my opinion) in Acrobat Reader 7 when you disable JavaScript that causes this warning to appear when exiting the program:
This document contains JavaScripts. Do you want to enable JavaScripts from now on? This document may not behave correctly if they're disabled.
This happens even if you do not have a document loaded, since Adobe Reader tries to run some internal JavaScripts when it exits. If JavaScript is disabled, this warning comes up. I've created patches that prevent this from happening on both Linux and Windows. They may also prevent the warning from coming up with documents that actually contain JavaScript.
Actually the "Click here to get the plugin" message comes from Mozilla's default plugin and not from Macromedia. Here's the description I get from "about:plugins":
Default Plugin
File name: libnullplugin.so
The default plugin handles plugin data for mimetypes and extensions that are not specified and facilitates downloading of new plugins.
You can get rid of this message (in Unix) by going to your Mozilla install directory and deleting the libnullplugin.so file in the plugins/ directory, but you may lose some functionality.
My original solution to flash ads was to uninstall the flash plugin, but this meant that I couldn't view stuff like The Carabella Game: The Quest for Tunes. Then I found out that Mozilla and Phoenix can make use of plugins that are installed while the browser is running. This meant that I could load and unload the flash plugin without restarting my browser. I cooked up the following script, which was originally nicely indented:
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# != 1 ]; then echo "Usage: $0 [off|on]" exit fi
case $1 in "on") echo "Enabling ShockWave Flash for Mozilla and Phoenix" ln -sf/opt/plugins/ShockwaveFlash.class \ /opt/plugins/libflashplayer.so \ /opt/mozilla/plugins ln -sf/opt/plugins/ShockwaveFlash.class \ /opt/plugins/libflashplayer.so \ /opt/phoenix/plugins ;; "off") echo "Disabling ShockWave Flash for Mozilla and Phoenix" rm -f/opt/mozilla/plugins/ShockwaveFlash.class \ /opt/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so \ /opt/phoenix/plugins/ShockwaveFlash.class \ /opt/phoenix/plugins/libflashplayer.so ;; *) echo "Usage: $0 [off|on]" ;; esac
Here's how it works: Mozilla is installed in/opt/mozilla, and Phoenix is installed in/opt/phoenix. I have a directory called/opt/plugins where I keep my plugins so they aren't lost when I install a new nightly build. When I turn Flash on, the script makes a symlink to the Flash files inside the browser's plugins directory, and when I turn Flash off, the script deletes the symlinks.
To make this even simpler, I added the following entries to my window manager (IceWM). This way I can enable or disable flash with the click of my mouse.
prog "Flash On" general_configuration flash on prog "Flash Off" general_configuration flash off
Sony said it would continue to offer repairs and manufacture tapes for the format, adding the move would not affect its Betacam products for the broadcasting industry.
Looks like they'll still support the format for this industry.
I played around with AntiAdBlocker test, and I found that to pass the test I simply had to allow JavaScript to open unrequested windows (this is with Mozilla 1.1a). When this is enabled, a popup window briefly appears. It would be trivial to defeat this by adding an option to allow popups, but to hide the window. The site thinks that popups are working, but the user doesn't see them.
Of course, if the popup was interactive (which it doesn't seem to be in this case), this wouldn't work. But you could defeat that by scripting a default response, which they could counter by randomizing the popup,...
Ah, brings back fond memories of the copy protection wars of the 80's.
I worked at the
Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for one summer when I was an undergrad. I didn't do any FORTRAN programming, but almost everyone else there did. If you want some information about FORTRAN programming on high-performance systems, check out their
newletters, or just try searching their site for 'FORTRAN'.
Occasionally pilots find that they cannot turn back. I remember hearing about a helicopter crash about 50 miles south of our house. The helicopter was heading south from Wrangell in good, clear flying weather when the came upon a bank of clouds that cut visability to nil. They turned around to head back, but the route back had also closed off. In a matter of a few minutes they were completely blind and the pilot flew right into a mountain.
Finally, I'd have to agree that most of the alarmist posts are pure FUD. The webcams only cover a tiny portion of the state, so they are only useful to pilots flying in a few areas. And even then they are not the primary source for weather information. They are only intended to suppliment existing, offical weather and flight information.
The place I used to work at had huge server systems. Most of them had trivial physical security (cases weren't locked, no alarms), and they had a lot of empty space for expansion units or due to poor design, so putting another system inside one would be trivial. Also most of them had multiple network connections so another network cable wouldn't be suspicious.
However, a publisher that wanted to stick it to a writer could stop publishing the book, wait a bit for it to fall into the public domain, then start publishing it again without having to pay royalties to the author.
I think a better solution would be to simply revert to more reasonable copyright durations.
One way to overcome the spam bots is to display the code in an image. A lot of web sites do this to thwart automatic registration agents. However, people using text-only displays or screen readers wouldn't be able to read the code.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been wondering the same thing about the unresponsiveness of the Windows Shell, and I think I finally got the answer. I attended some Windows driver training a couple of months ago, and the instructor had worked as a contractor for Microsoft for several years. He's personally acquainted with several of the lead developers there, so he has a lot of inside knowledge. The way he explains it is that when Win9x development was halted, a lot of those developers were moved into IE, Explorer, and Office development. Unfortunately, they brought a lot of the poor coding practices from 9x with them, which accounts for the unresponsiveness, instability, and poor security. Explorer doesn't make use of threading and asynchronous I/O, so it is prone to hangs due to unresponsive hardware and slow network connections. The instructor said that the kernel and shell developers don't get along very well, because the kernel developers see the shell as giving their OS a bad name. I guess under all the Explorer cruft, the core OS actually works pretty well. They've made a lot of improvements for Vista that were sorely needed, and that make it a much better OS. Sadly, the normal user will never see them, since they're buried under a steaming pile of Explorer.
Microsoft needs to stop putting in more eye-candy and make their core components stable and responsive. I'd buy that over another unnecessary interface change.
I got a couple of Belkin 3-button optical mice from Dell a few months ago, and I'm very happy with them. They're nice, fairly inexpensive, and don't gum up like ball mice. I'm leary of Belkin products in general, but I haven't had any problems with these. I have more information at http://k-lug.org/~griswold/mouse.html.
I've found that ps2pdf from the ghostscript package is useful in this situation. If you try saving a PDF with document restrictions as a PostScript file, it embeds some extra code in the PostScript file. This code has a stern warning that removing the code is illegal, and it causes ps2pdf to not work right. However, ps2pdf also happily accepts PDF files as input, it doesn't check the document restrictions, and all of the features are allowed in the PDF files it creates.
There is a bug (in my opinion) in Acrobat Reader 7 when you disable JavaScript that causes this warning to appear when exiting the program:
This document contains JavaScripts. Do you want to enable JavaScripts from now on? This document may not behave correctly if they're disabled.
This happens even if you do not have a document loaded, since Adobe Reader tries to run some internal JavaScripts when it exits. If JavaScript is disabled, this warning comes up. I've created patches that prevent this from happening on both Linux and Windows. They may also prevent the warning from coming up with documents that actually contain JavaScript.
Actually the "Click here to get the plugin" message comes from Mozilla's default plugin and not from Macromedia. Here's the description I get from "about:plugins":
You can get rid of this message (in Unix) by going to your Mozilla install directory and deleting the libnullplugin.so file in the plugins/ directory, but you may lose some functionality.
My original solution to flash ads was to uninstall the flash plugin, but this meant that I couldn't view stuff like The Carabella Game: The Quest for Tunes. Then I found out that Mozilla and Phoenix can make use of plugins that are installed while the browser is running. This meant that I could load and unload the flash plugin without restarting my browser. I cooked up the following script, which was originally nicely indented:
Here's how it works: Mozilla is installed in /opt/mozilla, and Phoenix is installed in /opt/phoenix. I have a directory called /opt/plugins where I keep my plugins so they aren't lost when I install a new nightly build. When I turn Flash on, the script makes a symlink to the Flash files inside the browser's plugins directory, and when I turn Flash off, the script deletes the symlinks.
To make this even simpler, I added the following entries to my window manager (IceWM). This way I can enable or disable flash with the click of my mouse.
From the Yahoo! article:
Looks like they'll still support the format for this industry.
I played around with AntiAdBlocker test, and I found that to pass the test I simply had to allow JavaScript to open unrequested windows (this is with Mozilla 1.1a). When this is enabled, a popup window briefly appears. It would be trivial to defeat this by adding an option to allow popups, but to hide the window. The site thinks that popups are working, but the user doesn't see them.
...
Of course, if the popup was interactive (which it doesn't seem to be in this case), this wouldn't work. But you could defeat that by scripting a default response, which they could counter by randomizing the popup,
Ah, brings back fond memories of the copy protection wars of the 80's.
I worked at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for one summer when I was an undergrad. I didn't do any FORTRAN programming, but almost everyone else there did. If you want some information about FORTRAN programming on high-performance systems, check out their newletters, or just try searching their site for 'FORTRAN'.
Occasionally pilots find that they cannot turn back. I remember hearing about a helicopter crash about 50 miles south of our house. The helicopter was heading south from Wrangell in good, clear flying weather when the came upon a bank of clouds that cut visability to nil. They turned around to head back, but the route back had also closed off. In a matter of a few minutes they were completely blind and the pilot flew right into a mountain.
Finally, I'd have to agree that most of the alarmist posts are pure FUD. The webcams only cover a tiny portion of the state, so they are only useful to pilots flying in a few areas. And even then they are not the primary source for weather information. They are only intended to suppliment existing, offical weather and flight information.
Um... If you had actually read the CNN story, you would see right there at the bottom this little snippet of text:
RELATED SITE:
FAA Alaska weather webcams
Open mouth
Insert foot
And one final note: How is posting this story on /. any different than posting this story on CNN?
The place I used to work at had huge server systems. Most of them had trivial physical security (cases weren't locked, no alarms), and they had a lot of empty space for expansion units or due to poor design, so putting another system inside one would be trivial. Also most of them had multiple network connections so another network cable wouldn't be suspicious.
However, a publisher that wanted to stick it to a writer could stop publishing the book, wait a bit for it to fall into the public domain, then start publishing it again without having to pay royalties to the author.
I think a better solution would be to simply revert to more reasonable copyright durations.
One way to overcome the spam bots is to display the code in an image. A lot of web sites do this to thwart automatic registration agents. However, people using text-only displays or screen readers wouldn't be able to read the code.