I disagree. Leaving aside the squatters and ad-pumpers (I wish we could:-) the "ordinary user" should not be able to hide their identity. Hiding physical address details is an unfortunate but acceptable security restriction today; but hiding email, phone, and other contact data is just wrong. It's abused by thousands of companies to prevent people contacting them when their poxy products fail, or to hide their true ownership and identity. Registering a personal domain is one thing; registering a domain as a business should bring with it the responsibility to publish valid contact information and keep it up to date. It should be illegal for registrars to hide the identity of their business registrants.
Probably true. Whatever about NIMBY and environmental issues, with a government in thrall to the unions as well as big biz, the road transportation lobbies (union and employer) will crush this idea like a gnat. The rail lobbies simply don't have enough money or influence to buy out enough politicians, so expect this idea to die stillborn. The fact that it's so clearly The Right Thing To Do is, sadly, no longer relevant today.
Indeed not. Cross-compatibility is a pain, for sure; I don't know if OO and Abi talk to each other, but they shouldn't be making life hardes for the users by pursuing different models.
For me, it's two things:
Documentation: it's written by developers for other developers, not for end users. A lot of it simply lists the menus and menu items, explaining the File|Save can be used to save your file. While this is needed at some level, it's not useful when you're looking for a function that is probably in there somewhere, but unfindable. I write tech doc; I'd love to contribute to the FOSS material, but I cannot do this while the interfaces are so broken...which brings me to #2...
Interfaces: Interaction design is one of hardest tasks around, and without substantial sums to do testing, releasing it and getting feedback is the only solution. Unfortunately, while the feedback on bugs and breaks seems to function, I don't see a whole lot about ease of use. GIMP (originally quite unbelievably bad) did eventually make a few small changes, and OO/Abi aren't bad now either, but far too much else has all the much-sought functionality buried levels deep in menus, and all the rarely-used stuff at the top. Worse, there is still very little consistency between apps, because freely contributing developers understandably want to push their own idea of what the interface should be like (for them) rather than following the prevailing guidelines and expected methods of working.
I hardly use any proprietary or commercial software these days, largely because the FOSS offerings do almost everything I want -- at the cost of some effort and the occasional cuss. But I would hesitate to recommend it to the averagely naive user simply because it's not as self-evident as it ought to be. That's not to say the commercial stuff is much better, but they have the money to polish the turds -- we don't.
HTML, especially XHTML, can already do what the OP describes, but browsers don't support all the bells and whistles needed for paper-like paged rendering. CSS goes some way towards meeting the deficiencies, but the end user still retains sufficient control to (perhaps unwittingly) defeat almost any attempt to force pagination and placement. It is tedious, but by no means impossible, to write documents of considerable complexity in HTML, as I pointed out long ago, but page support requires browser cooperation.
The only reliable answer at the moment is to provide multiple formats generated from a single source. An XML master (DocBook, TEI, whatever) can be used with XSLT to generate LaTeX source code for making a PDF, and the pagination data can be re-used in a subsequent XSLT script to generate paged HTML. The problem is the XML and LaTeX editors, which are unsuited for writing unless you learn about XML or LaTeX markup, and even the relatively smart ones don't implement a lot of the features needed for complex structured writing (<plug>come to Balisage to find out why</plug>).
LyX and similar editors (Scientific Word, Textures) provide synchronous typographic interfaces to LaTeX, and TeX4ht provides excellent conversion to web pages and other formats. Even Word and OpenOffice, when used with named styles (with utter rigour) can be converted reliably to HTML, LaTeX and other outputs.
The last thing on earth we need is to increase the size of the HTML tagset: HTML5 is already suffering from bloat.
It depends what you mean by "alternative" - but (sadly in my opinion), most people will just say "the web" and mean HTML-based bulletin board discussions eg Facebook.
Oh well. I loved Usenet.
No need to lose it. I've been using news.individual.de for years and it's fine. EUR10 a year.
...Shouldn't they have privacy to do their online banking, exchange private e-mail, access medical records, or many other *perfectly legal* activities?
In the eyes of the administrators, no. They're in college, using a network provided by the college to do college stuff: access the library, write their essays, do their coursework, access Blackboard/Moodle/whatever, and email their tutor. If they browse the web, sign up to mailing lists, download stuff, or anything else, that's fine if it's for their work. If they want to do online banking, exchange private e-mail, access medical records, or many other *perfectly legal* activities, they should use a home/cafe/public connection. The concept that the institution should be helping the students learn a bit more about life, the universe, and everything, has never crossed the minds of the college administrators.
Apart from the bureaucrats being naive and computer-illiterate, every institution seems to be getting more and more IT center staff who have never seen anything except Microsoft, who are unwilling to learn anything new unless it's provided by Microsoft, who are joined at the hip to Microsoft by contracts, and who have absolutely no clue about the Real World[tm] outside the Microsoft fold. Not only are they doing their students and institution a serious disservice (and costing them unnecessary money), they (and the little trolls in HR who hired them) are helping to perpetuate the problem.
It's nice to see that even in these straitened days, colleges still have plenty of money to pursue these policies.
>...to support the idea of adopting open data standards and/or Open Source software in order to contain IT expenses (by reducing licensing costs).
I think it might get a better reception if you invert the argument: don't present adopting open source/standards as the target; present saving money as the target, and open source/standards as the method.
>...supporting open standards by not locking in to long term software contracts [and] to unlock the stranglehold that proprietary software may have on the department IT budget.
Same here. Make the objective to unlock the stranglehold and free up dependencies...by using open source/standards.
In half a life in state-funded IT managment, I have found that most public-service IT managers and local government administrators are woefully undereducated in software selection, and either a) have never heard of FOSS, b) think it has something to do with downloading viruses from bulletin-boards, or c) simply aren't bothered one way or the other unless it saves money or makes life easier. A very, very small number are on kickbacks from suppliers, but you shouldn't work for them.
There are a gazillion other benefits, but try to present them as serendipitous by-products of using open source/standards, not as ends in themselves. The immediate end is saving money (or its equivalent).
However, before you do so, make sure you aren't making a noose for your own neck. Sometimes a department or agency which saves real money finds that this is treated as evidence that they don't need any more resources ever again. It's sometimes better to use the move to FOSS as a way to free up money to do things you said were impossible unless you got extra funding.
Good luck, and please let us know how you got on. Post the document if that is permitted.
> The MySQL error was: User itworld already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections.
> Currently, the username is itworld and the database server is 10.10.10.93.
Thank you for sharing your database details with us. Have a nice day. Plonk.
..."Whenever someone sees your OpenID in use, anywhere on the Internet, they'll know that it's you." To me, this seems like a bug, not a feature...
That misses the point. This way when a programmer from my fave pr0n site sees my OpenID in the credit-card records she's just cracked open, or (worse) someone browsing rec.editors.vi seems my OpenID posting in gnu.emacs.sources, they'll just know it's really me
I'll stick to remembering usernames and password with the aid of my keychain, thanks.
No, back in the bad old days before the Internet management was taken over by commercial interests, if you misbehaved you just got cut off by your upstream connection. If you had sent unsolicited bulk email, your plug was pulled until your boss crawled and promised it would never happen again.
All we need is to reinstitute that policy, and make it go right up the line upstream. But it'll never happen while it's more profitable to take the spammers' cash.
As I have argued ad nauseamhere (PDF) and elsewhere, Ebook readers sinply won't take off big-time until the manufacturers forget their proprietary formats and go for something sensible.
Unfortunately, "something sensible" doesn't mean some HTML bodge, RTF kludge, or non-reprocessable binary like PDF, but a persistent, parsable, non-proprietary, standard. Gosh, isn't that what XML was supposed to do?
Even more so now that we see TV ads for software to let Widnows users connect to their remote machines via a browser. "Run all your programs! Read your mail! Access all your files!"
In the late 1950s when TV took off in the UK, there was "The Film" every evening, the major primetime presentation, and half-way through they had an intermission to change reels on the telecine converter. At that point the entire country got up off the couch and switched on the electric kettle to make a cup of tea.
There is some footage around somewhere showing a meter in a UK power station taking the hit.
Acceleration is the killer (or hitting the gas to go uphill). If you keep your speed as constant as possible, you'll minimise fuel consumption more than by any other technique. On the open road, 50mph seems to be about optimum (car magazines use this as the test speed for consumption). In city streets, I guess 20, but it's going to vary according to congestion.
This means you'll want to avoid having to brake suddenly (because that means accelerating again to get back to your ideal constant speed). which is why you might see people driving more slowly than usual: not to save fuel per se but to give them more reaction space and minimise braking.
My father told me that during and after the war, when fuel was rationed, his father used to turn off the engine when they got to the top of a hill, and roll down, starting again near the bottom by switching on the ignition, putting it into 3rd, and letting out the clutch (works only on a manual, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. Leaving aside the squatters and ad-pumpers (I wish we could :-) the "ordinary user" should not be able to hide their identity. Hiding physical address details is an unfortunate but acceptable security restriction today; but hiding email, phone, and other contact data is just wrong. It's abused by thousands of companies to prevent people contacting them when their poxy products fail, or to hide their true ownership and identity. Registering a personal domain is one thing; registering a domain as a business should bring with it the responsibility to publish valid contact information and keep it up to date. It should be illegal for registrars to hide the identity of their business registrants.
At least not in our lifetimes.
Probably true. Whatever about NIMBY and environmental issues, with a government in thrall to the unions as well as big biz, the road transportation lobbies (union and employer) will crush this idea like a gnat. The rail lobbies simply don't have enough money or influence to buy out enough politicians, so expect this idea to die stillborn. The fact that it's so clearly The Right Thing To Do is, sadly, no longer relevant today.
Stability isn't the only issue.
Indeed not. Cross-compatibility is a pain, for sure; I don't know if OO and Abi talk to each other, but they shouldn't be making life hardes for the users by pursuing different models.
For me, it's two things:
I hardly use any proprietary or commercial software these days, largely because the FOSS offerings do almost everything I want -- at the cost of some effort and the occasional cuss. But I would hesitate to recommend it to the averagely naive user simply because it's not as self-evident as it ought to be. That's not to say the commercial stuff is much better, but they have the money to polish the turds -- we don't.
One way to do this is fire the HR morons and make the line manager personally responsible for hiring.
Unfortunately that presupposes that the line manager knows something about the job...
HTML, especially XHTML, can already do what the OP describes, but browsers don't support all the bells and whistles needed for paper-like paged rendering. CSS goes some way towards meeting the deficiencies, but the end user still retains sufficient control to (perhaps unwittingly) defeat almost any attempt to force pagination and placement. It is tedious, but by no means impossible, to write documents of considerable complexity in HTML, as I pointed out long ago, but page support requires browser cooperation.
The only reliable answer at the moment is to provide multiple formats generated from a single source. An XML master (DocBook, TEI, whatever) can be used with XSLT to generate LaTeX source code for making a PDF, and the pagination data can be re-used in a subsequent XSLT script to generate paged HTML. The problem is the XML and LaTeX editors, which are unsuited for writing unless you learn about XML or LaTeX markup, and even the relatively smart ones don't implement a lot of the features needed for complex structured writing (<plug>come to Balisage to find out why</plug>).
LyX and similar editors (Scientific Word, Textures) provide synchronous typographic interfaces to LaTeX, and TeX4ht provides excellent conversion to web pages and other formats. Even Word and OpenOffice, when used with named styles (with utter rigour) can be converted reliably to HTML, LaTeX and other outputs.
The last thing on earth we need is to increase the size of the HTML tagset: HTML5 is already suffering from bloat.
It depends what you mean by "alternative" - but (sadly in my opinion), most people will just say "the web" and mean HTML-based bulletin board discussions eg Facebook.
Oh well. I loved Usenet.
No need to lose it. I've been using news.individual.de for years and it's fine. EUR10 a year.
...Shouldn't they have privacy to do their online banking, exchange private e-mail, access medical records, or many other *perfectly legal* activities?
In the eyes of the administrators, no. They're in college, using a network provided by the college to do college stuff: access the library, write their essays, do their coursework, access Blackboard/Moodle/whatever, and email their tutor. If they browse the web, sign up to mailing lists, download stuff, or anything else, that's fine if it's for their work. If they want to do online banking, exchange private e-mail, access medical records, or many other *perfectly legal* activities, they should use a home/cafe/public connection. The concept that the institution should be helping the students learn a bit more about life, the universe, and everything, has never crossed the minds of the college administrators.
Apart from the bureaucrats being naive and computer-illiterate, every institution seems to be getting more and more IT center staff who have never seen anything except Microsoft, who are unwilling to learn anything new unless it's provided by Microsoft, who are joined at the hip to Microsoft by contracts, and who have absolutely no clue about the Real World[tm] outside the Microsoft fold. Not only are they doing their students and institution a serious disservice (and costing them unnecessary money), they (and the little trolls in HR who hired them) are helping to perpetuate the problem.
It's nice to see that even in these straitened days, colleges still have plenty of money to pursue these policies.
> ...to support the idea of adopting open data standards and/or Open Source software in order to contain IT expenses (by reducing licensing costs).
I think it might get a better reception if you invert the argument: don't present adopting open source/standards as the target; present saving money as the target, and open source/standards as the method.
> ...supporting open standards by not locking in to long term software contracts [and] to unlock the stranglehold that proprietary software may have on the department IT budget.
Same here. Make the objective to unlock the stranglehold and free up dependencies...by using open source/standards.
In half a life in state-funded IT managment, I have found that most public-service IT managers and local government administrators are woefully undereducated in software selection, and either a) have never heard of FOSS, b) think it has something to do with downloading viruses from bulletin-boards, or c) simply aren't bothered one way or the other unless it saves money or makes life easier. A very, very small number are on kickbacks from suppliers, but you shouldn't work for them.
There are a gazillion other benefits, but try to present them as serendipitous by-products of using open source/standards, not as ends in themselves. The immediate end is saving money (or its equivalent).
However, before you do so, make sure you aren't making a noose for your own neck. Sometimes a department or agency which saves real money finds that this is treated as evidence that they don't need any more resources ever again. It's sometimes better to use the move to FOSS as a way to free up money to do things you said were impossible unless you got extra funding.
Good luck, and please let us know how you got on. Post the document if that is permitted.
> It's a really bad sign when your naming scheme is less user-friendly than IP addresses
> The MySQL error was: User itworld already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections.
> Currently, the username is itworld and the database server is 10.10.10.93.
Thank you for sharing your database details with us. Have a nice day. Plonk.
..."Whenever someone sees your OpenID in use, anywhere on the Internet, they'll know that it's you." To me, this seems like a bug, not a feature...
That misses the point. This way when a programmer from my fave pr0n site sees my OpenID in the credit-card records she's just cracked open, or (worse) someone browsing rec.editors.vi seems my OpenID posting in gnu.emacs.sources, they'll just know it's really me
I'll stick to remembering usernames and password with the aid of my keychain, thanks.
No, back in the bad old days before the Internet management was taken over by commercial interests, if you misbehaved you just got cut off by your upstream connection. If you had sent unsolicited bulk email, your plug was pulled until your boss crawled and promised it would never happen again. All we need is to reinstitute that policy, and make it go right up the line upstream. But it'll never happen while it's more profitable to take the spammers' cash.
And nothing of value was lost
If they'd only open up and produce printer drivers for CUPS...
Would sub-space internet radio broadcasts be subject to a DRM?
As I have argued ad nauseam here (PDF) and elsewhere, Ebook readers sinply won't take off big-time until the manufacturers forget their proprietary formats and go for something sensible.
Unfortunately, "something sensible" doesn't mean some HTML bodge, RTF kludge, or non-reprocessable binary like PDF, but a persistent, parsable, non-proprietary, standard. Gosh, isn't that what XML was supposed to do?
What's a pager, Mom?
not to mention locate wmd
Better than cat is dog, which can take a URI as the filename argument, especially with the --links option to list all the href and src attributes.
On our first web server I soft-linked my ~/public_html/index.html to ~/.plan
Even more so now that we see TV ads for software to let Widnows users connect to their remote machines via a browser. "Run all your programs! Read your mail! Access all your files!"
There is some footage around somewhere showing a meter in a UK power station taking the hit.
Of course, if the browsers had been standards-compliant, perhaps it might have encouraged the siteowners...
are there any practical hypermiling techniques
Acceleration is the killer (or hitting the gas to go uphill). If you keep your speed as constant as possible, you'll minimise fuel consumption more than by any other technique. On the open road, 50mph seems to be about optimum (car magazines use this as the test speed for consumption). In city streets, I guess 20, but it's going to vary according to congestion.
This means you'll want to avoid having to brake suddenly (because that means accelerating again to get back to your ideal constant speed). which is why you might see people driving more slowly than usual: not to save fuel per se but to give them more reaction space and minimise braking.
My father told me that during and after the war, when fuel was rationed, his father used to turn off the engine when they got to the top of a hill, and roll down, starting again near the bottom by switching on the ignition, putting it into 3rd, and letting out the clutch (works only on a manual, of course).