The word "they" actually is used by some people as a gender neutral singular third person pronoun, in addition to being used as the plural third person pronoun. You can find historical justification for this at http://www.paganpaths.org/~lebleu/notes/linguistic . tml For more information on gender neutral pronouns, read the GNP FAQ
You're looking at the wrong year. The contributions being spoken of were made for the 2000 campaign, not the 2002 campaign. OpenSecrets.org has Microsoft down for contributing $4.5 million for 2000. Now, that still leaves a $1.5 million difference, but that may also be a difference in exact definition of what counts as a Microsoft donation, or in exact time period it applies to.
Try control + page up or control + page down. They added those as shortcuts for switching tabs the milestone after they added tabbed browsing, as I recall. On an extended keyboard, I can easily do those with just my right hand. Of course, I use my right hand for the mouse, so I don't know if it would help with your dilemma.
Actually, one of the computer labs at University of Wisconsin-Madison had KDE running on UltraSPARCs (running Solaris, not Linux) back a few years ago (~1998 - 1999) when I was in school.
I don't really see the point of running KDE on Windows as long as you're still depending on an X server. (Well, other than just because you can.....:) Now, if QT could be ported to wrap the Win32 interface, instead of X, then you would have a real possibility of making an application for KDE also available as a Windows application. (Just compile it for Windows, include the Cygwin DLL, and boom, you've got a windows version.) In which case someone might actually make some useful applications available for both Windows and Linux by using it.
Why else? Because you are using at least a vaguely modern telephone modem, which has the compression option enabled. Modem protocols have supported compression since the days of 28.8 or 14.4k. Of course, they can compress text far better than random data (such as something that has already been compressed).
This command (without the spaces that slashdot inserts) will pop up a message box on the local machine with the specified message.
The problem is, www.incidents.org only has instructions on removing the orignal CodeRed. Nothing on removing the new variant, which also requires removing explorer.exe from c:\. So, I'd like to be able to use a better URL, if I had one.
Another advantage is that hydrogen in its liquified form can be distributed with little modification to todays gas distribution infastructure.
Excuse me? Um, liquid hydrogen has to be either under extreme pressure or extremely cold. Neither of which can be done with just a little modification to today's gas distribution infrastructure. Now, if you use something like this fuel processor to convert a more easily distributed fuel like methanol or diesel fuel into hydrogen in the car itself, then the methanol or diesel can easily be distributed with little modification to today's gas distribution infrastructure.
It appears that it has not been modded down, but that this user has been modded down so much that they are automatically posting at this score. (I could be wrong, maybe/. changed it so you can't see the moderation totals just by clicking the link for the post.)
However, it should have been modded down anyway just for being offtopic. If this was an article about Bill Gates giving away money, or any other topic addressed in the post, then it would be reasonable to mod it up.
(Personally, I have a number of disagreements with the contents of the post, but moderation is supposed to be about quality, not about agreement.)
Actually, he may have said it that way originally. There has been a trend in American English over the past 50-100 years or so to genericize the prepositions, using "of" where in previous times only one particular preposition ("at", "above", "on", "in", etc.) was allowed. One of my CS/Linguistics professors commented on how he has noticed the change over his lifetime. Unfortunately, I can't recall any of the specific examples he used.
I don't know for sure, never having talked to senecal about his research (combustion research isn't my field), but I suspect a factor might have been the amount of time it takes to test each member of the population. Each simulation of an engine takes many hours, and I believe the limit was 4 jobs per person at the time he was probably running those simulations.
It's cool to see something I was actually tangentially involved with on slashdot!;) I used to work as the sys admin at the UW-ERC where this work was done. The "SGI supercomputer" referred to in the article is probably the Origin 2000 with 32 R12000 CPUs running at 300 Mhz and 16 gig of ram.
One of the biggest and most valid criticisms you (regularly) receive on/. is directed to your writing style. Specifically, you write _long_ articles with _long_ (occasionally run-on) sentences containing questionable grammar. Given that you're a professional (paid!) journalist, do you feel that this affects how seriously your readers take your writing?
I have an addition to this question: Are you used to having an editor for your professional journalistic writing, and do you have an editor for your articles on slashdot? If you don't have an editor for your articles on slashdot, do you think perhaps that getting an editor would help with the writing style factors that you are so criticized on?
I found corel's contribution to the linux community was rather superficial. It was just a typical Linux distribution with the system logs hidden from the users view. I believe when you hide information does more harm than good. I was hoping the corel bootup screen would have viewable bootup log.
It has an option at boot for expert boot, which boots the normal way instead of hiding it with graphics. I do wish they let you push esc to clear the graphics and let you see normal boot messages like windoze does. As for contribution, they have a nice easy graphical install for debian, Corel Explorer (the best windoze explorer clone I've ever seen), and Corel Update (a nice graphical interface to the debian package system). Unfortunately they lump all the corel stuff into one big deb package, or I'd install corel update and corel explorer on my debian machine.
The command line was also lacking in comparison to other major distributions. Just because some new users do not want to deal with command line options doesn't mean you should not put them in your distro. Pico was missing for heavens stake!
Um, pico is a dinky little editor that is only good for email! It's also part of the pine distribution, which is under an icky license that doesn't allow distributing modified versions of the source, only original source + patches. I think it also disallows binary distribution, so debian requires you to compile it after install. (Incidentally, pine is the email program I use, and I love pine 4.x which even supports reading all that icky HTML email. I think PICO is very good for its intended purpose of editing email) Try out "ae" it's a wordstar clonish text editor that's good for about the level of ease of use of pico. I'd believe they also include vi, but I can't remember for sure. They don't include emacs though (probably due to size). However, go into corel update, click the checkboxes to enable the debian distribution sites (or better yet, go to the debian website and add the nearest mirror), and then you can install all that stuff through Corel Update.
Overall, my review of the download version of Corel Linux 1.0 is that it looks like a very good start to an easy to install and use variant of debian, with some nice new features like corel explorer and corel update. It's also quite clearly feels like a 1.0 release however, with many kinks to work out, ranging from bad handling of taking over an entire drive on multiple drive systems (it went straight to asking if you want to erase everything without asking which drive!) to not being able to disable PAP authentication via the GUI KPPP interface (even when it says it is disabled!), because the PAP option was in the global options file in/etc/ppp/. Of course, the fact that I'm familiar with and really like debian probably helped.;)
BTW, about the redhat init system with everything in/etc/rc.d/init.d and/etc/rc.d/rc#.d/ vs. debian with it in/etc/init.d and/etc/rc#.d/, I like the debian variant (which is identical to the IRIX layout I admin at work) much better... the redhat version requires more typing, for a not very useful rearrangement of the directories.
My personal conspiracy theory is, that there exists a *LOT* of expensive hardware that can do Fouries forwards and back to allow real-time encoding and decoding of MPEG movies in good quality. The companies producing these devices will lobby any standards-organisation to *NOT* consider wavelets and stick to good old Fourier. If this holds, it will take a few years until we see Wavelet compressed video:)
Wrong explanation, sorry. I'm afraid it's our old friend the software patent. From what I've heard, just about every use of wavelets was patented pretty quickly. So, until those patents expire, no widespread uses are likely to happen. Sure, there's stuff like VQF, but it's not going to be as widespread as MP3. (There is a patent with MP3, but it only covers one way to encode them, to my knowledge... so if you develop your own way to pick out the parts that don't make an audible difference, you're in the clear.)
I don't think #1 (server-os) and #3 (workstation-os) breakup is reasonable, though. They share too much technology. What would you think about breaking Linux development up into server and workstation? Nah.
No, this is perfect! Make win95/98 one division, and winNT another division! With win2000 MS tried and failed to move winNT's code into the desktop market, but I'm sure they plan to try it with the next version. What if win95/98 and winNT had to compete directly for market and let the best win?
Also, this breaks the advantages of winNT the server OS being designed to work with the desktop OS, and vice versa. WinNT probably wouldn't have good odds, facing linux on the server side, and win9x if they want to move into the desktop arena. (OTOH, WinNT makes a way more stable desktop than win9x) Win9x would have a pretty tight grip on the desktop initially, but the older technology would have a hard time competing against WinNT and also linux. (as linux becomes viable on the desktop) Imagine how much effort NT corp and win9x corp would have to put into *real* innovation to hold their ground without the MS juggernaut to support them. The consumers would win out because we'd have 2-4 way competition for the desktop market. (win9x, winNT, and possibly linux and MacOS(think iMac))
I'm unsure about #2 (internet content tools). How would it work as a company? They have themselves made it hard to make money selling a web-browser.
Well, for one thing, they deserve the trouble for making it so hard to make money selling a web-browser.:) For another, it includes other things like Frontpage, audio streaming tools, etc. Might include MSN in here (could have AOL w/ netscape vs. MSN w/ IE then), hotmail, and also MS's content ownership rights. Since this could be the weakest baby MS, you might throw any random bits that didn't fit anywhere else in here too, just for good measure.
And the technology _is_ pretty much integrated in the os by now.
1) It's still pretty removable. 2) Make the interfaces publicly documented, so the user has the choice of Netscape/Mozilla or IE as the browser integrated into the OS. (It's not so far integrated that this is all that hard)
Personally, I don't trust this entire thing. I for one wouldn't want to contribute to any GPL'ed project if the maintainers/authors of the software chose to make special exceptions ``just this once''.
Actually, if you contribute to the project and don't transfer copyright to the maintainer, they can not change the license without your (and every other contributer's) authorization. You still own copyright over your contribution, so you have to allow the license change. Note: IANAL
If they want to be accomodating, there are plenty of other licensing schemes, such as the LGPL. Making ``exceptions'' is against the spirit of the GPL. And no, I'm not talking about this software, specifically, but in the broader scheme of things where things could get.. really ugly.
Personally, I agree... libraries should be licensed under the LGPL. The only reason not to is if you don't even want to allow non-GPLed software to even use your library. (I can see why a few hard line idealists would want to take this stance, but myself I think that using a library, particularly a dynamically linked one, shouldn't require license compatibility like that.)
I like debian the best, because of its easy upgrades, doesn't block using stuff from source or messing around with its internals, and it defaults to a nice, relatively secure setup, unlike some other distros.
That pattern matching stuff to detect URLs is annoying. MS Outlook client does this and it's mostly a pain. It sometimes catches things that aren't intended to be URLs.
There is a tradeoff between capturing badly formed URLs(e.g. www.slashdot.org is a badly formed url, it should be http://www.slashdot.org/) and capturing junk. (e.g. www.blah blah) Just because MS Outlook's URL auto-detection uses an overly broad pattern doesn't mean everything has to. For example, the pattern I gave for detecting things without the initial "http://" specifically checked for the last part being 2 or 3 characters, as all TLDs are 2 or 3 characters, to my knowledge. You can put a variety of checks like that in, and if you like, even open an http connection and see if you get an error accessing the URL to guarantee validity, if you wish.
If you're sending mail that tries to explain how to do something with HTML tags in this mode, it can be very confusing.
Well, URL autodetect should be optional. Just like the anonymous posting checkbox, we could have a URL autodect checkbox, and/or not auto-detect URLs in certain entry modes, like HTML. That way when you want to do something where you don't want URL-like things highlighted, you don't have to worry about it.
Also, URLs can and do have embedded spaces and there's no good way to deal with that.
Actually, no, no legal URL can have an embedded, unescaped space. Webbrowsers accept spaces in input, but hopefully they convert it to %20 over the network. If you check section 2.4.3 of RFC2396 - Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax, it says:
2.4.3. Excluded US-ASCII Characters
...
The space character is excluded because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URI are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word- processing programs. Whitespace is also used to delimit URI in many contexts.
However, your assertion that the FSF could release a GPLd work, such as a modification of gcc, under fee-licensing only is not true.
IANAL, but actually, it is true. You quote the GPL, but you've overlooked who "you" is in the license. It is the licensee, not the copyright holder. The copyright holder would be "I" or "we"
Or, are you saying, as is sometimes heard, that the GPL is not legally binding and thus could be broken at whim?
Licenses are not legally binding on the copyright holder. The reason the FSF insists on copyright to everything is 1) It's clear who has to defend it when violated, 2) They can change the license at any time. In theory, they could change to fee licensing, but in actuality, the likely use of this is that if the GPL fails in court, they will come up with a new license that does the same thing and change the license to that.
However, one difference with the GPL is that there is no way for the FSF to revoke the license from previous copies of the code. They could make the next version of gcc fee-based only, however we could just fork off the currently released version's code, and stop using anything from the FSF. So, even if Microsoft buys out the FSF, rewires RMS's brain, and changes all FSF software to cost $1000000000 per copy, we can just fork everything and continue development on those versions.
Let me point out again: The copyright holder is not the licensee, and is not restricted by the license which applies to everyone else using the software
I disagree. The/. code should just automatically convert something matching the syntax of a URL to a link. It's not that hard to match, something like "(http|ftp|mailto|telnet)://[a-zA-Z0-9\.-]*(/.*)" or "[a-zA-Z0-9\.-]*\.[a-zA-Z0-9\.-]{2,3}/[^ ]*" as the matching regexs, convert anything that matches into a link. Would take about 3 lines in perl.
let's face it, the existance of rather spotty quality free/shareware has tarnished the origins of GNU/OpenSource..
You should judge software on the basis of it's latest release.. not previous mistakes.
Reading your post, it seems to me that you misunderstand the reference you quoted. Freeware/shareware has nothing to do with the previous mistakes of GNU/OpenSource/"Free Software"(as defined by RMS)
Perhaps you're not familiar with it, but in the DOS/Windoze world, there is tons of software available gratis(free), frequently with a rarely obeyed stipulation that if you like it and use it you should pay for it, which is almost always closed source. I do believe that this is what the previous poster was referring to. Freeware and shareware tend to combine all the disadvantages of proprietary/closed source software with all the disadvantages of GNU/OpenSource software. You don't get the source, so you can't fix it yourself, but there is no support, and since the people who write it barely make any money off it anyway, they don't spend much time fixing it. Some of it still manages to be pretty good, but a lot of it is crap. (hence the "spotty quality" comment)
P.S. Personally, I think we should avoid the confusing terms "open source" (which only implies that the source is open, not that you can get the source for free even necessarily) and "free software"(which sounds more like gratis than libre in english). My current favorite term is "free source", which can be interpreted correctly with both interpretations of "free", but doen't *necessarily* imply that as a product it's free. (Hell, they can sell bottled water;) I do have to wonder though if a term like "liberated software" or something like that would be good, avoiding the gratis interpretation. However, I'm rambling, so I'll shut up now
Oh... I encountered a problem like that on my parents' win95a machine. It had a 28.8k modem, and was reporting as connecting at 2400 baud when it was clearly faster. I turned on the debugging log, looked, and it turned out that it was 24000 baud. The setting for 24000 baud was missing from the registry though. There's a section in the registry that lists all the modem connect messages, and then has a binary setting that includes the connect speed. I hacked the registry and added an entry for "CONNECT 24000" to report 24000 baud, and that fixed it. Try doing the same.
Hey, wheel mouse support is not for low-end hardware! I got a wheel mouse recently because my ancient 2 button mouse's buttons were failing, and it rocks. I think all mice should've started coming with wheels ages ago, that way we'd have better linux application support now.
They're just so intuitive... within one day after I got my wheel mouse on my linux box, I went to work and was trying to scroll on the SGIs by rubbing the middle mouse button... it's quite annoying whenever I'm on a machine without a wheel mouse now, because I use it to scroll so much.
BTW, wheel mice are also great for leaning back while reading something... keyboard usually can't reach easily, but it's easy to just hold the mouse in your hand and scroll, since it's lighter than the keyboard, and sometimes has a longer cord)
Find a friend or friend of a friend with a CD burner. Problem solved. Only costs $12 too, between the emusic price for an album(last I checked) and the price of a blank CD-R.
Slashdot Mirror
The word "they" actually is used by some people as a gender neutral singular third person pronoun, in addition to being used as the plural third person pronoun. You can find historical justification for this at http://www.paganpaths.org/~lebleu/notes/linguistic . tml For more information on gender neutral pronouns, read the GNP FAQ
You're looking at the wrong year. The contributions being spoken of were made for the 2000 campaign, not the 2002 campaign. OpenSecrets.org has Microsoft down for contributing $4.5 million for 2000. Now, that still leaves a $1.5 million difference, but that may also be a difference in exact definition of what counts as a Microsoft donation, or in exact time period it applies to.
Try control + page up or control + page down. They added those as shortcuts for switching tabs the milestone after they added tabbed browsing, as I recall. On an extended keyboard, I can easily do those with just my right hand. Of course, I use my right hand for the mouse, so I don't know if it would help with your dilemma.
Actually, one of the computer labs at University of Wisconsin-Madison had KDE running on UltraSPARCs (running Solaris, not Linux) back a few years ago (~1998 - 1999) when I was in school.
:) Now, if QT could be ported to wrap the Win32 interface, instead of X, then you would have a real possibility of making an application for KDE also available as a Windows application. (Just compile it for Windows, include the Cygwin DLL, and boom, you've got a windows version.) In which case someone might actually make some useful applications available for both Windows and Linux by using it.
I don't really see the point of running KDE on Windows as long as you're still depending on an X server. (Well, other than just because you can.....
Why else? Because you are using at least a vaguely modern telephone modem, which has the compression option enabled. Modem protocols have supported compression since the days of 28.8 or 14.4k. Of course, they can compress text far better than random data (such as something that has already been compressed).
Take a look at http://www.dshield.org/howto.html, it says how to submit snort logs.
What you need to do is add /c followed by the command to the end of the url as a query parameter. For example:
GET /scripts/root.exe?/c+net+send+localhost+"Your+comp uter+is+infected+with+Code+Red+2.+See+www.incident s.org+for+instructions+on+how+to+remove." HTTP/1.0
This command (without the spaces that slashdot inserts) will pop up a message box on the local machine with the specified message.
The problem is, www.incidents.org only has instructions on removing the orignal CodeRed. Nothing on removing the new variant, which also requires removing explorer.exe from c:\. So, I'd like to be able to use a better URL, if I had one.
Excuse me? Um, liquid hydrogen has to be either under extreme pressure or extremely cold. Neither of which can be done with just a little modification to today's gas distribution infrastructure. Now, if you use something like this fuel processor to convert a more easily distributed fuel like methanol or diesel fuel into hydrogen in the car itself, then the methanol or diesel can easily be distributed with little modification to today's gas distribution infrastructure.
It appears that it has not been modded down, but that this user has been modded down so much that they are automatically posting at this score. (I could be wrong, maybe /. changed it so you can't see the moderation totals just by clicking the link for the post.)
However, it should have been modded down anyway just for being offtopic. If this was an article about Bill Gates giving away money, or any other topic addressed in the post, then it would be reasonable to mod it up.
(Personally, I have a number of disagreements with the contents of the post, but moderation is supposed to be about quality, not about agreement.)
Actually, he may have said it that way originally. There has been a trend in American English over the past 50-100 years or so to genericize the prepositions, using "of" where in previous times only one particular preposition ("at", "above", "on", "in", etc.) was allowed. One of my CS/Linguistics professors commented on how he has noticed the change over his lifetime. Unfortunately, I can't recall any of the specific examples he used.
I don't know for sure, never having talked to senecal about his research (combustion research isn't my field), but I suspect a factor might have been the amount of time it takes to test each member of the population. Each simulation of an engine takes many hours, and I believe the limit was 4 jobs per person at the time he was probably running those simulations.
It's cool to see something I was actually tangentially involved with on slashdot! ;) I used to work as the sys admin at the UW-ERC where this work was done. The "SGI supercomputer" referred to in the article is probably the Origin 2000 with 32 R12000 CPUs running at 300 Mhz and 16 gig of ram.
--Kevin, former ERC sys admin
I have an addition to this question: Are you used to having an editor for your professional journalistic writing, and do you have an editor for your articles on slashdot? If you don't have an editor for your articles on slashdot, do you think perhaps that getting an editor would help with the writing style factors that you are so criticized on?
It has an option at boot for expert boot, which boots the normal way instead of hiding it with graphics. I do wish they let you push esc to clear the graphics and let you see normal boot messages like windoze does. As for contribution, they have a nice easy graphical install for debian, Corel Explorer (the best windoze explorer clone I've ever seen), and Corel Update (a nice graphical interface to the debian package system). Unfortunately they lump all the corel stuff into one big deb package, or I'd install corel update and corel explorer on my debian machine.
Um, pico is a dinky little editor that is only good for email! It's also part of the pine distribution, which is under an icky license that doesn't allow distributing modified versions of the source, only original source + patches. I think it also disallows binary distribution, so debian requires you to compile it after install. (Incidentally, pine is the email program I use, and I love pine 4.x which even supports reading all that icky HTML email. I think PICO is very good for its intended purpose of editing email) Try out "ae" it's a wordstar clonish text editor that's good for about the level of ease of use of pico. I'd believe they also include vi, but I can't remember for sure. They don't include emacs though (probably due to size). However, go into corel update, click the checkboxes to enable the debian distribution sites (or better yet, go to the debian website and add the nearest mirror), and then you can install all that stuff through Corel Update.Overall, my review of the download version of Corel Linux 1.0 is that it looks like a very good start to an easy to install and use variant of debian, with some nice new features like corel explorer and corel update. It's also quite clearly feels like a 1.0 release however, with many kinks to work out, ranging from bad handling of taking over an entire drive on multiple drive systems (it went straight to asking if you want to erase everything without asking which drive!) to not being able to disable PAP authentication via the GUI KPPP interface (even when it says it is disabled!), because the PAP option was in the global options file in /etc/ppp/. Of course, the fact that I'm familiar with and really like debian probably helped. ;)
BTW, about the redhat init system with everything in /etc/rc.d/init.d and /etc/rc.d/rc#.d/ vs. debian with it in /etc/init.d and /etc/rc#.d/, I like the debian variant (which is identical to the IRIX layout I admin at work) much better... the redhat version requires more typing, for a not very useful rearrangement of the directories.
Wrong explanation, sorry. I'm afraid it's our old friend the software patent. From what I've heard, just about every use of wavelets was patented pretty quickly. So, until those patents expire, no widespread uses are likely to happen. Sure, there's stuff like VQF, but it's not going to be as widespread as MP3. (There is a patent with MP3, but it only covers one way to encode them, to my knowledge... so if you develop your own way to pick out the parts that don't make an audible difference, you're in the clear.)
Try checking out Dia on freshmeat. I haven't used it much, but it does have a mode for doing that. Dunno if it's good enough, but it's something. :)
No, this is perfect! Make win95/98 one division, and winNT another division! With win2000 MS tried and failed to move winNT's code into the desktop market, but I'm sure they plan to try it with the next version. What if win95/98 and winNT had to compete directly for market and let the best win?
Also, this breaks the advantages of winNT the server OS being designed to work with the desktop OS, and vice versa. WinNT probably wouldn't have good odds, facing linux on the server side, and win9x if they want to move into the desktop arena. (OTOH, WinNT makes a way more stable desktop than win9x) Win9x would have a pretty tight grip on the desktop initially, but the older technology would have a hard time competing against WinNT and also linux. (as linux becomes viable on the desktop) Imagine how much effort NT corp and win9x corp would have to put into *real* innovation to hold their ground without the MS juggernaut to support them. The consumers would win out because we'd have 2-4 way competition for the desktop market. (win9x, winNT, and possibly linux and MacOS(think iMac))
Well, for one thing, they deserve the trouble for making it so hard to make money selling a web-browser. :) For another, it includes other things like Frontpage, audio streaming tools, etc. Might include MSN in here (could have AOL w/ netscape vs. MSN w/ IE then), hotmail, and also MS's content ownership rights. Since this could be the weakest baby MS, you might throw any random bits that didn't fit anywhere else in here too, just for good measure.
1) It's still pretty removable.
2) Make the interfaces publicly documented, so the user has the choice of Netscape/Mozilla or IE as the browser integrated into the OS. (It's not so far integrated that this is all that hard)
Actually, if you contribute to the project and don't transfer copyright to the maintainer, they can not change the license without your (and every other contributer's) authorization. You still own copyright over your contribution, so you have to allow the license change. Note: IANAL
Personally, I agree... libraries should be licensed under the LGPL. The only reason not to is if you don't even want to allow non-GPLed software to even use your library. (I can see why a few hard line idealists would want to take this stance, but myself I think that using a library, particularly a dynamically linked one, shouldn't require license compatibility like that.)
I like debian the best, because of its easy upgrades, doesn't block using stuff from source or messing around with its internals, and it defaults to a nice, relatively secure setup, unlike some other distros.
There is a tradeoff between capturing badly formed URLs(e.g. www.slashdot.org is a badly formed url, it should be http://www.slashdot.org/) and capturing junk. (e.g. www.blah blah) Just because MS Outlook's URL auto-detection uses an overly broad pattern doesn't mean everything has to. For example, the pattern I gave for detecting things without the initial "http://" specifically checked for the last part being 2 or 3 characters, as all TLDs are 2 or 3 characters, to my knowledge. You can put a variety of checks like that in, and if you like, even open an http connection and see if you get an error accessing the URL to guarantee validity, if you wish.
Well, URL autodetect should be optional. Just like the anonymous posting checkbox, we could have a URL autodect checkbox, and/or not auto-detect URLs in certain entry modes, like HTML. That way when you want to do something where you don't want URL-like things highlighted, you don't have to worry about it.
Actually, no, no legal URL can have an embedded, unescaped space. Webbrowsers accept spaces in input, but hopefully they convert it to %20 over the network. If you check section 2.4.3 of RFC2396 - Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax, it says:
IANAL, but actually, it is true. You quote the GPL, but you've overlooked who "you" is in the license. It is the licensee, not the copyright holder. The copyright holder would be "I" or "we"
Licenses are not legally binding on the copyright holder. The reason the FSF insists on copyright to everything is 1) It's clear who has to defend it when violated, 2) They can change the license at any time. In theory, they could change to fee licensing, but in actuality, the likely use of this is that if the GPL fails in court, they will come up with a new license that does the same thing and change the license to that.
However, one difference with the GPL is that there is no way for the FSF to revoke the license from previous copies of the code. They could make the next version of gcc fee-based only, however we could just fork off the currently released version's code, and stop using anything from the FSF. So, even if Microsoft buys out the FSF, rewires RMS's brain, and changes all FSF software to cost $1000000000 per copy, we can just fork everything and continue development on those versions.
Let me point out again: The copyright holder is not the licensee, and is not restricted by the license which applies to everyone else using the software
I disagree. The /. code should just automatically convert something matching the syntax of a URL to a link. It's not that hard to match, something like "(http|ftp|mailto|telnet)://[a-zA-Z0-9\.-]*(/.*)" or "[a-zA-Z0-9\.-]*\.[a-zA-Z0-9\.-]{2,3}/[^ ]*" as the matching regexs, convert anything that matches into a link. Would take about 3 lines in perl.
P.S. and yes I know how to put links in myself, I just think we should make it easier for people. Also, the code can make sure to attach the "http:" to URLs so that they don't try to link internally to /. like happens if people forget the leading part in their HREF.
Reading your post, it seems to me that you misunderstand the reference you quoted. Freeware/shareware has nothing to do with the previous mistakes of GNU/OpenSource/"Free Software"(as defined by RMS)
Perhaps you're not familiar with it, but in the DOS/Windoze world, there is tons of software available gratis(free), frequently with a rarely obeyed stipulation that if you like it and use it you should pay for it, which is almost always closed source. I do believe that this is what the previous poster was referring to. Freeware and shareware tend to combine all the disadvantages of proprietary/closed source software with all the disadvantages of GNU/OpenSource software. You don't get the source, so you can't fix it yourself, but there is no support, and since the people who write it barely make any money off it anyway, they don't spend much time fixing it. Some of it still manages to be pretty good, but a lot of it is crap. (hence the "spotty quality" comment)
P.S. Personally, I think we should avoid the confusing terms "open source" (which only implies that the source is open, not that you can get the source for free even necessarily) and "free software"(which sounds more like gratis than libre in english). My current favorite term is "free source", which can be interpreted correctly with both interpretations of "free", but doen't *necessarily* imply that as a product it's free. (Hell, they can sell bottled water;) I do have to wonder though if a term like "liberated software" or something like that would be good, avoiding the gratis interpretation. However, I'm rambling, so I'll shut up now
Oh... I encountered a problem like that on my parents' win95a machine. It had a 28.8k modem, and was reporting as connecting at 2400 baud when it was clearly faster. I turned on the debugging log, looked, and it turned out that it was 24000 baud. The setting for 24000 baud was missing from the registry though. There's a section in the registry that lists all the modem connect messages, and then has a binary setting that includes the connect speed. I hacked the registry and added an entry for "CONNECT 24000" to report 24000 baud, and that fixed it. Try doing the same.
Hey, wheel mouse support is not for low-end hardware! I got a wheel mouse recently because my ancient 2 button mouse's buttons were failing, and it rocks. I think all mice should've started coming with wheels ages ago, that way we'd have better linux application support now.
They're just so intuitive... within one day after I got my wheel mouse on my linux box, I went to work and was trying to scroll on the SGIs by rubbing the middle mouse button... it's quite annoying whenever I'm on a machine without a wheel mouse now, because I use it to scroll so much.
BTW, wheel mice are also great for leaning back while reading something... keyboard usually can't reach easily, but it's easy to just hold the mouse in your hand and scroll, since it's lighter than the keyboard, and sometimes has a longer cord)
Find a friend or friend of a friend with a CD burner. Problem solved. Only costs $12 too, between the emusic price for an album(last I checked) and the price of a blank CD-R.