Anybody who's followed Microsoft's legal hassles -- or the legal hassles of any big corporation -- knows this stuff.
Back during the Watergate scandals, a big corp got caught making illegal contributions to a Republican slush fund. They had to pay a fine, of course. A reporter, noticing the paltry size of the fine, remarked to one of the lawyers, "I'll bet your fee was higher than that." The lawyer responded heatedly, "I should hope so!"
But don't respond with a round of lawyer bashing. That's like blaming garbagemen for pollution. Instead, go out and elect a President who will appoint an Attorney General who thinks that anti-trust laws need penalities that actually hurt.
Critiquing the quality of information in the article is hardly offtopic. My personal gripe is that the story is full of comments like, "KDE and Konqueror are OK, but I'd rather use Gnome and Mozilla." We all know that SuSE is KDE-centric, and that not everybody likes KDE, so what is he telling us that is of any interest? If you're going to do an unauthorized peek at a beta version of a product, you should use a writer who can actually talk about what's changed in the product. In the case of a Linux distro, that probably means a person who actually prefers that distro and uses it with most of its default options.
That's the big Catch-22 of high tech. Logisitcally, you can put a software company or a computer factory anywhere you can find basic infrastructure: electricity, telecom, roads, etc. So why does everybody work where its expensive? Because that's where the talented labor is. Why is the talented labor concentrated in just a few expensive places? Because that's where the jobs are.
I'm not a big fan of California: too many people, too much pollution, too much traffic, costs too much to live. If I could, I'd move in a heartbeat. Not the absolute boonies, but one of those middling places where there's enough people to have a decent cultural life. Hundreds of places like that in the U.S., but none of them need the kind of talent I have.
Except that Gateway has its headquarters in California, where sales taxes are pretty high. I never quite figured out why they moved here from South Dakota, where taxes are lower and it generally costs less to operate. I guess they were just tired of the cold.
Last time I looked, groups.google.com stripped all attachments.
But I suppose you're probably right anyway. Google's Usenet software is smart enough to find -- and remove -- text-encode binaries even from message bodies. Which is actully how you sent binaries before MIME was invented (1992, I think). The old USENET tapes they used to create their archives must contain millions of files stored that way.
Question is, do they really care whether people stash binaries in their email? The only reason to do that is to provide them for download without paying for storage or bandwidth. Which they could easily prevent by other means.
I'm not sure "genius" is the right word, but Google ads are certainly smarter.
I've always thought of Google ads as reflecting Brin and Page's distaste for the obnoxious advertising that was dominating competing search engines back when Google went commercial. But your insight is probably closer to the truth: they simply realized that "smart" ads could be more effective than traditional spam-like ads. Many times more effective, judging from the fact that it took them about 2 years to start making an actual profit.
On the other hand, many people don't view those simple plain text links as ads. Which actually makes them even more effective.
Orkut is a half-assed effort that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. They had to try social networking software because it's all the rage right now. But Orkut doesn't even work as well as Friendster. I suspect Google knows that SN is just a passing fad, and is just going through the motions.
Sure, Google is well-equipped to misuse the data stored on their mail servers. So is every other public mail provider. And every hacker who knows how to sniff packets. I've never put information in ordinary email that I considered really sensitive. If you're worried about who's reading your email, encrypt it. But you won't bother because it's not worth the trouble.
You're right, of course. But I still find it strange that so much of Google's revenue comes from ads -- when their ad strategy is so thoroughly low key. Traditionally advertising is obnoxious and in your face. But that doesn't seem to work on the web.
I don't see how they can ban binary attachments unless they ban all attachments. But you probably have the right idea. They could allocate each user 100 meg of raw storage, and simply call this the equivalent of 1G of compressed text. People could store non-text attachments, but would soon use up their quotas. They could also prevent people from using the system as a passive storage area by requiring that people actually send and receive mail.
Still, 100 meg is a lot of storage for a free service. Yahoo used to offer 15, then decided they couldn't afford it. If it were anybody but Google, I'd dismiss the whole thing as another dotcom boondoggle. But Google has a talent for making money on services you wouldn't believe are profitable.
To be at all funny, an April Fools item has to have some potential to actually fool somebody. Having a special icon would make that impossible. Not that it matters, since the basic joke is so worn out, nobody is ever fooled anyway.
When you said "can't use ^V/^C" I took "can't" to mean "technically impossible." OK, not what you meant. But you're still wrong. Good terminal emulators always define some kind of quote sequence so you can pass through something you want interpreted by the remote system. Or you configure your keyboard shortcuts on the two systems so that they don't conflict. Or you don't use keyboard shortcuts at all -- I tend to rely on context menus for cutting and pasting. There's no "can't" here.
All that says is that you can change the specific action of the buttons. Which is in fact a standard XWindows feature. Or more precisely, a feature of most X window managers that were designed more than 10 years ago. Since then, more sophisticated input features have become commonplace. The right mouse button doesn't have a single function, it brings up a context-sensitive menu. Or you can skip the menu and use keyboard shortcuts. This kind of UI is something you see not just on Windows, but on most popular X Window Managers. Not just the ones like KDE, which people accuse of slavishly imitating Windows, but also really innovative WMs, like Englightenment.
The problem is that they can't use ^C ^V like the rest of Windows apps because the program running inside putty may use those - for example if you are using pine.
That's nonsense. Text mode programs don't know about terminal cut and paste. They all think they're running on DEC-compatible terminals, which is what all XTerm implementations emulate. (Actually, they assume whatever terminal you specify via $TERM, but nowadays that's almost always set to "xterm", since hardware terminals are more or less dead.) They don't see mouse gestures. They just see input. They have no way of knowing whether these inputs come from a keyboard or a clipboard.
Have you seen other programs that handle this better? What approach did they take?
I thought of that. But have you seen the PuTTY source? Fixing the configuration problem or making cut&paste more flexible would require more than a simple patch. It would be more like a major fork, or even a new app that borrowed a lot of PuTTY's routines. I probably don't have the skill to do that, and I certainly don't have the time. The best I can do is make whining noises and hope that somebody takes an interest.
Which kind of points up why PuTTY is such a solid program: the authors think in terms of simple practical functionality. I have nothing against non-functional eye candy, but programs that support things like transparency and theming tend to suffer, qualitywise.
I guess you could argue that PuTTY's strength is also its weakness. The authors have very specific ideas about the architecture of the program, and don't leave a lot of room for tweaking.
am still waiting for the Tab support, nowadays my desktop at work is full of putty windows, what is a bit annoying.
PuTTY will never have tab support -- that's just the kind of fancy UI gimmick that doesn't fit in with its basic design, and which the authors have no interest in implementing even if it were practical.
Personally, I don't use tabs, even when I use Mozilla or another program that supports them -- two levels of window access is too complex for my feeble brain. I like to have everything in the taskbar. (But isn't it hard to find stuff when you have 15 window buttons in the taskbar?) Not if you resize and rearrange the taskbar so that you have two or three rows of window buttons. You also need to increase the height of your caption bars (which also specifies the height of your taskbar buttons) so they're easier to read.
What's really helpful is to have a utility to rearrange your taskbar buttons into some kind of logical order. The best ones simply implement drag-and-drop on the taskbar. Unfortunately XP broke all of these -- the only utility that still works is Taskbar Commander which makes you pop up a special window to rearrange your buttons.
PuTTY for Windows is the best software of its kind. When I need an SSH/XTerm window to a Linux box, PuTTY is what I use, because I can't find an alternative that works nearly as well. That being said:
PuTTY insists that you use default XWindows conventions for cutting and pasting. Even most XWindows software is more flexible than that, never mind a cross-platform app. It's a pain for somebody who works primarily in Windows.
Configuration is horribly idiosyncratic. Options are not arranged in anything like a logical fashion, creating or modifying sessions is a pain, and it's too easy to make a bunch of changes and then lose them.
Either the PuTTY people are totally bored by UI design issues, or they just like to torture people. I hate to complain, because it's basically good (even excellent) software, and the price is right. But come on, guys!
Perhaps what's unfair is to blame Hopper for inventing the notion of an English-like programming language back in 1952. When, as you point out, it wasn't obvious to most computer people how complicated natural language really is. More blameworthy are the government bureaucrats who continued to push the idea even into the 60s, which was when the became embodied into Cobol. By then, they'd hard enough experience with language design to know better.
And, come to think of it, Hopper was one of those bureaucrats. She never did admit that there was anything wrong with her original concept. The original mistake is forgivable, but not the stuborness with which she stuck to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Back during the Watergate scandals, a big corp got caught making illegal contributions to a Republican slush fund. They had to pay a fine, of course. A reporter, noticing the paltry size of the fine, remarked to one of the lawyers, "I'll bet your fee was higher than that." The lawyer responded heatedly, "I should hope so!"
But don't respond with a round of lawyer bashing. That's like blaming garbagemen for pollution. Instead, go out and elect a President who will appoint an Attorney General who thinks that anti-trust laws need penalities that actually hurt.
The only place I've ever seen Turing spelled with an Umlaut is in Cryptonomicon. Stephenson can't resist a linguistic joke, no matter how feeble.
Critiquing the quality of information in the article is hardly offtopic. My personal gripe is that the story is full of comments like, "KDE and Konqueror are OK, but I'd rather use Gnome and Mozilla." We all know that SuSE is KDE-centric, and that not everybody likes KDE, so what is he telling us that is of any interest? If you're going to do an unauthorized peek at a beta version of a product, you should use a writer who can actually talk about what's changed in the product. In the case of a Linux distro, that probably means a person who actually prefers that distro and uses it with most of its default options.
So it's annoying for some people and convenient for others. That's why God invented options.
Have you tried plink?
And yet somehow other Xterm emulators manage to do this. Magic?
I'm not a big fan of California: too many people, too much pollution, too much traffic, costs too much to live. If I could, I'd move in a heartbeat. Not the absolute boonies, but one of those middling places where there's enough people to have a decent cultural life. Hundreds of places like that in the U.S., but none of them need the kind of talent I have.
Except that Gateway has its headquarters in California, where sales taxes are pretty high. I never quite figured out why they moved here from South Dakota, where taxes are lower and it generally costs less to operate. I guess they were just tired of the cold.
All your capital are belong to us!
But I suppose you're probably right anyway. Google's Usenet software is smart enough to find -- and remove -- text-encode binaries even from message bodies. Which is actully how you sent binaries before MIME was invented (1992, I think). The old USENET tapes they used to create their archives must contain millions of files stored that way.
Question is, do they really care whether people stash binaries in their email? The only reason to do that is to provide them for download without paying for storage or bandwidth. Which they could easily prevent by other means.
I've always thought of Google ads as reflecting Brin and Page's distaste for the obnoxious advertising that was dominating competing search engines back when Google went commercial. But your insight is probably closer to the truth: they simply realized that "smart" ads could be more effective than traditional spam-like ads. Many times more effective, judging from the fact that it took them about 2 years to start making an actual profit.
On the other hand, many people don't view those simple plain text links as ads. Which actually makes them even more effective.
Sure, Google is well-equipped to misuse the data stored on their mail servers. So is every other public mail provider. And every hacker who knows how to sniff packets. I've never put information in ordinary email that I considered really sensitive. If you're worried about who's reading your email, encrypt it. But you won't bother because it's not worth the trouble.
You're right, of course. But I still find it strange that so much of Google's revenue comes from ads -- when their ad strategy is so thoroughly low key. Traditionally advertising is obnoxious and in your face. But that doesn't seem to work on the web.
Still, 100 meg is a lot of storage for a free service. Yahoo used to offer 15, then decided they couldn't afford it. If it were anybody but Google, I'd dismiss the whole thing as another dotcom boondoggle. But Google has a talent for making money on services you wouldn't believe are profitable.
To be at all funny, an April Fools item has to have some potential to actually fool somebody. Having a special icon would make that impossible. Not that it matters, since the basic joke is so worn out, nobody is ever fooled anyway.
I used to enjoy the occasional April 1 news item. But Slashdot seems determined to beat the idea to death!
When you said "can't use ^V/^C" I took "can't" to mean "technically impossible." OK, not what you meant. But you're still wrong. Good terminal emulators always define some kind of quote sequence so you can pass through something you want interpreted by the remote system. Or you configure your keyboard shortcuts on the two systems so that they don't conflict. Or you don't use keyboard shortcuts at all -- I tend to rely on context menus for cutting and pasting. There's no "can't" here.
All that says is that you can change the specific action of the buttons. Which is in fact a standard XWindows feature. Or more precisely, a feature of most X window managers that were designed more than 10 years ago. Since then, more sophisticated input features have become commonplace. The right mouse button doesn't have a single function, it brings up a context-sensitive menu. Or you can skip the menu and use keyboard shortcuts. This kind of UI is something you see not just on Windows, but on most popular X Window Managers. Not just the ones like KDE, which people accuse of slavishly imitating Windows, but also really innovative WMs, like Englightenment.
Interesting point. How does the Linux version of PuTTY manage sessions?
I thought of that. But have you seen the PuTTY source? Fixing the configuration problem or making cut&paste more flexible would require more than a simple patch. It would be more like a major fork, or even a new app that borrowed a lot of PuTTY's routines. I probably don't have the skill to do that, and I certainly don't have the time. The best I can do is make whining noises and hope that somebody takes an interest.
I guess you could argue that PuTTY's strength is also its weakness. The authors have very specific ideas about the architecture of the program, and don't leave a lot of room for tweaking.
PuTTY will never have tab support -- that's just the kind of fancy UI gimmick that doesn't fit in with its basic design, and which the authors have no interest in implementing even if it were practical.Personally, I don't use tabs, even when I use Mozilla or another program that supports them -- two levels of window access is too complex for my feeble brain. I like to have everything in the taskbar. (But isn't it hard to find stuff when you have 15 window buttons in the taskbar?) Not if you resize and rearrange the taskbar so that you have two or three rows of window buttons. You also need to increase the height of your caption bars (which also specifies the height of your taskbar buttons) so they're easier to read.
What's really helpful is to have a utility to rearrange your taskbar buttons into some kind of logical order. The best ones simply implement drag-and-drop on the taskbar. Unfortunately XP broke all of these -- the only utility that still works is Taskbar Commander which makes you pop up a special window to rearrange your buttons.
An open source project backed by RealNetworks? That's just not natural!
- PuTTY insists that you use default XWindows conventions for cutting and pasting. Even most XWindows software is more flexible than that, never mind a cross-platform app. It's a pain for somebody who works primarily in Windows.
- Configuration is horribly idiosyncratic. Options are not arranged in anything like a logical fashion, creating or modifying sessions is a pain, and it's too easy to make a bunch of changes and then lose them.
Either the PuTTY people are totally bored by UI design issues, or they just like to torture people. I hate to complain, because it's basically good (even excellent) software, and the price is right. But come on, guys!And, come to think of it, Hopper was one of those bureaucrats. She never did admit that there was anything wrong with her original concept. The original mistake is forgivable, but not the stuborness with which she stuck to it.