Long, ago, I vowed never again to buy goods that used to made at home, but have had their factories moved overseas by corporate greed. I urge everybody to do the same! Of course, this limits your social options, since U.S. made clothes are hard to find...
When I listen to songs, I'm tired of the FCC regulating stations, and butchering songs I would otherwise appreciate into beeps, buzzes, silent space, and otherwise crap FX.
Actually, the FCC no longer bans specific words. For all the (bleep)ing bleeping, blame the huge media companies, which are averse to risk-taking. So what people complain about is what gets censored, be it four-letter words or the latest Dixie Chicks song. If you don't like it, you should complain yourself.
Not everyone wants to pay for radio, but I guess if you spend enough time listening to it, maybe it's worthwhile.
A lot of us pay for NPR, and we don't even get a bill!
Seriously, though, I'm a little tired of the "why would anybody want to pay for that" attitude around here. It's a service, about the same value as a newspaper subscription, and priced accordingly.
Why does Slashdot seem to be getting more and more parochial?
So yeah, I can get privacy if I disable the feature. Which means I don't get any of the GIS services either. (Not having the 911 operator know where I am is particularly painful, especially if I don't know myself.) Better to have the feature on, and proper controls over who can access the data.
That's pretty ironic: you flame Lord Kholdan for thinking only terms of his own needs, and then you insist that you have to be able to use a UI that's only accesible for a few hard-core techies.
If your choice of a highly customizable UI only affects you, then feel free. But for most of us, user interfaces are not a private thing. We create, test, document, and provide training for software that people use. All of which becomes much more difficult and expensive if we have no UI standards.
Everybody has to make compromises. I certainly would never use Windows at all if I had an absolutely free choice. But as it is, I use it between 60% and 95% of the time. The desktop I admire the most is Englightenment -- but I never use it, because it simply isn't practical me to make the necessary mental retooling. I could go on, but you get the idea.
It's a pity you can't always do things precisely the way you want. But none of us can, and it's childish to whine about every compromise you have to make.
As so many people do, you've assumed that you have to be up to something illicit to care about privacy. Simply not true. Here's an not unlikely example: You say to your boss, "I need the afternoon off. Gotta take my kid to the doctor." "Sure!" your boss says, then runs back to his office and order a location trace on your cell. It turns out the address you go to is for a specialist in childhood leukemia. "Christ!" your boss says, "Our insurance costs are through the roof already! If this kid needs a bone marrow transplant, forget about any end of the year bonus! Better downsize this guy, stat!"
Of course this technology has legitimate uses. If you'd bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that the privacy advocates were not objecting to the technology itself, but to the absence of control over who gets access to the data.
You seem to have missed this from the Supercookies link:
The SuperCookie problem was fixed by Microsoft in version 9 of the Windows Media Player by having all computers return the same cookie value of {3300AD50-2C39-46c0-AE0A-000000000000}.
That EULA you mention does seem a little intrusive. But "complete control"? Gimme a break!
I can't figure out what specifically you're referring to in the fourth link. If you weren't an AC, I'd ask you to amplify.
All in all, I'd say your "informative" points were hastily given!
Pretty sure this makes Microsoft look really inept.
Since when have they needed any help with that?
If people are doing open source IE patches, would somebody please fix this sucker? Thousands of people are complaining about this bug online, yet MS hasn't even officially admitted its existence. Now that's inept!
Part of Lustre appears to be a new local journalling file system called OBDFS. Pretty interesting in itself, thought they say little about it.
Worth noting that ClusterFS is advertising Lustre as a pre-1.0 product. Probably not a current option for anybody who can't afford a big support contract.
AFS would be awesome... you see, sometimes these two offices need to work on the same files from both locations... not simultaneously, but sometimes consecutively. In those cases, it'd be great to have a setup that locally caches the file on the slave server, but will automatically serve the most recent version of the file, even if it had since been edited master server. With AFS, all of that is taken care of by the server, I believe.
So far, you've said nothing about what's in these files and how they are being modified. That's not a secondary question. In fact, it may make your whole search for the right filesystem irrelevent.
You're assuming that a remote filesystem is the only way to share files. But its only the most common and simplest. When you start talking about replication and version control (which you are, even though you don't use the terms) you need to consider a technology that directly supports these features. There's version control systems, databases, content management systems. Which is right for you? Without knowing more about the data you're dealing with, it's impossible to say.
A lot of Lucent hardware runs Unixware. If you have one of the Audix voice mail systems, there's a Unixware box in your phone room. (I can just picture all the SCO haters looking at their desk phones with utter contempt!) Sort of a logical progression, since even before AT&T started selling commercial Unix licenses, it was using Unix in Bell System installations. Presumably, they stuck with the "original" Unix, even after both Lucent and Unix left AT&T.
I've tried a lot of tagging software over the years, and a lot of it is pretty good, but the authors always seemed to have their own notions about which features were important and what was the easiest way to do thing. And figuring out exactly how to get the software to do what I want is also a lot of work. I've mostly ended up thinking that major retagging is not worth the trouble. I haven't tried doing it in Perl, but for what I need it might actually be less work than a high-level application.
You claim that EasyTag does about 90% of what you might do with scripting. I don't know EasyTag, but that sounds about right. In most applications, about 90% of what you need to do is built right in. But that other 10% can be really painful and time-consuming if you have to do it by hand. That's why scripting languages are so important. Of course, the ideal is a good application that exposes just the right API to a scripting language, so a programmer can extend the app's functionality without being constrained by it. But that's pretty rare. A good alternative is a non-application scripting API that covers all the basic functionality of common applications. That may be slightly redundant, but it's hardly "re-inventing the wheel".
If Solaris for x86 had to survive on its own, it'd have died off long ago. Not even Sun is enthusiastic about it, and keeps trying to discontinue it, to the dismay of few hard-care enthusiasts. They certainly don't make any money off it.
I suppose Solaris 86 has its uses, like the ones you mention, but those don't make it a viable product on its own. Most people who would prefer Solaris over other OSs also prefer Sparc over other processors.
There's no market for this thing. If you've got technical issues that keep you from using Linux or BSD, you're probably also looking for a fancy processor, such as SPARC, not a "commodity processor". And running on x86 is the only serious advantage Unixware has over other "real" Unixes. So Unixware is semi-abandonware, like WordPerfect or 1-2-3. There will always be people who insist on such products, but not enough to sustain a serious busines. UnixWare's only remaining commercial value is as a basis for litigation.
The article doesn't seem to say that they're going to use Mars time for anything but scheduling work shifts. I suspect they'll still do all their record keeping with old-fashioned UTC. The weird clock and time units sound like typical NASA PR, not something anybody would actually use.
I have to comment on another approach to Mars time. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels, which are otherwise well thought out, he uses this silly convention called a "Time Slip". At midnight, all clocks simply stop for 39 minutes and 30 seconds. Imagine the record keeping nightmares that would cause! Can't imagine was Robinson was thinking of, except maybe an infatuation with a certain Philip Dick novel. I never read it, but I assume it's as short on logic as most of Dick's work.
The KDE source files all say "This file is part of the KDE project." The email given for the koffice.org webmaster is webmaster@kde.org! Sounds like more than a casual connection.
You assume that KOffice has a serious reason to exist. It doesn't. Perhaps it made sense at one time for KDE to try to replicate every Microsoft desktop software. But now it's time for them to adjust their goals. They need to acknowledge that they don't have the resources to do everything they'd like to do. They especially don't need to duplicate the work of the OpenOffice team. If OO interoperability were as much an issue as it used to be, things might be different.
The computer language culture at MIT is based on functional languages instead of the procedural languages most of us rely on. In really serious function programming, you use recursion a lot, even for iteration. So of course MIT people love recursive acronyms, like "GNU's not Unix!" And of course, this bunch sort of culturally dominate the whole Free Software movement, since the whole thing basically started at the MIT AI lab.
The first time I saw a recursive acronym ("MUNG Until No Good") I thought it was very funny. But that was 20 years ago, and the joke's beginning to get stale.
No, the difference was that, in WWII, it was necessary to make a LOT of war machinery. In Iraq and Afganistan, we already had enough jets, tanks, etc.
Actually, we don't. We have tons of fancy expensive toys, but we always seem to be running short of the basics. Couple weeks ago a local Nat. Guard unit got mobilized for Iraq duty, and all the local cop agencies donated their extra bulletproof vests. One has to wonder why such a unit doesn't come pre-equipped. And during the first war, they actually had their big force all assembled before they discovered they had no mine clearing equipment. Had to borrow it from the Israelis (and paint over the markings on the boxes so the Saudis wouldn't see them).
Come to think of it, mobilizing all those reservists and NG people is also bad economically, since many of them are skilled tech, cops, professionals, etc. Less of an issue during Vietnam (when they used 18-year-old draftees) and WW II (when most GIs where un- or semiskilled people glad to have a job).
The reason the US government can borrow any ammount of money it wants, is because it has complete control over the Federal Reserve, and can do with the money, anything it chooses.
If that were true, a budget deficit would be the least of our worries. Governments that pay the bills by printing money invariably cause hyperinflation. Which we're certainly not seeing now -- some people are actually worried about deflation.
The worst inflation I'm old enough to remember was 1980, when it was 18% a year. A classic case printing-press hyperinflation is pre-Nazi Germany, where it peaked at 300% a month. And that's not even the worst case in recent history.
(Inflation joke: guy goes into a restaurant in Berlin in 1922, puts down one US dollar, and says, "What can I get for this," and they say, "Oh, you can have a three-course meal, tip included!" So he sits down and is served. He's just finishing up the third course when the waiter brings yet another one. "I only paid for three courses!" "Oh, while you were eating, the exchange rate went up again!")
That's precisely why the money supply is controlled by an autonomous Federal Reserve system, not by the politicians. Our deficit is financed by bonds, not by the printing press.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but is it worth it to become a fuzzy-headed liberal elitist? I mean, that's the only kind of person who listens to NPR, right?
Long, ago, I vowed never again to buy goods that used to made at home, but have had their factories moved overseas by corporate greed. I urge everybody to do the same! Of course, this limits your social options, since U.S. made clothes are hard to find...
It's been a while since NPR got more than a tiny fraction of its budget from the feds.
Seriously, though, I'm a little tired of the "why would anybody want to pay for that" attitude around here. It's a service, about the same value as a newspaper subscription, and priced accordingly.
Why does Slashdot seem to be getting more and more parochial?
So yeah, I can get privacy if I disable the feature. Which means I don't get any of the GIS services either. (Not having the 911 operator know where I am is particularly painful, especially if I don't know myself.) Better to have the feature on, and proper controls over who can access the data.
If your choice of a highly customizable UI only affects you, then feel free. But for most of us, user interfaces are not a private thing. We create, test, document, and provide training for software that people use. All of which becomes much more difficult and expensive if we have no UI standards.
Everybody has to make compromises. I certainly would never use Windows at all if I had an absolutely free choice. But as it is, I use it between 60% and 95% of the time. The desktop I admire the most is Englightenment -- but I never use it, because it simply isn't practical me to make the necessary mental retooling. I could go on, but you get the idea.
It's a pity you can't always do things precisely the way you want. But none of us can, and it's childish to whine about every compromise you have to make.
Of course this technology has legitimate uses. If you'd bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that the privacy advocates were not objecting to the technology itself, but to the absence of control over who gets access to the data.
You seem to have missed this from the Supercookies link:
That EULA you mention does seem a little intrusive. But "complete control"? Gimme a break!
I can't figure out what specifically you're referring to in the fourth link. If you weren't an AC, I'd ask you to amplify.
All in all, I'd say your "informative" points were hastily given!
Since you mention CSS: when are they going to implement CSS2 properly? It's only been out 5 years!
If people are doing open source IE patches, would somebody please fix this sucker? Thousands of people are complaining about this bug online, yet MS hasn't even officially admitted its existence. Now that's inept!
Worth noting that ClusterFS is advertising Lustre as a pre-1.0 product. Probably not a current option for anybody who can't afford a big support contract.
You're assuming that a remote filesystem is the only way to share files. But its only the most common and simplest. When you start talking about replication and version control (which you are, even though you don't use the terms) you need to consider a technology that directly supports these features. There's version control systems, databases, content management systems. Which is right for you? Without knowing more about the data you're dealing with, it's impossible to say.
Any other examples?
You claim that EasyTag does about 90% of what you might do with scripting. I don't know EasyTag, but that sounds about right. In most applications, about 90% of what you need to do is built right in. But that other 10% can be really painful and time-consuming if you have to do it by hand. That's why scripting languages are so important. Of course, the ideal is a good application that exposes just the right API to a scripting language, so a programmer can extend the app's functionality without being constrained by it. But that's pretty rare. A good alternative is a non-application scripting API that covers all the basic functionality of common applications. That may be slightly redundant, but it's hardly "re-inventing the wheel".
I suppose Solaris 86 has its uses, like the ones you mention, but those don't make it a viable product on its own. Most people who would prefer Solaris over other OSs also prefer Sparc over other processors.
There's no market for this thing. If you've got technical issues that keep you from using Linux or BSD, you're probably also looking for a fancy processor, such as SPARC, not a "commodity processor". And running on x86 is the only serious advantage Unixware has over other "real" Unixes. So Unixware is semi-abandonware, like WordPerfect or 1-2-3. There will always be people who insist on such products, but not enough to sustain a serious busines. UnixWare's only remaining commercial value is as a basis for litigation.
I have to comment on another approach to Mars time. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels, which are otherwise well thought out, he uses this silly convention called a "Time Slip". At midnight, all clocks simply stop for 39 minutes and 30 seconds. Imagine the record keeping nightmares that would cause! Can't imagine was Robinson was thinking of, except maybe an infatuation with a certain Philip Dick novel. I never read it, but I assume it's as short on logic as most of Dick's work.
The KDE source files all say "This file is part of the KDE project." The email given for the koffice.org webmaster is webmaster@kde.org! Sounds like more than a casual connection.
A glider can stay up indefinitely, if the pilot can find the right thermals. A regular airplane can only stay up until it runs out of fuel.
You assume that KOffice has a serious reason to exist. It doesn't. Perhaps it made sense at one time for KDE to try to replicate every Microsoft desktop software. But now it's time for them to adjust their goals. They need to acknowledge that they don't have the resources to do everything they'd like to do. They especially don't need to duplicate the work of the OpenOffice team. If OO interoperability were as much an issue as it used to be, things might be different.
The first time I saw a recursive acronym ("MUNG Until No Good") I thought it was very funny. But that was 20 years ago, and the joke's beginning to get stale.
Come to think of it, mobilizing all those reservists and NG people is also bad economically, since many of them are skilled tech, cops, professionals, etc. Less of an issue during Vietnam (when they used 18-year-old draftees) and WW II (when most GIs where un- or semiskilled people glad to have a job).
If that were true, a budget deficit would be the least of our worries. Governments that pay the bills by printing money invariably cause hyperinflation. Which we're certainly not seeing now -- some people are actually worried about deflation.The worst inflation I'm old enough to remember was 1980, when it was 18% a year. A classic case printing-press hyperinflation is pre-Nazi Germany, where it peaked at 300% a month. And that's not even the worst case in recent history.
(Inflation joke: guy goes into a restaurant in Berlin in 1922, puts down one US dollar, and says, "What can I get for this," and they say, "Oh, you can have a three-course meal, tip included!" So he sits down and is served. He's just finishing up the third course when the waiter brings yet another one. "I only paid for three courses!" "Oh, while you were eating, the exchange rate went up again!")
That's precisely why the money supply is controlled by an autonomous Federal Reserve system, not by the politicians. Our deficit is financed by bonds, not by the printing press.