Other replies to this were kind of hazy ("You can get at the metadata through Explorer")...
JPEG allows arbitrary headers; one such header is the EXIF header which most digital cameras will include. This includes stuff like date and time taken, focal length, etc. The problem is that since it's an extension of JPEG rather than a mandatory part of the standard, any software is free to ignore the EXIF header, and neglect to preserve it when modifying the image. For example, take a JPEG from a digital camera, with date and time helpfully included in the EXIF header... run ImageMagick "mogrify" on it; perhaps to resize it or to change the JPEG compression ratio -- EXIF header disappears (you can use jhead to get around this.)
My understanding of JPEG2000 is that the standard specifies a header containing XML metadata. Evidence here.
I'm very keen on the concept. It makes sense that in a single (standard format) file I should be able to store a picture, technical details about it, free text annotation, etc. such that for example, a really simple bit of CGI could present it as an album.
Cute names are fine, but you should make sure you have "subdomains" (not in the DNS sense) so you can sensibly group your machines.
For example, at my university, all the workstations were named after countries. With hundreds of machines, that could get unmanageable, but to avoid that, each lab was a continent -- so one room was known as Europe (never formally, as far as I recall) and contained the machines England, Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, etc., another was South America (Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, etc.) and so on. Of course this only scales to five labs, but it worked for us.
Where I work, we use kids TV characters. Nominally, each project is a different show, and the servers for a project are all characters from that one show -- inevitably there is drift though.
From what I've read, you can't (without going at your expensive new monitor with a hacksaw) rotate these monitors into portrait orientation. That seems a terrible shame. A lot of the time you want landscape, but on those occasions you want portrait (DTP, playing "1942" in MAME, etc.) it would be a terribly nice thing to be able to do.
according to this article, the creator of spacewar also wrote pong in 1970.....there's got to be a million copies/versions of pong out there for every platform avalible. including shockwave.
There certainly are. But one interesting thing about Pong is that it was an analogue circuit, not a digital computer, so to "emulate" it you'd need to model the electronics, rather than simply (hah!) translate an instruction set as you would when emulating a computer.
GPS is subject to error. No problem on rural roads... but what about in cities? It could very well error enough to put you on a different cost road.
Good point. I guess that in urban areas they would have some kind of monitoring devices on the ground (these already exist in London, they are introducing a £5 charge for bringing a car into the centre).
What about time of war (which as bush reminds us contstantly - we'll be wageing for the next 10 years) - when GPS jitter is increased?
Well, it's not been turned on for this current conflict. I guess some sort of assurance would need to be sought that this would not be done. Civilian use of GPS is very high now; it would need to be quite some incident to get the US govt. to nobble the signals now.
What about people who live in the city or park in the city - won't they show excessive use of roads they *park* on?
A GPS reciever can easily tell if it's not moving...
Finally... this has got to be terribly easy to foil.
Well, this is true, but then it's also quite easy to drive around with no tax disk, or a fake tax disk. Most people are generally law-abiding (I hope). As today, it will be the job of the police to catch cheats, and if they're smart, they'll manage it. For example, if your car's mileage doesn't tally with your GPS log, that should flag somewhere in the system.
I imagine that in general in the UK, offences such as not being taxed are spotted during routine police work -- if a policeman stops you for having a bare tyre, failing to indicate, faulty lights, whatever, they will check your licence, your tax, you would generally be requested to take your MOT certificate (proves your car was tested as roadworthy in the last 12 months). Checking that your GPS black box was working correctly would slot nicely into that routine. Appropriate penalties would surely make this a reasonably rare crime.
The big barriers to me are the privacy issue and the cost of the equipment. I think that the privacy issue only requires a strict privacy policy, and legal safeguards to ensure it is stuck to). A simple GPS today costs $100, hardly anything compared to the cost of a new car... of course this black box has other components (memory for the track log, some sort of transmitter). A market the size of the UK car market would mean mass production, again reducing the per-unit cost, and we're probably talking 2010 at least, so there's time for the techology to get cheaper.
Ah, yes, I forgot, it isn't *really* about the *money*....
That's right, it's not. It's about collecting about the same amount of revenue as existing fuel tax and road tax, while skewing the payments towards travellers in congestion hotspots (hotspots in both space and time, to boot). The aim is to reduce congestion, not to make more money.
I don't think the average US citizen understand the level of traffic congestion which beleagers Britain. I've driven a large chunk of the USA (see sig) and I can tell you that for most of the day, even quite small towns have queues on a par with downtown Chicago at rush hour. By contrast, you can usually breeze through the average spot on a US map without a hitch.
The freeways in LA were nightmarish, but at no point did we stop moving altogether. At peak times on the M6 north of Birmingham, one can *expect* to spend two hours driving 10 miles.
We have a problem that I don't think an American can understand without coming and seeing for themselves. Prof Begg rightly states that we can't roadbuild our way out of this situation; the British public need something else to coax them onto public transport. And we tried raising fuel tax; some idiots did some rabble rousing and the govt was forced to back down.
Of course, this is the same country that taxed TV viewing, so what can you expect from the crazy socialists there.
You raise an important point which (trust me) can be wrenched back on topic.
I was recently having a conversation about The Sopranos. The gist of what I was being told was that US advertisers would never have wanted to place ads during a violent show full of swearing and shooting, and that the Sopranos would never have been commissioned by an ad-funded station. Only because HBO is subscription-funded could The Sopranos be made. And I think we're richer for it.
Now, HBO can operate as a subscription service because now we have the technology to gate viewers (except the ones who circumvent it...), but when the BBC was launched, there was no way to "narrowcast" to a set of subscribers; you could only broadcast to everyone with a TV (or radio) set. Hence, the TV licence which funds the BBC is analogous to a subscription fee. It allows the BBC to avoid pandering to advertisers. (There are other features of the system which allow the BBC to remain independed of goverment, and a remit that they "inform" and "educate" as well as "entertain", but let's not get too embroiled in this just yet.) And this is why the BBC can produce "The Blue Planet", while ITV and Channel 4 (our two main ad channels) show "When Buildings Collapse" and make localised versions of "Temptation Island".
And here's where we wrench things back on topic: If the TV licence is like pay-TV for an age where you couldn't measure who watched what, then road tax and fuel duty are congestion charging for a time when you couldn't measure who was in a congested area and who was on a congested city road.
I think the scheme has merit. It needs fleshing out, a lot of fleshing out (the accuracy of GPS, areas without line-of-sight to enough GPS satellites, privacy, tamperproofing, are all issues for which I think solutions could be found).
One thing I think would be very important is a readout of just what you're spending, as you drive. One reason people in Britain drive instead of taking a long distance bus or train, is that when you're driving the cost is not immediately apparent to you. Petrol tends to be a weekly fillup, road tax is annual, insurace is annual. A train journey involves slapping real money on a counter.
Re:Britian would make itself more useless to world
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Every Road a Toll Road
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· Score: 2
As pointed out by someone else, this is *instead* of road tax, and fuel tax not as well as it.
The taxing body could adjust the amounts payable by commercial traffic (I suspect that private vehicles are the real target) so as to dissuade or encourage them as required.
Charges would vary according to the time of day -- commercial traffic would be shifted to quieter times of day/night, reducing congestion without reducing the volume of goods shifted. I'm sure a good transport manager could plan economical routes within such a framework.
I'm with you all the way. It's an extremely in-depth discussion of the hardware, but the hardware is not what's most important.
Remember all those SNES vs Megadrive/Genesis arguments -- at the end of the day, the power of the hardware wasn't what was important, it was whether you prefered Sonic or Mario.
You might be wrong about DOA3 though. Yes, it's very pretty. I've never played 3, but DOA2 is a far better fighter than any iteration of Tekken.
And note to Eurotrolls, who might take the chance to cry US-centric, or brute american, or whatever trash you usually spew, don't think for a second your government isn't engaged in every kind of spying it can.
Heh, I am that EuroTroll, and I'm well aware of the kind of thing my goverment might be up to.
But that's not the point. The opportunity for US-bashing here is not "oh look, the US govt wants to break encryption" -- it's the ridiculous conceit that limiting export of the technology from the US would achieve anything at all.
(1) It's not enforceable -- how do you stop absolutely anyone from downloading crypto code from a US server; or walking over the Canadian border with a CD; or getting on a plane from LAX to Saudi Arabia with a data CD in a Maria Carey jewel case?
(2) Even if it was enforceable, to be useful it would need to be the case that only the USA was capable of creating crypto software. This is so patently not the case, that the US government has made an algorithm developed in Scandinavia its new standard (AES).
only one question... How would one save the files after broadcast? (i.e. to save the essential mix broadcasts?)
In XMMS, go to the Ogg Vorbis configuration window, and select "Save stream to disk".
NB, this is one reason some broadcasters might prefer to use proprietary streaming formats -- they don't want people keeping recordings, and a proprietary player makes it marginally more difficult for a non-technical person to record (although a hacked soundcard driver will defeat any such measures).
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
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The Euro
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· Score: 2
Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: American.
Hmm, I'm British, and I have personally met US citizens who are monoglot English speakers, monoglot Spanish speakers, monoglot Polish speakers (actually I only met the English-speaking son of a mother who he told me only spoke Polish).
Look in the right places and you'll find huge numbers of bilingual Americans; mostly English/Spanish speaking, I'd guess.
"But unless you buy a new machine from a Linux specialist like GND Systems or Penguin Computing, you'll be hard pressed to find a company that offers Linux as a pre-installed alternative to Windows on its new systems."
IBM, you may have heard of them.
However, if I want to knock off a quick letter, I think I'd want to use Windows - the thing is I don't: rephrase that last sentence as it as "You can lose yourself in Windows for hours, fiddling with fonts here, adding clip art there, it's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to do ad-hoc manipulation of large text files, you're still likely to be able to do it faster and better with cut, sort, uniq, sed and awk; and Linux is as good a place to use those tools as any."
What people need to understand is that different people use their desktop for different things. I could never be productive with the tools Windows gives you (Cygwin might help). Only yesterday sort, sed and uniq let me do in a couple of seconds what could have taken me at least an hour in Excel (and I'd have had to pay for Excel). My needs are *not* the same as those of (say) a journalist; but my needs are clearly not unique.
Hrm, in the UK, as long as you know the payee's branch number and sort code, it's easy to make payments either through online banking or by phoning your bank, and has been for years.
This is why it was so frustrating when I made my first eBay purchase from an American, before PayPal went international: for a while I had a policy of not bidding unless the seller took Visa.
I'm surprised... I thought our system was Europe-wide, maybe I'm wrong.
Staying off the security vulnerability side of things, IE's non-conformance to the standard way of determining file type has irritated me for some time. Here's why:
The HTTP standards dictate that the Content-type: header contains the MIME type of the data which follows. Netscape accepts this; any standards compliant browser does this. IE, however, looks at the filename extension (and even the data itself) and makes decisions based on that.
This means that if I write some HTML, put it in a file called "text.html", then configure my browser to serve it with "content-type: text/plain", the right thing for a browser to do would be to display the HTML source as text. Some versions of IE think they're far too clever to fall for that one, and just render it as HTML anyway.
(1): What if I *want* to read the HTML source?
But more importantly than (1), I've seen proper production servers misconfigured in this way -- don't ask me why, so HTML content is sent with the wrong Content-type header. If the site is tested with IE only, everything will appear to be fine; only when you try and browse the site with another browser does the fault show up.
Now, what's a non-technical web user going to think when they see this? Are they going to think "Hmm, the server is set up wrong"? No, if it works in IE but not in Netscape, they're going to think "Netscape sucks!", and merrily continue using IE.
This despite the fact that IE is the one that's behaving wrongly.
I won't go as far as to suggest that this behaviour was put in as a deliberate ploy, but if someone else wanted to, I wouldn't argue with them...
When I was at Aston University in (um) 1994, I lived in one of three neighbouring 20 storey tower blocks, all student residences.
Prompted by tales of this having happened in the past, I created a poster consisting of a picture of a desk lamp, a date and time, and the words "watch and copy", one of which I placed in the foyer of each building.
At the allotted time, I turned off my main room light, and began flashing my desklamp on and off. Within 5 minutes all three towers were shimmering, including, I'm told, the faces not visible from my window.
It was a neat, if not original, social hack, and a lot of fun... This thing in Berlin is much cooler technically of course.
I'm surprised not to see anyone touting this. I'm a short way in, and it's already scaring the bejesus out of me. It's a class act.
Re:"Sorcerer's Stone" vs. "Philosopher's Stone"
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Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 2
apparently (according to news sources in the uk), it's because american audiences (of the book and the film) wouldn't understand who/what a philosopher is. so they simplified it.
More likely, Americans *would* know what a philospher was, and hence expect the "philosopher's stone" to somehow tie in with Plato or Nietche -- whereas in fact the phrase "philosopher's stone" refers to the substance sought by alchemists; see http://skepdic.com/alchem.html
There is a long tradition of assuming American film audiences are stupid (my guess is that Hollywood execs with a low opinion of their audience do this, not snotty Englishmen). The play that became the film "The Madness of King George" was originally called "The Madness of George III"; it is said that the name was changed because of fears that American audiences would assume they had missed the first two films of a trilogy!
However I recently downloaded the SWIG based OpenSSL Python bindings (mtcrypto) and on my first attempt the build failed because the SWIG syntax had changed between releases. I would advocate not using SWIG for anything important until it stabilises.
The SWIG homepage appears to back me up here: "
SWIG is currently in a state of redevelopment in which substantial parts of the system are being reimplemented. This work can be found in the SWIG1.3 series of releases. If you are concerned about stability or are a first-time user, you may want to download some variant of SWIG1.1 instead. Caveat--SWIG1.1 may not be compatible with recent releases of certain scripting languages such as Perl 5.6 and Guile."
I'll back up what others have said about offering each individual a choice: I may prefer to code in Vim; my colleague may prefer Windows Notepad. That's fine by me. The most productive mode for an individual is to find their preferred working environment, and stick with it. For me, that's code in one window, compile and execute in another (debugger in another, sometimes).
That said, I've never got beyond spending an hour or so boggling at an IDE, since they tend to be so feature-packed I don't know where to begin.
If you really want to increase developer productivity, I have to sing CVS's praises from the rooftops! The ability to run diffs against arbitary revisions makes it wonderfully easy to measure and evaluate your work. (Do any of the IDEs discussed here have an integrated CVS interface? That would be.. neat...)
Sorry to spoil a moderately good gag (in both senses of the world) but standard UK stamps are now self-adhesive, i.e. you don't need to lick them, just peel off the backing.
That might not be the case for special edition stamps though, so don't give up hope of getting to scratch, sniff and lick QE2's behind...
Linux on a gameboy??? You're kidding me, right? I can see the use of putting Linux on a lot of other consoles (Dreamcast, etc) since you can attach a keyboard to them. But putting it on a Gameboy would be dumb since the only form of input you'd have would be the controller.
[sigh] Linux is an operating system. What you're used to typing 'ls' into is the shell. There is no reason whatsoever why the first program a UNIX init runs has to be a text login/shell. It could be anything. It could be something designed for a small screen, a couple of buttons and a joypad. No problem.
Furthermore, the GBA has a linkup port, you could probably hook a terminal up to it.
NB, the best reason I can think of for putting a UNIX on Dreamcast (Linux and NetBSD are both coming along well) is to eventually use it as a development platform for applications which do not require a keyboard (an xpilot port? please?).
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JPEG allows arbitrary headers; one such header is the EXIF header which most digital cameras will include. This includes stuff like date and time taken, focal length, etc. The problem is that since it's an
extension of JPEG rather than a mandatory part of the standard, any software is free to ignore the EXIF header, and neglect to preserve it when modifying the image. For example, take a JPEG from a digital camera, with date and time helpfully included in the EXIF header... run ImageMagick "mogrify" on it; perhaps to resize it or to change the JPEG compression ratio -- EXIF header disappears (you can use jhead to get around this.)
My understanding of JPEG2000 is that the standard specifies a header containing XML metadata. Evidence here.
I'm very keen on the concept. It makes sense that in a single (standard format) file I should be able to store a picture, technical details about it, free text annotation, etc. such that for example, a really simple bit of CGI could present it as an album.
Cute names are fine, but you should make sure you have "subdomains" (not in the DNS sense) so you can sensibly group your machines.
For example, at my university, all the workstations were named after countries. With hundreds of machines, that could get unmanageable, but to avoid that, each lab was a continent -- so one room was known as Europe (never formally, as far as I recall) and contained the machines England, Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, etc., another was South America (Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, etc.) and so on. Of course this only scales to five labs, but it worked for us.
Where I work, we use kids TV characters. Nominally, each project is a different show, and the servers for a project are all characters from that one show -- inevitably there is drift though.
Odd. I have a working SPF2X dump for MAME. Got it off the net somewhere. My kids love it.
Cool! Perhaps you could send a copy to the guys at mame.dk?
See here. SPF2T is excellent, but does not (yet) work in MAME. SPF2X works (apparently) but mame.dk has no known good dump.
However, there are excellent Playstation (1) and Saturn versions, as well as a Jap-only Dreamcast version which you can play online.
Why has there been no input from King of Fighters freaks yet?
From what I've read, you can't (without going at your expensive new monitor with a hacksaw) rotate these monitors into portrait orientation. That seems a terrible shame. A lot of the time you want landscape, but on those occasions you want portrait (DTP, playing "1942" in MAME, etc.) it would be a terribly nice thing to be able to do.
according to this article, the creator of spacewar also wrote pong in 1970.....there's got to be a million copies/versions of pong out there for every platform avalible. including shockwave.
There certainly are. But one interesting thing about Pong is that it was an analogue circuit, not a digital computer, so to "emulate" it you'd need to model the electronics, rather than simply (hah!) translate an instruction set as you would when emulating a computer.
I don't know of any Pong simulators, only clones.
GPS is subject to error. No problem on rural roads... but what about in cities? It could very well error enough to put you on a different cost road.
Good point. I guess that in urban areas they would have some kind of monitoring devices on the ground (these already exist in London, they are introducing a £5 charge for bringing a car into the centre).
What about time of war (which as bush reminds us contstantly - we'll be wageing for the next 10 years) - when GPS jitter is increased?
Well, it's not been turned on for this current conflict. I guess some sort of assurance would need to be sought that this would not be done. Civilian use of GPS is very high now; it would need to be quite some incident to get the US govt. to nobble the signals now.
What about people who live in the city or park in the city - won't they show excessive use of roads they *park* on?
A GPS reciever can easily tell if it's not moving...
Finally... this has got to be terribly easy to foil.
Well, this is true, but then it's also quite easy to drive around with no tax disk, or a fake tax disk. Most people are generally law-abiding (I hope). As today, it will be the job of the police to catch cheats, and if they're smart, they'll manage it. For example, if your car's mileage doesn't tally with your GPS log, that should flag somewhere in the system.
I imagine that in general in the UK, offences such as not being taxed are spotted during routine police work -- if a policeman stops you for having a bare tyre, failing to indicate, faulty lights, whatever, they will check your licence, your tax, you would generally be requested to take your MOT certificate (proves your car was tested as roadworthy in the last 12 months). Checking that your GPS black box was working correctly would slot nicely into that routine. Appropriate penalties would surely make this a reasonably rare crime.
The big barriers to me are the privacy issue and the cost of the equipment. I think that the privacy issue only requires a strict privacy policy, and legal safeguards to ensure it is stuck to). A simple GPS today costs $100, hardly anything compared to the cost of a new car... of course this black box has other components (memory for the track log, some sort of transmitter). A market the size of the UK car market would mean mass production, again reducing the per-unit cost, and we're probably talking 2010 at least, so there's time for the techology to get cheaper.
Ah, yes, I forgot, it isn't *really* about the *money*....
That's right, it's not. It's about collecting about the same amount of revenue as existing fuel tax and road tax, while skewing the payments towards travellers in congestion hotspots (hotspots in both space and time, to boot). The aim is to reduce congestion, not to make more money.
I don't think the average US citizen understand the level of traffic congestion which beleagers Britain. I've driven a large chunk of the USA (see sig) and I can tell you that for most of the day, even quite small towns have queues on a par with downtown Chicago at rush hour. By contrast, you can usually breeze through the average spot on a US map without a hitch.
The freeways in LA were nightmarish, but at no point did we stop moving altogether. At peak times on the M6 north of Birmingham, one can *expect* to spend two hours driving 10 miles.
We have a problem that I don't think an American can understand without coming and seeing for themselves. Prof Begg rightly states that we can't roadbuild our way out of this situation; the British public need something else to coax them onto public transport. And we tried raising fuel tax; some idiots did some rabble rousing and the govt was forced to back down.
Of course, this is the same country that taxed TV viewing, so what can you expect from the crazy socialists there.
You raise an important point which (trust me) can be wrenched back on topic.
I was recently having a conversation about The Sopranos. The gist of what I was being told was that US advertisers would never have wanted to place ads during a violent show full of swearing and shooting, and that the Sopranos would never have been commissioned by an ad-funded station. Only because HBO is subscription-funded could The Sopranos be made. And I think we're richer for it.
Now, HBO can operate as a subscription service because now we have the technology to gate viewers (except the ones who circumvent it...), but when the BBC was launched, there was no way to "narrowcast" to a set of subscribers; you could only broadcast to everyone with a TV (or radio) set. Hence, the TV licence which funds the BBC is analogous to a subscription fee. It allows the BBC to avoid pandering to advertisers. (There are other features of the system which allow the BBC to remain independed of goverment, and a remit that they "inform" and "educate" as well as "entertain", but let's not get too embroiled in this just yet.) And this is why the BBC can produce "The Blue Planet", while ITV and Channel 4 (our two main ad channels) show "When Buildings Collapse" and make localised versions of "Temptation Island".
And here's where we wrench things back on topic: If the TV licence is like pay-TV for an age where you couldn't measure who watched what, then road tax and fuel duty are congestion charging for a time when you couldn't measure who was in a congested area and who was on a congested city road.
I think the scheme has merit. It needs fleshing out, a lot of fleshing out (the accuracy of GPS, areas without line-of-sight to enough GPS satellites, privacy, tamperproofing, are all issues for which I think solutions could be found).
One thing I think would be very important is a readout of just what you're spending, as you drive. One reason people in Britain drive instead of taking a long distance bus or train, is that when you're driving the cost is not immediately apparent to you. Petrol tends to be a weekly fillup, road tax is annual, insurace is annual. A train journey involves slapping real money on a counter.
I'm with you all the way. It's an extremely in-depth discussion of the hardware, but the hardware is not what's most important.
Remember all those SNES vs Megadrive/Genesis arguments -- at the end of the day, the power of the hardware wasn't what was important, it was whether you prefered Sonic or Mario.
You might be wrong about DOA3 though. Yes, it's very pretty. I've never played 3, but DOA2 is a far better fighter than any iteration of Tekken.
And note to Eurotrolls, who might take the chance to cry US-centric, or brute american, or whatever trash you usually spew, don't think for a second your government isn't engaged in every kind of spying it can.
Heh, I am that EuroTroll, and I'm well aware of the kind of thing my goverment might be up to.
But that's not the point. The opportunity for US-bashing here is not "oh look, the US govt wants to break encryption" -- it's the ridiculous conceit that limiting export of the technology from the US would achieve anything at all.
(1) It's not enforceable -- how do you stop absolutely anyone from downloading crypto code from a US server; or walking over the Canadian border with a CD; or getting on a plane from LAX to Saudi Arabia with a data CD in a Maria Carey jewel case?
(2) Even if it was enforceable, to be useful it would need to be the case that only the USA was capable of creating crypto software. This is so patently not the case, that the US government has made an algorithm developed in Scandinavia its new standard (AES).
only one question... How would one save the files after broadcast? (i.e. to save the essential mix broadcasts?)
In XMMS, go to the Ogg Vorbis configuration window, and select "Save stream to disk".
NB, this is one reason some broadcasters might prefer to use proprietary streaming formats -- they don't want people keeping recordings, and a proprietary player makes it marginally more difficult for a non-technical person to record (although a hacked soundcard driver will defeat any such measures).
Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: American.
Hmm, I'm British, and I have personally met US citizens who are monoglot English speakers, monoglot Spanish speakers, monoglot Polish speakers (actually I only met the English-speaking son of a mother who he told me only spoke Polish).
Look in the right places and you'll find huge numbers of bilingual Americans; mostly English/Spanish speaking, I'd guess.
"But unless you buy a new machine from a Linux specialist like GND Systems or Penguin Computing, you'll be hard pressed to find a company that offers Linux as a pre-installed alternative to Windows on its new systems."
IBM, you may have heard of them.
However, if I want to knock off a quick letter, I think I'd want to use Windows - the thing is I don't: rephrase that last sentence as it as "You can lose yourself in Windows for hours, fiddling with fonts here, adding clip art there, it's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to do ad-hoc manipulation of large text files, you're still likely to be able to do it faster and better with cut, sort, uniq, sed and awk; and Linux is as good a place to use those tools as any."
What people need to understand is that different people use their desktop for different things. I could never be productive with the tools Windows gives you (Cygwin might help). Only yesterday sort, sed and uniq let me do in a couple of seconds what could have taken me at least an hour in Excel (and I'd have had to pay for Excel). My needs are *not* the same as those of (say) a journalist; but my needs are clearly not unique.
Hrm, in the UK, as long as you know the payee's branch number and sort code, it's easy to make payments either through online banking or by phoning your bank, and has been for years.
This is why it was so frustrating when I made my first eBay purchase from an American, before PayPal went international: for a while I had a policy of not bidding unless the seller took Visa.
I'm surprised... I thought our system was Europe-wide, maybe I'm wrong.
Staying off the security vulnerability side of things, IE's non-conformance to the standard way of determining file type has irritated me for some time. Here's why:
The HTTP standards dictate that the Content-type: header contains the MIME type of the data which follows. Netscape accepts this; any standards compliant browser does this. IE, however, looks at the filename extension (and even the data itself) and makes decisions based on that.
This means that if I write some HTML, put it in a file called "text.html", then configure my browser to serve it with "content-type: text/plain", the right thing for a browser to do would be to display the HTML source as text. Some versions of IE think they're far too clever to fall for that one, and just render it as HTML anyway.
(1): What if I *want* to read the HTML source?
But more importantly than (1), I've seen proper production servers misconfigured in this way -- don't ask me why, so HTML content is sent with the wrong Content-type header. If the site is tested with IE only, everything will appear to be fine; only when you try and browse the site with another browser does the fault show up.
Now, what's a non-technical web user going to think when they see this? Are they going to think "Hmm, the server is set up wrong"? No, if it works in IE but not in Netscape, they're going to think "Netscape sucks!", and merrily continue using IE.
This despite the fact that IE is the one that's behaving wrongly.
I won't go as far as to suggest that this behaviour was put in as a deliberate ploy, but if someone else wanted to, I wouldn't argue with them...
Prompted by tales of this having happened in the past, I created a poster consisting of a picture of a desk lamp, a date and time, and the words "watch and copy", one of which I placed in the foyer of each building.
At the allotted time, I turned off my main room light, and began flashing my desklamp on and off. Within 5 minutes all three towers were shimmering, including, I'm told, the faces not visible from my window.
It was a neat, if not original, social hack, and a lot of fun... This thing in Berlin is much cooler technically of course.
I'm surprised not to see anyone touting this. I'm a short way in, and it's already scaring the bejesus out of me. It's a class act.
apparently (according to news sources in the uk), it's because american audiences (of the book and the film) wouldn't understand who/what a philosopher is. so they simplified it.
More likely, Americans *would* know what a philospher was, and hence expect the "philosopher's stone" to somehow tie in with Plato or Nietche -- whereas in fact the phrase "philosopher's stone" refers to the substance sought by alchemists; see http://skepdic.com/alchem.html
There is a long tradition of assuming American film audiences are stupid (my guess is that Hollywood execs with a low opinion of their audience do this, not snotty Englishmen). The play that became the film "The Madness of King George" was originally called "The Madness of George III"; it is said that the name was changed because of fears that American audiences would assume they had missed the first two films of a trilogy!
> Here's a few links to other and may be more objective reviews:
Yup, I'm listening...
> TeamXBox [teamxbox.com]
Err, objective? (I'm sure the rest were OK)
SWIG looks like it'll be great when it's done.
However I recently downloaded the SWIG based OpenSSL Python bindings (mtcrypto) and on my first attempt the build failed because the SWIG syntax had changed between releases. I would advocate not using SWIG for anything important until it stabilises.
The SWIG homepage appears to back me up here: "
SWIG is currently in a state of redevelopment in which substantial parts of the system are being reimplemented. This work can be found in the SWIG1.3 series of releases. If you are concerned about stability or are a first-time user, you may want to download some variant of SWIG1.1 instead. Caveat--SWIG1.1 may not be compatible with recent releases of certain scripting languages such as Perl 5.6 and Guile."
I'll back up what others have said about offering each individual a choice: I may prefer to code in Vim; my colleague may prefer Windows Notepad. That's fine by me. The most productive mode for an individual is to find their preferred working environment, and stick with it. For me, that's code in one window, compile and execute in another (debugger in another, sometimes).
That said, I've never got beyond spending an hour or so boggling at an IDE, since they tend to be so feature-packed I don't know where to begin.
If you really want to increase developer productivity, I have to sing CVS's praises from the rooftops! The ability to run diffs against arbitary revisions makes it wonderfully easy to measure and evaluate your work. (Do any of the IDEs discussed here have an integrated CVS interface? That would be.. neat...)
Hey - don't forget you get to lick it too.
Sorry to spoil a moderately good gag (in both senses of the world) but standard UK stamps are now self-adhesive, i.e. you don't need to lick them, just peel off the backing.
That might not be the case for special edition stamps though, so don't give up hope of getting to scratch, sniff and lick QE2's behind...
Linux on a gameboy??? You're kidding me, right? I can see the use of putting Linux on a lot of other consoles (Dreamcast, etc) since you can attach a keyboard to them. But putting it on a Gameboy would be dumb since the only form of input you'd have would be the controller.
[sigh] Linux is an operating system. What you're used to typing 'ls' into is the shell. There is no reason whatsoever why the first program a UNIX init runs has to be a text login/shell. It could be anything. It could be something designed for a small screen, a couple of buttons and a joypad. No problem.
Furthermore, the GBA has a linkup port, you could probably hook a terminal up to it.
NB, the best reason I can think of for putting a UNIX on Dreamcast (Linux and NetBSD are both coming along well) is to eventually use it as a development platform for applications which do not require a keyboard (an xpilot port? please?).