I bet they could have dropped mail-in rebates a lot sooner if the whole process had been patented and thet got sued. But instead, they spent a whole year trying to work things out with the suppliers to drop them? Well, at least now there is some positive results coming out.
Anyone know the port, host, or path, the WGA communicates to the mothership with so I can block it at the router or proxy server? Oh wait, I bet the people running the Great Firewall of China know.
If police treat people like assholes, then you can expect people to return the favor. If cops behave incompetent, they deserve the verbal abuse they get.
About 20 years ago, a friend of mine was visiting a nearby town. Maybe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he was pounced on in a convenience store by 3 local cops, causing him several small injuries. These 3 cops were abusive both verbally and physically. It wasn't quite a Rodney King level of beating, but it did require a visit to the hospital, which was denied him for several hours. His "crime"? He opened one of the soft drinks he was carrying while standing in a long line at the register. How do I know his story rings true? My friend IS a police officer. He was just off duty, out of jurisdiction, and not in uniform.
Police officers are (supposed to be) trained in dealing with abuse from the public, including physical abuse. Verbal abuse is something they are supposed to just shrug off as if it never happened. That I learned in a CJ class I took way back when I was in college. I wonder if it's still true.
I think it's pretty clear the tape showed an abusive officer. They saw it and they reacted to it on the spot. If the tape had shown a police officer doing exactly his duty and nothing more, why would there be such a reaction?
The police should have thanked Mr. Gannon for bringing it directly to them, and dealt with it as an internal matter. It was to their advantage that he went to them first instead of the local newspaper or TV station. Now, people will be watching the police and they will be taking their evidence not to the police department. The Nashua Police Department did all police officers throughout the country a major harm by this action. It's just plain disgusting.
This (the kill switch date) is just in time for the fall elections. All those Windows based voting machines will have to be running the new WGA or they could be killed off by Microsoft or the l33t h4q0rz that have cracked the code.
Not only are the drives particularly expensive right now, but adding in CD capability, which must include an entirely separate laser (including positioning mechanism), isn't as simple as just slapping in cheap CD drive parts. The mix of parts has to not just co-exist, but work together. The drives that will have full CD/DVD/BRD capability will have to be designed that way.
The electronics for this drive have to be able to sustain the higher data rates. That in itself is not particularly hard. But you can't just use existing CD, or even DVD, interface electronics, and everything does have to be integrated to have all the capability in one drive. Imagine a single drive with separate electronics and separate attachment cables for each capability, one for BRD, one for DVD, and one for CD. Even fitting all that into one drive unit would be major engineering work. And given that the low priced CD units are all so tightly integrated within themselves now (e.g. everything is on one chip and one assembly) the parts from that can't even be used. Adding CD capability right now would very likely kick up the costs by a few hundred dollars, which is not something most people would be willing to pay for, especially those few who are the genuine users of BRD today (most likely authoring video, not audio).
Right now, I believe the engineers (both the design engineers and the manufacturing engineers) are focusing on making things right for the BRD technology itself. As soon as that stabilizes and the prices drop, then they have time, and product price margin, and development resources, to add in other capabilities.
WebSideStory and a lot of other sites are blocked here. A substantial number of those which are blocked are in the list because of annoying tracking bugs. Some other tracking sites are NOT blocked because their methods of tracking do not cause problems, and hence don't even get noticed. But in the case of WSS, I specifically remember the reason they were first blocked, despite this being years ago. They used a GIF that was animated AND had its cache setting set to expire immediately. Thus every time the GIF cycled through the animation and reloaded, it wasn't in the cache, so it pulled itself again from the server. At the time, dialup was still the vast majority of net access, and so I blocked their site by entering a replacement domain zone file in the DNS cache used by everyone for lookups. The DNS server is a rather effective way to block a lot of that crap, too. I now have 936 domains blocked that way on the primary set of DNS caches, as of today. I also have an alternate DNS cache for users that want to get around for some reason (this isn't intended as a censorship mechanims).
This basically distorts their stats in two ways. One is that many networks that are more dilligently run will just not even show up in their stats because of being blocked. Since it's not hard to block them, I suspect a lot of networks have done so. The other is that their stats may in fact be distorted to favor whatever browser refetches more often because it uses its local cache to restart each animation recycle, and obeys even insane caching parameters.
Ah, you mean applications that are not portable... or at least the installer isn't portable. BTW, I do have a dummy/etc/init.d tree. It's never used during system startup. It just satisfies the craving by some programmers to make their installer automatically startup some daemon on my system. Yet the daemon will never run unless I set up the rc tree that really runs to do so (and I won't unless I know what the daemon does and have a need for it). BTW, the rc tree that really runs has no symlinks.
How unreliable black-lists are? I find them to be very reliable. They tend to be way more reliable than content analysis. The latter could not understand that mail containing sales pitches for music CDs was something I actually signed up to get.
I'm in a somewhat rural area. The nearest phone exchange is about 8 miles away. But DSL is available, supposedly by repeater. And cable just started offering internet here this week. But given there have been 3 big cable outages this month, including the past 2 hours this evening, I'm reluctant to go with cable. The basic phone service has not been out for at least 3 years, but I have no idea if DSL would be as reliable. I do have to do some rewiring for DSL because the phone wires in this house were miswired by the builder (basically I'll just run a new extension out to the access point and put the filter in there).
The offer I just got in the mail last week was for DSL at $24.95 a month after the first month free and the next 2 months at $19.95 a month, and specifically on a month to month basis. There is an early disconnection cost only if I don't send the modem back at my cost. Supposedly I'm even off the hook for that after a year. I wonder if this is related to the fact that the cable company here just finished rewiring the system and just turned it on 3 days ago, and is now offering cable internet service. I suppose I should hurry up and make a decision as the new Slackware 11.0 is coming soon. I guess I'll call each company and tell them what the other is offering and see what they can do.
Why do you want a "soft-linked/etc/init.d"? Or better yet, why not just build one for yourself (and package it for others)? Slackware doesn't get in your way. I know because I actually rewrote the whole rc script system from scratch several years ago, and it's been working fine in several Slackware versions since then. My rc designs isn't based on symlinks, though.
In the last three years, every site I've attempted to rebuild in CSS from tables I've been able to do with 90% accuracy. It's not only a different layout tool, it's a different layout model. You can't expect tables to CSS to be a 1:1 conversion, there will be compromises along the way.
But many people don't want the kind of compromises they are sometimes forced into with CSS layout models.
I've been in the same situation with graphic designers. The problem is that they think the web works like paper, where the design is a monolithic entity that simply exists. They have little to no understanding of what HTML and CSS is, does, or how it works. The concept that their full screen 50 layer photoshop file will be chopped up, gutted of text, and reassembled later is entirely beyond them. Long time print designers make the absolute worst web designers, I've found.
They are also thinking about content and presentation simultaneously. They don't think about issues with some content being presentable in different ways and in different media. The print and TV industries have never needed to do it any other way before.
But there are problems with table-based designs, first and foremost being user presentation, in the form of increased load times for the increased amount of text, AND because browsers can't render the table until the entire thing is downloaded. I have seen some website that don't come up for quite sometime because their entire 226kb layout is contained within a single outer table, so it doesn't show up on the screen until the whole page is downloaded.
There is nothing inherint in a table that prevents it from being incrementally displayed as it is arriving. You're speaking of a browser issue. I know this is the case because I've seen browsers vary in the way they handle this. I've seen many pages load their tables as they arrive. My own LinuxHomePage does, though that's hard to see because its layout table is just one row and three columns. A better example is here. Of course it helps to speed up layout if everything inside the table has a known layout size as soon as possible. That's one reason why my images in LinuxHomePage have the width and height specified explicitly in the HTML.
It has seemed to me that much of the design of the web standards, from the earliest HTML to the latest CSS2, has been more about academic documents where there is a clear dividing line between what is semantic content, and what is style of presentation. The real world mixes style and content together as a single unit. Print and television media have been doing it this way for decades before the web came along. While I can understand the principle of why the content and presentation need to be separate for the ideal web page (or whatever media is being used), the fact is much (most) of the real world isn't making stuff for which that ideal fits. If the CSS standards makers were to address some of the issues where "content" makers are actually creating a combination content and presentation, they might find a way to make the "more correct" method of separate content and presentation easier to work with.
How well does your CSS work in IE6 or even IE5 (still in wide use)?
Now show me the CSS for an N-column layout, where a separate static stylesheet is used in conjunction with dynamically generated content that may have varying numbers of columns based on selections provided by the user. And these columns cannot be allowed to flow down to the next row, as that would confuse their meanings.
Of course the biggest problems designing for the web are broken browsers, especially IE6 (it doesn't even support CSS tables). Nevertheless, CSS itself still has issue. Not everything can yet be done by CSS, and many of those things can still be hacked with at least some HTML that doesn't follow the semantic intentions.
Here's another example. Write the CSS code to show how to produce a drop shadow effect behind a box with a border. Now expand that so that with pointer hover, the drop shadow is made to appear higher. Now fix the glitch where the rising box oscillates when the pointer is at just at the right spot in the 2 split corners (hint: put the whole thing in a box and use:hover on that box). That's all easy enough. The real challenge is to make all this work on an existing HTML file that has only ONE layer of DIV elements wrapping the content to be styled this way.
Style... any style you might think of... should never need to depend on creating multiple levels of DIV elements in the HTML. It should be designed so the entire style, however complex, can be applied as a unit to a single element by class or id. Your markup semantics should have nothing more than the elements to mark up what is what. The markup should have to worry about how many layers need to be used to create the desired style. CSS isn't there, yet, and since they aren't even considering this for CSS3, and the long times it takes for Microsoft to catch up to complying with standards in a reasonably bug free way, I'm afraid that CSS will remain broken for years, maybe even a decade or two. Fortunately, most of these hacks are relatively benign additions to HTML.
This actually happened at my high school. Three students were denied access to the graduation ceremonies for having been caught smoking on school grounds the week before. They got their diplomas mailed to them a few days later, just like I did (I actually missed it because of illness, but I really didn't care).
There's a difference between what the law says, and what they ask students to sign an agreement for. If they law specifically prohibited certain actions, or authorized the school to prohibit them, they wouldn't need to get students to sign the paper to agree to not do those certain actions. Sure, if you do something that is illegal, and get caught, you're in trouble. And if it has something to do with the school, you can be in trouble with the school, too. If you're web site is just being critical of the school, administrators, janitor, faculty, or even other students, I think that is free speech. I also believe that extends to insulting. There are certain protections in the law with regard to libel, and speech intended to incite something wrong, so be careful. And of course don't use any school property or resources to do it, no matter how legal it is for you to do it at home.
If you stupidly signed that little piece of paper in which you agree not to do certain things (for which there is no law against, otherwise they wouldn't need this piece of paper to be signed) under penalty of not graduating, then yes, they can. So just don't sign it. Then they have nothing but what the law requires or prohibits of you or them. So just obey they law after you refuse to sign the paper and thus you give them no basis to deny you an education or to graduate if you complete the requirements to graduate. And if they try to pressure you with false threats of "we can prevent you from graduating" just cover your ears, close your eyes, jump up and down, and chant "no child left behind... no child left behind...". They hate that.
If a proxy server is configured to run on port 80, accessing it would look pretty much like accessing a web server. So what are their filters doing on the ports other than 80? Are they filtering by IP address? Host name? Domain name? URI content? And what are they doing about SSL which many sites now require on the login page? All the filters can know for SSL is what IP address and port the connection is being made to. There are a lot of ways to slip through the filters.
Hey kids! If you are going to public school, don't sign that paper. If they had the right to enforce something as law, they wouldn't need to have you agree to it. You think they are allowed to deny you your right to an education? Remember, no child left behind.
It's probably more a case of MCSEs that don't grok the concepts of Linux and how it is documented. The survey was supposedly limited to just shops that run both Windows and Linux. That means you are likely dealing with a bunch of MCSEs that have been working with Windows for over a decade and have only in the past couple years been given Linux to also administer. If such a survey were limited to shops that had been running both systems for an equal period of time and have people on staff who are specialists in each system and have equivalent levels of experience (for example the Windows admin has 10 years Windows experience and the Linux admin has 10 years Linux experience and both have been working at this particular shop for 4 years, which has been running both Windows and Linux for the past 6 years), then I think it might be able to show the true differences and similarities. But I don't think this is anything Ms. Didio is capable of doing.
It's probably more a case of Linux just happening to go down during the hours when most of the people on IRC's #linuxnewbiehelp channel are asleep, or out hunting for a real Linux job that doesn't require an MCSE.
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I bet they could have dropped mail-in rebates a lot sooner if the whole process had been patented and thet got sued. But instead, they spent a whole year trying to work things out with the suppliers to drop them? Well, at least now there is some positive results coming out.
They can't patent the password "eatme" because I have prior art on that. Oh wait ... what's that beeping sound ... uh oh ...
Anyone know the port, host, or path, the WGA communicates to the mothership with so I can block it at the router or proxy server? Oh wait, I bet the people running the Great Firewall of China know.
... rapid development? Oh wait, Bill told them to do rabid development.
If police treat people like assholes, then you can expect people to return the favor. If cops behave incompetent, they deserve the verbal abuse they get.
About 20 years ago, a friend of mine was visiting a nearby town. Maybe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he was pounced on in a convenience store by 3 local cops, causing him several small injuries. These 3 cops were abusive both verbally and physically. It wasn't quite a Rodney King level of beating, but it did require a visit to the hospital, which was denied him for several hours. His "crime"? He opened one of the soft drinks he was carrying while standing in a long line at the register. How do I know his story rings true? My friend IS a police officer. He was just off duty, out of jurisdiction, and not in uniform.
Police officers are (supposed to be) trained in dealing with abuse from the public, including physical abuse. Verbal abuse is something they are supposed to just shrug off as if it never happened. That I learned in a CJ class I took way back when I was in college. I wonder if it's still true.
I think it's pretty clear the tape showed an abusive officer. They saw it and they reacted to it on the spot. If the tape had shown a police officer doing exactly his duty and nothing more, why would there be such a reaction?
The police should have thanked Mr. Gannon for bringing it directly to them, and dealt with it as an internal matter. It was to their advantage that he went to them first instead of the local newspaper or TV station. Now, people will be watching the police and they will be taking their evidence not to the police department. The Nashua Police Department did all police officers throughout the country a major harm by this action. It's just plain disgusting.
This (the kill switch date) is just in time for the fall elections. All those Windows based voting machines will have to be running the new WGA or they could be killed off by Microsoft or the l33t h4q0rz that have cracked the code.
Not only are the drives particularly expensive right now, but adding in CD capability, which must include an entirely separate laser (including positioning mechanism), isn't as simple as just slapping in cheap CD drive parts. The mix of parts has to not just co-exist, but work together. The drives that will have full CD/DVD/BRD capability will have to be designed that way.
The electronics for this drive have to be able to sustain the higher data rates. That in itself is not particularly hard. But you can't just use existing CD, or even DVD, interface electronics, and everything does have to be integrated to have all the capability in one drive. Imagine a single drive with separate electronics and separate attachment cables for each capability, one for BRD, one for DVD, and one for CD. Even fitting all that into one drive unit would be major engineering work. And given that the low priced CD units are all so tightly integrated within themselves now (e.g. everything is on one chip and one assembly) the parts from that can't even be used. Adding CD capability right now would very likely kick up the costs by a few hundred dollars, which is not something most people would be willing to pay for, especially those few who are the genuine users of BRD today (most likely authoring video, not audio).
Right now, I believe the engineers (both the design engineers and the manufacturing engineers) are focusing on making things right for the BRD technology itself. As soon as that stabilizes and the prices drop, then they have time, and product price margin, and development resources, to add in other capabilities.
While RTFM-ing I ran across this jewel:
Actually, it was a proper delegation of judgement of the seriousness of the matter to ... a judge.
WebSideStory and a lot of other sites are blocked here. A substantial number of those which are blocked are in the list because of annoying tracking bugs. Some other tracking sites are NOT blocked because their methods of tracking do not cause problems, and hence don't even get noticed. But in the case of WSS, I specifically remember the reason they were first blocked, despite this being years ago. They used a GIF that was animated AND had its cache setting set to expire immediately. Thus every time the GIF cycled through the animation and reloaded, it wasn't in the cache, so it pulled itself again from the server. At the time, dialup was still the vast majority of net access, and so I blocked their site by entering a replacement domain zone file in the DNS cache used by everyone for lookups. The DNS server is a rather effective way to block a lot of that crap, too. I now have 936 domains blocked that way on the primary set of DNS caches, as of today. I also have an alternate DNS cache for users that want to get around for some reason (this isn't intended as a censorship mechanims).
This basically distorts their stats in two ways. One is that many networks that are more dilligently run will just not even show up in their stats because of being blocked. Since it's not hard to block them, I suspect a lot of networks have done so. The other is that their stats may in fact be distorted to favor whatever browser refetches more often because it uses its local cache to restart each animation recycle, and obeys even insane caching parameters.
Ah, you mean applications that are not portable ... or at least the installer isn't portable. BTW, I do have a dummy /etc/init.d tree. It's never used during system startup. It just satisfies the craving by some programmers to make their installer automatically startup some daemon on my system. Yet the daemon will never run unless I set up the rc tree that really runs to do so (and I won't unless I know what the daemon does and have a need for it). BTW, the rc tree that really runs has no symlinks.
How unreliable black-lists are? I find them to be very reliable. They tend to be way more reliable than content analysis. The latter could not understand that mail containing sales pitches for music CDs was something I actually signed up to get.
I'm in a somewhat rural area. The nearest phone exchange is about 8 miles away. But DSL is available, supposedly by repeater. And cable just started offering internet here this week. But given there have been 3 big cable outages this month, including the past 2 hours this evening, I'm reluctant to go with cable. The basic phone service has not been out for at least 3 years, but I have no idea if DSL would be as reliable. I do have to do some rewiring for DSL because the phone wires in this house were miswired by the builder (basically I'll just run a new extension out to the access point and put the filter in there).
The offer I just got in the mail last week was for DSL at $24.95 a month after the first month free and the next 2 months at $19.95 a month, and specifically on a month to month basis. There is an early disconnection cost only if I don't send the modem back at my cost. Supposedly I'm even off the hook for that after a year. I wonder if this is related to the fact that the cable company here just finished rewiring the system and just turned it on 3 days ago, and is now offering cable internet service. I suppose I should hurry up and make a decision as the new Slackware 11.0 is coming soon. I guess I'll call each company and tell them what the other is offering and see what they can do.
Why do you want a "soft-linked /etc/init.d"? Or better yet, why not just build one for yourself (and package it for others)? Slackware doesn't get in your way. I know because I actually rewrote the whole rc script system from scratch several years ago, and it's been working fine in several Slackware versions since then. My rc designs isn't based on symlinks, though.
But many people don't want the kind of compromises they are sometimes forced into with CSS layout models.
They are also thinking about content and presentation simultaneously. They don't think about issues with some content being presentable in different ways and in different media. The print and TV industries have never needed to do it any other way before.
There is nothing inherint in a table that prevents it from being incrementally displayed as it is arriving. You're speaking of a browser issue. I know this is the case because I've seen browsers vary in the way they handle this. I've seen many pages load their tables as they arrive. My own LinuxHomePage does, though that's hard to see because its layout table is just one row and three columns. A better example is here. Of course it helps to speed up layout if everything inside the table has a known layout size as soon as possible. That's one reason why my images in LinuxHomePage have the width and height specified explicitly in the HTML.
It has seemed to me that much of the design of the web standards, from the earliest HTML to the latest CSS2, has been more about academic documents where there is a clear dividing line between what is semantic content, and what is style of presentation. The real world mixes style and content together as a single unit. Print and television media have been doing it this way for decades before the web came along. While I can understand the principle of why the content and presentation need to be separate for the ideal web page (or whatever media is being used), the fact is much (most) of the real world isn't making stuff for which that ideal fits. If the CSS standards makers were to address some of the issues where "content" makers are actually creating a combination content and presentation, they might find a way to make the "more correct" method of separate content and presentation easier to work with.
How well does your CSS work in IE6 or even IE5 (still in wide use)?
Now show me the CSS for an N-column layout, where a separate static stylesheet is used in conjunction with dynamically generated content that may have varying numbers of columns based on selections provided by the user. And these columns cannot be allowed to flow down to the next row, as that would confuse their meanings.
Of course the biggest problems designing for the web are broken browsers, especially IE6 (it doesn't even support CSS tables). Nevertheless, CSS itself still has issue. Not everything can yet be done by CSS, and many of those things can still be hacked with at least some HTML that doesn't follow the semantic intentions.
Here's another example. Write the CSS code to show how to produce a drop shadow effect behind a box with a border. Now expand that so that with pointer hover, the drop shadow is made to appear higher. Now fix the glitch where the rising box oscillates when the pointer is at just at the right spot in the 2 split corners (hint: put the whole thing in a box and use :hover on that box). That's all easy enough. The real challenge is to make all this work on an existing HTML file that has only ONE layer of DIV elements wrapping the content to be styled this way.
Style ... any style you might think of ... should never need to depend on creating multiple levels of DIV elements in the HTML. It should be designed so the entire style, however complex, can be applied as a unit to a single element by class or id. Your markup semantics should have nothing more than the elements to mark up what is what. The markup should have to worry about how many layers need to be used to create the desired style. CSS isn't there, yet, and since they aren't even considering this for CSS3, and the long times it takes for Microsoft to catch up to complying with standards in a reasonably bug free way, I'm afraid that CSS will remain broken for years, maybe even a decade or two. Fortunately, most of these hacks are relatively benign additions to HTML.
This actually happened at my high school. Three students were denied access to the graduation ceremonies for having been caught smoking on school grounds the week before. They got their diplomas mailed to them a few days later, just like I did (I actually missed it because of illness, but I really didn't care).
There's also this little piece that doesn't mention anything about any exceptions for schools or people under the age of 18:
Now think again if you believe the law can't make certain exceptions.
There's a difference between what the law says, and what they ask students to sign an agreement for. If they law specifically prohibited certain actions, or authorized the school to prohibit them, they wouldn't need to get students to sign the paper to agree to not do those certain actions. Sure, if you do something that is illegal, and get caught, you're in trouble. And if it has something to do with the school, you can be in trouble with the school, too. If you're web site is just being critical of the school, administrators, janitor, faculty, or even other students, I think that is free speech. I also believe that extends to insulting. There are certain protections in the law with regard to libel, and speech intended to incite something wrong, so be careful. And of course don't use any school property or resources to do it, no matter how legal it is for you to do it at home.
If you stupidly signed that little piece of paper in which you agree not to do certain things (for which there is no law against, otherwise they wouldn't need this piece of paper to be signed) under penalty of not graduating, then yes, they can. So just don't sign it. Then they have nothing but what the law requires or prohibits of you or them. So just obey they law after you refuse to sign the paper and thus you give them no basis to deny you an education or to graduate if you complete the requirements to graduate. And if they try to pressure you with false threats of "we can prevent you from graduating" just cover your ears, close your eyes, jump up and down, and chant "no child left behind ... no child left behind ...". They hate that.
If a proxy server is configured to run on port 80, accessing it would look pretty much like accessing a web server. So what are their filters doing on the ports other than 80? Are they filtering by IP address? Host name? Domain name? URI content? And what are they doing about SSL which many sites now require on the login page? All the filters can know for SSL is what IP address and port the connection is being made to. There are a lot of ways to slip through the filters.
Hey kids! If you are going to public school, don't sign that paper. If they had the right to enforce something as law, they wouldn't need to have you agree to it. You think they are allowed to deny you your right to an education? Remember, no child left behind.
It's probably more a case of MCSEs that don't grok the concepts of Linux and how it is documented. The survey was supposedly limited to just shops that run both Windows and Linux. That means you are likely dealing with a bunch of MCSEs that have been working with Windows for over a decade and have only in the past couple years been given Linux to also administer. If such a survey were limited to shops that had been running both systems for an equal period of time and have people on staff who are specialists in each system and have equivalent levels of experience (for example the Windows admin has 10 years Windows experience and the Linux admin has 10 years Linux experience and both have been working at this particular shop for 4 years, which has been running both Windows and Linux for the past 6 years), then I think it might be able to show the true differences and similarities. But I don't think this is anything Ms. Didio is capable of doing.
It's probably more a case of Linux just happening to go down during the hours when most of the people on IRC's #linuxnewbiehelp channel are asleep, or out hunting for a real Linux job that doesn't require an MCSE.