I'm no expert in whois or anything. but maybe someone can shed some light on what this means:
kalin@nubain:~$ whois aol.com
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the.com and.net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
AOL.COM.SAYS.HARASS.SOFTY797.FOR.SUBVERTER.NET
AOL.COM.RAPED.SUBVERTER.NET
AOL.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.GULLI.COM
AOL.COM.IS.0WNED.BY.SUB7.NET
AOL.COM.AINT.GOT.AS.MUCH.FREE.PORN.AS.SECZ.COM
AOL.COM
To single out one record, look it up with "xxx", where xxx is one of the
of the records displayed above. If the records are the same, look them up
with "=xxx" to receive a full display for each record.
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 06:25:08 EST
Oh, I had the exact same idea as you! Except the year was 1996 and the site was Altavista. Couldn't live without it. Thank Goodness the government didn't nationalize and subsidize them making the emergence of Google as a successful, profitable, private, limited liability corporation next to impossible. But now that we have Google maybe we should reconsider your plan, I mean, nothing could ever get better than this, right?
Sure, Google may have come from nowhere to become profitable while providing a huge amount of value not only to the people who risked piles of time and money on the enterprise, but also to the public at large and their customers. But of course mutual benefit through voluntary association and private property just usually isn't possible in a capitalist system, this is an anomaly and it must be protected.
I also rely on Debian daily for job related activities; I know a lot of people who do. Maybe final decision making power for Debian should be removed from the technical committee and developers and transfered to an appropriations committee of the US Dept of Commerce. I mean, can we really risk such an important piece of technology to a bunch of private individuals. I even heard that one of the former DPLs played a major role at a major corporation in the motion picture industry, while he was involved with Debian!. We all know how greedy and untrustworthy that type is; there is no way of telling how he may have subverted Debian when he had control of it.
Ok now that I've pulled my tongue out of my cheek, could I ask you to put down the Adbusters and spend time every day really thinking about these wonderful things that we rely on and where they came from? Also think about the real freedom to innovate and how that could start to be lost.
And if you do the honourable thing and keep your emigration pact with Alec Baldwin, please don't come to Canada.
Google has as much corporate greed as any well-run corporation ought to. Given all the money they make, while so many other internet companies have crashed and burned around them, I would wager that the profit motive is pretty strong.
Google was smart enough to realize that there was a lot of revenue to be made in delivering a good product to its customers (advertisers and content providers).
The thing Google has excelled at is in producing huge volumes of its product (eyeballs) at a higher quality (very well-targeted advertising space). If Google had gone the short-sighted route of many other search engines they never would have come from nowhere to capture so many consumers to sell to their customers.
The reason people use Google is because it is the best search engine around not because it appears to be run by altruists. The reason it is the best search engine around is because Google will do anything to capture more eyeballs to sell. They are in for the long haul and won't sacrifice their core product for expensive and speculative gambles outside of thier core competencies (like turning into a portal, compromising search results, and/or developing their own content).
In short, greed is good. Also, the smarter you are, the greater your carrying capacity may be for your greed.
They didn't sell off part of BC Hyrdo to Accenture, they outsourced administrative functions to the company as a cost savings measure and in a partnership to offer services to other jurisdictions. If you aren't even talking about real events you aren't even in the debate. Privitisation is a fundamentally different process.
Also, they didn't lose the last election for sake of honesty unless you had meant the lack of it shown by the NDP when they printed budgets that were completely false to give the impression of fiscal responsibility. Remember it, the "fudge-it budget"? I think the investigation of Clark over the casino license was a farce, with the tv camera's waiting and all that, but the punishment the NDP received for outright lying to British Columbians on the central issue of governance was well deserved and measurably kind.
It's almost painful to watch the opposition in this province not even attempt to sustain a debate in reality. Of course BC politics is about nothing if not destroying a decade of progress along one ideology and drastically rebuilding every 10 years.
Some readers might think that at $10 a month and 2000 songs downloaded the artists aren't seeing much of that, and they're right. But this is the beauty of Emusic, the pricing can adjust itself based on approximate usage.
I'm not sure that this is actually how emusic shares it's revenues with labels, they may very well use aggreagates for pay outs. Let's assume or pretend that they take a monthly subscription fee and split it out over an account's monthly downloads. There have been months whne I have downloaded upwards of a hundred albums and listened to most of them maybe once or twice. Say this represents around $0.10 per album. In the old days I would have had to pay $20 for some of these albums. But if I am listening to so much music that I barely even touch an album, why should I have to pay $20 for it?
It ends up becoming more of a radio service when you are a heavy user. The difference is that for once the radio station is playing music that I like, loads of it, and it's also making recommendations and providing instant access. It's also a radio station where the artist may get paid around a penny in royalites when you listen to a song which just outdoes anything else in revenue potential.
Emusic this way also matches the marketing power of radio and then some as it's easy to preview many indie acts that come through town. At the shows I invariably drop some cash at their merch tables.
Of course having a massive amount of music to sample on the cheap has other huge marketing benefits for indie artists. Namely the ease with which mix cds are created for freinds from the mp3 format. Mix tapes/CDs of course having always been one of the major mdoes of transmission for music awareness in the absense of non-shitty radio.
On most months I have only downloaded 5-15 albums. Most of which I listened to several times resulting in an average pay out of $0.75-2 per record which is quite reasonable for what basically represents zero marginal cost to the label/artist. Especially if I listen to an album 5-10 time and then move on to something new, there is so much music out there that in the end it becomes rare to rely on only a few albums per month for entertainment once you get used to it.
This ends up flattening out the distribution of entertainment dollars to more artists in a pretty self-correcting way. It's what the end of physical distribution should be doing to entertainment: breaking up the innefiecient (from a market perspective) structures that create a few annointed (and talentless) millionaires and force the vast majority of super-talented musicians to toil on in relative obscurity.
> So, Mr. Cowpland, making the best of a *bad* situation, goes one back in the supply
It is interesting that Robertson and his product are on such a similar trajectory as Cowpland was with Corel Linux, another Debian based system for the masses, that people can get the two confused years after Cowpland has left Corel.
I recall that one of Cowpland's coupes was bundling Corel Linux with motherboards. Hopefully Robertson fares better.
I don't recall the article stating that the discovery was made by the Dalai Lama. Just how tight do you think the control on information like this is?
It's distressing to me how standard this elitest tack is in this thread. We live in a relatively open society. Propagating the idea that the people involved in 51 separate observations of the object are all going to, or ought to have, come to some conclusion that the plebs don't need to hear about it is irresponsible.
> Too bad that a very long perspective in economics is non-existent.
Too bad you have no idea what you're talking about. Thank god a good number of economists do. And are pushing the arguement forward.
Kalin
If some European politician made any such proposal or in
fact any attempt to "secure a market" at this point in time
he'd be thrown out of office.
Are you for real?
Proposing deals to secure markets for corporations is a daily occurance in Mercantile Europe. A really quick google news picked up this.
Some commentators in France fear the United States will dominate Iraq's reconstruction, freezing out France since Chirac staunchly opposed the war and incurred the wrath of Washington.
But a spokeswoman at employers federation Medef said an informal working group had been set up to look at opportunities for French businesses.
"It's a cooperation between the (government) administration and companies," the spokeswoman said. "We have not had any meetings. It is informal."
...
Finance Minister Francis Mer said on Sunday French companies including oil giant TotalFinaElf could have a role in assisting in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry.
It's also no secret that French opposition to the war has been driven largely by economic interests:
Richard Perle, a former US Assistant Defence Secretary, said the French anti-war stance was driven by economic interests. French oil giant TotalFinaElf has exclusive exploration contracts worth ?60bn - ?75bn to develop the massive Majnoon and Bin Umar oilfields in southern Iraq, he said.
?What?s distinctive about the Total contract is that it?s not favourable to Iraq, it?s favourable to Total,? Mr Perle, the chairman of the Pentagon?s Defence Policy Board, said during an address in New York.
?One can suspect that there?s some arbitrage there, that in between the real value of that contract and the cash value of that contract there?s a certain amount of political support.
?It?s entirely possible that Saddam negotiated that deal because that along with the revenues, he could get something else.?
He said oil experts who had analysed the deal described it as ?extraordinarily lopsided? in favour of the French company.
Don't trust Richard Perle? How about Egyptian economist Khalil Al-'Anani (as presented in al-Jazeera):
France's opposition to the war in Iraq, rather than being based on political considerations, its historical ties with the Arab world, or an attempt to challenge America's role as superpower, is motivated by pure economic interests. Despite France's attempts to portray its stance against the war as a political one, it is difficult not to imagine the economic benefits to France if the war had not occurred. The consequences of war on the weak French economy will be palpable primarily in the oil and commercial sectors. . ..
The German economy is going through difficult times with a GDP growth in 2002 of 0.2% and unemployment of 11.3% which translates into 4.06 million unemployed workers. The reduction in taxes collected, coupled with rising unemployment benefits, could drive German deficits above the 3% ceiling established by the European Union, which would invite punitive measures. The war in Iraq could result in two immediate negative consequences for the German economy: first, a decline in German exports which is the main engine for German economic growth; and second, higher oil prices could intensify the German economic slow-down. . ..
Not unlike the case of France, it is difficult to overlook the extent and depth of the economic relations between Russia and Iraq which extend over 40 years. Here, again, economic considerations drive the Russian position vis-à-vis the war on Iraq. . ..
I don't know if any of these acts will ever be well-known by anyone outside of Vancouver/Edmonton and area, but so what? Why should music be national? Why is that even important to people? There are hundreds of amazingly talented people in every city who could work on music full-time if more than a couple of thousand people cared to listen to something produced for the love of it and the love of doing something new rather than some celebrity death-wish.
The whole notion of national celebrities is one of the strangest consequences of copyright law and if we lost it I'm convinced we'd be ther better for it. Having the state sponser monopolies by restricting speech, funnelling money into cartels and creating the celebrity-class is at best bizzarre, at worst it's seriously fucked.
Thanks! LaunchBar looks like it will solve a bunch of my problems. Though it's annoying to be dealing with shareware again. I'd also suggest TinkerTool for anyone who hasn't tried it. I'd forgotten that the dock could move to the right side without enhancements, because i used TinkerTool to put it *exactly* where I wanted it.
I'm sitting at a W2k box here, and the API inconsistencies across apps alone are incredibly frustrating, leaving alone OSes. That one gets you into troll territory, I'm afraid.
Although there are differences between a lot of windows apps. Almost without exception you can rely on being able to do almost anything with a few basic keys. My biggest frustration with the mac is not being able to consistently tab between controls efficiently. It seems that if the program uses the basic Win32 this is automatic. I don't know how Apple designed thier API so it is possible to not be able to tab between check boxes sometimes but it's a bigger oversight than I would have expected.
OK, you're right, I should have been more clear on that. You can put it on the right but only centered on the right which mans that as you minimize windows your icons move around. I had to use Tweaktool to "top justify it" so I could move to the finder icon without having to look at it.
After owning an iBook for a month I really have to question the wisdom of all those who bow to the alter of OS X usability.
I've turned full keyboard control on but I'm constantly presented by applications which refuse to focus to check box or radio button widgets with tabs. I can't even imagine what it would be like to use a mac if one were handicapped in any serious way. I have never had any problem using any PC OS without a mouse. On a laptop forcing a user to go to the trackpad to check a box before hitting enter should pretty much relegate doftware to beta status.
It wasn't until 10.2 that Apple finally standardized switching between open windows of an application with Option-~.
I had to install third party software just to get the dock on the right side (where as a poster below pointed out is where the mouse spends a lot of time due to scroll bars and volume icons being there by default).
I even had to create my own black tiff just to make the background black, Apple doesn't even let you select background colors (they use image files in their "solid color" option.
Also the horizontal lines on the default Aqua interface are in my opinion hideous. They make small text hard to read and don't offer any real advantage. Again it required third party software to install a theme that lacked the lines.
OS X is nice, but it is far from being the pinnacle of usability. If anything it is a clear example of an interface which has stressed learnability over usability far too much.
I'm not saying that GNOME hasn't had a lot of rough edges, but in it's current state of 2.2 it seems to have created a simple ui that is as learnable for novices as OS X. It seems to have done more work on acessiblity than any other desktop out there. But I can still define my own keybindings for sawfish if I so desire. It's just a pleasure to use if you're the sort that uses your computer daily.
fastmail.fm, which has become one of my favorite companies on the net, has a bounce feature on their webmail interface which brings one no end of joy bouncing stuff back (even though most from addresses are bogus). They also use spamassasin on thier premium accounts which doesn't delete the mail but simply adds a X-Spam: (or some such) header, you can filter it however you like after that.
Accessing my mail through IMAP with evolution I'm a big fan of doing exactly what you said, basically testing for the spam header and displaying the mail in a different color or moving it to an alternate folder (I'm super paraoid about false-positives although I've never seen one with spamassasin).
I actually just installed ALSA last night based on Jon Aslund's excellent HOWTO from August. The LinuxOrbit one looks good too, but I thought I'd through out another url. Two HOWTO's are always better than one after all.
If you've ever had the displeasure of working with/code you realize that it would take an army of CowboyNeals a week to fix that problem. They could have changed the domain variable in slashrc in just under 10 seconds.
It's so ridiculous to have to add this to my hosts file. I'm pretty dissapointed that the kids running this enterprise didn't define the server as brak.slashdot.org in their slashrc file for a day or two so the links would work without local intervention. It would have saved a lot of users a lot of confusion.
Pity the coutless users who don't know about/etc/hosts or just don't have permission to change it.
Kalin
while you're waiting for this /.ing to end...
on
He Writes Back
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually Sympathy for the Record Industry is based out of Long Beach while the White Stripes are from Detroit.
And while I'm posting, I'll say that the fact that it seems that all the new WS fans can only come up with Zeppelin-esque as a (poor) description of their sound is the surest sign that the RIAA method of distribution has failed us.;-)
Rock on though. White Blood Cells was like the best album last year by far, and try to see them live if at all possible, it's electric.
This seems like as good an article as any recently to post some rambling thought I've had on the state of co-operation in p2p networks.
Aside from the more scalable architecture offered by napster and fasttrack in comparison to gnutella they also had a major advantage in user/freeloader ratios.
I'd guess that 90% of napster users went with the default installations that allowed the client programs to scan their hard drives and automatically share all mp3s. Furthermore, I'd guess that a similar ration never had any siginificant cognition about the FT or napster clients continuing to run as background processes when they 'exited' the program.
Gnutella has a real reputation as a freeloaders network and it's not surprising. Many of the clients do not stay running when you close them (and even if something like LimeWire did, I'm loathe to have a huge chunk of memory taken up by a bloated JRE). Furthermore, a lot of the clients don't do a good job of making it extra work to *not* share your files. In the original gnutella client for windows as well as current incarnations of gtk-gnutella, you have to explicitly enter the config screen and tell the program which directories you want to share. For a lot of people with weak ethics or concepts of fair exchange that extra step is just enough to give them an excuse to be a leetch on the network.
It is intriguing to see what happens as more and more clients are punishing freeloaders in even the most rudimentary fashion. For instance, Limewire now has an option that will allow you to set preferences against those sharing less than a specific number of files. This in theory should encorage people to share their directories especially as the controls become more fine-grained and reward those sharing large collections/bandwidth with preferred access in exchange for offering their services to the network.
It's a little less cumbersome, if also a little less elegant and perfect, than the mojo nation system of a credit based economy. However, as in the curren tstate of most p2p, it is potentially missing the bigger picture by concentrating only on the health of the community qua community and ignoring the potential problems of freeloading within the scope of society. Namely, rewarding artists for their work.
P2P gains some respect if you accept the arguments that it encourages more CDs or concert tickets to be purchased, and thus greater rewards to the artists. This is no doubt true for many, however there are also plenty of people who haven't bought an album since they got broadband,a nd these people are gaining unfairly on the goodwill of thsoe who do have a sense of ethics on fair exchange with artists.
What I'd like to see is a similar system to the idea of giving preferential bandwidth to those who share that is integrated with sites like fairtunes. It seems possible that a p2p protocol could be developed or extended to check a user who is requesting a download for tokens representing 'tips' that they have made at fairtunes in exchange for the pleasure they have received for downloaded music. It would definitely add some overhead to the protocol to authenticate the tokens against a fairtunes server and/or public key, however offering perferential performance on the network would serve as a gentle pressure to encourage a more ethical, and arguably a more sustainable, system which artists would have less trepidation of participating in and may very well be able to earn reasonable incomes from if their music is enjoyed by enough people.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa! Do you have any idea how poorly your site renders in mozilla firebird 0.7?
I hope that's not Pivot's fault.
hmmm,
how do i mod myself down now...
I'm no expert in whois or anything. but maybe someone can shed some light on what this means:
kalin@nubain:~$ whois aol.comWhois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
AOL.COM.SAYS.HARASS.SOFTY797.FOR.SUBVERTER.NET
AOL.COM.RAPED.SUBVERTER.NET
AOL.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.GULLI.COM
AOL.COM.IS.0WNED.BY.SUB7.NET
AOL.COM.AINT.GOT.AS.MUCH.FREE.PORN.AS.SECZ.COM
AOL.COM
To single out one record, look it up with "xxx", where xxx is one of the
of the records displayed above. If the records are the same, look them up
with "=xxx" to receive a full display for each record.
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 06:25:08 EST
Oh, I had the exact same idea as you! Except the year was 1996 and the site was Altavista. Couldn't live without it. Thank Goodness the government didn't nationalize and subsidize them making the emergence of Google as a successful, profitable, private, limited liability corporation next to impossible. But now that we have Google maybe we should reconsider your plan, I mean, nothing could ever get better than this, right?
Sure, Google may have come from nowhere to become profitable while providing a huge amount of value not only to the people who risked piles of time and money on the enterprise, but also to the public at large and their customers. But of course mutual benefit through voluntary association and private property just usually isn't possible in a capitalist system, this is an anomaly and it must be protected.
I also rely on Debian daily for job related activities; I know a lot of people who do. Maybe final decision making power for Debian should be removed from the technical committee and developers and transfered to an appropriations committee of the US Dept of Commerce. I mean, can we really risk such an important piece of technology to a bunch of private individuals. I even heard that one of the former DPLs played a major role at a major corporation in the motion picture industry, while he was involved with Debian!. We all know how greedy and untrustworthy that type is; there is no way of telling how he may have subverted Debian when he had control of it.
Ok now that I've pulled my tongue out of my cheek, could I ask you to put down the Adbusters and spend time every day really thinking about these wonderful things that we rely on and where they came from? Also think about the real freedom to innovate and how that could start to be lost.
And if you do the honourable thing and keep your emigration pact with Alec Baldwin, please don't come to Canada.
More than your spelling is circumspect here.
Google has as much corporate greed as any well-run corporation ought to. Given all the money they make, while so many other internet companies have crashed and burned around them, I would wager that the profit motive is pretty strong.
Google was smart enough to realize that there was a lot of revenue to be made in delivering a good product to its customers (advertisers and content providers).
The thing Google has excelled at is in producing huge volumes of its product (eyeballs) at a higher quality (very well-targeted advertising space). If Google had gone the short-sighted route of many other search engines they never would have come from nowhere to capture so many consumers to sell to their customers.
The reason people use Google is because it is the best search engine around not because it appears to be run by altruists. The reason it is the best search engine around is because Google will do anything to capture more eyeballs to sell. They are in for the long haul and won't sacrifice their core product for expensive and speculative gambles outside of thier core competencies (like turning into a portal, compromising search results, and/or developing their own content).
In short, greed is good. Also, the smarter you are, the greater your carrying capacity may be for your greed.
You may remember the BC NDP government from such hit slashdot posts as Regulating video games, the how and why, and Canada, a new home for Microsoft.
They didn't sell off part of BC Hyrdo to Accenture, they outsourced administrative functions to the company as a cost savings measure and in a partnership to offer services to other jurisdictions. If you aren't even talking about real events you aren't even in the debate. Privitisation is a fundamentally different process.
Also, they didn't lose the last election for sake of honesty unless you had meant the lack of it shown by the NDP when they printed budgets that were completely false to give the impression of fiscal responsibility. Remember it, the "fudge-it budget"? I think the investigation of Clark over the casino license was a farce, with the tv camera's waiting and all that, but the punishment the NDP received for outright lying to British Columbians on the central issue of governance was well deserved and measurably kind.
It's almost painful to watch the opposition in this province not even attempt to sustain a debate in reality. Of course BC politics is about nothing if not destroying a decade of progress along one ideology and drastically rebuilding every 10 years.
Some readers might think that at $10 a month and 2000 songs downloaded the artists aren't seeing much of that, and they're right. But this is the beauty of Emusic, the pricing can adjust itself based on approximate usage.
I'm not sure that this is actually how emusic shares it's revenues with labels, they may very well use aggreagates for pay outs. Let's assume or pretend that they take a monthly subscription fee and split it out over an account's monthly downloads. There have been months whne I have downloaded upwards of a hundred albums and listened to most of them maybe once or twice. Say this represents around $0.10 per album. In the old days I would have had to pay $20 for some of these albums. But if I am listening to so much music that I barely even touch an album, why should I have to pay $20 for it?
It ends up becoming more of a radio service when you are a heavy user. The difference is that for once the radio station is playing music that I like, loads of it, and it's also making recommendations and providing instant access. It's also a radio station where the artist may get paid around a penny in royalites when you listen to a song which just outdoes anything else in revenue potential.
Emusic this way also matches the marketing power of radio and then some as it's easy to preview many indie acts that come through town. At the shows I invariably drop some cash at their merch tables.
Of course having a massive amount of music to sample on the cheap has other huge marketing benefits for indie artists. Namely the ease with which mix cds are created for freinds from the mp3 format. Mix tapes/CDs of course having always been one of the major mdoes of transmission for music awareness in the absense of non-shitty radio.
On most months I have only downloaded 5-15 albums. Most of which I listened to several times resulting in an average pay out of $0.75-2 per record which is quite reasonable for what basically represents zero marginal cost to the label/artist. Especially if I listen to an album 5-10 time and then move on to something new, there is so much music out there that in the end it becomes rare to rely on only a few albums per month for entertainment once you get used to it.
This ends up flattening out the distribution of entertainment dollars to more artists in a pretty self-correcting way. It's what the end of physical distribution should be doing to entertainment: breaking up the innefiecient (from a market perspective) structures that create a few annointed (and talentless) millionaires and force the vast majority of super-talented musicians to toil on in relative obscurity.
Kalin
> So, Mr. Cowpland, making the best of a *bad* situation, goes one back in the supply
It is interesting that Robertson and his product are on such a similar trajectory as Cowpland was with Corel Linux, another Debian based system for the masses, that people can get the two confused years after Cowpland has left Corel.
I recall that one of Cowpland's coupes was bundling Corel Linux with motherboards. Hopefully Robertson fares better.
Why would you even alert the masses of this?
I don't recall the article stating that the discovery was made by the Dalai Lama. Just how tight do you think the control on information like this is?
It's distressing to me how standard this elitest tack is in this thread. We live in a relatively open society. Propagating the idea that the people involved in 51 separate observations of the object are all going to, or ought to have, come to some conclusion that the plebs don't need to hear about it is irresponsible.
> Too bad that a very long perspective in economics is non-existent. Too bad you have no idea what you're talking about. Thank god a good number of economists do. And are pushing the arguement forward. Kalin
If some European politician made any such proposal or in fact any attempt to "secure a market" at this point in time he'd be thrown out of office.
Are you for real?
Proposing deals to secure markets for corporations is a daily occurance in Mercantile Europe. A really quick google news picked up this.
It's also no secret that French opposition to the war has been driven largely by economic interests:
Don't trust Richard Perle? How about Egyptian economist Khalil Al-'Anani (as presented in al-Jazeera):
I'm drifting, but really,
Pretty much all of my favourite albums from the last year were produced well by talented producers, and released on labels run by people who care about music. More importantly, I've seen all the bands multiple times in great intimate venues.
I don't know if any of these acts will ever be well-known by anyone outside of Vancouver/Edmonton and area, but so what? Why should music be national? Why is that even important to people? There are hundreds of amazingly talented people in every city who could work on music full-time if more than a couple of thousand people cared to listen to something produced for the love of it and the love of doing something new rather than some celebrity death-wish.
The whole notion of national celebrities is one of the strangest consequences of copyright law and if we lost it I'm convinced we'd be ther better for it. Having the state sponser monopolies by restricting speech, funnelling money into cartels and creating the celebrity-class is at best bizzarre, at worst it's seriously fucked.
Thanks! LaunchBar looks like it will solve a bunch of my problems. Though it's annoying to be dealing with shareware again. I'd also suggest TinkerTool for anyone who hasn't tried it. I'd forgotten that the dock could move to the right side without enhancements, because i used TinkerTool to put it *exactly* where I wanted it.
s/Tweaktool/Tinkertool/
I'm sitting at a W2k box here, and the API inconsistencies across apps alone are incredibly frustrating, leaving alone OSes. That one gets you into troll territory, I'm afraid.
Although there are differences between a lot of windows apps. Almost without exception you can rely on being able to do almost anything with a few basic keys. My biggest frustration with the mac is not being able to consistently tab between controls efficiently. It seems that if the program uses the basic Win32 this is automatic. I don't know how Apple designed thier API so it is possible to not be able to tab between check boxes sometimes but it's a bigger oversight than I would have expected.
OK, you're right, I should have been more clear on that. You can put it on the right but only centered on the right which mans that as you minimize windows your icons move around. I had to use Tweaktool to "top justify it" so I could move to the finder icon without having to look at it.
I've turned full keyboard control on but I'm constantly presented by applications which refuse to focus to check box or radio button widgets with tabs. I can't even imagine what it would be like to use a mac if one were handicapped in any serious way. I have never had any problem using any PC OS without a mouse. On a laptop forcing a user to go to the trackpad to check a box before hitting enter should pretty much relegate doftware to beta status.
It wasn't until 10.2 that Apple finally standardized switching between open windows of an application with Option-~.
I had to install third party software just to get the dock on the right side (where as a poster below pointed out is where the mouse spends a lot of time due to scroll bars and volume icons being there by default).
I even had to create my own black tiff just to make the background black, Apple doesn't even let you select background colors (they use image files in their "solid color" option.
Also the horizontal lines on the default Aqua interface are in my opinion hideous. They make small text hard to read and don't offer any real advantage. Again it required third party software to install a theme that lacked the lines.
OS X is nice, but it is far from being the pinnacle of usability. If anything it is a clear example of an interface which has stressed learnability over usability far too much.
I'm not saying that GNOME hasn't had a lot of rough edges, but in it's current state of 2.2 it seems to have created a simple ui that is as learnable for novices as OS X. It seems to have done more work on acessiblity than any other desktop out there. But I can still define my own keybindings for sawfish if I so desire. It's just a pleasure to use if you're the sort that uses your computer daily.
Accessing my mail through IMAP with evolution I'm a big fan of doing exactly what you said, basically testing for the spam header and displaying the mail in a different color or moving it to an alternate folder (I'm super paraoid about false-positives although I've never seen one with spamassasin).
Kalin
If you've ever had the displeasure of working with /code you realize that it would take an army of CowboyNeals a week to fix that problem. They could have changed the domain variable in slashrc in just under 10 seconds.
Pity the coutless users who don't know about /etc/hosts or just don't have permission to change it.
Kalin
It's a work of art really. A digitized voice reading spam over royalty free ambient soundscapes.
And while I'm posting, I'll say that the fact that it seems that all the new WS fans can only come up with Zeppelin-esque as a (poor) description of their sound is the surest sign that the RIAA method of distribution has failed us. ;-)
Rock on though. White Blood Cells was like the best album last year by far, and try to see them live if at all possible, it's electric.
Kalin
Aside from the more scalable architecture offered by napster and fasttrack in comparison to gnutella they also had a major advantage in user/freeloader ratios.
I'd guess that 90% of napster users went with the default installations that allowed the client programs to scan their hard drives and automatically share all mp3s. Furthermore, I'd guess that a similar ration never had any siginificant cognition about the FT or napster clients continuing to run as background processes when they 'exited' the program.
Gnutella has a real reputation as a freeloaders network and it's not surprising. Many of the clients do not stay running when you close them (and even if something like LimeWire did, I'm loathe to have a huge chunk of memory taken up by a bloated JRE). Furthermore, a lot of the clients don't do a good job of making it extra work to *not* share your files. In the original gnutella client for windows as well as current incarnations of gtk-gnutella, you have to explicitly enter the config screen and tell the program which directories you want to share. For a lot of people with weak ethics or concepts of fair exchange that extra step is just enough to give them an excuse to be a leetch on the network.
It is intriguing to see what happens as more and more clients are punishing freeloaders in even the most rudimentary fashion. For instance, Limewire now has an option that will allow you to set preferences against those sharing less than a specific number of files. This in theory should encorage people to share their directories especially as the controls become more fine-grained and reward those sharing large collections/bandwidth with preferred access in exchange for offering their services to the network.
It's a little less cumbersome, if also a little less elegant and perfect, than the mojo nation system of a credit based economy. However, as in the curren tstate of most p2p, it is potentially missing the bigger picture by concentrating only on the health of the community qua community and ignoring the potential problems of freeloading within the scope of society. Namely, rewarding artists for their work.
P2P gains some respect if you accept the arguments that it encourages more CDs or concert tickets to be purchased, and thus greater rewards to the artists. This is no doubt true for many, however there are also plenty of people who haven't bought an album since they got broadband,a nd these people are gaining unfairly on the goodwill of thsoe who do have a sense of ethics on fair exchange with artists.
What I'd like to see is a similar system to the idea of giving preferential bandwidth to those who share that is integrated with sites like fairtunes. It seems possible that a p2p protocol could be developed or extended to check a user who is requesting a download for tokens representing 'tips' that they have made at fairtunes in exchange for the pleasure they have received for downloaded music. It would definitely add some overhead to the protocol to authenticate the tokens against a fairtunes server and/or public key, however offering perferential performance on the network would serve as a gentle pressure to encourage a more ethical, and arguably a more sustainable, system which artists would have less trepidation of participating in and may very well be able to earn reasonable incomes from if their music is enjoyed by enough people.