That's fine. I hope to see more people using this jargon and 133+ 5p34|
Obvious exaggeration of a point doesn't serve to forward your opinions.
Bob asked, "Where are we?" No one suspects you're asking a question.
You can contrive any example you want; the plural of anecdote is still not data. Your logic taken to the logical conclusion is exactly the same logic that rslts n ths bng ccptbl; context is enough to figure that out. The question is, what do you do when there is confusion based on context?
There are circumstances where punctuation can fall outside quotes, although you haven't presented one.
So? I didn't say, always put the punctuation outside of the quotes, only as it makes sense.
My way is empirically better; it results in fewer ambiguous situations. This point isn't open to debate, it's a simple fact. The only way in which you are correct is that that is how it was done fifty years ago. You want to stand on that definition of "correct", fine, but don't be stunned when we move past you. Some of us have moved past concrete operational, we'll be happy to welcome you when you join us.
And again, I remind you, your "correct" way was imposed on us by typographers, for reasons that are now completely out of date. "Correct" has shifted before (hope that doesn't blow your brains too much)... are you so sure it isn't shifting again, back to the way it was done before typesetting? Like I said, I've seen this "in the wild", I've even seen it in recent style guides mentioned by name, though regrettably they are under copyright and not linkable. Perhaps you are behind the times.
Humanity is right now the only feasible chance that "Mother Nature" has of spreading the macroscopic portions of the environment to other planets and environments.
Also, you're being a little unfair: "Single celled organisms" probably are more flexible then humanity right now... but so are "reptiles". Pick me one species of single-celled organism that does as well as we do... and don't forget that at the moment we're surviving in space, even if it's not self-sustaining quite yet. The organisms that live in deep sea volcanos can't live in a mountain lake, after all.
(This is in the spirit of intellectual play; none of this particularly matters;-) )
I would like to suggest that most of us asshats know not to put a space before quotes and not to put punctuation outside quotes.
The first one is still legit. The second criticism is out-of-date. That is called "logical quoting" as explained by the Jargon Dictionary, and I have indeed started to see it in significant and serious use outside of the Hacker community as well.
Remember the rule wasn't grammatical but typographical in the first place, and logical quoting is more expressive.
Lately I've taken it to the logical conclusion, and if quoting somebody's exclamation, I will do it like this: He said, "Oh my gosh that hurts!". That's right, I don't allow the quote's punctuation to terminate my sentence, because I'm not exclaiming. Your English teacher may not like it, but by the metrics of "range of expression" and "logical consistency", my way is better, and I think in the end as the typographical issues fade this is how it's going to be.
(Remember the Rule of Breaking Rules: "You may break a rule if you understand it.". I understand this rule and its history quite well.)
And finally, there is a difference between a Slashdot posting and a CEO's communication;-) I'd never use a smiley in a corporate communication, and I'd never write a comment inside of Mozilla's text box without spell-checking support. But it's not worth the effort to do any better for a Slashdot comment.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (X) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
(Yes, it's pulled from here. The meta-point is, if we're going to progress in the war on spam we need to move past the solutions that have been proposed a million times with obvious holes in them. Either that, or face the possibility that the system we have now is already optimal.
Primary justification of the above snarky copy&paste job is that this patently obvious scheme has a patently obvious DDoS scheme built into it, left as an exercise for the reader.)
It is often... though not often enough... pointed out that the singular of "data" is not "anecdote".
Similarly, "fact" is not merely an emphatic form of "theory".
I might as well theorize that black holes don't exist at all; who owes what now? Oh, right, nothing changes, because theories aren't facts.
Mick Ohrberg, why don't you grow out of Physics Fanboydom and take some time to learn some real stuff? For starters, why don't you being with Science 101 and learn the definition of "theory", and "equation", and other such basic terms?
I read that, and I don't think you understand why quantum non-locality can't provide FTL communication. I read the article you're pointing to and I don't see that that article changes anything. (Don't you think they would have gotten a little more excited if they had done FTL communication?)
FTL communication is impossible because all known entangled properties are random and uncontrollable, by definition. You can send out an entangled photon pair and measure the polarization of one, and it will indeed immediately determine the other. However, the phase you measure is by necessity random. You get no say in what it is, you have no means of manipulating it on the receiving end.
Therefore, it is useless to you. Sure, you can determine that you got a +90, but you don't know what that means, because it's completely random. The fact that the entangled photon on the other end is immediately a -90 is true, but they don't know what it means, either, because for them it was equally completely random. The other end of the communication still needs to communicate a key to you, and that communication occurs over lightspeed-at-best communication.
You said:
The link The link goes to an American Institute of Physics bulletin on successful instantaneous determination of a photon's energy from a distance of 10km. goes to an American Institute of Physics bulletin on successful instantaneous determination of a photon's energy from a distance of 10km.
And you are somewhat correct, but you don't understand what they mean by "determination". What they mean is that they "determined" the energy level by measuring it, forcing it to have a discrete value. That measurement was itself randomized and is no more capable of communication then the phase example I used above.
The article you pointed to does nothing to violate FTL. If anything, it closed off one more potential loop hole. Physics fanboys, it's time to face facts: FTL-anything-useful is looking less and less likely each year, as every loophole we can think of and look into doesn't work. You can't tell this because you don't actually understand physics if your source of information is a second-hand report of a synopsis of a real experiment. Seriously, either take the time to learn or shut the hell up and stop poisoning other people's minds. (Or at the very least, get out of the physics fanboy echo chamber, where you keep convincing each other by repitition of falsehoods that you might be right, darn it.)
Anybody who wants to take issue with this message I point at your nearest textbook on quantum physics. (Except for correction by people who actually know QM and might correct me on a few points.) If the points in this posting weren't correct, don't you think we'd have heard about it by now? FTL stuff isn't covered up, if anything, it's overplayed!
If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself
Completely false. You are free to reply, you are free to publish that reply, and there are sites that will help people who care find your reply, even if the original source doesn't ever point to you.
Your problem is...
of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)
You seem to think that you have some sort of right to be heard... that if ABC News publishes an article and you have some comment that you have some sort of right to make ABC News distribute your opinion on the same footing as their own. This is flatly false. They may acknowlege your opinion or not as they see fit.
The true benefit of the RSS-style of communication is that it provides you with a channel of communication that is yours. Your RSS file has no trolls. Your RSS file has no spam. Thus, if people care about your opinions (or whatever you are posting), they can subscribe with confidence to your feed. The technology exists then to bring your content to those who are interesting.
Odds are, you won't get thousands or millions of subscribers. That's because, odds are, you aren't one out of a million. I say this as someone who has had a feed since Jan. 2000 and have not exactly raked in the fame. However, this is the way it is.
It's not like the alternatives are any better. Do you actually read the feedback forums on ABC News? Sure, I do intermittently, but there's just no way around the fact that when you create that "right of reply", it's flooded and you can't help but be uninterested in it.
Fundamentally, you see this "one-way communication", but what you don't see is that (nearly) all communication is one way. You are not allowed to modify this message, but you can post a reply. You are not allowed to modify somebody else's RSS feed, but you can post a reply. The fact that I don't have to read every last schmoe's reply to some article, but only get the ones from the people I care about, is a feature, not a bug.
The ideal communication technology is a compromise between the readers and the writers. RSS feeds are one of the best we've created so far, with low binding on both the writer's and the reader's side. (Even posted an unpopular opinion and been deluged in hate mail? Unless you're a sociopath it gets old. RSS is one of the few ways for a writer to be able to deal with that, because they are not forced to read the flames in the same forum they themselves are posting in.) In the end, RSS-based communities are one of the best matches to the real principles of free speech: That you can say whatever you like, and people are free to read whatever they like, and there is no binding between the two: You do not have the right to be heard, and you do not have the right to censor anyone else, even by "shouting them down". In this way, RSS feeds surpass even real-world communication.
Practically speaking, it is undeniable that this plays out as I've described, and not as you've described. I've participated in many conversations via RSS, so I have empirical proof they exist, no matter how you might theorize that they don't. And plenty of people comment on all sort of things, many of whom I find interesting and many of whom I don't. You obviously don't use it, if you have so many misconceptions.
RSS is the exact opposite of TV on the web. Everybody gets to compete on a level playing ground for attention, and is rewarded according to their social merits. Some people don't like this and prefer forums where they (falsely) think this doesn't apply. Even the big networks and newspapers don't have much adv
All games absolutely must have a story... for the right definition of "story".
Most people interpret "story" to mean "plot", but the two are not the same. A story, broadly speaking, is "setup, conflict, development, resolution", but writing a plot line, with set characters and dialog is only one way to get a "story".
Tetris has a "story". The set up is the rules. The conflict is that the game is throwing blocks at you, but you don't want blocks on the field. The development is the game play, and in Tetris's case, the eventual resolution is typically that you fail, but you get some kind of score. (There are varients that play to a finite point which you can "win", but when most people think Tetris they think of the varient where you play until you fill the screen.)
Games with no "story" exist, but are typically rare. You can recognize them because they will typically look like "tech demos", or you'll think of them as "incomplete", even if they have all the technological pieces in place. Imagine an RPG engine that works perfectly, but you're confined to one town and absolutely everybody is friendly and all you can do is talk to them, except this one fight with a rat on the edge of town. The engine is (for the sake of argument), perfectly done, but there's no story.
You can similarly imagine a side-scrolling shooter where the game just goes on and on, but no bosses, no increasing difficulty, just monotonous onslaughts of homogenous enemies. I remember playing these on the C64... briefly. For better or for worse, the now-standard "boss" system does at least provide a story. Even the "level" system provides story; the exact same game as the classic 2D space shooter Galaxian, but without level delinations, would be a lot less compelling.
Lots of things must have a story like this, but not necessarily a "plot line" and "characters". A presentation should always tell a story: "Our project was this (setup), our problems with it were this (setup), we handled it this way (development), and this was the result (resolution)." (I strongly disagree with people who say to put the result first; you lose the interest of the crowd and they'll have a superficial understanding of the result. If you result is at all complex and you really want your crowd to understand the result, you must take them through the whole story before they can appreciate this.)
Doom has a story, but the "plotline" it has is entirely incidental. Doom's story is on a per-level basis: "[Rules of the Doom game] (setup), there are monsters blocking my path (conflict), the combat (development), I got to the end of the level and prevailed (resolution)." There is an over-arching story in the boss battle but it's quite diffuse compared to the level-by-level story, as evidenced by the fact you can basically pick it up and play any level you want without playing the ones before it.
All games must have stories. Plot lines are one way, but not the only want and generally not even a good way, for this to occur. Generally the engine itself must provide the story, or the user will feel they are just watching a movie.
(Think about this and apply it to games you've played before dismissing this; this is really a surprisingly interesting field. It seems that the general story pattern of setup, conflict, development, resolution is buried deep in our psyches since it is so important in so many artistic or creative endeavors, from games to literature to presentations to music to a whole lot of other things. Heck, even software tutorials should have a story. People who understand this and apply it have a distinct advantage over those who don't.)
He's definitely not thinking of Gentoo for this role. He's talking about Progeny.
We, the people who are posting about Gentoo in this thread, know that.
The question is, "Why didn't Ian seem to?"
One of the important responsibilities an Open Source developer has is to check around and make sure there isn't already a project that is nearly what they want, and try to see if they can contribute to that project instead. Of course, being Open Source nobody enforces this (nobody should), but the end result of ignoring this rule is generally Yet Another (Something) package on Sourceforge that is forever ignored because the package that the author should have been contributing to always overshadows it. You ignore this at your own peril.
Of course there are exceptions, but one should justify yourself carefully; "This package's architecture is inimical to the features I want to have." is acceptable. "I didn't write this package and I only understand X" is not, really.
I use "package" because this applies to distributions, not just software package.
Our problem with Ian's proposal is not that he wants to create Yet Another Distribution. In fact, you might say we don't necessarily have a problem at all; many of us have agitated for a version of Gentoo that does better with binary packages, and perhaps the competition with Progeny will help make that reality, in addition to the creation of a new Linux distribution which is pretty much never a bad thing. (I'm not one who "agitates" for such a Gentoo but I wouldn't mind the option, especially with the big packages like Mozilla that take me most of an afternoon to compile.)
Our problem is that he doesn't seem to have heard of Gentoo, which fits the description of the system he wants to a T, except for maybe the binary aspect of it. And considering that there exists a system that works as he describes, and it works by compiling from source, there's a bit of an "argument by existance" that it works from source; there is no equivalent proof that it is even reasonably possible with binaries. In fact, the Gentoo-based projects to date have largely failed due to there being too many permutations of the system to make the binaries worth it. If he hasn't heard of Gentoo, if he describes things solely in terms of Red Hat and UserLinux, what's to say he's not going to make the same mistakes those failed Gentoo projects made? Why can't he get what he wants built on top of Gentoo?
In short, it doesn't seem to me that he's discharged his "obligation" as an Open Source developer to try to join an existing team, rather then create a new one, for what appears to be the reason that he's familiar with X, where "X" is Debian. Like I said, nobody can enforce the "rule" (maybe I should call it a "guideline"), but it does not bode well for the project.
I am not saying "Uz0R g3n700, l0zz3r!" I'm saying, "Why don't you acknowlege how close Gentoo already is to where you claim you want to be? Is it because you don't know about it?" I hope he succeeds, but if his knowlege of distributions is limited to Debian, Red Hat, and UserLinux, basically such that he can say with a straight face that "Even today, Linux distributions continue to be developed from the top down as monolithic wholes, as opposed to bottom up as collections of piece-parts,", and he seems to be strongly implying that nobody else does it in a modular way, he's throwing away a lot of knowlege and working code that will put him back by a lot.
Again, I emphasize, Ian is free to do as he likes. This is just my opinion; I do not think it an auspicious start to a project to start on the faulty premise that "nobody is doing this" and I believe that lack of knowlege has real consequences.
If exponential growth predictions hold true, and the "first entity" locked out others from use, then the "first entity" would be a "winner" simply due to taking off too rapidly for others to feasibly catch up. That doesn't make the other entities "losers", except in relative terms; they may always be four years behind but that four years may represent a factor of, oh, as long as we're being fanciful let's say 50.
However, I think there's a majorly false claim in there, which is that the first owner will lock out everyone else. Obviously, the first order of business when you have a space elevator is to put up more of them, and for a while they may indeed have a monopoly. But given the resources still available on Earth, someone will eventually tender an offer for a fully-completed cable that the first entity can't refuse; no matter how valuable the cable, it is possible to pay the owner off today with $X dollars, which the first entity will (correctly) perceive is more valuable to have it in liquid form, available to then invest back into other things. That price may be sky-high, pun semi-intended, but there are people on Earth who will be able to afford it.
By buying a completed cable, they can jump-start themselves up, and as more and more entities do this, it'll start looking more even. While the first mover will have a true advantage that may last a very long time, I don't see a situation where they maintain a 20x advantage over everybody in perpetuity; the value proposition of liquidating one of the cables is just too appealing.
This assumes a capitalistic owner of the first tether, and if the US gets there, the world can for once be glad that we see everything in terms of dollars, sooner or later, because that means that we will indeed have our price (though in the truest capitalistic tradition, it will be all the traffic can bear!). If it's not the US, well, it depends on who gets there first, but even so, it would take a very strong government to turn down the offers it would get... some of which are quite likely to be of the "offer you can't refuse" variety. ("Dear China: We still have nukes. Sincerely, All Nuclear-Capable Countries.") I still can't imagine a plausible long-term scenario where somebody maintains a massive, multiplicitave lead indefinately, though again, serious short- and medium-term advantage do accrue to them. (If nothing else, they'll need to draw on international capital to invest in space itself.)
Now that the rush on this article has passed I don't feel too bad announcing it; don't care to hype it especially as it's not released yet. I'm working on an outliner called Iron Lute, written in Python/Tk.
For an outliner moving a paragraph up is a very basic operation. I prefer writing essays in outliners, but there isn't a useful one for Linux, except maybe JOE.
I think the current keyboard shortcut is actually "CTRL-Up";-)
Factorials grow fast. Your supposed 6 input key may not have many combinations, but what of a 20 input key, which should be very feasible? 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 combinations is much more difficult to crack.
(And that's assuming one input can't go to multiple outputs; some degree of fan-out is probably possible, which can make it grow even faster.)
Still, I'd lean more towards saying that a dynamic key system, like many car remote locks use, is more intrinsically secure.
Unless the project is wildly successful, it's entirely possible that I will never see a physical user of my program, nor is this a unique circumstance to my program.
You can throw this accusation at KDE or Gnome or the major browsers, but what if you're writing something that only 100 people will ever use, all over the world? Even if you do eventually meet them you've probably got better things to do then run usability testing on them.
Some things are very rarely used but still important in some situations. Some options will rarely be used because they were not easy to find, which can also skew your stats.
Way ahead of ya. (I have the bad habit of thinking about these things.)
If there's a feature that requires three or four commands in succession, you should be able to see the drop-off over time. (Of course a feature should be as simple as possible, but sometimes you can't avoid the fact that they need to enter three or four bits of information, possibly in sequence.)
If there's a pet feature that I like, but nobody uses it, at least this gives me an opportunity to ask why, rather then blindly assuming that it's being used and understood. (In other projects you can sort of get this by the number of people asking for features that already exist, but that's not as reliable.)
I intend to process the preferences based on how many were twiddled by a given person, so if you only set one away from the default, it gets your "full vote", while if you twiddle lots, you show as caring about a lot of little features but not as much. (I'm thinking of scaling this logarithmically, so if you twiddle two features, you have like 75% interest in both; I don't care if they add up to 100%, I care if it shows what's going on.) As for commands, I intend to cut off the top X commands (which in this context are likely to be things like "Copy" or "Paste"), and go from there to see what people are actually using. Some commands, like "Open File from Web" may not see much use numerically, but still be very important, whereas "Move Up Paragraph" may be used bajillions of times, but technically, if it were removed it would only be moderately annoying overall.
There's also the point of view of "How many people used this command more then three times (to get over people just "Trying it out")?" which I think would be interesting; if you've got some obscure data format that only 3 out of 2000 people use, you may want to pull it out into an optional plug-in that those three people can install, to get it out of the main menus, but still keep it around (as long as it is passing its unit tests...). It would also be easier for a very, very small group of people to maintain a plug-in, whereas they would have no interest in maintaining it if it were in the core program (and who could blame them?).
Sure, interpretation will be tricky, but I think it will be doable, and without the data you're shooting in the dark.
I'm going one step further then even the other reply to your post said. You'll have to explicitly ask to send the data, which I'll be asking for as a way to contribute to the project without coding. If you're really paranoid, shut it off.
If you're worried, don't send it.
Of course I'll also show the exact data sent, both as a human-meaningful file and as the literal XML message I'll be sending.
This is nothing like "spyware", which is often installed without clear consent, definately installed without clear knowlege, and secretly ships off information without showing it to the human to third parties often unrelated to the task the program has, if it even has a legitimate task. (As opposed to something like the Google toolbar, which if you intend to turn on the PageRank feature, it has to send every URL you visit to Google to work. Still "spyware" in some sense, but there's no other feasible way for it to work.)
By my count that's at least five ways this is different from true "spyware".
We'll see how this goes, but in my open source project, I'm planning on instrumenting the program to allow the users to (voluntarily and anonymously, of course) report to the project server which preferences they are twiddling and which commands (i.e., menu commands) they are actually using.
I'm hoping this will let me chop at the features and preferences and get away from "I'M A LOUD USER AND WHILE I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO TWIDDLES MY BAZZLES I'LL CRY IF IT'S REMOVED" by virtue of having hard numbers. (I made a Fruedian slip and typed "lout user", which works too.)
(You shouldn't have bad spoofing problems until the project is much larger, by then I'm hoping to have a better gestalt understanding.)
Feel free to snarf this idea, I'd love to see it more often.
You could get into legal trouble for knowingly contributing to copyright infringement. Among other things, that's good ole' fashioned conspiracy. (Seriously, not kidding.)
There's no way this setup would qualify for the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA (the good part of the DMCA that everyone forgets about) which would protect against that.
Theoretically, you could turn on the FTP and walk away, never to look at it again, and call it a community resource, but good luck convincing anyone in court that you had no idea what it was used for. Since this would be a civil court in all likelihood, not a criminal court, you probably would need to demonstrate that you didn't even know that copyright abuse would take place, and the legal argument "I'm an idiot" doesn't generally fly too well.
Granted, IANAL, but I've studied this a lot. In the current legal environment, "they" will find a way to string you up for this if they are so inclined. There's several avenues for attack and many of them are civil.
(Contrast this to the large number of people in the dorms who have no idea, or plausibly have no idea, that their Windows File Shares are wide open. They can't get into anywhere near as much trouble, because it is very plausible that they had no idea that anybody on campus could pull anything off their computer... or push anything on to it... that they want. Setting up a massive disk array and making that machine do nothing else doesn't look like this, though.)
Find a Friend of the Appropriate Sex quickly who will be willing to take advantage of your conjugal visits. You won't have much time, so I'd go ahead and skip classes an' all; you won't be finishing them anyhow.
It's not like Bud is handing over your drinking habits to the US gov't,
Wanna take bets on that? And would you like to take the same bet five years from now?
Privacy-sensitive information is almost always innocent in the hands that collected it, but it is valid to be concerned about where that information will end up.
And while the "terrorism" angle here is probably not terribly likely (though rest assured such data will be processed and evaluated for whether it indicates terrorism), but now that the information is collected, I could see someone getting the bright idea of passing it all on to the law for use in marking who is buying a lot of beer, which can be used in many ways.
Concern about privacy is concern about the flow of information, and every time a new "flow" is created there are valid concerns. Does it really hurt that Budweiser knows? Probably not. But who will they tell? That is a valid concern that can't just be waved away.
(And of course, in isolation, this is a small issue. But this isn't in isolation, it's one small part of a massive trend. That doesn't make it less interesting, it makes it more interesting, because the value of all this information multiplies as it is added together.)
I eventually got it working under 2.6.3, with the EV_DEV enabled and the new XFree86 drivers, which I believe you mention you've already tried.
I never did get it in 2.6.2. Eventually I went into the kernel and changed the function that determined what kind of mouse you have to always return PS/2. At least the mouse then worked, albeit with no special features. (It even de-activated the tap-to-click, which previously worked even when the kernel didn't understand Synaptics.)
But it is working now and I'm really enjoying the side-scroll, which I never had working before, and two-fingers-for-middle-button is very nice, too; I'd try the latest 2.6.3 if you haven't tried that one yet. Make sure you follow the directions in the latest XFree86 driver's README (or whichever file that is).
Based on the criteria as given, you've kind of talked yourself into a corner. If you're not allowed to install "random software", then most of the people here recommending various random software packages aren't going to help here. If you're thinking that you're not going to get any software support, then you're hosed; twiddling preferences in Windows just isn't going to do anything.
What I would recommend is trying to dig deeper. Why aren't you being allowed to use your preferred environments? Do they need you to run on Outlook? If so, rather then buying everybody a full Office load + all the other Windows crap, buy everybody a copy of Ximian Connector and let everyone run Evolution. If it's Office compatibility, why don't you examine the documents the company is generating and see if they're doing crazy stuff with VBA and ActiveX, or if OpenOffice can cut it. If they want compatibility with other developers, see to what degree they are talking about.
You need to talk their language, which is of course money, and you've got at least a certain degree of leverage in the fact that the company is going to have to buy a lot of software that will not be free. Ximian + OpenOffice is cheaper then a full Windows+Office+Support suite. Most free software is much cheaper and just fine.
Moreover, once you find out why you're making the change, you can probably quantify the hidden costs of the transition... and potentially strategies to defray it, perhaps convincing them to purchase (or, in the case of things like Cygwin, allow) the other software. Personally, for instance, being stuck in the sorry excuse for a Windows desktop I'd lose 10% or 20% productivity off the top, because I've become very proficient with multiple desktops being a single keystroke away. (Yes, there is a Powertool that does this but it doesn't match my usage patterns; I want a "move right" key, not just a "Move to Desktop 2".)
You may find they have legitimate reasons, or you may find that they have delusions. ("We develop in Windows so we want you to apply your Perl skills to our VBA apps."... yeah...) Either way, you'll be better off to talk turkey with them if you get more info. Assuming they've got good reasons, you'll know where to focus on for the software you want to ask for.
Now, please read the following carefully so you know what I'm saying: If you're stonewalled and if you can simply not get more information of this nature, then it is time to start polishing the resume and looking for a new job unless there is some compelling reason not to. Not because they're forcing you to Windows, per se, which with support could eventually be livable (and a job's a job, right?), but because this is a clear and unambiguous sign that they are completely unwilling to support their developers and deal with them as professionals, rather then children who need to be protected from themselves. Now, if you're OK with being treated as children, that's OK, but I'd be surprised; Unix doesn't encourage that attitude. I am not saying that being forced to Windows is a reason to think seriously about leaving; I am saying to think seriously about leaving if the new company doesn't understand how to best utilize developers (which happens to be the same as keeping them happy, for the most part), and to use this issue as a touchstone. If you can't get this basic information at this stage, it's not going to get better, and it's extremely likely to get worse.
Instead of asking question that assume the poster is stupid, why not go learn something?
The original post is referring to a particular design of time machine that unlike most designs, has the distinction of possibly actually being able to exist and be build by humans (as opposed to the designs that Relativity implies that depend on natural features of the Universe which may or may not actually exist, and don't seem to). Rather then spell it out for you (probably incorrectly anyhow since I'm not a physicist by trade), why don't you go look it up? It does indeed mean that you can only travel back to the creation of the machine itself.
There are other time machine designs that don't have this limitation. For example, I hear H. G. Wells had one over a hundred years ago. They do suffer from the flaw of being totally fictional, though.
Will they delete the 'copied' data after they have finished, keeping only the information that they originally wanted, please this is v bad...
No, this happens everywhere in the world, every time a warrent is served or equipment is confiscated.
In the United States, due process requires that the evidence collected by the warrent only be used against the people the warrent was issued against. There's no real point to keeping the data around, since they couldn't use it to convict anyone, even if they find a crime.
(There are some rules about getting warrents with regard to other material you may accidentally find, but I am not familiar with them. But it is not "whatever the police want goes".)
Now, I am not so naive as to think that it's just erased, but by and large the FBI has no particular reason to keep it hanging around. (I'm pretty sure they can get a warrent to collect more evidence but the evidence they've already collected is tainted.)
Nor am I so naive as to think that only the US has this problem, or the US has some sort of special version of this problem. Check into your laws, presumably UK from your web link. If your police accidentally encounter evidence of a crime while investigating another, what do they do with it? (I don't know.)
It's not as if the UK hasn't been more-or-less matching the US in Big Brother inventions, if not exceeding (we do not yet have entire cities outfitted with cameras controlled by the government, after all!). At least we do have some Constitutional provisions covering these things and while you may not be able to tell from this sort of isolated anecdote, the battle is pitched and far from over. My impression from the news coming out of your country is that it is pretty much is over and Big Brother has won, to the general acclamation of your public.
I appreciate your concern for us, but perhaps you should tone down your Anti-Americanism, which your leaders are using to distract you from your own very real problems (less obviously in the UK as in Germany but still an issue), and focus on those real problems you have. Perhaps if you can clean up your own country you can provide some leadership for mine; if there's one thing the US isn't afraid to do it's import ideas from elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine. I hope to see more people using this jargon and 133+ 5p34|
Obvious exaggeration of a point doesn't serve to forward your opinions.
Bob asked, "Where are we?" No one suspects you're asking a question.
You can contrive any example you want; the plural of anecdote is still not data. Your logic taken to the logical conclusion is exactly the same logic that rslts n ths bng ccptbl; context is enough to figure that out. The question is, what do you do when there is confusion based on context?
There are circumstances where punctuation can fall outside quotes, although you haven't presented one.
So? I didn't say, always put the punctuation outside of the quotes, only as it makes sense.
My way is empirically better; it results in fewer ambiguous situations. This point isn't open to debate, it's a simple fact. The only way in which you are correct is that that is how it was done fifty years ago. You want to stand on that definition of "correct", fine, but don't be stunned when we move past you. Some of us have moved past concrete operational, we'll be happy to welcome you when you join us.
And again, I remind you, your "correct" way was imposed on us by typographers, for reasons that are now completely out of date. "Correct" has shifted before (hope that doesn't blow your brains too much)... are you so sure it isn't shifting again, back to the way it was done before typesetting? Like I said, I've seen this "in the wild", I've even seen it in recent style guides mentioned by name, though regrettably they are under copyright and not linkable. Perhaps you are behind the times.
Humanity is right now the only feasible chance that "Mother Nature" has of spreading the macroscopic portions of the environment to other planets and environments.
;-) )
Also, you're being a little unfair: "Single celled organisms" probably are more flexible then humanity right now... but so are "reptiles". Pick me one species of single-celled organism that does as well as we do... and don't forget that at the moment we're surviving in space, even if it's not self-sustaining quite yet. The organisms that live in deep sea volcanos can't live in a mountain lake, after all.
(This is in the spirit of intellectual play; none of this particularly matters
I would like to suggest that most of us asshats know not to put a space before quotes and not to put punctuation outside quotes.
;-) I'd never use a smiley in a corporate communication, and I'd never write a comment inside of Mozilla's text box without spell-checking support. But it's not worth the effort to do any better for a Slashdot comment.
The first one is still legit. The second criticism is out-of-date. That is called "logical quoting" as explained by the Jargon Dictionary, and I have indeed started to see it in significant and serious use outside of the Hacker community as well.
Remember the rule wasn't grammatical but typographical in the first place, and logical quoting is more expressive.
Lately I've taken it to the logical conclusion, and if quoting somebody's exclamation, I will do it like this: He said, "Oh my gosh that hurts!". That's right, I don't allow the quote's punctuation to terminate my sentence, because I'm not exclaiming. Your English teacher may not like it, but by the metrics of "range of expression" and "logical consistency", my way is better, and I think in the end as the typographical issues fade this is how it's going to be.
(Remember the Rule of Breaking Rules: "You may break a rule if you understand it.". I understand this rule and its history quite well.)
And finally, there is a difference between a Slashdot posting and a CEO's communication
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
(Yes, it's pulled from here. The meta-point is, if we're going to progress in the war on spam we need to move past the solutions that have been proposed a million times with obvious holes in them. Either that, or face the possibility that the system we have now is already optimal.
Primary justification of the above snarky copy&paste job is that this patently obvious scheme has a patently obvious DDoS scheme built into it, left as an exercise for the reader.)
It is often... though not often enough... pointed out that the singular of "data" is not "anecdote".
.
Similarly, "fact" is not merely an emphatic form of "theory".
I might as well theorize that black holes don't exist at all; who owes what now? Oh, right, nothing changes, because theories aren't facts
Mick Ohrberg, why don't you grow out of Physics Fanboydom and take some time to learn some real stuff? For starters, why don't you being with Science 101 and learn the definition of "theory", and "equation", and other such basic terms?
I read that, and I don't think you understand why quantum non-locality can't provide FTL communication. I read the article you're pointing to and I don't see that that article changes anything. (Don't you think they would have gotten a little more excited if they had done FTL communication?)
FTL communication is impossible because all known entangled properties are random and uncontrollable, by definition. You can send out an entangled photon pair and measure the polarization of one, and it will indeed immediately determine the other. However, the phase you measure is by necessity random. You get no say in what it is, you have no means of manipulating it on the receiving end.
Therefore, it is useless to you. Sure, you can determine that you got a +90, but you don't know what that means, because it's completely random. The fact that the entangled photon on the other end is immediately a -90 is true, but they don't know what it means, either, because for them it was equally completely random. The other end of the communication still needs to communicate a key to you, and that communication occurs over lightspeed-at-best communication.
You said:
The link The link goes to an American Institute of Physics bulletin on successful instantaneous determination of a photon's energy from a distance of 10km. goes to an American Institute of Physics bulletin on successful instantaneous determination of a photon's energy from a distance of 10km.
And you are somewhat correct, but you don't understand what they mean by "determination". What they mean is that they "determined" the energy level by measuring it, forcing it to have a discrete value. That measurement was itself randomized and is no more capable of communication then the phase example I used above.
The article you pointed to does nothing to violate FTL. If anything, it closed off one more potential loop hole. Physics fanboys, it's time to face facts: FTL-anything-useful is looking less and less likely each year, as every loophole we can think of and look into doesn't work. You can't tell this because you don't actually understand physics if your source of information is a second-hand report of a synopsis of a real experiment. Seriously, either take the time to learn or shut the hell up and stop poisoning other people's minds. (Or at the very least, get out of the physics fanboy echo chamber, where you keep convincing each other by repitition of falsehoods that you might be right, darn it.)
Anybody who wants to take issue with this message I point at your nearest textbook on quantum physics. (Except for correction by people who actually know QM and might correct me on a few points.) If the points in this posting weren't correct, don't you think we'd have heard about it by now? FTL stuff isn't covered up, if anything, it's overplayed!
If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself
Completely false. You are free to reply, you are free to publish that reply, and there are sites that will help people who care find your reply, even if the original source doesn't ever point to you.
Your problem is...
of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)
You seem to think that you have some sort of right to be heard... that if ABC News publishes an article and you have some comment that you have some sort of right to make ABC News distribute your opinion on the same footing as their own. This is flatly false. They may acknowlege your opinion or not as they see fit.
The true benefit of the RSS-style of communication is that it provides you with a channel of communication that is yours. Your RSS file has no trolls. Your RSS file has no spam. Thus, if people care about your opinions (or whatever you are posting), they can subscribe with confidence to your feed. The technology exists then to bring your content to those who are interesting.
Odds are, you won't get thousands or millions of subscribers. That's because, odds are, you aren't one out of a million. I say this as someone who has had a feed since Jan. 2000 and have not exactly raked in the fame. However, this is the way it is.
It's not like the alternatives are any better. Do you actually read the feedback forums on ABC News? Sure, I do intermittently, but there's just no way around the fact that when you create that "right of reply", it's flooded and you can't help but be uninterested in it.
Fundamentally, you see this "one-way communication", but what you don't see is that (nearly) all communication is one way. You are not allowed to modify this message, but you can post a reply. You are not allowed to modify somebody else's RSS feed, but you can post a reply. The fact that I don't have to read every last schmoe's reply to some article, but only get the ones from the people I care about, is a feature, not a bug.
The ideal communication technology is a compromise between the readers and the writers. RSS feeds are one of the best we've created so far, with low binding on both the writer's and the reader's side. (Even posted an unpopular opinion and been deluged in hate mail? Unless you're a sociopath it gets old. RSS is one of the few ways for a writer to be able to deal with that, because they are not forced to read the flames in the same forum they themselves are posting in.) In the end, RSS-based communities are one of the best matches to the real principles of free speech: That you can say whatever you like, and people are free to read whatever they like, and there is no binding between the two: You do not have the right to be heard, and you do not have the right to censor anyone else, even by "shouting them down". In this way, RSS feeds surpass even real-world communication.
Practically speaking, it is undeniable that this plays out as I've described, and not as you've described. I've participated in many conversations via RSS, so I have empirical proof they exist, no matter how you might theorize that they don't. And plenty of people comment on all sort of things, many of whom I find interesting and many of whom I don't. You obviously don't use it, if you have so many misconceptions.
RSS is the exact opposite of TV on the web. Everybody gets to compete on a level playing ground for attention, and is rewarded according to their social merits. Some people don't like this and prefer forums where they (falsely) think this doesn't apply. Even the big networks and newspapers don't have much adv
All games absolutely must have a story... for the right definition of "story".
Most people interpret "story" to mean "plot", but the two are not the same. A story, broadly speaking, is "setup, conflict, development, resolution", but writing a plot line, with set characters and dialog is only one way to get a "story".
Tetris has a "story". The set up is the rules. The conflict is that the game is throwing blocks at you, but you don't want blocks on the field. The development is the game play, and in Tetris's case, the eventual resolution is typically that you fail, but you get some kind of score. (There are varients that play to a finite point which you can "win", but when most people think Tetris they think of the varient where you play until you fill the screen.)
Games with no "story" exist, but are typically rare. You can recognize them because they will typically look like "tech demos", or you'll think of them as "incomplete", even if they have all the technological pieces in place. Imagine an RPG engine that works perfectly, but you're confined to one town and absolutely everybody is friendly and all you can do is talk to them, except this one fight with a rat on the edge of town. The engine is (for the sake of argument), perfectly done, but there's no story.
You can similarly imagine a side-scrolling shooter where the game just goes on and on, but no bosses, no increasing difficulty, just monotonous onslaughts of homogenous enemies. I remember playing these on the C64... briefly. For better or for worse, the now-standard "boss" system does at least provide a story. Even the "level" system provides story; the exact same game as the classic 2D space shooter Galaxian, but without level delinations, would be a lot less compelling.
Lots of things must have a story like this, but not necessarily a "plot line" and "characters". A presentation should always tell a story: "Our project was this (setup), our problems with it were this (setup), we handled it this way (development), and this was the result (resolution)." (I strongly disagree with people who say to put the result first; you lose the interest of the crowd and they'll have a superficial understanding of the result. If you result is at all complex and you really want your crowd to understand the result, you must take them through the whole story before they can appreciate this.)
Doom has a story, but the "plotline" it has is entirely incidental. Doom's story is on a per-level basis: "[Rules of the Doom game] (setup), there are monsters blocking my path (conflict), the combat (development), I got to the end of the level and prevailed (resolution)." There is an over-arching story in the boss battle but it's quite diffuse compared to the level-by-level story, as evidenced by the fact you can basically pick it up and play any level you want without playing the ones before it.
All games must have stories. Plot lines are one way, but not the only want and generally not even a good way, for this to occur. Generally the engine itself must provide the story, or the user will feel they are just watching a movie.
(Think about this and apply it to games you've played before dismissing this; this is really a surprisingly interesting field. It seems that the general story pattern of setup, conflict, development, resolution is buried deep in our psyches since it is so important in so many artistic or creative endeavors, from games to literature to presentations to music to a whole lot of other things. Heck, even software tutorials should have a story. People who understand this and apply it have a distinct advantage over those who don't.)
You're assuming that once someone builds the thing, it becomes impossible for someone else to build one as well.
From my post: "Obviously, the first order of business when you have a space elevator is to put up more of them".
Defense rests.
He's definitely not thinking of Gentoo for this role. He's talking about Progeny.
We, the people who are posting about Gentoo in this thread, know that.
The question is, "Why didn't Ian seem to?"
One of the important responsibilities an Open Source developer has is to check around and make sure there isn't already a project that is nearly what they want, and try to see if they can contribute to that project instead. Of course, being Open Source nobody enforces this (nobody should), but the end result of ignoring this rule is generally Yet Another (Something) package on Sourceforge that is forever ignored because the package that the author should have been contributing to always overshadows it. You ignore this at your own peril.
Of course there are exceptions, but one should justify yourself carefully; "This package's architecture is inimical to the features I want to have." is acceptable. "I didn't write this package and I only understand X" is not, really.
I use "package" because this applies to distributions, not just software package.
Our problem with Ian's proposal is not that he wants to create Yet Another Distribution. In fact, you might say we don't necessarily have a problem at all; many of us have agitated for a version of Gentoo that does better with binary packages, and perhaps the competition with Progeny will help make that reality, in addition to the creation of a new Linux distribution which is pretty much never a bad thing. (I'm not one who "agitates" for such a Gentoo but I wouldn't mind the option, especially with the big packages like Mozilla that take me most of an afternoon to compile.)
Our problem is that he doesn't seem to have heard of Gentoo, which fits the description of the system he wants to a T, except for maybe the binary aspect of it. And considering that there exists a system that works as he describes, and it works by compiling from source, there's a bit of an "argument by existance" that it works from source; there is no equivalent proof that it is even reasonably possible with binaries. In fact, the Gentoo-based projects to date have largely failed due to there being too many permutations of the system to make the binaries worth it. If he hasn't heard of Gentoo, if he describes things solely in terms of Red Hat and UserLinux, what's to say he's not going to make the same mistakes those failed Gentoo projects made? Why can't he get what he wants built on top of Gentoo?
In short, it doesn't seem to me that he's discharged his "obligation" as an Open Source developer to try to join an existing team, rather then create a new one, for what appears to be the reason that he's familiar with X, where "X" is Debian. Like I said, nobody can enforce the "rule" (maybe I should call it a "guideline"), but it does not bode well for the project.
I am not saying "Uz0R g3n700, l0zz3r!" I'm saying, "Why don't you acknowlege how close Gentoo already is to where you claim you want to be? Is it because you don't know about it?" I hope he succeeds, but if his knowlege of distributions is limited to Debian, Red Hat, and UserLinux, basically such that he can say with a straight face that "Even today, Linux distributions continue to be developed from the top down as monolithic wholes, as opposed to bottom up as collections of piece-parts,", and he seems to be strongly implying that nobody else does it in a modular way, he's throwing away a lot of knowlege and working code that will put him back by a lot.
Again, I emphasize, Ian is free to do as he likes. This is just my opinion; I do not think it an auspicious start to a project to start on the faulty premise that "nobody is doing this" and I believe that lack of knowlege has real consequences.
If exponential growth predictions hold true, and the "first entity" locked out others from use, then the "first entity" would be a "winner" simply due to taking off too rapidly for others to feasibly catch up. That doesn't make the other entities "losers", except in relative terms; they may always be four years behind but that four years may represent a factor of, oh, as long as we're being fanciful let's say 50.
However, I think there's a majorly false claim in there, which is that the first owner will lock out everyone else. Obviously, the first order of business when you have a space elevator is to put up more of them, and for a while they may indeed have a monopoly. But given the resources still available on Earth, someone will eventually tender an offer for a fully-completed cable that the first entity can't refuse; no matter how valuable the cable, it is possible to pay the owner off today with $X dollars, which the first entity will (correctly) perceive is more valuable to have it in liquid form, available to then invest back into other things. That price may be sky-high, pun semi-intended, but there are people on Earth who will be able to afford it.
By buying a completed cable, they can jump-start themselves up, and as more and more entities do this, it'll start looking more even. While the first mover will have a true advantage that may last a very long time, I don't see a situation where they maintain a 20x advantage over everybody in perpetuity; the value proposition of liquidating one of the cables is just too appealing.
This assumes a capitalistic owner of the first tether, and if the US gets there, the world can for once be glad that we see everything in terms of dollars, sooner or later, because that means that we will indeed have our price (though in the truest capitalistic tradition, it will be all the traffic can bear!). If it's not the US, well, it depends on who gets there first, but even so, it would take a very strong government to turn down the offers it would get... some of which are quite likely to be of the "offer you can't refuse" variety. ("Dear China: We still have nukes. Sincerely, All Nuclear-Capable Countries.") I still can't imagine a plausible long-term scenario where somebody maintains a massive, multiplicitave lead indefinately, though again, serious short- and medium-term advantage do accrue to them. (If nothing else, they'll need to draw on international capital to invest in space itself.)
Now that the rush on this article has passed I don't feel too bad announcing it; don't care to hype it especially as it's not released yet. I'm working on an outliner called Iron Lute, written in Python/Tk.
;-)
For an outliner moving a paragraph up is a very basic operation. I prefer writing essays in outliners, but there isn't a useful one for Linux, except maybe JOE.
I think the current keyboard shortcut is actually "CTRL-Up"
Factorials grow fast. Your supposed 6 input key may not have many combinations, but what of a 20 input key, which should be very feasible? 2,432,902,008,176,640,000 combinations is much more difficult to crack.
(And that's assuming one input can't go to multiple outputs; some degree of fan-out is probably possible, which can make it grow even faster.)
Still, I'd lean more towards saying that a dynamic key system, like many car remote locks use, is more intrinsically secure.
"Open source".
Think about what that means.
Unless the project is wildly successful, it's entirely possible that I will never see a physical user of my program, nor is this a unique circumstance to my program.
You can throw this accusation at KDE or Gnome or the major browsers, but what if you're writing something that only 100 people will ever use, all over the world? Even if you do eventually meet them you've probably got better things to do then run usability testing on them.
Some things are very rarely used but still important in some situations. Some options will rarely be used because they were not easy to find, which can also skew your stats.
Way ahead of ya. (I have the bad habit of thinking about these things.)
If there's a feature that requires three or four commands in succession, you should be able to see the drop-off over time. (Of course a feature should be as simple as possible, but sometimes you can't avoid the fact that they need to enter three or four bits of information, possibly in sequence.)
If there's a pet feature that I like, but nobody uses it, at least this gives me an opportunity to ask why, rather then blindly assuming that it's being used and understood. (In other projects you can sort of get this by the number of people asking for features that already exist, but that's not as reliable.)
I intend to process the preferences based on how many were twiddled by a given person, so if you only set one away from the default, it gets your "full vote", while if you twiddle lots, you show as caring about a lot of little features but not as much. (I'm thinking of scaling this logarithmically, so if you twiddle two features, you have like 75% interest in both; I don't care if they add up to 100%, I care if it shows what's going on.) As for commands, I intend to cut off the top X commands (which in this context are likely to be things like "Copy" or "Paste"), and go from there to see what people are actually using. Some commands, like "Open File from Web" may not see much use numerically, but still be very important, whereas "Move Up Paragraph" may be used bajillions of times, but technically, if it were removed it would only be moderately annoying overall.
There's also the point of view of "How many people used this command more then three times (to get over people just "Trying it out")?" which I think would be interesting; if you've got some obscure data format that only 3 out of 2000 people use, you may want to pull it out into an optional plug-in that those three people can install, to get it out of the main menus, but still keep it around (as long as it is passing its unit tests...). It would also be easier for a very, very small group of people to maintain a plug-in, whereas they would have no interest in maintaining it if it were in the core program (and who could blame them?).
Sure, interpretation will be tricky, but I think it will be doable, and without the data you're shooting in the dark.
I'm going one step further then even the other reply to your post said. You'll have to explicitly ask to send the data, which I'll be asking for as a way to contribute to the project without coding. If you're really paranoid, shut it off.
If you're worried, don't send it.
Of course I'll also show the exact data sent, both as a human-meaningful file and as the literal XML message I'll be sending.
This is nothing like "spyware", which is often installed without clear consent, definately installed without clear knowlege, and secretly ships off information without showing it to the human to third parties often unrelated to the task the program has, if it even has a legitimate task. (As opposed to something like the Google toolbar, which if you intend to turn on the PageRank feature, it has to send every URL you visit to Google to work. Still "spyware" in some sense, but there's no other feasible way for it to work.)
By my count that's at least five ways this is different from true "spyware".
We'll see how this goes, but in my open source project, I'm planning on instrumenting the program to allow the users to (voluntarily and anonymously, of course) report to the project server which preferences they are twiddling and which commands (i.e., menu commands) they are actually using.
I'm hoping this will let me chop at the features and preferences and get away from "I'M A LOUD USER AND WHILE I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO TWIDDLES MY BAZZLES I'LL CRY IF IT'S REMOVED" by virtue of having hard numbers. (I made a Fruedian slip and typed "lout user", which works too.)
(You shouldn't have bad spoofing problems until the project is much larger, by then I'm hoping to have a better gestalt understanding.)
Feel free to snarf this idea, I'd love to see it more often.
You could get into legal trouble for knowingly contributing to copyright infringement. Among other things, that's good ole' fashioned conspiracy. (Seriously, not kidding.)
There's no way this setup would qualify for the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA (the good part of the DMCA that everyone forgets about) which would protect against that.
Theoretically, you could turn on the FTP and walk away, never to look at it again, and call it a community resource, but good luck convincing anyone in court that you had no idea what it was used for. Since this would be a civil court in all likelihood, not a criminal court, you probably would need to demonstrate that you didn't even know that copyright abuse would take place, and the legal argument "I'm an idiot" doesn't generally fly too well.
Granted, IANAL, but I've studied this a lot. In the current legal environment, "they" will find a way to string you up for this if they are so inclined. There's several avenues for attack and many of them are civil.
(Contrast this to the large number of people in the dorms who have no idea, or plausibly have no idea, that their Windows File Shares are wide open. They can't get into anywhere near as much trouble, because it is very plausible that they had no idea that anybody on campus could pull anything off their computer... or push anything on to it... that they want. Setting up a massive disk array and making that machine do nothing else doesn't look like this, though.)
Anyone have any advice on that?
Find a Friend of the Appropriate Sex quickly who will be willing to take advantage of your conjugal visits. You won't have much time, so I'd go ahead and skip classes an' all; you won't be finishing them anyhow.
It's not like Bud is handing over your drinking habits to the US gov't,
Wanna take bets on that? And would you like to take the same bet five years from now?
Privacy-sensitive information is almost always innocent in the hands that collected it, but it is valid to be concerned about where that information will end up.
And while the "terrorism" angle here is probably not terribly likely (though rest assured such data will be processed and evaluated for whether it indicates terrorism), but now that the information is collected, I could see someone getting the bright idea of passing it all on to the law for use in marking who is buying a lot of beer, which can be used in many ways.
Concern about privacy is concern about the flow of information, and every time a new "flow" is created there are valid concerns. Does it really hurt that Budweiser knows? Probably not. But who will they tell? That is a valid concern that can't just be waved away.
(And of course, in isolation, this is a small issue. But this isn't in isolation, it's one small part of a massive trend. That doesn't make it less interesting, it makes it more interesting, because the value of all this information multiplies as it is added together.)
I eventually got it working under 2.6.3, with the EV_DEV enabled and the new XFree86 drivers, which I believe you mention you've already tried.
I never did get it in 2.6.2. Eventually I went into the kernel and changed the function that determined what kind of mouse you have to always return PS/2. At least the mouse then worked, albeit with no special features. (It even de-activated the tap-to-click, which previously worked even when the kernel didn't understand Synaptics.)
But it is working now and I'm really enjoying the side-scroll, which I never had working before, and two-fingers-for-middle-button is very nice, too; I'd try the latest 2.6.3 if you haven't tried that one yet. Make sure you follow the directions in the latest XFree86 driver's README (or whichever file that is).
Based on the criteria as given, you've kind of talked yourself into a corner. If you're not allowed to install "random software", then most of the people here recommending various random software packages aren't going to help here. If you're thinking that you're not going to get any software support, then you're hosed; twiddling preferences in Windows just isn't going to do anything.
What I would recommend is trying to dig deeper. Why aren't you being allowed to use your preferred environments? Do they need you to run on Outlook? If so, rather then buying everybody a full Office load + all the other Windows crap, buy everybody a copy of Ximian Connector and let everyone run Evolution. If it's Office compatibility, why don't you examine the documents the company is generating and see if they're doing crazy stuff with VBA and ActiveX, or if OpenOffice can cut it. If they want compatibility with other developers, see to what degree they are talking about.
You need to talk their language, which is of course money, and you've got at least a certain degree of leverage in the fact that the company is going to have to buy a lot of software that will not be free. Ximian + OpenOffice is cheaper then a full Windows+Office+Support suite. Most free software is much cheaper and just fine.
Moreover, once you find out why you're making the change, you can probably quantify the hidden costs of the transition... and potentially strategies to defray it, perhaps convincing them to purchase (or, in the case of things like Cygwin, allow) the other software. Personally, for instance, being stuck in the sorry excuse for a Windows desktop I'd lose 10% or 20% productivity off the top, because I've become very proficient with multiple desktops being a single keystroke away. (Yes, there is a Powertool that does this but it doesn't match my usage patterns; I want a "move right" key, not just a "Move to Desktop 2".)
You may find they have legitimate reasons, or you may find that they have delusions. ("We develop in Windows so we want you to apply your Perl skills to our VBA apps."... yeah...) Either way, you'll be better off to talk turkey with them if you get more info. Assuming they've got good reasons, you'll know where to focus on for the software you want to ask for.
Now, please read the following carefully so you know what I'm saying: If you're stonewalled and if you can simply not get more information of this nature, then it is time to start polishing the resume and looking for a new job unless there is some compelling reason not to. Not because they're forcing you to Windows, per se, which with support could eventually be livable (and a job's a job, right?), but because this is a clear and unambiguous sign that they are completely unwilling to support their developers and deal with them as professionals, rather then children who need to be protected from themselves. Now, if you're OK with being treated as children, that's OK, but I'd be surprised; Unix doesn't encourage that attitude. I am not saying that being forced to Windows is a reason to think seriously about leaving; I am saying to think seriously about leaving if the new company doesn't understand how to best utilize developers (which happens to be the same as keeping them happy, for the most part), and to use this issue as a touchstone. If you can't get this basic information at this stage, it's not going to get better, and it's extremely likely to get worse.
Instead of asking question that assume the poster is stupid, why not go learn something?
The original post is referring to a particular design of time machine that unlike most designs, has the distinction of possibly actually being able to exist and be build by humans (as opposed to the designs that Relativity implies that depend on natural features of the Universe which may or may not actually exist, and don't seem to). Rather then spell it out for you (probably incorrectly anyhow since I'm not a physicist by trade), why don't you go look it up? It does indeed mean that you can only travel back to the creation of the machine itself.
There are other time machine designs that don't have this limitation. For example, I hear H. G. Wells had one over a hundred years ago. They do suffer from the flaw of being totally fictional, though.
Will they delete the 'copied' data after they have finished, keeping only the information that they originally wanted, please this is v bad...
No, this happens everywhere in the world, every time a warrent is served or equipment is confiscated.
In the United States, due process requires that the evidence collected by the warrent only be used against the people the warrent was issued against. There's no real point to keeping the data around, since they couldn't use it to convict anyone, even if they find a crime.
(There are some rules about getting warrents with regard to other material you may accidentally find, but I am not familiar with them. But it is not "whatever the police want goes".)
Now, I am not so naive as to think that it's just erased, but by and large the FBI has no particular reason to keep it hanging around. (I'm pretty sure they can get a warrent to collect more evidence but the evidence they've already collected is tainted.)
Nor am I so naive as to think that only the US has this problem, or the US has some sort of special version of this problem. Check into your laws, presumably UK from your web link. If your police accidentally encounter evidence of a crime while investigating another, what do they do with it? (I don't know.)
It's not as if the UK hasn't been more-or-less matching the US in Big Brother inventions, if not exceeding (we do not yet have entire cities outfitted with cameras controlled by the government, after all!). At least we do have some Constitutional provisions covering these things and while you may not be able to tell from this sort of isolated anecdote, the battle is pitched and far from over. My impression from the news coming out of your country is that it is pretty much is over and Big Brother has won, to the general acclamation of your public.
I appreciate your concern for us, but perhaps you should tone down your Anti-Americanism, which your leaders are using to distract you from your own very real problems (less obviously in the UK as in Germany but still an issue), and focus on those real problems you have. Perhaps if you can clean up your own country you can provide some leadership for mine; if there's one thing the US isn't afraid to do it's import ideas from elsewhere.
Star Wars I , not IV .
I realize that many people may wish to wipe The Phantom Menace from their memories, but it does exist.
"A New Hope" may as well have taken place in an Empire of three or four planets, for all it mattered.