What kind of twisted in-bred retard would type in uk.co by accident?
I'll wager that the vast majority of internet users neither know nor care how domain names work; I'd even bet that most couldn't explain the difference between a URL and an e-mail address. It doesn't help that:
there is.org and.gov and.com
there is.org.uk and.gov.uk
there isn't a.com.uk to go with.com
there is.uk.com as well as the official.co.uk
So I don't find it surprising at all that many people might expect.uk.co to exist. In fact, I'd expect people to think all kinds of things might work, since the UK also has.police.uk,.nhs.uk,.ltd.uk,.plc.uk,.me.uk,.nic.uk,.sch.uk,.jet.uk and many others, hardly anyone uses.tv for Tuvalu, and things like.biz,.name,.museum and.info are now cropping up.
Several reasons... First because you'll PAY $100 for it [...] Long story short, OEMs act as wholesalers and get wholesale pricing, whereas the version you go to CompUsa and buy is a retail version, subject to retail pricing.
You appear to think that there is a free market in desktop/laptop OSes, and that the choices available to consumers and businesses are the result of normal market forces. These things are not true, as the court case we're discussing has clearly established.
Keep in mind everything above refers to desktop PCs and laptops.. Last I checked Dell offered RedHat Linux and No OS as software options for their PowerEdge servers.. Maybe now you'll get your $15 discount you guys have been screaming about. Wow, $15 off $4,0000, what a deal.
Over the last few years, my businesses have paid thousands of dollars to Microsoft for software we did not want, because laptops, PCs and servers of an adequate standard, with the support or specification we wanted, could not be purchased without this software included. To add insult to injury, these software "bundles" may not be transferred to another computer, nor sold to recoup the cost we have been obliged to pay to get the equipment we wanted, nor even upgraded to the next release in some cases.
Besides, I have recently begin doubting the existance of libraries. We have plenty of space these days, why not make everything statistically linked?
Dynamically linked executables have these benefits over statically linked ones on most modern computers (even when they have "plenty of space"):
fixing a bug in the library immediately fixes it in all the applications that use that library without having to recompile them
having one image of the library code in the computer's memory improves performance by allowing caches to do their jobs better (a copy of libc in memory for every running process would basically destroy cache coherency on most modern machines)
shared libraries also improve performance when a machine starts a lot of different processes, since after the first few programs are running, the library has probably already been loaded into RAM, so less information has to be loaded up to get a different new program running
a related benefit is that programs are smaller, since they don't all need to include library code, which saves both disk space and physical I/O when loading the program
for memory-limited devices, such as PDAs and phones, shared libraries can be executed from ROM, saving precious RAM for user applications and data
Oh, and piss off on the mouse issue- that dog won't hunt. This is science here, not your opinion. Multibutton mice slow people down. ITs a fact. Deal with it.
Please cite the incontrovertible scientific evidence you clearly possess that multi-button mice slow people down, showing clearly how "people" is fully representative of the entire population including experienced computer users.
As an experienced computer user, it's a fact that a single-button mouse slows me down when compared with a three-button mouse. When I choose equipment for my use, this is more important than how some other "people" are affected.
My (UK-based) accountants have always treated PC software as a consumable, rather than an asset, precisely because of the difficulty of realising any value from its sale at a later date. Consequently, it's written off within the same year as it's purchased. Ask your own accountant if you can treat your PC software purchases this way.
Either spelling is fine, since it's an attempt at representing a non-English word, ordinarily written in a non-Roman alphabet. Even the BBC use both spellings on different news outlets.
Similarly, Libya's leader's name is often spelled 'Qadaffi' in the U.S., but 'Gadaffi' in Britain. Same problem, with no one 'correct' answer.
Consequently, the famous "bobbies" are often packing heat now too.
Only armed response teams which are relatively rare...
Some other officers also have weapons. For example, the diplomatic protection group have been armed for many years (as a part of their "high-visibility" remit, they drive around London in red police cars). In addition, where the police think terrorists might try something, such as the City of London (financial district), or airports, you'll sometimes see police in flak jackets, with either side arms or sub-machine guns. But in general, it's true that most U.K. police officers are not armed with anything beyond a baton and pepper spray, and much of the body armour you might see them wearing is actually knife-proof rather than bullet proof, since they're much more likely to be stabbed than shot at.
Where I live, in Oregon, we have no obscenity laws. That's right kids, anything goes. You can watch all nude dancers and drink liquor at the same time. Hard core porn? No problem.
If you think anything goes in Oregon, you need to travel a bit. During the time I lived there, I don't recall hearing about any live sex shows, for example, nor do I remember seeing prostitutes' calling cards by payphones.
Where I live, in Britain, we have a variety of obscenity laws. And yet, I can go to the pub and watch all nude dancers while I drink. I can also buy hard liquor and hardcore porn from the local corner store, which is more than you can do in Oregon.
A sovereign is a pound, so it's twenty shillings. It's sometimes shortened to 'sovs' (as in five sovs == five pounds), but not used a lot as slang these days. 'Quid' is the common slang for 'pounds'. To contribute to more topic drift, here's more info on slang names for British money.
You missed out the half-crown (2/6). Groats disappeared in the 19th century, and the farthing was discontinued in the 1960s.
Also, your notation is a little confusing (!). The common way to write an amount of shillings and pence was ss/dd (d=pence, from the Latin 'denari', obviously). So, half of five shillings (a crown) is two-and-sixpence, which is 2/6. A ha'penny is half a penny, but 1/2d could be confused with one-and-tuppence (i.e., fourteen pence). Similarly, a farthing is a quarter of a penny, not one-and-fourpence. And since a groat is fourpence, half a groat is tuppence, not 10/6d, which is half a guinea.
There were copper-type coins for the farthing, the halfpenny (==ha'penny), and the penny, a twelve-sided bronze-type coin for threepence (known as the thruppenny bit), a tiddly little silver-type coin for sixpence, progressively larger silver-type coins for a shilling, two shillings (formally called the florin, but everyone just called it two bob), the half-crown and the crown (which was about two inches across), then the notes started at ten shillings (== a ten bob note), a pound, five pounds, ten pounds, etc.. If there was an official coin or note for the guinea, I never saw one.
So according to the paper you referenced, there should not be seven items in menu lists, for example, but instead around 3 or 4. Is this correct?
No, because the limitation refers to things that can be kept in working memory, and menus are right there on the screen where you can see them, so they don't place a burden on your memory.
It is a well known fact in the world of
human-computer interaction research that you
should not present more than 7 or 8 items at once
to a user, since that is the maximum amount they
can absorb at one time.
It is a well-known bogus fact.
The original paper that started this
'magic number 7' superstition specifically
addressed working memory capacity. People don't need to remember menus, because they're right there in front of them, so memory limitations don't apply.
This is why U.S. phone numbers are 7 digits--not counting the area code--for example.
No, it isn't. The original paper that introduced the notion of working memory being limited to about seven things at a time was published in 1956. The existing U.S. phone number scheme was developed nine years earlier, so its designers could not have used the memory research to inform their decision.
I regularly drive on the section of the M25 where the variable speed limits are imposed, and I've never seen 'a dozen cops sitting on the side of the road'. I can't see why they'd bother, since the gantries above the lanes that display the speed limits have digital speed cameras built into them. Last I heard, they're set to trigger if you're doing 10mph above the posted limit (and at 90 when there's no limit posted).
Actually, some senders are using a sneakier way of telling. They send HTML e-mail, and embed a reference to (say) a 1x1 invisible GIF, but serve it up through a URL that includes a unique identifier. That way (if your e-mail client renders HTML messages automatically, and you're connected at the time) they know you opened the message even if you then just delete it, without either a reply or even a receipt being explicitly sent by you.
Any company that goes from 'unsolicted sales enquiry' to 'air tickets for salesman' without intervening steps such as phone calls, faxes and written credentials has other problems besides proper hazmat handling.
> I agree that gun control reduces gun violence. However, that's not much of a comfort. [...] In the event that a gun is not handy, I strongly suspect that they'll use a knife or bludgeon rather than give up in frustration.
This is still a comfort. It requires real physical effort to kill someone with a knife or blunt instrument, and you have to get to within arm's length to attempt it. From the victim's perspective, this is much preferable to being shot at from a distance, because they have more of a chance of fighting back, and are more likely to survive the attack. In addition, in such an attack you are more likely to leave handy forensic evidence on or near the victim.
As you said, guns don't cause violence, but they do make it so much easier to inflict without risk, and so much more likely to be irrevocable.
>how do software patents make writing code imposible?
They don't make it impossible, but they do make practially any program likely to infringe on a potentially large number of patents, which threatens to make software development the preserve of the wealthy and the foolhardy. Imagine having to negotiate with tens or hundreds of patent holders (or, more likely, their laywers) before you can publish even a moderately complex program in safety. (By moderately complex, I mean between about 10,000-50,000 lines of code).
>Just beacuse you can't create a program that uses fractal image compression dosn't mean that your really hindered, you can use Jpeg or somthing. Sure the result will be a little worse, but you're still doing what you want.
Not necessarily. Literally thousands of more-or-less obvious programming techniques and algorithms are already patented, and tons more are currently wending their way through the U.S. patent system in secret, waiting to bite you at some point in the future. For example, there is currently a patent threatening any company that did an obvious fix for Y2K, which showed up in late 1999. Anyone who wants to fight this needs to have certainly tens of thousands of dollars, maybe as much as a million, with no guarantee of success. And that's the cost of dealing with just one bad patent -- currently, there are thousands, and the Patent Office clearly won't be on your side in the fight.
>So whats the problem, if it was obvious, then it shouldn't have been patented.
Most people misunderstand the kinds of things that can be patented, and as such vastly underestimate the number of trivially-different things that have patents. A hundred years ago, there were hundreds of patents on paper clips alone, all trivially different from one another. If the PTO thinks it's 'novel' (which generally means "hasn't been patented yet in exactly this form", not "doesn't exist"), and if they don't think it's 'obvious' (which generally means that they think an average practitioner wouldn't have thought of it right away in the course of his work, without effort), then it's patentable. What this means is that patents usually describe things that are fairly similar to lots of other things that have already been patented ('prior art'), and are awarded to whoever filed a patent first, irrespective of whether they invented it first.
Because of all this, it's likely that ordinary practitioners in a field are doing things that are infringing patents held by others, unless they're routinely working at the fringes of technical or scientific research, and have a group of tame patent lawyers filing what they do as they do it. If you write software in the U.S., almost everything you do is a potential problem, and what's especially bad is that it is impossible to find out what's going to be a problem, because you can't find out about patents currently being processed within the system.
>Unfortunetly the USPO is doing a pretty bad job of letting bad patents through, but thats a flaw in the implementation, not the theory.
This isn't an 'implementation problem', this is the official, US government-backed system; there are no other implementations that you can currently consider switching to. Changing to a better implementation isn't a matter of buying a new motherboard, but of persuading law-makers and bureaucrats to change a system that currently suits business interests better than the replacement one would, an almost impossible task. The current situation is nothing short of a disaster for programmers, and is especially hard on free software, since by its nature, anyone can see what it does and how it does it, so proving infrigement is easy, and most people writing it don't have the means to put up a defence.
Ultimately, patent law exists to promote progress, as has been said earlier. Ironically, open source development is perhaps the best way to achieve this, and yet is the way most jeopardised by the current US patent system.
'Shipping to manufacturing' is not the same as 'shipping to customers'. I don't consider any product as 'shipping' unless ordinary customers can receive it. Note that this precludes unsupported betas, release candidates to the select few, et cetera.
MS is just trying to pretend they kept their promise to ship before the end of 1999, which they have not, because Win2k will not be shipping to customers before Feb 2000 at the earliest.
>Judi Dench, the actress who played M in the past three films, held the part of Money Penny in every other film.
No she didn't. Judi Dench has only appeared in the Brosnan Bond films, and only in the role of 'M'.
Moneypenny was played by Lois Maxwell in every (official) Bond film from 'Dr No' until 'A View to a Kill'; Bernard Lee played 'M' from 'Dr No' until 'Moonraker'.
I believe there was a system to choosing the name, which included having a name that implied great size, and which began with 'A'. I don't know what the other candidates might have been.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll wager that the vast majority of internet users neither know nor care how domain names work; I'd even bet that most couldn't explain the difference between a URL and an e-mail address. It doesn't help that:
So I don't find it surprising at all that many people might expect .uk.co to exist. In fact, I'd expect people to think all kinds of things might work, since the UK also has .police.uk, .nhs.uk, .ltd.uk, .plc.uk, .me.uk, .nic.uk, .sch.uk, .jet.uk and many others, hardly anyone uses .tv for Tuvalu, and things like .biz, .name, .museum and .info are now cropping up.
You appear to think that there is a free market in desktop/laptop OSes, and that the choices available to consumers and businesses are the result of normal market forces. These things are not true, as the court case we're discussing has clearly established.
Over the last few years, my businesses have paid thousands of dollars to Microsoft for software we did not want, because laptops, PCs and servers of an adequate standard, with the support or specification we wanted, could not be purchased without this software included. To add insult to injury, these software "bundles" may not be transferred to another computer, nor sold to recoup the cost we have been obliged to pay to get the equipment we wanted, nor even upgraded to the next release in some cases.
What a deal indeed.
My (UK-based) accountants have always treated PC software as a consumable, rather than an asset, precisely because of the difficulty of realising any value from its sale at a later date. Consequently, it's written off within the same year as it's purchased. Ask your own accountant if you can treat your PC software purchases this way.
Either spelling is fine, since it's an attempt at representing a non-English word, ordinarily written in a non-Roman alphabet. Even the BBC use both spellings on different news outlets.
Similarly, Libya's leader's name is often spelled 'Qadaffi' in the U.S., but 'Gadaffi' in Britain. Same problem, with no one 'correct' answer.
Some other officers also have weapons. For example, the diplomatic protection group have been armed for many years (as a part of their "high-visibility" remit, they drive around London in red police cars). In addition, where the police think terrorists might try something, such as the City of London (financial district), or airports, you'll sometimes see police in flak jackets, with either side arms or sub-machine guns. But in general, it's true that most U.K. police officers are not armed with anything beyond a baton and pepper spray, and much of the body armour you might see them wearing is actually knife-proof rather than bullet proof, since they're much more likely to be stabbed than shot at.
If you think anything goes in Oregon, you need to travel a bit. During the time I lived there, I don't recall hearing about any live sex shows, for example, nor do I remember seeing prostitutes' calling cards by payphones.
Where I live, in Britain, we have a variety of obscenity laws. And yet, I can go to the pub and watch all nude dancers while I drink. I can also buy hard liquor and hardcore porn from the local corner store, which is more than you can do in Oregon.
And how will a couple of U.S. entertainment lobby groups do that? Kidnap the BBC?
A sovereign is a pound, so it's twenty shillings. It's sometimes shortened to 'sovs' (as in five sovs == five pounds), but not used a lot as slang these days. 'Quid' is the common slang for 'pounds'. To contribute to more topic drift, here's more info on slang names for British money.
You missed out the half-crown (2/6). Groats disappeared in the 19th century, and the farthing was discontinued in the 1960s.
Also, your notation is a little confusing (!). The common way to write an amount of shillings and pence was ss/dd (d=pence, from the Latin 'denari', obviously). So, half of five shillings (a crown) is two-and-sixpence, which is 2/6. A ha'penny is half a penny, but 1/2d could be confused with one-and-tuppence (i.e., fourteen pence). Similarly, a farthing is a quarter of a penny, not one-and-fourpence. And since a groat is fourpence, half a groat is tuppence, not 10/6d, which is half a guinea.
There were copper-type coins for the farthing, the halfpenny (==ha'penny), and the penny, a twelve-sided bronze-type coin for threepence (known as the thruppenny bit), a tiddly little silver-type coin for sixpence, progressively larger silver-type coins for a shilling, two shillings (formally called the florin, but everyone just called it two bob), the half-crown and the crown (which was about two inches across), then the notes started at ten shillings (== a ten bob note), a pound, five pounds, ten pounds, etc.. If there was an official coin or note for the guinea, I never saw one.
HTH.
No, because the limitation refers to things that can be kept in working memory, and menus are right there on the screen where you can see them, so they don't place a burden on your memory.
It is a well-known bogus fact.
The original paper that started this 'magic number 7' superstition specifically addressed working memory capacity. People don't need to remember menus, because they're right there in front of them, so memory limitations don't apply.
No, it isn't. The original paper that introduced the notion of working memory being limited to about seven things at a time was published in 1956. The existing U.S. phone number scheme was developed nine years earlier, so its designers could not have used the memory research to inform their decision.
See here for more info:
Summary article on number seven misuse in UI design
Original magic seven paper
Phone number history
I heard cynical engineers within HP at the time refer to it as the 'Open Mouth Foundation'.
So you don't consider field names to be critical data?
Critical to the correct behaviour of the Oracle application? Probably.
Critical to the stability of the server OS? Absolutely not.
in the example in this story, a generic post about 'modems' went directly to a particular IBM modem. Why? Why not "Top 25" modems?
Taking a wild guess, I'd presume it's because IBM paid for this link, and probably many others just like it.
I regularly drive on the section of the M25 where the variable speed limits are imposed, and I've never seen 'a dozen cops sitting on the side of the road'. I can't see why they'd bother, since the gantries above the lanes that display the speed limits have digital speed cameras built into them. Last I heard, they're set to trigger if you're doing 10mph above the posted limit (and at 90 when there's no limit posted).
Actually, some senders are using a sneakier way of telling. They send HTML e-mail, and embed a reference to (say) a 1x1 invisible GIF, but serve it up through a URL that includes a unique identifier. That way (if your e-mail client renders HTML messages automatically, and you're
connected at the time) they know you opened the message even if you then just delete it, without either a reply or even a receipt being explicitly sent by you.
Any company that goes from 'unsolicted sales enquiry' to 'air tickets for salesman' without intervening steps such as phone calls, faxes and written credentials has other problems besides proper hazmat handling.
> I agree that gun control reduces gun violence. However, that's not much of a comfort. [...] In the event that a gun is not handy, I strongly suspect that they'll use a knife or bludgeon rather than give up in frustration.
This is still a comfort. It requires real physical effort to kill someone with a knife or blunt instrument, and you have to get to within arm's length to attempt it. From the victim's perspective, this is much preferable to being shot at from a distance, because they have more of a chance of fighting back, and are more likely to survive the attack. In addition, in such an attack you are more likely to leave handy forensic evidence on or near the victim.
As you said, guns don't cause violence, but they do make it so much easier to inflict without risk, and so much more likely to be irrevocable.
They don't make it impossible, but they do make practially any program likely to infringe on a potentially large number of patents, which threatens to make software development the preserve of the wealthy and the foolhardy. Imagine having to negotiate with tens or hundreds of patent holders (or, more likely, their laywers) before you can publish even a moderately complex program in safety. (By moderately complex, I mean between about 10,000-50,000 lines of code).
>Just beacuse you can't create a program that uses fractal image compression dosn't mean that your really hindered, you can use Jpeg or somthing. Sure the result will be a little worse, but you're still doing what you want.
Not necessarily. Literally thousands of more-or-less obvious programming techniques and algorithms are already patented, and tons more are currently wending their way through the U.S. patent system in secret, waiting to bite you at some point in the future. For example, there is currently a patent threatening any company that did an obvious fix for Y2K, which showed up in late 1999. Anyone who wants to fight this needs to have certainly tens of thousands of dollars, maybe as much as a million, with no guarantee of success. And that's the cost of dealing with just one bad patent -- currently, there are thousands, and the Patent Office clearly won't be on your side in the fight.
>So whats the problem, if it was obvious, then it shouldn't have been patented.
Most people misunderstand the kinds of things that can be patented, and as such vastly underestimate the number of trivially-different things that have patents. A hundred years ago, there were hundreds of patents on paper clips alone, all trivially different from one another. If the PTO thinks it's 'novel' (which generally means "hasn't been patented yet in exactly this form", not "doesn't exist"), and if they don't think it's 'obvious' (which generally means that they think an average practitioner wouldn't have thought of it right away in the course of his work, without effort), then it's patentable. What this means is that patents usually describe things that are fairly similar to lots of other things that have already been patented ('prior art'), and are awarded to whoever filed a patent first, irrespective of whether they invented it first.
Because of all this, it's likely that ordinary practitioners in a field are doing things that are infringing patents held by others, unless they're routinely working at the fringes of technical or scientific research, and have a group of tame patent lawyers filing what they do as they do it. If you write software in the U.S., almost everything you do is a potential problem, and what's especially bad is that it is impossible to find out what's going to be a problem, because you can't find out about patents currently being processed within the system.
>Unfortunetly the USPO is doing a pretty bad job of letting bad patents through, but thats a flaw in the implementation, not the theory.
This isn't an 'implementation problem', this is the official, US government-backed system; there are no other implementations that you can currently consider switching to. Changing to a better implementation isn't a matter of buying a new motherboard, but of persuading law-makers and bureaucrats to change a system that currently suits business interests better than the replacement one would, an almost impossible task. The current situation is nothing short of a disaster for programmers, and is especially hard on free software, since by its nature, anyone can see what it does and how it does it, so proving infrigement is easy, and most people writing it don't have the means to put up a defence.
Ultimately, patent law exists to promote progress, as has been said earlier. Ironically, open source development is perhaps the best way to achieve this, and yet is the way most jeopardised by the current US patent system.
'Shipping to manufacturing' is not the same as 'shipping to customers'. I don't consider any product as 'shipping' unless ordinary customers can receive it. Note that this precludes unsupported betas, release candidates to the select few, et cetera.
MS is just trying to pretend they kept their promise to ship before the end of 1999, which they have not, because Win2k will not be shipping to customers before Feb 2000 at the earliest.
>Judi Dench, the actress who played M in the past three films, held the part of Money Penny in every other film.
No she didn't. Judi Dench has only appeared in the Brosnan Bond films, and only in the role of 'M'.
Moneypenny was played by Lois Maxwell in every (official) Bond film from 'Dr No' until 'A View to a Kill'; Bernard Lee played 'M' from 'Dr No' until 'Moonraker'.
See IMDB.
I believe there was a system to choosing the name, which included having a name that implied great size, and which began with 'A'. I don't know what the other candidates might have been.
In his recent BBC interview, Gates described 'Bob' as "a product ahead of its time." What does this say about his vision of the future?