Technically, a better alternative might be
DjVu
since it allows lossy compression like JPEG as
well as lossless. For some kinds of images it is
even smaller than JPEG (5-10 times smaller is
claimed for
color scanned documents and 2 times smaller
for photos). Practically, the
drawback is that it
is not supported directly by most browsers but
requires a plugin, so it is currently useful
only on sites with a specialized audience, until (and
if) browsers start supporting it natively.
I liked the 1.2.1 behavior of "first click on location bar selects all",
so that "click" then "s" immediately autocompletes the most frequently
visited "s" site (e.g. slashdot). This went away in
1.3 with a kind of 3rd-click-selects-all behavior. To restore it in
recent nightlies, and I assume 1.4alpha, put in your user.js:
This will also restore the behavior
partially in 1.3, but
only if you click on top of the currently displayed
URL (i.e. it won't work if you click in the blank
area because the 2nd user_pref was
implemented after 1.3).
Does anyone know of a company that is planning to move to
Office [2003] once it's out of beta? I don't.
I don't either, and it's irrelevant.
The same thing will happen as did with Office 95->98, 98->2K, 2K->XP.
Eventually you won't be able to buy the earlier versions anymore. So
newer computers will have to have 2003. It will probably have a
"compatibility" option to save in the old format, but by default it will
save in the new. As the new format proliferates, first the older users
will complain, but eventually as a practical matter they'll finally cave
in and slowly start to upgrade so they can read their
coworkers'/customers' documents without a hassle. (The pressure from customers will be
particularly important; it is bad PR to complain to a customer that you
can't read their documents because you have old obsolete software, when
you're pretending your products/services are at the bleeding edge of technology.
Been there, done that.) It's happened before and will happen again.
My general opinion is that having the gov't fund gaming companies is a bad idea.
But if it must be so, the people should receive something in return, such as
requiring the code to be open source or at least have it revert to open source
after some specified period of time.
By the way try as I might I could not determine if America's Army is open source.
Shouldn't it be since it was funded by
taxpayers? The guy contracted by the Army to do the
Linux port
mysteriously said "I have the source code to the game" but provided no
clue as to its general availability. (Now the Linux port seems to have disappeared in the links in the slashdot
article.)
In any case I wish someone would fix the damn America's Army bug that still
occasionally causes "General
Protection Fault" even with GeForce cards, and get the game to work on
other cards as well. If it was open source I bet it would be fixed by now.
This is a good interview, but I find the following vaguely troubling:
5. What are a few things you like and dislike about the Windows XP interface?...
Aaron J. Seigo: I've used Windows XP for a scant total of 2 days...
Havoc Pennington:...The task-based interface looks interesting, but
I've never tried it out...
Waldo Bastian: I am not familar with Windows XP.
For better or worse, MS has spent untold millions on usability studies
of the user interface in Windows XP. Perhaps a lot of the UI decisions
were misguided, but I doubt the decision to include this feature or that
was made lightly. Although I personally dislike the XP interface (the
first thing I did was switch to the "classic" theme - and of course immediately install
Cygwin, Mozilla, etc.:), I think its
features should be carefully studied and evaluated on their own merits.
Also (IMO), a feature should perhaps be "biased" towards the MS
behavior for the default settings, if there is no clear advantage
otherwise, simply because that's what most people are familiar with.
This will make the desktop attractive and
comfortable for the greatest number of
people. Those who dislike it can of course configure it however they want.
MS did a lot of work on this. Maybe a lot
of the results are distasteful - but that doesn't mean one should hide one's head in the
sand. There may be some good things and some bad things, but choices
can be made more intelligently when there is a broad base of knowledge
to draw upon.
My data indicates that the lifetime of a CD is drastically shorter if at
any point they are exposed to kids. Even if you train kids to handle
them properly, CDs still get corrupted inexplicably by imaginary
playmates and fairies.
When switching to a new computer I observed that only about half of
my son's old games could be installed. Some of these seemed to be
corrupted data problems, so I tried to make fresh copies - only about
30% could be copied. A resurfacing kit helped only a few a them. I
finally pinned down the problem: miniscule, barely visible scratches on
the TOP of the CD. CDs seem to be relatively immune to bottom
scratches, but scratches on the label are fatal - even the tiniest, if
it penetrates the ink at all, will permanently destroy the data with no
possible recovery.
Our new policy of course is to copy any CD as soon as purchased and
safely store away the original. That is, IF they can be copied - the
new copy protection stuff worries me. And how about DVDs, and in
particular XBox DVDs? Am I supposed to put a child-lock on the XBox and
constantly be interrupted when he wants to switch CDs?
Drop by your local Radio Shack. For fifteen bucks you
can buy a little device that plugs into the headphones jack on any
portable device and broadcasts it on a channel of your choice (well,
usually there's a choice of maybe four channels to try).
I bought the Radio Shack thing 2 years ago - or maybe a different model;
I think it was more expensive. However the radio would not pick up the
reception, since the antenna was shielded all the way to the trunk. So
I fished a wire to the trunk and sorta got it to work. But then I
discovered my then-laptop (Gateway Solo 2300) would only play MP3s with
the cover open, due an APM feature that apparently could not be
defeated. (It would play in halting interrupted bursts due to the
low-power mode. I hate APM I can't control - if I want a compilation to
run at full, battery-draining speed while I drive home that should be my
choice.) Anyway the whole setup was so awkward I finally stopped
using it.
First I tried HTTP and the connection dropped. No problem, I
thought, I'll just use "wget -c" and it will continue fine. Well, it
continued, but the archive was corrupt.
I've had similar problems with interrupted downloads. Continuations always seem to be a gamble. Can someone
tell me: is this a bug in the server, the first client, or wget? Can it be fixed, or is it some intrinsic unsolveable problem?
"when built on technologies such as UDDI and WDSL..."
Acronyms, acronyms... For the unitiated:
WDSL Wireless Digital Subscriber Line
WSDL Web Services Description Language
UDDI Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (not
Description and Discovery Interface)
ASP Active Server Page
CLR Common Language Runtime
CORBA Common Object Request Broker Architecture
OMG Object Management Group
XML eXtensible Markup Language
MSIL Micro$oft Intermediate Language
ADO ActiveX* Data Object
.NET ?
* The correct spelling is a skull-and-crossbones character in place of
the X but slashdot filters out
Unicode 9760
It is a Latin word.
I believe "locutus" is the perfect participle of the Latin loqui ("to speak"),
so it would mean "having spoken". So for the Star Trek character, it is suggests
a spokesman for the Borg. For the "Locutus" software product, which I don't
think is a "a toy, action figure, poseable figure or a doll," it might be
suggestive of a source of information.
Well, its also possible for the opposite to
happen. Several months ago I went to a Microsoft C# users group meeting. Maybe 30% of the
20 or so people were unemployed. Most were "learning C#" to put on
their resume I suppose. But it seemed they were doing this by inventing
silly make-work exercises they discussed at the meeting. It seemed such
a waste - these were seasoned programmers - what better use of their
new-found free time than to contribute libraries to the Mono project,
and see their name go down in history as well as earning an excellent
reference for their resume. And they'll
learn C# much better than some silly
exercise since the Mono stuff is for real. I suggested that at the
meeting - I don't think anyone
there had even heard of Mono - and I saw most of them
scribbing down go-mono.org. (The MS representative
made no comment.) I wonder if anything
came of it.
You're right, WordPad will open this rtf (it defaulted to opening with
Word on a separate machine). I still think rtf is annoying when plain
text will do. Also I screwed up the > and < in the slashdot html.
Here are the corrected quotes.
In the instructions that follow, the designation <installation path for
this SQL Server instance> refers to the path on your disk in which the
SQL Server files are installed. This path is typically <drive>:\Program
Files\Microsoft SQL Server\Mssql. Note that the Mssql directory may be
MSSQL$<Instance Name> for a named instance installation.
3. Make a back up copy of the ssnetlib.dll files from the
<installation path for this SQL Server instance>\Binn folder and
the ssnetlib.pdb files from the <installation path for this SQL
Server instance>\Binn\dll folder.
4. Copy the ssnetlib.dll files from the hotfix self-extracting archive
into the <installation path for this SQL Server instance>\Binn
folder and the ssnetlib.pdb files into <installation path for this
SQL Server instance>\Binn\Exe folder.
6. Test the scenario for the bug that this build fixes to verify that
your problem is resolved. Notify Microsoft PSS immediately if your
problem is still unresolved.
While I had this update applied, I felt and still feel uncomfortable
that it is installed correctly. The update is confusing. I wouldn't be
surprised if a lot of people installed it wrong. (I believe MS now has
an updated version they released _after_ the worm that is easier but
haven't checked it out.)
As an aside, the instructions are in a readme.rtf file, even though they
are actually just plain unformatted ASCII text pasted into Word. Who in
their right minds would have Office 2000 installed on their SQL server?
Or is this supposed to be standard practice? Gee, I guess should also
look into putting OpenOffice on my Linux firewall.
Here are some quotes from Microsoft's instructions.
In the instructions that follow, the designation refers to the path on your disk in which the
SQL Server files are installed. This path is typically:\Program
Files\Microsoft SQL Server\Mssql. Note that the Mssql directory may be
MSSQL$ for a named instance installation.
OK, but there is also a Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\ directory.
What about this one?
3. Make a back up copy of the ssnetlib.dll files from the \Binn folder and the ssnetlib.pdb
files from the \Binn\dll
folder.
ssnetlib.dll "files"? Why plural? I only found one in the path they
seem to reference, but actually there was another one in Microsoft SQL
Server\80\Tools\Binn\. However there was no ssnetlib.pdb in the main
path nor was there even a directory Microsoft SQL
Server\80\Tools\Binn\dll.
4. Copy the ssnetlib.dll files from the hotfix self-extracting archive
into the \Binn folder
and the ssnetlib.pdb files into \Binn\Exe folder.
Again, how can there be ssnetlib.dll "files"? What are they talking about? Also, earlier the
(non-existent) ssnetlib.pdb file was supposed to be backed up from the Dll folder, now we put the
new one into the Exe folder?
6. Test the scenario for the bug that this build fixes to verify that
your problem is resolved.
OK, so I unleash Slammer on my network to make sure the problem is
fixed? (And how would you test it before Slammer
was officially released?)
(NB: some of the above may not be completely accurate, being based on old scribbly notes
jotted down in the midst of confusion.
However the quotes are direct from readme.rtf.)
While waiting for the article link to become unslashdotted, perhaps
you'll like to solve the little mystery in this post found on Usenet:
comp.os.linux.advocacy
From: Franoculator
[1] Is Redhat Passing Subliminal Messages for Micros~1?
Lines: 19
Date: Thu Jan 23 23:01:17 EST 2003
I installed the redhat-artwork ebuild for gentoo, allowing me to use Red
Hat's Bluecurve them with KDE. After a while, I got sick of it and
changed it, only keeping the default Bluecurve font.
I'd really like to see some serious tests done with PostgreSQL.
I love PostgreSQL, have used it in a small (million-record)
transactional application with great success, and am pleased to see the
implied advocacy of having.org run on it. Nonetheless 2.4 million
records is hardly enterprise-level stress. I would really like to see
some serious benchmarks against Oracle. My tests on a small PC-based Linux
server last year showed that pg beat Oracle mainly because the bloat of
Oracle caused excessive thrashing, but on a large mainframe-type
application - billion-record type stuff - I simply have no idea. A
couple of years ago some benchmarks were published on the web but got
quickly taken down by Oracle under threat of lawsuit - their license
doesn't allow publication of benchmarks - and I never got to see them.
I think this is wrong. Perhaps the recent ruling against EDA benchmark
restrictions will open a door towards Oracle benchmarks?
They know the IP addresses of all the modems. Create a db with a random
string assigned to each IP, then write a script to change the passwords
(of all of the ones have the default password) in one fell swoop.
They'll have the db of passwords if they need to login for maintenance. The customer
doesn't even have to know about it. Any admin can do this trivially.
Instead, they are just going to lamely post instructions on
their web site, which probably 1% of customers are going to read.
Am I missing something?
It seems to be little-known fact that fonts and typefaces are not
protected by copyright. The only thing that
can be copyrighted is any software underlying the
generation of fonts, such as software that interprets hints and
presumably the hints themselves. This is how e.g. TrueType fonts achieve some
copyright protection. However if you're willing to live with a set of
fixed point sizes you can freely copy and use the
bitmaps they place on the screen, to create
your own font collection, as I
understand it. (This is my take on what I've
read; IANAL.)
There is a movement underfoot called TypeRight advocating copyright
protection for fonts. The site also explains some of the copyright
issues.
It interesting that the lack of copyright protection has apparently
not hindered the creation of a wide variety of fonts.
From the article: The combination of the Fab and the Dresden Design Center (DDC) was
said to require a $2.3 million investment, with close to $2M already
spent and the remaining $300M due to be used by the end of 2003.
By any chance were the/. editors on this tour?
(BTW here's a tip: Click on "Print this article" to see the whole article at
once, ad-free, without having to wait for 7 pages of ads to download.)
MA doesn't have that complex of a tax code anyway, so there really isn't
much for software to do in the first place besides data entry and
transmission.
Perhaps for simple returns, but if you have mutual funds and K-1's it
can be a nightmare. You have to account for "MA differences" on your
K-1's (usually due to breaking down in-state vs. out-of-state interest,
but also due to different rules on allowable deductions). You have to
separate out in-state and out-of-state interest from your bank accounts,
CDs, etc. You have to divide your mutual fund capital gains into little
pieces representing 1-year, 2-year, etc. holdings (the funds tell you
the breakdown for MA but never the calculation, which you have to
tediously compute from the itemized statements for each fund since the
percentages vary by quarter). Capital gains on "collectibles" have
different rules from capital gains on stocks. I won't even get into
Schedule C differences. It goes on and on. Last year I literally spent
more time on my MA than Federal (some of it screaming at Intuit support,
see below). A big part of it has to do with special interest lobbying
that gets tax special preferences on this or that. E.g. 5% tax on
in-state bank interest vs. 12% on out-of-state, ironic when you consider
in-state purchases are taxed and out-of-state not - MA vendors get
screwed and MA banks are laughing all the way to the, well, bank.
TurboTax does not help you break out your mutual fund gains.
TurboTax does not properly bring over K-1 info - it puts in-vs-out state
interest in wrong fields and double-counts some "MA differences". If
you blindly let it do it's thing you'll end up paying more tax than you
owe. You have to know what you're doing and manually override a bunch
of TurboTax fields. Each year I've complained to Intuit and
the K-1 problems still weren't fixed for 2001.
Speaking of TurboTax, the.tax file many years ago used to be a
semi-readable near-ASCII file that slowly evolved into the bloated,
cryptic binary mess it is today (1993 = 12KB, 2001 = 300KB). I was beginning
to feel my data is now captive to this program, but I'm glad to hear
(from another poster) that TaxCut is able to read it and I'll probably
switch. But what the world really
needs is a standard, portable XML format for tax files, that multiple vendors support.
Now a lot of the jazz catalog is public domain in Europe, while in the U.S. we're limited to pre-1922 dreck like Moonlight Bay.
Sorry, only the sheet music copyright has expired; for audio
recordings the situation in the US is much worse (and NYT neglects to
mention it).
From the Public Domain Music site: "Different copyright
experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all
agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright
protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to
remember:
Sound Recording Rule of Thumb:
There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain."
There is an analogous problem with Undo/Redo in editors.
If you make a change, Undo it, then make another change, the Redo functionality
is gone for the first change. The first change you made is irretrievably lost. At least in most editors.
BTW the article says the Back button "accounts for 40% of all
Internet clicks." This might be true for IE users who don't have tabbed
browsing (and the article shows a screen shot of IE's back button).
I've seen IE users find a bunch of Google matches, click on one, go
back, click on the next, go back, etc. I don't see how they can stand
it. (Yes they can open new windows but that can be annoying in its own
way, and they usually don't.) With Mozilla's tabbed browsing I hardly
ever use the back button.
Many people don't even realize that you can iterate through files with one command in DOS.
for %1 in (*.jpg) do convert -resize 128x128 %1 thumbnail/%1
Uh, I'm not an expert on DOS (nor WinXP) but on
WinXP "HELP CONVERT" at the Command Prompt says: "Converts FAT volumes to NTFS." Was there an image-converting "convert"
command in DOS that they took out for XP? I thought
"convert" was a GNU/Linux thing.
Got any examples of sort-of-high-traffic sites that just plain don't work in Mozilla based browsers?
Well, I don't know if you consider the Dow Chemical Company
in this category, but virtually every page is broken in Mozilla with
Javascript code strewn across the screen; search forms, etc. don't work
as a result.
The problem is that their HTML comments are screwed up
with the wrong number of double-hyphen pairs. Mozilla parses them
correctly per the SGML
standard, the result being not what Dow intended; but IE parses them
incorrectly, and IE's bug cancels out Dow's bug. Curiously Dow's own internal
search engine does parse the comments per the standard, so you often see
garbage JavaScript fragments (even in IE) - the same ones you see in Mozilla -
where the summary for the search result page should go.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, a better alternative might be DjVu since it allows lossy compression like JPEG as well as lossless. For some kinds of images it is even smaller than JPEG (5-10 times smaller is claimed for color scanned documents and 2 times smaller for photos). Practically, the drawback is that it is not supported directly by most browsers but requires a plugin, so it is currently useful only on sites with a specialized audience, until (and if) browsers start supporting it natively.
user_pref("browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll", true);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.clickAtEndSelects", true);
This will also restore the behavior partially in 1.3, but only if you click on top of the currently displayed URL (i.e. it won't work if you click in the blank area because the 2nd user_pref was implemented after 1.3).
I don't either, and it's irrelevant.
The same thing will happen as did with Office 95->98, 98->2K, 2K->XP. Eventually you won't be able to buy the earlier versions anymore. So newer computers will have to have 2003. It will probably have a "compatibility" option to save in the old format, but by default it will save in the new. As the new format proliferates, first the older users will complain, but eventually as a practical matter they'll finally cave in and slowly start to upgrade so they can read their coworkers'/customers' documents without a hassle. (The pressure from customers will be particularly important; it is bad PR to complain to a customer that you can't read their documents because you have old obsolete software, when you're pretending your products/services are at the bleeding edge of technology. Been there, done that.) It's happened before and will happen again.
By the way try as I might I could not determine if America's Army is open source. Shouldn't it be since it was funded by taxpayers? The guy contracted by the Army to do the Linux port mysteriously said "I have the source code to the game" but provided no clue as to its general availability. (Now the Linux port seems to have disappeared in the links in the slashdot article.)
In any case I wish someone would fix the damn America's Army bug that still occasionally causes "General Protection Fault" even with GeForce cards, and get the game to work on other cards as well. If it was open source I bet it would be fixed by now.
MS did a lot of work on this. Maybe a lot of the results are distasteful - but that doesn't mean one should hide one's head in the sand. There may be some good things and some bad things, but choices can be made more intelligently when there is a broad base of knowledge to draw upon.
(Same comments for Mac UI of course...)
When switching to a new computer I observed that only about half of my son's old games could be installed. Some of these seemed to be corrupted data problems, so I tried to make fresh copies - only about 30% could be copied. A resurfacing kit helped only a few a them. I finally pinned down the problem: miniscule, barely visible scratches on the TOP of the CD. CDs seem to be relatively immune to bottom scratches, but scratches on the label are fatal - even the tiniest, if it penetrates the ink at all, will permanently destroy the data with no possible recovery.
Our new policy of course is to copy any CD as soon as purchased and safely store away the original. That is, IF they can be copied - the new copy protection stuff worries me. And how about DVDs, and in particular XBox DVDs? Am I supposed to put a child-lock on the XBox and constantly be interrupted when he wants to switch CDs?
I bought the Radio Shack thing 2 years ago - or maybe a different model; I think it was more expensive. However the radio would not pick up the reception, since the antenna was shielded all the way to the trunk. So I fished a wire to the trunk and sorta got it to work. But then I discovered my then-laptop (Gateway Solo 2300) would only play MP3s with the cover open, due an APM feature that apparently could not be defeated. (It would play in halting interrupted bursts due to the low-power mode. I hate APM I can't control - if I want a compilation to run at full, battery-draining speed while I drive home that should be my choice.) Anyway the whole setup was so awkward I finally stopped using it.
I've had similar problems with interrupted downloads. Continuations always seem to be a gamble. Can someone tell me: is this a bug in the server, the first client, or wget? Can it be fixed, or is it some intrinsic unsolveable problem?
Acronyms, acronyms... For the unitiated:
WDSL Wireless Digital Subscriber Line
WSDL Web Services Description Language
UDDI Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (not Description and Discovery Interface)
ASP Active Server Page
CLR Common Language Runtime
CORBA Common Object Request Broker Architecture
OMG Object Management Group
XML eXtensible Markup Language
MSIL Micro$oft Intermediate Language
ADO ActiveX* Data Object
.NET ?
* The correct spelling is a skull-and-crossbones character in place of the X but slashdot filters out Unicode 9760
It is a Latin word. I believe "locutus" is the perfect participle of the Latin loqui ("to speak"), so it would mean "having spoken". So for the Star Trek character, it is suggests a spokesman for the Borg. For the "Locutus" software product, which I don't think is a "a toy, action figure, poseable figure or a doll," it might be suggestive of a source of information.
Well, its also possible for the opposite to happen. Several months ago I went to a Microsoft C# users group meeting. Maybe 30% of the 20 or so people were unemployed. Most were "learning C#" to put on their resume I suppose. But it seemed they were doing this by inventing silly make-work exercises they discussed at the meeting. It seemed such a waste - these were seasoned programmers - what better use of their new-found free time than to contribute libraries to the Mono project, and see their name go down in history as well as earning an excellent reference for their resume. And they'll learn C# much better than some silly exercise since the Mono stuff is for real. I suggested that at the meeting - I don't think anyone there had even heard of Mono - and I saw most of them scribbing down go-mono.org. (The MS representative made no comment.) I wonder if anything came of it.
Remember the 34-byte universal machine?
As an aside, the instructions are in a readme.rtf file, even though they are actually just plain unformatted ASCII text pasted into Word. Who in their right minds would have Office 2000 installed on their SQL server? Or is this supposed to be standard practice? Gee, I guess should also look into putting OpenOffice on my Linux firewall.
Here are some quotes from Microsoft's instructions.
OK, but there is also a Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\ directory. What about this one?
ssnetlib.dll "files"? Why plural? I only found one in the path they seem to reference, but actually there was another one in Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\. However there was no ssnetlib.pdb in the main path nor was there even a directory Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\dll.
Again, how can there be ssnetlib.dll "files"? What are they talking about? Also, earlier the (non-existent) ssnetlib.pdb file was supposed to be backed up from the Dll folder, now we put the new one into the Exe folder?
OK, so I unleash Slammer on my network to make sure the problem is fixed? (And how would you test it before Slammer was officially released?)
(NB: some of the above may not be completely accurate, being based on old scribbly notes jotted down in the midst of confusion. However the quotes are direct from readme.rtf.)
I love PostgreSQL, have used it in a small (million-record) transactional application with great success, and am pleased to see the implied advocacy of having .org run on it. Nonetheless 2.4 million
records is hardly enterprise-level stress. I would really like to see
some serious benchmarks against Oracle. My tests on a small PC-based Linux
server last year showed that pg beat Oracle mainly because the bloat of
Oracle caused excessive thrashing, but on a large mainframe-type
application - billion-record type stuff - I simply have no idea. A
couple of years ago some benchmarks were published on the web but got
quickly taken down by Oracle under threat of lawsuit - their license
doesn't allow publication of benchmarks - and I never got to see them.
I think this is wrong. Perhaps the recent ruling against EDA benchmark
restrictions will open a door towards Oracle benchmarks?
They know the IP addresses of all the modems. Create a db with a random string assigned to each IP, then write a script to change the passwords (of all of the ones have the default password) in one fell swoop. They'll have the db of passwords if they need to login for maintenance. The customer doesn't even have to know about it. Any admin can do this trivially. Instead, they are just going to lamely post instructions on their web site, which probably 1% of customers are going to read. Am I missing something?
There is a movement underfoot called TypeRight advocating copyright protection for fonts. The site also explains some of the copyright issues.
It interesting that the lack of copyright protection has apparently not hindered the creation of a wide variety of fonts.
By any chance were the /. editors on this tour?
(BTW here's a tip: Click on "Print this article" to see the whole article at once, ad-free, without having to wait for 7 pages of ads to download.)
Yeah, I hate auto mechanics who love money. Damn them.
Ecclesiastes 10:19 A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.
Perhaps for simple returns, but if you have mutual funds and K-1's it can be a nightmare. You have to account for "MA differences" on your K-1's (usually due to breaking down in-state vs. out-of-state interest, but also due to different rules on allowable deductions). You have to separate out in-state and out-of-state interest from your bank accounts, CDs, etc. You have to divide your mutual fund capital gains into little pieces representing 1-year, 2-year, etc. holdings (the funds tell you the breakdown for MA but never the calculation, which you have to tediously compute from the itemized statements for each fund since the percentages vary by quarter). Capital gains on "collectibles" have different rules from capital gains on stocks. I won't even get into Schedule C differences. It goes on and on. Last year I literally spent more time on my MA than Federal (some of it screaming at Intuit support, see below). A big part of it has to do with special interest lobbying that gets tax special preferences on this or that. E.g. 5% tax on in-state bank interest vs. 12% on out-of-state, ironic when you consider in-state purchases are taxed and out-of-state not - MA vendors get screwed and MA banks are laughing all the way to the, well, bank.
TurboTax does not help you break out your mutual fund gains. TurboTax does not properly bring over K-1 info - it puts in-vs-out state interest in wrong fields and double-counts some "MA differences". If you blindly let it do it's thing you'll end up paying more tax than you owe. You have to know what you're doing and manually override a bunch of TurboTax fields. Each year I've complained to Intuit and the K-1 problems still weren't fixed for 2001.
Speaking of TurboTax, the .tax file many years ago used to be a
semi-readable near-ASCII file that slowly evolved into the bloated,
cryptic binary mess it is today (1993 = 12KB, 2001 = 300KB). I was beginning
to feel my data is now captive to this program, but I'm glad to hear
(from another poster) that TaxCut is able to read it and I'll probably
switch. But what the world really
needs is a standard, portable XML format for tax files, that multiple vendors support.
Sorry, only the sheet music copyright has expired; for audio recordings the situation in the US is much worse (and NYT neglects to mention it). From the Public Domain Music site: "Different copyright experts have offered very different complicated explanations, but all agree that all sound recordings essentially are under copyright protection until the year 2067. So here is the one sentence you need to remember: Sound Recording Rule of Thumb: There are NO sound recordings in the Public Domain."
If you make a change, Undo it, then make another change, the Redo functionality is gone for the first change. The first change you made is irretrievably lost. At least in most editors.
BTW the article says the Back button "accounts for 40% of all Internet clicks." This might be true for IE users who don't have tabbed browsing (and the article shows a screen shot of IE's back button). I've seen IE users find a bunch of Google matches, click on one, go back, click on the next, go back, etc. I don't see how they can stand it. (Yes they can open new windows but that can be annoying in its own way, and they usually don't.) With Mozilla's tabbed browsing I hardly ever use the back button.
for %1 in (*.jpg) do convert -resize 128x128 %1 thumbnail/%1
Uh, I'm not an expert on DOS (nor WinXP) but on WinXP "HELP CONVERT" at the Command Prompt says: "Converts FAT volumes to NTFS." Was there an image-converting "convert" command in DOS that they took out for XP? I thought "convert" was a GNU/Linux thing.
Well, I don't know if you consider the Dow Chemical Company in this category, but virtually every page is broken in Mozilla with Javascript code strewn across the screen; search forms, etc. don't work as a result.
The problem is that their HTML comments are screwed up with the wrong number of double-hyphen pairs. Mozilla parses them correctly per the SGML standard, the result being not what Dow intended; but IE parses them incorrectly, and IE's bug cancels out Dow's bug. Curiously Dow's own internal search engine does parse the comments per the standard, so you often see garbage JavaScript fragments (even in IE) - the same ones you see in Mozilla - where the summary for the search result page should go.