Additional $0.20/minute charge for calls made on PCS Connection Cards(TM) with voice capability.
300MB per month?
I've got more than 300MB in my download history just for this morning.
Re:In some ways it's inferior to IE5 and IE6...
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: 1
I know its not a media player - what I meant was, the control is modal. Either you are loading, or you have finished loading.
From a point of pure efficiency, I can see that argument, and if there was a cost to having multiple buttons... if we were building a physical object here... I could see a point to the efficiency argument. Buut we're not, so the question isn't "is it efficient", but "is it the right thing to do from a human-interface point of view"?
From that point of view this kind of alternation shouldn't just depend on whether the operation is modal, but on whether the operation is reversible and the two operations are complementary.
And they're not. Aborting a page load is not to opposite of resuming a page load. Aborting a page load isn't even reversible. It may not be possible, under some circumstances, to continue to the page that you would have reached if you hadn't aborted... this is actually common in the case of multi-stage transactions where the browser state and the server state have to match.
That is an awfully specific example. Does this happen a lot? Not to me anyways.
How do you know? If you're using a browser with separate stop and reload buttons (and you probably are, given that this is the normal state of affairs), you will never notice if you hit "stop" right at the end of the operation, because if you're a little too late you're hitting an inactive button and nothing happens.
The odds of you clicking stop (now reload) at the exact moment the page sets itself are pretty low, you have to admit.
The odds of doing in on any given click are pretty low. The odds of doing it at least once, over any reasonable period of time, are quite large.
Ultimately this is an argument about the meaning of a word. I say it means one thing and you disagree.
You say it means only one thing.
In French, you could go to the Academie Francais and get a firm ruling, and continue on to force a couple to change the name of their child because "Cerise" is not an approved name, and get boycott a store named "Le Pique Nique", and insist that "Computers" should be called "Ordinateurs".
This isn't French. It doesn't work that way.
You can use the word any way you want, but when you're arguing that an action isn't "censorship" because it's not being performed by a "government", you're not just using your personal definition of the word. You're trying to argue that because this isn't censhorship-as-defined-by-you it's not a bad thing. When you go on to talk about free speech in the context or a regulated public utility, it's clear that you're trying to justify censorship-in-the-broad-sense by defining the action as not-censorship.
The issue isn't "what's the definition of censorship". It's "should a public utility have the right to suppress opposing points of view". Government censorship is wrong not primarily because the government is doing it, but because the government is doing it and the government has the power to make its actions effective. And it's that power that makes government censorship a particularly odious restriction on speech.
If a government wants to restrict access to speech on the Internet, they either have to operate the internet service provider (as in China), or they have to be able to impose sanctions on a non-complying internet service provider (as in Germany). If the ISP (in this case, the telco) is allowed to restrict access to websites on any criteria it wants, that actually gives it MORE power than the government - which is at least nominally answerable to the public.
So, ultimately, it doesn't matter whether you call the action "censorship" or "restriction of speech" or "abomination" or "wakalixing". The bottom line is that what the telco was doing in this case was every bit as effective as "government censorship". Calling it "censorship", however you define it, is not making too strong a case by any means.
I've worked for Houston's Time Warner Cable call center...
If I've ever said anything to you that I might have cause to regret, I apologise. I know it's not your fault, but some days, well, I'm not a saint.
Re:In some ways it's inferior to IE5 and IE6...
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: 1
I agree with most of your points - except for this. Why is this a bad idea?
Because it's not a media player. The stop button is not a "stop playing" (or more properly "pause" button), and the reload button isn't a "start playing" ("resume" button). You don't typically hit stop and reload alternately, and hitting either of these things isn't really reversed by hitting the other...
You normally only use the "stop" button when something's wrong, the web page is taking too long to download, it's gotten hung up loading some embedded object that's screwing up, or otherwise you need to abort the operation, sometimes in a hurry.
If the "stop" button turns into a "reload" button", what happens when you're just a little too slow and you hit the "stop" button just as the page finishes loading?
Whoops, now you've hit the "reload" button instead. And whatever you wanted to prevent happening? Well, now it's going to happen all over again. And maybe even it's something that you really didn't want to do all over again, because it's got side-effects... maybe it's ".../cgi-bin/shopping.cgi?item=12345&action=buy&on eclick=true".
After enough of this kind of silliness I switched from Safari to Shiira.
The Mac has more keyboard shortcuts than Windows, but you'd have to talk to a power user to realize that.
The Mac also has more mouse buttons than Windows, but four of them are on the keyboard and only a power user can keep them straight.
These two points are not advantages for the Mac.
In some ways it's inferior to IE5 and IE6...
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: 2, Informative
Moving the menu bar breaks the Windows standard user interface. Meanwhile, Firefox has followed the Windows standard user interface as completely as they can... sometimes to the detriment of non-Windows ports.
Also, moving the tab bar away from the window makes it harder to immediately identify which tab you're on.
Merged stop-and-reload is just plain daft. The only current browser I know that does this is Safari, and it's the biggest reason I use Shiira instead of Safari on Mac OS X. Is Microsoft copyng Apple's bad ideas again, like when they released the first version of Windows with cooperative multitasking despite having concurrent multitasking working first?
Both these problems can be avoided by using the HTML control from another application, as you can see by the screen-shot of Crazy Browser.
Merging the drop-downs into a single button is visually confusing and doesn't save any space. Putting some of your navigation controls on the opposite side of the address bar is also confusing.
All in all, I'd say the user interface is significantly less consistent and more confusing than IE5 or IE6. This is almost a step back to the early days of the web when browsers seemed to be in a contest to see which could be weirder.
PS: The search bar is just a copy of the search bar on every other browser out there, except the "select search engine" button is on the other side.
PPS: Microsoft can't avoid the reboot when it installs IE, because it's replacing a component that it's using all over the system... they need to kill and restart every GUI program on the system to move the old control out of the way.
No, it's a crummy idea. Apple uses it in Safari, which is why when I use a Webkit/KHTML-based browser on Mac OS X I use Shiira.
Possibly Microsoft's using their classic method of copying Apple's ideas whether they're good or bad again?
Re:Why FreeBSD is not good for most businesses
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
I haven't reacted that way at any point.
That's the impression I'm getting from your continual arguments that the Linux packages+kernel route is the only way to build "a mainstream server/desktop OS".
A tiny stable core, and a bunch of ways to install apps do not a mainstream server/desktop OS make.
Um, that "tiny stable core" encompasses the entirety of a clean and effective implementation of the most influentual operating system on the planet today. With a couple of exceptions like VMS and IBM's mainframe-derived lines, every currently viable operating system can trace its roots back to the traditional UNIX source tree that's reflected in the BSD core.
The comparable core in Linux is just the kernel itself.
And there aren't "a bunch of ways to install apps". There's only one packaging model for installable applications in FreeBSD.
Linux treats the core specially, too. It just has a much smaller core.
Re:Have you even looked at Apple's website?
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Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
I highly doubt there is no kernel-level code in OS-X for graphics, and it is certainly proprietary right now.
You're confusing "privileged mode" AKA "kernel mode" with "in the kernel". Mach isn't a real microkernel, but it does support the ability to run software in privileged mode without it being "linked in the kernel".
Of course it may not be possible to build a credible microkernel-style design based on Linux, given Linus opinions of microkernel operating systems and the hardcore traditionalism of Linux' design... which would be a bigger problem for Apple than the GPL.
MS dilikes the GPL, but has actually come out and said they like BSD on more than one occasion.
Microsoft says lots of stuff, but it's their actions that count. And their only package that uses a significant amount of real open-source software uses both BSD and GPL components.
In the end we'll get Linux with all the best features from AIX, HPUX, Irix.
I doubt it. SGI is pretty much moribund and is selling the IP they have left to the highest bidder, even when that's Microsoft. There's not much in HPUX that's worth saving. A whole lot of code in AIX is shared with IBM's very profitable mainframe and mini lines.
IBM and SGI have however released entire file systems which were formerly proprietary.
One great operating system is better than four good ones, IMO.
One operating system can't possibly fill all the niches. Linux is tied to a kernel design that works well for a certain class of problems, but it depends on Linus for continued development and Linus antipathy towards non-traditional kernels is legendary.
In fact, everything I can think of that they did release started out as open source.
Have you looked at the the actual code? Or are you just going by "what you heard"?
So while you were busy with your "Apple is good" tirade in response to something I didn't say, you are showing that you agree with me.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. My point is that the actions of the company using open source code are more important than the license you use. Microsoft and Apple are both using both GPL and BSDL code. The GPL hasn't led to Microsoft releasing anything, their own open source is strictly Windows-only. And Apple's released a flood of stuff whether it started out as BSDL, GPL, or they created it themselves.
I'm so happy for you, that your ISP has a UPS. I don't know if my cable company has a UPS, I know that I don't have enough UPS to run my cable modem and firewall for 7 hours, but I know that the local telco central office has a whole bleeding floor full of batteries and a motor generator and an emergency disaster plan that involves priority allocation of gasoline trucks, and I don't have to pay for business-class internet service to benefit from all this.
Heck, given what "business class" costs here, I could pay for POTS and a VOIP second line and Internet and come out ahead.
VOIP - You're an alpha geek, you can make it reliable. All it takes is money.
POTS - It just works. And it's even cheap. And your grandmother can handle it.
I have to add that my ISDN service from SWB has been even less reliable. It's a dedicated point-to-point dial-on-demand between home and work, about as simple a scheme as possible, and I've still had problems. Oh, and when I call them about the problems, I have to spend ten minutes convincing them not to switch me over to their Internet people as soon as I say ISDN.
It's not that they're cable versus telco, it's that there's a century of telco culture behind "voice phone service is important, damnit", and phone guys willing to go the extra mile to make it work... but data and wireless? Nobody considers them critical, the way they do POTS.
I wouldn't switch to VOIP whether the IP bit was provided by the phone company, the cable company, the cellular company, or little green men from Mars. Not until they start taking IP as seriously as they do dialtone, anyway.
That's what Time Warner Roadrunner was trying to tell me when I was on hold for the THIRD TIME THIS WEEK because my cable had gone down from 2PM to 5PM.
"Hello," I said to the customer service representative, after I finally got through their new and exciting phone system that told me two times how to spend 15 minutes resetting the DVR I don't own, "Could you tell your management that having ads for your phone service when people are on hold trying to get their cable service back... on a phone they couldn't use because their cable service was out... is probably NOT going to win many new customers?"
I was in Houston when Alicia hit. A tornado took out the U-Haul storage place across the street. I had no power for 6 hours. But my phone worked, I could even get online (on a BBS, the Internet wasn't around yet) and leave a message for the folks I knew back at college. When the floods hit we lost power for half a day, of course there was no cable. But my phone worked, I could let my family know I was OK. This June a storm (and possibly another tornado) dropped someone else's fence on my roof and took mine in exchange. I had no power and no cable for several hours. But I could call up the power company and report the outage, and the insurance company to make a claim! I'm getting a partial rebate for July, because a bad splitter had packet-loss going to 85% every time the weather got hot, but I could still call the cable company to report it even if it took them two weeks to get someone out at a time I could be home.
Hell with dialling 911. I want a landline phone because I need Time Warner's repair service on speed-dial.
If you want commercial drivers in your kernel, you should be running an OS that doesn't apply the GPL to the kernel. If you want to write drivers for an open-source kernel, and you don't want to GPL the drivers, then you should write them for an OS that doesn't apply the GPL to the kernel.
What the world needs is an open source emulator that lets you run non-Linux drivers (BSD, Solaris, even Windows) in the Linux kernel. Since the interface you're emulating is not GPLed, your drivers won't need to be GPLed, even if the shim itself is GPLed.
Yes, I know this would be horribly difficult, but it only needs to be done once.
Now that I have a job, my only reasons not to buy and install a retail WinXP is because I go through just as much of a hassle as if I were to pirate it.
Buy it and then use the pirated copy.
That's what I did with Wizardry. I even copied the pirated copy over the original floppies, because the copy protection had rendered it unbootable.
Censorship is the use of governmental power to control speech and other forms of human expression.
Wikipedia is not authoritative. Hell, the Oxford English Dictionary isn't even authoritative, so an encyclopedia edited by whoever feels like stepping up to the plate and throwing a ball (or a stuffed bear, or whetever else they feel like the game needs right then) sure as heck isn't. If they'll let some random joe like myself edit Wikipedia, anonymously, with nothing more to identify myself than the IP address of a firewall that's got 150 people behind it (and they have) well, that's about as non-authorititive as you can get.
I could come up with a bunch of quotes to disprove your assertion, but I've gotta go to lunch, so rather than digging up the OED, I'll just ask you to consider the term "government censorship". Google gives us 72,000 hits for that specific term, so I hope you'll agree that it's in reasonably common use. Now, why is that so? What's the reason that the term "government censorship" exists? It can only be because there's censorship that isn't government censorship, so the term "government censorship" can be used to distinguish government censorship from non-government censorship.
What does Quicksilver have to do with this? I don't see how it could, even in principle, let me (for example) tab into the System Preferences toolbar and show all the preferences, instead of having to memorise Control-F5 or Command-L? What was unique about Windows (at least before Windows 95) is that you could manipulate all controls in any application with little more than the cursor keys, tab and backtab, alt, space, return, and escape. The difference between classic Windows and anything else was really amazing.
Alas, it didn't last. It really started with the Windows 9x shell and the Office apps, but these days while it's still better than anyone else it's not just automatic any more.
I often work without a mouse, and Windows is one of the better OSes in this regard.
No shit. I just said that. The problem is that being the best graphical user interface to use with a keyboard is such a low bar that Microsoft doesn't seem to feel it's necessary to really try any more. And starting with Windows 95, they've shown increasing signs that they've quit trying.
As for toolbars, everything on them should be available on the menus too
Mostly, yes, but that's not the point. The point to keyboard navigation is to make it easy and convenient to use the program, as presented, without a mouse. Having to dig through the menus to find something instead of tabbing to it and selecting it is counterproductive.
I mean, consider the options.
1. Include toolbars in the focus list.
They actually seemed to do this for Windows 3.x, you could keyboard through the file manager toolbar to select drives, for example.
Downside: you have one more control per toolbar or icon (depending on whether you treat them as a list or a collection of controls) to tab through.
Upside: all controls would be available whether they were in the menus or not. The user interface model remains consistent.
2. Exclude toolbars from the focus list.
Upside: It's marginally quicker to cycle through all the controls in a window, though since the toolbar is above the default focus most of the time you'll never need to tab through them.
Downside: Breaks the mental model of everyone who's become used to being able to use any control on the screen with the keyboard. Makes it easier for application developers to accidentally break keyboardability by leaving duplicates of toolbar controls in the menu.
Seems like an obvious decision to me. but what do I know, I'm just a user who really liked the Windows 3.x user interface and wishes Microsoft paid as much attention to users as they did in the '80s.
Windows is possibly the best OS for keyboard shortcuts, because it is the most consistent regardless of whichever application is running.
I would agree with this. In fact I just made the same argument... my problem is that every time Microsoft ships something new it gets less consistent, which is why I assumed this was more of the same.
Consider how we treat animals, I doubt we'll bat an eyelash
Most people seem to avoid considering animals as being self-aware in the sense that humans are. Whether that's true or not, if you had some kind of formal proof that a software component was self-aware in that sense... would that make a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Like hell it is.
300MB per month?
I've got more than 300MB in my download history just for this morning.
I know its not a media player - what I meant was, the control is modal. Either you are loading, or you have finished loading.
From a point of pure efficiency, I can see that argument, and if there was a cost to having multiple buttons... if we were building a physical object here... I could see a point to the efficiency argument. Buut we're not, so the question isn't "is it efficient", but "is it the right thing to do from a human-interface point of view"?
From that point of view this kind of alternation shouldn't just depend on whether the operation is modal, but on whether the operation is reversible and the two operations are complementary.
And they're not. Aborting a page load is not to opposite of resuming a page load. Aborting a page load isn't even reversible. It may not be possible, under some circumstances, to continue to the page that you would have reached if you hadn't aborted... this is actually common in the case of multi-stage transactions where the browser state and the server state have to match.
That is an awfully specific example. Does this happen a lot? Not to me anyways.
How do you know? If you're using a browser with separate stop and reload buttons (and you probably are, given that this is the normal state of affairs), you will never notice if you hit "stop" right at the end of the operation, because if you're a little too late you're hitting an inactive button and nothing happens.
The odds of you clicking stop (now reload) at the exact moment the page sets itself are pretty low, you have to admit.
The odds of doing in on any given click are pretty low. The odds of doing it at least once, over any reasonable period of time, are quite large.
Ultimately this is an argument about the meaning of a word. I say it means one thing and you disagree.
You say it means only one thing.
In French, you could go to the Academie Francais and get a firm ruling, and continue on to force a couple to change the name of their child because "Cerise" is not an approved name, and get boycott a store named "Le Pique Nique", and insist that "Computers" should be called "Ordinateurs".
This isn't French. It doesn't work that way.
You can use the word any way you want, but when you're arguing that an action isn't "censorship" because it's not being performed by a "government", you're not just using your personal definition of the word. You're trying to argue that because this isn't censhorship-as-defined-by-you it's not a bad thing. When you go on to talk about free speech in the context or a regulated public utility, it's clear that you're trying to justify censorship-in-the-broad-sense by defining the action as not-censorship.
The issue isn't "what's the definition of censorship". It's "should a public utility have the right to suppress opposing points of view". Government censorship is wrong not primarily because the government is doing it, but because the government is doing it and the government has the power to make its actions effective. And it's that power that makes government censorship a particularly odious restriction on speech.
If a government wants to restrict access to speech on the Internet, they either have to operate the internet service provider (as in China), or they have to be able to impose sanctions on a non-complying internet service provider (as in Germany). If the ISP (in this case, the telco) is allowed to restrict access to websites on any criteria it wants, that actually gives it MORE power than the government - which is at least nominally answerable to the public.
So, ultimately, it doesn't matter whether you call the action "censorship" or "restriction of speech" or "abomination" or "wakalixing". The bottom line is that what the telco was doing in this case was every bit as effective as "government censorship". Calling it "censorship", however you define it, is not making too strong a case by any means.
I've worked for Houston's Time Warner Cable call center...
If I've ever said anything to you that I might have cause to regret, I apologise. I know it's not your fault, but some days, well, I'm not a saint.
I agree with most of your points - except for this. Why is this a bad idea?
n eclick=true".
Because it's not a media player. The stop button is not a "stop playing" (or more properly "pause" button), and the reload button isn't a "start playing" ("resume" button). You don't typically hit stop and reload alternately, and hitting either of these things isn't really reversed by hitting the other...
You normally only use the "stop" button when something's wrong, the web page is taking too long to download, it's gotten hung up loading some embedded object that's screwing up, or otherwise you need to abort the operation, sometimes in a hurry.
If the "stop" button turns into a "reload" button", what happens when you're just a little too slow and you hit the "stop" button just as the page finishes loading?
Whoops, now you've hit the "reload" button instead. And whatever you wanted to prevent happening? Well, now it's going to happen all over again. And maybe even it's something that you really didn't want to do all over again, because it's got side-effects... maybe it's ".../cgi-bin/shopping.cgi?item=12345&action=buy&o
After enough of this kind of silliness I switched from Safari to Shiira.
The Mac has more keyboard shortcuts than Windows, but you'd have to talk to a power user to realize that.
The Mac also has more mouse buttons than Windows, but four of them are on the keyboard and only a power user can keep them straight.
These two points are not advantages for the Mac.
Moving the menu bar breaks the Windows standard user interface. Meanwhile, Firefox has followed the Windows standard user interface as completely as they can... sometimes to the detriment of non-Windows ports.
Also, moving the tab bar away from the window makes it harder to immediately identify which tab you're on.
Merged stop-and-reload is just plain daft. The only current browser I know that does this is Safari, and it's the biggest reason I use Shiira instead of Safari on Mac OS X. Is Microsoft copyng Apple's bad ideas again, like when they released the first version of Windows with cooperative multitasking despite having concurrent multitasking working first?
Both these problems can be avoided by using the HTML control from another application, as you can see by the screen-shot of Crazy Browser.
Merging the drop-downs into a single button is visually confusing and doesn't save any space. Putting some of your navigation controls on the opposite side of the address bar is also confusing.
All in all, I'd say the user interface is significantly less consistent and more confusing than IE5 or IE6. This is almost a step back to the early days of the web when browsers seemed to be in a contest to see which could be weirder.
PS: The search bar is just a copy of the search bar on every other browser out there, except the "select search engine" button is on the other side.
PPS: Microsoft can't avoid the reboot when it installs IE, because it's replacing a component that it's using all over the system... they need to kill and restart every GUI program on the system to move the old control out of the way.
Sharnig Stop and Refresh is a *GOOD* idea?
No, it's a crummy idea. Apple uses it in Safari, which is why when I use a Webkit/KHTML-based browser on Mac OS X I use Shiira.
Possibly Microsoft's using their classic method of copying Apple's ideas whether they're good or bad again?
I haven't reacted that way at any point.
That's the impression I'm getting from your continual arguments that the Linux packages+kernel route is the only way to build "a mainstream server/desktop OS".
A tiny stable core, and a bunch of ways to install apps do not a mainstream server/desktop OS make.
Um, that "tiny stable core" encompasses the entirety of a clean and effective implementation of the most influentual operating system on the planet today. With a couple of exceptions like VMS and IBM's mainframe-derived lines, every currently viable operating system can trace its roots back to the traditional UNIX source tree that's reflected in the BSD core.
The comparable core in Linux is just the kernel itself.
And there aren't "a bunch of ways to install apps". There's only one packaging model for installable applications in FreeBSD.
Linux treats the core specially, too. It just has a much smaller core.
I highly doubt there is no kernel-level code in OS-X for graphics, and it is certainly proprietary right now.
You're confusing "privileged mode" AKA "kernel mode" with "in the kernel". Mach isn't a real microkernel, but it does support the ability to run software in privileged mode without it being "linked in the kernel".
Of course it may not be possible to build a credible microkernel-style design based on Linux, given Linus opinions of microkernel operating systems and the hardcore traditionalism of Linux' design... which would be a bigger problem for Apple than the GPL.
MS dilikes the GPL, but has actually come out and said they like BSD on more than one occasion.
Microsoft says lots of stuff, but it's their actions that count. And their only package that uses a significant amount of real open-source software uses both BSD and GPL components.
In the end we'll get Linux with all the best features from AIX, HPUX, Irix.
I doubt it. SGI is pretty much moribund and is selling the IP they have left to the highest bidder, even when that's Microsoft. There's not much in HPUX that's worth saving. A whole lot of code in AIX is shared with IBM's very profitable mainframe and mini lines.
IBM and SGI have however released entire file systems which were formerly proprietary.
Like HFS+?
One great operating system is better than four good ones, IMO.
One operating system can't possibly fill all the niches. Linux is tied to a kernel design that works well for a certain class of problems, but it depends on Linus for continued development and Linus antipathy towards non-traditional kernels is legendary.
In fact, everything I can think of that they did release started out as open source.
Have you looked at the the actual code? Or are you just going by "what you heard"?
So while you were busy with your "Apple is good" tirade in response to something I didn't say, you are showing that you agree with me.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. My point is that the actions of the company using open source code are more important than the license you use. Microsoft and Apple are both using both GPL and BSDL code. The GPL hasn't led to Microsoft releasing anything, their own open source is strictly Windows-only. And Apple's released a flood of stuff whether it started out as BSDL, GPL, or they created it themselves.
I'm so happy for you, that your ISP has a UPS. I don't know if my cable company has a UPS, I know that I don't have enough UPS to run my cable modem and firewall for 7 hours, but I know that the local telco central office has a whole bleeding floor full of batteries and a motor generator and an emergency disaster plan that involves priority allocation of gasoline trucks, and I don't have to pay for business-class internet service to benefit from all this.
Heck, given what "business class" costs here, I could pay for POTS and a VOIP second line and Internet and come out ahead.
VOIP - You're an alpha geek, you can make it reliable. All it takes is money.
POTS - It just works. And it's even cheap. And your grandmother can handle it.
once 3G networks roll into your neighborhood cell towers, you can unplug completely.
And with the cellular airtime charges, you'll end up paying as much as if you'd bought Cable and DSL as backups to each other.
I have to add that my ISDN service from SWB has been even less reliable. It's a dedicated point-to-point dial-on-demand between home and work, about as simple a scheme as possible, and I've still had problems. Oh, and when I call them about the problems, I have to spend ten minutes convincing them not to switch me over to their Internet people as soon as I say ISDN.
It's not that they're cable versus telco, it's that there's a century of telco culture behind "voice phone service is important, damnit", and phone guys willing to go the extra mile to make it work... but data and wireless? Nobody considers them critical, the way they do POTS.
I wouldn't switch to VOIP whether the IP bit was provided by the phone company, the cable company, the cellular company, or little green men from Mars. Not until they start taking IP as seriously as they do dialtone, anyway.
VOIP is reliable enough for me.
That's what Time Warner Roadrunner was trying to tell me when I was on hold for the THIRD TIME THIS WEEK because my cable had gone down from 2PM to 5PM.
"Hello," I said to the customer service representative, after I finally got through their new and exciting phone system that told me two times how to spend 15 minutes resetting the DVR I don't own, "Could you tell your management that having ads for your phone service when people are on hold trying to get their cable service back... on a phone they couldn't use because their cable service was out... is probably NOT going to win many new customers?"
I was in Houston when Alicia hit. A tornado took out the U-Haul storage place across the street. I had no power for 6 hours. But my phone worked, I could even get online (on a BBS, the Internet wasn't around yet) and leave a message for the folks I knew back at college. When the floods hit we lost power for half a day, of course there was no cable. But my phone worked, I could let my family know I was OK. This June a storm (and possibly another tornado) dropped someone else's fence on my roof and took mine in exchange. I had no power and no cable for several hours. But I could call up the power company and report the outage, and the insurance company to make a claim! I'm getting a partial rebate for July, because a bad splitter had packet-loss going to 85% every time the weather got hot, but I could still call the cable company to report it even if it took them two weeks to get someone out at a time I could be home.
Hell with dialling 911. I want a landline phone because I need Time Warner's repair service on speed-dial.
It's the Quintuple Play! It's a wireless cable modem phone MUSIC PLAYER!
And it's edible, with Zero Carbs! Just don't nibble on your phone before your two year service agreement is up...
If you want commercial drivers in your kernel, you should be running an OS that doesn't apply the GPL to the kernel. If you want to write drivers for an open-source kernel, and you don't want to GPL the drivers, then you should write them for an OS that doesn't apply the GPL to the kernel.
What the world needs is an open source emulator that lets you run non-Linux drivers (BSD, Solaris, even Windows) in the Linux kernel. Since the interface you're emulating is not GPLed, your drivers won't need to be GPLed, even if the shim itself is GPLed.
Yes, I know this would be horribly difficult, but it only needs to be done once.
Now that I have a job, my only reasons not to buy and install a retail WinXP is because I go through just as much of a hassle as if I were to pirate it.
Buy it and then use the pirated copy.
That's what I did with Wizardry. I even copied the pirated copy over the original floppies, because the copy protection had rendered it unbootable.
IM is still relatively spam-free. Wait until it gets bogged down with spam.
Censorship is the use of governmental power to control speech and other forms of human expression.
Wikipedia is not authoritative. Hell, the Oxford English Dictionary isn't even authoritative, so an encyclopedia edited by whoever feels like stepping up to the plate and throwing a ball (or a stuffed bear, or whetever else they feel like the game needs right then) sure as heck isn't. If they'll let some random joe like myself edit Wikipedia, anonymously, with nothing more to identify myself than the IP address of a firewall that's got 150 people behind it (and they have) well, that's about as non-authorititive as you can get.
I could come up with a bunch of quotes to disprove your assertion, but I've gotta go to lunch, so rather than digging up the OED, I'll just ask you to consider the term "government censorship". Google gives us 72,000 hits for that specific term, so I hope you'll agree that it's in reasonably common use. Now, why is that so? What's the reason that the term "government censorship" exists? It can only be because there's censorship that isn't government censorship, so the term "government censorship" can be used to distinguish government censorship from non-government censorship.
How about that?
What does Quicksilver have to do with this? I don't see how it could, even in principle, let me (for example) tab into the System Preferences toolbar and show all the preferences, instead of having to memorise Control-F5 or Command-L? What was unique about Windows (at least before Windows 95) is that you could manipulate all controls in any application with little more than the cursor keys, tab and backtab, alt, space, return, and escape. The difference between classic Windows and anything else was really amazing.
Alas, it didn't last. It really started with the Windows 9x shell and the Office apps, but these days while it's still better than anyone else it's not just automatic any more.
I often work without a mouse, and Windows is one of the better OSes in this regard.
No shit. I just said that. The problem is that being the best graphical user interface to use with a keyboard is such a low bar that Microsoft doesn't seem to feel it's necessary to really try any more. And starting with Windows 95, they've shown increasing signs that they've quit trying.
As for toolbars, everything on them should be available on the menus too
Mostly, yes, but that's not the point. The point to keyboard navigation is to make it easy and convenient to use the program, as presented, without a mouse. Having to dig through the menus to find something instead of tabbing to it and selecting it is counterproductive.
I mean, consider the options.
1. Include toolbars in the focus list.
They actually seemed to do this for Windows 3.x, you could keyboard through the file manager toolbar to select drives, for example.
Downside: you have one more control per toolbar or icon (depending on whether you treat them as a list or a collection of controls) to tab through.
Upside: all controls would be available whether they were in the menus or not. The user interface model remains consistent.
2. Exclude toolbars from the focus list.
Upside: It's marginally quicker to cycle through all the controls in a window, though since the toolbar is above the default focus most of the time you'll never need to tab through them.
Downside: Breaks the mental model of everyone who's become used to being able to use any control on the screen with the keyboard. Makes it easier for application developers to accidentally break keyboardability by leaving duplicates of toolbar controls in the menu.
Seems like an obvious decision to me. but what do I know, I'm just a user who really liked the Windows 3.x user interface and wishes Microsoft paid as much attention to users as they did in the '80s.
Windows is possibly the best OS for keyboard shortcuts, because it is the most consistent regardless of whichever application is running.
I would agree with this. In fact I just made the same argument... my problem is that every time Microsoft ships something new it gets less consistent, which is why I assumed this was more of the same.
I don't want a G5 in my Mac mini. Too hot, too little work-per-clock. I want a Freescale MPC8641.
Agree on the core-image capable GPU. The 9550 in the new iBook would do.
Consider how we treat animals, I doubt we'll bat an eyelash
Most people seem to avoid considering animals as being self-aware in the sense that humans are. Whether that's true or not, if you had some kind of formal proof that a software component was self-aware in that sense... would that make a difference.
Sure you've not got a keyboard mapper installed?
Don't ask me, ask Paul Thurrot. I don't even have Windows Vista to try it on.