Not to say that I don't believe you, but do you have a source for these numbers? I'm in Hamilton, so I would imagine the situation in my city to be just about the same.
Maybe because that was one of the 'biggest' (gotta love the pun) problems with the first X-box ? It was considered -way- too big.
Who really had this problem? I have an X-box, and I really couldn't care less that it's 3 times the size of my playstation.. as long as it fits on a shelf in my entertainment center and has a nice black color scheme to match the rest of my components. Are these people carrying their X-boxes around with them or something? It's a console.. 95% of people bring it home, set it up, plug it in, and don't move it ever again.
If they want to continue to grow they must make the XBOX2 "moddable".
I think they're going to fight tooth and nail to make sure the XBOX2 is NOT moddable. They've traditionally sold the hardware at a loss, and made up for it in software. In their eyes, modchips are lost software revenue and only pirates use them.
I'm not a trained mathematician, but I still mostly understand the proof. It works by converting the n-degree-polynomial into an n-degree-differential equation, the solutions of which are identical to the original polynomial equation. A power series (for those rusty, this is an infinite sum) is then used (and made to converege with the use of a free parameter.. adding an infinite number of things does not always yield a finite sum, but sometimes it does) to approxomate the solutions.
I don't know about #1, I have not played with mouse gestures in Firefox. From my other experience, binding functions to keys is an area where Firefox is currently lacking.
#2 works just fine in Firefox, out of the box under both Linux and Windows.
#3 sounds interesting, any details as to how it works?
The Web Developer extension for Firefox has a Zoom feature (under Miscellanous, Zoom) that works just like the one you describe, scaling images and all.
Canada's system (the one I'm used to) is a little different from yours.
We have *1* person (the DRO) who is actually allowed to open the voting box, pull out the votes, unfold them, read them, and put them into the envelope to be sent off. This person has sworn an oath of secrecy and of integrity, and is not allowed to be a present or past member of any political party.
There is an additional person (the Poll Clerk) who marks the votes with a checkmark onto a huge sheet of grid paper. IIRC, this person also cannot be a member of any party.
The other people at the counting table (up to 2 representatives per party per poll) are just there to make sure the counting is fair... they obviously belong to a party.
So finding neutral people to count the votes really isn't that hard.. and the people scrutinising the vote need not be neutral.
Voting for a party does not make you a "member" in this sense (it makes you a supporter), because you cannot be asked by gouvernment you who you've voted for in the past (at least in Canada). Contributing time or money on the other hand, does make you a supporter, and thus makes you ineligible to count votes.
Speaking of downloading movies and TV from the web, here's something we noticed. While we'll often hunt for a movie or TV show on BitTorrent, it's usually faster to just use the Media Center PC guide and search for a movie or show. With 200 channels on cable there's a good chance what you're looking for might be playing somewhere soon. Then we just set it to record and automatically transfer it over to the PMC.
They can keep their PMC/MCP and other Windows Media enabled garbage. I'll stick to my BitTorrent, MPEG(1|2|4) and XBox Media Center setup where what I want is either downloading right now, or will be downloading soon, regardless of when it's on or if that channel is available to me or not. Not to mention in 10 years, I'm pretty sure we'll still have MPEG decoders.. I can't say the same about WMP and it's array of codecs.
So.. um.. people can't support a political party and still do their job without prejudice?
prejudice.. I don't think that word means what you think it means..
I don't know how it works in the USA, but I've worked several elections up here in Canada. Not only are people wearing any party symbols not allowed in the voting room, any past or present member of a political party is not allowed to work in the room, period.
It has nothing to do with prejudice (as there's no pre-judging going on. when you donate your time/money to a political party, you are their supporter, plain and simple), and everything to do with removing any possible conflict of interest.
These people have to handle your ballots for fucks sakes, they should NOT be allowed to support ANY party if you want an honest election. Then again, since when has the USA had honest elections..
The smaller memory footprint which is ~6MB instead of what they claim is ~30MB for Word but which I claim is only ~17MB according to my tasklist
I've run a few tests with Office 2003's version of MS Word (v11.5604.5606), empty document.. I did this 3 times and report the full range of results:
On startup: 15-26.5mb physical, 16mb virtual Once minimized: 0.8-1.5mb physical, 15.9mb virtual Once restored: 7-9.4mb physical, 15.6mb virtual
Starting to type a document caused memory usage to jump to about 13mb physical (and used about 10% of my XP2400+), but minimizing and restoring makes it go back to normal.
Weird.. some kind of swapout thing is going on I think.
Forgive me, I can't help but join this little flamewar.
I have a cheap-o Koss MP3 CD player that I paid something like $50 for. To accompany it, I paid $10 for a 24-CD carrying case. That gives me 24*0.7 ~= 17gb of portable storage, albeit in a bulkier form factor (but I don't care, it sits in my backpack). On 2 Ni-MH rechargeable batteries, my CD player runs a good 20 hours. Transfer rates are pretty good too.. 48X CDRW is ~7.2mb/bsec, and once it's burned I can swap a CD in about 5 seconds (open lid, take out old disk, put in new disk, close lid).. a transfer rate of ~140mb/sec.
So I got to thinking, this download information that the tracker gives, is it necessary?
No, it's not necessary for the tracker to report this information publically. The stock (official) tracker does NOT do this.
Would there be a way to seed that list with random cable modem ip addresses and torrents, without screwing up the bittorrent network too much?
This would greatly decrease the effectiveness of torrents.. the RIAA are a peer like any other peer. If you hurt their ability to gather IPs, you also hurt everyone else's.
Disclaimer: IAABCA (I _AM_ A BitTorrent Client Author)
It is -trivially- easy for the *AA to get a) your IP b) what files you're downloading c) how much you've downloaded d) how much you've uploaded
And they can do all this without ever connecting to your computer... IP blockers are -USELESS- in this case, the Azerus people are wasting their time creating a false sense of security for their users.
All the above information is gained from the tracker level. Many even have a nice web-based interface to this information. (See, for example, here, login may be required)
If you're in a country where P2P is illegal (I'm in Canada, all my development and downloading goes on here, and so far the consumer is winning the war here) then don't download illegal material with BT, they're watching, and there's nothing you can do.
Regarding the guy who said "just don't upload and they can't do anything".. BT works on tit-for-tat. You send a block, you get (usually) 3 back. Sometimes a client will take pity on you, and send you a free block (to test how fast it can send to you, and if you will send back or not). In other words.. no uploading == very, very slow downloading, if any at all, which negates the purpose of BT.
BitTorrent is NOT a protocl for spreading w4r3z. It is for spreading large legitimate files in a situation where the author doesn't have access to the resources to spread the files himself.
Because i've got a laptop with a two button pad:) I'll use the ctrl-click thing sometimes, but other times i don't want to bother with the keyboard. The RadialContext thing sounds weird, but i'll take a look at it. [snip] Sure they do! I used to have six or eight IE windows open all the time, now i have 20 or 30 tabs open all the time:) Besides, it seems a bit silly to say "Everyone should use program X because it has feature Y!... Oh no! Stop using feature Y so much!"
It sounds like you should look into the SingleWindow extension, as it will probably suit your browsing style nicely:)
I don't want a "feature" that is sometimes a nuiscance =P The XUL thing sounds like what i want, but what XUL file? Searching the Program Files directory shows several.XULs in Netscape\res\samples, but nothing in the Mozilla Firefox folder.
It appears firefox is now compling XULs into a form which cannot be edited:( You'll likely have to find the source for the skin you're using, and edit that. Don't ask me where or how, this is beyond me.
I like to be able to easily see how many files are downloading and how far each one has left to go while doing other stuff
I've heard this particular (and very valid) complaint before.. and I could have sworn there was a way to disable the download manager. This is definitely a must-have setting for v1.0
That is both sad and silly. Why bother showing the icons in the bookmark folder if they don't save them?
Bugzilla link (they don't allow direct linking from slashdot): http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252540
This seems to be a pretty elusive bug.. but the icons are SUPPOSED to save.
This would be almost entirely useless for anyone who types using any method other then hunt-and-peck.
I do _not_ want a keyboard that reconfigures itself.. I "know" where all the keys on my keyboard are, if they were to move around or change constantly I'd go crazy.
Not to mention I need the tactile feedback for touch typing.. or my wpm drops to less then half because I no longer "know" when I've made a mistake.
Mozilla doesn't multitask very well. While mail is downloading, browsing stalls for tens of seconds.
Use Thunderbird for e-mail, Firefox for browsing. Seperate apps, no multitasking problems.
Sometimes it goes into long compute loops.
Haven't seen firefox do this.. it renders damn quickly.
"XUL.mfl" becomes corrupted after crashes, and must be deleted before Mozilla is usable again.
I've never heard of the file, since my firefox has never corrupted it on me..
Big mail folders choke the mail system.
I'm currently storing somewhere to the order of 15,000 messages in thunderbird and performance is amazing. Searching is literally instant when compared to Outlook Express. It does take 4-5 seconds to initialize the junk filter when the first downloaded message comes in (I have my filter trained fairly heavily), but other then that, it's fast.
When you right click on a link it lists "open in new window" before "open in new tab" how do i switch the order of those two?
Why not just middle-click the link? Alternatively, you can use an extension like RadialContext to completely replace the right click menu with something easy to navigate and useful.
How do i get rid of the "x" box on the right side of the tabs that closses the current tab? It's annoying and i keep pressing it by mistake.
Maybe that means you're keeping too many tabs open? Tabs are a useful organization feature, but they do not replace multiple windows..
How do i get rid of the "close other tabs" option when i right click on a tab? I sometimes hit it by mistake when trying to select "close tabs." (Okay, those last two were issues in Netscape as well, but i'd still like to know how to fix them.)
LMAO, this is what that red 'X' on the side you 'accidentally' hit is for..failing that, you can edit the XUL file
The message "Download Complete" that slides up from the bottom of the screen is _really_ annoying, how do i turn it off? _Nothing_ should be moving around the desktop on it's own!
Go to about:config, the setting is browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete.. set it to false.
The whole grouped together downloads thing is annoying, how do i get it to show one download box with percentage in the task bar for each file i am downlading?
I thought there was a setting for this, but I cannot seem to find it. Personally I love the single-window download approach.
Sometimes there's an error and a page without an icon gets associated with the icon of another page. How do i clear out the icon from a bookmark?
I've never had this happen.. but you can restart firefox to clear the icon cache.
Is it supposed to save the icons permenatly?
As far as I can tell, no. It would be nice if they'd stick around though.. I like icons.
90% of the country owns only 29% of the wealth. Once you have a lot of money, it becomes easier and easier to make more of it... and people have a tendency to get greedy when lots of money is involved, and start to do unethical things.
I agree with the grandparent poster, the rich do not deserve the same protections as the little guy, because the little guy doesn't have the power that the rich have. Too bad it's never happening, the little guy cannot afford to buy the laws necessary to level the playing field..
Yes.. I use Mandrake and it has an excellent package manager (rpmdrake) built on top of urpmi.. It takes a bit of configuring, but once you set your package repositories up, it works great and resolves dependencies automagically.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to say that I don't believe you, but do you have a source for these numbers? I'm in Hamilton, so I would imagine the situation in my city to be just about the same.
Maybe because that was one of the 'biggest' (gotta love the pun) problems with the first X-box ? It was considered -way- too big.
Who really had this problem? I have an X-box, and I really couldn't care less that it's 3 times the size of my playstation.. as long as it fits on a shelf in my entertainment center and has a nice black color scheme to match the rest of my components. Are these people carrying their X-boxes around with them or something? It's a console.. 95% of people bring it home, set it up, plug it in, and don't move it ever again.
If they want to continue to grow they must make the XBOX2 "moddable".
I think they're going to fight tooth and nail to make sure the XBOX2 is NOT moddable. They've traditionally sold the hardware at a loss, and made up for it in software. In their eyes, modchips are lost software revenue and only pirates use them.
Penn & Teller - Bullshit
Season 2, Episode 5 (#18 on the above linked page) - Recycling
Available on your p2p network of choice.
I'm not a trained mathematician, but I still mostly understand the proof. It works by converting the n-degree-polynomial into an n-degree-differential equation, the solutions of which are identical to the original polynomial equation. A power series (for those rusty, this is an infinite sum) is then used (and made to converege with the use of a free parameter .. adding an infinite number of things does not always yield a finite sum, but sometimes it does) to approxomate the solutions.
There's really nothing new here..
8x DVD-R/+R is ~10.5mb/sec.. I've seen 16x drives, but not 16x media.
I second the nomination!
Much thanks to Donald Becker for implementing cheap network card chipset (Realtek) support under linux!
Wide Girl Friend
:)
You know, the kind that eats lots of.. cpu cycles
I don't know about #1, I have not played with mouse gestures in Firefox. From my other experience, binding functions to keys is an area where Firefox is currently lacking.
#2 works just fine in Firefox, out of the box under both Linux and Windows.
#3 sounds interesting, any details as to how it works?
The Web Developer extension for Firefox has a Zoom feature (under Miscellanous, Zoom) that works just like the one you describe, scaling images and all.
Canada's system (the one I'm used to) is a little different from yours.
We have *1* person (the DRO) who is actually allowed to open the voting box, pull out the votes, unfold them, read them, and put them into the envelope to be sent off. This person has sworn an oath of secrecy and of integrity, and is not allowed to be a present or past member of any political party.
There is an additional person (the Poll Clerk) who marks the votes with a checkmark onto a huge sheet of grid paper. IIRC, this person also cannot be a member of any party.
The other people at the counting table (up to 2 representatives per party per poll) are just there to make sure the counting is fair... they obviously belong to a party.
So finding neutral people to count the votes really isn't that hard.. and the people scrutinising the vote need not be neutral.
Voting for a party does not make you a "member" in this sense (it makes you a supporter), because you cannot be asked by gouvernment you who you've voted for in the past (at least in Canada). Contributing time or money on the other hand, does make you a supporter, and thus makes you ineligible to count votes.
Speaking of downloading movies and TV from the web, here's something we noticed. While we'll often hunt for a movie or TV show on BitTorrent, it's usually faster to just use the Media Center PC guide and search for a movie or show. With 200 channels on cable there's a good chance what you're looking for might be playing somewhere soon. Then we just set it to record and automatically transfer it over to the PMC.
They can keep their PMC/MCP and other Windows Media enabled garbage. I'll stick to my BitTorrent, MPEG(1|2|4) and XBox Media Center setup where what I want is either downloading right now, or will be downloading soon, regardless of when it's on or if that channel is available to me or not. Not to mention in 10 years, I'm pretty sure we'll still have MPEG decoders.. I can't say the same about WMP and it's array of codecs.
So .. um .. people can't support a political party and still do their job without prejudice?
prejudice.. I don't think that word means what you think it means..
I don't know how it works in the USA, but I've worked several elections up here in Canada. Not only are people wearing any party symbols not allowed in the voting room, any past or present member of a political party is not allowed to work in the room, period.
It has nothing to do with prejudice (as there's no pre-judging going on. when you donate your time/money to a political party, you are their supporter, plain and simple), and everything to do with removing any possible conflict of interest.
These people have to handle your ballots for fucks sakes, they should NOT be allowed to support ANY party if you want an honest election. Then again, since when has the USA had honest elections..
First paragraph of TFA:
"Sunbird is the new cross-platform calendar application from the Mozilla foundation"
There ain't no iCal on Win32 nor Linux.
And as far as mozilla ripping off netscape, I think you have it backwards.. netscape is built on top of mozilla.
The smaller memory footprint which is ~6MB instead of what they claim is ~30MB for Word but which I claim is only ~17MB according to my tasklist
I've run a few tests with Office 2003's version of MS Word (v11.5604.5606), empty document.. I did this 3 times and report the full range of results:
On startup: 15-26.5mb physical, 16mb virtual
Once minimized: 0.8-1.5mb physical, 15.9mb virtual
Once restored: 7-9.4mb physical, 15.6mb virtual
Starting to type a document caused memory usage to jump to about 13mb physical (and used about 10% of my XP2400+), but minimizing and restoring makes it go back to normal.
Weird.. some kind of swapout thing is going on I think.
Forgive me, I can't help but join this little flamewar.
I have a cheap-o Koss MP3 CD player that I paid something like $50 for. To accompany it, I paid $10 for a 24-CD carrying case. That gives me 24*0.7 ~= 17gb of portable storage, albeit in a bulkier form factor (but I don't care, it sits in my backpack). On 2 Ni-MH rechargeable batteries, my CD player runs a good 20 hours. Transfer rates are pretty good too.. 48X CDRW is ~7.2mb/bsec, and once it's burned I can swap a CD in about 5 seconds (open lid, take out old disk, put in new disk, close lid).. a transfer rate of ~140mb/sec.
So I got to thinking, this download information that the tracker gives, is it necessary?
No, it's not necessary for the tracker to report this information publically. The stock (official) tracker does NOT do this.
Would there be a way to seed that list with random cable modem ip addresses and torrents, without screwing up the bittorrent network too much?
This would greatly decrease the effectiveness of torrents.. the RIAA are a peer like any other peer. If you hurt their ability to gather IPs, you also hurt everyone else's.
I'm going to debunk this once and for all..
... IP blockers are -USELESS- in this case, the Azerus people are wasting their time creating a false sense of security for their users.
Disclaimer: IAABCA (I _AM_ A BitTorrent Client Author)
It is -trivially- easy for the *AA to get
a) your IP
b) what files you're downloading
c) how much you've downloaded
d) how much you've uploaded
And they can do all this without ever connecting to your computer
All the above information is gained from the tracker level. Many even have a nice web-based interface to this information. (See, for example, here, login may be required)
If you're in a country where P2P is illegal (I'm in Canada, all my development and downloading goes on here, and so far the consumer is winning the war here) then don't download illegal material with BT, they're watching, and there's nothing you can do.
Regarding the guy who said "just don't upload and they can't do anything".. BT works on tit-for-tat. You send a block, you get (usually) 3 back. Sometimes a client will take pity on you, and send you a free block (to test how fast it can send to you, and if you will send back or not). In other words.. no uploading == very, very slow downloading, if any at all, which negates the purpose of BT.
BitTorrent is NOT a protocl for spreading w4r3z. It is for spreading large legitimate files in a situation where the author doesn't have access to the resources to spread the files himself.
Because i've got a laptop with a two button pad :) I'll use the ctrl-click thing sometimes, but other times i don't want to bother with the keyboard. The RadialContext thing sounds weird, but i'll take a look at it. :) Besides, it seems a bit silly to say "Everyone should use program X because it has feature Y! ... Oh no! Stop using feature Y so much!"
:)
.XULs in Netscape\res\samples, but nothing in the Mozilla Firefox folder.
:( You'll likely have to find the source for the skin you're using, and edit that. Don't ask me where or how, this is beyond me.
0
[snip]
Sure they do! I used to have six or eight IE windows open all the time, now i have 20 or 30 tabs open all the time
It sounds like you should look into the SingleWindow extension, as it will probably suit your browsing style nicely
I don't want a "feature" that is sometimes a nuiscance =P The XUL thing sounds like what i want, but what XUL file? Searching the Program Files directory shows several
It appears firefox is now compling XULs into a form which cannot be edited
I like to be able to easily see how many files are downloading and how far each one has left to go while doing other stuff
I've heard this particular (and very valid) complaint before.. and I could have sworn there was a way to disable the download manager. This is definitely a must-have setting for v1.0
That is both sad and silly. Why bother showing the icons in the bookmark folder if they don't save them?
Bugzilla link (they don't allow direct linking from slashdot): http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25254
This seems to be a pretty elusive bug.. but the icons are SUPPOSED to save.
This would be almost entirely useless for anyone who types using any method other then hunt-and-peck.
I do _not_ want a keyboard that reconfigures itself.. I "know" where all the keys on my keyboard are, if they were to move around or change constantly I'd go crazy.
Not to mention I need the tactile feedback for touch typing.. or my wpm drops to less then half because I no longer "know" when I've made a mistake.
.. and so does CIBC.
Mozilla doesn't multitask very well. While mail is downloading, browsing stalls for tens of seconds.
Use Thunderbird for e-mail, Firefox for browsing. Seperate apps, no multitasking problems.
Sometimes it goes into long compute loops.
Haven't seen firefox do this.. it renders damn quickly.
"XUL.mfl" becomes corrupted after crashes, and must be deleted before Mozilla is usable again.
I've never heard of the file, since my firefox has never corrupted it on me..
Big mail folders choke the mail system.
I'm currently storing somewhere to the order of 15,000 messages in thunderbird and performance is amazing. Searching is literally instant when compared to Outlook Express. It does take 4-5 seconds to initialize the junk filter when the first downloaded message comes in (I have my filter trained fairly heavily), but other then that, it's fast.
I can help you with a few of theses:
When you right click on a link it lists "open in new window" before "open in new tab" how do i switch the order of those two?
Why not just middle-click the link? Alternatively, you can use an extension like RadialContext to completely replace the right click menu with something easy to navigate and useful.
How do i get rid of the "x" box on the right side of the tabs that closses the current tab? It's annoying and i keep pressing it by mistake.
Maybe that means you're keeping too many tabs open? Tabs are a useful organization feature, but they do not replace multiple windows..
How do i get rid of the "close other tabs" option when i right click on a tab? I sometimes hit it by mistake when trying to select "close tabs." (Okay, those last two were issues in Netscape as well, but i'd still like to know how to fix them.)
LMAO, this is what that red 'X' on the side you 'accidentally' hit is for..failing that, you can edit the XUL file
The message "Download Complete" that slides up from the bottom of the screen is _really_ annoying, how do i turn it off? _Nothing_ should be moving around the desktop on it's own!
Go to about:config, the setting is browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete.. set it to false.
The whole grouped together downloads thing is annoying, how do i get it to show one download box with percentage in the task bar for each file i am downlading?
I thought there was a setting for this, but I cannot seem to find it. Personally I love the single-window download approach.
Sometimes there's an error and a page without an icon gets associated with the icon of another page. How do i clear out the icon from a bookmark?
I've never had this happen.. but you can restart firefox to clear the icon cache.
Is it supposed to save the icons permenatly?
As far as I can tell, no. It would be nice if they'd stick around though.. I like icons.
In the land of the free, where being rich is a punishable offense
Yes, it should be punishable, but no more then a business holding a monopoly is punished and for much the same reason: to ensure fair competition.
Here's the problem: [in the United states] the top 1% own 38.1% of the wealth in the country. [snip] Ninety percent of the country owns a mere 29.1%.
90% of the country owns only 29% of the wealth. Once you have a lot of money, it becomes easier and easier to make more of it... and people have a tendency to get greedy when lots of money is involved, and start to do unethical things.
I agree with the grandparent poster, the rich do not deserve the same protections as the little guy, because the little guy doesn't have the power that the rich have. Too bad it's never happening, the little guy cannot afford to buy the laws necessary to level the playing field..
Have RPM distros gotten better?
Yes.. I use Mandrake and it has an excellent package manager (rpmdrake) built on top of urpmi.. It takes a bit of configuring, but once you set your package repositories up, it works great and resolves dependencies automagically.