I guess I have to concede that I probably wouldn't have praised that comment if I didn't agree with it. But honestly, so far as I can be objective, I thought I was calling it clear-headed because I found it insightful. I didn't mean just to praise it because it supported something I'd already concluded. Though, admittedly, it did.
I don't know offhand what it was that Clinton did that defied the UN; I'd be genuinely interested to know. What I can tell you is that, being British, I knew nothing much about Bush before he came to power, and after 11th September 2001 I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Since then I'm afraid his actions - rather any predisposition of mine - have led me to conclude that my faith was very much misplaced.
Oh God, I'm going to get sucked into an Iraq argument on an old thread nobody else will ever read, aren't I...
Anyway, I don't know first-hand about the polls (I wasn't there), so I won't argue that point. All I'll say is that yes, the US has done a lot of excellent work in support of UN resolutions; but I don't believe that gives it any authority to invade and occupy Iraq against the will of the UN!
From http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/FUD.html:
FUD:/fuhd/, n.
Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.
[In 2003, SCO sued IBM in an action which, among other things, alleged SCO's proprietary control of Linux. The SCO suit rapidly became infamous for the number and magnitude of falsehoods alleged in SCO's filings. In October 2003, SCO's lawyers filed a memorandum in which they actually had the temerity to link to the web version of this entry in furtherance of their claims. Whilst we appreciate the compliment of being treated as an authority, we can return it only by observing that SCO has become a nest of liars and thieves compared to which IBM at its historic worst looked positively angelic. Any judge or law clerk reading this should surf through to my collected resources on this topic for the appalling details. -- ESR]
I'd rather pay $10 a year for unlimited searches. Often my first few searches just turn up Kelkoo-type crap, and it takes a few goes to come up with a working query. That's annoying enough as it is, without my having to pay for it!
I disagree entirely. I used to use Outlook, with SpamBayes as my spam filter. The Thunderbird spam filter is far, far less effective. I have a suspicion it doesn't read email headers or something. All I can say for sure is that after training SpamBayes for two weeks I used to get maybe one email a week in my "suspected spam" folder. Then I moved to TB's built-in spam filter, and since then I get more like three spams a day delivered straight to my inbox. Not good. If this new version doesn't fix that I'm just going to go back to SpamBayes, even though I'll have to run it as a separate process.
I agree, it's definitely a step backwards. I actually suspect there's been some quiet politics going on here. IMO Firefox used to have a beautiful interface; the people responsible for it were clearly very talented designers who knew what they were doing. It's hard to imagine that those people would genuinely think this ugly thing was so much better it should replace that as the default theme. I suspect there may have been other forces at work.
That's cool. It'll be nice not to have to clear out my Yahoo! inbox every week. This will probably stop me migrating. After all everyone already knows my @yahoo.com email address.
However, at some point my 100Mb box will be full, and I'll want to get it down to, say 50Mb. At which point I very much hope there'll be some decent new tools for bulk deletion. The idea of trying to free up 50Mb by clicking through page after page of email going "select... delete..." does not appeal.
screw the U.N.,that'll be the day when those pricks run our show.Its just made up of countries who have banded together with the intent of milking the U.S. for money and help while excercising control over our way of life
There is NO evidence that Iraq was involved in the events of 11th September 2001.
GWB's pretext for invading Iraq was that it wasn't honouring various UN resolutions. That was a hugely presumptuous argument: if someone's breaching UN resolutions then it's up to the UN to decide how and whether to respond. Not individual members.
In fact, the international community made it clear that it didn't believe there was an urgent need to invade Iraq. Yet GWB invaded anyway, while, incredibly, claiming he was "enacting the will of the Security Council."
I've heard Americans argue that opposition to the invasion was influenced by vested interests. That's a fair argument for scrutinising the decision-making process more carefully. But it's not acceptable for UN members to simply disregard the views of other members on grounds of doubting their objectivity. If it were then we could look forward to the imminent invasion of Israel by any number of nations. After all, that country is in breach of several UN resolutions, and many more that were defeated only by a US veto.
Of course the attack on the World Trade Centre warranted a response. But, given the fanatical and nebulous nature of the enemy, that response needed to be thoughtful and pragmatic. Bush has absolutely failed to rise to the challenge. His arrogant and belligerent foreign policy has stirred up far more hatred of the west than ever existed beforehand; and his diplomatic failings have set the cause of world peace back by at least 20 years. Kim Jong-Il (for example) now knows that a hostile power might try to invade and overthrow him at any time, with no regard for international law. What effect do you think that has on his strategic planning? I rather doubt he's decommissioning missles.
Right now you're saying "good thing we went to war." I hope for all our sakes you don't have to find out how wrong you are.
If SpamBayes filtered a legit message in with the spam, how would you know about it?
Short answer: because I am very distrustful of technology, and I do actually skim through my spam-box every so often just in case.:)
However, one reason it never came up is that SpamBayes has a very graceful response to email it's not quite sure of. It puts emails below a certain (user-adjustable) confidence threshold in a "suspected spam" bin, for you to review at your convenience. After the first few days actual spam almost never ended up in here, but it was very good for catching email from, e.g. new mailing lists that I'd just signed up for (which Thunderbird 0.6 simply dismisses as junk).
To be fair, yes, I should have taken this into account when making the claim you quote. But y'know.
I really don't understand why this is still a live issue. When I used to use Outlook I used SpamBayes to filter my spam and within a few days it was catching 99.99% of my spam. That's obviously a made-up figure, but that's how it felt. I never missed a single real mail, and after a few weeks I don't think a single spam ended up in my inbox.
Then I moved to Thunderbird, and suddenly obvious spam is regularly ending up in my inbox, despite several weeks' training. Don't get me wrong, it's a great mail client, but I don't see why it's so hard to implement something that's already been done perfectly in more than one open-source project?
Psst... the guy you're replying to agrees with you. He was responding to an earlier post suggesting that IBM should have filed this motion after a month, rather than waiting a year.
Dunno where the guy you're replying to is from, but here in Britain it's normal to consider a group of people - even one with a singular name - as plural. E.g. "Google are launching a new service", "Manchester United are set to win the FA Cup", "the Labour Party are trailing in the polls". Etc. etc.
Heh... funny you should say that! I also had a Celeron 300A, and it's still running happily at 450MHz to this day - though nowadays it's been demoted to serving as an internet gateway for my home LAN.
However, in this particular case I suspect the answer is no, because at the time the 300A was launched, 450MHz was WAY up at the top end of the scale - I don't think there was even a Pentium II available at that speed at the time. Plus it turned out that there never was a Celeron 450 (there was a 450MHz PII, but ISTR that for some reason the Celerons went from 400MHz to 466MHz). So I suspect that may just have been a lucky side-effect of high-quality manufacture....
I would question the feasibility of taking hardware designed for single-layer disks
Just a toy hypothesis: it could be that these drives are in fact internally identical to the dual-layer burners, and that it's only the firmware they ship with that's "designed for single-layer disks." Without a pair of units to compare I naturally can't test this theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if NEC had found it cost-effective to make all the drive units the same, and just charge a premium for the version with "unlocked" firmware. I'm sure someone will remind me when Intel did something similar with one of their processors - was it the 386SX?
I remember "overclocking" my 4x speed Ricoh CD writer to 6x speed using hacked firmware. Ricoh posted no end of dire warnings, but it worked, perfectly, forever (well, until a 6x speed writer was of no use to anyone any more).
It's true that these hacked drives do sound like they're prone to strange behaviour; but from the nature of the flakiness that sounds like the firmware isn't quite there yet rather than being a laser problem (e.g. the hardware no longer working as IDE Slave).
Just thinking aloud.
Re:Applications
on
GPS for GBA
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Dude, do you know how GPS works? A GPS unit on the ground listens to the signals from a couple of different GPS satellites and uses the information in those signals to triangulate its own position relative to the satellites (that's a very simplified explanation, but that's basically how it works). The satellites don't "find" you or "tell you where you are." They just beam messages down to the surface. They have no idea where, or by whom, those messages are being received.
Re:GPS for the Parent
on
GPS for GBA
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Hey... I'm on Windows and my antivirus software updates itself while I'm asleep. My firewall hasn't needed an upgrade in two years - why would it? I do run anti-spyware software every so often, but since I use Mozilla and a recent version of Outlook, it never finds anything. My anti-spam software is SpamBayes, so keeping it current is just a case of hitting "this is spam" on the very occasional piece of junk that makes it into my inbox (and you'd equally have to do that on a Mac anyway). As for keeping the OS up to date - I get a little notification in my system tray when there's a new critical update, and I just have to click on it to download and install the new patch.
And that's all the demands it makes. I certainly don't consider that costs me $130 a year.
They screwed up type preview (is the ability to arrow down through the fonts and have them update on the type you've put in the box and are actually putting in the graphic really something you want to take away?
No, which is why you can still do this - only now the type actually appears in your composition, rather than in a separate requester, which I think is a major improvement.
Plus, I don't know where you're getting "150Mb+" from; my Windows Task Manager is right now reporting Photoshop CS as having a memory footprint of 34,076k.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I have to concede that I probably wouldn't have praised that comment if I didn't agree with it. But honestly, so far as I can be objective, I thought I was calling it clear-headed because I found it insightful. I didn't mean just to praise it because it supported something I'd already concluded. Though, admittedly, it did.
I don't know offhand what it was that Clinton did that defied the UN; I'd be genuinely interested to know. What I can tell you is that, being British, I knew nothing much about Bush before he came to power, and after 11th September 2001 I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Since then I'm afraid his actions - rather any predisposition of mine - have led me to conclude that my faith was very much misplaced.
Hey, we Brits aren't any better. We changed "by God" to "egad", "God's wounds" to "zounds" and "God's hooks" to "gadzooks".
Oh God, I'm going to get sucked into an Iraq argument on an old thread nobody else will ever read, aren't I...
Anyway, I don't know first-hand about the polls (I wasn't there), so I won't argue that point. All I'll say is that yes, the US has done a lot of excellent work in support of UN resolutions; but I don't believe that gives it any authority to invade and occupy Iraq against the will of the UN!
Man I wish I could mod you up. That's the most clear-headed thing I've read on this subject in a long time.
Why not ask the author of the memo?
:
/fuhd/, n.
From http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/FUD.html
FUD:
Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.
[In 2003, SCO sued IBM in an action which, among other things, alleged SCO's proprietary control of Linux. The SCO suit rapidly became infamous for the number and magnitude of falsehoods alleged in SCO's filings. In October 2003, SCO's lawyers filed a memorandum in which they actually had the temerity to link to the web version of this entry in furtherance of their claims. Whilst we appreciate the compliment of being treated as an authority, we can return it only by observing that SCO has become a nest of liars and thieves compared to which IBM at its historic worst looked positively angelic. Any judge or law clerk reading this should surf through to my collected resources on this topic for the appalling details. -- ESR]
I'd rather pay $10 a year for unlimited searches. Often my first few searches just turn up Kelkoo-type crap, and it takes a few goes to come up with a working query. That's annoying enough as it is, without my having to pay for it!
I disagree entirely. I used to use Outlook, with SpamBayes as my spam filter. The Thunderbird spam filter is far, far less effective. I have a suspicion it doesn't read email headers or something. All I can say for sure is that after training SpamBayes for two weeks I used to get maybe one email a week in my "suspected spam" folder. Then I moved to TB's built-in spam filter, and since then I get more like three spams a day delivered straight to my inbox. Not good. If this new version doesn't fix that I'm just going to go back to SpamBayes, even though I'll have to run it as a separate process.
I agree, it's definitely a step backwards. I actually suspect there's been some quiet politics going on here. IMO Firefox used to have a beautiful interface; the people responsible for it were clearly very talented designers who knew what they were doing. It's hard to imagine that those people would genuinely think this ugly thing was so much better it should replace that as the default theme. I suspect there may have been other forces at work.
Is that really necessary? I just stick a couple of ""s in the middle of my domain name.
That's cool. It'll be nice not to have to clear out my Yahoo! inbox every week. This will probably stop me migrating. After all everyone already knows my @yahoo.com email address.
However, at some point my 100Mb box will be full, and I'll want to get it down to, say 50Mb. At which point I very much hope there'll be some decent new tools for bulk deletion. The idea of trying to free up 50Mb by clicking through page after page of email going "select... delete..." does not appeal.
If you want the US out of the UN, does that then mean you believe countries should simply be free to act independently and unilaterally?
screw the U.N.,that'll be the day when those pricks run our show.Its just made up of countries who have banded together with the intent of milking the U.S. for money and help while excercising control over our way of life
Indeed. By the way, remind me where it's based?
Dear Christ.
There is NO evidence that Iraq was involved in the events of 11th September 2001.
GWB's pretext for invading Iraq was that it wasn't honouring various UN resolutions. That was a hugely presumptuous argument: if someone's breaching UN resolutions then it's up to the UN to decide how and whether to respond. Not individual members.
In fact, the international community made it clear that it didn't believe there was an urgent need to invade Iraq. Yet GWB invaded anyway, while, incredibly, claiming he was "enacting the will of the Security Council."
I've heard Americans argue that opposition to the invasion was influenced by vested interests. That's a fair argument for scrutinising the decision-making process more carefully. But it's not acceptable for UN members to simply disregard the views of other members on grounds of doubting their objectivity. If it were then we could look forward to the imminent invasion of Israel by any number of nations. After all, that country is in breach of several UN resolutions, and many more that were defeated only by a US veto.
Of course the attack on the World Trade Centre warranted a response. But, given the fanatical and nebulous nature of the enemy, that response needed to be thoughtful and pragmatic. Bush has absolutely failed to rise to the challenge. His arrogant and belligerent foreign policy has stirred up far more hatred of the west than ever existed beforehand; and his diplomatic failings have set the cause of world peace back by at least 20 years. Kim Jong-Il (for example) now knows that a hostile power might try to invade and overthrow him at any time, with no regard for international law. What effect do you think that has on his strategic planning? I rather doubt he's decommissioning missles.
Right now you're saying "good thing we went to war." I hope for all our sakes you don't have to find out how wrong you are.
Dude, your post contains the word "virii."
I'd be very interested to see your results if you tried SpamBayes now. I bet it wouldn't do better.
I was using SpamBayes three weeks ago! And it was doing a lot better.
Though it occurs to me that this argument is a bit pointless, because there's really no feasible way for me to support this claim... sorry!
If SpamBayes filtered a legit message in with the spam, how would you know about it?
:)
Short answer: because I am very distrustful of technology, and I do actually skim through my spam-box every so often just in case.
However, one reason it never came up is that SpamBayes has a very graceful response to email it's not quite sure of. It puts emails below a certain (user-adjustable) confidence threshold in a "suspected spam" bin, for you to review at your convenience. After the first few days actual spam almost never ended up in here, but it was very good for catching email from, e.g. new mailing lists that I'd just signed up for (which Thunderbird 0.6 simply dismisses as junk).
To be fair, yes, I should have taken this into account when making the claim you quote. But y'know.
improved junk mail filtering
I really don't understand why this is still a live issue. When I used to use Outlook I used SpamBayes to filter my spam and within a few days it was catching 99.99% of my spam. That's obviously a made-up figure, but that's how it felt. I never missed a single real mail, and after a few weeks I don't think a single spam ended up in my inbox.
Then I moved to Thunderbird, and suddenly obvious spam is regularly ending up in my inbox, despite several weeks' training. Don't get me wrong, it's a great mail client, but I don't see why it's so hard to implement something that's already been done perfectly in more than one open-source project?
Psst... the guy you're replying to agrees with you. He was responding to an earlier post suggesting that IBM should have filed this motion after a month, rather than waiting a year.
Dunno where the guy you're replying to is from, but here in Britain it's normal to consider a group of people - even one with a singular name - as plural. E.g. "Google are launching a new service", "Manchester United are set to win the FA Cup", "the Labour Party are trailing in the polls". Etc. etc.
Heh... funny you should say that! I also had a Celeron 300A, and it's still running happily at 450MHz to this day - though nowadays it's been demoted to serving as an internet gateway for my home LAN.
However, in this particular case I suspect the answer is no, because at the time the 300A was launched, 450MHz was WAY up at the top end of the scale - I don't think there was even a Pentium II available at that speed at the time. Plus it turned out that there never was a Celeron 450 (there was a 450MHz PII, but ISTR that for some reason the Celerons went from 400MHz to 466MHz). So I suspect that may just have been a lucky side-effect of high-quality manufacture....
I would question the feasibility of taking hardware designed for single-layer disks
Just a toy hypothesis: it could be that these drives are in fact internally identical to the dual-layer burners, and that it's only the firmware they ship with that's "designed for single-layer disks." Without a pair of units to compare I naturally can't test this theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if NEC had found it cost-effective to make all the drive units the same, and just charge a premium for the version with "unlocked" firmware. I'm sure someone will remind me when Intel did something similar with one of their processors - was it the 386SX?
I remember "overclocking" my 4x speed Ricoh CD writer to 6x speed using hacked firmware. Ricoh posted no end of dire warnings, but it worked, perfectly, forever (well, until a 6x speed writer was of no use to anyone any more).
It's true that these hacked drives do sound like they're prone to strange behaviour; but from the nature of the flakiness that sounds like the firmware isn't quite there yet rather than being a laser problem (e.g. the hardware no longer working as IDE Slave).
Just thinking aloud.
Dude, do you know how GPS works? A GPS unit on the ground listens to the signals from a couple of different GPS satellites and uses the information in those signals to triangulate its own position relative to the satellites (that's a very simplified explanation, but that's basically how it works). The satellites don't "find" you or "tell you where you are." They just beam messages down to the surface. They have no idea where, or by whom, those messages are being received.
Dude, it's GPS. Now they know where they are.
Hey... I'm on Windows and my antivirus software updates itself while I'm asleep. My firewall hasn't needed an upgrade in two years - why would it? I do run anti-spyware software every so often, but since I use Mozilla and a recent version of Outlook, it never finds anything. My anti-spam software is SpamBayes, so keeping it current is just a case of hitting "this is spam" on the very occasional piece of junk that makes it into my inbox (and you'd equally have to do that on a Mac anyway). As for keeping the OS up to date - I get a little notification in my system tray when there's a new critical update, and I just have to click on it to download and install the new patch.
And that's all the demands it makes. I certainly don't consider that costs me $130 a year.
They screwed up type preview (is the ability to arrow down through the fonts and have them update on the type you've put in the box and are actually putting in the graphic really something you want to take away?
No, which is why you can still do this - only now the type actually appears in your composition, rather than in a separate requester, which I think is a major improvement.
Plus, I don't know where you're getting "150Mb+" from; my Windows Task Manager is right now reporting Photoshop CS as having a memory footprint of 34,076k.