There are lots of keys we never use, and a lot of the keypad keys are duplicates or not used often enough to deserve their own keys. Also, British keyboards have a key for typing for some reason.
Having all these infrequently keys comes at the cost of making keyboards larger, and that in turn takes up desk space and moves your mouse out to the right, which is less comfortable for some people. On the other hand, the Happy Hacker Keyboard is a more plausible approach to making a useful keyboard with fewer keys.
Except that VB.NET isn't really the same language as VB; it's more like C# with the keywords changed to resemble VB6.
Some of the VB Developer Studio features that make VB 'user-friendly' are not present in Visual Studio.NET or in the VB.NET language. (On Error being just one of them.)
VB.NET is not all that bad a programming language, especially if your keyboard lacks Shift, '{' and '}' keys. But I don't think we can use VB.NET features to justify the VB6 language...:-)
I have had crashes with Safari with HTML documents containing object tags. This could be the same -- there are object tags for a DVDviewer or something.
Re:amazing programing in 256k, and no serious bugs
on
Apollo 12 at 35
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· Score: 1
When they calculate the computing power of Mission Control are they including the slide rules? I'm thinking of the scene in the movie Apolle 13 where they need to recalculate orbits and they run the calculations on a roomful of people with slide rules...
There was once a time when Computer was a job title, not a type of machine!
I know, it's sad, really...:-) Microsoft don't ship the simple tools, so more complicated substitutions are required. Like you can't use telnet to admin your server, but must instead use something like pcANYWHERE, a hugely more complex piece of software.
Also, I imagine that preventing tampering is not the whole reason for wanting to add a DRM wrapper to their documentation; I imagine the reading process involves indicating assent to the license file before you read, allowing them to glue an EULA to the documentation files...
If it is tampering they want to prevent, they could publish the SHA(1) digest of the files, or sign the MHTML documents with PGP or GPG.
An even simpler(*) solution would be to write documents in plain text, and sign that. An approach that has been used on Usenet for... how many years now?
-- Damian
(*) Simpler from a technological point of view. Not simpler to apply for people unaware of the distinction between Microsoft Word documents and plain text and ignorant of existing digital-signature conventions.
There's also the overhead of X's network transparency: all communication between client and server is network traffic rather than the simpler, less-flexible system that Windows uses. The X protocol is also fairly verbose.
I think you have hit the nail on the head -- Unix programmers have assimilated a set of assumptions about file usage that reiserfs makes obsolete. Without those restrictions, "typical usage" might well change over time in interesting ways.
As I understand it, what is interesting is that the lawyers renegociated their payment arrangements to improve their position in the event the litigation fails -- which implies they think this is a more likely outcome.
Also, there has been a lot of speculation that the real aim of the lawsuit was to get IBM to buy SCO just to shut them up. This arrangement adds weight to this suggestion because the lawyers have been given a big incentive to try to make it come to pass.
On the other hand, how much does it cost to keep a live dog? If it costs $1 a day to feed it, then your AIBO would be cheaper after four years or so. That's not counting pet bills, increased cleaning bills, and replacing chewed valuables...
Not to mention, keeping a flesh-and-blood dog in a city is not very nice for the dog, especially if it is in some tiny house where it cannot be walked every day because everyone's out walking, or because its owner is old and can't get out much or whatever.
Re:Congratulations, Phoenix. I'll never buy again.
on
Phoenix To Change Name
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· Score: 5, Informative
Phoenix (the company) also make a web browser that runs on your BIOS. So there really would be two Phoenix web browsers, which would be confusing.
Here’s a similar problem I had. I wanted to generate web pages using ASP, but I wanted to use UTF-8 as the character encoding. The easiest solution seemed to be to make my UTF-8 encoding routine return a string, which I then pass to Response.Write. Make sense?
This seems to work, but behind the scenes there is a conversion between 8- and 16-bit character sets and back. UTF-8 encoding makes a sequence of bytes. I was storing these in a
VB string, which stores Unicode character data, so it transcoded my byte sequence as if it were character data encoded in Window’s ANSI ecoding (MbcsToWideChar).
But this is OK, because Response.Write does the inverse conversion: it takes UTF-16 character data and writes what it thinks is Windows ANSI character data (WideCharToMcbs).
It all goes horribly wrong if WideCharToMcbs(McbsToWideChar(x)) is not equal to x, for some value x used in the UTF-8 encoding. Normally this isn’t a problem (for the platforms I have tested it on), but recent additon of the EURO SIGN to Unicode and Windows ANSI has caused me trouble: some code in SQL Server that does the transcoding itself rather than using the APIs causes this identity to be invalid...:-(
As I understand it, Dan Bernstein does permit you (the owner of your computer) to modify the software to suit your system—including where it keeps its files. You can also make your own/etc/rc.d/init.d script so you don't need to use svc. He doesn't support it, but he says you have the right to do it.
This way you can still use documentation written for an unmodified system; you will know what changes you've made, because you made them. This is in contrast to vendors' helpful changes, which make it harder to write Djbdns in a Nutshell because each paragraph needs to detail the differences on half a dozen UNIX flavours, none of which is yours...
I find Bernstein's work very interesting. His style reminds me of Strunk & White (Rule 17, Omit needless words! becomes Omit needless features!). Things like the/service directory are very simple, elegant and useful. It's a pity that the licensing issue is going to get in the way. I can see his logic in eschewing the GPL if you already have all the rights he believes matter, but life would be easier if everyone just stuck with the good ol' GPL...
It is true that the EU is not a country, but if I remember correctly, ISO 3166 lists 'territories', not 'countries'. One of the articles on the cited page says that:
The new domain has to be approved by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and added to the list of established country codes. ISO has reserved it for Europe but still there is no clear-cut answer.
Looks to me like they are still making up their minds...:-)
This quasi-country-code issue also features in the choice of EUR as the three-letter abbreviation for the euro. The currency TLAs are usually formed from a territory code plus a letter (so 'pounds sterling' is abbreviated 'GBP'). It follows that 'EUR' also implies a territory called 'EU'.
The difference between downloading software and buying a book is that when you download you are creating a new copy of the software, whereas the book is a copy manufactured by the publisher -- and the publisher does have to have a contract, licence, etc.
It's all a little weirder when you consider software on CDs. I think most countries still count running software as copying it (you copy it from CD to disc, and disc to RAM), which is the excuse people give for all these shrink-wrap licences.
The example they might point to is buying a painting from an artist. The artist retains the copyright, so you can't publish copies of the painting without licensing it from the artist, even though you own the object itself. This makes perfect sense for physical objects, but seems strange to many people when applied to intangibles like software.
The FSF attempt to turn this strange system on its head with the GPL, by offering the General Public a licence gratis. Thus everyone can copy GPL software -- so long as they can enter in to the licence agreement. This all falls down if they can't, but most authors of GPL software will turn a blind eye to underage contributors.
From what other posters have said, Corel's situation might be different, because it is possible in Canada for minors to enter a contract without being bound by it, or it might just be that they are making explicit something that the GPL takes for granted.
I think the word Linux was highlighted in the press release by the newswire service, not the writers of the release. My theory is that this release was discovered by searching for Linux, and the wire service automatically highlights the matching terms when it displays the results of a search.
Slash was not available as a directory separator because they'd already used it for command options, in the way Unix uses a minus sign (/d instead of -d).
Not sure why they used slashes for options. Presumably CP/M and QDOS did. Perhaps to be different from Unix, perhaps to be similar to VMS (which uses [,., and ] in file names instead of/).
"The Internet -- it's not just for anoraks anymore."
The BBC says it isn't dumbing down its coverage, oh dear me no, but it still has to start every feature on computers by putting down the very people who made these facilities available to computer-illiterates like themseves in the first place. Even on Radio 4, which is supposed to be pro-literacy.
Imagine the tedium if every time the farming crisis (or crises) got mentioned on the news, they had to start with "Baaa baaa! Mooo! Not all farmers wear green wellingtons and barbour jackets these days...", and every discussion of the building industry started with the same crack about builders arses hanging out of their jeans -- even at the start of an interview with an award-winning architect.
Oh, well. Sorry to rant about this. Despite the above, I am in favour of the popularization of communications technology, because I think computers aren't really very useful unless they're useful to ordinary joes, not just those of us lucky enough to be educated in their use. I'm sure that this documentary will be the exception to the rule, and will boldly eschew that tired old modem sound sample all together...
I did not ask, "What if someone creates a GIF using licensed software that came with a scanner, then modifies that image with the GIMP or another freeware program?" I really didn't want to know the answer to this question; all of my GIFs have passed through at least one Unisys-licensed program at some point, so if I am asked I can honestly say that they were created (at least partially) in accordance with the Unisys patent.
IANAL, but as I understand their web page, their position is that you can use GIFs if and only if either (1) all software you use includes a licence for LZW, (2) you have negotiated your own licence with them (they specify that it must be a signed piece of paper), or (3) you pay them $5000 per web site. They claim that, without options 2 or 3, if you have ever used non-licensed software, you are in breach of their patents.
It worries me that software patents seem to have such broad effects -- they originally got their patent for a hardware implementation of LZW, and now claim to have complete ownership of a data format, no matter what software is used to generate it, or what the application is. This means that creating GIF files for your own use would fall within the scope of their patent; removing them from your web site would not save you. Running them through a licensed program won't save you -- the license for that program will include a sublicence for using the output of that program but only that program.
Macintosh server...:-) (re: Is NT Better?)
on
Script Kiddy HOWTO
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· Score: 1
Windows NT may be more secure out of the box than some Unix-like systems because it provides fewer services by default. On the other hand, a Macintosh-based server will be even more limited (can TELNET do anything useful on a Mac?), and hence even more secure. Mac-based web servers are probably the least hackable ones in the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
For 'for typing for some reason' read 'for typing the character U+00AC NOT SIGN for some reason'.
Somehow the synbol I typed has vanished, which shows just how useless it is.
There are lots of keys we never use, and a lot of the keypad keys are duplicates or not used often enough to deserve their own keys. Also, British keyboards have a key for typing for some reason.
Having all these infrequently keys comes at the cost of making keyboards larger, and that in turn takes up desk space and moves your mouse out to the right, which is less comfortable for some people. On the other hand, the Happy Hacker Keyboard is a more plausible approach to making a useful keyboard with fewer keys.
The importance of using hyphens in adjectival phrases used attributively:
Microsoft Releases Malicious-Software Removal Tool
Microsoft Releases Malicious Software-Removal Tool
Except that VB.NET isn't really the same language as VB; it's more like C# with the keywords changed to resemble VB6.
:-)
Some of the VB Developer Studio features that make VB 'user-friendly' are not present in Visual Studio.NET or in the VB.NET language. (On Error being just one of them.)
VB.NET is not all that bad a programming language, especially if your keyboard lacks Shift, '{' and '}' keys. But I don't think we can use VB.NET features to justify the VB6 language...
I have had crashes with Safari with HTML documents containing object tags. This could be the same -- there are object tags for a DVDviewer or something.
When they calculate the computing power of Mission Control are they including the slide rules? I'm thinking of the scene in the movie Apolle 13 where they need to recalculate orbits and they run the calculations on a roomful of people with slide rules...
There was once a time when Computer was a job title, not a type of machine!
Incredibly high pressures. ZEPPs would run very hot and very high pressure, and be built from materials that do not quite exist yet.
I know, it's sad, really...:-) Microsoft don't ship the simple tools, so more complicated substitutions are required. Like you can't use telnet to admin your server, but must instead use something like pcANYWHERE, a hugely more complex piece of software.
Also, I imagine that preventing tampering is not the whole reason for wanting to add a DRM wrapper to their documentation; I imagine the reading process involves indicating assent to the license file before you read, allowing them to glue an EULA to the documentation files...
If it is tampering they want to prevent, they could publish the SHA(1) digest of the files, or sign the MHTML documents with PGP or GPG.
... how many years now?
An even simpler(*) solution would be to write documents in plain text, and sign that. An approach that has been used on Usenet for
-- Damian
(*) Simpler from a technological point of view. Not simpler to apply for people unaware of the distinction between Microsoft Word documents and plain text and ignorant of existing digital-signature conventions.
Bug 18764 has 73 votes and many duplicates, which makes it fairly popular. It isn't the the most voted-for bug though; some have well over 100 votes.
The problem is not that it is MHTML, but that the MHTML resource is embedded in a file in Microsoft's DRM format.
There's also the overhead of X's network transparency: all communication between client and server is network traffic rather than the simpler, less-flexible system that Windows uses. The X protocol is also fairly verbose.
I think you have hit the nail on the head -- Unix programmers have assimilated a set of assumptions about file usage that reiserfs makes obsolete. Without those restrictions, "typical usage" might well change over time in interesting ways.
As I understand it, what is interesting is that the lawyers renegociated their payment arrangements to improve their position in the event the litigation fails -- which implies they think this is a more likely outcome.
Also, there has been a lot of speculation that the real aim of the lawsuit was to get IBM to buy SCO just to shut them up. This arrangement adds weight to this suggestion because the lawyers have been given a big incentive to try to make it come to pass.
On the other hand, how much does it cost to keep a live dog? If it costs $1 a day to feed it, then your AIBO would be cheaper after four years or so. That's not counting pet bills, increased cleaning bills, and replacing chewed valuables...
Not to mention, keeping a flesh-and-blood dog in a city is not very nice for the dog, especially if it is in some tiny house where it cannot be walked every day because everyone's out walking, or because its owner is old and can't get out much or whatever.
Phoenix (the company) also make a web browser that runs on your BIOS. So there really would be two Phoenix web browsers, which would be confusing.
Here’s a similar problem I had. I wanted to generate web pages using ASP, but I wanted to use UTF-8 as the character encoding. The easiest solution seemed to be to make my UTF-8 encoding routine return a string, which I then pass to Response.Write. Make sense?
This seems to work, but behind the scenes there is a conversion between 8- and 16-bit character sets and back. UTF-8 encoding makes a sequence of bytes. I was storing these in a VB string, which stores Unicode character data, so it transcoded my byte sequence as if it were character data encoded in Window’s ANSI ecoding (MbcsToWideChar). But this is OK, because Response.Write does the inverse conversion: it takes UTF-16 character data and writes what it thinks is Windows ANSI character data (WideCharToMcbs).
It all goes horribly wrong if WideCharToMcbs(McbsToWideChar(x)) is not equal to x, for some value x used in the UTF-8 encoding. Normally this isn’t a problem (for the platforms I have tested it on), but recent additon of the EURO SIGN to Unicode and Windows ANSI has caused me trouble: some code in SQL Server that does the transcoding itself rather than using the APIs causes this identity to be invalid... :-(
This way you can still use documentation written for an unmodified system; you will know what changes you've made, because you made them. This is in contrast to vendors' helpful changes, which make it harder to write Djbdns in a Nutshell because each paragraph needs to detail the differences on half a dozen UNIX flavours, none of which is yours...
I find Bernstein's work very interesting. His style reminds me of Strunk & White (Rule 17, Omit needless words! becomes Omit needless features!). Things like the /service directory are very simple, elegant and useful. It's a pity that the licensing issue is going to get in the way. I can see his logic in eschewing the GPL if you already have all the rights he believes matter, but life would be easier if everyone just stuck with the good ol' GPL...
It is true that the EU is not a country, but if I remember correctly, ISO 3166 lists 'territories', not 'countries'. One of the articles on the cited page says that:
Looks to me like they are still making up their minds... :-)
This quasi-country-code issue also features in the choice of EUR as the three-letter abbreviation for the euro. The currency TLAs are usually formed from a territory code plus a letter (so 'pounds sterling' is abbreviated 'GBP'). It follows that 'EUR' also implies a territory called 'EU'.
The difference between downloading software and buying a book is that when you download you are creating a new copy of the software, whereas the book is a copy manufactured by the publisher -- and the publisher does have to have a contract, licence, etc.
It's all a little weirder when you consider software on CDs. I think most countries still count running software as copying it (you copy it from CD to disc, and disc to RAM), which is the excuse people give for all these shrink-wrap licences.
The example they might point to is buying a painting from an artist. The artist retains the copyright, so you can't publish copies of the painting without licensing it from the artist, even though you own the object itself. This makes perfect sense for physical objects, but seems strange to many people when applied to intangibles like software.
The FSF attempt to turn this strange system on its head with the GPL, by offering the General Public a licence gratis. Thus everyone can copy GPL software -- so long as they can enter in to the licence agreement. This all falls down if they can't, but most authors of GPL software will turn a blind eye to underage contributors.
From what other posters have said, Corel's situation might be different, because it is possible in Canada for minors to enter a contract without being bound by it, or it might just be that they are making explicit something that the GPL takes for granted.
I think the word Linux was highlighted in the press release by the newswire service, not the writers of the release. My theory is that this release was discovered by searching for Linux, and the wire service automatically highlights the matching terms when it displays the results of a search.
Not sure why they used slashes for options. Presumably CP/M and QDOS did. Perhaps to be different from Unix, perhaps to be similar to VMS (which uses [, ., and ] in file names instead of /).
Internet segments on British radio and teevee invariably starting with the same sound sample followed by the same eight words:
"beep boop beep boop shshshshsh boingy boingy boing shshshshshshsh...
"The Internet -- it's not just for anoraks anymore."
The BBC says it isn't dumbing down its coverage, oh dear me no, but it still has to start every feature on computers by putting down the very people who made these facilities available to computer-illiterates like themseves in the first place. Even on Radio 4, which is supposed to be pro-literacy.
Imagine the tedium if every time the farming crisis (or crises) got mentioned on the news, they had to start with "Baaa baaa! Mooo! Not all farmers wear green wellingtons and barbour jackets these days...", and every discussion of the building industry started with the same crack about builders arses hanging out of their jeans -- even at the start of an interview with an award-winning architect.
Oh, well. Sorry to rant about this. Despite the above, I am in favour of the popularization of communications technology, because I think computers aren't really very useful unless they're useful to ordinary joes, not just those of us lucky enough to be educated in their use. I'm sure that this documentary will be the exception to the rule, and will boldly eschew that tired old modem sound sample all together...
It worries me that software patents seem to have such broad effects -- they originally got their patent for a hardware implementation of LZW, and now claim to have complete ownership of a data format, no matter what software is used to generate it, or what the application is. This means that creating GIF files for your own use would fall within the scope of their patent; removing them from your web site would not save you. Running them through a licensed program won't save you -- the license for that program will include a sublicence for using the output of that program but only that program.
Windows NT may be more secure out of the box than some Unix-like systems because it provides fewer services by default. On the other hand, a Macintosh-based server will be even more limited (can TELNET do anything useful on a Mac?), and hence even more secure. Mac-based web servers are probably the least hackable ones in the Internet.