Why do gun owners seemingly fantasize over the scenarios in which they may use their gun. It always sounds almost masturbatory.
Why do students study for a test? Why do athletes mentally run through upcoming plays? Why do speakers rehearse their speeches? Why does a guy think about what he might say to the new girl in class? Why does anyone mentally prepare for a tricky or dangerous situation they might encounter? It's something that goes along with being sentient. We think about things. We plan ahead.
We also live on a planet inhabited by the most dangerous creature in the known universe: Man. We know that bad things happen sometimes. We want to be able to walk into a place and know that we have a good chance of walking out alive. It's the same mental preparation any number of people go through every day. If he was a police officer saying the exact same thing, would you call it a masturbatory fantasy, or a good technique for surviving his shift every day? What, a gun owner is supposed to be mentally unprepared to use his weapon for self defense in a real-world situation? Never think about it and nothing bad will happen, right? Sorry, but this isn't a utopia just yet.
Oftentimes what you read into something comes from your own mind...
Re:An accessible page, more types of fluids tested
on
Bang But No Splash
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· Score: 1
Yes it is a good movie. I see that the drop in the top frame is flattened, presumeably due to the resistance of the thicker air it is passing through. The drop in the lower frame/lower atmospheric pressure is more nearly a perfect sphere. Maybe that accounts for the splash/no splash effect? Kind of like the difference between a belly flop (flattened sphere) and a clean dive.
After viewing the video backward and forward and frame by frame, I would have to say that the shape of the droplet seems to have very little to do with the splashing. If you look closely, the lip of the expanding liquid in the high pressure atmosphere starts curling upward immediately after contact. This looks like it has to be caused by the greater "viscosity" of the high pressure gas surrounding the liquid. The pressure of the gas is pushing under the tiny lip of the expanding fluid created by the surface tension of the fluid itself. It pushes hard enough and the surface tension is weak enough that the outer edge of the "splash" starts breaking apart very quickly. Go through it frame by frame. The air pressure keeps lifting the fringe as it expands, and as the outer edge of the fringe gets too thin, it breaks apart into micro-droplets that go flying all over the place. Thus, a splash.
Now, for higher viscosity fluids, the reason they splash more would be pretty simple: Logically the tiny expanding lip that gets created on contact is higher because of the greater surface tension. That is, the cross section of the edge of the expanding lip has a greater radius. A higher lip makes it easier for the surrounding gas to push underneath the lip as it expands, lift it up and break it apart, thus causing a splash. Fluids with lower viscosities will logically create a thinner lip that will slice right underneath the surrounding gas molecules if it's thin enough, without giving room for the surrounding gas to push under and lift it up. Thus, no raised lip, no splash, just a smooth flattening of the droplet on contact.
Otherwise can I please have a link to download the patch? Last time I went mozilla.org but couldn't find the patch, and had to download the whole 4.3MB 1.0.1
Sorry, buddy, no can do.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that even now in the post-1.0 days, there ARE NO INCREMENTAL PATCHES. All the auto-update feature does is auto-download the ENTIRE 4.3MB install file into your download directory, and automatically start the install. That was my experience with the 1.0.1 update, anyway. What is this, a joke?
I'm sure I'm one of a great many people who were hoping that once Firefox stabilized we wouldn't have to keep downloading the ENTIRE MULTI-MEGABYTE INSTALL file just to apply an incremental update from 1.0.1 to 1.0.2. Why doesn't the auto-update "feature" just load mozilla.org and tell us to download the latest version manually and uninstall the previous version before updating (to avoid having multiple versions listed in Add/Remove Programs). Hey, Firefox developers! I am one of many who are completely unimpressed with this auto-update "feature". It's a joke with a bad punchline. There has to be a better way.
One common strategy often played by big companies when they want to purchase someone (especially when it's done in a hostile fashion), is to sue them beyond their means to defend themselves, and then promise to call off their lawyers if they sell out at the lowball offer price. I've worked for a company that has had this done to them. It should be called extortion, but is perfectly legal.
Why should it be called extortion? If there was a real basis for the lawsuit (as in this case), they are still offering to pay for something they already own. Seems like that's pretty generous when they do have the option of pounding you into the ground through the court rather than giving you any money at all. That's probably why it's perfectly legal and not called extortion.
If you could find someone really forward thinking at Hasbro in a position to make decisions, a creative alternate arrangement could be reached, where fatty Jared could either license the material from Hasbro, or they could take over the site and put him on the payroll. Given the nature of most suits and bean counters, this is a highly improbable outcome.
Isn't that because the whole point of the suit is to punish the defendant and discourage others from violating Hasbro's copyrights and trademarks without licensing them? I don't understand why so many people keep suggesting that it would be a great idea to reward the unauthorized use of copyrights and trademarks with a business deal and employment.
Any which way you slice it and no matter what your opinion of Hasbro is, they own the name and the design of the game. They have a responsibility under trademark law to defend their trademark, or they will lose it. The guy running the site had a responsibility to license the game before he started cloning the game, using the name and making money off of it. Rewarding people who do things bass-ackwards is not normally the smart thing for a business to do. It just encourages more idiots to create unlicensed clones and knock-offs and then ask for money or deals. It would be different if this person came to Hasbro with the idea before it even went public and asked for a license and a cut of the profits from running the site. Did he do that?
You are a perfect example of why most of the rest of the world considers the average American to be a pompous, arrogant, ignorant, a-hole. Which is why, as you may have noticed, you've been modded as flamebait, even though you claimed not to be.
Due to the market penetration of Windows, the EU would come crawling back, begging for Windows marketing to be reinstated.
Any country or group of countries in their right mind would consider such a thing a virtual ATTACK on said country(ies) survival and economic prosperity, due to the monopolistic market penetration of Windows. As far as I (an American) am concerned, the countries in question would be well within their rights and responsibilities to their citizens to terminate all local copyrights, patents and trademarks owned by Microsoft, to allow the country to continue to supply itself with the dominant Microsoft software (for survival) while they work on moving everything over to OS X, Linux and other alternative software that won't allow them to be brought to their knees by a single corporation ever again.
The fact that the EU could be literally forced to come begging a single corporation to come back and do business with them after said corporation basically committed the equivalent of a terrorist attack on their member nations is exactly why monopolists cannot be allowed to abuse their monopolies, and why monopolies should be discouraged from even existing. Nothing should have that much power over the economy of an entire nation.
Do you not realize that if they have this power over the EU, they have the same power over the US? How is that acceptable just because they are an American-based company? Would it be cool if Microsoft just "pulled out" of the government software market, refused to sell to the US government and stopped giving them any service or updates? Hopefully you would be outraged at any American company that did such a thing, especially a company like Microsoft that wields monopoly power in our economy. It would essentially be an attack on the government's ability to run and protect our precious America.
The fact that you think it would be A-OK for an American company to do such a thing as long as it doesn't do it in the US, is absolutely frightening. You come off like you think God made Americans in His own image and we are the Chosen People who can do no wrong. You think any American company can go anywhere in the world and do whatever it wants without regard to local laws, and without ever being fined for breaking the law, just because it's a US-based company? And then you sit back and wonder why so much of the population of Earth hates Americans with a passion.
My basic point is that, as an American, why should we give a flying flip what the EU wants?! It's not like they really have any enforcement powers beyond their member's borders...
As Americans, "we" don't really care what the EU wants. But if you want to GO to the EU and do business IN THEIR COUNTRIES, you need to abide by their rules, just like their companies need to abide by our rules when they do business in the US. Is there something complicated about that? They aren't trying to enforce anything beyond their own borders! They are merely dictating the behavior of Microsoft's branches in their own area of the world.
In their part of the world, where Microsoft, being a multinational corporation, very much desires to continue doing business, Microsoft has been convicted of abusing its monopoly position in the market (breaking the law). They've been told to stop violating the local laws. They refused, so the EU imposed some fines and remedies. Microsoft in effect thumbed their nose at the fines and remedies imposed by the courts, so the EU is going to impose more fines, as is their right to do in their own part of the world. Again, is there something complicated here?
I always wonder how people even get ideas like yours into their heads. If you gave it just a smidgen of thought those ideas SHOULD self-destr
Stability is supposed to be one of the selling points of Linux. What exactly is the benefit in having a default setting that allows any user on any Linux desktop computer to lock up their machine just by starting up some application or script that consumes too many resources? Thanks but no thanks. I want both my server and my personal desktop computer to be able to recover from such things without a hard reboot. Whether they are malicious or just a mistake in some shell script doesn't matter. If it takes down the box, it's bad, and should be disabled by default.
Nobody in their right mind should be defending a lack of stability in Linux. Those who want to push the box to its absolute limits (and risk a hard lockup) can find out how to activate the options that allow this. It should NEVER be the default to have options active that compromise the stability of a machine so easily. Desktops are just as important as servers in this regard, as far as I'm concerned.
Linux is supposed to be better than Windows, remember? Raising a valid objection to a default setting capable of causing (or allowing) real-world problems on everyday computer systems is not "running around screaming".
Oh, and by the way, not everyone on Earth is a trained Linux system administrator, and being a Linux admin isn't a prerequisite to being in one's right mind. There are plenty of perfectly intelligent people who have no idea how to "lock down their box" and never will, just like most people have no idea how to break down a carburator or build a nuclear reactor. Some people have other things to do. If Linux distros want to market to the general public, they should be safe to use by the general public. We're talking about DEFAULTS here that are being used by every person running Linux in general. Not just servers run by Linux gurus. Your statement comes across like saying people who aren't expert car mechanics shouldn't be allowed on public roadways. In other words, a little elitist, don't you think?
<p class="style1">I Have style 1</p> <p class="style1 style2>I have style1 and style2 combined</p> <p class="style1 style3">I have style1 and style3</p> <p class="style1 style2 style3">I have the lot!</p>
That's all well and good, but I remember reading somewhere that using multiple classes doesn't work well in IE. Yet another nice CSS property that would have made the web a nicer place to design, but it cannot be implemented easily because of You Know Who.
I could be wrong, it was a while ago that I read about this being a problem with IE. Someone please correct me if this is no longer the case.
He could also probably help keep a few people from being traumatized by noting that there are a lot of photos of blood and death on that website. This person seems to have an obsession with blood, sharp implements, sliced up women and very graphic death images. Even the non-person and "humorous" photos have blood references! I'm not here to judge anyone but most of polite society would call that website really f--ked up.
Fake blood and fake death, to be sure, but it's still gross and not something that everyone appreciates looking at without being warned. I'm assuming that your intention was not trolling, but that stuff you linked to bugs me more than goatse links ever did. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, there are some boobs, people, but trust me, it ain't worth it.
How is this bad for firefox? If anything its a big black eye for MS and integrating IE into the OS.
Except it's not about Firefox, IE, Windows, or even Java! It's about the ignorant user who explicitly bypasses a warning dialog and allows a malicious Java applet to step outside the sandbox and do whatever it wants to anywhere on the hard drive. It just happens that the applet infects IE with some spyware. Something similar could probably happen with any web browser on any operating system as long as it runs Sun's Java Runtime and the user goes ahead and allows the exploit to do its thing by clicking "Yes" on the prominent warning dialog that comes up. User error. Sounds like the warning dialogs need to become more explicit, simple enough for regular people to understand, and it needs to be more difficult to automatically click "Yes" without thinking.
And now back to our regularly scheduled Microsoft/Windows/IE bashing...
They are too short sighted to realize that as more people read the news online, the prices of ad-space will increase.
The real money a newspaper makes is in selling ads. Currently online advertisements aren't as profitable. But that is because industry isn't used to this type of advertisement, and isn't sure it is worth spending money on. So, the newspapers are selling online ad space for less money. But as online ads catch on, companies will feel more comfortable with them, and they will be just as profitable as "traditional" ad space.
Do you really believe that? Online ads have been going nowhere but down in value for years now. They don't work. Rest assured that industry is quite sure what online advertisements are worth to them after a decade of experience with a commercial Internet. They've run the numbers, and the numbers show them that they don't get enough return from investing in online ads to justify paying more than a pittance for them on 99.9999% of the websites on the Internet.
At this point I can remove the vast majority of them from my online experience with the click of a button. That technical problem alone reduces their value tremendously, even on the most popular websites on the net, and the blocking technologies will only get better and more widespread. I can't wave a magic wand over my printed media and make all the ads disappear.
I don't think ad-supported online media is going to work out very well. They will have to find some other way to get part of their revenue.
Why are people here up in arms when GPL code is stolen, but not when copyrighted music or movies are illegally downloaded or swapped?
People here are up in arms (or should be) when any IP is stolen FOR PROFIT and passed off as one's own creation when it very clearly isn't. What you're missing is the difference between commercial use (plagiaristic commercial use, no less) and personal use. We don't care much when people download a few songs for personal use (the same kind of songs they play on a radio all day for free, amazing, isn't it?). There are various reasons for this attitude that have been rehashed ad nauseum here, and the attitude isn't confined to Slashdot. One big reason is the completely overblown estimates of how much money is supposedly being "lost" to copyright infringement. We all know that only a small percentage of any of that money would ever have been spent if P2P didn't exist, and there are even studies that claim piracy is slightly beneficial, exposing people to more media that they eventually go purchase that they wouldn't have without P2P. So it's a very murky issue.
Commercial use is very different. I don't think anyone on Slashdot would support some guy copying a commercially produced movie, modifying a few scenes and then trying to sell it as entirely his own movie. We may like stickin' it to the **AA but this kind of thing is just plain wrong. I would hope that even everyone here would fully support the MPAA/RIAA when going after such blatantly commercial violations. It doesn't bear much resemblance to them suing a 12-year-old for millions for non-commercially downloading or sharing a few songs over P2P. It's a whole different issue.
I have never seen anyone here or on any other forum actively supporting copyright infringement FOR PROFIT. Never seen anyone supporting someone who copies copyrighted software, music or movies and tries to sell them commercially while passing them off as their own. Never. Not once.
There is some hypocrisy here from all of those who download copyrighted materials for their own personal use and then expect not to be prosecuted for it, but there are various reasons for that attitude and it isn't confined to Slashdot. Most of the population of America and the rest of the world thinks it's cool to download stuff for personal use. It's even legal in some places.
This guy is on a whole different level. He's passing off code written by others as his own, and TRYING TO PROFIT FROM IT COMMERCIALLY. Even the most lenient open source licenses such as the BSD license requires that you at the very least acknowledge the actual authors of the code. The law is being broken here very clearly.
It's a very cut-and-dried situation, unlike the whole idea of copying stuff for personal use. No one can seem to pin down how much damage the personal-use copying does, if any, and as I said above it's even legal in some parts of the world, so many people question why it shouldn't be legal in their part of the world. Apples and oranges. You can't call it theft with such certainty, because you can never prove with certainty that the person who copied the material (for personal use) ever would have or could have paid for it, so you can never prove the actual deprivation of income. I know I'm never going to throw away $700 on Photoshop until I start a business where the software will pay for itself, so here's the sum total of the money I've deprived Adobe of getting from me: $0. Personal use, or commercial use. Two different things. The personal use issue is not nearly as simple as the commercial issue.
Not only that, but it's plagiaristic commercial use. Everyone hates to see someone get away with crap like this. Rest assured that there would be the same outcry and support of legal action if some idiot decided to copy 90% of a bunch of popular RIAA-owned music and MPAA-owned movies and start passing it off as their own for commercial benefit. I cannot imagine that anyone here would even try to defend such an action, even to spite the **AAs.
Yes, you should definitely have been modded down for that post, as it was absolutely pointless.
Do you need a pretty GUI, or do you just want the new functionality etc.?
We may not need a good GUI, but we usually prefer it. Got a problem with that? Why bother with the command-line client, shouldn't you just be recreating a BT client by hand in assembly every time you want to download something?
Now, all you Mac users, go download Azureus. It's the best BT client for the Mac I've seen. Very comprehensive, easy to use, lets you limit the upload/download rates so you don't saturate the connection. It actually works now, as opposed to when I downloaded it a few months back. It's the first BT client I've seen on any platform that doesn't suck.
Azureus. Get it. I'm sure they will be updating internally to the new BitTorrent release before long, but it already works great. Cross platform, too. You'll need the latest Java installed.
I recall a line about forcing windows to produce fingerprintable timestamps.
That's something I hadn't heard. Typical of Windows to be controllable externally in such a manner. Definitely a little closer to an active action to unmask the user.
I am merely tired (that is worn and mentally frayed) from the constant stream of new ways people can look at you that I didn't know about.
I hear you. It's not a fun universe some days. But life goes on. Cheers.
while your trashing of my post is pretty good, I think you're missing the point. There seems to be a drive to find more ways of tracking what people are doing. My gripe is that I don't really see where this gets us except that now there is yet ANOTHER way for people to look at what you're doing. Whether you want them to or not. Inevitably somone will try to use this to their advantage without concern for my privacy or what damage it may do to me. I'm merely arguing that there has to be a point at which we decide we don't accept this anymore.
Don't see where this gets whom? It's just a piece of knowledge. Like a lot of knowledge, in the right hands and with the right uses it could benefit many people by helping to identify crackers and stolen hardware, etc. In the wrong hands it could do a lot of damage, until we make the technique useless which it sounds like should happen pretty quickly. In systems like Linux and OpenBSD people have already posted how to turn off the feature that allows this fingerprinting technique to work. It can be done in a few seconds, and will probably become a default in most open source operating systems before the year is out.
The problem is that your statement assumes that "we" (whoever "we" is) run the world and have some sort of control over all the people in it. This is really a pointless and misdirected sentiment because nobody has control over everyone on this planet. If you don't want someone walking by your house to peek in your window, it's accepted that you already need to take some reasonable technological pro-active actions like pulling the shades over your bay windows before you get nekkid.
You had a good point there about the emission of light but you missed its significance to your argument. If you don't take privacy precautions the person who looks in your window is no longer a peeping tom, but an innocent bystander who can even charge you with lewd conduct if they can clearly see you nekkid from outside your property without taking any unusual action like climbing a tree. They aren't invading your privacy if you aren't taking any real action to protect it. There is an expectation that they won't try very hard to look inside your house, but there is also an expectation that you won't display the inside of your house where everyone can see it without even trying. If you build your house of glass, any court in this country would say that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
As we all know, computer analogies are always very rough when they relate things to the real world. The emission of identifiable packets from your NAT is the same as having a completely uncovered window. It just happens that everyone walking by up until now was legally blind and couldn't see clearly the identifying information embedded in your packets. Now that someone has developed a pair of glasses to let us bring into focus the packets (photons) coming through your NAT (window), you'll have to do the equivalent of putting frosted contact paper over your window. You'll have to randomize that fingerprinting information like contact paper would scatter the identifiable photons.
This fingerprinting thing isn't the equivalent of peeking through the curtains. If your curtains are closed, I would have to use a telescope or come right up to your house into your yard in order to look inside through the crack. That's the equivalent of taking an action like tapping your LAN or inserting a trojan into your internal network. It's active rather than passive. I don't buy that analyzing traffic going over the public Internet (sidewalk) is the same as peeking through the curtains. This is more like the police taking surveillance photos of you walking down a public street. In the same way, the packets being analyzed are walking down a public wire.
Again, if you don't want to be identified, don't send the packets outside your LAN, or make them put on a disguise. Your NAT box lets your computers onto the public Internet, it doesn't necessarily keep the public Int
How this thing qualifies as a "smackdown for freedom" is simply beyond me. That entirely depends on how it's used and how quickly we can make the technique worthless with a security update.
Now I can't be an anonymous coward because slashdot can sniff my time-skew and put my name up anyway.
Um, you have to be registered and logged in to post anonymously. Slashdot can already decide to unmask all ACs henceforth if they feel like it. Probably not retroactively, but I don't understand slashcode enough to verify that. Fingerprinting your computer would be a useless addition that would only tell them you logged in from a particular piece of hardware.
Where are the days when I could telephone someone and NOT have to be identified. (caller id).
Those days never existed that I know of. The telephone system has always been able to identify where you are calling from, they just extended that capability to the home user with the Caller ID service. What gives you the right to be anonymous when you call someone else? If you want to be anonymous, call from a payphone. It will still probably tell them your address. That's the nature of the phone system. If you really want to be anonymous, don't use the phone system.
Is this really necessary? Nothing is sacred anymore. I want to be able to live my life behind my walls without people constantly peeking through the curtains, and thats what this is. At some point we have to stand up and say "you stop here" to these damn peeping toms.
What. The. Bleep. Are. You. Smoking? That's a new one. Security through mutual worldwide agreement of packet sacredness? Good luck. And what does "necessary" have to do with anything? Was it "necessary" to climb Mt. Everest, or land on the Moon, or discover that uranium ore exhibits radioactivity?
No, this isn't "peeking through the curtains". This has nothing to do with your privacy in your own home. If you don't want anyone analyzing the packets that you send outside your four walls, don't send any packets out. Nobody is "peeping" into your LAN. You are handing them all the information they need to find this fingerprint from anywhere in the world. Either don't send the information out or mangle it in some way to keep it from being identifiable.
This fingerprinting technique is merely knowledge gained from understanding a technology. Knowledge is neither good nor evil, and knows nothing about what we consider sacred and what we don't. All knowledge can be abused. The answer is not to bury our heads in the sand and demand that no one analyze our TCP packets without our permission. The answer is not to demand that knowledge not be used, or new knowledge not be created. The right answer is to adapt to this security threat with new technology and move on with our lives. Oh, and it would be good to have some sense of reality while we're at it.
But for all the folks out there who simply have juvenile comments on the order of "Flash sucks"... well, I guess I just don't understand what you think you're contributing to the topic.
Get it right, man. He didn't say it sucks, he said it blows. That's a totally different and perfectly legitimate argument... Duh. Some people.
Not quite. This would be like if Apache bundled a copy of Real Player or the Google toolbar with every install.
Even that doesn't cover it, if they're bundling it with Flash player. This would be like Apache making you install Google Toolbar or whatever for you the user to view any website hosted on Apache. The users don't install Apache. If this is for real it's an extremely stupid move on Macromedia's part. It's the sort of thing that makes the world turn against a technology like so many of us turned against the obnoxiousness of Real Player and Netscape with all its bundled AOL crap.
None of those cases come anywhere near the clean design of the Mac mini besides maybe the SilverStone LC09, which I couldn't find on Newegg but probably costs at least $150 (based on a similar SilverStone case I saw).
I've seen the Hush PC before. Looks nice, and it's silent. Just for kicks I spec'ed out a Mini-ITX model with moderately similar components to the 1.25 G4 Mac mini. No extra memory, and I didn't even upgrade XP Home to Pro. Came out to about 970 Euros. That's for a 1.2GHz VIA processor. That's up from the base price of 769 Euros for something with a CD-ROM! Count me among the unimpressed.
Honestly, the more people try to present alternatives to the Mac mini, the more impressive the Mac mini looks. It's truly amazing what Apple has crammed into that little box at that price level. Now if only they would put a little more effort into quality control...
Unless you have a bunch of keyboard shortcuts memorized (-2 points for new users right there) and always have one hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse (please, no "where's the other hand" jokes), you lose a lot of efficiency. In Windows, everything's designed where it can pretty much be controlled by the mouse, with a need to sometimes use the keyboard for shortcuts or special functions, which I prefer. Keyboard shortcuts aren't bad, but I personally like being able to control from the mouse easily.
You do realize that Apple computers were the first to use a mouse, right? In 1985 or thereabouts? The whole Mac OS has had a mouse-centric design since the beginning. You are suffering from a severe misunderstanding somewhere if you think you need keyboard shortcuts to do anything. A more correct way to look at it is that if you do learn some keyboard shortcuts you gain a lot of efficiency, not lose it. With one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse OS X responds to my needs more efficiently than Windows ever has. Yes, I have also used Windows for many years, and didn't use Mac OS until recently. I would agree with anyone who said previous versions of Mac OS had much suckage, but the latest version of OS X is quite different.
Even with just the standard one-button mouse everything in any Mac OS is quickly accessible. If you want even more efficiency get a regular two-button scroll mouse and you'll have access to many context menus similar to what you get in Windows. You can simulate a right-click with a one-button mouse by holding down the Control key when clicking. Give it a try. You can also use Command-Tab to task switch, similar to how Windows does it with Alt-Tab. The Command key is the one with the apple on it. Hold down the Command key and you can use the arrow keys or even the mouse to switch to your desired application. Or highlight the icon, keep holding the Command key and press Q to quit the app without even switching to it.
Even better, use Command-` (backtick, just above the tab key) to switch between open windows/documents within a single application. It's great when you have to cut and paste between Word documents or something similar. Windows has no similar functionality. In their paradigm you're actually switching between windows, not between applications. This is one reason so many people love tabbed browsers, so we don't have to Alt-Tab through 20 separate browser windows. Open a few images in a graphics application like Photoshop and you'll soon see how nice the ability to switch between documents is. It's very awkward to move between several different images in the Windows version of Photoshop or any similar application. Command-` (backtick). It rules.
Usually you can also use the scroll wheel to switch between applications. Click it to switch back and forth between the two most recent tasks. Hold it down and scroll or hover the mouse over an icon on the task switcher that appears. It's very fast once you get used to it.
Sure, OS X does things "differently". So does Windows XP. I am continually confused by the design of XP even though I've used Windows since 3.0 and never had much of a problem with it. The difference is that OS X does things more efficiently in many ways, if you'll just keep an open mind and allow yourself to get used to it. XP, on the other hand... sheesh. What were they thinking? It's like they applied the Clippy concept to the entire OS. Oh, and the "you must call us by phone and beg for permission to reinstall your OS" concept. That's a real user-friendly bonus.
Let's talk about the Finder. You don't have to get to the desktop in order to use the Finder. This is a misconception a lot of people seem to have. Even if you did have to get to the desktop, you can use Exposé to access the desktop very quickly. Just hit the F11 key. F11 again returns everything to normal. You can trigger Exposé with the mouse if you set the hot corners to do so. Look in System Preferences under Desktop & Screen
Thanks, that's interesting information. I guess a better question would be whose idiot idea it was to move the Control key down into the corner. Still, the Alt/Command key position still seems better even if the Control key were still in the Tab key position. Using the thumb leaves all the fingers on the home keys. I'm still looking for Mac-like keybindings for the various Linux desktop environments and applications. I tried to make my own for KDE but it was a real pain because there's so much focus on the Control key combinations.
Maybe you can answer a question I've had for a long time. How does one use Control key combinations with both hands on the home keys? Seems rather difficult unless you twist your pinky finger into an awkward angle. Ever since I spent some time using BeOS I've been spoiled with Alt key combinations (Command key on the Mac). Just move your thumb a little to the left off the space bar. I used Windows for years without using any of those obnoxious Control key combinations. Linux isn't much better, it uses the Control key for most key combinations. Why? Seems like the Alt key is a far superior key for the key combos you want to use all the time. What is the deal with the dominance of the more awkward Control key?
Ahhh, the old ITWORKSFINEFORME response. Highly insightful.
I too have had problems with drivers in Windows, but in general new and old devices of all types still work better out of the box with Windows than they ever have or ever will with Linux. Yes, there are many more drivers in Linux than there were last year, or the year before. Yes, it still keeps improving. But you could never make a statement that Linux driver support is no longer a problem unless you blindly leave out hundreds of common devices that work just fine with Windows. There are still common video cards that don't work properly, or at all. Many cards with TV input/output don't work right, or at all. All kinds of digital cameras are still unsupported on Linux. Sound cards, plenty of USB devices, printers, so on and so forth. Of course none of this is the fault of Linux.
But the main problem is that driver support on Linux, even if it's available, is still an arcane thing in many cases. Hardware detection on Linux is also getting better, but when it doesn't work you can find yourself on the command line with no idea what you're doing, whereas in Windows you'd be popping in the manufacturer's CD or at worst going to a website to download an updated driver. And if the driver you download doesn't work, you have a chance of getting technical support from the manufacturer or whoever you bought the computer from. Therefore Linux driver support is still not comparable to driver support in Windows.
If Linux is to advance in the desktop world, we all have to make it a habit to step out of our geek shoes and look at things from the standpoint of a common user (a user who doesn't understand how anything works and doesn't want to dig into the system deep enough to find out what a kernel module is, or even what a kernel is). Whereupon it is easy to observe that Linux still needs work to be effective on the desktop. It works for some people and is inadequate for others. No matter how bad Windows sucks in various ways, that doesn't change the fact that Linux still needs work. It is non-constructive to ignore these shortcomings as if they have all been solved already.
A person CAN win an auction if their high bid is not a full official increment above the lower bidder. This happens in the following situation: I bid $5.02 on an auction first. Then you bid $5 in the final seconds, in an attempt to snipe my bid which is showing as the starting price of $0.99. I win the auction with a winning bid of $5.02, even though the next increment should be $5.25.
What eBay says is basically that you are invalidating your original proxy bid if you place a new maximum bid, so it (the proxy system) increases your previous maximum of $5.02 up to the minimum increment above the opposing bidder's $5.00 bid. With your initial proxy bid you had the advantage of placing the bid first, so even if the opposing maximum bid was exactly equal to yours, you would still win. By placing a new maximum bid you invalidated that time advantage and reset the proxy system. Your previous maximum of $5.02 is no longer high enough above the opposing bid to be a valid bid, so your bid is increased to the next increment to make it valid under their system.
It all has to do with time, and whether the proxy system should be reset by a new maximum bid or continue to consider the old maximum as a valid bid and leave it alone, even if it wouldn't have qualified if it hadn't been your previous maximum. It's described fairly clearly when you read the help files on proxy bidding, so I doubt this will hold up in court. I'm looking at it from all sides and can't really find fault with eBay. You agreed to use their system, they described how the proxy bidding works (including what happens if you place a new maximum bid), so I can't see that there is really anything heinous going on. There is no manipulation, it's all above board for once.
If you want to save a dollar here and there, stick with your original maximum bid and quit futzing with the proxy system, or snipe it with a precise amount. Either way, don't complain when you lose the auction.
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Why do gun owners seemingly fantasize over the scenarios in which they may use their gun. It always sounds almost masturbatory.
Why do students study for a test? Why do athletes mentally run through upcoming plays? Why do speakers rehearse their speeches? Why does a guy think about what he might say to the new girl in class? Why does anyone mentally prepare for a tricky or dangerous situation they might encounter? It's something that goes along with being sentient. We think about things. We plan ahead.
We also live on a planet inhabited by the most dangerous creature in the known universe: Man. We know that bad things happen sometimes. We want to be able to walk into a place and know that we have a good chance of walking out alive. It's the same mental preparation any number of people go through every day. If he was a police officer saying the exact same thing, would you call it a masturbatory fantasy, or a good technique for surviving his shift every day? What, a gun owner is supposed to be mentally unprepared to use his weapon for self defense in a real-world situation? Never think about it and nothing bad will happen, right? Sorry, but this isn't a utopia just yet.
Oftentimes what you read into something comes from your own mind...
Yes it is a good movie. I see that the drop in the top frame is flattened, presumeably due to the resistance of the thicker air it is passing through. The drop in the lower frame/lower atmospheric pressure is more nearly a perfect sphere. Maybe that accounts for the splash/no splash effect? Kind of like the difference between a belly flop (flattened sphere) and a clean dive.
After viewing the video backward and forward and frame by frame, I would have to say that the shape of the droplet seems to have very little to do with the splashing. If you look closely, the lip of the expanding liquid in the high pressure atmosphere starts curling upward immediately after contact. This looks like it has to be caused by the greater "viscosity" of the high pressure gas surrounding the liquid. The pressure of the gas is pushing under the tiny lip of the expanding fluid created by the surface tension of the fluid itself. It pushes hard enough and the surface tension is weak enough that the outer edge of the "splash" starts breaking apart very quickly. Go through it frame by frame. The air pressure keeps lifting the fringe as it expands, and as the outer edge of the fringe gets too thin, it breaks apart into micro-droplets that go flying all over the place. Thus, a splash.
Now, for higher viscosity fluids, the reason they splash more would be pretty simple: Logically the tiny expanding lip that gets created on contact is higher because of the greater surface tension. That is, the cross section of the edge of the expanding lip has a greater radius. A higher lip makes it easier for the surrounding gas to push underneath the lip as it expands, lift it up and break it apart, thus causing a splash. Fluids with lower viscosities will logically create a thinner lip that will slice right underneath the surrounding gas molecules if it's thin enough, without giving room for the surrounding gas to push under and lift it up. Thus, no raised lip, no splash, just a smooth flattening of the droplet on contact.
Interesting.
Otherwise can I please have a link to download the patch? Last time I went mozilla.org but couldn't find the patch, and had to download the whole 4.3MB 1.0.1
Sorry, buddy, no can do.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that even now in the post-1.0 days, there ARE NO INCREMENTAL PATCHES. All the auto-update feature does is auto-download the ENTIRE 4.3MB install file into your download directory, and automatically start the install. That was my experience with the 1.0.1 update, anyway. What is this, a joke?
I'm sure I'm one of a great many people who were hoping that once Firefox stabilized we wouldn't have to keep downloading the ENTIRE MULTI-MEGABYTE INSTALL file just to apply an incremental update from 1.0.1 to 1.0.2. Why doesn't the auto-update "feature" just load mozilla.org and tell us to download the latest version manually and uninstall the previous version before updating (to avoid having multiple versions listed in Add/Remove Programs). Hey, Firefox developers! I am one of many who are completely unimpressed with this auto-update "feature". It's a joke with a bad punchline. There has to be a better way.
One common strategy often played by big companies when they want to purchase someone (especially when it's done in a hostile fashion), is to sue them beyond their means to defend themselves, and then promise to call off their lawyers if they sell out at the lowball offer price. I've worked for a company that has had this done to them. It should be called extortion, but is perfectly legal.
Why should it be called extortion? If there was a real basis for the lawsuit (as in this case), they are still offering to pay for something they already own. Seems like that's pretty generous when they do have the option of pounding you into the ground through the court rather than giving you any money at all. That's probably why it's perfectly legal and not called extortion.
If you could find someone really forward thinking at Hasbro in a position to make decisions, a creative alternate arrangement could be reached, where fatty Jared could either license the material from Hasbro, or they could take over the site and put him on the payroll. Given the nature of most suits and bean counters, this is a highly improbable outcome.
Isn't that because the whole point of the suit is to punish the defendant and discourage others from violating Hasbro's copyrights and trademarks without licensing them? I don't understand why so many people keep suggesting that it would be a great idea to reward the unauthorized use of copyrights and trademarks with a business deal and employment.
Any which way you slice it and no matter what your opinion of Hasbro is, they own the name and the design of the game. They have a responsibility under trademark law to defend their trademark, or they will lose it. The guy running the site had a responsibility to license the game before he started cloning the game, using the name and making money off of it. Rewarding people who do things bass-ackwards is not normally the smart thing for a business to do. It just encourages more idiots to create unlicensed clones and knock-offs and then ask for money or deals. It would be different if this person came to Hasbro with the idea before it even went public and asked for a license and a cut of the profits from running the site. Did he do that?
You are a perfect example of why most of the rest of the world considers the average American to be a pompous, arrogant, ignorant, a-hole. Which is why, as you may have noticed, you've been modded as flamebait, even though you claimed not to be.
Due to the market penetration of Windows, the EU would come crawling back, begging for Windows marketing to be reinstated.
Any country or group of countries in their right mind would consider such a thing a virtual ATTACK on said country(ies) survival and economic prosperity, due to the monopolistic market penetration of Windows. As far as I (an American) am concerned, the countries in question would be well within their rights and responsibilities to their citizens to terminate all local copyrights, patents and trademarks owned by Microsoft, to allow the country to continue to supply itself with the dominant Microsoft software (for survival) while they work on moving everything over to OS X, Linux and other alternative software that won't allow them to be brought to their knees by a single corporation ever again.
The fact that the EU could be literally forced to come begging a single corporation to come back and do business with them after said corporation basically committed the equivalent of a terrorist attack on their member nations is exactly why monopolists cannot be allowed to abuse their monopolies, and why monopolies should be discouraged from even existing. Nothing should have that much power over the economy of an entire nation.
Do you not realize that if they have this power over the EU, they have the same power over the US? How is that acceptable just because they are an American-based company? Would it be cool if Microsoft just "pulled out" of the government software market, refused to sell to the US government and stopped giving them any service or updates? Hopefully you would be outraged at any American company that did such a thing, especially a company like Microsoft that wields monopoly power in our economy. It would essentially be an attack on the government's ability to run and protect our precious America.
The fact that you think it would be A-OK for an American company to do such a thing as long as it doesn't do it in the US, is absolutely frightening. You come off like you think God made Americans in His own image and we are the Chosen People who can do no wrong. You think any American company can go anywhere in the world and do whatever it wants without regard to local laws, and without ever being fined for breaking the law, just because it's a US-based company? And then you sit back and wonder why so much of the population of Earth hates Americans with a passion.
My basic point is that, as an American, why should we give a flying flip what the EU wants?! It's not like they really have any enforcement powers beyond their member's borders...
As Americans, "we" don't really care what the EU wants. But if you want to GO to the EU and do business IN THEIR COUNTRIES, you need to abide by their rules, just like their companies need to abide by our rules when they do business in the US. Is there something complicated about that? They aren't trying to enforce anything beyond their own borders! They are merely dictating the behavior of Microsoft's branches in their own area of the world.
In their part of the world, where Microsoft, being a multinational corporation, very much desires to continue doing business, Microsoft has been convicted of abusing its monopoly position in the market (breaking the law). They've been told to stop violating the local laws. They refused, so the EU imposed some fines and remedies. Microsoft in effect thumbed their nose at the fines and remedies imposed by the courts, so the EU is going to impose more fines, as is their right to do in their own part of the world. Again, is there something complicated here?
I always wonder how people even get ideas like yours into their heads. If you gave it just a smidgen of thought those ideas SHOULD self-destr
Stability is supposed to be one of the selling points of Linux. What exactly is the benefit in having a default setting that allows any user on any Linux desktop computer to lock up their machine just by starting up some application or script that consumes too many resources? Thanks but no thanks. I want both my server and my personal desktop computer to be able to recover from such things without a hard reboot. Whether they are malicious or just a mistake in some shell script doesn't matter. If it takes down the box, it's bad, and should be disabled by default.
Nobody in their right mind should be defending a lack of stability in Linux. Those who want to push the box to its absolute limits (and risk a hard lockup) can find out how to activate the options that allow this. It should NEVER be the default to have options active that compromise the stability of a machine so easily. Desktops are just as important as servers in this regard, as far as I'm concerned.
Linux is supposed to be better than Windows, remember? Raising a valid objection to a default setting capable of causing (or allowing) real-world problems on everyday computer systems is not "running around screaming".
Oh, and by the way, not everyone on Earth is a trained Linux system administrator, and being a Linux admin isn't a prerequisite to being in one's right mind. There are plenty of perfectly intelligent people who have no idea how to "lock down their box" and never will, just like most people have no idea how to break down a carburator or build a nuclear reactor. Some people have other things to do. If Linux distros want to market to the general public, they should be safe to use by the general public. We're talking about DEFAULTS here that are being used by every person running Linux in general. Not just servers run by Linux gurus. Your statement comes across like saying people who aren't expert car mechanics shouldn't be allowed on public roadways. In other words, a little elitist, don't you think?
i.e.
That's all well and good, but I remember reading somewhere that using multiple classes doesn't work well in IE. Yet another nice CSS property that would have made the web a nicer place to design, but it cannot be implemented easily because of You Know Who.
I could be wrong, it was a while ago that I read about this being a problem with IE. Someone please correct me if this is no longer the case.
He could also probably help keep a few people from being traumatized by noting that there are a lot of photos of blood and death on that website. This person seems to have an obsession with blood, sharp implements, sliced up women and very graphic death images. Even the non-person and "humorous" photos have blood references! I'm not here to judge anyone but most of polite society would call that website really f--ked up.
Fake blood and fake death, to be sure, but it's still gross and not something that everyone appreciates looking at without being warned. I'm assuming that your intention was not trolling, but that stuff you linked to bugs me more than goatse links ever did. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, there are some boobs, people, but trust me, it ain't worth it.
How is this bad for firefox? If anything its a big black eye for MS and integrating IE into the OS.
Except it's not about Firefox, IE, Windows, or even Java! It's about the ignorant user who explicitly bypasses a warning dialog and allows a malicious Java applet to step outside the sandbox and do whatever it wants to anywhere on the hard drive. It just happens that the applet infects IE with some spyware. Something similar could probably happen with any web browser on any operating system as long as it runs Sun's Java Runtime and the user goes ahead and allows the exploit to do its thing by clicking "Yes" on the prominent warning dialog that comes up. User error. Sounds like the warning dialogs need to become more explicit, simple enough for regular people to understand, and it needs to be more difficult to automatically click "Yes" without thinking.
And now back to our regularly scheduled Microsoft/Windows/IE bashing...
They are too short sighted to realize that as more people read the news online, the prices of ad-space will increase.
The real money a newspaper makes is in selling ads. Currently online advertisements aren't as profitable. But that is because industry isn't used to this type of advertisement, and isn't sure it is worth spending money on. So, the newspapers are selling online ad space for less money. But as online ads catch on, companies will feel more comfortable with them, and they will be just as profitable as "traditional" ad space.
Do you really believe that? Online ads have been going nowhere but down in value for years now. They don't work. Rest assured that industry is quite sure what online advertisements are worth to them after a decade of experience with a commercial Internet. They've run the numbers, and the numbers show them that they don't get enough return from investing in online ads to justify paying more than a pittance for them on 99.9999% of the websites on the Internet.
At this point I can remove the vast majority of them from my online experience with the click of a button. That technical problem alone reduces their value tremendously, even on the most popular websites on the net, and the blocking technologies will only get better and more widespread. I can't wave a magic wand over my printed media and make all the ads disappear.
I don't think ad-supported online media is going to work out very well. They will have to find some other way to get part of their revenue.
Why are people here up in arms when GPL code is stolen, but not when copyrighted music or movies are illegally downloaded or swapped?
People here are up in arms (or should be) when any IP is stolen FOR PROFIT and passed off as one's own creation when it very clearly isn't. What you're missing is the difference between commercial use (plagiaristic commercial use, no less) and personal use. We don't care much when people download a few songs for personal use (the same kind of songs they play on a radio all day for free, amazing, isn't it?). There are various reasons for this attitude that have been rehashed ad nauseum here, and the attitude isn't confined to Slashdot. One big reason is the completely overblown estimates of how much money is supposedly being "lost" to copyright infringement. We all know that only a small percentage of any of that money would ever have been spent if P2P didn't exist, and there are even studies that claim piracy is slightly beneficial, exposing people to more media that they eventually go purchase that they wouldn't have without P2P. So it's a very murky issue.
Commercial use is very different. I don't think anyone on Slashdot would support some guy copying a commercially produced movie, modifying a few scenes and then trying to sell it as entirely his own movie. We may like stickin' it to the **AA but this kind of thing is just plain wrong. I would hope that even everyone here would fully support the MPAA/RIAA when going after such blatantly commercial violations. It doesn't bear much resemblance to them suing a 12-year-old for millions for non-commercially downloading or sharing a few songs over P2P. It's a whole different issue.
I have never seen anyone here or on any other forum actively supporting copyright infringement FOR PROFIT. Never seen anyone supporting someone who copies copyrighted software, music or movies and tries to sell them commercially while passing them off as their own. Never. Not once.
There is some hypocrisy here from all of those who download copyrighted materials for their own personal use and then expect not to be prosecuted for it, but there are various reasons for that attitude and it isn't confined to Slashdot. Most of the population of America and the rest of the world thinks it's cool to download stuff for personal use. It's even legal in some places.
This guy is on a whole different level. He's passing off code written by others as his own, and TRYING TO PROFIT FROM IT COMMERCIALLY. Even the most lenient open source licenses such as the BSD license requires that you at the very least acknowledge the actual authors of the code. The law is being broken here very clearly.
It's a very cut-and-dried situation, unlike the whole idea of copying stuff for personal use. No one can seem to pin down how much damage the personal-use copying does, if any, and as I said above it's even legal in some parts of the world, so many people question why it shouldn't be legal in their part of the world. Apples and oranges. You can't call it theft with such certainty, because you can never prove with certainty that the person who copied the material (for personal use) ever would have or could have paid for it, so you can never prove the actual deprivation of income. I know I'm never going to throw away $700 on Photoshop until I start a business where the software will pay for itself, so here's the sum total of the money I've deprived Adobe of getting from me: $0. Personal use, or commercial use. Two different things. The personal use issue is not nearly as simple as the commercial issue.
Not only that, but it's plagiaristic commercial use. Everyone hates to see someone get away with crap like this. Rest assured that there would be the same outcry and support of legal action if some idiot decided to copy 90% of a bunch of popular RIAA-owned music and MPAA-owned movies and start passing it off as their own for commercial benefit. I cannot imagine that anyone here would even try to defend such an action, even to spite the **AAs.
Yes, you should definitely have been modded down for that post, as it was absolutely pointless.
Do you need a pretty GUI, or do you just want the new functionality etc.?
We may not need a good GUI, but we usually prefer it. Got a problem with that? Why bother with the command-line client, shouldn't you just be recreating a BT client by hand in assembly every time you want to download something?
Now, all you Mac users, go download Azureus. It's the best BT client for the Mac I've seen. Very comprehensive, easy to use, lets you limit the upload/download rates so you don't saturate the connection. It actually works now, as opposed to when I downloaded it a few months back. It's the first BT client I've seen on any platform that doesn't suck.
Azureus. Get it. I'm sure they will be updating internally to the new BitTorrent release before long, but it already works great. Cross platform, too. You'll need the latest Java installed.
I recall a line about forcing windows to produce fingerprintable timestamps.
That's something I hadn't heard. Typical of Windows to be controllable externally in such a manner. Definitely a little closer to an active action to unmask the user.
I am merely tired (that is worn and mentally frayed) from the constant stream of new ways people can look at you that I didn't know about.
I hear you. It's not a fun universe some days. But life goes on. Cheers.
while your trashing of my post is pretty good, I think you're missing the point. There seems to be a drive to find more ways of tracking what people are doing. My gripe is that I don't really see where this gets us except that now there is yet ANOTHER way for people to look at what you're doing. Whether you want them to or not. Inevitably somone will try to use this to their advantage without concern for my privacy or what damage it may do to me. I'm merely arguing that there has to be a point at which we decide we don't accept this anymore.
Don't see where this gets whom? It's just a piece of knowledge. Like a lot of knowledge, in the right hands and with the right uses it could benefit many people by helping to identify crackers and stolen hardware, etc. In the wrong hands it could do a lot of damage, until we make the technique useless which it sounds like should happen pretty quickly. In systems like Linux and OpenBSD people have already posted how to turn off the feature that allows this fingerprinting technique to work. It can be done in a few seconds, and will probably become a default in most open source operating systems before the year is out.
The problem is that your statement assumes that "we" (whoever "we" is) run the world and have some sort of control over all the people in it. This is really a pointless and misdirected sentiment because nobody has control over everyone on this planet. If you don't want someone walking by your house to peek in your window, it's accepted that you already need to take some reasonable technological pro-active actions like pulling the shades over your bay windows before you get nekkid.
You had a good point there about the emission of light but you missed its significance to your argument. If you don't take privacy precautions the person who looks in your window is no longer a peeping tom, but an innocent bystander who can even charge you with lewd conduct if they can clearly see you nekkid from outside your property without taking any unusual action like climbing a tree. They aren't invading your privacy if you aren't taking any real action to protect it. There is an expectation that they won't try very hard to look inside your house, but there is also an expectation that you won't display the inside of your house where everyone can see it without even trying. If you build your house of glass, any court in this country would say that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
As we all know, computer analogies are always very rough when they relate things to the real world. The emission of identifiable packets from your NAT is the same as having a completely uncovered window. It just happens that everyone walking by up until now was legally blind and couldn't see clearly the identifying information embedded in your packets. Now that someone has developed a pair of glasses to let us bring into focus the packets (photons) coming through your NAT (window), you'll have to do the equivalent of putting frosted contact paper over your window. You'll have to randomize that fingerprinting information like contact paper would scatter the identifiable photons.
This fingerprinting thing isn't the equivalent of peeking through the curtains. If your curtains are closed, I would have to use a telescope or come right up to your house into your yard in order to look inside through the crack. That's the equivalent of taking an action like tapping your LAN or inserting a trojan into your internal network. It's active rather than passive. I don't buy that analyzing traffic going over the public Internet (sidewalk) is the same as peeking through the curtains. This is more like the police taking surveillance photos of you walking down a public street. In the same way, the packets being analyzed are walking down a public wire.
Again, if you don't want to be identified, don't send the packets outside your LAN, or make them put on a disguise. Your NAT box lets your computers onto the public Internet, it doesn't necessarily keep the public Int
How this thing qualifies as a "smackdown for freedom" is simply beyond me. That entirely depends on how it's used and how quickly we can make the technique worthless with a security update.
Now I can't be an anonymous coward because slashdot can sniff my time-skew and put my name up anyway.
Um, you have to be registered and logged in to post anonymously. Slashdot can already decide to unmask all ACs henceforth if they feel like it. Probably not retroactively, but I don't understand slashcode enough to verify that. Fingerprinting your computer would be a useless addition that would only tell them you logged in from a particular piece of hardware.
Where are the days when I could telephone someone and NOT have to be identified. (caller id).
Those days never existed that I know of. The telephone system has always been able to identify where you are calling from, they just extended that capability to the home user with the Caller ID service. What gives you the right to be anonymous when you call someone else? If you want to be anonymous, call from a payphone. It will still probably tell them your address. That's the nature of the phone system. If you really want to be anonymous, don't use the phone system.
Is this really necessary? Nothing is sacred anymore. I want to be able to live my life behind my walls without people constantly peeking through the curtains, and thats what this is. At some point we have to stand up and say "you stop here" to these damn peeping toms.
What. The. Bleep. Are. You. Smoking? That's a new one. Security through mutual worldwide agreement of packet sacredness? Good luck. And what does "necessary" have to do with anything? Was it "necessary" to climb Mt. Everest, or land on the Moon, or discover that uranium ore exhibits radioactivity?
No, this isn't "peeking through the curtains". This has nothing to do with your privacy in your own home. If you don't want anyone analyzing the packets that you send outside your four walls, don't send any packets out. Nobody is "peeping" into your LAN. You are handing them all the information they need to find this fingerprint from anywhere in the world. Either don't send the information out or mangle it in some way to keep it from being identifiable.
This fingerprinting technique is merely knowledge gained from understanding a technology. Knowledge is neither good nor evil, and knows nothing about what we consider sacred and what we don't. All knowledge can be abused. The answer is not to bury our heads in the sand and demand that no one analyze our TCP packets without our permission. The answer is not to demand that knowledge not be used, or new knowledge not be created. The right answer is to adapt to this security threat with new technology and move on with our lives. Oh, and it would be good to have some sense of reality while we're at it.
But for all the folks out there who simply have juvenile comments on the order of "Flash sucks"... well, I guess I just don't understand what you think you're contributing to the topic.
Get it right, man. He didn't say it sucks, he said it blows. That's a totally different and perfectly legitimate argument... Duh. Some people.
Not quite. This would be like if Apache bundled a copy of Real Player or the Google toolbar with every install.
Even that doesn't cover it, if they're bundling it with Flash player. This would be like Apache making you install Google Toolbar or whatever for you the user to view any website hosted on Apache. The users don't install Apache. If this is for real it's an extremely stupid move on Macromedia's part. It's the sort of thing that makes the world turn against a technology like so many of us turned against the obnoxiousness of Real Player and Netscape with all its bundled AOL crap.
They never learn.
None of those cases come anywhere near the clean design of the Mac mini besides maybe the SilverStone LC09, which I couldn't find on Newegg but probably costs at least $150 (based on a similar SilverStone case I saw).
I've seen the Hush PC before. Looks nice, and it's silent. Just for kicks I spec'ed out a Mini-ITX model with moderately similar components to the 1.25 G4 Mac mini. No extra memory, and I didn't even upgrade XP Home to Pro. Came out to about 970 Euros. That's for a 1.2GHz VIA processor. That's up from the base price of 769 Euros for something with a CD-ROM! Count me among the unimpressed.
Honestly, the more people try to present alternatives to the Mac mini, the more impressive the Mac mini looks. It's truly amazing what Apple has crammed into that little box at that price level. Now if only they would put a little more effort into quality control...
Unless you have a bunch of keyboard shortcuts memorized (-2 points for new users right there) and always have one hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse (please, no "where's the other hand" jokes), you lose a lot of efficiency. In Windows, everything's designed where it can pretty much be controlled by the mouse, with a need to sometimes use the keyboard for shortcuts or special functions, which I prefer. Keyboard shortcuts aren't bad, but I personally like being able to control from the mouse easily.
You do realize that Apple computers were the first to use a mouse, right? In 1985 or thereabouts? The whole Mac OS has had a mouse-centric design since the beginning. You are suffering from a severe misunderstanding somewhere if you think you need keyboard shortcuts to do anything. A more correct way to look at it is that if you do learn some keyboard shortcuts you gain a lot of efficiency, not lose it. With one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse OS X responds to my needs more efficiently than Windows ever has. Yes, I have also used Windows for many years, and didn't use Mac OS until recently. I would agree with anyone who said previous versions of Mac OS had much suckage, but the latest version of OS X is quite different.
Even with just the standard one-button mouse everything in any Mac OS is quickly accessible. If you want even more efficiency get a regular two-button scroll mouse and you'll have access to many context menus similar to what you get in Windows. You can simulate a right-click with a one-button mouse by holding down the Control key when clicking. Give it a try. You can also use Command-Tab to task switch, similar to how Windows does it with Alt-Tab. The Command key is the one with the apple on it. Hold down the Command key and you can use the arrow keys or even the mouse to switch to your desired application. Or highlight the icon, keep holding the Command key and press Q to quit the app without even switching to it.
Even better, use Command-` (backtick, just above the tab key) to switch between open windows/documents within a single application. It's great when you have to cut and paste between Word documents or something similar. Windows has no similar functionality. In their paradigm you're actually switching between windows, not between applications. This is one reason so many people love tabbed browsers, so we don't have to Alt-Tab through 20 separate browser windows. Open a few images in a graphics application like Photoshop and you'll soon see how nice the ability to switch between documents is. It's very awkward to move between several different images in the Windows version of Photoshop or any similar application. Command-` (backtick). It rules.
Usually you can also use the scroll wheel to switch between applications. Click it to switch back and forth between the two most recent tasks. Hold it down and scroll or hover the mouse over an icon on the task switcher that appears. It's very fast once you get used to it.
Sure, OS X does things "differently". So does Windows XP. I am continually confused by the design of XP even though I've used Windows since 3.0 and never had much of a problem with it. The difference is that OS X does things more efficiently in many ways, if you'll just keep an open mind and allow yourself to get used to it. XP, on the other hand... sheesh. What were they thinking? It's like they applied the Clippy concept to the entire OS. Oh, and the "you must call us by phone and beg for permission to reinstall your OS" concept. That's a real user-friendly bonus.
Let's talk about the Finder. You don't have to get to the desktop in order to use the Finder. This is a misconception a lot of people seem to have. Even if you did have to get to the desktop, you can use Exposé to access the desktop very quickly. Just hit the F11 key. F11 again returns everything to normal. You can trigger Exposé with the mouse if you set the hot corners to do so. Look in System Preferences under Desktop & Screen
Thanks, that's interesting information. I guess a better question would be whose idiot idea it was to move the Control key down into the corner. Still, the Alt/Command key position still seems better even if the Control key were still in the Tab key position. Using the thumb leaves all the fingers on the home keys. I'm still looking for Mac-like keybindings for the various Linux desktop environments and applications. I tried to make my own for KDE but it was a real pain because there's so much focus on the Control key combinations.
Maybe you can answer a question I've had for a long time. How does one use Control key combinations with both hands on the home keys? Seems rather difficult unless you twist your pinky finger into an awkward angle. Ever since I spent some time using BeOS I've been spoiled with Alt key combinations (Command key on the Mac). Just move your thumb a little to the left off the space bar. I used Windows for years without using any of those obnoxious Control key combinations. Linux isn't much better, it uses the Control key for most key combinations. Why? Seems like the Alt key is a far superior key for the key combos you want to use all the time. What is the deal with the dominance of the more awkward Control key?
Ahhh, the old ITWORKSFINEFORME response. Highly insightful.
I too have had problems with drivers in Windows, but in general new and old devices of all types still work better out of the box with Windows than they ever have or ever will with Linux. Yes, there are many more drivers in Linux than there were last year, or the year before. Yes, it still keeps improving. But you could never make a statement that Linux driver support is no longer a problem unless you blindly leave out hundreds of common devices that work just fine with Windows. There are still common video cards that don't work properly, or at all. Many cards with TV input/output don't work right, or at all. All kinds of digital cameras are still unsupported on Linux. Sound cards, plenty of USB devices, printers, so on and so forth. Of course none of this is the fault of Linux.
But the main problem is that driver support on Linux, even if it's available, is still an arcane thing in many cases. Hardware detection on Linux is also getting better, but when it doesn't work you can find yourself on the command line with no idea what you're doing, whereas in Windows you'd be popping in the manufacturer's CD or at worst going to a website to download an updated driver. And if the driver you download doesn't work, you have a chance of getting technical support from the manufacturer or whoever you bought the computer from. Therefore Linux driver support is still not comparable to driver support in Windows.
If Linux is to advance in the desktop world, we all have to make it a habit to step out of our geek shoes and look at things from the standpoint of a common user (a user who doesn't understand how anything works and doesn't want to dig into the system deep enough to find out what a kernel module is, or even what a kernel is). Whereupon it is easy to observe that Linux still needs work to be effective on the desktop. It works for some people and is inadequate for others. No matter how bad Windows sucks in various ways, that doesn't change the fact that Linux still needs work. It is non-constructive to ignore these shortcomings as if they have all been solved already.
A person CAN win an auction if their high bid is not a full official increment above the lower bidder. This happens in the following situation:
I bid $5.02 on an auction first. Then you bid $5 in the final seconds, in an attempt to snipe my bid which is showing as the starting price of $0.99. I win the auction with a winning bid of $5.02, even though the next increment should be $5.25.
What eBay says is basically that you are invalidating your original proxy bid if you place a new maximum bid, so it (the proxy system) increases your previous maximum of $5.02 up to the minimum increment above the opposing bidder's $5.00 bid. With your initial proxy bid you had the advantage of placing the bid first, so even if the opposing maximum bid was exactly equal to yours, you would still win. By placing a new maximum bid you invalidated that time advantage and reset the proxy system. Your previous maximum of $5.02 is no longer high enough above the opposing bid to be a valid bid, so your bid is increased to the next increment to make it valid under their system.
It all has to do with time, and whether the proxy system should be reset by a new maximum bid or continue to consider the old maximum as a valid bid and leave it alone, even if it wouldn't have qualified if it hadn't been your previous maximum. It's described fairly clearly when you read the help files on proxy bidding, so I doubt this will hold up in court. I'm looking at it from all sides and can't really find fault with eBay. You agreed to use their system, they described how the proxy bidding works (including what happens if you place a new maximum bid), so I can't see that there is really anything heinous going on. There is no manipulation, it's all above board for once.
If you want to save a dollar here and there, stick with your original maximum bid and quit futzing with the proxy system, or snipe it with a precise amount. Either way, don't complain when you lose the auction.