Touch screens looked good in Star Trek, but in real life, you end up with users suffering from Gorilla Arm.
Similarly another Trek-ism, voice control suffers from the same problem. Just as touch screens cause Gorilla Arm, voice recognition generates laryngitis and has the additional effect of annoying bystanders.
I think I'll stick with the keyboard & mouse for the time being. Though I wouldn't mind seing the keyboard redesigned. Get rid of useless keys like Scroll lock, and simplify things a bit.
XMLTerm is a terminal program designed to replace xterm and its descendents. It is a command line interface, but the output is in XML pagelets instead of ASCII text in a VT100 emulator, with embedded images, web page style formatted text, clickable links, etc.
It requires Mozilla to work, as it uses the Mozilla engine for rendering.
There are several reasons why toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt aren't based directly on Xt.
Xt's API is awful (so is Motif's by extension). It forces you to explicitly deal with a lot of low-level crap that should be handled automatically through defaults or under-the-hood behavior. Xt doesn't have enough functionality by itself to build decent GUIs, it needs help from a higher level toolkit like Motif.
As a correllary, Motif was non-free for years. Most Linux users didn't feel the need to fork over hundreds of dollars for Motif, when they could accomplish their tasks without it (crudely with just Xt and Xaw). For a while, Motif was superior to the free tools, but Qt and GTK+ have now left Motif in the dust. Even though Motif is now free, nobody wants to bother with it now that they have moved on to better things.
Xt is slow. Qt in particular makes calls directly to Xlib (the lowest level interface to X) instead of going through Xt for performance reasons. I'm not sure about GTK+ & other toolkits.
Both GTK+ and Qt are great improvements over Xt+Motif. They're easier to program to, less buggy, have more functionality, provide more consistent GUIs and are much faster.
The only possible reason to use Motif/Xt is to deal with legacy applications.
Hey, c'mon!!! I love animals!!! They're delicious!!! They're also very fashionable. How dare you suggest that I forgo my hamburgers and leather jackets!!! That's just uncivilized!!!
Some ISPs, fed up with wasting time and money kicking spammers off their networks, charge spammers with a cleanup fee of several hundred dollars when they kick them off. I highly encourage this, and wish more ISPs would do this.
Also, by using spamcop.net, the spammers are also more likely to end up in ORBS or the MAPS Black Hole List, as are the ISPs that don't do enough to give spammers the smackdown.
Also, if you generate enough complaints, you may end up on a spammer's list of a different type - the list of addresses to avoid mailing because they file complaints.
Here's a question for Bero: 3dfx/Glide support was included in RH 7.0, as a set of beta drivers in the Previews directory. Are you guys including more stable 3dfx support now? (something that doesn't mangle Unreal Tournament for instance?)
Martin Fowler said it best in his book Refactoring: Comments are a good thing, but they are frequently used as a deodorant to cover up bad smelling code. I prefer to write self-documenting code. This means that I do little things like choosing meaningful variable names, using whitespace to group code in small digestable chunks, choose expressions for their understandability in the same way I choose English phrases, use common idioms used in the industry for whatever language I'm using, and try to use good coding practices in general. There are cases where it is impossible to show in the code itself why something is done, in that case, I'll use comments, but I'll also ask myself if there is a better way to write the code so it doesn't need explanation. In any case, I try to avoid "x++;// Add 1 to x".
There are reasons to continue running the old text-mode version. One of my friends is legally blind and uses a speech synthesizer to read on-screen text outloud when he is working. He has GUI versions of his software, as the speech synthesizer can OCR text in GUI windows, but that mode is less than reliable (skips lines, misreads words, etc.) He vastly prefers using text-mode WordPerfect, as the speech synthesizer has a much easier time reading characters straight out of the text buffer in ASCII.
Ken Shrum and Madam Theisen were the two best teachers I've had in my educational experience.
Madam Theisen was my French teacher when I was in Jr. High school. Most foreign language teachers did the conventional thing: They taught the grammar, taught vocabulary, had us do assignments to drill the vocabulary, important things to learn, but I got bored with the drills and lectures and didn't get very much out of those classes. Madam Theisen was about the craziest woman I've ever met in school (the perfect thing for a French class:) ) She would wear outrageous outfits, including a big chicken hat. She had us sing songs, she brought in food and had us recite the names of food and utensils as we ate, she taught us French nursery rhymes. The class was incredibly silly, but we learned French well. During the summer, she also organized and chaperoned trips to France, which both I and my sister went on. <ramble> We saw Paris, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Pompidou Center (also known as the Inside Out building). I spent a week or so living with a French family. I visited the D-Day beaches at Normandy. I visited the Cote D'Azure, I saw the Bastille Day celebrations, and had a blast!</ramble> She taught us not only French, but a deep appreciation of other cultures which I carry to this day.
My other truly great teacher was Ken Shrum, who taught my Object Oriented Design class last fall at Colorado State University. He was one of those teachers who bucked against the normal way of doing things at CSU. The first thing he did in his class, before we got to object oriented design itself, was teach us how to be better programmers in what he called his "Boot Camp," which covered good programming style, and threw in some Extreme Programming concepts including unit testing, test-first programming and pair-programming. He was concerned about some of the things that were left untaught in the CS Dept., and that put him at odds with the rest of the department and the friction forced him to leave. Nevertheless, it is clear that Ken cared a great deal about his students and went out of his way to help them.
To both of you, thanks for everything, you don't know the difference you've made in people's lives.
IIRC, I read this from some article about a kid who tried to build a breeder reactor(?!) in his backyard toolshed. If you can get a hold of a few old smoke alarms, you can extract Americium from them. You can also get elements such as Radium and Thorium from mundane sources such as antique clocks with glow-in-the-dark faces. The hard part is processing such materials so they are suitable for irradiating junk mailers without irradiating yourself and turning your garden shed into a Superfund site.
Just put a slice of SPAM (Hormel's infamous meat product) into the reply envelope and mail it. I'd imagine that by the time it has been processed through the USPS's mail routing machines and left to ripen for a few days during transit, it will be quite a treat for them to open, and make a tasty snack for the junkmailer's mail opening machines. Just a small way of giving them a taste of their own medicine.
I think putting a slice of Spam (Hormel's mystery meat product) into the BRM envelope would result in some poetic justice, especially if it takes a long time to reach the junk mailer (/me retches uncontrollably.)
I doubt that you'd get put in prison for that, but the post office will refuse to deliver it.
I just wish it was legal to send letter bombs in those prepaid return envelopes, maybe that'll break them of their junk mail habits.;)
Re:An interesting hobby.
on
Infiltration
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· Score: 1
Water under pressure (such as 250psi found in steam pipes) can end up in a superheated liquid state much hotter than 100C. In any case, rupturing a 250psi steam pipe in an enclosed tunnel will cause a steam explosion and cook you like a lobster in a big hurry. Caution is advised.
I would like to know if you support alternatives to copy protection, such as copyright protection (holograms, watermarks, digital signatures & such.) If so, which methods you would support, and how would you like to see them used?
For example, one alternative could be the use of watermarks to track pirated music back to the purchaser and slap him with a small fine, as I suggested in this post. I wanted a scheme does not obstruct fair use, helps to catch those responsible for pirating, gives a moderate punishment (multi-million dollar judgements and 20 year prison sentences are not moderate), and get rid of some of the legal baggage. This would be preferable to treating honest customers like criminals.
Anyways, what do you think about these kinds of alternatives?
They do spend a LOT of money on marketing. For example the publishers pay the retailers tens of thousands of dollars for the right to display an endcap, the cardbord displays advertising a game at places like Babbages.
Yes, I'm also suspicious about the amount of money actually lost to piracy. Noone has been able to come up with reasonably plausible numbers. I think PC Gamer came up with the $1.00 number out of the blue.
I am disappointed that the developers don't get a bigger piece of the pie. They're in the same boat as musicians - getting the shaft from the publishers.
Well, I never said my idea was perfect,;) indeed I said there were probably ways to abuse this system, and you found a few... There should be a method for ownership transfer (with the new owner agreeing to the same fine system as the 1st owner,) and a way for reporting theft similar to the policies for reporting theft of credit cards, to limit liability for the original owner. We don't want people to buy tracks, send bogus "My music was stolen" letters to avoid fines and then start bootlegging, owners still have to have some responsibility.
Also, the watermark damn well better be strong. I'd suggest using some sort of digital signature in the watermark that ensures that even if the watermark could be removed, it could not be forged with current technology before the heat-death of the universe.
As for "buying something outright and owning it," that never was entirely true. When you buy a CD, DVD, software in the store, you're buying the media, fancy packaging, and a license for unlimited personal use of the information on the media, codified by copyright. This is how it worked for most of the 20th century.
Also just for arguments sake, let's say the $100 fine was per song, and that the owner could be fined a maximum of 5 times for incidents or $500, then he would be permanently banned from my online music service as a habitual offender, thus preventing further damage to the owner, the music service and the artists. (You know, get too many speeding tickets and lose your driver's license.)
The traditional (but not mandated) area for protest speech and such is a place known as the Stump, literally an old tree stump that people stand and shout on that is in the plaza next to the student union, library and engineering buildings. There would be serious problems with creating a "free speech zone" elsewhere on campus.
While we're on this subject, here are some more ideas.
All telemarketers must provide Caller ID information naming the company calling. Big fines if this doesn't happen.
The phone company practice of playing both sides against the middle needs to stop. If the phone company offers a service such as anonymous call rejection, they are not allowed to provide telemarketers a way to get around it. Ideally, they should keep a list of known telemarketers and provide automatic rejection based on that list.
The telemarketers' wardialers need to be stopped. They are responsible for the vast majority of hang-up phone calls I receive. They should not be allowed to place a call unless a human being is ready to take that call when the victim^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomer picks up.
I just saw an article in the latest issue of PC Gamer titled "Where Does Your Money Go?" showing a breakdown of the costs involved in producing a computer game. They are more expensive then you may realize. Here are the costs per game.
Retail costs:
Online Sales: $.50
Store buildings & real estate: $4.00
Money to publishers & distributors: $5.00
Alleged loss to pirates: $1.00
Publishing costs:
Marketing: $6.00
Release Party: $0.25
Endcaps and other in-store promotion: $0.50
Merchandising (T-shirts, keychains): $0.20
Insert ads (the games you see in Best Buy ads): $1.00
Cross Promotion: (Star Trek game ads during Star Trek TV shows) $1.00
Sales staff, PR, more advertising: $5.00
Production and shipping: $5.00
Tech Support $1.00
Development costs:
Production costs (FMV shoots, actors, studios, travel expenses): $4.00
Salaries (programmers have to eat): $6.00
Licensing a franchise such as Star Trek: $2.00
Licensing a game engine such as the Quake III or Unreal engine: $2.50
Other overhead (office space, computers & software, everything else): $5.00
In case you can't do math, the above costs add up to $49.95 which coincidentally is what you typically pay at Babbages or Best Buy. The programmers get barely enough money to tread water. I'm not sure what the cost breakdowns are for DVD movies and music, but as has been frequently pointed out, the original creators don't get much, most of the expenses are in marketing.
Putting a unique watermark on a DVD or MP3 could work, but I'd do it a bit differently. Say I was the evil overlord of an online subscription based music company and I wanted to deter piracy, I would do as follows:
Make the customers sign a legally binding agreement (snail-mailed & signed with a pen if necessary) before allowing them to use my service. The contract would make them responsible for preventing copyright infringements, and make them pay a $100.00 fine for each infringement traced back to them.
Every time a customer downloads a song or album, it would have a unique watermark attached to it (ideally using heavy encryption and steganography to prevent cracking and prevent altering of the watermark,) so each track can be traced back to the downloading customer.
The customer is now free to use the music however he/she wishes. He can even copy it and use it in any way permitted by Fair Use. There is no copy protection in this scheme, just copyright protection. Thus, there is little incentive for most people to crack the watermark.
If a track is found on the net or on the streets in an obvious copyright infringement situation (on a warez site, or found in the hands of bootleggers,) the company uses the watermark to trace the song back to the original customer, and adds a $100.00 fine to his bill. The amount is important. $100.00 is high enough to be irritating and an effective deterrent to home users, but low enough to make it not worth fighting. Legally speaking, this kind of offense should have the seriousness of a minor traffic ticket. Most infringers will gripe and grumble, but pay the fine without a big legal battle. The customer did sign a contract, making it harder to break this system with legal action. A bonus to this system is that the company and artists get a new source of income from fines. The idea is that the company issues lots of fines as a routine part of the business, rather than spending thousands of dollars trying to get a small number of pirates hung, drawn and quartered in court.
The idea here is not to bankrupt people or create drawn out court cases, we want a simple deterrent, while still allowing fair use of copyrighted works. There should be a limit to the fines - a customer shouldn't have to pay $100,000,000 if the company catches 1,000,000 infringing copies of his track on the net. Also, there should be a fair appeals process in place, preferably through a disinterested 3rd party so the customer can contest the fine, but the process should be quick, cheap and final.
Of course, depending of the evilness of the people implementing this plan, there are probably lots of ways for this plan to be abused. But maybe it can be turned into a fair way of fighting piracy.
Ok, I think I just let something evil loose, flame away!
There is one big reason to worry about this - these schemes will break interoperability between open source and closed source software and make all open source software suspect. Think it's annoying that you have to boot to Windows to view that Star Wars trailer in Quicktime format? Take that annoyance and mutiply it a thousand fold. If the corps have their way, no Linux software will ever be able to legally work with any data that is even remotely copyrighted. No company will allow an open source implementation of a copy protection scheme. Like that new album you paid for and downloaded? Sorry, can't listen to it in Linux. The protocols were reverse engineered a few years ago, but the guys who did it are now serving long prison sentences. Anyone trying to use Linux or other open source software to view protected content is automatically a suspect. Kiss your freedom goodbye.
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I thought he traditionally accompanied his entrees with fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Touch screens looked good in Star Trek, but in real life, you end up with users suffering from Gorilla Arm.
Similarly another Trek-ism, voice control suffers from the same problem. Just as touch screens cause Gorilla Arm, voice recognition generates laryngitis and has the additional effect of annoying bystanders.
I think I'll stick with the keyboard & mouse for the time being. Though I wouldn't mind seing the keyboard redesigned. Get rid of useless keys like Scroll lock, and simplify things a bit.
Something got screwed up, try http://xmlterm.com/
XMLTerm is a terminal program designed to replace xterm and its descendents. It is a command line interface, but the output is in XML pagelets instead of ASCII text in a VT100 emulator, with embedded images, web page style formatted text, clickable links, etc.
It requires Mozilla to work, as it uses the Mozilla engine for rendering.
There are several reasons why toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt aren't based directly on Xt.
The only possible reason to use Motif/Xt is to deal with legacy applications.
Hey, c'mon!!! I love animals!!! They're delicious!!! They're also very fashionable. How dare you suggest that I forgo my hamburgers and leather jackets!!! That's just uncivilized!!!
Some ISPs, fed up with wasting time and money kicking spammers off their networks, charge spammers with a cleanup fee of several hundred dollars when they kick them off. I highly encourage this, and wish more ISPs would do this.
Also, by using spamcop.net, the spammers are also more likely to end up in ORBS or the MAPS Black Hole List, as are the ISPs that don't do enough to give spammers the smackdown.
Also, if you generate enough complaints, you may end up on a spammer's list of a different type - the list of addresses to avoid mailing because they file complaints.
Here's a question for Bero: 3dfx/Glide support was included in RH 7.0, as a set of beta drivers in the Previews directory. Are you guys including more stable 3dfx support now? (something that doesn't mangle Unreal Tournament for instance?)
Martin Fowler said it best in his book Refactoring: Comments are a good thing, but they are frequently used as a deodorant to cover up bad smelling code. I prefer to write self-documenting code. This means that I do little things like choosing meaningful variable names, using whitespace to group code in small digestable chunks, choose expressions for their understandability in the same way I choose English phrases, use common idioms used in the industry for whatever language I'm using, and try to use good coding practices in general. There are cases where it is impossible to show in the code itself why something is done, in that case, I'll use comments, but I'll also ask myself if there is a better way to write the code so it doesn't need explanation. In any case, I try to avoid "x++; // Add 1 to x".
There are reasons to continue running the old text-mode version. One of my friends is legally blind and uses a speech synthesizer to read on-screen text outloud when he is working. He has GUI versions of his software, as the speech synthesizer can OCR text in GUI windows, but that mode is less than reliable (skips lines, misreads words, etc.) He vastly prefers using text-mode WordPerfect, as the speech synthesizer has a much easier time reading characters straight out of the text buffer in ASCII.
Ken Shrum and Madam Theisen were the two best teachers I've had in my educational experience.
Madam Theisen was my French teacher when I was in Jr. High school. Most foreign language teachers did the conventional thing: They taught the grammar, taught vocabulary, had us do assignments to drill the vocabulary, important things to learn, but I got bored with the drills and lectures and didn't get very much out of those classes. Madam Theisen was about the craziest woman I've ever met in school (the perfect thing for a French class :) ) She would wear outrageous outfits, including a big chicken hat. She had us sing songs, she brought in food and had us recite the names of food and utensils as we ate, she taught us French nursery rhymes. The class was incredibly silly, but we learned French well. During the summer, she also organized and chaperoned trips to France, which both I and my sister went on. <ramble> We saw Paris, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Pompidou Center (also known as the Inside Out building). I spent a week or so living with a French family. I visited the D-Day beaches at Normandy. I visited the Cote D'Azure, I saw the Bastille Day celebrations, and had a blast!</ramble> She taught us not only French, but a deep appreciation of other cultures which I carry to this day.
My other truly great teacher was Ken Shrum, who taught my Object Oriented Design class last fall at Colorado State University. He was one of those teachers who bucked against the normal way of doing things at CSU. The first thing he did in his class, before we got to object oriented design itself, was teach us how to be better programmers in what he called his "Boot Camp," which covered good programming style, and threw in some Extreme Programming concepts including unit testing, test-first programming and pair-programming. He was concerned about some of the things that were left untaught in the CS Dept., and that put him at odds with the rest of the department and the friction forced him to leave. Nevertheless, it is clear that Ken cared a great deal about his students and went out of his way to help them.
To both of you, thanks for everything, you don't know the difference you've made in people's lives.
IIRC, I read this from some article about a kid who tried to build a breeder reactor(?!) in his backyard toolshed. If you can get a hold of a few old smoke alarms, you can extract Americium from them. You can also get elements such as Radium and Thorium from mundane sources such as antique clocks with glow-in-the-dark faces. The hard part is processing such materials so they are suitable for irradiating junk mailers without irradiating yourself and turning your garden shed into a Superfund site.
Just put a slice of SPAM (Hormel's infamous meat product) into the reply envelope and mail it. I'd imagine that by the time it has been processed through the USPS's mail routing machines and left to ripen for a few days during transit, it will be quite a treat for them to open, and make a tasty snack for the junkmailer's mail opening machines. Just a small way of giving them a taste of their own medicine.
I think putting a slice of Spam (Hormel's mystery meat product) into the BRM envelope would result in some poetic justice, especially if it takes a long time to reach the junk mailer (/me retches uncontrollably.)
I doubt that you'd get put in prison for that, but the post office will refuse to deliver it.
I just wish it was legal to send letter bombs in those prepaid return envelopes, maybe that'll break them of their junk mail habits. ;)
Water under pressure (such as 250psi found in steam pipes) can end up in a superheated liquid state much hotter than 100C. In any case, rupturing a 250psi steam pipe in an enclosed tunnel will cause a steam explosion and cook you like a lobster in a big hurry. Caution is advised.
I would like to know if you support alternatives to copy protection, such as copyright protection (holograms, watermarks, digital signatures & such.) If so, which methods you would support, and how would you like to see them used?
For example, one alternative could be the use of watermarks to track pirated music back to the purchaser and slap him with a small fine, as I suggested in this post. I wanted a scheme does not obstruct fair use, helps to catch those responsible for pirating, gives a moderate punishment (multi-million dollar judgements and 20 year prison sentences are not moderate), and get rid of some of the legal baggage. This would be preferable to treating honest customers like criminals.
Anyways, what do you think about these kinds of alternatives?
They do spend a LOT of money on marketing. For example the publishers pay the retailers tens of thousands of dollars for the right to display an endcap, the cardbord displays advertising a game at places like Babbages.
Yes, I'm also suspicious about the amount of money actually lost to piracy. Noone has been able to come up with reasonably plausible numbers. I think PC Gamer came up with the $1.00 number out of the blue.
I am disappointed that the developers don't get a bigger piece of the pie. They're in the same boat as musicians - getting the shaft from the publishers.
Well, I never said my idea was perfect, ;) indeed I said there were probably ways to abuse this system, and you found a few... There should be a method for ownership transfer (with the new owner agreeing to the same fine system as the 1st owner,) and a way for reporting theft similar to the policies for reporting theft of credit cards, to limit liability for the original owner. We don't want people to buy tracks, send bogus "My music was stolen" letters to avoid fines and then start bootlegging, owners still have to have some responsibility.
Also, the watermark damn well better be strong. I'd suggest using some sort of digital signature in the watermark that ensures that even if the watermark could be removed, it could not be forged with current technology before the heat-death of the universe.
As for "buying something outright and owning it," that never was entirely true. When you buy a CD, DVD, software in the store, you're buying the media, fancy packaging, and a license for unlimited personal use of the information on the media, codified by copyright. This is how it worked for most of the 20th century.
Also just for arguments sake, let's say the $100 fine was per song, and that the owner could be fined a maximum of 5 times for incidents or $500, then he would be permanently banned from my online music service as a habitual offender, thus preventing further damage to the owner, the music service and the artists. (You know, get too many speeding tickets and lose your driver's license.)
The traditional (but not mandated) area for protest speech and such is a place known as the Stump, literally an old tree stump that people stand and shout on that is in the plaza next to the student union, library and engineering buildings. There would be serious problems with creating a "free speech zone" elsewhere on campus.
I just saw an article in the latest issue of PC Gamer titled "Where Does Your Money Go?" showing a breakdown of the costs involved in producing a computer game. They are more expensive then you may realize. Here are the costs per game.
In case you can't do math, the above costs add up to $49.95 which coincidentally is what you typically pay at Babbages or Best Buy. The programmers get barely enough money to tread water. I'm not sure what the cost breakdowns are for DVD movies and music, but as has been frequently pointed out, the original creators don't get much, most of the expenses are in marketing.
Putting a unique watermark on a DVD or MP3 could work, but I'd do it a bit differently. Say I was the evil overlord of an online subscription based music company and I wanted to deter piracy, I would do as follows:
The idea here is not to bankrupt people or create drawn out court cases, we want a simple deterrent, while still allowing fair use of copyrighted works. There should be a limit to the fines - a customer shouldn't have to pay $100,000,000 if the company catches 1,000,000 infringing copies of his track on the net. Also, there should be a fair appeals process in place, preferably through a disinterested 3rd party so the customer can contest the fine, but the process should be quick, cheap and final.
Of course, depending of the evilness of the people implementing this plan, there are probably lots of ways for this plan to be abused. But maybe it can be turned into a fair way of fighting piracy.
Ok, I think I just let something evil loose, flame away!
My Batman Factor is 2, will be 3 if I get a Palm Pilot. Who can claim the highest Batman Factor?
There is one big reason to worry about this - these schemes will break interoperability between open source and closed source software and make all open source software suspect. Think it's annoying that you have to boot to Windows to view that Star Wars trailer in Quicktime format? Take that annoyance and mutiply it a thousand fold. If the corps have their way, no Linux software will ever be able to legally work with any data that is even remotely copyrighted. No company will allow an open source implementation of a copy protection scheme. Like that new album you paid for and downloaded? Sorry, can't listen to it in Linux. The protocols were reverse engineered a few years ago, but the guys who did it are now serving long prison sentences. Anyone trying to use Linux or other open source software to view protected content is automatically a suspect. Kiss your freedom goodbye.