Linux's usablility problem does not derive from this very prudent choice, but from the difficulty of discovering how to turn any particular service on or off.
In my experience it tends to be fairly easy. First, you make sure you installed the service. Then, you start up your distro's config program (in my case, YAST), look through the settings until you come to the one described as 'start XXXX at boot time', where XXXX is the service you're after, and change it from 'No' to 'Yes'. Easy enough?
Based on the sites selected for this study, it appears that highway agencies have a tendancy to set speed limits slightly below the average speed of traffic
I wonder if they considered the possibility that this was because drivers have a tendency to drive, on average, slightly faster than the universal "safe" speed that is supposed to be used in setting speed limits.
This is, in fact, almost certainly the case because:
- the universal safe speed (i.e. the speed limit) must be set at a level which is safe for all but a very small minority of drivers. - The vast majority of drivers are therefore capable of driving safely at a speed that is faster than the speed limit.
This unit works nicely enough - it is still a meaningless figure that sounds as though it was pulled out of the air. I mean -- just what does it mean to say that performance impoved by 1000%. I measure performance as the length of time I have to wait for an operation. Improvement means it reduced. So the amount of time is reduced by 1000%? In that case, it would now be negative - the job is done before I ask for it, by a factor of 9 times the length of time would previously have taken?
Read the post. He wasn't suggesting defragmenting, he was suggesting disk optimisation, which in Windows-land is performed by the defragmenter. The idea is that you put files which are likely to be needed together (e.g. program binary files and shared libraries that they reference) close together on the disk. The OS builds up statistical usage information about whats used and then at a later stage a disk optimiser process rearranges the disk for faster performance.
This has been known to result in slight performance improvements, and versions of it have been around in Windows since win 98, I believe, although Win XP marketing material has claimed it as something entirely new...
there seems to be 2 camps in the linux world - those hell-bent on bringing it to the end user, and those hell-bent on improving it for techies
Yes there are. And this is a good thing, for two reasons:
1. because the 1st of those groups are techies, and if Linux isn't good for techies, they won't be able to do what they need to do for the users.
2. because Linux's predominant use at this time is in server environments. Most servers are run by techies.
What's useful to techies isn't necessarily useful to the home user
That's true. But neither is it a problem for the home user. There is plenty of space for both extremes here, as long as they learn to work with each other.
Also note: Windows has many capabilities that are only useful for techies. You just probably don't know about them. Have a look at all the interesting things you can do if you mess around with the registry, particularly in HKLM\Control\CurrentControlSet\Services\*\Paramete rs
... in amplifier design, but something they've done confuses me. It seems they've replaced the negative feedback amplifiers that are normally found in hi-fi equipment with amplifiers that use no feedback at all.
My understanding is that negative feedback improves the temperature stability and frequency response of an amplifier for virtually no cost. Why remove it?
The setup is designed for high sensitivity, not high power. He's only feeding them with 400W RMS signals, for 6.4 KW total; here in the UK that'd cost about 30p (about 50c) per hour to run. Not a huge problem.
I suppose this is a "feature" that allows users to quickly tell if something is an audio file without having to know the details of its encoding, etc. But for power users it's a pain in the neck.
Yeah. What's also a pain in the neck is that Windoze explorer 'sort files by type' sorts them alphabetically by the file type description, meaning that it can't actually sort your.oggs separetly from your.mp3s. Very annoying.
Ask your average MP3 listener (they can't be a geek) if they notice the "volume" change between songs. They'll look dumbfounded and ask "wha-a?"
Huh? I don't know about your MP3 collection, maybe you encoded them all yourself so they're at a standard volume level, but mine has a selection of tracks that are encoded at anything from 40% to 125% of what I think of as 'standard' volume. While I'll grant you need to pay attention to notice a change of 25%, the 60% change down to the very quitest file in my library would leave just about anyone who isn't deaf reaching for the volume control, if I didn't use some form of automatic correction for it.
I don't think that really matters. In fact, I would be willing to bet that this is exactly the kind of application that:
1) The designers of DNS had in mind when introducing wildcard entries to the the design 2) The designers of web server software (particularly apache) had in mind when introducing features that let you make decision what to do based on the content of the 'Host:' HTTP header (i.e. NameVirtualHost directives).
Both of these things happened substantially before this patent was filed on August 30, 1999.
Sorry, even considering your objections to everyone else's objections, I still don't think its valid.
I think Mr. Minter started it. The others are just copy-yaks.
(I remember Maxis as having an obsession with camels, can't picture anything llama related in any of their stuff but it has been a _long_ time since I had my hands on any of their games).
Third-party studies show that competitive office suites retain only 75% accuracy (data and formatting) when receiving documents from Office users
Third-party studies suggest that 92% of statistics quoted in marketing material are made up.
Particulaly if they try to assign a number to something which is clearly qualitative, like 'formatting accuracy'. How do you do that? Print the page out on a 600dpi printer and check how many pixels are in exactly the same place?
It doesn't specify APIs, it states 'interfaces'. I would say tat a protocol is an 'interface' between two different programs.
Certainly, protocols is what the original case brought by Sun was about, and protocols is what would help with the specific problem that the order is intended to remedy.
Microsoft will be able to "reasonably charge" for that information
Actually, this is worth pointing out. Microsoft "would be entitled to reasonable remuneration" for whatever is "protected by intellectual property [in the EU]". Note that EU intellectual property laws _do not_ include a concept of a trade secret. So:
1. MS would be able to charge for access to the documents (under copyright legislation) 2. MS would be able to charge for patent licenses where applicable
But MS would _not_ be able to stop somebody from freely republishing the information in the documents that they charge for access to, because information cannot be copyright in the EU, only arrangements and formats of collections of information (e.g. the specific MS documents that contain it).
There is no problem in Europe (I believe) with redistributing information that has been subject of an NDA violation, unless you are a signatory to that NDA. Standard NDAs include terms that state that if you come across the information from another source you're also allowed to distribute it [this could probably be argued into existence under Unfair Contract Terms legislation even if it isn't in the NDA].
What this means is that once anybody leaks the NDA information in Europe, they can't keep a lid on it. They can only get damages from the person who leaked the info. If they can find him.
The use of 'Mozilla' in this context was never a protocol issue. I've never seen any protocol specify that HTTP user agents must contain the string 'Mozilla'.
Internet Explorer was trying to trick dynamic web pages into thinking it was Netscape.
Of course, the primary reason why an attempt to sue MS would have failed is that trademark protection doesn't extend to anything that is hidden from the user -- the only offences under trademark law are related to attempting to pass your product off as somebody elses, or otherwise confusing customers so that you can trade on somebody else's reputation. Thats why 'trade' is in the name. Because MS weren't openly calling IE 'mozilla', no issue arises.
Sounds perfectly normal to me. If I ran a patent office, it would work like this:
[boss comes in to office] Boss: I hear there's a high profile patent infringement case going down at the moment. Can you check to see if we really should have issued the patent, or if we screwed it up like we seem to do so often?
[Office Juniour looks at a few bits of paper from a filing cabinet] OJ: Doh!
Which is what happens when you let a product manager talk about technical issues.
There applications that will break are _not_ (necessarily) insecure. They just behave in a way that makes it impossible for Windows to tell isn't somebody trying to execute some code in an overflowed buffer.
Are you kidding? You have seen the format of a bitmap, haven't you? It's a seriously screwed up format.
I believe, BTW, the problem is an integer overflow one; a length field has a number substracted from it without previously checking that it is large enough to not wrap around to 2^32-(a little bit). This kind of thing happens a lot, and was the cause of the most recent Apache hole (among many others), so criticising MS for having one similar is a little harsh.
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Linux's usablility problem does not derive from this very prudent choice, but from the difficulty of discovering how to turn any particular service on or off.
In my experience it tends to be fairly easy. First, you make sure you installed the service. Then, you start up your distro's config program (in my case, YAST), look through the settings until you come to the one described as 'start XXXX at boot time', where XXXX is the service you're after, and change it from 'No' to 'Yes'. Easy enough?
He could safely draw that conclusion from 19 times and never at high speed.
Based on the sites selected for this study, it appears that highway agencies have a tendancy to set speed limits slightly below the average speed of traffic
I wonder if they considered the possibility that this was because drivers have a tendency to drive, on average, slightly faster than the universal "safe" speed that is supposed to be used in setting speed limits.
This is, in fact, almost certainly the case because:
- the universal safe speed (i.e. the speed limit) must be set at a level which is safe for all but a very small minority of drivers.
- The vast majority of drivers are therefore capable of driving safely at a speed that is faster than the speed limit.
Yeah sure you may be made late by a speeder
But only if you're close enough behind them. Which probably means you're speeding too.
This unit works nicely enough - it is still a meaningless figure that sounds as though it was pulled out of the air. I mean -- just what does it mean to say that performance impoved by 1000%. I measure performance as the length of time I have to wait for an operation. Improvement means it reduced. So the amount of time is reduced by 1000%? In that case, it would now be negative - the job is done before I ask for it, by a factor of 9 times the length of time would previously have taken?
Read the post. He wasn't suggesting defragmenting, he was suggesting disk optimisation, which in Windows-land is performed by the defragmenter. The idea is that you put files which are likely to be needed together (e.g. program binary files and shared libraries that they reference) close together on the disk. The OS builds up statistical usage information about whats used and then at a later stage a disk optimiser process rearranges the disk for faster performance.
This has been known to result in slight performance improvements, and versions of it have been around in Windows since win 98, I believe, although Win XP marketing material has claimed it as something entirely new...
there seems to be 2 camps in the linux world - those hell-bent on bringing it to the end user, and those hell-bent on improving it for techies
e rs
Yes there are. And this is a good thing, for two reasons:
1. because the 1st of those groups are techies, and if Linux isn't good for techies, they won't be able to do what they need to do for the users.
2. because Linux's predominant use at this time is in server environments. Most servers are run by techies.
What's useful to techies isn't necessarily useful to the home user
That's true. But neither is it a problem for the home user. There is plenty of space for both extremes here, as long as they learn to work with each other.
Also note: Windows has many capabilities that are only useful for techies. You just probably don't know about them. Have a look at all the interesting things you can do if you mess around with the registry, particularly in HKLM\Control\CurrentControlSet\Services\*\Paramet
... in amplifier design, but something they've done confuses me. It seems they've replaced the negative feedback amplifiers that are normally found in hi-fi equipment with amplifiers that use no feedback at all.
My understanding is that negative feedback improves the temperature stability and frequency response of an amplifier for virtually no cost. Why remove it?
The setup is designed for high sensitivity, not high power. He's only feeding them with 400W RMS signals, for 6.4 KW total; here in the UK that'd cost about 30p (about 50c) per hour to run. Not a huge problem.
Indeed. Best answer: delete in_mod.dll and remove it from your input plugins list. Who the hell uses mods any more, anyway?
I suppose this is a "feature" that allows users to quickly tell if something is an audio file without having to know the details of its encoding, etc. But for power users it's a pain in the neck.
.oggs separetly from your .mp3s. Very annoying.
Yeah. What's also a pain in the neck is that Windoze explorer 'sort files by type' sorts them alphabetically by the file type description, meaning that it can't actually sort your
Ask your average MP3 listener (they can't be a geek) if they notice the "volume" change between songs. They'll look dumbfounded and ask "wha-a?"
Huh? I don't know about your MP3 collection, maybe you encoded them all yourself so they're at a standard volume level, but mine has a selection of tracks that are encoded at anything from 40% to 125% of what I think of as 'standard' volume. While I'll grant you need to pay attention to notice a change of 25%, the 60% change down to the very quitest file in my library would leave just about anyone who isn't deaf reaching for the volume control, if I didn't use some form of automatic correction for it.
I don't think that really matters. In fact, I would be willing to bet that this is exactly the kind of application that:
1) The designers of DNS had in mind when introducing wildcard entries to the the design
2) The designers of web server software (particularly apache) had in mind when introducing features that let you make decision what to do based on the content of the 'Host:' HTTP header (i.e. NameVirtualHost directives).
Both of these things happened substantially before this patent was filed on August 30, 1999.
Sorry, even considering your objections to everyone else's objections, I still don't think its valid.
I think Mr. Minter started it. The others are just copy-yaks.
(I remember Maxis as having an obsession with camels, can't picture anything llama related in any of their stuff but it has been a _long_ time since I had my hands on any of their games).
Third-party studies show that competitive office suites retain only 75% accuracy (data and formatting) when receiving documents from Office users
Third-party studies suggest that 92% of statistics quoted in marketing material are made up.
Particulaly if they try to assign a number to something which is clearly qualitative, like 'formatting accuracy'. How do you do that? Print the page out on a 600dpi printer and check how many pixels are in exactly the same place?
Funny. I have the jet engine installed on my machine, but I don't have access. Could it be its a core part of Windows? I think it might be...
It doesn't specify APIs, it states 'interfaces'. I would say tat a protocol is an 'interface' between two different programs.
Certainly, protocols is what the original case brought by Sun was about, and protocols is what would help with the specific problem that the order is intended to remedy.
Microsoft will be able to "reasonably charge" for that information
Actually, this is worth pointing out. Microsoft "would be entitled to reasonable remuneration" for whatever is "protected by intellectual property [in the EU]". Note that EU intellectual property laws _do not_ include a concept of a trade secret. So:
1. MS would be able to charge for access to the documents (under copyright legislation)
2. MS would be able to charge for patent licenses where applicable
But MS would _not_ be able to stop somebody from freely republishing the information in the documents that they charge for access to, because information cannot be copyright in the EU, only arrangements and formats of collections of information (e.g. the specific MS documents that contain it).
IANAL, etc.
There is no problem in Europe (I believe) with redistributing information that has been subject of an NDA violation, unless you are a signatory to that NDA. Standard NDAs include terms that state that if you come across the information from another source you're also allowed to distribute it [this could probably be argued into existence under Unfair Contract Terms legislation even if it isn't in the NDA].
What this means is that once anybody leaks the NDA information in Europe, they can't keep a lid on it. They can only get damages from the person who leaked the info. If they can find him.
The use of 'Mozilla' in this context was never a protocol issue. I've never seen any protocol specify that HTTP user agents must contain the string 'Mozilla'.
Internet Explorer was trying to trick dynamic web pages into thinking it was Netscape.
Of course, the primary reason why an attempt to sue MS would have failed is that trademark protection doesn't extend to anything that is hidden from the user -- the only offences under trademark law are related to attempting to pass your product off as somebody elses, or otherwise confusing customers so that you can trade on somebody else's reputation. Thats why 'trade' is in the name. Because MS weren't openly calling IE 'mozilla', no issue arises.
IANAL, etc.
Yes, it is a great idea, and a lot of people do it. Other examples that spring to mind include Borland, and, erm, SCO (or Caldera as they were then).
Sounds perfectly normal to me. If I ran a patent office, it would work like this:
[boss comes in to office]
Boss: I hear there's a high profile patent infringement case going down at the moment. Can you check to see if we really should have issued the patent, or if we screwed it up like we seem to do so often?
[Office Juniour looks at a few bits of paper from a filing cabinet]
OJ: Doh!
Which is what happens when you let a product manager talk about technical issues.
There applications that will break are _not_ (necessarily) insecure. They just behave in a way that makes it impossible for Windows to tell isn't somebody trying to execute some code in an overflowed buffer.
Typical MS press relations, blame everyone else.
Err... would you care to enlighten me on the difference in a way that suggests java doesn't do JIT code generation?
Are you kidding? You have seen the format of a bitmap, haven't you? It's a seriously screwed up format.
I believe, BTW, the problem is an integer overflow one; a length field has a number substracted from it without previously checking that it is large enough to not wrap around to 2^32-(a little bit). This kind of thing happens a lot, and was the cause of the most recent Apache hole (among many others), so criticising MS for having one similar is a little harsh.