There's comfort. If I had the option here, I'd take the train to driving or flying to any location within a reasonable distance.
Driving is stressful and unpleasant. And the idiot airlines are doing their very best to ensure flying isn't much less, and the latter pretty much insists you either pay four figure seat prices or else fly in massive discomfort.
So I disgree with "it offers a service no one wants" or "There is really no advantage to using Amtrak over other options." That may be true for you and your specific situation, but you don't speak for everyone.
May just reflect high rates in your area. A standard Covad/BellSouth combination package (Covad is the wholesaler for companies like SpeakEasy, but they sell directly too) is around the $400 mark. That includes everything (well, installation is seperate, but the point is it includes the T-1 line and Internet access via it.)
I think it's a good argument for updating the regulation, not necessarily either abolishing it or applying it to everyone.
Right now, ILECs have a near monopoly on the "last mile". Cable is about the only near competitor, but as there's never been a universal access requirement for cable, it's not something that can be as universal and thus important as standard telephone wire.
ILECs use their wire to supply a number of services that require that last-mile line but do not, by themselves, need to be provided by the line owner. This is far more true now than it was in 1984, or 1970, or 1950, or 1920, where in all cases building a telephone exchange was a substantial investment requiring a lot of space and a lot of integration with the lines used.
I think Vonage isn't regulated enough. They're allowed to claim they have "911 service", despite the fact their's isn't the same as anyone else's. I think they also suffer from relying upon underlying third parties that themselves have little regulation. If I access them via Earthlink, my phone service's reliability is dependent on Earthlink, BellWhatever, and Vonage, and only one of those organizations is regulated.
I'm not suggesting the government should go over the top, but I think a little bit of standards enforcement would go a long way. At the very least:
Telecommunications operators should be required to be non-discriminatory in the way they manage traffic. The basic division of business vs residential lines worked for decades, now ISPs try to do the same thing by, instead, blocking ports and putting absurd restrictions in their AUPs. That needs to change. The Internet becomes less reliable and less adaptable the more these kinds of technical bodges are applied to it. For them to be applied purely in the name of trying to persuade a home user who wants to access their digital photos from work to upgrade to a $400/month T1 connection is just plain stupid.
Telecommunications operators should be required to provide a minimum service level to all-comers. This doesn't have to be the advertised "Dude! Surf the net at sixteen gigabits!" kind of thing that ISPs try to stay close to, but it has to be clearly stated in the advertising and it has to be reasonable. That service level needs to be both bandwidth and up-time based. It could be as basic as "We guarantee up and downlink speeds of 128kb/s with 99.999% of packets transported through our part of the network at those speeds successfully. We will make a best effort, however, to provide bandwidth closer to 1.5mb/s most of the time. And, at the very least, mandate certain minimum service levels that apply to everyone providing DSL.
These rules should apply when the technology makes it credible. It is credible for DSL. It isn't for dial-up, and it isn't for wireless phone access (2.5G or 3G solutions), so it shouldn't apply for the latter, however those selling these unregulated Internet access services should have a duty of making sure that their customers are aware of this.
Subject Vonage and other VoIP services to the same QoS minimums that ILECs are currently subject to
All of this will annoy the libertarians, but it can come at a benefit of removing some of the cost controls and other controls that currently apply to telephone companies. Regulate last mile access and co-lo charges, but deregulate, for example, regular telephone service pricing and the services an ILEC can offer. Make it a decent swap.
As a general rule, most businesses aren't actually unhappy about being required to conform to standards, unless they're the only people in their sector doing so. Usually, those standards prevent a "race to the bottom", which ultimately hurts the industry over-all while not benefiting those who avoid being part of that race. Restaurants, for example, are all too aware of what would happen if health inspections and minimum health requirements were removed - pretty soon the entire industry would be damaged and people would stop going because of a rash of food poisoning incidents. Level playing fields are good.
The truth is an absolute defense against all defamation and libel suits
This depends on the juristiction. For example, in Britain it can be false depending on what's implied by the allegation.
For example, if I were to call {Major Public Figure} a serial liar who cannot be trusted in the UK, the chances are I'd be successfully sued for libel if my "defense" was "But he does, your honour! Why, I heard that he used to lie about his homework when he was at school, and the other day he sprung a surprise birthday party on his wife, after telling her for several days previous that he'd be in Europe that day and she should "go to his office" to collect something he forgot. In reality, he didn't forget anything, and he was in the office! What a liar! And look, I have a long list of similar lies he's told in the past!"
The good news is that if I tried to pull such a stunt, I could probably recover the legal fees and fines by working in the marketing department of a US telephone company.;-)
On a seperate note, the political weekly The New Statesman and Society was successfully sued in the early nineties for publishing an article saying John Major, the then PM, was not having an affair with his cook. In case you think "Aha! Most people would have read that as being sarcasm, and thought the opposite!", the context was an article that was talking about media rumours and how any old lie can get talked about amongst journalists with subtle mentions appearing in print. One such rumour was that the PM was having an affair, with the NS&S mentioning this, pointing out the absurdity of the thing.
And, by the way, that means I'm eligible for a lawsuit now too, if John Major gives a s--- about some pseudonymously posted comment in a US journal. Nice, huh?
I specifically avoided associated anything to do with my identity with my account here precisely because I wanted to be able to speak freely about what came to me, and if that included being pissed at someone I work with, then so be it.
I reason that as long as my employer isn't named, there's no real clue that identifies them in what I write, I can write as much as I want about what bugs me without it impacting on my employer or back on me. As my employer has a strict policy about public statements, it's also the case that pseudonymously or anonymously is about the only way I can comment about my life in general.
It's a straight choice - either speak without anyone realistically connecting events to my employer, or be fired. Some people, yourself, and a few opinionated but out-of-the-real-world F/OSS people, etc have recently suggested this is cowardly. You'll excuse me if I avoid taking advice from these groups as you have no idea of the precise circumstances I'm in.
I would agree it would show a lack of integrity if I published private information publically about my employer, attacking them, and ensuring everyone associated this private information with them (ie, if I worked for IBM, I wrote something like "My dumbass boss told me to cancel the XYZ project I've been working on which is going to totally fuck up our customers who were depending on this to deal with the bugs in XY. IBM sucks! Don't work here!"), then that'd show a lack of integrity. But writing generically, or commenting on what's public - stories in the news, etc - is hardly a sign of a lack of integrity.
What I will say is people who make sweeping attacks on entire groups of people without regard to their circumstances, ignoring the obvious, expecting people to value some third party's opinion about them more than their careers, has a seriously screwed set of values.
What's no legal in the US may be legal in Europe and vice versa
But that's the rub, isn't it?
I don't have much of an objection to stripping voting rights from murderers (not that I advocate it either.) But as the list of laws grows, the proportion I'm comfortable with the idea of vote stripping dwindles.
I personally believe that Nixon's great achievement for the Republicans was to identify and concentrate on criminalizing a large section of society that generally voted Democratic and did something that a lot of people were uncomfortable with, even if it had nothing to with them - that is, recreational, consenting, drug users. When you make voting dependent on a lack of felonies, you give politicians a good reason to abuse their legislative and executive powers.
I'm not sure what the solution is. A constitutional amendment is the usual way to deal with such things, but it's an obvious trampling on "States Rights", so I can see a large amount of opposition, especially today with the Democrats being won around to SR, and Republicans traditional, if fair-weather, supporters of it anyway.
I doubt it's the CRT, or if it is, the time period has to be wrong, 'cos the CRT is extremely old.
Its "modern" form, based upon hot cathodes, goes back to before 1922. Before that it was used as far back as 1897 for the first oscilloscope.
LCDs are a relatively recent invention, the first being demonstrated in 1968. So it's unlikely patents on CRTs contributed to their creation. More likely, I suspect, that the desire for flat, lightweight, displays spurred innovation in that sector.
Oh sure, you can switch and in some cases it'll be a good idea. But this isn't a decision that's going to be forced upon you to help someone else's bottom line.
You can make a straightforward decision to move to qmail et al based upon the fact it'll do a particular job better. You have time and resources to wiegh that decision. And, in all honesty, as a result, the number of times you switch applications and/or platforms is going to be small.
That's just not the case for proprietary software. Companies cut off support. They go bust. They implement "incentives" such as incompatable file formats for future versions to make it increasingly difficult to use what you use.
It's not the same ballpark. Occasional replacements of one free tool with another compared to regular, required, replacements of one unfree tool with another. If it's "easier to migrate", it's because it damn well ought to be. The insult is hurtful enough without that extra injury.
The fact is and remains, that for some people, and in many situations, the burden of switching between proprietary apps is still far, far, far less than the burden and lost productivity and time that is spent on F/OSS applications.
And in many situations, that is true. And in most situations, it's not important.
The different between FOSS and proprietary is this: for the former, I don't have to switch. For the latter, I do.
If Commodore Amiga's operating system had been Free Software, the chances are I'd still be using it today. It would, by now, have a community of developers built around it who would have kept it up to date, ported it to commodity hardware, etc.
So, to be honest, this kind of argument doesn't impress me. Why, exactly, do I need to switch from sendmail? I don't. I can't envisage needing to any time in the next decade, can you?
Why did I need to switch from AmigaOS? 'cos it was set in stone. There'd never likely be an update, and even if there was one, I'd be unlikely to obtain it, and it's unlikely it'd ever move forward very far.
I always find it ironic that most of those who flame RMS et al usually argue that they're just being ideological, and all those who disagree "just want to get things done" and "free software 'zealots' are just being impractical".
Nah. I was won over to free software because it's practical. I've never seen handing your data over to be managed by proprietary software product as "practical".
I'm kind of bitter that way as I've been using computers for a long time, since the early eighties, and have had too much experience of what happens when proprietary vendors do not support you any longer, even often with no malice intended, as the manufacturers of the Dragon 32, Sinclair QL, and Commodore Amiga can demonstrate. I switched to GNU/Linux. Because it was practical. Because I knew that I didn't have to rely on a third party for support, because I could help others and get the information I need to support others, because no matter what happened, I'd be able to continue with what I had.
Practical? You bet. Ideological? Perhaps, but only the same way as my dive instructor was "ideological", I mean he was obsessed with safety, obsessed I tell you! All I wanted to do was go down 60 feet and look at coral, but oooooooo noooooh! It's all "Buddy System" and "nitrogen levels" and other stuff.
Ok, that's facetious. The latter is about life and death. But there's no reason that the less serious nature of proprietary vs open and free should make me unconcerned about the issue.
That by itself doesn't mean a lot. Black Holes were, indeed, predicted to exist. We found things that might be Black Holes, but we have no way of being sure they are. To make things more difficult, the physicists aren't exactly certain there is such a thing as a Black Hole to begin with.
What we've actually found are spots in the sky that appear to have such a great gravitational force, from the time and space visible bent around them, and that are emitting one form of radiation while apparently swallowing almost all other forms. All we know ultimately is that the mass of the object is consistant with what a black hole would have. But, actually, that's not the question.
The question isn't "Can we put so much mass within a small enough area that light would not be able to escape?", because that's obvious. Just keep piling it on until you get to a mass and radius so large the escape velocity of the mass you've created exceeds the speed of light. The question is what happens to matter under those circumstances - when you have that much matter, collapsed to neutrons nudged against one another, so much that the neutrons are themselves under extreme force, what happens to them? We've found examples in the sky of these objects, but the fact we can't look into such an object (because light escapes, and because they're too frickin' far away) makes it difficult to answer that question.
The physicist that's started this particular debate is saying something else might happen altogether. That the object isn't a singularity, but rather an entire phase change of the matter involved. It doesn't contradict the observations, and the observations don't describe what you believe them to.
I think your analogy isn't strictly correct either, as there's no suggestion surveillance is being made impossible, and even if there was, unless they prohibit access to the police (which there's no sign of in this case, either with the "dome" or the WLAN), I don't see it as being a problem.
A better analogy would be a cake. What you have is an icing (the end users and 802.11g technology), over a large sponge (the local government's provision of a WLAN network), a creamy filling (the connection to the Internet, again at the local government's expense), and the bottom layer, again a big sponge (the Internet, in this analogy.) Now, say you're the cops, you can use a knife to cut a segment of the cake and then you see all the layers at once. Or you can just cut a bit off the top. Now, a small child might want to take some of the icing, which they can take off with their finger. Is the local government responsible in either case? Remember: the local government is only the middle two parts of the cake (the upper sponge and creamy filling) and not the top or the bottom, the cops clearly have access to all areas, just as they would if the cake belonged to Verizon, or Earthlink, or NetZero, but a kid has swiped a large bit of icing from the top.
How is that the local government's fault? It isn't, not even close.
My understanding, from what I've read, is that a major reason Apple rejected BeOS was the fact they felt far more work needed to be done to make it feature complete than was needed for NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. This has been simplified in the great canon of computing legends as "Be wanted too much money", but the issue Apple saw was "We'd spend this with BeOS, and still have to spend X million on getting this that and the other, and that's before we implement Mac OS compatability, whereas with NeXT, we only have tweak the UI, and can get on straight away with the Mac OS compatability."
Opinions differ on whether Apple was right. Apple was able to get a feature complete next generation Mac OS out the door within months of buying NeXT - but they only released it to developers. That OS was Rhapsody. Then it went back behind closed doors and it was years before something marketable came along, and even longer before something end-users considered usable (arguably Jaguar, though actually people loved Rhapsody by all accounts) was released. Much of those delays were because developers didn't want to port existing applications using the OPENSTEP APIs. And much of it was Steve Jobs wanting the OS to look a little bit special.
Those same delays, arguably, would have probably plagued BeOS too. Existing developers wouldn't have wanted to port existing apps to use the BeOS APIs. The look and feel issue needed to be dealt with. And BeOS's problems with printing, etc, would have needed to be resolved too.
Sounds like my experience, and I don't have any special programs loading too. In practice I avoid rebooting (as opposed to sleep/suspend) my PowerBook and reboot my desktop Macs very rarely.
As far as the Daring Fireball hack goes, I don't think it's relevent. Both myself and the grandparent are talking about the length of time it takes to get to the login screen (or, in my case on my PowerBook, the time taken to get to any sign the Finder is loading, eg the backdrop changing), not any SBOD that appears between that and the Finder becoming usable.
I think you should remove the tin-foil hat. It is perfectly normal to use a combination of experience and common sense to determine how you use your computer. We don't, as a rule, look for scientific studies though if one comes out that determines the issue either way, we'll make use of it. Just because you use commonsense and past experience does not make you involved in some giant conspiracy on behalf of the power industry.
The concept of leaving the computer on all the time was particularly popular during the eighties when many chips on computer circuit boards were socketed and many technicians found that a common fault was that the chips would come un-socketed after a period of time, leading to malfunctions. I've had personal experience of this happening. You react to it by pushing down every chip and then the machine works again. Why did this happen? Thermal expansion and contraction was literally pushing the chips out of their sockets.
That chips aren't socketted any more may make the advice obsolete. Or it may be more important now than ever - it really depends on how strongly soldered surface mount technology is. I don't know, but I do know that, so far, I've had pretty much zero experience of any desktop machine failing on me no matter how old for reasons other than direct damage (that is, my old Amiga I bought in 1990 was killed by a lightning strike that hit a telephone wire, frying modem and Amiga in one almighty bang. Yes, I was using it at the time. That's it. I have absolutely ancient hardware floating around my house doing various jobs, on 24/7, and it just isn't failing. Given the average lifetime for a PC seems to be around two to four years, I think that speaks for itself, regardless of whether you consider it anecdotal or not.) My guess would be that the strength is going to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.
So, pardon me, but I'll continue to use my experience as a guide. Of course, if you're the type who throws out that Pentium 2.4 you bought two years ago because, well, the 3.4GHz is out now so it's soooo obsolete, then you probably don't need to do this anyway...
I had that problem. My dog, of course, is called Rover. People laughed. "He doesn't exist". "Yes he does, he's invisible to everyone except me." "Oh, sure. Right. *rolls eyes*." "Rover! Go get 'em!" (snarling noise, growling noise, huge bite mark suddenly appears on doubter's legs)
He has some pretty major judgements against him. From TFS:
In a Denver Post article Richter claims to have less than $10 million in assets but more than $50 million in debts including the $49 million that Microsoft is seeking.
Presumably that means actually if Microsoft were to drop the case against him, he'd be back in the clear.
I did not know that. Until you pointed it out, I'd never even seen the menu option. I knew about the tricks where you can take the trouble to work out a search URL and stick a %s in it and stuff, like the poster who posted after you pointed out, but that felt worse than using the drop-down list of search engines.
No, they were actually banned and you could get into trouble - in theory (like I said, the law was never really enforced, the worst trouble you could get into in practice was a jobworth phone engineer coming over to install a line, spotting such an item, and refusing to do their job) for merely hooking up such a device.
The "Red sticker" (a requirement for unapproved devices) actually had the words "PROHIBITED from direct or indirect connection to any telecommunication system run by British Telecommunications. Action will be taken against anyone so using such apparatus" on it. (the specific reference to BT is because they were the phone company at the time, it was easier to mention them by name than to put in some vague reference to regulated public telecommunications systems.)
In cooking, you can give eaters condiments, and they can end up making something that's almost an entirely different meal. I think that's what we should view plug-ins as, not an excuse to create a poor meal to begin with (on the grounds an end user can customize it with as much ketchup and soy-sauce as they want until it's edible), but as something that can be added to a best-try attempt to make a perfect meal, by people who are never satisfied.
In that sense, cooking is a li[tt]le like an onion. On the inside, you have the apical meristem, the root core of the onion, which provides it with its link to the ground, allowing it to obtain liquids and other important fluids from the ground. Just as you might add ingredients to the pot, this pulls carbon and water and "cooks" it using a highly developed cell structure into something else. You, in this sense, are the apical meristem, and you are "making" the onion by turning raw ingredients and energy into, what's essentially, food. And, of course, the onion is covered in a thick skin, which you might see as the presentation layer of the meal you cook - you don't just slop cells onto a plate, it's important the texture of the food is represented by the physical appearance. Your cooking, of course, is similar to programming an IDE - you might say that you're taking tools like Java, object libraries, slivers of code from memory, and converting them into a full blown application, similar to how you build the cells of the onion and turn it into a full blown onion. The outer layer of the onion is the UI of your program, and an end user can essentially take the onion and use it in their own projects, extending it as necessary. They add seasoning, fry the onion in butter, etc, making it their own.
We need to see the end project as the meal. We can see it as the onion, and in one sense, creating a final product for a cook, it is, in that analogy, but in the other analogy, it's just an ingredient. We need to give people the meal, and make the best meal we can, and they can add salt and pepper if they need it. Let's not just give them onion seeds.
I've been using Firefox's configurable search feature for a while (you can add plug-ins for things like IMDB and Dictionary.com, and then select the engine you want before searching.) While it's a great idea in theory, it also is a little more clumsy than you'd normally want. I've ended up doing too many searches for "Linux USB XYZ-123 driver" in Dictionary.com or Wikipedia or whatever, because it doesn't reset itself after each search. After a while, you stop using it - it's just not quite what it needs to be.
A9 will improve itself with this kind of feature. But, more importantly (like I said, two levels, by adopting this RSS-extension, it will encourage others to do likewise, which means other developers can put together tools for this kind of quick-search without having to learn a hundred different search engine APIs. This means there'll be enough tinkering with UIs for it to be virtually certain someone will come up with something usable.
At the moment, searching on the Internet's a little like a bunch of 1960s style fast food outle[tt]s. You get your basic cheese burger virtually every where, but it's literally just a bun, a beef burger, and a slice of cheese. A few places are adding pickles (like Google, you might call news the pickle, or groups the tomato ketchup), but we're a long way away from, say, the engines offering delicious Whoppers. If we want to have search engines that give us the full lettuce, mayo, ketchup, onion, tomato, etc, we need to standardize on protocols in much the same way as outfits like MacDonalds and Burger King were able to create efficient food transportation systems for raw ingredients beyond simple buns and beef. This is Amazon giving us the lettuce of Wikipedia and mayo of the NYT to us, asking us if we want the fries of NASA, and it's a step towards them offering "have it your way." Awesome.
In fairness, last week you couldn't actually read this (Business 2.0) article (except for the first page.) They've turned off the "subscribers only" thing. There were a number of complaints last time that you couldn't read the article.
With respect, both those seeds came out of the Free Software and Open Source communities too. Complaints about Java continue to this very day. These are legitimate complaints, they can't be dismissed simply because Microsoft benefits.
The major issue right now is that a lot of FOSS people decided that.NET was better so developed two usable free alternatives, with the same degree of effort not spent on "Free" Javas. There are free Javas of course, but the major project, Kaffe, is out of date, and the current efforts going into GCJ and GNU Classpath are late coming. Now that said, the GCJ people are doing something genuinely innovative rather than blindly coping the existing system a'la Mono, so we might end up with something superior at the end of it.
There is, right now, no Free Java. It's coming. But don't pretend that it's FUD to suggest that, as of today, there's no viable way to develop a completely Free system that uses Java. Because, unfortunately, right now that's the case. And Free Software advocates wouldn't be being honest if they supported a "Free Software" or "Open Source" project that relies upon a non-Free element.
Slashdot Mirror
Driving is stressful and unpleasant. And the idiot airlines are doing their very best to ensure flying isn't much less, and the latter pretty much insists you either pay four figure seat prices or else fly in massive discomfort.
So I disgree with "it offers a service no one wants" or "There is really no advantage to using Amtrak over other options." That may be true for you and your specific situation, but you don't speak for everyone.
May just reflect high rates in your area. A standard Covad/BellSouth combination package (Covad is the wholesaler for companies like SpeakEasy, but they sell directly too) is around the $400 mark. That includes everything (well, installation is seperate, but the point is it includes the T-1 line and Internet access via it.)
Right now, ILECs have a near monopoly on the "last mile". Cable is about the only near competitor, but as there's never been a universal access requirement for cable, it's not something that can be as universal and thus important as standard telephone wire.
ILECs use their wire to supply a number of services that require that last-mile line but do not, by themselves, need to be provided by the line owner. This is far more true now than it was in 1984, or 1970, or 1950, or 1920, where in all cases building a telephone exchange was a substantial investment requiring a lot of space and a lot of integration with the lines used.
I think Vonage isn't regulated enough. They're allowed to claim they have "911 service", despite the fact their's isn't the same as anyone else's. I think they also suffer from relying upon underlying third parties that themselves have little regulation. If I access them via Earthlink, my phone service's reliability is dependent on Earthlink, BellWhatever, and Vonage, and only one of those organizations is regulated.
I'm not suggesting the government should go over the top, but I think a little bit of standards enforcement would go a long way. At the very least:
- Telecommunications operators should be required to be non-discriminatory in the way they manage traffic. The basic division of business vs residential lines worked for decades, now ISPs try to do the same thing by, instead, blocking ports and putting absurd restrictions in their AUPs. That needs to change. The Internet becomes less reliable and less adaptable the more these kinds of technical bodges are applied to it. For them to be applied purely in the name of trying to persuade a home user who wants to access their digital photos from work to upgrade to a $400/month T1 connection is just plain stupid.
- Telecommunications operators should be required to provide a minimum service level to all-comers. This doesn't have to be the advertised "Dude! Surf the net at sixteen gigabits!" kind of thing that ISPs try to stay close to, but it has to be clearly stated in the advertising and it has to be reasonable. That service level needs to be both bandwidth and up-time based. It could be as basic as "We guarantee up and downlink speeds of 128kb/s with 99.999% of packets transported through our part of the network at those speeds successfully. We will make a best effort, however, to provide bandwidth closer to 1.5mb/s most of the time. And, at the very least, mandate certain minimum service levels that apply to everyone providing DSL.
- These rules should apply when the technology makes it credible. It is credible for DSL. It isn't for dial-up, and it isn't for wireless phone access (2.5G or 3G solutions), so it shouldn't apply for the latter, however those selling these unregulated Internet access services should have a duty of making sure that their customers are aware of this.
- Subject Vonage and other VoIP services to the same QoS minimums that ILECs are currently subject to
All of this will annoy the libertarians, but it can come at a benefit of removing some of the cost controls and other controls that currently apply to telephone companies. Regulate last mile access and co-lo charges, but deregulate, for example, regular telephone service pricing and the services an ILEC can offer. Make it a decent swap.As a general rule, most businesses aren't actually unhappy about being required to conform to standards, unless they're the only people in their sector doing so. Usually, those standards prevent a "race to the bottom", which ultimately hurts the industry over-all while not benefiting those who avoid being part of that race. Restaurants, for example, are all too aware of what would happen if health inspections and minimum health requirements were removed - pretty soon the entire industry would be damaged and people would stop going because of a rash of food poisoning incidents. Level playing fields are good.
For example, if I were to call {Major Public Figure} a serial liar who cannot be trusted in the UK, the chances are I'd be successfully sued for libel if my "defense" was "But he does, your honour! Why, I heard that he used to lie about his homework when he was at school, and the other day he sprung a surprise birthday party on his wife, after telling her for several days previous that he'd be in Europe that day and she should "go to his office" to collect something he forgot. In reality, he didn't forget anything, and he was in the office! What a liar! And look, I have a long list of similar lies he's told in the past!"
The good news is that if I tried to pull such a stunt, I could probably recover the legal fees and fines by working in the marketing department of a US telephone company. ;-)
On a seperate note, the political weekly The New Statesman and Society was successfully sued in the early nineties for publishing an article saying John Major, the then PM, was not having an affair with his cook. In case you think "Aha! Most people would have read that as being sarcasm, and thought the opposite!", the context was an article that was talking about media rumours and how any old lie can get talked about amongst journalists with subtle mentions appearing in print. One such rumour was that the PM was having an affair, with the NS&S mentioning this, pointing out the absurdity of the thing.
And, by the way, that means I'm eligible for a lawsuit now too, if John Major gives a s--- about some pseudonymously posted comment in a US journal. Nice, huh?
I reason that as long as my employer isn't named, there's no real clue that identifies them in what I write, I can write as much as I want about what bugs me without it impacting on my employer or back on me. As my employer has a strict policy about public statements, it's also the case that pseudonymously or anonymously is about the only way I can comment about my life in general.
It's a straight choice - either speak without anyone realistically connecting events to my employer, or be fired. Some people, yourself, and a few opinionated but out-of-the-real-world F/OSS people, etc have recently suggested this is cowardly. You'll excuse me if I avoid taking advice from these groups as you have no idea of the precise circumstances I'm in.
I would agree it would show a lack of integrity if I published private information publically about my employer, attacking them, and ensuring everyone associated this private information with them (ie, if I worked for IBM, I wrote something like "My dumbass boss told me to cancel the XYZ project I've been working on which is going to totally fuck up our customers who were depending on this to deal with the bugs in XY. IBM sucks! Don't work here!"), then that'd show a lack of integrity. But writing generically, or commenting on what's public - stories in the news, etc - is hardly a sign of a lack of integrity.
What I will say is people who make sweeping attacks on entire groups of people without regard to their circumstances, ignoring the obvious, expecting people to value some third party's opinion about them more than their careers, has a seriously screwed set of values.
If it's overclocking you want, perhaps a better liquid to suspend them in would be coffee. Or Mountain Dew. Or Jolt Cola.
I don't have much of an objection to stripping voting rights from murderers (not that I advocate it either.) But as the list of laws grows, the proportion I'm comfortable with the idea of vote stripping dwindles.
I personally believe that Nixon's great achievement for the Republicans was to identify and concentrate on criminalizing a large section of society that generally voted Democratic and did something that a lot of people were uncomfortable with, even if it had nothing to with them - that is, recreational, consenting, drug users. When you make voting dependent on a lack of felonies, you give politicians a good reason to abuse their legislative and executive powers.
I'm not sure what the solution is. A constitutional amendment is the usual way to deal with such things, but it's an obvious trampling on "States Rights", so I can see a large amount of opposition, especially today with the Democrats being won around to SR, and Republicans traditional, if fair-weather, supporters of it anyway.
LCDs are a relatively recent invention, the first being demonstrated in 1968. So it's unlikely patents on CRTs contributed to their creation. More likely, I suspect, that the desire for flat, lightweight, displays spurred innovation in that sector.
You can make a straightforward decision to move to qmail et al based upon the fact it'll do a particular job better. You have time and resources to wiegh that decision. And, in all honesty, as a result, the number of times you switch applications and/or platforms is going to be small.
That's just not the case for proprietary software. Companies cut off support. They go bust. They implement "incentives" such as incompatable file formats for future versions to make it increasingly difficult to use what you use.
It's not the same ballpark. Occasional replacements of one free tool with another compared to regular, required, replacements of one unfree tool with another. If it's "easier to migrate", it's because it damn well ought to be. The insult is hurtful enough without that extra injury.
The different between FOSS and proprietary is this: for the former, I don't have to switch. For the latter, I do.
If Commodore Amiga's operating system had been Free Software, the chances are I'd still be using it today. It would, by now, have a community of developers built around it who would have kept it up to date, ported it to commodity hardware, etc.
So, to be honest, this kind of argument doesn't impress me. Why, exactly, do I need to switch from sendmail? I don't. I can't envisage needing to any time in the next decade, can you?
Why did I need to switch from AmigaOS? 'cos it was set in stone. There'd never likely be an update, and even if there was one, I'd be unlikely to obtain it, and it's unlikely it'd ever move forward very far.
Nah. I was won over to free software because it's practical. I've never seen handing your data over to be managed by proprietary software product as "practical".
I'm kind of bitter that way as I've been using computers for a long time, since the early eighties, and have had too much experience of what happens when proprietary vendors do not support you any longer, even often with no malice intended, as the manufacturers of the Dragon 32, Sinclair QL, and Commodore Amiga can demonstrate. I switched to GNU/Linux. Because it was practical. Because I knew that I didn't have to rely on a third party for support, because I could help others and get the information I need to support others, because no matter what happened, I'd be able to continue with what I had.
Practical? You bet. Ideological? Perhaps, but only the same way as my dive instructor was "ideological", I mean he was obsessed with safety, obsessed I tell you! All I wanted to do was go down 60 feet and look at coral, but oooooooo noooooh! It's all "Buddy System" and "nitrogen levels" and other stuff.
Ok, that's facetious. The latter is about life and death. But there's no reason that the less serious nature of proprietary vs open and free should make me unconcerned about the issue.
What we've actually found are spots in the sky that appear to have such a great gravitational force, from the time and space visible bent around them, and that are emitting one form of radiation while apparently swallowing almost all other forms. All we know ultimately is that the mass of the object is consistant with what a black hole would have. But, actually, that's not the question.
The question isn't "Can we put so much mass within a small enough area that light would not be able to escape?", because that's obvious. Just keep piling it on until you get to a mass and radius so large the escape velocity of the mass you've created exceeds the speed of light. The question is what happens to matter under those circumstances - when you have that much matter, collapsed to neutrons nudged against one another, so much that the neutrons are themselves under extreme force, what happens to them? We've found examples in the sky of these objects, but the fact we can't look into such an object (because light escapes, and because they're too frickin' far away) makes it difficult to answer that question.
The physicist that's started this particular debate is saying something else might happen altogether. That the object isn't a singularity, but rather an entire phase change of the matter involved. It doesn't contradict the observations, and the observations don't describe what you believe them to.
A better analogy would be a cake. What you have is an icing (the end users and 802.11g technology), over a large sponge (the local government's provision of a WLAN network), a creamy filling (the connection to the Internet, again at the local government's expense), and the bottom layer, again a big sponge (the Internet, in this analogy.) Now, say you're the cops, you can use a knife to cut a segment of the cake and then you see all the layers at once. Or you can just cut a bit off the top. Now, a small child might want to take some of the icing, which they can take off with their finger. Is the local government responsible in either case? Remember: the local government is only the middle two parts of the cake (the upper sponge and creamy filling) and not the top or the bottom, the cops clearly have access to all areas, just as they would if the cake belonged to Verizon, or Earthlink, or NetZero, but a kid has swiped a large bit of icing from the top.
How is that the local government's fault? It isn't, not even close.
The latter is a PITA, the further the new API is from the one the app was written for.
Opinions differ on whether Apple was right. Apple was able to get a feature complete next generation Mac OS out the door within months of buying NeXT - but they only released it to developers. That OS was Rhapsody. Then it went back behind closed doors and it was years before something marketable came along, and even longer before something end-users considered usable (arguably Jaguar, though actually people loved Rhapsody by all accounts) was released. Much of those delays were because developers didn't want to port existing applications using the OPENSTEP APIs. And much of it was Steve Jobs wanting the OS to look a little bit special.
Those same delays, arguably, would have probably plagued BeOS too. Existing developers wouldn't have wanted to port existing apps to use the BeOS APIs. The look and feel issue needed to be dealt with. And BeOS's problems with printing, etc, would have needed to be resolved too.
As far as the Daring Fireball hack goes, I don't think it's relevent. Both myself and the grandparent are talking about the length of time it takes to get to the login screen (or, in my case on my PowerBook, the time taken to get to any sign the Finder is loading, eg the backdrop changing), not any SBOD that appears between that and the Finder becoming usable.
The concept of leaving the computer on all the time was particularly popular during the eighties when many chips on computer circuit boards were socketed and many technicians found that a common fault was that the chips would come un-socketed after a period of time, leading to malfunctions. I've had personal experience of this happening. You react to it by pushing down every chip and then the machine works again. Why did this happen? Thermal expansion and contraction was literally pushing the chips out of their sockets.
That chips aren't socketted any more may make the advice obsolete. Or it may be more important now than ever - it really depends on how strongly soldered surface mount technology is. I don't know, but I do know that, so far, I've had pretty much zero experience of any desktop machine failing on me no matter how old for reasons other than direct damage (that is, my old Amiga I bought in 1990 was killed by a lightning strike that hit a telephone wire, frying modem and Amiga in one almighty bang. Yes, I was using it at the time. That's it. I have absolutely ancient hardware floating around my house doing various jobs, on 24/7, and it just isn't failing. Given the average lifetime for a PC seems to be around two to four years, I think that speaks for itself, regardless of whether you consider it anecdotal or not.) My guess would be that the strength is going to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.
So, pardon me, but I'll continue to use my experience as a guide. Of course, if you're the type who throws out that Pentium 2.4 you bought two years ago because, well, the 3.4GHz is out now so it's soooo obsolete, then you probably don't need to do this anyway...
Never a problem after that.
That is awesome. Thank you!
The "Red sticker" (a requirement for unapproved devices) actually had the words "PROHIBITED from direct or indirect connection to any telecommunication system run by British Telecommunications. Action will be taken against anyone so using such apparatus" on it. (the specific reference to BT is because they were the phone company at the time, it was easier to mention them by name than to put in some vague reference to regulated public telecommunications systems.)
In that sense, cooking is a li[tt]le like an onion. On the inside, you have the apical meristem, the root core of the onion, which provides it with its link to the ground, allowing it to obtain liquids and other important fluids from the ground. Just as you might add ingredients to the pot, this pulls carbon and water and "cooks" it using a highly developed cell structure into something else. You, in this sense, are the apical meristem, and you are "making" the onion by turning raw ingredients and energy into, what's essentially, food. And, of course, the onion is covered in a thick skin, which you might see as the presentation layer of the meal you cook - you don't just slop cells onto a plate, it's important the texture of the food is represented by the physical appearance. Your cooking, of course, is similar to programming an IDE - you might say that you're taking tools like Java, object libraries, slivers of code from memory, and converting them into a full blown application, similar to how you build the cells of the onion and turn it into a full blown onion. The outer layer of the onion is the UI of your program, and an end user can essentially take the onion and use it in their own projects, extending it as necessary. They add seasoning, fry the onion in butter, etc, making it their own.
We need to see the end project as the meal. We can see it as the onion, and in one sense, creating a final product for a cook, it is, in that analogy, but in the other analogy, it's just an ingredient. We need to give people the meal, and make the best meal we can, and they can add salt and pepper if they need it. Let's not just give them onion seeds.
I've been using Firefox's configurable search feature for a while (you can add plug-ins for things like IMDB and Dictionary.com, and then select the engine you want before searching.) While it's a great idea in theory, it also is a little more clumsy than you'd normally want. I've ended up doing too many searches for "Linux USB XYZ-123 driver" in Dictionary.com or Wikipedia or whatever, because it doesn't reset itself after each search. After a while, you stop using it - it's just not quite what it needs to be.
A9 will improve itself with this kind of feature. But, more importantly (like I said, two levels, by adopting this RSS-extension, it will encourage others to do likewise, which means other developers can put together tools for this kind of quick-search without having to learn a hundred different search engine APIs. This means there'll be enough tinkering with UIs for it to be virtually certain someone will come up with something usable.
At the moment, searching on the Internet's a little like a bunch of 1960s style fast food outle[tt]s. You get your basic cheese burger virtually every where, but it's literally just a bun, a beef burger, and a slice of cheese. A few places are adding pickles (like Google, you might call news the pickle, or groups the tomato ketchup), but we're a long way away from, say, the engines offering delicious Whoppers. If we want to have search engines that give us the full lettuce, mayo, ketchup, onion, tomato, etc, we need to standardize on protocols in much the same way as outfits like MacDonalds and Burger King were able to create efficient food transportation systems for raw ingredients beyond simple buns and beef. This is Amazon giving us the lettuce of Wikipedia and mayo of the NYT to us, asking us if we want the fries of NASA, and it's a step towards them offering "have it your way." Awesome.
In fairness, last week you couldn't actually read this (Business 2.0) article (except for the first page.) They've turned off the "subscribers only" thing. There were a number of complaints last time that you couldn't read the article.
The major issue right now is that a lot of FOSS people decided that .NET was better so developed two usable free alternatives, with the same degree of effort not spent on "Free" Javas. There are free Javas of course, but the major project, Kaffe, is out of date, and the current efforts going into GCJ and GNU Classpath are late coming. Now that said, the GCJ people are doing something genuinely innovative rather than blindly coping the existing system a'la Mono, so we might end up with something superior at the end of it.
There is, right now, no Free Java. It's coming. But don't pretend that it's FUD to suggest that, as of today, there's no viable way to develop a completely Free system that uses Java. Because, unfortunately, right now that's the case. And Free Software advocates wouldn't be being honest if they supported a "Free Software" or "Open Source" project that relies upon a non-Free element.