Anyone who's ever bought accessories for a Nokia phone might disagree with you there;)
(I love the latest "innovation", a 2.5" "headset jack" that happens to be completely different and incompatable with the existing standardized 2.5" headset jack. WTF?)
That's right. And sines and cosines aren't mathematically valid either because they don't involve a single add, subtract, multiple, or divide operation.
The basis of the First Amendment resulting in any State and Federal support for religion being banned is well established by precedent, witth those precedents very much built upon direct constitutional interpretation. Simply because you can't read one sentence, out of any type of context, as ultimately resulting in what you're seeing doesn't mean that this is not the ultimate valid conclusion when put into practice, when applied to the US system of government, when the overall powers of congress are wieghed. I'm sorry you don't like it, personally I think it's a good thing, I fail to see why anyone should be able to leverage the resources of government at any level to push religion.
In case anyone's confused (since Word for Windows jumped from Word 2 to Word 6 without any inbetween versions - take that Slackware!), this article is about Word 5.1 for Mac.
The trunk is relatively inexpensive to duplicate, which is why by-and-large there are far more long distance operators with their own infrastructure than there are nationwide local telephone companies. Rebuilding the trunk means connecting cities together, in general digging one trench (albiet a long one) per city (or even using wireless links.) Rebuilding the local loop means digging up every street, navigating through haphazard and poorly planned existing infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage, etc) while you do so, interrupting traffic, et al.
That's why the local loop is a natural monopoly and the trunk isn't. Cable and Wireless had little problem in the UK duplicating BT's trunk after competition was opened up. In the US, MCI, Sprint, Qwest, etc, have all reproduced AT&T's trunk without major problems. Indeed, competition didn't have to be legal for trunks to be economically viable. In the UK, British Rail operated its own for a very long time before telephony was opened up.
By comparison, the only attempts to make local loops in most countries have been on the back of something else. Cable TV companies sell it because they're having to lay cable anyway (an exceedingly unpopular activity); The UK had one operator that tried to sell phone service (whose name I temporarily forget - I still have a share certificate somewhere...) which it did by using wireless links, a technology with some rather obvious major limitations; other than that the only real competition has come from mobile operators.
I'm not suggesting rolling out a long distance network is cheap. It's beyond the resource of you or I. But it's far easier and cheaper than rolling out a local loop, so much so that it's economically quite a viable thing to do.
No, I'm British. I didn't say BT had a monopoly, I said they were a monopolist. I've never seen them enter a market they didn't scheme to try to get an unfair advantage.
Technically it was the first moderm programming language much like.NET is the new one for this century so I don't think you can blame them for condensing a comment like that.
It was a version of BASIC, and BASIC dates back to the 1960s. It wasn't even a spectacular version of BASIC.
And the quote isn't "the first modern programming language", it's just "the first programming language". So even if your apologism were correct, it would be irrelevent.
About the only thing I can think of is that the writer might have meant to write "Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the first programming language for that historic platform." Or even "Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first programming language."
I've already replied to this argument. This "distinction" amounts to symantics. Recycling is re-use and vice-versa, and while we pretend the two things are different, we'll continue with the somewhat daft processes that many people in charge of recycling programs insist on doing, such as the constant trying to break things up into raw materials.
Recycling isn't just about saving money with raw materials. It never was. Materials processing and manufacturing is where the greatest savings can be made. The closer you can get an recycled product to its already processed state, en-mass, the better the savings.
This lesson needs to be drilled into those in charge of the programs. It's not enough to simply try to resell people's rubbish. You have to encourage the rubbish to be seperated by more than just "what it's made of". You have to encourage manufacturers to make things that can be recycled easily.
Now come on now, it's glass recycling. It's taking glass that was used and recycling it rather than mining the materials again and incurring other related production costs. What you and some of the others replying to me seem to be saying is "Yeah, it's entirely different because the way we do things right now is really bad". Well, yeah, the way we do things right now is really bad, that doesn't make the principle wrong, it makes the process wrong and we should be using a more efficient process.
But there's nothing wrong with the principle, and where the principle is implemented properly, we've had a net benefit.
I suspect he's talking about The Mac Interface, not interfaces that WERE The Mac Interface. There's very little in common that Mac OS's 6-9 have with Mac OS X. There's that menu at the top of the screen I guess, but beyond that...
Though it's probably worth pointing out that Mac OS 1-5 also was built around multitasking, just not in the modern "every application is equal" sense. The original Mac OS came with "Desk Accessories", little apps that would run in parallel with whatever big app you were running. These behaved well with the general Mac interface.
I'm not sure the Windows interface is as anti-MT as the grandparent suggests. There were problems from Windows 95 onwards because Microsoft wanted to encourage the use of certain UI specifics that, in the end, weren't popular with users (weren't really finished for the most part) such as their "Windows in a Window" method of MDI. They avoided using it themselves (compromising things like the original semi-spacial Explorer) and as it was space inefficient (hiding other windows on screen, etc) it ultimately worked relatively poorly. More modern versions of Windows have better window management, but it's been a long time in coming. In essense, Microsoft made something, nobody used it, they probably would if it had been better designed.
For the screener problem, this would introduce a nuisance copy protection measure. (Note to industry; have those ever done anything to prevent copying?)
Moreover, can anyone think of anything more likely to create an industry in devices that can copy DVDs (legally or illegally) than DVDs designed to degrade?
If Hollywood were to adopt this, they'd be slitting their own throats.
I don't believe this for one second. Glass recycling schemes predate the whole green thing by decades. In the UK back when virtually every soft drink came in glass bottle form, virtually every bottle had a rebate available to people who returned the bottle. This was 20-30 years ago (and probably earlier, I'm only 32.) Milk deliveries used to pretty much insist your empty bottles be left on the doorstep, if you routinely didn't you'd be charged for their replacement.
Glass has always been an expensive business. Recycling glass bottles has been a money earner for decades.
I know people want to hate the green lobby because it does some daft things, but not everything the green lobby proposes is being done simply because the green lobby has proposed it. Sometimes it makes economic sense for businesses to act in a way that happens to be environmentally sound.
Hypercards is the Apple Mac thing that was a cross between HTML and Visual Basic. (Ok, that's probably got to be the most misleading simplification I've seen, but it's roughly right.)
What you're think of are hyperlinks. And it wasn't BTG that "patented" hyperlinks, it was BT, Britain's monopolist telephone company. A phone company that makes you pay by the second for local calls.
And it wasn't really a hyperlinks patent either. It was a sending a request down a phone and getting a response back that includes more codes you can send back down the phone - it's been a while since I read the patent, but one of the reasons it was thrown out was that it was ridiculously specific and described a technology that was sooooooo 1970s.
It's this kind of attitude that gives us Python and Gentoo zealots. Not content to just like those things, a certain minority insists on boring us to death over the subject. "Python's great. I think our company is stupid because it doesn't adopt Python. I'm getting really fed up with my boss, I think he's biased against Python. Python's the best, you can do anything you can do in C in Python, and it's much quicker too, and did I tell you about the indenting? I don't see why we don't all program in Python. Look at this code to filter out lines from a CSV file where the fifth item is between 7 and 1499, I wrote it in Python and it took less than an hour to write and it's so much quicker than the equivalent in Perl."
SHUT UP! For crying out loud! Do you have NOTHING better to think about? Yeah, yeah, Python's great, so just program in it already. Stop feeling the need to tell me about everything you do in Python, insist I should do whatever I'm doing in Python, etc, etc.
(Calm blue ocean. Calm blue ocean.)
Something can be great and important to you without you needing to molest others on the subject.
Actually I do run my own email server. I run it on my DSL line and use a domain name from dynip.com to get it to work. And because I use rational spam blocking strategies, that are not blanket port/IP based BS, I neither lose real mail nor download anything more than a HELO, MAIL FROM, and RCPT TO, when people try to spam me.
I'm fortunate enough though to have an ISP that doesn't do incoming port blocking. Many people do not have such ISPs. Why don't they have such ISPs? Because ISPs continue to employ the draconian, discredited, and destructive proposals that the anti-spam community keeps uniting around.
And as far as the 15x what it is now, I simply don't believe you. To believe this is to believe that attempts at spamming makes up way more than 93% of total Internet traffic at the moment (or even way more than 93% of email alone), which is complete nonsense. It's also to believe that current IP filter "solutions" are effective. Spammers still seem to have no problems getting through.
It had nothing to do with Europe and had a lot to do with the Mozilla team taking a lot of heat for being obnoxious about it.
When the Mozilla team were trying to change the name from Phoenix (because of the BIOS manufacturer of the same name), they looked into Firebird and were told early on there was already a FOSS project with that name.
Rather than say "Oh, ok, let's think of something else", they took legal advice and having determined that what they were doing was technically not illegal they settled on Firebird anyway. Because, as we all know, if it's not illegal, it's morally fine.;-) [This type of thinking is the major problem I have with libertarianism, the fact is people will be arseholes, people will not suddenly magically start being nice to one another because there are no longer any laws compelling them to do so.]
There was an uproar. The pseudo-libertarians argued that as there was no law against it, it was perfectly fine and the other project should just "get over it". Anyone trying to find the database project would just have to add a few keywords to their Google search ("database" wouldn't have been enough as that's almost as generic a term as "program".) Another half of the FOSS community said this was particularly scummy and wanted little to do with Firebird.
Eventually the Mozilla team listened to reason and changed the name again.
I'm glad they did. I don't understand the logic of deliberately switching to a name you know is used, especially when you know it'll just cause harm to another group that really doesn't deserve that.
I can't speak for anywhere outside of Florida, but AT&TW coverage seems to have improved from many black-spots to virtually none in the last two years. I used to have difficulty getting a signal in my office at certain times of day, the road outside had a half mile area of no signal at all, the beach wasn't covered, and it's improved since then. I can't remember the last time I couldn't get a signal.
I don't think Cingular is necessarily the cause of the improvements since connecting to a Cingular tower (which happens automatically if that tower's signal is strongest and you're on automatic network selection - I turned this off because of the issues with when roaming minutes appear on your bill) puts "Cingular" on screen so you know you're "roaming" - they don't appear to be doing the transparent base station sharing that T-Mobile and Cingular are doing.
I think it's the roll-out of GSM 850, which both adds to the areas they can cover and means there's more coverage inside buildings. I'm amazed how quickly they've done that - It was just over a year ago that I read Cingular put out a press release of how they'd tested the world's first prototype GSM 850 phone and tower.
I don't have as many problems recommending AT&TW's GSM as I did early on. It used to take twenty or more seconds between hitting "Call" and hearing the other end ringing. There are less holes. The sound quality seems a little bit better (absolutely fine when calling landlines now) About the only major disappointment right now is the lack of CSD.
So it's (probably) not as bad as the complaints you're hearing might imply...
That's not what I meant. You are not guaranteed any method that would result in a single email getting through. The algorithm is "Is sender on whitelist? If so, YES, if not check Bayesian spam filters"
In case the ambiguity is over:
but you should still receive at least one email from someone even if they're not on the list.
I mean this literally. ie someone who's not on the list may find their first email filtered, but once they try enough times (assuming they're not a spammer), they'll get through - so you'll receive at least one email from them. Once they're through for the first time, they're easy to whitelist.
It doesn't mean "The first email from an unknown address should always be accepted".
Yup, GSM. Wow, I knew they had problems when they started the service (I was one of the first GSM customers, just after they started it here and just after I signed up everything went bang and for several days they couldn't sign anyone new up) but I thought they'd resolved it.
That's funny. I always thought because the sound quality isn't as good as, say, T-Mobile's, and the call connections used to take ages (that's improved recently though) that they were overlaying the GSM over the TDMA network or something, but I guess if they're using completely seperate billing systems that's unlikely.
And whitelists are a partial solution for many reasons - the first of which being you have to know the address someone is going to send you something from before you can receive it. That's fine when you just get email from your girlfriend (oh, who are we kidding, we mean your mother), but not so great when you actually want to receive your receipts for online purchases or not make potential new clients jump through hoops.
This is why you couple whitelists with Bayesian (or similar) filtering, if you're in the unfortunate position of not being able to run your own SMTP server. Really, email clients ought to make this easier, with a nice big "Add to white list" button next to every email address. This way the filter doesn't accidentally filter legit email, but you should still receive at least one email from someone even if they're not on the list.
The comments about bogus words I understand but I don't think, for the most part, it's working. On Yahoo's email system I find that the vast majority of emails in my Bulk Folder have nonsense keywords. Ultimately a good filter, Bayesian, the thing in Mail.app, etc, investigates a bunch of things. A group of words with a URL where that group of words isn't similar to words you normally get with an email will long term effect the bias.
But you've got to use the white-list to make it work.
The REAL solution is there needs to be a second class of email - email that you have to pay money to send. The recipient could even refund your "postage" if they like your message. Then we can all set our filters to let paid-for email through and throw the rest in the trash - just like we do with real vs. bulk mail in the post office box.
Aha, yes, that one. I think my response to that one was implied by my "Getting rid of SMTP" entry above.
No, it wouldn't work, because people wouldn't adopt it, because the infrastructure needed would be drastic, because things like mailing lists would become more difficult, because people want to receive and send email, they just don't want spam to be part of that email.
And I don't know about you, but I don't pay attention to the value of the stamp on the junk (paper) mail I get. Indeed, I suspect I'd throw out quite a lot of legitimate email if I just counted on that. Most Amazon marketplace packages arrive media-mail, for instance...
Maybe we should replace our current draconian murder laws with a "Do Not Kill" list? As long as you sign up to the list, it would be illegal for anyone to kill you. I'm sure it'd be terribly effective...
Slashdot Mirror
(I love the latest "innovation", a 2.5" "headset jack" that happens to be completely different and incompatable with the existing standardized 2.5" headset jack. WTF?)
Thank you!
The basis of the First Amendment resulting in any State and Federal support for religion being banned is well established by precedent, witth those precedents very much built upon direct constitutional interpretation. Simply because you can't read one sentence, out of any type of context, as ultimately resulting in what you're seeing doesn't mean that this is not the ultimate valid conclusion when put into practice, when applied to the US system of government, when the overall powers of congress are wieghed. I'm sorry you don't like it, personally I think it's a good thing, I fail to see why anyone should be able to leverage the resources of government at any level to push religion.
What's a matrixed channel?
There was probably a DOS Word 5 too.
I recall RMS is a big fan of Lisp...
That's why the local loop is a natural monopoly and the trunk isn't. Cable and Wireless had little problem in the UK duplicating BT's trunk after competition was opened up. In the US, MCI, Sprint, Qwest, etc, have all reproduced AT&T's trunk without major problems. Indeed, competition didn't have to be legal for trunks to be economically viable. In the UK, British Rail operated its own for a very long time before telephony was opened up.
By comparison, the only attempts to make local loops in most countries have been on the back of something else. Cable TV companies sell it because they're having to lay cable anyway (an exceedingly unpopular activity); The UK had one operator that tried to sell phone service (whose name I temporarily forget - I still have a share certificate somewhere...) which it did by using wireless links, a technology with some rather obvious major limitations; other than that the only real competition has come from mobile operators.
I'm not suggesting rolling out a long distance network is cheap. It's beyond the resource of you or I. But it's far easier and cheaper than rolling out a local loop, so much so that it's economically quite a viable thing to do.
No, I'm British. I didn't say BT had a monopoly, I said they were a monopolist. I've never seen them enter a market they didn't scheme to try to get an unfair advantage.
And the quote isn't "the first modern programming language", it's just "the first programming language". So even if your apologism were correct, it would be irrelevent.
About the only thing I can think of is that the writer might have meant to write "Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the first programming language for that historic platform." Or even "Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first programming language."
Recycling isn't just about saving money with raw materials. It never was. Materials processing and manufacturing is where the greatest savings can be made. The closer you can get an recycled product to its already processed state, en-mass, the better the savings.
This lesson needs to be drilled into those in charge of the programs. It's not enough to simply try to resell people's rubbish. You have to encourage the rubbish to be seperated by more than just "what it's made of". You have to encourage manufacturers to make things that can be recycled easily.
But there's nothing wrong with the principle, and where the principle is implemented properly, we've had a net benefit.
Though it's probably worth pointing out that Mac OS 1-5 also was built around multitasking, just not in the modern "every application is equal" sense. The original Mac OS came with "Desk Accessories", little apps that would run in parallel with whatever big app you were running. These behaved well with the general Mac interface.
I'm not sure the Windows interface is as anti-MT as the grandparent suggests. There were problems from Windows 95 onwards because Microsoft wanted to encourage the use of certain UI specifics that, in the end, weren't popular with users (weren't really finished for the most part) such as their "Windows in a Window" method of MDI. They avoided using it themselves (compromising things like the original semi-spacial Explorer) and as it was space inefficient (hiding other windows on screen, etc) it ultimately worked relatively poorly. More modern versions of Windows have better window management, but it's been a long time in coming. In essense, Microsoft made something, nobody used it, they probably would if it had been better designed.
If Hollywood were to adopt this, they'd be slitting their own throats.
Glass has always been an expensive business. Recycling glass bottles has been a money earner for decades.
I know people want to hate the green lobby because it does some daft things, but not everything the green lobby proposes is being done simply because the green lobby has proposed it. Sometimes it makes economic sense for businesses to act in a way that happens to be environmentally sound.
What you're think of are hyperlinks. And it wasn't BTG that "patented" hyperlinks, it was BT, Britain's monopolist telephone company. A phone company that makes you pay by the second for local calls.
And it wasn't really a hyperlinks patent either. It was a sending a request down a phone and getting a response back that includes more codes you can send back down the phone - it's been a while since I read the patent, but one of the reasons it was thrown out was that it was ridiculously specific and described a technology that was sooooooo 1970s.
SHUT UP! For crying out loud! Do you have NOTHING better to think about? Yeah, yeah, Python's great, so just program in it already. Stop feeling the need to tell me about everything you do in Python, insist I should do whatever I'm doing in Python, etc, etc.
(Calm blue ocean. Calm blue ocean.)
Something can be great and important to you without you needing to molest others on the subject.
I'm fortunate enough though to have an ISP that doesn't do incoming port blocking. Many people do not have such ISPs. Why don't they have such ISPs? Because ISPs continue to employ the draconian, discredited, and destructive proposals that the anti-spam community keeps uniting around.
And as far as the 15x what it is now, I simply don't believe you. To believe this is to believe that attempts at spamming makes up way more than 93% of total Internet traffic at the moment (or even way more than 93% of email alone), which is complete nonsense. It's also to believe that current IP filter "solutions" are effective. Spammers still seem to have no problems getting through.
When the Mozilla team were trying to change the name from Phoenix (because of the BIOS manufacturer of the same name), they looked into Firebird and were told early on there was already a FOSS project with that name.
Rather than say "Oh, ok, let's think of something else", they took legal advice and having determined that what they were doing was technically not illegal they settled on Firebird anyway. Because, as we all know, if it's not illegal, it's morally fine. ;-) [This type of thinking is the major problem I have with libertarianism, the fact is people will be arseholes, people will not suddenly magically start being nice to one another because there are no longer any laws compelling them to do so.]
There was an uproar. The pseudo-libertarians argued that as there was no law against it, it was perfectly fine and the other project should just "get over it". Anyone trying to find the database project would just have to add a few keywords to their Google search ("database" wouldn't have been enough as that's almost as generic a term as "program".) Another half of the FOSS community said this was particularly scummy and wanted little to do with Firebird.
Eventually the Mozilla team listened to reason and changed the name again.
I'm glad they did. I don't understand the logic of deliberately switching to a name you know is used, especially when you know it'll just cause harm to another group that really doesn't deserve that.
I don't think Cingular is necessarily the cause of the improvements since connecting to a Cingular tower (which happens automatically if that tower's signal is strongest and you're on automatic network selection - I turned this off because of the issues with when roaming minutes appear on your bill) puts "Cingular" on screen so you know you're "roaming" - they don't appear to be doing the transparent base station sharing that T-Mobile and Cingular are doing.
I think it's the roll-out of GSM 850, which both adds to the areas they can cover and means there's more coverage inside buildings. I'm amazed how quickly they've done that - It was just over a year ago that I read Cingular put out a press release of how they'd tested the world's first prototype GSM 850 phone and tower.
I don't have as many problems recommending AT&TW's GSM as I did early on. It used to take twenty or more seconds between hitting "Call" and hearing the other end ringing. There are less holes. The sound quality seems a little bit better (absolutely fine when calling landlines now) About the only major disappointment right now is the lack of CSD.
So it's (probably) not as bad as the complaints you're hearing might imply...
In case the ambiguity is over:
I mean this literally. ie someone who's not on the list may find their first email filtered, but once they try enough times (assuming they're not a spammer), they'll get through - so you'll receive at least one email from them. Once they're through for the first time, they're easy to whitelist.It doesn't mean "The first email from an unknown address should always be accepted".
That's funny. I always thought because the sound quality isn't as good as, say, T-Mobile's, and the call connections used to take ages (that's improved recently though) that they were overlaying the GSM over the TDMA network or something, but I guess if they're using completely seperate billing systems that's unlikely.
The comments about bogus words I understand but I don't think, for the most part, it's working. On Yahoo's email system I find that the vast majority of emails in my Bulk Folder have nonsense keywords. Ultimately a good filter, Bayesian, the thing in Mail.app, etc, investigates a bunch of things. A group of words with a URL where that group of words isn't similar to words you normally get with an email will long term effect the bias.
But you've got to use the white-list to make it work.
Aha, yes, that one. I think my response to that one was implied by my "Getting rid of SMTP" entry above.No, it wouldn't work, because people wouldn't adopt it, because the infrastructure needed would be drastic, because things like mailing lists would become more difficult, because people want to receive and send email, they just don't want spam to be part of that email.
And I don't know about you, but I don't pay attention to the value of the stamp on the junk (paper) mail I get. Indeed, I suspect I'd throw out quite a lot of legitimate email if I just counted on that. Most Amazon marketplace packages arrive media-mail, for instance...
You don't have to limit yourself to one television. Hey, some of us have difficult limiting ourselves to one mobile phone :)
Maybe we should replace our current draconian murder laws with a "Do Not Kill" list? As long as you sign up to the list, it would be illegal for anyone to kill you. I'm sure it'd be terribly effective...