Besides, I'd hardly say.NET is "about to release" either. They've been talking about it for a while now and we haven't seen much materialize. Seems awfully vaporware-ish.
Except for the fact that you can get the VisualStudio.NET beta 2 today at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/beta.asp
You can download the SDK here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?ur l=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/000/97 6/msdncompositedoc.xml&frame=true
And MSDN has a whole bunch of info on the frameworks, and there's other links on the MS's site which have the ECMA draft sites. But other than that...
The richest person in the world by a wide margin dislikes "Open Software".
Gates is actually no longer the richest man in the world, he's been replaced by some Walton heir... (but then again, maybe you're referring to the Walton heir, but I wouldn't think he'd even care about open source either way)
Re:You Linux-loving morons, here's some reality
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 1
To be fair, MS does have the bulk of the market at this time, but that is rapidly changing, with MacOS gaining fairly steadily on WIN, and *nux making leaps and bounds.
What does an article from 1997 have to do with anything in today's computer market? It's hard to find anything that talks about Macintosh's market share today (except the educational market share, where they're apparently doing quite well). The article you quote here is the #1 article on Google, and all the other articles are similar in content, but also similar in date. I mean come on, this thing is talking about the Macintosh clones - isn't that what nearly killed Apple?
Anyway, I found buried in Google this article which talks about Macintosh's dwindling market share. It's a little over 1 year after the other article.
Certianly things have gotten better for Apple since then - and it'd be nice to see some recent figures on the subject (anyone have links?).
IIRC, someone tried something similar not long ago with battery acid, although they were aiming to get the cash, not the coke, from the machines.
Along these sames line you used to be able to (maybe you still can, I don't know) dump salt water into the coin slot in a soda machine. The machine would wig out and start giving you sodas and change.
The nice thing for petty vandals/thiefs about salt water is soda machines are often at swimming pools, which come up an unlimited supply of water on hand. They just need to supply the salt and a jug of some sort. Battery acid would just be a pain in the ass to deal with.
The only problem with this arguement is that in the license agreements (which, in Canada anyway, are separate from the regular ones), you are not allowed the use the product for commercial use; it is for 'learning and demonstration use only'. So, it may free (as in cheap) but for what we are usually discussing, it ain't legal.
I think the theory behind this is if you're using it for commercial use you're making money - and if you're making money off their product, you should be able to afford to pay the full price for it. So this limitation seems perfectly reasonable to me...
There is a program called ext2fsnt - although it's not free software. The original web site has a link to a new web site where it's a commercial program ($14.95 read-only,$29.95 read-write).
In it's previous form (the last download I had was v.04 - there's no release date but ext2.sys has a date of 10/25/1999) I had a lot of trouble with it, but I'd imagine now that it's a commercial program that's no longer an issue (or so I'd hope).
Specifically it had problems displaying the files in directories which had an inode above a specific value. I don't remember what the specific value was, but it didn't strike me as being anything obvious (ie 2^15 or 2^31 for signed values).
It also had a tendency to trash my ext2 volumes. I still have a large amount of mp3's which jump from one song to song within the mp3 because they were trashed... it's really quite annoying...
2. Jobs. There are many jobs in law enforcement, drug treatment, legal representation..and others.
What would they do for a living now?
This is what scares the drug warriors shitless. They'd be forced to become productive members of society rather than destroying the lives of productive members of society.
no one is going to be going to the store to buy pot when they can just grow it themselves.
Yeah, this is the exact same reason everyone grows their own food - I can either buy it or grow it, why not just grow it and save the money?
The fact of the matter is that most people are lazy, and don't want to spend a season of their life growing pot when they can just pay $x of dollars for it - and even being taxed and legalized it'd still be cheaper then it is now.
I've heard people who think that if pot was legalized it'd essentially become free - why not, anyone can grow it right, and once everyone's growing it, who's going to pay for it?
But has this happened in the Netherlands yet? No, you find that there's people who put time and money in to grow the best pot in the world - and people would rather work a normal job and pay for it rather than spend hours developing a green thumb.
I prefer a standalone DVD player to a PC. I prefer to use a Palm for storing addresses. PCs, even notebooks, don't carry around very well. I'd prefer to carry a mini MP3 player around than to carry a PC around. I prefer a PlayStation for many games over a PC.
You mention a total of 3 products here - and they all have various reasons why they're superior. The DVD player is better on a TV normally because the screen is bigger. I would much prefer to watch a DVD on a monitor of the same size vs. a television of the same size, simply because of better resolution. So DVD players lose on this point in my opinion. And it's damn easy to watch a DVD on a computer - stick it in the drive and w/ AutoPlay it happens. Then it's easier to control the DVD it's self with a mouse then with a stupid remote control with a bad interface.
The other 2 devices are an issue of portability - and they'd be more powerful if only they could get more power into that same space, which will happen in time. Why carry around both a Palm and a mini MP3 player when you can carry around one device which is more robust?
Certianly you're not going to use your computer for a microwave, that's just ridiculous. But with a central computer that's powerful enough to not be upgraded every year and a half you have a lot more time to invest in add-ons. You get that DVD player, you get that huge monitor, you get those nice controllers to play games with that are just like your Playstation. And it all ends up cheaper.
Imagine - instead of buying a DVD player, a television, a device to surf the web, a CD player, a tuner (you'd still need an amplifier of some sort), and a game console you buy a computer. There's several devices all rolled into one. Who wants all that crap laying around their house when they can have a central computer which powers all of this? And why can't this same central computer power multiple monitors, etc... It's a great deal.
That doesn't get rid of the need for a portable computer, and your portable computer could even hook up to your central computer, but why carry around both a Palm and a MP3 player? Who the hell wants to do that? Why don't a throw a CD player and a tape walkman into my backpack just for good measure?
I think people often confuse the idea of the desktop computer going away and computers becoming integrated into our lives. Of course computers are going to become integrated more in our lives. That takes time though, before it becomes really useful we need omnipresent wireless access with omnipresent IPV6 so everyone's toaster can be on line (http://toaster.myhome.com).
But all together it's really annoying to hear scientists bitching about this stuff. Everyone's just under this delusion of internet-time and they think that the infrastructure of the world will change at that same rate. Infrastructure does not change over night.
I was impressed with this until I clicked on the Try It! button at their website.
I didn't see anything appeared to be WYSIWIG - I saw text areas filled with HTML code to create pages. I wouldn't call that a very good editor.
Where I work we've created an inhouse web site editing utility which isn't fantastic (certianly not wysiwig) but it allows users to select text and then click on a button to throw HTML tags around it automagically (ie, you select the text then press the BOLD button). It doesn't bold the text in the textarea box (although that may be possible to do with style sheets) but it is WYSIWIG.
I could never get this to work in Netscape 4 (it would do the bold tags with "insert text here" inbetween the open and the end).
I would imagine it would be possible to do a better job with Netscape 6 - the big thing that you need to do this is range support.
Anyway, I never saw any good products out there that did this, hence the reason we just made one in-house. There's plenty of cheesy javascript or java applets but they just don't seem very good.
Although IBM supports Linux, it is not really a Linux company. It is not publicising greatly its Linux capacity, probably because it does not have that great a Linux capacity anyway.
IBM has placed full page ads in USA Today advertising Linux. On top of that they want Linux to run on every type of hardware they provide. I'd say that IBM is pretty firmly committed behind Linux, I can only imagine they have a decent capacity, and they certainly do seem to be publicizing it.
I did a few searches and the engine seemed to practically return random links. I searched for google (didn't return google at all), sex (alright, so it's a "Family Oriented Search Engine) which had the #1 result of the James Group Ministry - which is an amazing 1 page website that has 1 link - back to it's self, and CNN, which although it did return CNN's website, it didn't return the front page (come on, this is a pretty simple bonus to raise the front page of a site up to the top!)
I did find one search result which seems to return more relevant results than google: "fax repair new york". Is this the type of search this site's designed for? (Google get's too many fax phone numbers in there for this to be useful).
I don't agree, a computer accomplishes one task, which is to run programs, following your line of reasoning, a refrigerator accomplishes hundreds of tasks just because it happens to store hundreds of different foods...
The problem where this breaks down is that even though all a refrigerator does is refrigerate, and all a computer does is compute, a computer also has programs ('food') and the programs themselves can go bad. People don't blame the refrigerator when their food goes bad. So in that sense a computer (with it's software) does do much more than a refrigerator.
Now, certainly computer hardware should not be prone to a high level of failures, and it'd be great if software wasn't prone to such problems, but the two combined are much more complex than a VCR or any of the other devices mentioned in the article. Certainly a computer's software does a lot more than a refrigerator's hardware does, too.
The nice thing about real world problems (skyscrappers, VCRs, etc) is that there are lots of components, and those components can be tested individually. We can then put them all together, and we know that they'll successfully work and function properly - because all the components are correct and we understand how they fit together. We obviously need more componentization in the computer word, and less Office suites.
This is actually a part of "Active Desktop" though. It's installed w/ the Active Desktop components of IE 4.01 SP2 (and that's where Microsoft says you have to get it).
I think this applies to Win2K as well, but in ME, you right click on the desktop, go to 'Active Desktop' and then 'Show Web Content'
Very true, but in Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 this is only available as the add in w/ IE 4.01 SP2, which is conveniently no longer available. I can only assume this is because MS would rather see people use ME/2K then turn NT 4.0 or 95 (maybe even 98?) into a halfway usable product.
The big win from this is just the editable address bar when you're in the shell version of explorer (versus the internet version of explorer).
It says that part of their argument will be based on the fact that including IE with windows gave users "features unavailable to them in a non-Microsoft browser." And what pray tell would these features be?
My guess on this is that they're referring to Active Desktop. That comes with IE 4.01 SP2, although not IE 5.01/5.5 anymore (and IE 4.01SP2 is no longer available for download). You can still get it if you download the IE Administrators Kit and configure a custom install of IE though.
It's really lame that you can't get this anymore - it is the only good part about being forced to use IE (or at least having it loaded all the time) and if you're using NT 4.0 Workstation the interface just plain sucks without Active Desktop. It's so convenient to be able to just type in an address when you're looknig at files and go straight to the web and vice-versa.
That, and its insistance on word-wrapping lines in contexts where it's not appropriate (line-oriented languages, anyone?) make it insuitable for hard-core work.
This is what pico -w is for (it turns off word wrapping - nice to have an alias for this)...
You definitely hit the nail on the head about crazy edits, but it's worse then just that. You can't do any search and replaces in Pico! I could understand no support for regular expressions in a search and replace, but no search and replace at all!?!? That's just madness.
Common sense will tell you that inhaling smoke into your lungs and holding it there...
Minor quips here, but according to High Times holding marijuana smoke in does not increase the high - it only increases the amount of ash in your longs.
While i can't state any statistics on MJ related lung cancers or other health hazards...
The only information I've ever read about this was (I believe) in The Emperor Wears no Clothes by Jack Herer. I believe there was a study quoted in there where smokers of both marijuana and tobacco had lower rates of cancer than smokers of merely tobacco. Presumably because marijuana opens up your open lung passages, whereas tobacco closes them off trapping the smoke in there.
I bet if you go out on the street and ask 100 people who makes the best chips in the world, you'll get 99 answers of "Intel", and if you ask them about AMD, Sun, Motorola, or IBM, they'll say "who?"
Probably more like you'll get 99 people who say "Chips Ahoy."
What if a Napster like service existed that provided all the services of Napster but via the web? It really wouldn't be very difficult.
The user's software (I would call it a client, but it's also a server) would have a web server built into it. When a user would connect to the service, they'd send the service their IP, get spidered by the service, and also then be able to use the search engine (at the same time as being entered into the search engine). When they disconnect they get removed from the search engine.
The users would then be presented with a list of links - which are just links to a web site essentially.
It'd effectively be just the web. On the downside it'd no longer work for sites behind a firewall because it'd all be HTTP requests, and your computer could never be spidered.
Also, there'd be the issue of the addresses for the links. You can't just put in the IP, doing a reverse DNS lookup could fail so that might not work either. That might mean the service would have to provide some form of dynamic DNS (and only allow logged in clients to do DNS lookups?)
I wonder what the courts would think about something like this - very similar to Napster, but all web based.
Also, we need to lose www. What a fucking bonehead move. Use fscking web. Or better yet, have web be the default service -- forget the subnet altogether.
There's nothing stopping anyone from doing this - infact most web sites work with or without the www on it. In this case the www is a machine name - as is the mail, news, etc... If these are all on one machine, and that machine is at the IP for blah.com, then you don't need the www.
Actually, if you made DNS a little smarter you could have it return a list of IPs each with port ranges and failovers etc. Then the client could go to the correct IP for the pop-3 port, without having to use mail.blah.net and news.blah.net instead of just blah.net (or blah.isp, damnit, blah.isp). And if news.blah.net it would just try news2.blah.net, etc.
Discussing your rollover idea here, this is already much the situation with mail exchance records in the DNS. You actually setup a list of mail exchangers (MX records), with the highest priority being 0. The client could just go through the list of MX records trying on after another until it gets a successful connect.
In addition to the mail records, there's nothing preventing anyone's DNS from returning IP addresses in a round-robin fashion. Then if you have a decent web browser (ie, not IE which appears to cache DNS requests) you'll get a different IP for each DNS request.
Of course, this doesn't do quite what you want - one machine name (blah.com) which connects to the appropriate machine for the request. Of course that's nothing that a simple firewall can't handle.
All in all, there's not much of a need to change the DNS system to do what you'd like. You just need to get system administrators to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, I'd hardly say .NET is "about to release" either. They've been talking about it for a while now and we haven't seen much materialize. Seems awfully vaporware-ish.
p
r l=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/000/97 6/msdncompositedoc.xml&frame=true
And MSDN has a whole bunch of info on the frameworks, and there's other links on the MS's site which have the ECMA draft sites. But other than that...
Except for the fact that you can get the VisualStudio.NET beta 2 today at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/beta.as
You can download the SDK here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?u
To the casual difference, how dfferent really is that "squiggly" link?
Ordinary User: Wow! Internet Explorer has spell correction now just like Word... Wait a second, that word's spelled correctly...
The richest person in the world by a wide margin dislikes "Open Software".
Gates is actually no longer the richest man in the world, he's been replaced by some Walton heir... (but then again, maybe you're referring to the Walton heir, but I wouldn't think he'd even care about open source either way)
To be fair, MS does have the bulk of the market at this time, but that is rapidly changing, with MacOS gaining fairly steadily on WIN, and *nux making leaps and bounds.
What does an article from 1997 have to do with anything in today's computer market? It's hard to find anything that talks about Macintosh's market share today (except the educational market share, where they're apparently doing quite well). The article you quote here is the #1 article on Google, and all the other articles are similar in content, but also similar in date. I mean come on, this thing is talking about the Macintosh clones - isn't that what nearly killed Apple?
Anyway, I found buried in Google this article which talks about Macintosh's dwindling market share. It's a little over 1 year after the other article.
Certianly things have gotten better for Apple since then - and it'd be nice to see some recent figures on the subject (anyone have links?).
IIRC, someone tried something similar not long ago with battery acid, although they were aiming to get the cash, not the coke, from the machines.
Along these sames line you used to be able to (maybe you still can, I don't know) dump salt water into the coin slot in a soda machine. The machine would wig out and start giving you sodas and change.
The nice thing for petty vandals/thiefs about salt water is soda machines are often at swimming pools, which come up an unlimited supply of water on hand. They just need to supply the salt and a jug of some sort. Battery acid would just be a pain in the ass to deal with.
The only problem with this arguement is that in the license agreements (which, in Canada anyway, are separate from the regular ones), you are not allowed the use the product for commercial use; it is for 'learning and demonstration use only'. So, it may free (as in cheap) but for what we are usually discussing, it ain't legal.
I think the theory behind this is if you're using it for commercial use you're making money - and if you're making money off their product, you should be able to afford to pay the full price for it. So this limitation seems perfectly reasonable to me...
There is a program called ext2fsnt - although it's not free software. The original web site has a link to a new web site where it's a commercial program ($14.95 read-only,$29.95 read-write).
.04?
In it's previous form (the last download I had was v.04 - there's no release date but ext2.sys has a date of 10/25/1999) I had a lot of trouble with it, but I'd imagine now that it's a commercial program that's no longer an issue (or so I'd hope).
Specifically it had problems displaying the files in directories which had an inode above a specific value. I don't remember what the specific value was, but it didn't strike me as being anything obvious (ie 2^15 or 2^31 for signed values).
It also had a tendency to trash my ext2 volumes. I still have a large amount of mp3's which jump from one song to song within the mp3 because they were trashed... it's really quite annoying...
Of course, what does one expect from version
2. Jobs. There are many jobs in law enforcement, drug treatment, legal representation..and others. What would they do for a living now?
This is what scares the drug warriors shitless. They'd be forced to become productive members of society rather than destroying the lives of productive members of society.
no one is going to be going to the store to buy pot when they can just grow it themselves.
Yeah, this is the exact same reason everyone grows their own food - I can either buy it or grow it, why not just grow it and save the money?
The fact of the matter is that most people are lazy, and don't want to spend a season of their life growing pot when they can just pay $x of dollars for it - and even being taxed and legalized it'd still be cheaper then it is now.
I've heard people who think that if pot was legalized it'd essentially become free - why not, anyone can grow it right, and once everyone's growing it, who's going to pay for it?
But has this happened in the Netherlands yet? No, you find that there's people who put time and money in to grow the best pot in the world - and people would rather work a normal job and pay for it rather than spend hours developing a green thumb.
How can linux's use on the desktop go down? It's currently not used on the desktop in signifigant numbers (not counting people who read slashdot).
I prefer a standalone DVD player to a PC. I prefer to use a Palm for storing addresses. PCs, even notebooks, don't carry around very well. I'd prefer to carry a mini MP3 player around than to carry a PC around. I prefer a PlayStation for many games over a PC.
You mention a total of 3 products here - and they all have various reasons why they're superior. The DVD player is better on a TV normally because the screen is bigger. I would much prefer to watch a DVD on a monitor of the same size vs. a television of the same size, simply because of better resolution. So DVD players lose on this point in my opinion. And it's damn easy to watch a DVD on a computer - stick it in the drive and w/ AutoPlay it happens. Then it's easier to control the DVD it's self with a mouse then with a stupid remote control with a bad interface.
The other 2 devices are an issue of portability - and they'd be more powerful if only they could get more power into that same space, which will happen in time. Why carry around both a Palm and a mini MP3 player when you can carry around one device which is more robust?
Certianly you're not going to use your computer for a microwave, that's just ridiculous. But with a central computer that's powerful enough to not be upgraded every year and a half you have a lot more time to invest in add-ons. You get that DVD player, you get that huge monitor, you get those nice controllers to play games with that are just like your Playstation. And it all ends up cheaper.
Imagine - instead of buying a DVD player, a television, a device to surf the web, a CD player, a tuner (you'd still need an amplifier of some sort), and a game console you buy a computer. There's several devices all rolled into one. Who wants all that crap laying around their house when they can have a central computer which powers all of this? And why can't this same central computer power multiple monitors, etc... It's a great deal.
That doesn't get rid of the need for a portable computer, and your portable computer could even hook up to your central computer, but why carry around both a Palm and a MP3 player? Who the hell wants to do that? Why don't a throw a CD player and a tape walkman into my backpack just for good measure?
I think people often confuse the idea of the desktop computer going away and computers becoming integrated into our lives. Of course computers are going to become integrated more in our lives. That takes time though, before it becomes really useful we need omnipresent wireless access with omnipresent IPV6 so everyone's toaster can be on line (http://toaster.myhome.com).
But all together it's really annoying to hear scientists bitching about this stuff. Everyone's just under this delusion of internet-time and they think that the infrastructure of the world will change at that same rate. Infrastructure does not change over night.
Hmm... That's not what I saw at all. What browser were you using? On IE 5.5 it was truly WYSIWYG.
:(
AHh, that must of been it then - I was using Mozilla (20010126) - I guess they haven't gotten around to supporting it yet.
I was impressed with this until I clicked on the Try It! button at their website.
I didn't see anything appeared to be WYSIWIG - I saw text areas filled with HTML code to create pages. I wouldn't call that a very good editor.
Where I work we've created an inhouse web site editing utility which isn't fantastic (certianly not wysiwig) but it allows users to select text and then click on a button to throw HTML tags around it automagically (ie, you select the text then press the BOLD button). It doesn't bold the text in the textarea box (although that may be possible to do with style sheets) but it is WYSIWIG.
I could never get this to work in Netscape 4 (it would do the bold tags with "insert text here" inbetween the open and the end).
I would imagine it would be possible to do a better job with Netscape 6 - the big thing that you need to do this is range support.
Anyway, I never saw any good products out there that did this, hence the reason we just made one in-house. There's plenty of cheesy javascript or java applets but they just don't seem very good.
Although IBM supports Linux, it is not really a Linux company. It is not publicising greatly its Linux capacity, probably because it does not have that great a Linux capacity anyway.
IBM has placed full page ads in USA Today advertising Linux. On top of that they want Linux to run on every type of hardware they provide. I'd say that IBM is pretty firmly committed behind Linux, I can only imagine they have a decent capacity, and they certainly do seem to be publicizing it.
I did a few searches and the engine seemed to practically return random links. I searched for google (didn't return google at all), sex (alright, so it's a "Family Oriented Search Engine) which had the #1 result of the James Group Ministry - which is an amazing 1 page website that has 1 link - back to it's self, and CNN, which although it did return CNN's website, it didn't return the front page (come on, this is a pretty simple bonus to raise the front page of a site up to the top!)
I did find one search result which seems to return more relevant results than google: "fax repair new york". Is this the type of search this site's designed for? (Google get's too many fax phone numbers in there for this to be useful).
I don't agree, a computer accomplishes one task, which is to run programs, following your line of reasoning, a refrigerator accomplishes hundreds of tasks just because it happens to store hundreds of different foods...
The problem where this breaks down is that even though all a refrigerator does is refrigerate, and all a computer does is compute, a computer also has programs ('food') and the programs themselves can go bad. People don't blame the refrigerator when their food goes bad. So in that sense a computer (with it's software) does do much more than a refrigerator.
Now, certainly computer hardware should not be prone to a high level of failures, and it'd be great if software wasn't prone to such problems, but the two combined are much more complex than a VCR or any of the other devices mentioned in the article. Certainly a computer's software does a lot more than a refrigerator's hardware does, too.
The nice thing about real world problems (skyscrappers, VCRs, etc) is that there are lots of components, and those components can be tested individually. We can then put them all together, and we know that they'll successfully work and function properly - because all the components are correct and we understand how they fit together. We obviously need more componentization in the computer word, and less Office suites.
This is actually a part of "Active Desktop" though. It's installed w/ the Active Desktop components of IE 4.01 SP2 (and that's where Microsoft says you have to get it).
I think this applies to Win2K as well, but in ME, you right click on the desktop, go to 'Active Desktop' and then 'Show Web Content'
Very true, but in Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 this is only available as the add in w/ IE 4.01 SP2, which is conveniently no longer available. I can only assume this is because MS would rather see people use ME/2K then turn NT 4.0 or 95 (maybe even 98?) into a halfway usable product.
The big win from this is just the editable address bar when you're in the shell version of explorer (versus the internet version of explorer).
It says that part of their argument will be based on the fact that including IE with windows gave users "features unavailable to them in a non-Microsoft browser." And what pray tell would these features be?
My guess on this is that they're referring to Active Desktop. That comes with IE 4.01 SP2, although not IE 5.01/5.5 anymore (and IE 4.01SP2 is no longer available for download). You can still get it if you download the IE Administrators Kit and configure a custom install of IE though.
It's really lame that you can't get this anymore - it is the only good part about being forced to use IE (or at least having it loaded all the time) and if you're using NT 4.0 Workstation the interface just plain sucks without Active Desktop. It's so convenient to be able to just type in an address when you're looknig at files and go straight to the web and vice-versa.
That, and its insistance on word-wrapping lines in contexts where it's not appropriate (line-oriented languages, anyone?) make it insuitable for hard-core work.
This is what pico -w is for (it turns off word wrapping - nice to have an alias for this)...
You definitely hit the nail on the head about crazy edits, but it's worse then just that. You can't do any search and replaces in Pico! I could understand no support for regular expressions in a search and replace, but no search and replace at all!?!? That's just madness.
Common sense will tell you that inhaling smoke into your lungs and holding it there ...
Minor quips here, but according to High Times holding marijuana smoke in does not increase the high - it only increases the amount of ash in your longs.
While i can't state any statistics on MJ related lung cancers or other health hazards...
The only information I've ever read about this was (I believe) in The Emperor Wears no Clothes by Jack Herer. I believe there was a study quoted in there where smokers of both marijuana and tobacco had lower rates of cancer than smokers of merely tobacco. Presumably because marijuana opens up your open lung passages, whereas tobacco closes them off trapping the smoke in there.
I bet if you go out on the street and ask 100 people who makes the best chips in the world, you'll get 99 answers of "Intel", and if you ask them about AMD, Sun, Motorola, or IBM, they'll say "who?"
Probably more like you'll get 99 people who say "Chips Ahoy."
Glass is still a liquid, just rediculously viscous (it flows over decades/centuries).
Actually I believe glass is an amorphous solid, minor detail, but it's not truly considered a liquid even though it flows.
Hurm... I wonder about this.
What if a Napster like service existed that provided all the services of Napster but via the web? It really wouldn't be very difficult.
The user's software (I would call it a client, but it's also a server) would have a web server built into it. When a user would connect to the service, they'd send the service their IP, get spidered by the service, and also then be able to use the search engine (at the same time as being entered into the search engine). When they disconnect they get removed from the search engine.
The users would then be presented with a list of links - which are just links to a web site essentially.
It'd effectively be just the web. On the downside it'd no longer work for sites behind a firewall because it'd all be HTTP requests, and your computer could never be spidered.
Also, there'd be the issue of the addresses for the links. You can't just put in the IP, doing a reverse DNS lookup could fail so that might not work either. That might mean the service would have to provide some form of dynamic DNS (and only allow logged in clients to do DNS lookups?)
I wonder what the courts would think about something like this - very similar to Napster, but all web based.
Also, we need to lose www. What a fucking bonehead move. Use fscking web. Or better yet, have web be the default service -- forget the subnet altogether.
There's nothing stopping anyone from doing this - infact most web sites work with or without the www on it. In this case the www is a machine name - as is the mail, news, etc... If these are all on one machine, and that machine is at the IP for blah.com, then you don't need the www.
Actually, if you made DNS a little smarter you could have it return a list of IPs each with port ranges and failovers etc. Then the client could go to the correct IP for the pop-3 port, without having to use mail.blah.net and news.blah.net instead of just blah.net (or blah.isp, damnit, blah.isp). And if news.blah.net it would just try news2.blah.net, etc.
Discussing your rollover idea here, this is already much the situation with mail exchance records in the DNS. You actually setup a list of mail exchangers (MX records), with the highest priority being 0. The client could just go through the list of MX records trying on after another until it gets a successful connect.
In addition to the mail records, there's nothing preventing anyone's DNS from returning IP addresses in a round-robin fashion. Then if you have a decent web browser (ie, not IE which appears to cache DNS requests) you'll get a different IP for each DNS request.
Of course, this doesn't do quite what you want - one machine name (blah.com) which connects to the appropriate machine for the request. Of course that's nothing that a simple firewall can't handle.
All in all, there's not much of a need to change the DNS system to do what you'd like. You just need to get system administrators to do it.