In Eleventh Hour, the main character needed a T3 connection to perform online search on a patent. And the girl offered him to go to her dorm where she had Wi-Fi, "in case you need more privacy"... ouch.
1. C-64 had a bad keyboard? C'mon, get real. The C-64/Vic-20 had one of the greatest keyboards of its class. The only one that could be considered as better was that of the Apple IIe and THAT was way more expensive. I had no problem typing from one.
2. How come that a list of the 10 worst keyboards of all time fails to mention the utterly horrible keyboard of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum??? (*shudder*)
3. "Modern" $5 keyboards (and a lot of the more expensive models) seriously belong to any list of the world's worst keyboards. Fragile keys, keys such as "power off" and "suspend" placed in the traditional place of Insert/Home/PgUp, just begging to be accidentally pressed; crappy Windows keys, and a general lack of reliability... and they don't make the list?? PLEASE!
P.S.: The original IBM PC keyboard was also widely despised for having a key between Shift and Z, thus surprising a lot of touch typists.
I live in Asunción, Paraguay, South America. Here, the ccTLD.py is managed by NIC.py. NIC.py specifically states that Paraguayan domain names must be third-level domains only, from the second-level domains ORG.PY, EDU.PY, MIL.PY, GOV.PY, NET.PY, COM.PY.
Straight from the horse's mouth (my rough translation):
Second-level domains determine the nature of a domain name. A company or institution may request a certain third-level domain name only under one of the second-level domains (emphasis mine) , i.e., the one that best identifies or reflects its goals, structure, services, or products.
On the other hand, Russian domain names are usually second-level domain names such as alphabank.ru, etc.
Therefore, and given that Paraguayan domain names are third-level domain names such as mybank.com.py, it would be very difficult for a Paraguayan phisher to set up Paraguayan sites to phish Russian users.
NIC.py states that it might consider creating other.PY second-level domains, so names such as www.python.py could be theoretically possible; but for that you must make a very good and convincing case to the NIC.py folks.
Arghh. Modded you incorrectly under the new discussion system and there's no undo. I'd rather lose all my moderation on this page than modding you as 'flamebait'. Great reply!
Gracias por contestar:). Pero poner la raza, el color de la piel de alguien como factor importante, es racista. Lamenton decírtelo amigo, pero eres tan racista como cualquier "redneck" si piensas que el color de la piel es importante para determinar si alguien debe ser modelo para tu gente, das lástima.
Look, I am Paraguayan (from South America). My native language is Spanish, and also I speak some Guaraní. My family does not have any special 'ethnic background'. I have written a number of articles for the U.S. online tech press, and I use GNU/Linux daily as my sole operating system. I also help in the KDE-ES Spanish translation effort (heck, that Subversion transition was a dog).
With all that said, let me state that I think that this story is preposterous and reeks of utter political correctness. I find stories such as this an insult to my intelligence and my abilities. I do not care about anyone's race. Do not show me the color of your skin, or the language you speak, or the culture that forms your framework of reference. Show me your code; show me your contribution to the cause of Free Software. This is going to be my mark of respect.
I don't need that affirmative action bovine crap. I need substantial efforts to see GNU/Linux or other Free operating system powering the world's desktops because of its superior quality and its freedom.
Bueno, por lo menos esto es lo que pienso; disculpen si por escribir en inglés nunca se imaginaron que soy sudamericano. No necesito de la basura de la mal llamada affirmative action y la sola sugerencia de dicha medida me es algo insultante. Gracias por todo.
I use LaTeX2e on a daily basis for a great variety of documents. While at it, I also had to interact at the professional level with people who seem to think that the one and only way to do rich text is with MS Word, so I had to see what could I do to preserve interoperability.
In the Free Software realm, the two best options seem to be latex2rtf and tex4ht.
The first one, latex2rtf, is the one I use. It works decently, does its job, and does it well. The only glitches I saw are that the resulting document has an user--defined page size and margins that are too big (i.e., 3.5--4.2cm), but both of these are easily surmountable. For your needs, the trouble with latex2rtf is that it only does LaTeX, AFAIK.
The second one, tex4ht, is said to be an excellent tool. It is aimed mainly to the production of hypertext documents for the Web, and it could be used as a (La)TeX -- HTML tool. But it can also generate XML/CSS, and OpenOffice.org.sxw documents, too. From there, converting to a Word format would be trivial.
For me, tex4ht looked interesting, and really worth checking out. Additionally, it is not bound to the LaTeX format; it can do plain TeX. However, and this is the sad part, its installation instructions for Unix systems are incredibly hard to understand, especially for those of us that do not use the C shell. And, it does not integrate well with the defacto TeX distribution for Unix, teTeX.
My take: if you can manage to get it going, perhaps tex4ht might be the way to go for you.
The law is there to uphold the beliefs of society.
No. The law should be there to uphold what is right and punish what is wrong, regardless of the beliefs of the society. This is because laws are not derived from society, but from the common Good (which is never to be identified with societal beliefs). If enough people are breaking a law, the people is wrong, not the law.
Majority does not make something right. Tell that to poor girls with their clitoris cut by some majoritarian, but utterly wrong, belief held in some parts of the world.
This book, launched in June 2004, is a major rewrite of the old book and for every LaTeX user its worth its price in gold. I have a dog-eared copy at my desk and I can attest to it.
Euphoria is a interpreted programming language that is simple, fast, and with a syntax that resembles something like Pascal without the anal-retentiveness and with a LOT of common sense. Has lots of features, is very fast for an interpreted language, and gives instant gratification. Works in DOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. The downside, though, is that the license is proprietary and AFAIK the interpreter, though very small, is binary-only.
Of course I believe you. But there is a difference between narrowly localized slang (and I assume that lumis as a harlot is slang) and the common usage of Spanish in all of our countries.
I even doubt that lumis is ever used as a word beyond the boundaries of your Spanish autonomous community. See for example that many of the people involved in the story were Latinos, and they showed no objection whatsoever to the name. Therefore, to allege that lumis is part of the Spanish language and that would be understood by most people as such is quite a stretch.
(in Spanish, "lumis" is a name for bad reputation women)
The Royal Spanish Academy doesn't register this word in its Dictionary of the Spanish Language. (KDE Users: to check this, type rae:lumis on the Konqueror location bar.)
And speaking for myself, a native Spanish speaker from South America, I didn't know about the word before reading this article.
Someone mod parent down, please.
Lots of business people care about Free licenses!
on
Red Hat Desktop Unveiled
·
· Score: 2, Informative
quoting parent:
For all of you who don't understand this yet, let me spell it out one more time. 99% of the population doesn't give two shits what the license terms of thier software is. To these people, free-as-in-beer will always be way more important than free-as-in-speech. They don't care if it's open-source. They don't even care if RedHat says it's open-source and it's really not. They want to know two things..."Will it work?" and "How much does it cost?"
Excuse me, but 99% of the population where? Here (Paraguay, South America), it is extremely easy to have judges and state prosecutors on corporate payroll, and the BSA mobsters use them to exploit loopholes in our legislation so that they can extort full time a lot of small companies.
For example, here you are mandated by tax law to keep all receipts for five years. Now, a newer "anti-piracy" law requires everyone to produce on request of law enforcement authorities not only the license for every software package you're running, but the receipt also. And many companies here are running Win95, Win 3.1x, or other aging software. Some months ago, the BSA got into a company, and the company was forced to pay for some old but licensed software, simply because the receipts were destroyed, being older than five years. Of course you could theoretically fight this in court, but many prefer just to pay knowing in advance that legal fees would be a lot higher.
Because of these strong-arm tactics of the BSA mobsters, in many companies down here you are expressly forbidden to install anything.
The company I mentioned later initiated a company-wide switch to GNU/Linux, just to be safe, and several shops already switched in both servers and desktops.
So yes, a LOT of people (especially those in businesses) do care about software freedom here.
I wonder if the next stage will be a story about a homophobic coder being upset by gay people using his code.
Actually, history has shown that it is very likely to be the other way around. Some militant gay activist upset about something being upset by people they label as 'homophobic'.
And yes, they're going to sue, and moan, and bitch, and they're going to win, lest anyone would let himself label as homophobic, too.
I'm in Paraguay, right in the center of South America, and I never heard of anyone running Conectiva.
What people use here is Red Hat/Fedora, Mandrake, Slackware and (sometimes) SUSE. Conectiva, people never heard about it.
I am aware that Conectiva is fairly well known in Brazil, but Brazil != South America. To call Conectiva "...the most popular distribution in South America" is quite a stretch,and nothing but a stupid marketing hype statement
I remember reading in a computing mag from 1984 that some UK research group was doing this. They developed a Defender-like game in which you couldn't shoot, only move the ship along the y-axis of the screen.
For the controls, they used some kind of bio-feedback in which the player put two fingers in sensors and the device would measure the difference in electrical conductivity and then translate it into movement instructions. The whole effort was justified on the basis of accessibility research and the game ran, IIRC, on a BBC Micro or an Atari 800.
I agree. In my home country (Paraguay) whole corporations are switching to GNU/Linux servers and workstations. People are using Linux at home and at work. The trend will continue. Why? Because no one likes having his home/workplace inspected by some mobster from the BSA armed with search warrants and extorting thousands of dollars from you because you happen to be a "pirate". Don't even mention the costs that you incur because of the overhead implied in the license auditing and management.
I guess that many First World people simply don't realize the global implications of a Free Software OS and how truly liberating a GNU/Linux desktop has been and is being right now. From India to Nigeria to Boliva, Free Software is gaining momentum steadily. Awake to that fact, please.
By the way, if Linux is supposedly dead on the desktop, then why Bill Gates had to make serious donations and brib^H^H^H^H lobbying to China and lately Peru? It was not because of the servers, dude. Food for thought.
I understand that you're a Talmudic scholar. This is interesting in itself since most of the highest profile members of the Free Software community usually express anti-religious ideas or are from religious traditions drastically at variance with the Judeo-Christian traditions (ie, neo-paganism and oriental misticysm).
How is that you relate your Jewish faith with the work as a Free Software developer, and the central tenets of the Free Software movement?
The site is apparently slashdotted and when I tried to read the story, I only got a page with ads and little else, and no story in sight. Can anyone post a copy or point to a Google cache please?
Slashdot Mirror
In Eleventh Hour, the main character needed a T3 connection to perform online search on a patent. And the girl offered him to go to her dorm where she had Wi-Fi, "in case you need more privacy"... ouch.
1. C-64 had a bad keyboard? C'mon, get real. The C-64/Vic-20 had one of the greatest keyboards of its class. The only one that could be considered as better was that of the Apple IIe and THAT was way more expensive. I had no problem typing from one.
2. How come that a list of the 10 worst keyboards of all time fails to mention the utterly horrible keyboard of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum??? (*shudder*)
3. "Modern" $5 keyboards (and a lot of the more expensive models) seriously belong to any list of the world's worst keyboards. Fragile keys, keys such as "power off" and "suspend" placed in the traditional place of Insert/Home/PgUp, just begging to be accidentally pressed; crappy Windows keys, and a general lack of reliability... and they don't make the list?? PLEASE!
P.S.: The original IBM PC keyboard was also widely despised for having a key between Shift and Z, thus surprising a lot of touch typists.
I live in Asunción, Paraguay, South America. Here, the ccTLD .py is managed by NIC.py. NIC.py specifically states that Paraguayan domain names must be third-level domains only, from the second-level domains ORG.PY, EDU.PY, MIL.PY, GOV.PY, NET.PY, COM.PY.
Straight from the horse's mouth (my rough translation):
On the other hand, Russian domain names are usually second-level domain names such as alphabank.ru, etc.
Therefore, and given that Paraguayan domain names are third-level domain names such as mybank.com.py, it would be very difficult for a Paraguayan phisher to set up Paraguayan sites to phish Russian users.
NIC.py states that it might consider creating other .PY second-level domains, so names such as www.python.py could be theoretically possible; but for that you must make a very good and convincing case to the NIC.py folks.
Arghh. Modded you incorrectly under the new discussion system and there's no undo. I'd rather lose all my moderation on this page than modding you as 'flamebait'. Great reply!
Gracias por contestar :). Pero poner la raza, el color de la piel de alguien como factor importante, es racista. Lamenton decírtelo amigo, pero eres tan racista como cualquier "redneck" si piensas que el color de la piel es importante para determinar si alguien debe ser modelo para tu gente, das lástima.
Un abrazo y que Dios te bendiga.
Look, I am Paraguayan (from South America). My native language is Spanish, and also I speak some Guaraní. My family does not have any special 'ethnic background'. I have written a number of articles for the U.S. online tech press, and I use GNU/Linux daily as my sole operating system. I also help in the KDE-ES Spanish translation effort (heck, that Subversion transition was a dog).
With all that said, let me state that I think that this story is preposterous and reeks of utter political correctness. I find stories such as this an insult to my intelligence and my abilities. I do not care about anyone's race. Do not show me the color of your skin, or the language you speak, or the culture that forms your framework of reference. Show me your code; show me your contribution to the cause of Free Software. This is going to be my mark of respect.
I don't need that affirmative action bovine crap. I need substantial efforts to see GNU/Linux or other Free operating system powering the world's desktops because of its superior quality and its freedom.
Bueno, por lo menos esto es lo que pienso; disculpen si por escribir en inglés nunca se imaginaron que soy sudamericano. No necesito de la basura de la mal llamada affirmative action y la sola sugerencia de dicha medida me es algo insultante. Gracias por todo.
I use LaTeX2e on a daily basis for a great variety of documents. While at it, I also had to interact at the professional level with people who seem to think that the one and only way to do rich text is with MS Word, so I had to see what could I do to preserve interoperability.
In the Free Software realm, the two best options seem to be latex2rtf and tex4ht.
The first one, latex2rtf, is the one I use. It works decently, does its job, and does it well. The only glitches I saw are that the resulting document has an user--defined page size and margins that are too big (i.e., 3.5--4.2cm), but both of these are easily surmountable. For your needs, the trouble with latex2rtf is that it only does LaTeX, AFAIK.
The second one, tex4ht, is said to be an excellent tool. It is aimed mainly to the production of hypertext documents for the Web, and it could be used as a (La)TeX -- HTML tool. But it can also generate XML/CSS, and OpenOffice.org .sxw documents, too. From there, converting to a Word format would be trivial.
For me, tex4ht looked interesting, and really worth checking out. Additionally, it is not bound to the LaTeX format; it can do plain TeX. However, and this is the sad part, its installation instructions for Unix systems are incredibly hard to understand, especially for those of us that do not use the C shell. And, it does not integrate well with the defacto TeX distribution for Unix, teTeX.
My take: if you can manage to get it going, perhaps tex4ht might be the way to go for you.
Why don't you use KDE's KPrinter? It made ESR's complain moot at the time of its writing, and now even more so.
The law is there to uphold the beliefs of society.
No. The law should be there to uphold what is right and punish what is wrong, regardless of the beliefs of the society. This is because laws are not derived from society, but from the common Good (which is never to be identified with societal beliefs). If enough people are breaking a law, the people is wrong, not the law.
Majority does not make something right. Tell that to poor girls with their clitoris cut by some majoritarian, but utterly wrong, belief held in some parts of the world.
Oh well, resubmitted with proper formatting...
Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens et al., The LaTeX Companion, 2nd edition.
This book, launched in June 2004, is a major rewrite of the old book and for every LaTeX user its worth its price in gold. I have a dog-eared copy at my desk and I can attest to it.
Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens et al.,
This book, launched in June 2004, is a <em>major</em> rewrite of the old book and for every LaTeX user its worth its price in gold. I have a dog-eared copy at my desk and I can attest to it.
Euphoria is a interpreted programming language that is simple, fast, and with a syntax that resembles something like Pascal without the anal-retentiveness and with a LOT of common sense. Has lots of features, is very fast for an interpreted language, and gives instant gratification. Works in DOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. The downside, though, is that the license is proprietary and AFAIK the interpreter, though very small, is binary-only.
If you like to see more, here's the FAQ.
Of course I believe you. But there is a difference between narrowly localized slang (and I assume that lumis as a harlot is slang) and the common usage of Spanish in all of our countries.
I even doubt that lumis is ever used as a word beyond the boundaries of your Spanish autonomous community. See for example that many of the people involved in the story were Latinos, and they showed no objection whatsoever to the name. Therefore, to allege that lumis is part of the Spanish language and that would be understood by most people as such is quite a stretch.
According, again, to the Dictionary of the Spanish Academy, bicho is bug. It's not only in S.A.; it's the standard Spanish.
Quoting parent...
The Royal Spanish Academy doesn't register this word in its Dictionary of the Spanish Language. (KDE Users: to check this, type rae:lumis on the Konqueror location bar.)
And speaking for myself, a native Spanish speaker from South America, I didn't know about the word before reading this article.
Someone mod parent down, please.
quoting parent:
Excuse me, but 99% of the population where? Here (Paraguay, South America), it is extremely easy to have judges and state prosecutors on corporate payroll, and the BSA mobsters use them to exploit loopholes in our legislation so that they can extort full time a lot of small companies.
For example, here you are mandated by tax law to keep all receipts for five years. Now, a newer "anti-piracy" law requires everyone to produce on request of law enforcement authorities not only the license for every software package you're running, but the receipt also. And many companies here are running Win95, Win 3.1x, or other aging software. Some months ago, the BSA got into a company, and the company was forced to pay for some old but licensed software, simply because the receipts were destroyed, being older than five years. Of course you could theoretically fight this in court, but many prefer just to pay knowing in advance that legal fees would be a lot higher.
Because of these strong-arm tactics of the BSA mobsters, in many companies down here you are expressly forbidden to install anything.
The company I mentioned later initiated a company-wide switch to GNU/Linux, just to be safe, and several shops already switched in both servers and desktops.
So yes, a LOT of people (especially those in businesses) do care about software freedom here.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! :D
I wonder if the next stage will be a story about a homophobic coder being upset by gay people using his code.
Actually, history has shown that it is very likely to be the other way around. Some militant gay activist upset about something being upset by people they label as 'homophobic'.
And yes, they're going to sue, and moan, and bitch, and they're going to win, lest anyone would let himself label as homophobic, too.
What people use here is Red Hat/Fedora, Mandrake, Slackware and (sometimes) SUSE. Conectiva, people never heard about it.
I am aware that Conectiva is fairly well known in Brazil, but Brazil != South America. To call Conectiva "...the most popular distribution in South America" is quite a stretch,and nothing but a stupid marketing hype statement
I remember reading in a computing mag from 1984 that some UK research group was doing this. They developed a Defender-like game in which you couldn't shoot, only move the ship along the y-axis of the screen.
For the controls, they used some kind of bio-feedback in which the player put two fingers in sensors and the device would measure the difference in electrical conductivity and then translate it into movement instructions. The whole effort was justified on the basis of accessibility research and the game ran, IIRC, on a BBC Micro or an Atari 800.
I am able to top parent. My worst job was teaching English to 6th and 9th graders in school. 'Nuff said.
I agree. In my home country (Paraguay) whole corporations are switching to GNU/Linux servers and workstations. People are using Linux at home and at work. The trend will continue. Why? Because no one likes having his home/workplace inspected by some mobster from the BSA armed with search warrants and extorting thousands of dollars from you because you happen to be a "pirate". Don't even mention the costs that you incur because of the overhead implied in the license auditing and management.
I guess that many First World people simply don't realize the global implications of a Free Software OS and how truly liberating a GNU/Linux desktop has been and is being right now. From India to Nigeria to Boliva, Free Software is gaining momentum steadily. Awake to that fact, please.
By the way, if Linux is supposedly dead on the desktop, then why Bill Gates had to make serious donations and brib^H^H^H^H lobbying to China and lately Peru? It was not because of the servers, dude. Food for thought.
I understand that you're a Talmudic scholar. This is interesting in itself since most of the highest profile members of the Free Software community usually express anti-religious ideas or are from religious traditions drastically at variance with the Judeo-Christian traditions (ie, neo-paganism and oriental misticysm).
How is that you relate your Jewish faith with the work as a Free Software developer, and the central tenets of the Free Software movement?
The site is apparently slashdotted and when I tried to read the story, I only got a page with ads and little else, and no story in sight. Can anyone post a copy or point to a Google cache please?
Hi Jonathan, I made this post using lynx.