I suppose that somebody coming out with a "Red Mat" distro would be OK, then? Or a "Webian"? Or possibly a web server called, "Mapache"?
I do believe they could do that. In fact, I think I could modify one line of the source code for Apache, maybe do a s/apache/mapache/g and then label it as Mapache! As long as they also GPL it...
But you're missing the point - Microsoft is taking a regular English word and trying to claim it as their own. If company A creates a windowed interface named Windows and company B created a windowed interface too, company A should expect some consumer confusion because its product's name is so generic. Somebody could say "My windows is frozen" and mean either company A's or company B's version.
Besides, Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies have to play by a different set of rules, and the courts look at them differently. That's the price they pay for such high market share. The courts may (perhaps should) come down a little harder on a monopoly if it tries to sue its competitors out of existence.
"I was in a mall the other day and I heard [the theme to] "Batman," Dunn recalled. "I wanted to say, 'Hey, I did that.' "
Dear Washingtonpost.com writer Christopher Stern,
I just wanted to thank you for clarifying what Chris Dunn meant when he made the quote referenced above. At first, I thought, "Wow! Batman was at the mall! And Chris Dunn heard him!" Thanks to your insightful editorial alteration, I now understand that he only heard the theme song to the television show by the same name. The fourteen extra bytes transmitted to convey that information was well worth it.
Yes, I am quite obviously retarded. Thank you for the well thought-out response. I especially appreciate your disregard for capitalization; it does wonders to the strength of your (already impressive) rebuttal.
what the hell is the point of posting such a thing if it can't withstand the slashdot load? honestly? what purpose does it serve? none! i think there should be some hardware requirements in order for a site to be linked to from slashdot.
those geniuses at slashdot should seriously think of something soon before i go postal.
I fail to see how slashdot owes you a selection of fast-loading, interesting links. What have you done to deserve this? Looked at ads? Too many people at slashdot complain that the site isn't up to their expectations. Please leave. If you aren't getting your money's worth, I'm sure the slashdot crew will refund you all the money you've given them.
You get what you get, and if you don't like it, you go someplace else. If a person's interactive christmas-light-display can't handle thousands of people accessing it at the same time, then most of those people won't get to see it. If slashdot doesn't post the article, then none (or very very very few) of these people will get to see it.
So to answer the question you thought was rhetorical, the point of posting the story was to show as many people as possible what this project was, then to open the topic up for discussion. Enough with this slashdot-owes-me-fast-links crap. Grow up.
"One of those contractors, Steve Harper, said he has sent 5 million e-mails so far. Earlier this month, he claims he sold 330,000 cars after sending a million ads in one day." And people wonder why spam still gets sent. It is because people buy stuff that is spamvertised.
The first thing I thought of when I read that was: How do we get this guy's address and send him junk mail, like slashdot did to Alan Ralsky? Come on, folks, I want an address, I want an aerial map!
Re:Where'd they get those numbers?
on
Tornado in a Can
·
· Score: 2
Most female chickens lay an egg per day. Usually those get collected and sold, but the fact is there are about 365 eggs produced per (female)chicken-year. Most chickens, also, are female - one rooster services lots of chickens.
If you take one adult chicken and kill her at the end of the year, you'll have 6 pounds of chicken and 23 pounds of eggshell. If you hatch some of those eggs, they will most likely not be killed by end-of-year because it's of more benefit for the farmer to get it to egg-laying (or fertilizing) age. So don't add that chicken's mass to the total. And you still have the eggshell to deal with!
Not that I really care, but I like using measurement units like eggs per chicken-year (that's product, not subtraction)
1. Get an online publication to write an article in which a spammer brags about his expensive home
2. Tell thousands of geeksabout it and present a thinly veiled challenge to find the guy's address
3. ????? 4.Profit!!!!
Sorry, once I got to number three I couldn't resist:)
Re:Destandardize the pop standard
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 2
Maybe this will even free us from the decades-old but arbitrary standard of three and a half minute tracks.
Actually, the three-minute standard length is not arbitrary. It came from early recordings on the wax rolls (pre-vinyl) which would make a full revolution in about three minutes. The restriction stuck when 45's came out, since they wouldn't fit much more per side. When LP's came out, a half hour of continuous music was now possible, but the radio stations had already established their formats and weren't about to change. Besides, the culture was used to having bite-sized songs, and couldn't sit through a long piece anymore. The three-minute-song is now hard-coded into the minds of most non-musicians.
The first Top-40 piece to take more than the standard allotment was "Hey Jude" by the Beatles, btw. That's enough trivia for today...
The phonemail system where I work can digitally slow our messages down just by pressing "7" repeatedly. If anybody else wants to leave this song on my voicemail at work, I'll slow it down a bunch and get out my stopwatch.
Or, I could press "9" furiously and make songs faster. Reggae becomes ska! w00t!
Yeah, I just wish I could get that POS Real software to work... all I get is silence.
I thought the same thing too, but then I listened to part 1.2 and there was sound... There isn't much sound for the first five minutes of part 1.1 and it builds up very, very slowly - I guess that's how things happen when a song lasts twenty-four hours.
The study does not say that broadband does not add to the user experience. It does say that increased speed or an "always-on" connection are not the primary reasons for most broadband subscribers. It suggests, instead, that users are more interested in the ability to surf the web slower.
With a broadband connection, users are not tying up a phone line. There is no rush when using broadband; with a dial-up connection, users tend to feel like they have to use browse quickly. I got the impression from the article that broadband is useful, but not for the reasons companies are currently marketing towards. If providers change their angle, this rate of growth would most likely increase (and I might remind/. readers that just because Mage99 says broadband providers get thousands of new subscribers per day, it might not be true - a link or two to back up such sweeping statistics would be nice, since most of us have no clue who Mage99 really is).
I want MAME to get to work on emulating the degenatron!"Swing from green dot to green dot with your red square monkey!"
That's what I want MAME to support.
This couldn't have come at a better time for me
on
Helping Your Ex-Employer?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I just recently had something very similar happen to me. I had created a simple web site for somebody last spring, and included instructions to modify the files (he didn't want to pay me to update the site, but wanted me to teach him how to do it). I provided him with some basic ftp instructions, and told him to not modify parts between the symbols (php pages). Using proper HTML was up to him.
A few months later his host upgraded the server his site was on. I modified the templates for him at no charge - no need to burn bridges, and it was fairly easy for me to fix.
A few months after that, he tried updating the site and botched it - he did not download the files first, but instead used copies on his local machine already (downloaded before the server was upgraded). Once he started getting php error messages, he contacted me, accusing me of giving him bad instructions (actually, he said I "wrote the site incorrectly") and I need to fix it right away. Very demanding, very accusative, and unwilling to answer any questions. After a few messages full of him sidestepping my questions (presumably because he did not want to admit he didn't follow the instructions), I was able to figure out what happened, and told him that since he did not follow the instructions it was not my fault.
I told him I'd only charge for a half hour of work to fix it. I made the price low because I wasn't in need of the money - it was meant to get the point across that this work is above and beyond the original deal. The total cost to him would have been twenty-three dollars and fifty cents. He kept fighting me and insisting that he is not a moron. (his justification? "I'm the head of a marketing department." Oh, I'm sorry, you couldn't be a moron, then!)
After a week, I told him I would fix it on the condition that he never contact me again. I told him there was clearly nothing I could do to make him a satisfied customer short of doing everything for free. I told him I'd gladly lose twenty-three dollars just to never have to deal with him again. I told him I hoped the time he spent fighting me was worth no more than twenty-three dollars.
I don't regret burning that bridge. If the other party has no interest in reimbursing you for your work, then you're not really even buring a bridge - you're getting rid of excess baggage.
I don't recall a setting to turn ZIP view off, but maybe there is one hidden somewhere??
I believe the solution is to install WinZip, or some other app that gets associated with zip files. If explorer.exe is the default handler, it will treat it like a folder. I'm off the XP now, though, so I can't tell you for sure.
There is a flavor of linux that runs on the iPaq, the name of the distro is Familiar. There is also a GUI for it, named Opie. I had both of these on mine, but the difficulty I had syncing it with either my Win2K at work or my Linux box at home was disappointing. And it was slow. And I had a lot of freeze-ups (don't know whether to blame Opie or Familiar for that though).
As a side note, installing Linux on an x86-based machine is much different than installing it on a PDA, which uses a variety of different chips. The memory sticks don't have the same speed as conventional memory, too. And then there's the fact that people use PDA's differently than handhelds - putting a desktop OS on a handheld makes the handheld harder to use. Not that that argument has stopped people from installing Linux on a Dreamcast...
I moved to the Amiga in 1988, after learning all about BASIC on a C-64. I was only 10 at the time and had a budget of $0 so I relied on my parents for games, demos etc. but there was a users group - two actually, the Latham Amiga Users Group (LAUG) and the Capital District Amiga Users Group (CDAUG).
I'd tag along with my dad to meetings and we'd get floppy disks from Fred Fish. We had Digi-Paint, which used a b&w camera that could take color images using red, green and blue cellophane - pretty ingenious at the time. Then there was Deluxe Paint III, with animation and animated brushes and tutorials on VHS (I remember creating the bouncing ball demo). I also learned how to use MED (a music editor) and Deluxe Music for writing out scores. These were some real tools that taught you how to be clever. And every application could run off a floppy - with only 20MB of hard disk space you had better be able to run things off floppies.
Speech synthesis was another wonderful thing - the program I used even made a simple mouth that would animate when it spoke!
I think the Amiga's crash was the best I've ever seen too - Guru meditations! Somebody at Commodore realized that if they could make you laugh at a crash, the problem wouldn't seem so bad.
When my dad decided we should take the plunge into PC's, I was disappointed at how far behind they were. Sound cards?? Amigas had built-in sound! Mouse drivers? The Amiga's mouse worked right off the bat! And don't get me started on those damn 8.3 filenames. Windows 3.1 was a beast, and where's the icon for the hard disk? But it had a CD-ROM drive, eight megs of ram (when most new computers had four- we splurged), and hundreds of megabytes of hard disk space. And I knew other people who had PC's - that was important. Now that I'm a Linux user I don't know if I have any needs that an Amiga would fill. I hope I'm wrong.
This is odd to me. Since Mozilla hit 1.0, I've been creating pages for Mozilla first, then checking them in IE and they always come out right. This is partly because IE makes lots of assumptions to cover up bad code (such as not closing tags). While that might seem nice, it really is a band-aid solution that only makes the application unnecessarily large and encourages bad practices.
Mozilla doesn't invent its own standards - why don't you look at the HTML code generated by MS Word if you want to see invented standards! Look at IE's "page transitions," which seem to exist only to alert you that the web "designer" found a "really cool feature" in FrontPage.
Lastly, Java was intended to be "write once, run anywhere." JavaScript was originally a Netscape extension in the browser wars which MS picked up on, and has now become ECMAScript.
And frankly, your url (http://www.geocities.com/scotthallexpress/Bio.htm l) doesn't lend you a whole lot of credibility in terms of web design knowledge. Anybody who has a Geocities Wrestling fansite (created with Yahoo pagebuilder no less) is going to have a tough time finding an audience to talk to about proper web design.
You just wait until you have a job in an IT department. Answering to corporate suit types. Restarting computers and getting snide remarks because you always tell users to reboot when their computers crash. You HAVE to limit what users can do. I'm not bitter about it, I just know that the freedom that competent users want can't always happen on computers at work. If you don't like it, get a job in the IT department, or go someplace else. IT's job is to ensure that those computers can run those mission-critical apps, and sometimes that means locking them down.
That's great. Now I can sit at my desk and see what AOLholes have to say:
hpyrabbit1981: Ya! LOL!:)):) dlscowboys0101: hi rabbit how r u? tina23992: me 2! hpyrabbit1981: @->-- cowbyos;) memphisflowershop2: me too! a/s/l?
I don't want that. I let the AOLers have their little messenger and chat rooms and they can crap all over it as much as they want. I much prefer slashdot, where frist porst's and goatse.cx reign supreme!
It would have been so easy for these people to protect that information until the proper release time, too. Here are a few things that could have been done:
chmod 100 file.pdf and chown root file.pdf - then either chmod/chown it back manually or write a cron job to do it.
wrap the file in a php file that checks the date first (the pdf would be outside the server root and the php file would write a few headers and then spit out the file)
Don't put it on the site until it's really time to be public!I've known people who put new versions of websites in subdirectories called "beta" or something equally simple, and other people who wrap links to "secret" files in <font color="#FFFFFF"> tags. Security through obscurity is inexcusable when there are very simple techniques that will greatly improve security.
Slashdot Mirror
But you're missing the point - Microsoft is taking a regular English word and trying to claim it as their own. If company A creates a windowed interface named Windows and company B created a windowed interface too, company A should expect some consumer confusion because its product's name is so generic. Somebody could say "My windows is frozen" and mean either company A's or company B's version.
Besides, Microsoft is a monopoly. Monopolies have to play by a different set of rules, and the courts look at them differently. That's the price they pay for such high market share. The courts may (perhaps should) come down a little harder on a monopoly if it tries to sue its competitors out of existence.
I just wanted to thank you for clarifying what Chris Dunn meant when he made the quote referenced above. At first, I thought, "Wow! Batman was at the mall! And Chris Dunn heard him!" Thanks to your insightful editorial alteration, I now understand that he only heard the theme song to the television show by the same name. The fourteen extra bytes transmitted to convey that information was well worth it.
Keep up the good work!
Yours Truly,
-Joe
Yes, I am quite obviously retarded. Thank you for the well thought-out response. I especially appreciate your disregard for capitalization; it does wonders to the strength of your (already impressive) rebuttal.
You get what you get, and if you don't like it, you go someplace else. If a person's interactive christmas-light-display can't handle thousands of people accessing it at the same time, then most of those people won't get to see it. If slashdot doesn't post the article, then none (or very very very few) of these people will get to see it.
So to answer the question you thought was rhetorical, the point of posting the story was to show as many people as possible what this project was, then to open the topic up for discussion. Enough with this slashdot-owes-me-fast-links crap. Grow up.
The first thing I thought of when I read that was: How do we get this guy's address and send him junk mail, like slashdot did to Alan Ralsky? Come on, folks, I want an address, I want an aerial map!
Most female chickens lay an egg per day. Usually those get collected and sold, but the fact is there are about 365 eggs produced per (female)chicken-year. Most chickens, also, are female - one rooster services lots of chickens.
If you take one adult chicken and kill her at the end of the year, you'll have 6 pounds of chicken and 23 pounds of eggshell. If you hatch some of those eggs, they will most likely not be killed by end-of-year because it's of more benefit for the farmer to get it to egg-laying (or fertilizing) age. So don't add that chicken's mass to the total. And you still have the eggshell to deal with!
Not that I really care, but I like using measurement units like eggs per chicken-year (that's product, not subtraction)
I like the current method to cut down spam:
:)
1. Get an online publication to write an article in which a spammer brags about his expensive home
2. Tell thousands of geeksabout it and present a thinly veiled challenge to find the guy's address
3. ?????
4.Profit!!!!
Sorry, once I got to number three I couldn't resist
The first Top-40 piece to take more than the standard allotment was "Hey Jude" by the Beatles, btw. That's enough trivia for today...
The phonemail system where I work can digitally slow our messages down just by pressing "7" repeatedly. If anybody else wants to leave this song on my voicemail at work, I'll slow it down a bunch and get out my stopwatch.
Or, I could press "9" furiously and make songs faster. Reggae becomes ska! w00t!
Yeah, I just wish I could get that POS Real software to work... all I get is silence.
I thought the same thing too, but then I listened to part 1.2 and there was sound... There isn't much sound for the first five minutes of part 1.1 and it builds up very, very slowly - I guess that's how things happen when a song lasts twenty-four hours.
The study does not say that broadband does not add to the user experience. It does say that increased speed or an "always-on" connection are not the primary reasons for most broadband subscribers. It suggests, instead, that users are more interested in the ability to surf the web slower.
/. readers that just because Mage99 says broadband providers get thousands of new subscribers per day, it might not be true - a link or two to back up such sweeping statistics would be nice, since most of us have no clue who Mage99 really is).
With a broadband connection, users are not tying up a phone line. There is no rush when using broadband; with a dial-up connection, users tend to feel like they have to use browse quickly. I got the impression from the article that broadband is useful, but not for the reasons companies are currently marketing towards. If providers change their angle, this rate of growth would most likely increase (and I might remind
1. Make Beowolf cluster joke
2. Make Version number joke
3. ????
4. PROFIT!!
May as well overuse some other jokes too.
I want MAME to get to work on emulating the degenatron! "Swing from green dot to green dot with your red square monkey!"
That's what I want MAME to support.
I just recently had something very similar happen to me. I had created a simple web site for somebody last spring, and included instructions to modify the files (he didn't want to pay me to update the site, but wanted me to teach him how to do it). I provided him with some basic ftp instructions, and told him to not modify parts between the symbols (php pages). Using proper HTML was up to him.
A few months later his host upgraded the server his site was on. I modified the templates for him at no charge - no need to burn bridges, and it was fairly easy for me to fix.
A few months after that, he tried updating the site and botched it - he did not download the files first, but instead used copies on his local machine already (downloaded before the server was upgraded). Once he started getting php error messages, he contacted me, accusing me of giving him bad instructions (actually, he said I "wrote the site incorrectly") and I need to fix it right away. Very demanding, very accusative, and unwilling to answer any questions. After a few messages full of him sidestepping my questions (presumably because he did not want to admit he didn't follow the instructions), I was able to figure out what happened, and told him that since he did not follow the instructions it was not my fault.
I told him I'd only charge for a half hour of work to fix it. I made the price low because I wasn't in need of the money - it was meant to get the point across that this work is above and beyond the original deal. The total cost to him would have been twenty-three dollars and fifty cents. He kept fighting me and insisting that he is not a moron. (his justification? "I'm the head of a marketing department." Oh, I'm sorry, you couldn't be a moron, then!)
After a week, I told him I would fix it on the condition that he never contact me again. I told him there was clearly nothing I could do to make him a satisfied customer short of doing everything for free. I told him I'd gladly lose twenty-three dollars just to never have to deal with him again. I told him I hoped the time he spent fighting me was worth no more than twenty-three dollars.
I don't regret burning that bridge. If the other party has no interest in reimbursing you for your work, then you're not really even buring a bridge - you're getting rid of excess baggage.
There is a flavor of linux that runs on the iPaq, the name of the distro is Familiar. There is also a GUI for it, named Opie. I had both of these on mine, but the difficulty I had syncing it with either my Win2K at work or my Linux box at home was disappointing. And it was slow. And I had a lot of freeze-ups (don't know whether to blame Opie or Familiar for that though).
As a side note, installing Linux on an x86-based machine is much different than installing it on a PDA, which uses a variety of different chips. The memory sticks don't have the same speed as conventional memory, too. And then there's the fact that people use PDA's differently than handhelds - putting a desktop OS on a handheld makes the handheld harder to use. Not that that argument has stopped people from installing Linux on a Dreamcast...
I moved to the Amiga in 1988, after learning all about BASIC on a C-64. I was only 10 at the time and had a budget of $0 so I relied on my parents for games, demos etc. but there was a users group - two actually, the Latham Amiga Users Group (LAUG) and the Capital District Amiga Users Group (CDAUG).
I'd tag along with my dad to meetings and we'd get floppy disks from Fred Fish. We had Digi-Paint, which used a b&w camera that could take color images using red, green and blue cellophane - pretty ingenious at the time. Then there was Deluxe Paint III, with animation and animated brushes and tutorials on VHS (I remember creating the bouncing ball demo). I also learned how to use MED (a music editor) and Deluxe Music for writing out scores. These were some real tools that taught you how to be clever. And every application could run off a floppy - with only 20MB of hard disk space you had better be able to run things off floppies.
Speech synthesis was another wonderful thing - the program I used even made a simple mouth that would animate when it spoke!
I think the Amiga's crash was the best I've ever seen too - Guru meditations! Somebody at Commodore realized that if they could make you laugh at a crash, the problem wouldn't seem so bad.
When my dad decided we should take the plunge into PC's, I was disappointed at how far behind they were. Sound cards?? Amigas had built-in sound! Mouse drivers? The Amiga's mouse worked right off the bat! And don't get me started on those damn 8.3 filenames. Windows 3.1 was a beast, and where's the icon for the hard disk? But it had a CD-ROM drive, eight megs of ram (when most new computers had four- we splurged), and hundreds of megabytes of hard disk space. And I knew other people who had PC's - that was important. Now that I'm a Linux user I don't know if I have any needs that an Amiga would fill. I hope I'm wrong.
This is odd to me. Since Mozilla hit 1.0, I've been creating pages for Mozilla first, then checking them in IE and they always come out right. This is partly because IE makes lots of assumptions to cover up bad code (such as not closing tags). While that might seem nice, it really is a band-aid solution that only makes the application unnecessarily large and encourages bad practices.
m l) doesn't lend you a whole lot of credibility in terms of web design knowledge. Anybody who has a Geocities Wrestling fansite (created with Yahoo pagebuilder no less) is going to have a tough time finding an audience to talk to about proper web design.
Mozilla doesn't invent its own standards - why don't you look at the HTML code generated by MS Word if you want to see invented standards! Look at IE's "page transitions," which seem to exist only to alert you that the web "designer" found a "really cool feature" in FrontPage.
Lastly, Java was intended to be "write once, run anywhere." JavaScript was originally a Netscape extension in the browser wars which MS picked up on, and has now become ECMAScript.
And frankly, your url (http://www.geocities.com/scotthallexpress/Bio.ht
You just wait until you have a job in an IT department. Answering to corporate suit types. Restarting computers and getting snide remarks because you always tell users to reboot when their computers crash. You HAVE to limit what users can do. I'm not bitter about it, I just know that the freedom that competent users want can't always happen on computers at work. If you don't like it, get a job in the IT department, or go someplace else. IT's job is to ensure that those computers can run those mission-critical apps, and sometimes that means locking them down.
That's great. Now I can sit at my desk and see what AOLholes have to say:
:)):) ;)
hpyrabbit1981: Ya! LOL!
dlscowboys0101: hi rabbit how r u?
tina23992: me 2!
hpyrabbit1981: @->-- cowbyos
memphisflowershop2: me too! a/s/l?
I don't want that. I let the AOLers have their little messenger and chat rooms and they can crap all over it as much as they want. I much prefer slashdot, where frist porst's and goatse.cx reign supreme!
It's real... the same duck is in Windows XP too! That's some good old MS innovation...
chmod 100 file.pdf and chown root file.pdf - then either chmod/chown it back manually or write a cron job to do it.
wrap the file in a php file that checks the date first (the pdf would be outside the server root and the php file would write a few headers and then spit out the file)
Don't put it on the site until it's really time to be public!I've known people who put new versions of websites in subdirectories called "beta" or something equally simple, and other people who wrap links to "secret" files in <font color="#FFFFFF"> tags. Security through obscurity is inexcusable when there are very simple techniques that will greatly improve security.
In the words of Ozzy Osbourne, wha?
But is Krakow a real person, or is he actually a marketing person at Microsoft and a royalty-free stock photograph?
Forgot to include a link, for those who like to click things.