Not me; I don't even want to use media players on MS Windows. A good compiler is more entertaining than anything coming out of the entertainment industry.
If I want to take a break from creating my own intellectual property to passively experience someone else's, there's a TV set and audio equipment in the other room.
"We've got to do something and by something I don't mean talking to representatives, I mean educating people."
First dig out your psych. book and look up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. People worried about whether they will have food and shelter *cannot* think about abstractions such as freedom. Find them all secure jobs and then they'll have brainpower left over to listen to you.
"Not only new versions of Windows will be patched or improved, but as I understood they also plan to force security updates for older versions of Windows down peoples throats. Even if that means that some applications will mallfunction."
Well, good. It's about time all of those broken app.s were exposed. Poor as it is, MS' code is clean as a whistle compared to many third-party Windows app.s.
The downside is there'll be a whole new class of broken-as-designed app.s I'll have to invent workarounds for. At least I've had LOTS of practice....
See White's "Sector General Hospital" stories for clues about a society of beings (the Kelgians, IIRC) whose emotions are all revealed by the activity of their fur and who thus never bothered to invent politeness.
(BTW, I wonder what an IIRC physiologic type would look like?:-)
"Does anyone know if someone's tried to tack on hardware ECC to HDs?"
Does anyone know any HD manufacturer who has *not*? Digital made their 170-bit ECC a major selling point on the RA80, which is so old that most computer users today wouldn't recognize the part number. I still have the fake cardboard "disk platter" advertising handout.
I still think you all ought to take a look at the voting machines here in Marion County, IN. They're decades old but still work well, and should be noted as good examples in books on human-interface design. No half-votes, double votes, or hanging-chads possible.
" Don't buy from Telcos whose CEO's/CFO's/etc have their pictures' [Grammatical Question: Is this the proper use of the apostrophe in this instance?] plastered on a wall at your local post office."
Grammatical answer: no. Only the first apostrophe (the one in "don't") is used correctly. Contractions take apostrophes, and so do possessives, but what you have is plurals and they are distinguished from possessives by the lack of an apostrophe. (The last one above is the form of a possessive plural, which takes the apostrophe *after* the "s", but the form you wanted is the simple plural.) If a spelling could be either a contraction or a possessive, the contraction takes the apostrophe and the possessive does not.
Now you've gone and reminded me of Twain's "translation" of _The Tale of the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate_. Thanks!
I remember seeing an honest-to-gosh Picturephone(tm) (the one that needs a dedicated T1 to operate) at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago years ago, and I still haven't been able to answer the question, "why would I want a video telephone?" Today I'd pay $5 more to *not* have video on my phone. Audio-only communication simplifies interactions nicely. I called to *talk* to you, not to look at you.
The one thing I miss about VCRs is that you just push the cartridge in and the movie starts. On DVD the content vendors seem to be in a race to build the deepest, most tangled, most annoying menu tree imaginable. I'd pay $10 extra for a DVD player that can be set to just go directly to the movie (after the FBI boilerplate) without *any* interaction. I should never see a menu until I press "menu".
(But then, I also scour the stores for "unspecial editions" that aren't brimful of silly games, studio floor sweepings, and other not-the-movie stuff, so what do I know?)
"Here's the scenario: 1. RIAA goon searches for title of copyrighted work. 2. File sharers, including one in Australia, happily and consentually transmit search results. 3. RIAA goon reads search results. 4. RIAA goon requests download of file from the Australian. 5. Australian happily and consentually sends it. 6. RIAA goon listens to it; determines it is the copyrighted work. 7. RIAA goon DoSes the Australian file-sharer. -- Where in there did the RIAA goon "gain access to, or enter, a computer system"?
Why, steps 1, 4, and 7, of course. Although only step 7 is unauthorized by the server's owner.
"Another poster in this forum suggested that Canadian extra-territoriality law has some relevance (as a Canadian, I'm inclined to agree) -- to wit, our laws to do with your Cuba embargo (Helms-Burton being the most recent example) specifically hold the American act and its provisions to be invalid in Canada."
Okay, I need a clue -- are you saying that Canadians can be arrested for *not* doing business with Cuba?
I'd much rather have entertainment gear that *works like* my PC. That is, I can reprogram it to suit my needs; various data sources are multiplexed onto a data bus and can be routed concurrently to various sinks; I can plug a card into the bus and add new ports or other capabilities; I can just copy losslessly from old to new media as storage technology changes.
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"the literature of open source is richer on the subject of debugging than design."
I tend to think it's because of the pervasive attitude that design is for wimps; REAL programmers just start coding.
Not me; I don't even want to use media players on MS Windows. A good compiler is more entertaining than anything coming out of the entertainment industry.
If I want to take a break from creating my own intellectual property to passively experience someone else's, there's a TV set and audio equipment in the other room.
"We've got to do something and by something I don't mean talking to representatives, I mean educating people."
First dig out your psych. book and look up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. People worried about whether they will have food and shelter *cannot* think about abstractions such as freedom. Find them all secure jobs and then they'll have brainpower left over to listen to you.
"Not only new versions of Windows will be patched or improved, but as I understood they also plan to force security updates for older versions of Windows down peoples throats. Even if that means that some applications will mallfunction."
Well, good. It's about time all of those broken app.s were exposed. Poor as it is, MS' code is clean as a whistle compared to many third-party Windows app.s.
The downside is there'll be a whole new class of broken-as-designed app.s I'll have to invent workarounds for. At least I've had LOTS of practice....
Indeed, I have copies of the tarballs from 01-Jul-2002 and they were not trojaned then.
4. Grab the source, check the detached signature, warn the site if the .asc doesn't verify or if the identity of the signer seems strange.
Of course this only works if the developers sign their packages....
"Doesn't it need to be reversed as well?"
See _Sun Cross_ by Barbara Hambly, IIRC. (Also a good read.)
"We're looking at Abiword at work. V.nice, but doesn't seem to read hyperlinks when loading a document from word."
Sounds like a feature to me.
I've been waiting impatiently for the opportunity to say, "no, thank you" to Passport on my Linux boxes.
...WHY???
So are they gonna name it Crikkit? :-)
See White's "Sector General Hospital" stories for clues about a society of beings (the Kelgians, IIRC) whose emotions are all revealed by the activity of their fur and who thus never bothered to invent politeness.
:-)
(BTW, I wonder what an IIRC physiologic type would look like?
"Does anyone know if someone's tried to tack on hardware ECC to HDs?"
Does anyone know any HD manufacturer who has *not*? Digital made their 170-bit ECC a major selling point on the RA80, which is so old that most computer users today wouldn't recognize the part number. I still have the fake cardboard "disk platter" advertising handout.
"...never informed the public that they were launching sizable masses of radioactive matter into space."
I knew about it years ago. Dunno why you didn't. Maybe you don't read _Science News_? or _Popular Science_? It's not like this was secret or anything.
Why do you put storage in POS terminals at all? Netboot 'em. Voila: no more drive failures.
I still think you all ought to take a look at the voting machines here in Marion County, IN. They're decades old but still work well, and should be noted as good examples in books on human-interface design. No half-votes, double votes, or hanging-chads possible.
Tom Swift Jr. did something similar for sonar decades ago.
" Don't buy from Telcos whose CEO's/CFO's/etc have their pictures' [Grammatical Question: Is this the proper use of the apostrophe in this instance?] plastered on a wall at your local post office."
Grammatical answer: no. Only the first apostrophe (the one in "don't") is used correctly. Contractions take apostrophes, and so do possessives, but what you have is plurals and they are distinguished from possessives by the lack of an apostrophe. (The last one above is the form of a possessive plural, which takes the apostrophe *after* the "s", but the form you wanted is the simple plural.) If a spelling could be either a contraction or a possessive, the contraction takes the apostrophe and the possessive does not.
Now you've gone and reminded me of Twain's "translation" of _The Tale of the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate_. Thanks!
I remember seeing an honest-to-gosh Picturephone(tm) (the one that needs a dedicated T1 to operate) at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago years ago, and I still haven't been able to answer the question, "why would I want a video telephone?" Today I'd pay $5 more to *not* have video on my phone. Audio-only communication simplifies interactions nicely. I called to *talk* to you, not to look at you.
The one thing I miss about VCRs is that you just push the cartridge in and the movie starts. On DVD the content vendors seem to be in a race to build the deepest, most tangled, most annoying menu tree imaginable. I'd pay $10 extra for a DVD player that can be set to just go directly to the movie (after the FBI boilerplate) without *any* interaction. I should never see a menu until I press "menu".
(But then, I also scour the stores for "unspecial editions" that aren't brimful of silly games, studio floor sweepings, and other not-the-movie stuff, so what do I know?)
"Here's the scenario: 1. RIAA goon searches for title of copyrighted work. 2. File sharers, including one in Australia, happily and consentually transmit search results. 3. RIAA goon reads search results. 4. RIAA goon requests download of file from the Australian. 5. Australian happily and consentually sends it. 6. RIAA goon listens to it; determines it is the copyrighted work. 7. RIAA goon DoSes the Australian file-sharer. -- Where in there did the RIAA goon "gain access to, or enter, a computer system"?
Why, steps 1, 4, and 7, of course. Although only step 7 is unauthorized by the server's owner.
"Another poster in this forum suggested that Canadian extra-territoriality law has some relevance (as a Canadian, I'm inclined to agree) -- to wit, our laws to do with your Cuba embargo (Helms-Burton being the most recent example) specifically hold the American act and its provisions to be invalid in Canada."
Okay, I need a clue -- are you saying that Canadians can be arrested for *not* doing business with Cuba?
I'd much rather have entertainment gear that *works like* my PC. That is, I can reprogram it to suit my needs; various data sources are multiplexed onto a data bus and can be routed concurrently to various sinks; I can plug a card into the bus and add new ports or other capabilities; I can just copy losslessly from old to new media as storage technology changes.
Think about *that*, media moguls!
Prof. Bullfinch had This years ago. Read all about it in _Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint_.
(Although now I think about it, he must've cribbed it from Cavor. (_First Men in the Moon_))
Wowee, state-of-the-art 14-bit security!
Put this story on the pile of reasons why we need a real, pervasive PKI.