This whole patenting of doing $BLATANTLY_OBVIOUS_THING on a computer is starting to remind me of a comedian I used to enjoy. His name escapes me, but he's a cheesy ventriliquist whose crude (but cute) dummies included the Cockroach On A Stick, the Chili Pepper On A Stick, and so forth. And "on a stick" was pronounced in a sort of Cheech Marin sort of way: 'on a steeeeeck'.
I wonder if maybe the guys over at uspto.gov are just paying homage to that guy's work?
The information already exists. Better it should be secure in a system the people can understand. Maybe it can lead to open and *fair* credit checks, and whatnot.
Hey man, wasn't trying to imply that your sarcasm was barely audible, just that I feel strongly on the subject. (I'm one of those idealistic slashdot users who lies awake at night wondering if I should metamod as unfair someone who modded a joke as insightful.)
I still think the Great Karma Experiment could eventually be successful (currently I think it's mixed at best) but more work needs to be done. So while I've got your (relatively) undivided attention, please consider changing the max Karma from 5 to 10. It would give us the fine-grained control we need to fully utilize the modifier system. Also, the Read More link from the front page should be something like:
That would let us view comments at the level appropriate to the activity that story has seen, without wasting a page view at our default threshold to grab the menu and hit 'change', and would also give insight into the 'quality distribution' on a story (which, of course, would be of rather dubioius value).
I'll second the nomination on that one. Give either subscribers or highly regarded moderators* a crude moderation system for stories themselves, then lower the submission acceptance threshold. Net result should, in a perfect world (yes, I'm new here), result in a much higher quality of articles.
Or more strongly enforce the groupthink, but who can say?
* I think it should be either group, but not both.
Any mingling of Karma's benefits with money you've
paid would effectively end the Karma experiment.
That would be selling Karma, and while slashdot's karma system may not be living up to it's fullest potential (understatement, anyone?) directly selling the visibility that Karma provides would be an instant abortion of the system.
At least in my case. The ixMicro TwinTurbo128 that was in my Umax S-900 would hiss white noise (well, more towards gray, actually) when dragging large windows, but there were also other more subtle things. I hadn't actually realized that I no longer heard it till I saw this 'story.' I gave that computer to a friend who happens to run a home recording studio so I'll have to ask him if he's experiencing that.
I'd also noticed sometimes that having a menu held down would do something similar, but I think only when running Mac OS 9. OS X is a totally different beast, acoustically speaking. Any Mac user can tell you that a fast SCSI hard drive sounds *noticeably* different when booting the two (I have a sounds-like-jiffy-pop-under-a-pillow model, but when booting X it sounds more like a stun gun with a subwoofer), so maybe the video noise is really a feature of some twisted sort?
On a mostly unrelated note, I leave my cell phone sitting under the front of my CRT so I can see the image shake when it phones home once an hour, and answer it before it rings. (Hmm, either Slashdot is suddenly epileptic, or my phone's about to ring...)
The recording industry decided that since people collectively will only be buying 300 million CDs per year, then if they only run 30 marketing campaigns to push 30 artists, they would still sell 300 million CDs - but spend a heck of a lot less than they would pushing say 3000 artists.
Dude! You nailed it!
I thought I completely understood this thing, but thinking about it from that angle gave me the one piece I couldn't quite figure out, which was their ultimate motivation for keeping the top selling part of the market so small, rather than doubling the sales at 60% the cost, which would be what, a 20% total gain? I guess the fixed costs have finally gotten beyond some certain strange attractor kinda point that it actually becomes more profitable to strangle your own market.
Wow. Ain't math cool?
Oh, wait, you mean this is for real, and not just some bizarre postulate that only happens on paper? Damn.
Those thieving bastards used the same ugly widgets that Windows uses.
Microsoft copied from NeXT like fifteen years ago, and these guys just come along and use 'em. How can that be legal to take Microsoft's innovations like that?!?!?
I had a girlfriend who was acutely sensitive to MSG; she got an instant headache over her left eye after just one or two bites of something. (My grandomother is the same way, and they both suffer from the thyroid condition known as Graves Disease. Coincidence?)
It made me very aware of what did and didn't contain MSG. Over the years we watched various products stop using it, much to her delight. In recent years however (we broke up in '99), it seems to be making a comeback. Anybody know why this is, other than the obvious?
I can't detect it in foods myself, but since it's classified as an excitatory neurotoxin I try to avoid it anyway.
This story supposes that Microsoft should somehow be a paragon of network infrastructure.
Umm, yes, they should be. Considering what they've got the world convinced they're good at, I really do think it's fair to hold them to a very high standard as regards the function of their *office* network. Most businesses believe that Microsoft's products are *the* way to communicate, and Microsoft makes billions (daily) off of that perception. So if they can't keep their Windows-based LAN running as advertised, then yes, I think the public bloody well ought to know about it.
A lot of you out there like to use BillG@fuckmicrosoft.com when giving an email address to people like Real, or especially Microsoft. I'd like for you to stop. Please. That *is* a real address.
Bullshit. At least as regards the widgets. I've got Jaguar skinned like Platinum: boxy and with no menu alpha.
Even Java based apps such as LimeWire and FurthurNet use the skinned widgets, although I think I noticed FurthurNet using alpha blending with my platinum menus. I have yet to see any app show me canned Aqua graphics, unless you count the window widgets in QuickTime Player.
The text entry part I can't say for sure either way, but I don't 'feel' a difference. I've been noticing lately how universal option-arrow key support in text editing has become, and I guess Chimera mimics that perfectly as well.
Seriously, that's what I've always wondered; why is political bribery at the federal level so incredibly cheap? The fact that a mega corporation can get laws strongly beneficial to it's bottom line for a fraction of their worth boggles my mind.
If you ran a company grossing $500 million annually, and you were buying legislation that would help you clear an extra $50 million on top of that, how much would you be willing to spend? Me, I'd figure twenty percent of the expected benefit to be a great deal. Let's assume the new law is only of maximum benefit for five years' time; that's $250 million of direct benefit, so $50 million seems more than fair. Yet what do our politicians charge for such influence? The barest fraction of that! A quarter million when they could be getting fifty or a hundred times that much, easily. It's an outrage, I tell you, the way these companies are ripping off our congressional representatives!
Oh, uh, wait, that's not quite how I meant it, but hopefully you get the picture.
Why, if I turn off Javascript in IE, must I always and forever receive a popup warning me the website may not work as designed with my current security settings.
Simple. You're being 'punished' for making the 'wrong' choice.
Same reason if I set cookies to prompt, in clear and direct violation of Microsoft's best interests, I will be spammed with dialogs to click through for every single freaking cookie. Perpetually. With no chance for a "remember this decision" or "decline all cookies from this site" button. Ever.
I'm sure the only reason they don't yet pretend to block popups with IE is that even their sheeple would realize that warning users "the popup could have contained valuable information and that the web site may not offer the full experience it's designers intended without you acknowledging this window's presence" dialog box every fourteen seconds wouldn't be too much of an improvement.
Chimera is a fast lightweight (unlike Mozilla) browser using Gecko layout engine and Cocoa user interface. Links on the otherhand is an excellent text browser. Sadly neither one was in the review.
Uhh, yeah it was. That's what Navigator 0.5 is, Chimera.
But other than that, you're right about it. It's lightweight, and *fast* as hell. It also now renders pages almost as beautifully as OmniWeb, but I'll admit I haven't tried that lately. Speaking of which, didn't the article say Omni is free? Wasn't last I knew.
Oh well, it's MacWorld. They served us well in their day, now, well... What are ya gonna do?
The coolest thing is you can selectively allow pop-ups based on whether they are requested (followed link) or not. I cannot remember if Chimera does this but I think it does.
Yep.
Once Chimera implements 90% of Mozilla I'm changed for good.
They have. Gecko's in there in it's entirety, and that's the whole web browsing portion of Mozilla. (Except the resource hogging XUL environment; sorry, but it's true.)
It's the preference interface that isn't full featured yet. In other words, it will honor every pref set by Mozilla, even the ones it doesn't present to the user. So either set them from Mozilla, or edit the file 'prefs.js' by hand.
So what to make of all those 'soft rock' type radio stations (you know what I mean, every town's got one) that try so hard to position themselves as *the* radio station to listen to at work?
Are they just ignorant of copyright laws, or is this an example of the RIAA/ASSCAP/etc. dabbling in entrappment?
Yes, I know it's a ridiculous question, and may be considered a troll in some states [of mind], but I'm serious. I really do see a big conflict there.
Seems the researchers are collecting entire heads of deer, and not just brainstems.
Hopefully we won't have a lot of deer hunters erroneously informed by slashdot's misleading summary; asking the public to harvest the brain stems of these animals wouldn't be terribly wise.
Fortunately, this being slashdot, basic demographics ensure that won't be much of a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
This whole patenting of doing $BLATANTLY_OBVIOUS_THING on a computer is starting to remind me of a comedian I used to enjoy. His name escapes me, but he's a cheesy ventriliquist whose crude (but cute) dummies included the Cockroach On A Stick, the Chili Pepper On A Stick, and so forth. And "on a stick" was pronounced in a sort of Cheech Marin sort of way: 'on a steeeeeck'.
I wonder if maybe the guys over at uspto.gov are just paying homage to that guy's work?
Plays perfectly on a 533 G4, and at the moment I'm only running a 16mb ATI Rage.
At least he's got a sense of humor about it. Now let's see if that helps any. Doubtful.
You're new here, aren't you?
[sorry, just could not resist]
I still think the Great Karma Experiment could eventually be successful (currently I think it's mixed at best) but more work needs to be done. So while I've got your (relatively) undivided attention, please consider changing the max Karma from 5 to 10. It would give us the fine-grained control we need to fully utilize the modifier system. Also, the Read More link from the front page should be something like:That would let us view comments at the level appropriate to the activity that story has seen, without wasting a page view at our default threshold to grab the menu and hit 'change', and would also give insight into the 'quality distribution' on a story (which, of course, would be of rather dubioius value).
Please, please don't. I strongly feel that Karma and cash need to be kept separate a la church-and-state.
Or more strongly enforce the groupthink, but who can say?
NO!!!
That would be selling Karma, and while slashdot's karma system may not be living up to it's fullest potential (understatement, anyone?) directly selling the visibility that Karma provides would be an instant abortion of the system.
Shit, I'd rather have him sit his ass down and fix our Exchange Server!
"...and, uh, if there's still some time left, could ya finish implementing scroll wheel support in Access? Umm, yeah, that'd be great."
At least in my case. The ixMicro TwinTurbo128 that was in my Umax S-900 would hiss white noise (well, more towards gray, actually) when dragging large windows, but there were also other more subtle things. I hadn't actually realized that I no longer heard it till I saw this 'story.' I gave that computer to a friend who happens to run a home recording studio so I'll have to ask him if he's experiencing that.
I'd also noticed sometimes that having a menu held down would do something similar, but I think only when running Mac OS 9. OS X is a totally different beast, acoustically speaking. Any Mac user can tell you that a fast SCSI hard drive sounds *noticeably* different when booting the two (I have a sounds-like-jiffy-pop-under-a-pillow model, but when booting X it sounds more like a stun gun with a subwoofer), so maybe the video noise is really a feature of some twisted sort?
On a mostly unrelated note, I leave my cell phone sitting under the front of my CRT so I can see the image shake when it phones home once an hour, and answer it before it rings. (Hmm, either Slashdot is suddenly epileptic, or my phone's about to ring...)
Dude! You nailed it!
I thought I completely understood this thing, but thinking about it from that angle gave me the one piece I couldn't quite figure out, which was their ultimate motivation for keeping the top selling part of the market so small, rather than doubling the sales at 60% the cost, which would be what, a 20% total gain? I guess the fixed costs have finally gotten beyond some certain strange attractor kinda point that it actually becomes more profitable to strangle your own market.
Wow. Ain't math cool?
Oh, wait, you mean this is for real, and not just some bizarre postulate that only happens on paper? Damn.
Those thieving bastards used the same ugly widgets that Windows uses.
Microsoft copied from NeXT like fifteen years ago, and these guys just come along and use 'em. How can that be legal to take Microsoft's innovations like that?!?!?
I had a girlfriend who was acutely sensitive to MSG; she got an instant headache over her left eye after just one or two bites of something. (My grandomother is the same way, and they both suffer from the thyroid condition known as Graves Disease. Coincidence?)
It made me very aware of what did and didn't contain MSG. Over the years we watched various products stop using it, much to her delight. In recent years however (we broke up in '99), it seems to be making a comeback. Anybody know why this is, other than the obvious?
I can't detect it in foods myself, but since it's classified as an excitatory neurotoxin I try to avoid it anyway.
Umm, yes, they should be. Considering what they've got the world convinced they're good at, I really do think it's fair to hold them to a very high standard as regards the function of their *office* network. Most businesses believe that Microsoft's products are *the* way to communicate, and Microsoft makes billions (daily) off of that perception. So if they can't keep their Windows-based LAN running as advertised, then yes, I think the public bloody well ought to know about it.
GPL licensing is anathema to them, but they seem to enjoy using BSD licensing....
But only in the one direction, no? Do they ever license their own work as BSD?
A lot of you out there like to use BillG@fuckmicrosoft.com when giving an email address to people like Real, or especially Microsoft. I'd like for you to stop. Please. That *is* a real address.
Thank you.
Bullshit. At least as regards the widgets. I've got Jaguar skinned like Platinum: boxy and with no menu alpha.
Even Java based apps such as LimeWire and FurthurNet use the skinned widgets, although I think I noticed FurthurNet using alpha blending with my platinum menus. I have yet to see any app show me canned Aqua graphics, unless you count the window widgets in QuickTime Player.
The text entry part I can't say for sure either way, but I don't 'feel' a difference. I've been noticing lately how universal option-arrow key support in text editing has become, and I guess Chimera mimics that perfectly as well.
Seriously, that's what I've always wondered; why is political bribery at the federal level so incredibly cheap? The fact that a mega corporation can get laws strongly beneficial to it's bottom line for a fraction of their worth boggles my mind.
If you ran a company grossing $500 million annually, and you were buying legislation that would help you clear an extra $50 million on top of that, how much would you be willing to spend? Me, I'd figure twenty percent of the expected benefit to be a great deal. Let's assume the new law is only of maximum benefit for five years' time; that's $250 million of direct benefit, so $50 million seems more than fair. Yet what do our politicians charge for such influence? The barest fraction of that! A quarter million when they could be getting fifty or a hundred times that much, easily. It's an outrage, I tell you, the way these companies are ripping off our congressional representatives!
Oh, uh, wait, that's not quite how I meant it, but hopefully you get the picture.
Relax, he was joking.
(Oh, please god, let him have been joking.)
Same reason if I set cookies to prompt, in clear and direct violation of Microsoft's best interests, I will be spammed with dialogs to click through for every single freaking cookie. Perpetually. With no chance for a "remember this decision" or "decline all cookies from this site" button. Ever.
I'm sure the only reason they don't yet pretend to block popups with IE is that even their sheeple would realize that warning users "the popup could have contained valuable information and that the web site may not offer the full experience it's designers intended without you acknowledging this window's presence" dialog box every fourteen seconds wouldn't be too much of an improvement.
But other than that, you're right about it. It's lightweight, and *fast* as hell. It also now renders pages almost as beautifully as OmniWeb, but I'll admit I haven't tried that lately. Speaking of which, didn't the article say Omni is free? Wasn't last I knew.
Oh well, it's MacWorld. They served us well in their day, now, well... What are ya gonna do?
They have. Gecko's in there in it's entirety, and that's the whole web browsing portion of Mozilla. (Except the resource hogging XUL environment; sorry, but it's true.)
It's the preference interface that isn't full featured yet. In other words, it will honor every pref set by Mozilla, even the ones it doesn't present to the user. So either set them from Mozilla, or edit the file 'prefs.js' by hand.
Okay, I'm confused now. Which types of payments are we talking about here, royalty payments to the rights holders or reparations to the victims?
So what to make of all those 'soft rock' type radio stations (you know what I mean, every town's got one) that try so hard to position themselves as *the* radio station to listen to at work?
Are they just ignorant of copyright laws, or is this an example of the RIAA/ASSCAP/etc. dabbling in entrappment?
Yes, I know it's a ridiculous question, and may be considered a troll in some states [of mind], but I'm serious. I really do see a big conflict there.
Seems the researchers are collecting entire heads of deer, and not just brainstems.
Hopefully we won't have a lot of deer hunters erroneously informed by slashdot's misleading summary; asking the public to harvest the brain stems of these animals wouldn't be terribly wise.
Fortunately, this being slashdot, basic demographics ensure that won't be much of a problem.