I myself was wondering if that statistic was per tire or per car, i.e. four tires. If it's per set of four, that would put 70,000 miles of wear at about seven pounds, which I could believe, if forced to.
Interesting. This means that in addition to balding tires give you a bit more dry traction, they now give you slightly better mileage through reduced weight. Science is just racking up reasons for me to put off a new tire purchase.
Just saw that comment while doing metamoderation, and had to acknowledge it as being the best explanation of mental addiction I've ever heard, and a hell of a laugh to boot. Thanks.
Seems like this could be gotten around by doing the HTTP request for the page in question, and then requesting all linked graphics from the server. But rather than parsing/rendering any of that unwanted content, just download it to/dev/null or equivalent. Sure, that'll leave the bandwidth issue unresolved, but it solves every other issue from the user's point of view. And this feature could be toggled as needed on a site by site basis, kinda like the ironic inverse of "Block images from this server."
Site admins using malware like this will be able to see how many users get turned away by these tactics. There is undoubedtly some threshold, be it 10, 100 or 1,000 users per day, at which they'll rethink things and decide that maybe turning users away isn't the way to maximize ad revenue. It is our moral obligation to help them achieve that threshold.
You're all acting as if the ideal interface is designed for a single, highly idealized user (probably that guy with the 2.5 kids, damn shame about that.)
All those "contradictory" and "confusing" interface elements coexist so that the user may use any combination of them to get their work done. Who here is using their computer in it's exact default state? How many here exclusively use or don't use the Open/Save file picker? I know many slashdotters run pretty much exclusively from the command prompt, but I suspect most of you occassionally drag something via the GUI. Nice to have that option, huh? All about choice, best tool for the job, etc.
Go ahead, design next year's kewl new GUI based solely on the needs of a newbie, conveniently overlooking the fact that it will effectively lock out us old-timers who like to micro-manage (is that a pun in this context?) which apps we have running, where and when we're saving our files, etc.
Face it, no GUI is perfect. They're all crude, 2D digital representations of a 3D analog environment, trying to present concrete objects and abstract ideas in the same context. No matter what you do, there will still be some learning and adaptation of your mental paradigms, and that will vary for each user. At some point you gotta just accept that and move on.
Geez, if you're gonna be anonymous, try a little harder, Mr. lee.bolding@unixconsulting.co.uk (the email link connected to the AC).
What's truly funny is that their homepage is the default pre-configuration page for a Cobalt RaQ server. Doesn't really seem to fit with that domain name, does it? I mean, c'mon, at least slap something together with FrontPage before you start spreading the url around on slashdot.
You used to be able to download pre-alpha copies of Copland from Hotline back in 1997.
Although I've never even been in the same room as Copland, I've got a developer copy of Mac OS 8.7, which I believe to be Rhapsody just before it was merged with NeXT. I tried installing it on my Umax S-900 (currently running 10.1.5), and spent the following week getting my onboard SCSI busses functional again. Haven't tried since.
If anybody can tell me what machine will successfully boot that, I'd love to see it in action.
Yet as much as I tried, I just couldn't see it as stealing when I started downloadng albums I'd never purchased. Why not? Because, having gone about seven years without purchasing any new music, I knew with certainty that my downloading something wasn't going to result in any lost revenues.
What leads you to believe this? What about production, distribution, and promotion?
Those costs are the same whether I buy the album or not. If I'm not gonna buy the album, they don't incur any higher costs.
And as the shady contractual doings of the record companies became common knowledge, I had to admit that I felt absolutely no moral conflict in grabbing whatever music I felt like, knowing that I was expected to pay ~$15 to the record company and less than $1 to the artist (and about as much to the retailer).
And this is going to accomplish....?
Nothing at all, unfortunately. Other than saving me almost $20 that can go towards living expenses. Frankly, I feel that's a better use of my money than handing it to a bunch of millionaires for the privelege of hearing a thirty year old Beatles song.
An equally important question: Why aren't bands making their music available so that they can accommodate this?
Good question. I imagine it has something to do with the RIAA and pals asserting total control over every possible means of widespread distribution under the guise of curbing "piracy." That, and the assumption on the part of the bands that if all those other guys became instant millionaires from playing rock and roll, why shouldn't they too? But I couldn't tell ya for sure.
I have managed to convince one musician, a close friend of mine, to relase some of his music that way. He's got studio time scheduled and tells me that once he's got new stuff recorded, he'll attempt to do that.
Are you saying that you've paid for everything of Zappa's that you now have?
Nope. I think I've legitimately purchased only four or five Zappa CDs over the years, and have approximately five times that much of his music in my MP3 collection. But I'm confident that if he were here to comment, he'd be okay with it. In all seriousness, anybody know of anything he's said or written that would indicate otherwise?
Okay, sure, I'll take a crack at it. First off, I think we can pretty much dismiss the legal arguments. I think most adults here would agree that less than 5% of all MP3 trading on the P2P networks falls under the protection of Fair Use. So that leaves the moral, ethical and psychological arguments, which in my mind all kinda blur together.
When I first dove into the Napster scene (the same day I got a cable modem and registered this slashdot account) Most of what I downloaded was music I had purchased over the years but no longer physically had, due to the shrinkage of a CD collection over time that we're all too familiar with. My justification was that if the record companies wanted to view their product as IP, then the physical medium was irrelevant, and having "licensed" vast amounts of music over the years, I was still entitled to those albums, both ethically and legally.
Now mind you, I don't steal. Anything. Ever. Not even candy as a little kid. I've handed back excess change to cashiers, coerced friends into returning things they'd shoplifted, etc. Yet as much as I tried, I just couldn't see it as stealing when I started downloadng albums I'd never purchased. Why not? Because, having gone about seven years without purchasing any new music, I knew with certainty that my downloading something wasn't going to result in any lost revenues. And as the shady contractual doings of the record companies became common knowledge, I had to admit that I felt absolutely no moral conflict in grabbing whatever music I felt like, knowing that I was expected to pay ~$15 to the record company and less than $1 to the artist (and about as much to the retailer). So does that make me a hypocrite? I'm sure some would say yes, but I truly don't think so. I don't listen to new music, so everything I download has either succeeded of flopped, and isn't gonna get any of my money whether I listen to it or not. So what exactly is the reason for me not to hear it?
Personally, I'd rather download only music for which I could pay a *reasonable* amount directly to the band, or free-as-in-beer music. But where do I find it? I don't donwload much anymore because I've already got all the music I've ever liked, and am burned out on most of it. My biggest problem is finding new music that fits my taste, but I didn't make use of AudioGalaxy while it was still around. There's got to be hundreds of bands playing music that I like, but unless they sign with the old boy network, individuals like me have almost no chance of fiding them. I'd gladly pay for some means of getting around that paradox.
Okay, so this isn't nearly as coherent, concise or persuasive as I'd hoped, and is undoubtedly redundant, but dammit, it's how I feel. I believe that if Zappa were still around, he'd be fine with my having almost his entire collected works even though I've only spent about $75 retail on his stuff over the years.
Seems people are overlooking a basic question here... if the content of something offends you, why do you want to view it?
Is there some unalienable right to watch the same movie as everybody else that is being violated by having nudity/profanity/evolution/whatever shoved down your throat by those oppressive writers/directors/actors/whatevers?
If you want a movie/book/song/whatever that meets certain criteria, shouldn't you produce/write/sing one of your own? And frankly, if a content creator is creating content to which you object, why would you want to give them your money? That is, after all, how we as a society assign moderator points to creative works.
Of course, we live in a culture that thinks adults viewing sex is harmful, yet sees no problem with children witnessing gunshots to the head. So maybe slashdot's moderation system isn't the only one that's broken.
My personal favorite are GE brand grow lights, available retail at Wal Mart. They used to be marketed under the name Grow-n-Show, but I think it's something different now. Look for a bluish frosted tint on the bulb. I've never tried the flourescent tube variety, but the incandescent standard and floodlight style bulbs kick ass! You can just about watch the plants grow under these things.
I also prefer them to "regular" light bulbs for people lighting. The light is a bit closer to actual sunlight [insert slashdot reader skin tone comment] and is much easier on the eyes.
Philips has their own offering, but personally I find them inferior, more like standard light bulbs with a cheap blue tint.
One of these and a fast-growing vining plant, like Moonflowers (also available at Wally World, any idiot can make them thrive with enough light and water), and you'll be bathed in hand made oxygen within a matter of weeks.
Lucky you. My PowerTower Pro (with G3 400) puked after I installed Jaguar on it (using XPostFacto). Puked as in all over the screen, followed by a kernel panic, when it restarted. Fortunately I made a point of not installing it over the working copy of 10.1.5.
Guess I was unclear. I still haven't done 10.2 yet, as I've outgrown my warez dayz and don't have the cash right now. I was also waiting for others braver than I to figure out the perfect unsupported install.
It seems Ryan Rempel has been cranking out builds faster than Apple was, but I've already seen success stories on most "normal" unsupported machines. (But only with a G3 or G4, not with their original 603 or 604 chips.)
There was something about the PTP recently. I don't remember quite what it was, but the user did eventually get around it. I think it may have had something to do with the NVRAM, but I'm probably wrong.
Remember folks, it *does* run on older hardware, and very nicely I might add. I'm on a Umax S-900, a machine that first hit the market six years ago this month. I've got a bunch RAM in it, a big, fast SCSI drive, a dual head Radeon, and a 400mhz G3. Counting the initial purchase price of the machine, I'm still under $500 total.
And flame away, but this thing's as smooth and responsive (in most ways, but not all) as Win98SE on my P3/733 at work.
Everybody's commenting about how all the parts of this story don't add up, that these megacorps wouldn't make such obvious blunders, or handle them so crudely. Hmm. While the old "follow the money" trick may not directly apply in this case, it's close enough.
What is the upshot of this incident, once you filter out all the distractions?
1) Hacker bypasses DRM-type security 2) Company "forced" to retool/change security 3) Direct, demonstrable monetary losses
They need to set precedents that exposing obvious security gaffes (unencrypted signal on the bus in this case) leads directly to major financial losses. Makes future prosecutions much easier.
This brings to mind the famous PDP-8 date problem. Under OS-8, the year was encoded as 3 bits (!!), which promptly ran out in 75 or 76, at which point the powers that were managed to scrape another bit. Anybody out there still running OS-8? What did you do when the year turned to sh*t again? (Buy an 8080 based machine for improved performance and memory capability?)
Kinda puts all our platform bashing in perspective, huh?
To the naysayers: I didn't mean fully immersive 3D like SysQuake; I meant only as 3D as it needs to be. One example is the Dock's auto-magnify feature. The concept is that everything's there; whatever has focus will just be more there.
Same with the drop shadowing on all windows: they only use two levels, foreground and background, but the foreground item (never more than one) has twice as much shadow as everything else. Everything not at the front layer has less shadow, making it further away from the user, and some transparency to it's title bar, implying, to me anyway, distance blurring.
I've been wondering what ancestral role (if any) the multi-column view will have in any forthcoming 2.5D/3D GUI. Any ideas, or is it just a cool NeXT holdover wiht no future in the 21st century?
There's a full 3D file browser called 3DOSX that give at least some idea of what's possible. If nothing else, it'll make you realize that cubes and large, flat surfaces (with their need for more axes of control) aren't the only concievable 3D workspace.
I've been saying for a while (ever since I first switched to OS X back in the 10.0.3 days) that the whole Aqua thing was mostly a placeholder. Every major shortcoming and non-sensical policy could be explained that way.
Why try to prevent theming? Because what was coming would utterly break any theming software imaginable.
Why the clunky Finder and Dock? Because they were mere halfway points in the journey, to get people used to a crude version of the real thing so that it wouldn't feel quite so alien when it finally arrives.
What journey? To a fully native OpenGL-based 3D windowing environment. Even this, Quartz Extreme, is just a small step along the way, but it's at this point that it starts becoming obvious. The magnification effect of the Dock isn't just cool eye candy, it's a 2D approximation of their long-term ideas.
Mark my words: This clunky 2D Aqua we've got now will be long gone in two years or less. In hindsight it will be obvious that it was just transitional. See how many bad design decisions you can explain away this way?
One platform that really, really, really needs a tool like this: Mac OS X.
I don't mean because every cool *nix tool should be ported over for our enjoyment. I mean because, not to generalize, but generally speaking Mac users tend to be a very cocky bunch as regards security. We're used to having literally unhackable machines, and now with the move to a BSD base, all we're told is how much more secure that is than anything else on the planet, so there's probably quite a few Mac users out there who assume their cumulative hackability score is now a negative number.
Couple that with the fact that it's quickly becoming the most common form of *nix (by sheer quantity) and you've got a whole lot of potentially insecure BSD setups operating under a false sense of security, which could bring as much evil to this world as raw sockets.
Feel free to look down on me for being some lowly point-and-drool GUI junky, but if OS X boxes start getting cracked in large numbers, then the mainstream hears that *nix isn't much more secure than the other type of operating system, and that only helps the bad guys.
Slashdot Mirror
I myself was wondering if that statistic was per tire or per car, i.e. four tires. If it's per set of four, that would put 70,000 miles of wear at about seven pounds, which I could believe, if forced to.
Interesting. This means that in addition to balding tires give you a bit more dry traction, they now give you slightly better mileage through reduced weight. Science is just racking up reasons for me to put off a new tire purchase.
Just saw that comment while doing metamoderation, and had to acknowledge it as being the best explanation of mental addiction I've ever heard, and a hell of a laugh to boot. Thanks.
So IE usage is now down below 85%? Wow. That nap must have been longer than I thought.
Seems like this could be gotten around by doing the HTTP request for the page in question, and then requesting all linked graphics from the server. But rather than parsing/rendering any of that unwanted content, just download it to /dev/null or equivalent. Sure, that'll leave the bandwidth issue unresolved, but it solves every other issue from the user's point of view. And this feature could be toggled as needed on a site by site basis, kinda like the ironic inverse of "Block images from this server."
Site admins using malware like this will be able to see how many users get turned away by these tactics. There is undoubedtly some threshold, be it 10, 100 or 1,000 users per day, at which they'll rethink things and decide that maybe turning users away isn't the way to maximize ad revenue. It is our moral obligation to help them achieve that threshold.
People!
You're all acting as if the ideal interface is designed for a single, highly idealized user (probably that guy with the 2.5 kids, damn shame about that.)
All those "contradictory" and "confusing" interface elements coexist so that the user may use any combination of them to get their work done. Who here is using their computer in it's exact default state? How many here exclusively use or don't use the Open/Save file picker? I know many slashdotters run pretty much exclusively from the command prompt, but I suspect most of you occassionally drag something via the GUI. Nice to have that option, huh? All about choice, best tool for the job, etc.
Go ahead, design next year's kewl new GUI based solely on the needs of a newbie, conveniently overlooking the fact that it will effectively lock out us old-timers who like to micro-manage (is that a pun in this context?) which apps we have running, where and when we're saving our files, etc.
Face it, no GUI is perfect. They're all crude, 2D digital representations of a 3D analog environment, trying to present concrete objects and abstract ideas in the same context. No matter what you do, there will still be some learning and adaptation of your mental paradigms, and that will vary for each user. At some point you gotta just accept that and move on.
You're new here, aren't you?
What's truly funny is that their homepage is the default pre-configuration page for a Cobalt RaQ server. Doesn't really seem to fit with that domain name, does it? I mean, c'mon, at least slap something together with FrontPage before you start spreading the url around on slashdot.
Although I've never even been in the same room as Copland, I've got a developer copy of Mac OS 8.7, which I believe to be Rhapsody just before it was merged with NeXT. I tried installing it on my Umax S-900 (currently running 10.1.5), and spent the following week getting my onboard SCSI busses functional again. Haven't tried since.
If anybody can tell me what machine will successfully boot that, I'd love to see it in action.
Now that's brutal honesty. I like those guys. Although the folks in marketing may feel a bit differently.
Those costs are the same whether I buy the album or not. If I'm not gonna buy the album, they don't incur any higher costs.
And this is going to accomplish....?
Nothing at all, unfortunately. Other than saving me almost $20 that can go towards living expenses. Frankly, I feel that's a better use of my money than handing it to a bunch of millionaires for the privelege of hearing a thirty year old Beatles song.
An equally important question: Why aren't bands making their music available so that they can accommodate this?
Good question. I imagine it has something to do with the RIAA and pals asserting total control over every possible means of widespread distribution under the guise of curbing "piracy." That, and the assumption on the part of the bands that if all those other guys became instant millionaires from playing rock and roll, why shouldn't they too? But I couldn't tell ya for sure.
I have managed to convince one musician, a close friend of mine, to relase some of his music that way. He's got studio time scheduled and tells me that once he's got new stuff recorded, he'll attempt to do that.
Are you saying that you've paid for everything of Zappa's that you now have?
Nope. I think I've legitimately purchased only four or five Zappa CDs over the years, and have approximately five times that much of his music in my MP3 collection. But I'm confident that if he were here to comment, he'd be okay with it. In all seriousness, anybody know of anything he's said or written that would indicate otherwise?
Okay, sure, I'll take a crack at it. First off, I think we can pretty much dismiss the legal arguments. I think most adults here would agree that less than 5% of all MP3 trading on the P2P networks falls under the protection of Fair Use. So that leaves the moral, ethical and psychological arguments, which in my mind all kinda blur together.
When I first dove into the Napster scene (the same day I got a cable modem and registered this slashdot account) Most of what I downloaded was music I had purchased over the years but no longer physically had, due to the shrinkage of a CD collection over time that we're all too familiar with. My justification was that if the record companies wanted to view their product as IP, then the physical medium was irrelevant, and having "licensed" vast amounts of music over the years, I was still entitled to those albums, both ethically and legally.
Now mind you, I don't steal. Anything. Ever. Not even candy as a little kid. I've handed back excess change to cashiers, coerced friends into returning things they'd shoplifted, etc. Yet as much as I tried, I just couldn't see it as stealing when I started downloadng albums I'd never purchased. Why not? Because, having gone about seven years without purchasing any new music, I knew with certainty that my downloading something wasn't going to result in any lost revenues. And as the shady contractual doings of the record companies became common knowledge, I had to admit that I felt absolutely no moral conflict in grabbing whatever music I felt like, knowing that I was expected to pay ~$15 to the record company and less than $1 to the artist (and about as much to the retailer). So does that make me a hypocrite? I'm sure some would say yes, but I truly don't think so. I don't listen to new music, so everything I download has either succeeded of flopped, and isn't gonna get any of my money whether I listen to it or not. So what exactly is the reason for me not to hear it?
Personally, I'd rather download only music for which I could pay a *reasonable* amount directly to the band, or free-as-in-beer music. But where do I find it? I don't donwload much anymore because I've already got all the music I've ever liked, and am burned out on most of it. My biggest problem is finding new music that fits my taste, but I didn't make use of AudioGalaxy while it was still around. There's got to be hundreds of bands playing music that I like, but unless they sign with the old boy network, individuals like me have almost no chance of fiding them. I'd gladly pay for some means of getting around that paradox.
Okay, so this isn't nearly as coherent, concise or persuasive as I'd hoped, and is undoubtedly redundant, but dammit, it's how I feel. I believe that if Zappa were still around, he'd be fine with my having almost his entire collected works even though I've only spent about $75 retail on his stuff over the years.
Seems people are overlooking a basic question here... if the content of something offends you, why do you want to view it?
Is there some unalienable right to watch the same movie as everybody else that is being violated by having nudity/profanity/evolution/whatever shoved down your throat by those oppressive writers/directors/actors/whatevers?
If you want a movie/book/song/whatever that meets certain criteria, shouldn't you produce/write/sing one of your own? And frankly, if a content creator is creating content to which you object, why would you want to give them your money? That is, after all, how we as a society assign moderator points to creative works.
Of course, we live in a culture that thinks adults viewing sex is harmful, yet sees no problem with children witnessing gunshots to the head. So maybe slashdot's moderation system isn't the only one that's broken.
My personal favorite are GE brand grow lights, available retail at Wal Mart. They used to be marketed under the name Grow-n-Show, but I think it's something different now. Look for a bluish frosted tint on the bulb. I've never tried the flourescent tube variety, but the incandescent standard and floodlight style bulbs kick ass! You can just about watch the plants grow under these things.
I also prefer them to "regular" light bulbs for people lighting. The light is a bit closer to actual sunlight [insert slashdot reader skin tone comment] and is much easier on the eyes.
Philips has their own offering, but personally I find them inferior, more like standard light bulbs with a cheap blue tint.
One of these and a fast-growing vining plant, like Moonflowers (also available at Wally World, any idiot can make them thrive with enough light and water), and you'll be bathed in hand made oxygen within a matter of weeks.
Guess I was unclear. I still haven't done 10.2 yet, as I've outgrown my warez dayz and don't have the cash right now. I was also waiting for others braver than I to figure out the perfect unsupported install.
It seems Ryan Rempel has been cranking out builds faster than Apple was, but I've already seen success stories on most "normal" unsupported machines. (But only with a G3 or G4, not with their original 603 or 604 chips.)
There was something about the PTP recently. I don't remember quite what it was, but the user did eventually get around it. I think it may have had something to do with the NVRAM, but I'm probably wrong.
> I have Windows XP running great on
> a 166 Mhz Pentium with 64 MB memory.
Shouldn't that be spelled 'grate'?
Remember folks, it *does* run on older hardware, and very nicely I might add. I'm on a Umax S-900, a machine that first hit the market six years ago this month. I've got a bunch RAM in it, a big, fast SCSI drive, a dual head Radeon, and a 400mhz G3. Counting the initial purchase price of the machine, I'm still under $500 total.
And flame away, but this thing's as smooth and responsive (in most ways, but not all) as Win98SE on my P3/733 at work.
Everybody's commenting about how all the parts of this story don't add up, that these megacorps wouldn't make such obvious blunders, or handle them so crudely. Hmm. While the old "follow the money" trick may not directly apply in this case, it's close enough.
What is the upshot of this incident, once you filter out all the distractions?
1) Hacker bypasses DRM-type security
2) Company "forced" to retool/change security
3) Direct, demonstrable monetary losses
They need to set precedents that exposing obvious security gaffes (unencrypted signal on the bus in this case) leads directly to major financial losses. Makes future prosecutions much easier.
To the naysayers: I didn't mean fully immersive 3D like SysQuake; I meant only as 3D as it needs to be. One example is the Dock's auto-magnify feature. The concept is that everything's there; whatever has focus will just be more there.
Same with the drop shadowing on all windows: they only use two levels, foreground and background, but the foreground item (never more than one) has twice as much shadow as everything else. Everything not at the front layer has less shadow, making it further away from the user, and some transparency to it's title bar, implying, to me anyway, distance blurring.
I've been wondering what ancestral role (if any) the multi-column view will have in any forthcoming 2.5D/3D GUI. Any ideas, or is it just a cool NeXT holdover wiht no future in the 21st century?
There's a full 3D file browser called 3DOSX that give at least some idea of what's possible. If nothing else, it'll make you realize that cubes and large, flat surfaces (with their need for more axes of control) aren't the only concievable 3D workspace.
I've been saying for a while (ever since I first switched to OS X back in the 10.0.3 days) that the whole Aqua thing was mostly a placeholder. Every major shortcoming and non-sensical policy could be explained that way.
Why try to prevent theming? Because what was coming would utterly break any theming software imaginable.
Why the clunky Finder and Dock? Because they were mere halfway points in the journey, to get people used to a crude version of the real thing so that it wouldn't feel quite so alien when it finally arrives.
What journey? To a fully native OpenGL-based 3D windowing environment. Even this, Quartz Extreme, is just a small step along the way, but it's at this point that it starts becoming obvious. The magnification effect of the Dock isn't just cool eye candy, it's a 2D approximation of their long-term ideas.
Mark my words: This clunky 2D Aqua we've got now will be long gone in two years or less. In hindsight it will be obvious that it was just transitional. See how many bad design decisions you can explain away this way?
Has anybody grabbed www.LeanerChalking.org yet?
One platform that really, really, really needs a tool like this: Mac OS X.
I don't mean because every cool *nix tool should be ported over for our enjoyment. I mean because, not to generalize, but generally speaking Mac users tend to be a very cocky bunch as regards security. We're used to having literally unhackable machines, and now with the move to a BSD base, all we're told is how much more secure that is than anything else on the planet, so there's probably quite a few Mac users out there who assume their cumulative hackability score is now a negative number.
Couple that with the fact that it's quickly becoming the most common form of *nix (by sheer quantity) and you've got a whole lot of potentially insecure BSD setups operating under a false sense of security, which could bring as much evil to this world as raw sockets.
Feel free to look down on me for being some lowly point-and-drool GUI junky, but if OS X boxes start getting cracked in large numbers, then the mainstream hears that *nix isn't much more secure than the other type of operating system, and that only helps the bad guys.
I'm wondering if this means they've fixed the long-standing BSD (and therefore OS X) password issue?
(Once word of that gets around we'll get a few points back on the stock, right? Right?)