I'm in the UK too, and stopped watching any of the pay-per-view stuff as soon as they put the macrovision crap on those channels. It's a sort of DRM since you have to use additional equipment to clean up the MV crap to get a decent recording. No, I don't intend to sell copies of "Scary Movie 2" at the local flea-market - I'd just like to be able to watch it a couple of times before recording over it.
I now just hire DVDs for all my films - still the same MV on there, but at least I can watch it over a couple of days for the same price of one viewing on Sky...
Does anyone have a link to any comparisons of all these journaling filesystems, showing their strengths and weaknesses? Why shouldn't I just stick with ext3 for everything?
Personally I doubt many people would take me as seriously if they saw my attrocious handwriting. This is due to my reliance on computers and other keyboard/keypad operated devices in place of pen and paper. I never use a pen anymore except to write the odd cheque - my hand now gets tired and aches after writing a few lines on the rare occasions I attempt it.
I can see the day coming when schoolkids are no longer taught to write, since it'll be as obsolete as caligraphy.
I collect up and forward all my spam onto various MPs every so often. It certainly seems to be doing the trick with this MP;-)
And I quote: "The MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey told The Register that he is "sick of the excuses" and wants something done to curb the amount of spam pouring into people's in-boxes.
In particular, he's concerned about the rising quantity of pornographic spam and the impact it may have on children using the Net. "
:-) We had something similar last year on a pretty big web project. We had two servers - one running httpd and mail, the other a dedicated database server. Due to the huge and unnecesarily complicated database (the customer wanted the ability to add new columns/tables at any time via a web interface and still have it work ok - not very efficient since it ended up with a huge number of redundant tables) it was taking about 2.5-3 seconds average for a query.
This didn't seem too bad until it went live and tried to cope with over 1000 visitors all searching and messing about within the first hour. The phone was ringing with complaints just after lunch;-)
It was then that I happened to notice the dual P3 database server only actually had one processor fitted. The supplier swore that we'd only ordered one CPU which seems odd when we knew we needed two and it's slightly inefficient to buy a dual CPU motherboard with 1 Proc. Plus we'd paid for 2.
Didn't make much difference anyway; with another proc in there the load was still way above what it could handle;-) You live and learn...
For the record, I consider every version of IE a "pre-release". The difference is, I don't care enough about MS to rant about it's unnumerable problems - I could list them, but they have enough money already that I don't feel like giving them free feedback. Let them pay for testers.
My point is that the bug count appears to be climbing as each release appears from my point of view. I don't care about the aesthetics - I'm only interested in the layout/scripting side. The clipping bug remains, the keyboard bug remains and in fact appears to be getting worse as the new features are added.
If I didn't give a shit about Mozilla I wouldn't even take the time to mention my problems - I'd just stick with another browser and ignore it as too many others do already. But I don't, I've encouraged plenty of people to switch - at least for the email client (which itself saves me having to reinstall Win whenever another virus of the month is installed by some... well... idiot).
This is becoming ridiculous (actually the line where "ridiculous" starts was left behind several years ago I guess). As the article points out, reverse engineering is commonplace, and helps all software evolve and improve. The ruling effectively makes it illegal for any company, or individual, to learn and improve their products if their improvements have already been implemented by another company.
So a few decades ago, if someone had thought to use a switch block instead of 10 if{}else statements, it would prevent anyone else doing the same. Or maybe Carmack could have put the smack down on anyone else using unchained modeX and raycasting to create an fps.
Really, if the patent/copyright situation of today were in place 200 years ago, we'd still be riding around in horse-drawn carts and reading books (presuming said book was our own personal copy, not to be shared by any other family or friends) in our hovels at night by candlelight today. When are these companies going to realize that this pathetic squabbling is just serving the soul-less, grinning, moneygrabbing lawyers and they're just digging themselves into trenches so deep they'll never make it out again?
...don't use the alpha builds, they ARE unstable by nature. Use the 1.0x series, that is stable.
Yes it's stable, but it's also too slow to take seriously. 1.1 wipes the floor with 1.0 in terms of rendering speed with dynamic content. I need to know the direction the browser is taking all the time as I maintain a javascript API for game-writers. I have to know what's changing before the stable release.
At the moment I'm becoming so despondant with more and more things becoming broken, and consequently having to add more and more code forks that dropping all Mozilla support until they fix things is looking more likely.
I hate IE only sites more than anything, but the Mozilla developers are making it very hard to support their browser. I'm not the only scripter saying this either. They just don't seem interested in addressing the problems reported to them (as I do frequently on Bugzilla, taking time to create examples and documenting the problem, though it gets me nowhere).
The last few builds have introduced more bugs than ever. It seems to me that spangly new features are being introduced at the expense of the browser's stability and performance.
For instance, the new keyboard stuff in 1.2a (ok, it's an Alpha I know), had screwed up Javascript's keydown events - the browser intercepts them first, then passes the event to the scripting engine so if a key is held down you get the anoying error "bell" as the buffer is filled. Keyboard events->javascript is/was also broken completely in the Mac/Linux port from 1.1. 1.2a is also slower than 1.1 at rendering dynamic content - especially content that involves keyboard input (like games) due to the problem above.
Also when will they fix the damned image clipping bug in linux that's been there for 2 sodding years now?!! For those who haven't seen it, when clipping an element containing images that have transparency, everything except the images will be clipped, completely ruining the layout of dynamic scripts.
I guess no-one wants to work on the boring stuff like making it work when there's sidebars, tabs and themes to be had...
Reading this story, it seems the chips only make a few dollars/pounds difference to the price of a single player, so is this really that big a deal to a consumer? I think the players are pretty cheap anyway - it's the DVD disk box-sets that really hit the wallet!
Well it seems you're incapable of holding any sort of debate without resorting to schoolboy insults, but I'll bite anyway...
I'm not interesting in taking away your freedom of speech - if you live in the US your government is already doing that anyway - I'm saying that blotting out the problem by sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "La la la, can't hear you" is doing nothing to stop the scumbags.
The spammers don't know, or care if the mail is read - they just post X million a day and hope for the best. YOU and YOUR ISP are paying for them to shovel Pr0n, penis enlargement and breast implant garbage into your mailbox, do you not understand this?
Just try to imagine that you had a partner, and eventually raised kids - do you want them to grow up trawling through 30,40 or 50 pR0n-filled emails a day that have mutated to beat filters? Freedom of speech has to stop somewhere, unless you'd think it's ok for someone to stand outside your trailer yelling "J.Johnson is a pedophille in my opinion" and littering your yard with child porn.
You see, you're a shining example of the real problem - a hand-wringer, constantly turning the other cheek as scumbags walk all over you to make a few bucks.
Every single time there's an article about spam we get the same old "I use spamassasin, so I'm alright Jack". Don't you see you're just hiding the problem.
You're actually doing the scum a favour by running spam blocking software - your users are oblivious to the problem and the spammer's ISP recieves less complaints. It's like just closing the curtains when some scumbag is throwing eggs at your windows - it won't go away until you actively DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
I have to agree, I've seen a LOT of pretty big companies using the "guy who knows most about Windows" in charge of the network. These networks tend to be a horrifically unpatched, badly setup mess. I honestly wouldn't trust most of these people with any version of Linux unless I'd installed everything they need, and bolted it down before letting them have it. "Pick'n'clik" really is the extent of their abilities, and even then I'm betting most of the clicking is pretty much guesswork!
It's scary to think that nothing more than the default router settings protects most of these people from script kiddies.
Why not retrieve a mirror of the site before posting the story, then have the slashdot server constantly monitor the real site. If the server goes down, the links from the front-page story switch over to the mirror. Once the real site recovers, links are set back to the real site.
How hard can it be? It's not like you'd be taking any renenue from the real site, as the mirror would only be active when they were incapable of accepting any more visitors...
They're based in the US - who's going to stop them? All they need do is hand over some bribeH^H^H^H^H^funding to the right people and anything they do will be backed by the "right people".
Not that I'm bashing the US, the same will happen in the UK too with out spineless, money-grabbing parlimentary losers...
As others have pointed out, the 1.3x server is fine already. Why put yourself through the pain of building 2.0, rebuilding PHP et al and worrying about it all working until it's been proven?
By the way, I'd like to know who the hell came up with this god-awful colour scheme?!!
It'd be cool to see a hack like this that added maybe a couple of buttons just behind the edge of the frame, or better still a touchscreen. This would give so many more options - such as it doubling up as a front-end to a burglar alarm, web browser, email client, MP3 player or whatever else could be used with minimal controls.
Apparently Jonh Carmack has stated this should be able to run Doom III at a "reasonable speed"... So long as you don't go nuts with the detail level...
I don't see why the apps would have to even know which method was in use. I've never written anything for OS-X, so I can't be sure which method is used to wire the menubar object up (callbacks,slots+signals,listeners or whatever), but wouldn't the app just build a menubar, and not care where it ended up as long as it performed the same functions?
The "window manager" is the only part that would need to know how to display the menu - either changing the top menubar to the menu for the window, or having the menu permanently displayed at the top of all the windows.
Not that Apple will ever do this of course, but I'd appreciate it if it did.
Does the menubar also appear in a second monitor by the way, for the windows in that monitor? Please don't say you have to move the mouse back into the first monitor window to access the menu for a window in the second monitor! That would kind of blow the whole "Single menu is best" argument out of the water!
XP is easier for you just because you are used to it. The OS X environment is easier for me because that is what I am used to.
Precisely. I'm not saying that everyone's the same, but since it's in Apples interest to attract Windows users, it makes sense to make the transition as painless as possible.
Is adding a menubar to a window really that radical a change? It's just an object - I'm betting the alteration to attach it to a movable window rather than fixed to the desktop is not a huge undertaking, and the apps wouldn't behave any differently aside from a thin strip across the top of the windows.
Again, this could easily be a choice; a simple checkbox ("Dock menu to window"), and not the default, but maybe mentioned in a getting started guide for Windows migrants. People can then choose whatever works best for them. Be interesting to see the percentages in any case...
I've never understood Apple's reliance on a single menubar for everything on the screen. Ok, it may make sense if you're only running one app on the screen but I always found it confusing, and other's I've shown it to have had the same problem. For instance, I open app A, and the menu appears - all well and good. Then I open apps B,C,D and E then click on the desktop by mistake - oops, the menu now has nothing to do with any app. This means going back to find it, click to give it focus, then go back up to the floating menu bar at the top of the screen.
At least with a menu-per-window you know that that's the menu for that app; there's no confusion. The paradigm breaks with OS-X anyway, since they allow toolbars in the windows, which makes matters worse - is an option available here, or up at the top of the screen?
Giving the OPTION of having the menus for each app in its window would go a long way toward helping people migrate from Windows, in my view.
This is just my opinion though, I use OS-X,XP and KDE pretty regularly but if I had to order them by ease of use, I'd have to say XP,KDE then OS-X...
I think it's pretty lengthy, but unfortunately it'll no doubt fly right over the heads of any normal person. If you skim the article you get the impression it's mainly a method for helping users protect their data, and incidentally also helps those poor fellows in Hollywood eak out a meagre living by helping them stop you becoming a criminal...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the UK too, and stopped watching any of the pay-per-view stuff as soon as they put the macrovision crap on those channels. It's a sort of DRM since you have to use additional equipment to clean up the MV crap to get a decent recording. No, I don't intend to sell copies of "Scary Movie 2" at the local flea-market - I'd just like to be able to watch it a couple of times before recording over it.
I now just hire DVDs for all my films - still the same MV on there, but at least I can watch it over a couple of days for the same price of one viewing on Sky...
Does anyone have a link to any comparisons of all these journaling filesystems, showing their strengths and weaknesses? Why shouldn't I just stick with ext3 for everything?
Personally I doubt many people would take me as seriously if they saw my attrocious handwriting. This is due to my reliance on computers and other keyboard/keypad operated devices in place of pen and paper. I never use a pen anymore except to write the odd cheque - my hand now gets tired and aches after writing a few lines on the rare occasions I attempt it.
I can see the day coming when schoolkids are no longer taught to write, since it'll be as obsolete as caligraphy.
I collect up and forward all my spam onto various MPs every so often. It certainly seems to be doing the trick with this MP ;-)
And I quote: "The MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey told The Register that he is "sick of the excuses" and wants something done to curb the amount of spam pouring into people's in-boxes.
In particular, he's concerned about the rising quantity of pornographic spam and the impact it may have on children using the Net. "
:-) We had something similar last year on a pretty big web project. We had two servers - one running httpd and mail, the other a dedicated database server. Due to the huge and unnecesarily complicated database (the customer wanted the ability to add new columns/tables at any time via a web interface and still have it work ok - not very efficient since it ended up with a huge number of redundant tables) it was taking about 2.5-3 seconds average for a query.
;-)
;-) You live and learn...
This didn't seem too bad until it went live and tried to cope with over 1000 visitors all searching and messing about within the first hour. The phone was ringing with complaints just after lunch
It was then that I happened to notice the dual P3 database server only actually had one processor fitted. The supplier swore that we'd only ordered one CPU which seems odd when we knew we needed two and it's slightly inefficient to buy a dual CPU motherboard with 1 Proc. Plus we'd paid for 2.
Didn't make much difference anyway; with another proc in there the load was still way above what it could handle
For the record, I consider every version of IE a "pre-release". The difference is, I don't care enough about MS to rant about it's unnumerable problems - I could list them, but they have enough money already that I don't feel like giving them free feedback. Let them pay for testers.
My point is that the bug count appears to be climbing as each release appears from my point of view. I don't care about the aesthetics - I'm only interested in the layout/scripting side. The clipping bug remains, the keyboard bug remains and in fact appears to be getting worse as the new features are added.
If I didn't give a shit about Mozilla I wouldn't even take the time to mention my problems - I'd just stick with another browser and ignore it as too many others do already. But I don't, I've encouraged plenty of people to switch - at least for the email client (which itself saves me having to reinstall Win whenever another virus of the month is installed by some... well... idiot).
This is becoming ridiculous (actually the line where "ridiculous" starts was left behind several years ago I guess). As the article points out, reverse engineering is commonplace, and helps all software evolve and improve. The ruling effectively makes it illegal for any company, or individual, to learn and improve their products if their improvements have already been implemented by another company.
So a few decades ago, if someone had thought to use a switch block instead of 10 if{}else statements, it would prevent anyone else doing the same. Or maybe Carmack could have put the smack down on anyone else using unchained modeX and raycasting to create an fps.
Really, if the patent/copyright situation of today were in place 200 years ago, we'd still be riding around in horse-drawn carts and reading books (presuming said book was our own personal copy, not to be shared by any other family or friends) in our hovels at night by candlelight today. When are these companies going to realize that this pathetic squabbling is just serving the soul-less, grinning, moneygrabbing lawyers and they're just digging themselves into trenches so deep they'll never make it out again?
...don't use the alpha builds, they ARE unstable by nature. Use the 1.0x series, that is stable.
Yes it's stable, but it's also too slow to take seriously. 1.1 wipes the floor with 1.0 in terms of rendering speed with dynamic content. I need to know the direction the browser is taking all the time as I maintain a javascript API for game-writers. I have to know what's changing before the stable release.
At the moment I'm becoming so despondant with more and more things becoming broken, and consequently having to add more and more code forks that dropping all Mozilla support until they fix things is looking more likely.
I hate IE only sites more than anything, but the Mozilla developers are making it very hard to support their browser. I'm not the only scripter saying this either. They just don't seem interested in addressing the problems reported to them (as I do frequently on Bugzilla, taking time to create examples and documenting the problem, though it gets me nowhere).
The last few builds have introduced more bugs than ever. It seems to me that spangly new features are being introduced at the expense of the browser's stability and performance.
For instance, the new keyboard stuff in 1.2a (ok, it's an Alpha I know), had screwed up Javascript's keydown events - the browser intercepts them first, then passes the event to the scripting engine so if a key is held down you get the anoying error "bell" as the buffer is filled. Keyboard events->javascript is/was also broken completely in the Mac/Linux port from 1.1. 1.2a is also slower than 1.1 at rendering dynamic content - especially content that involves keyboard input (like games) due to the problem above.
Also when will they fix the damned image clipping bug in linux that's been there for 2 sodding years now?!! For those who haven't seen it, when clipping an element containing images that have transparency, everything except the images will be clipped, completely ruining the layout of dynamic scripts.
I guess no-one wants to work on the boring stuff like making it work when there's sidebars, tabs and themes to be had...
</rant>
Reading this story, it seems the chips only make a few dollars/pounds difference to the price of a single player, so is this really that big a deal to a consumer? I think the players are pretty cheap anyway - it's the DVD disk box-sets that really hit the wallet!
you asshole.
Well it seems you're incapable of holding any sort of debate without resorting to schoolboy insults, but I'll bite anyway...
I'm not interesting in taking away your freedom of speech - if you live in the US your government is already doing that anyway - I'm saying that blotting out the problem by sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "La la la, can't hear you" is doing nothing to stop the scumbags.
The spammers don't know, or care if the mail is read - they just post X million a day and hope for the best. YOU and YOUR ISP are paying for them to shovel Pr0n, penis enlargement and breast implant garbage into your mailbox, do you not understand this?
Just try to imagine that you had a partner, and eventually raised kids - do you want them to grow up trawling through 30,40 or 50 pR0n-filled emails a day that have mutated to beat filters? Freedom of speech has to stop somewhere, unless you'd think it's ok for someone to stand outside your trailer yelling "J.Johnson is a pedophille in my opinion" and littering your yard with child porn.
You see, you're a shining example of the real problem - a hand-wringer, constantly turning the other cheek as scumbags walk all over you to make a few bucks.
Every single time there's an article about spam we get the same old "I use spamassasin, so I'm alright Jack". Don't you see you're just hiding the problem.
You're actually doing the scum a favour by running spam blocking software - your users are oblivious to the problem and the spammer's ISP recieves less complaints. It's like just closing the curtains when some scumbag is throwing eggs at your windows - it won't go away until you actively DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
And YES I do...
I have to agree, I've seen a LOT of pretty big companies using the "guy who knows most about Windows" in charge of the network. These networks tend to be a horrifically unpatched, badly setup mess. I honestly wouldn't trust most of these people with any version of Linux unless I'd installed everything they need, and bolted it down before letting them have it. "Pick'n'clik" really is the extent of their abilities, and even then I'm betting most of the clicking is pretty much guesswork!
It's scary to think that nothing more than the default router settings protects most of these people from script kiddies.
Funny, I didn't pay Redhat anything to download my installation, yet I still get to use up2date on all my servers...
Please try a little research before making silly statements...
[...excerpt from the FAQ...]
Why not retrieve a mirror of the site before posting the story, then have the slashdot server constantly monitor the real site. If the server goes down, the links from the front-page story switch over to the mirror. Once the real site recovers, links are set back to the real site.
How hard can it be? It's not like you'd be taking any renenue from the real site, as the mirror would only be active when they were incapable of accepting any more visitors...
They're based in the US - who's going to stop them? All they need do is hand over some bribeH^H^H^H^H^funding to the right people and anything they do will be backed by the "right people".
Not that I'm bashing the US, the same will happen in the UK too with out spineless, money-grabbing parlimentary losers...
As others have pointed out, the 1.3x server is fine already. Why put yourself through the pain of building 2.0, rebuilding PHP et al and worrying about it all working until it's been proven?
By the way, I'd like to know who the hell came up with this god-awful colour scheme?!!
It'd be cool to see a hack like this that added maybe a couple of buttons just behind the edge of the frame, or better still a touchscreen. This would give so many more options - such as it doubling up as a front-end to a burglar alarm, web browser, email client, MP3 player or whatever else could be used with minimal controls.
Apparently Jonh Carmack has stated this should be able to run Doom III at a "reasonable speed"... So long as you don't go nuts with the detail level...
I don't see why the apps would have to even know which method was in use. I've never written anything for OS-X, so I can't be sure which method is used to wire the menubar object up (callbacks,slots+signals,listeners or whatever), but wouldn't the app just build a menubar, and not care where it ended up as long as it performed the same functions?
The "window manager" is the only part that would need to know how to display the menu - either changing the top menubar to the menu for the window, or having the menu permanently displayed at the top of all the windows.
Not that Apple will ever do this of course, but I'd appreciate it if it did.
Does the menubar also appear in a second monitor by the way, for the windows in that monitor? Please don't say you have to move the mouse back into the first monitor window to access the menu for a window in the second monitor! That would kind of blow the whole "Single menu is best" argument out of the water!
XP is easier for you just because you are used to it. The OS X environment is easier for me because that is what I am used to.
Precisely. I'm not saying that everyone's the same, but since it's in Apples interest to attract Windows users, it makes sense to make the transition as painless as possible.
Is adding a menubar to a window really that radical a change? It's just an object - I'm betting the alteration to attach it to a movable window rather than fixed to the desktop is not a huge undertaking, and the apps wouldn't behave any differently aside from a thin strip across the top of the windows.
Again, this could easily be a choice; a simple checkbox ("Dock menu to window"), and not the default, but maybe mentioned in a getting started guide for Windows migrants. People can then choose whatever works best for them. Be interesting to see the percentages in any case...
I've never understood Apple's reliance on a single menubar for everything on the screen. Ok, it may make sense if you're only running one app on the screen but I always found it confusing, and other's I've shown it to have had the same problem. For instance, I open app A, and the menu appears - all well and good. Then I open apps B,C,D and E then click on the desktop by mistake - oops, the menu now has nothing to do with any app. This means going back to find it, click to give it focus, then go back up to the floating menu bar at the top of the screen.
At least with a menu-per-window you know that that's the menu for that app; there's no confusion. The paradigm breaks with OS-X anyway, since they allow toolbars in the windows, which makes matters worse - is an option available here, or up at the top of the screen?
Giving the OPTION of having the menus for each app in its window would go a long way toward helping people migrate from Windows, in my view.
This is just my opinion though, I use OS-X,XP and KDE pretty regularly but if I had to order them by ease of use, I'd have to say XP,KDE then OS-X...
Politicians seen as self-serving, greedy corporate sock-puppets. News at 11...
but it's still better than the pathetic mind-fucking experience the gov't calls "their internet".
You realise that statement could apply to just about any country...
I think it's pretty lengthy, but unfortunately it'll no doubt fly right over the heads of any normal person. If you skim the article you get the impression it's mainly a method for helping users protect their data, and incidentally also helps those poor fellows in Hollywood eak out a meagre living by helping them stop you becoming a criminal...