I don't agree, a computer accomplishes one task, which is to run programs, following your line of reasoning, a refrigerator accomplishes hundreds of tasks just because it happens to store hundreds of different foods...
It is interesting that the main objection that comes up when there are talks about Quality in software is that computer programs are too complicated, well, building a skyscraper is IMHO just as complicated, but if the Empire State Building falls down, you can't just release Empire State Building Service Pack 2, can you ?
IMHO the main problem is that the discipline of creating computer programs is still very 'new' compared to most of the others (architecture etc.) and after it will mature a bit more, everything will be just fine.
Many (bad) programmers complain that QA stifles their creativity, now I wonder how many city planners would use the same excuse (no, really, multiplexing sewage with water in the same pipes is better, since it will take up less space. What do you mean I can't do that ? You are infringing on my creativity !)
I have an MS in Electronic Engineering/CS, and here in Canada, after 2 years of employment I was already making twice what you are making while paying all the taxes that need to be paid (for whomever doesn't know, in Italy if you are a consultant or an independent worker, and you have a good financial consultant, you can end up paying little or no taxes by using all sorts of loopholes). In Italy, to make this kind of money, I would have probably have had to wait for 10 years at *least*, and probably even then I wouldn't have been able to do it, unless I 'knew' some 'friends' if you get my drift.
Food is excellent, no question about that, problem is that given the amount of money it costs, it better be !;)
Cell phone contracts might be free, but you have to *buy your own cellphone*, I got my cellphone for free with my plan, a cellphone that in Italy costs about 600$, and I am paying only 15$/mo for a 150 anytime minutes contract. After those 150 minutes, I am charged about 20c/min, but if I used it that much, I would go with a different plan.
When I left Italy, three years ago, there were flat fee Internet contracts, yes, but you still had to pay the telephone company per-minute charges to use it ! Here in Canada local calls are free, so I could stay online as much as I wanted for 20$/mo or less. BTW I have had ADSL for more than a year, which is just becoming available in Italy and costs a lot of money (as everything else).
Things might change quickly in Italy, that's true, but as you can see from my rebuttal, the bottom line is that it's still a rip compared to here;)
Please remember that the 820$ figure I quoted is -net-, and yes, these are the salaries a *good* worker, with a MS from a *good* university gets.
A lot of other friends of mine, who took arts degrees etc., are not so lucky, and they have to choose between staying at home or working 'in black' (i.e. not officially working, paid in cash and with no job security) something like 500$/month.
The more south you go in Italy, the worse it is regarding unemployment, in the North at least, if you don't mind doing menial jobs, you should be able to find something to do, but in the South, with like 20% unemployment rate, it would be really hard.
How do people survive on those salaries ? They live with their parents, and depend on them to give some money every now and then. To start a family, both the man and the woman *must* be working, they probably will have to work 5-6 years before even starting to *think* to have kids, and after that they will always have to be really careful.
Italy is the type of country where unless you win a lottery or something, you will die in the same social class you were born in, if your parents, like mine, were a blue collar worker and a homemaker, odds are you'll end up always renting an apartment your whole life, and never having enough money to enjoy things a little bit.
Here in Canada at least I have a chance of improving my social standing, and to be able to offer my future children a safer future than if I remained in Italy.
I agree wholeheartedly regarding not going to France: I hate to say this, but it seems that French people are very nationalist, and your life as an immigrant will be really hard.
A friend of mine moved there a while ago to work, France being in the EU, she *theoretically* didn't have to do pretty much anything in terms of beureocracy to be able to work. The reality was instead that she was treated like an immigrant from outside the EU everywhere, it took her a long time to find an apartment, and every basic thing (like hooking up a phone line) was a major hassle.
Also don't forget that if you don't speak French with a perfect accent you are going to be looked down upon all the time, which is really sad.
Japan is fairly bad for this type of nationalism as well, an acquaintance of mine stayed there for like 10 years, and even at the end of the 10 years when she was able to speak Japanese fairly fluently, people everywhere (on the bus etc.) where rude to her because of her accent with comments like 'You must be really stupid, my 6 years old has a better accent than you' etc. etc. she eventually left out of desperation.
Italians are very good in this regard, no matter what strange accent you have, you are going to be treated nicely (unless you come from North Africa, which is a different story due to the high number of beggars etc. that come from there).
One thing I don't think anybody mentioned: due to historical reasons, Italians absolutely adore and worship the US, they think that the US and Americans are the best thing in the world, so you'll probably won't have many problems making, uh, 'friends' if you know what I mean;);)
Sorry about this: I was forgetting just how much the US$ has gone up in the recent past when I quoted salary figures and stuff.
My friends are making about 820$/mo
Mega dump apartment cost is about 300$/mo
Heating is about 80$/mo
Phone is 25-200$ where 25$ means 'almost no usage'
everything else is correct (I already corrected it, but I forgot the above). Note that the US$ in respect to the Italian lira (ITL) has gone up from about 1500lira = 1$ to 2200 lira = 1$ in a year or so due to the Euro going down the drain.
To give some background, I lived in Italy until I was 27, and moved to Canada after that: I've been here about three years.
If you move to Italy for a little while, the reality will be that, even if you will get a 'real' work permit (which means a lot of time fighting the Italian burocratical windmills) you will likely be offered several jobs 'in black', meaning that you will be paid cash, and you won't be officially an employee of the company.
Don't forget that salaries are not what you are used to, some of my friends (with MS degrees from the *best* Italian university) are making about $1000-$1200/mo net after 2-3 years in the workplace.
This would be fine and dandy if living there didn't cost you an arm and a leg. Some quick facts:
a dumpy apartment in a major town will set you back at *least* 500$/mo (this is just for the apartment itself), then you have to add up at least, say, 100$/mo in heating costs, another 50$/mo in hydro (if you're careful with the lights, and you don't have a hot shower every day), another 50-200$/mo in phone depending on how much time you spend surfing (yes, even local calls are metered, and not cheap).
Let's not forget food: forget about eating out, if you don't want minuscule portions at obscene prices (unless you go in 'inns' (osterie) or in pizzerias where you can usually get a sizeable plate of pasta or a pizza for 4-5$ (plus 2$ for getting a seat, plus 1$ for a half-liter bottle of water (no free refills) or 3$ for an orange juice etc. etc.). If you buy your own food, you'll be surprised to see that food prices in Italy are *much* higher than in the States: just one example, meat is about 7-8$/pound, the only cheap stuff is pretty much pasta and tomato sauce and in-season veggies/fruit if you go to the big open markets.
Also forget about picking what looks good, usually in these markets there is a pyramid of fruits, and the shopkeeper gets the amount that you want from the *back* of the pile, which means that you get stuff that's way more beaten up than at the front, and the bags are paper and you pay in advance, so you can't see what you got until you get home.
Clothing is fairly rippish too, a decent (i.e. you don't get your feet wet when it rains) pair of shoes will set you back anywhere from 60$ to 150$, but if you want to spend more the sky's the limit (I've seen shoes for 1000$ a pair).
One of the few good points is that everything is very close together, so you'll be able to do everything that you need via public transit (fairly inexpensive for monthly passes) or at most with a bike (the crappier it looks the better, otherwise it *will* be stolen). If you plan to get a car, remember that the cheapest piece of junk that you can get in Italy will set you back at least 10,000$ new, a *neon* (which is not exactly a ferrari) costs like 20,000$;)
Italy is a really nice country if one has lots of money, for the low-to-middle class people it's a major rip. If I stayed in Italy I would probably still be living with my parents trying to scrape by some savings in order for one day to be able to buy a very small apartment (I grew up in a 400sqf one) while here in Canada I was able to get a really nice townhouse after only *1 year* of employment. Now I could afford much more, but until the mortgage rates will go down I won't move.
I was forgetting: people that say that the Valley is polluted should take a hike where I used to live (northern Italy, close to Milan), after 2-3 months without rain, just walking outside gives you a permanent headache: when I went out with a motorbike for an hour, the part of the face that was exposed (helmets are mandatory) would be grey with soot-like stuff, I don't want to imagine what my lungs were like.
The situation is this bad because of an incompetent and corrupt class of politicians, and because Italians are very family oriented, and don't want to leave Italy no matter how bad it gets, also English is not taught very well in school, I didn't learn to speak and understand English until I went to England for a while...
Italy has its strong points: excellent education system, great history, awesome monuments, great night life *in some cities*, people tend to be more willing to help you if you are in need, but right now my feeling is that unless you have a lot of money and you plan to go to Italy just for fun for a while, you'd better look more northward, a friend of mine did his Ph. D. in Dublin, and loved every moment of the two years he spent there.
OK, I found the problem (at least in mozilla, I'll retry NS6 ASAP).
I have the proxy set up as 'autoconfigure' which is just a way that simplifies IS's life, since theoretically NS goes to the autoconfig URL, and gets the proxy settings, hosts not to proxy, etc. etc. etc.
Well, it turns out that this feature seems broken in Mozilla, in fact, if I remove the autoconfig, and specify the proxy server manually, everything works just fine. I will try this on NS6 as soon if it finishes downloading.
Just out of curiosity, I downloaded a mozilla nightly, and I get exactly the same uncaught exception error, so after all it's not really netscape's fault.
What about making the installer application proxy-aware ? I am behind a fairly fascist firewall that doesn't allow anything through (I have to use a proxy for http) and obviously the installer application just hangs.
Fortunately the ftp site also carries the big tar file which I could download easily (and much faster than I thought, very close to 100KB/s average)
That said my first impression is not that good since besides taking like years to start up (on a p3-550 w/ 128 megs) every time I try to access a site, *any* site, I get the following
got a request
JavaScript error:
line 0: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIBrowserInstance.loadUrl]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame:: chrome://navigator/content/navigator.js:: OpenBookmarkURL:: line 714" data: no]
JavaScript error:
chrome://navigator/content/sessionHistoryUI.js line 150: gURLBar has no properties
If the URL is typed in directly I just get the gURLBar error, and not the previous one, in any case it doesn't work.
Also interesting that opening up the preferences dialog gives this on the console
we don't handle eBorderStyle_close yet... please fix me
*** panel to load is = chrome://communicator/content/pref/pref-navigator. xul
*** queueing up a panel...
this is on a fairly vanilla RH 7 box, which should have been QA'd by the NS folks I think... the second time I ran this abomination it doesn't even give me an error, it just refuses to load any page (I still get the errors if I click on the bookmarks tho).
An interesting tidbit, the default setting is to *save* all the data from previously submitted forms and passwords to sites (check in the preferences), and you can even display that previously entered data. If you leave your netscape unattended, prepare to be burned (IE at least *asks* you the first time if you want to save the passwords/form data)
I read the webpage, but it doesn't say if it will finally support the Sorensen codec for quicktime or not (biggest reason to browse in windows besides windows media player).
On a related note, does anybody know if it is at all possible (via wine or something) to listen to windows media player streams in Linux ? I find that honestly Realplayer streams blow chunks, and I would really love to listen tp WMP streams instead (www.com is a perfect example)
thanks for the tip, I did not remember I could do that (configure/. for this exclusion).
BTW, re: monopoly, I don't think that the PC has such a monopoly, there are PCs, macs, windows ce, palm, sun, hp, and many other hardware platforms to choose from.
I don't want to flame, but with all of the really important stuff that is happening in the world (even if we restrict it to the tech world) why does/. have to keep bringing up the Amiga ?
What is the point ? Even if Amiga wasn't dead (which by all practical means it is) nobody besides some fanatics/zealots really care about it !
This reminds me of a 70 years old guy going on about his high-school lover without realizing that like 50 years have passed and everybody else has moved on.
If you want to have examples of obfuscated circuitry, you only have to look at satellite smart cards.
I don't know about the situation here in North America, but while I was living in Europe the piracy of the cards was rampant, and I've read several articles that explained how satellite companies were trying to prevent people from reverse engineering their card.
I wish I could find the article online (it was on a magazine), it was a very interesting read, since these cards have a significant amount of logic, for example, whose purpose is just to foil any possible reverse engineering: and I am talking *hardware* reverse engineering, and no, just covering everything up in tar won't be enough with the current investigative tools...
Let me see, I bet I have had more HIV tests than the average person, why ? because every time I donate blood I get one;)
I sure hope, BTW, that they won't start testing for other things behind my back, genetic profiling, whether it's done by the government, by the insurance companies, etc. is always bad.
So, the chip is much slower than the p3, and extrapolating from the provided numbers, if you fit it with a real screen (not the ridiculous PDA size this benchmark has been run with) it sucks almost as much power as the aforementioned vanilla p3 notebook, and probably more or less the same as a p3 notebook at half of the Crusoe's clock speed (since that's a comparable speed given its performance).
Can anybody explain me what's the point of all the hoopla that has been going on about this ? If Intel or AMD created a processor like this they would be fried and grilled here, but since it's Linus' employer I have the feeling that the/. community is much more forgiving.
Don't get me wrong, from a company that has never produced CPUs the Crusoe is an excellent first product, but I fail to see why this should be hailed as the second coming or something.
I see your point of view, so I assume you would also agree to the following forms of free speech without any restrictions of age or form (think spots on TV etc.)
* Pornography of any kind (need I provide examples ?)
* Revisionism (The holocaust is a bunch of lies)
* Hate speech (Homosexuals should die)
* Pro drugs speech (Drugging yourself is good)
* Blackmailing (If you don't do what I want I will tell about that interesting thing that happened in your company the other day)
* Sexual harassment (need I provide examples ?)
and so on, and so on.
From your line of reasoning it follows that in our society we do not have free speech, since the above mentioned things are regulated, and personally I'd like it to remain that way.
Free speech is a right unless it infringes on anybody else's rights I can utter sexist remarks all I want in my bathroom, but if I do it repeatedly in the workplace I can get charged with sexual harassment (and that's a good thing) because those sexist remarks infringe on my coworker's liberty of not feeling threatened.
Now we can discuss all day on which liberties deserve protection (a non smoker thinks that they have the right not to have smokers around, while a smoker thinks they have the right to smoke wherever they please) but IMHO free speech and regulated speech are not mutually exclusive.
let's use an analogy to real life: what if you had a site like drugnews.com, that tells you everything about the newest drugs released, their latest effects, and maybe has a forum with various people who know how to get those drugs and whom you can email etc.
or an even better analogy: what if there was a site like stolengoods.com, where you see the booties of recent robberies, again with the message boards etc. how would you feel if you had been robbed and you saw your stuff traded on the site ? I bet you'd get pissed, wouldn't you ?
Like I said, I am all for free speech, but these sites IMHO are crossing the line: there is no reason for a law abiding citizen, somebody that doesn't pirate games, to go on these sites, and there is no reason for these sites to exist besides helping piracy and making money off it (via banner ads etc.).
Free speech is a right, but helping people commit crimes is not a right.
I am also appalled at the quality of the post, I mean, I know that/. is not a traditional news site, but a snide remark like so Sega is being very uncool. I think they're just pissed that only like 9 people bought dreamcasts *grin* reeks a lot of Sony fanboy-ism...
Short of having the measuring company installing a sealed black box that counts the request and bounces it right back to the website I don't see many other ways to do it if the server operator is malicious.
Of course some sanity could be put in the data if the usage bandwidth from the site's upstream provider is taken into account (5 million hits and you transferred only 2 megs ? hmmmm) pity that obviously this data is usually not publicized or available to third parties for obvious reasons. (so you pay 5$/gig upstream and you charge me 10$/gig if I go over my quota eh ?)
I am sure, though, that through the wonders of reverse engineering, IP spoofing etc. it could be possible to foil even black boxes, I mean, how much would it take to just take a machine in the office, connect it to the black box and send http requests crafted so that they appear to be from other IPs ? If the site owner has physical access to the site's hardware this would be really easy to pull off.
It would be more complicated if one had just a colocated box or a virtual host, but even then with some 3l33t h4x0r skills one could make the black box's head spin in whatever direction one wants...
The web, though, is very interesting in this respect, because unlike in the TV case (where you have to count the viewers at the viewers' location) it is theoretically feasible to do a precise, repeatable and cost effective analisys by monitoring only the point of origin, which means that the money that would go into finding an acceptable demographic group, providing them with set top boxes that analyze their habits etc. one could invest all of this in creating one single monitoring device installed at the site's location.
On a related note, I have a digital cable set top box, and I am sure that behind my back the cable company is collecting my viewing habits (I mean, how hard could that be ? the digital set top box already connects to their network to download programming information and it has a unique ID) anybody knows more about this ? My cable company is pushing heavily the digital set tops even towards people interested only in basic cable, and I don't think they are doing it for charity...
why so much hostility ? I never really understood why people can be so much more hostile online than in real life... maybe it's that people are hostile in real life as well, but the repercussions for showing it are much higher than in the impermanent internet world... (not that the real world is permanent at all, nithya is the right word IIRC;)
BTW I am not karma whoring, I am honestly interested, if anybody ever saw anywhere websites that contain studies on the above, dissertations, whatever, please post with the link.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree, a computer accomplishes one task, which is to run programs, following your line of reasoning, a refrigerator accomplishes hundreds of tasks just because it happens to store hundreds of different foods...
It is interesting that the main objection that comes up when there are talks about Quality in software is that computer programs are too complicated, well, building a skyscraper is IMHO just as complicated, but if the Empire State Building falls down, you can't just release Empire State Building Service Pack 2, can you ?
IMHO the main problem is that the discipline of creating computer programs is still very 'new' compared to most of the others (architecture etc.) and after it will mature a bit more, everything will be just fine.
Many (bad) programmers complain that QA stifles their creativity, now I wonder how many city planners would use the same excuse (no, really, multiplexing sewage with water in the same pipes is better, since it will take up less space. What do you mean I can't do that ? You are infringing on my creativity !)
Let me expand on your observations:
;)
;)
I have an MS in Electronic Engineering/CS, and here in Canada, after 2 years of employment I was already making twice what you are making while paying all the taxes that need to be paid (for whomever doesn't know, in Italy if you are a consultant or an independent worker, and you have a good financial consultant, you can end up paying little or no taxes by using all sorts of loopholes). In Italy, to make this kind of money, I would have probably have had to wait for 10 years at *least*, and probably even then I wouldn't have been able to do it, unless I 'knew' some 'friends' if you get my drift.
Food is excellent, no question about that, problem is that given the amount of money it costs, it better be !
Cell phone contracts might be free, but you have to *buy your own cellphone*, I got my cellphone for free with my plan, a cellphone that in Italy costs about 600$, and I am paying only 15$/mo for a 150 anytime minutes contract. After those 150 minutes, I am charged about 20c/min, but if I used it that much, I would go with a different plan.
When I left Italy, three years ago, there were flat fee Internet contracts, yes, but you still had to pay the telephone company per-minute charges to use it ! Here in Canada local calls are free, so I could stay online as much as I wanted for 20$/mo or less. BTW I have had ADSL for more than a year, which is just becoming available in Italy and costs a lot of money (as everything else).
Things might change quickly in Italy, that's true, but as you can see from my rebuttal, the bottom line is that it's still a rip compared to here
Please remember that the 820$ figure I quoted is -net-, and yes, these are the salaries a *good* worker, with a MS from a *good* university gets.
A lot of other friends of mine, who took arts degrees etc., are not so lucky, and they have to choose between staying at home or working 'in black' (i.e. not officially working, paid in cash and with no job security) something like 500$/month.
The more south you go in Italy, the worse it is regarding unemployment, in the North at least, if you don't mind doing menial jobs, you should be able to find something to do, but in the South, with like 20% unemployment rate, it would be really hard.
How do people survive on those salaries ? They live with their parents, and depend on them to give some money every now and then. To start a family, both the man and the woman *must* be working, they probably will have to work 5-6 years before even starting to *think* to have kids, and after that they will always have to be really careful.
Italy is the type of country where unless you win a lottery or something, you will die in the same social class you were born in, if your parents, like mine, were a blue collar worker and a homemaker, odds are you'll end up always renting an apartment your whole life, and never having enough money to enjoy things a little bit.
Here in Canada at least I have a chance of improving my social standing, and to be able to offer my future children a safer future than if I remained in Italy.
I agree wholeheartedly regarding not going to France: I hate to say this, but it seems that French people are very nationalist, and your life as an immigrant will be really hard.
;);)
A friend of mine moved there a while ago to work, France being in the EU, she *theoretically* didn't have to do pretty much anything in terms of beureocracy to be able to work. The reality was instead that she was treated like an immigrant from outside the EU everywhere, it took her a long time to find an apartment, and every basic thing (like hooking up a phone line) was a major hassle.
Also don't forget that if you don't speak French with a perfect accent you are going to be looked down upon all the time, which is really sad.
Japan is fairly bad for this type of nationalism as well, an acquaintance of mine stayed there for like 10 years, and even at the end of the 10 years when she was able to speak Japanese fairly fluently, people everywhere (on the bus etc.) where rude to her because of her accent with comments like 'You must be really stupid, my 6 years old has a better accent than you' etc. etc. she eventually left out of desperation.
Italians are very good in this regard, no matter what strange accent you have, you are going to be treated nicely (unless you come from North Africa, which is a different story due to the high number of beggars etc. that come from there).
One thing I don't think anybody mentioned: due to historical reasons, Italians absolutely adore and worship the US, they think that the US and Americans are the best thing in the world, so you'll probably won't have many problems making, uh, 'friends' if you know what I mean
Sorry about this: I was forgetting just how much the US$ has gone up in the recent past when I quoted salary figures and stuff.
My friends are making about 820$/mo
Mega dump apartment cost is about 300$/mo
Heating is about 80$/mo
Phone is 25-200$ where 25$ means 'almost no usage'
everything else is correct (I already corrected it, but I forgot the above). Note that the US$ in respect to the Italian lira (ITL) has gone up from about 1500lira = 1$ to 2200 lira = 1$ in a year or so due to the Euro going down the drain.
Cost of living is lower, please !
;)
To give some background, I lived in Italy until I was 27, and moved to Canada after that: I've been here about three years.
If you move to Italy for a little while, the reality will be that, even if you will get a 'real' work permit (which means a lot of time fighting the Italian burocratical windmills) you will likely be offered several jobs 'in black', meaning that you will be paid cash, and you won't be officially an employee of the company.
Don't forget that salaries are not what you are used to, some of my friends (with MS degrees from the *best* Italian university) are making about $1000-$1200/mo net after 2-3 years in the workplace.
This would be fine and dandy if living there didn't cost you an arm and a leg. Some quick facts:
a dumpy apartment in a major town will set you back at *least* 500$/mo (this is just for the apartment itself), then you have to add up at least, say, 100$/mo in heating costs, another 50$/mo in hydro (if you're careful with the lights, and you don't have a hot shower every day), another 50-200$/mo in phone depending on how much time you spend surfing (yes, even local calls are metered, and not cheap).
Let's not forget food: forget about eating out, if you don't want minuscule portions at obscene prices (unless you go in 'inns' (osterie) or in pizzerias where you can usually get a sizeable plate of pasta or a pizza for 4-5$ (plus 2$ for getting a seat, plus 1$ for a half-liter bottle of water (no free refills) or 3$ for an orange juice etc. etc.). If you buy your own food, you'll be surprised to see that food prices in Italy are *much* higher than in the States: just one example, meat is about 7-8$/pound, the only cheap stuff is pretty much pasta and tomato sauce and in-season veggies/fruit if you go to the big open markets.
Also forget about picking what looks good, usually in these markets there is a pyramid of fruits, and the shopkeeper gets the amount that you want from the *back* of the pile, which means that you get stuff that's way more beaten up than at the front, and the bags are paper and you pay in advance, so you can't see what you got until you get home.
Clothing is fairly rippish too, a decent (i.e. you don't get your feet wet when it rains) pair of shoes will set you back anywhere from 60$ to 150$, but if you want to spend more the sky's the limit (I've seen shoes for 1000$ a pair).
One of the few good points is that everything is very close together, so you'll be able to do everything that you need via public transit (fairly inexpensive for monthly passes) or at most with a bike (the crappier it looks the better, otherwise it *will* be stolen). If you plan to get a car, remember that the cheapest piece of junk that you can get in Italy will set you back at least 10,000$ new, a *neon* (which is not exactly a ferrari) costs like 20,000$
Italy is a really nice country if one has lots of money, for the low-to-middle class people it's a major rip. If I stayed in Italy I would probably still be living with my parents trying to scrape by some savings in order for one day to be able to buy a very small apartment (I grew up in a 400sqf one) while here in Canada I was able to get a really nice townhouse after only *1 year* of employment. Now I could afford much more, but until the mortgage rates will go down I won't move.
I was forgetting: people that say that the Valley is polluted should take a hike where I used to live (northern Italy, close to Milan), after 2-3 months without rain, just walking outside gives you a permanent headache: when I went out with a motorbike for an hour, the part of the face that was exposed (helmets are mandatory) would be grey with soot-like stuff, I don't want to imagine what my lungs were like.
The situation is this bad because of an incompetent and corrupt class of politicians, and because Italians are very family oriented, and don't want to leave Italy no matter how bad it gets, also English is not taught very well in school, I didn't learn to speak and understand English until I went to England for a while...
Italy has its strong points: excellent education system, great history, awesome monuments, great night life *in some cities*, people tend to be more willing to help you if you are in need, but right now my feeling is that unless you have a lot of money and you plan to go to Italy just for fun for a while, you'd better look more northward, a friend of mine did his Ph. D. in Dublin, and loved every moment of the two years he spent there.
P.S. Prices quoted are intended to be in US$
In Italian, instead, 'sega' literally means 'an act of (male) masturbation' as in 'go and do yourself a sega'
:)
I don't think I have to mention all the various jokes that have been going around about this
OK, I found the problem (at least in mozilla, I'll retry NS6 ASAP).
I have the proxy set up as 'autoconfigure' which is just a way that simplifies IS's life, since theoretically NS goes to the autoconfig URL, and gets the proxy settings, hosts not to proxy, etc. etc. etc.
Well, it turns out that this feature seems broken in Mozilla, in fact, if I remove the autoconfig, and specify the proxy server manually, everything works just fine. I will try this on NS6 as soon if it finishes downloading.
yep, that was it, now even NS6 works
Just out of curiosity, I downloaded a mozilla nightly, and I get exactly the same uncaught exception error, so after all it's not really netscape's fault.
I will submit a bugzilla entry right away.
What about making the installer application proxy-aware ? I am behind a fairly fascist firewall that doesn't allow anything through (I have to use a proxy for http) and obviously the installer application just hangs.
:: chrome://navigator/content/navigator.js :: OpenBookmarkURL :: line 714" data: no]
. xul
Fortunately the ftp site also carries the big tar file which I could download easily (and much faster than I thought, very close to 100KB/s average)
That said my first impression is not that good since besides taking like years to start up (on a p3-550 w/ 128 megs) every time I try to access a site, *any* site, I get the following
got a request
JavaScript error:
line 0: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIBrowserInstance.loadUrl]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame
JavaScript error:
chrome://navigator/content/sessionHistoryUI.js line 150: gURLBar has no properties
If the URL is typed in directly I just get the gURLBar error, and not the previous one, in any case it doesn't work.
Also interesting that opening up the preferences dialog gives this on the console
we don't handle eBorderStyle_close yet... please fix me
*** panel to load is = chrome://communicator/content/pref/pref-navigator
*** queueing up a panel...
this is on a fairly vanilla RH 7 box, which should have been QA'd by the NS folks I think... the second time I ran this abomination it doesn't even give me an error, it just refuses to load any page (I still get the errors if I click on the bookmarks tho).
An interesting tidbit, the default setting is to *save* all the data from previously submitted forms and passwords to sites (check in the preferences), and you can even display that previously entered data. If you leave your netscape unattended, prepare to be burned (IE at least *asks* you the first time if you want to save the passwords/form data)
I read the webpage, but it doesn't say if it will finally support the Sorensen codec for quicktime or not (biggest reason to browse in windows besides windows media player).
On a related note, does anybody know if it is at all possible (via wine or something) to listen to windows media player streams in Linux ? I find that honestly Realplayer streams blow chunks, and I would really love to listen tp WMP streams instead (www.com is a perfect example)
thanks for the tip, I did not remember I could do that (configure /. for this exclusion).
BTW, re: monopoly, I don't think that the PC has such a monopoly, there are PCs, macs, windows ce, palm, sun, hp, and many other hardware platforms to choose from.
I don't want to flame, but with all of the really important stuff that is happening in the world (even if we restrict it to the tech world) why does /. have to keep bringing up the Amiga ?
What is the point ? Even if Amiga wasn't dead (which by all practical means it is) nobody besides some fanatics/zealots really care about it !
This reminds me of a 70 years old guy going on about his high-school lover without realizing that like 50 years have passed and everybody else has moved on.
Wake up and smell the cappuccino please.
This surprises me, do you have any examples ? After all, if I look at a map, I expect it to be *accurate* and not to contain bogus information.
;)
Unless of course they stick these nonexistant features in quasi-unpopulated areas
Yep that was it (the 1999 article) for some reason I thought I saw it much longer ago ;)
thanks for the great reference !
If you want to have examples of obfuscated circuitry, you only have to look at satellite smart cards.
I don't know about the situation here in North America, but while I was living in Europe the piracy of the cards was rampant, and I've read several articles that explained how satellite companies were trying to prevent people from reverse engineering their card.
I wish I could find the article online (it was on a magazine), it was a very interesting read, since these cards have a significant amount of logic, for example, whose purpose is just to foil any possible reverse engineering: and I am talking *hardware* reverse engineering, and no, just covering everything up in tar won't be enough with the current investigative tools...
Several times through this discussion it has been mentioned that without insurance one is not able to get a mortgage.
Where does this happen ? I bought my house last year here in Canada and nobody ever asked me if I had a life insurance or if I wanted one...
Could you please include a link or some pointers on where to find more info on this practice ? Being a donor myself I am really interested.
Let me see, I bet I have had more HIV tests than the average person, why ? because every time I donate blood I get one ;)
I sure hope, BTW, that they won't start testing for other things behind my back, genetic profiling, whether it's done by the government, by the insurance companies, etc. is always bad.
So, the chip is much slower than the p3, and extrapolating from the provided numbers, if you fit it with a real screen (not the ridiculous PDA size this benchmark has been run with) it sucks almost as much power as the aforementioned vanilla p3 notebook, and probably more or less the same as a p3 notebook at half of the Crusoe's clock speed (since that's a comparable speed given its performance).
/. community is much more forgiving.
Can anybody explain me what's the point of all the hoopla that has been going on about this ? If Intel or AMD created a processor like this they would be fried and grilled here, but since it's Linus' employer I have the feeling that the
Don't get me wrong, from a company that has never produced CPUs the Crusoe is an excellent first product, but I fail to see why this should be hailed as the second coming or something.
Am I being too cynical ?
I see your point of view, so I assume you would also agree to the following forms of free speech without any restrictions of age or form (think spots on TV etc.)
* Pornography of any kind (need I provide examples ?)
* Revisionism (The holocaust is a bunch of lies)
* Hate speech (Homosexuals should die)
* Pro drugs speech (Drugging yourself is good )
* Blackmailing (If you don't do what I want I will tell about that interesting thing that happened in your company the other day)
* Sexual harassment (need I provide examples ?)
and so on, and so on.
From your line of reasoning it follows that in our society we do not have free speech, since the above mentioned things are regulated, and personally I'd like it to remain that way.
Free speech is a right unless it infringes on anybody else's rights I can utter sexist remarks all I want in my bathroom, but if I do it repeatedly in the workplace I can get charged with sexual harassment (and that's a good thing) because those sexist remarks infringe on my coworker's liberty of not feeling threatened.
Now we can discuss all day on which liberties deserve protection (a non smoker thinks that they have the right not to have smokers around, while a smoker thinks they have the right to smoke wherever they please) but IMHO free speech and regulated speech are not mutually exclusive.
Come on guys
/. is not a traditional news site, but a snide remark like so Sega is being very uncool. I think they're just pissed that only like 9 people bought dreamcasts *grin* reeks a lot of Sony fanboy-ism...
let's use an analogy to real life: what if you had a site like drugnews.com, that tells you everything about the newest drugs released, their latest effects, and maybe has a forum with various people who know how to get those drugs and whom you can email etc.
or an even better analogy: what if there was a site like stolengoods.com, where you see the booties of recent robberies, again with the message boards etc. how would you feel if you had been robbed and you saw your stuff traded on the site ? I bet you'd get pissed, wouldn't you ?
Like I said, I am all for free speech, but these sites IMHO are crossing the line: there is no reason for a law abiding citizen, somebody that doesn't pirate games, to go on these sites, and there is no reason for these sites to exist besides helping piracy and making money off it (via banner ads etc.).
Free speech is a right, but helping people commit crimes is not a right.
I am also appalled at the quality of the post, I mean, I know that
Short of having the measuring company installing a sealed black box that counts the request and bounces it right back to the website I don't see many other ways to do it if the server operator is malicious.
Of course some sanity could be put in the data if the usage bandwidth from the site's upstream provider is taken into account (5 million hits and you transferred only 2 megs ? hmmmm) pity that obviously this data is usually not publicized or available to third parties for obvious reasons. (so you pay 5$/gig upstream and you charge me 10$/gig if I go over my quota eh ?)
I am sure, though, that through the wonders of reverse engineering, IP spoofing etc. it could be possible to foil even black boxes, I mean, how much would it take to just take a machine in the office, connect it to the black box and send http requests crafted so that they appear to be from other IPs ? If the site owner has physical access to the site's hardware this would be really easy to pull off.
It would be more complicated if one had just a colocated box or a virtual host, but even then with some 3l33t h4x0r skills one could make the black box's head spin in whatever direction one wants...
The web, though, is very interesting in this respect, because unlike in the TV case (where you have to count the viewers at the viewers' location) it is theoretically feasible to do a precise, repeatable and cost effective analisys by monitoring only the point of origin, which means that the money that would go into finding an acceptable demographic group, providing them with set top boxes that analyze their habits etc. one could invest all of this in creating one single monitoring device installed at the site's location.
On a related note, I have a digital cable set top box, and I am sure that behind my back the cable company is collecting my viewing habits (I mean, how hard could that be ? the digital set top box already connects to their network to download programming information and it has a unique ID) anybody knows more about this ? My cable company is pushing heavily the digital set tops even towards people interested only in basic cable, and I don't think they are doing it for charity...
The mass is equivalent to two million suns, the size, according to the article, IIRC, is approximately the orbit of mars.
why so much hostility ? I never really understood why people can be so much more hostile online than in real life... maybe it's that people are hostile in real life as well, but the repercussions for showing it are much higher than in the impermanent internet world... (not that the real world is permanent at all, nithya is the right word IIRC ;)
BTW I am not karma whoring, I am honestly interested, if anybody ever saw anywhere websites that contain studies on the above, dissertations, whatever, please post with the link.