Re:for actually using a computer (writing document
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 1
I was helping to teach a typing class in school and there was a kid who did precisely that. He thought that the shift key was broken on all the keyboards he had used because when he pressed the shift and letter key simultaneously (not shift before the letter), it usually came out lowercase. I tried to get him to stop, but the habit had already become ingrained. He's probably still doing it years later.
Assuming you live in the United States, you should be very careful talking about things like this. Jim Bell is in prison right now for, in part, proposing a system to do almost exactly what you're saying. He even solved the "who will administer it" problem. I won't link to it, but Google for "Assassination Politics".
This is one of the most on-target criticisms of NASA's operations that I've seen.
Perhaps it is time to move this effort to the private sector. On the other hand, I would really like to move to Mars (assuming I can get Internet access there), and I don't see a profit-driven operation accomplishing that anytime soon.
The whole patch issue has been addressed. It comes down to the fact that by submitting a patch to a program under a certain licensing structure, you are implictly consenting to have your code licensed under the same structure. Why else would you have submitted the patch? And anyway, any patch that the original author would want to distribute as part of the application is almost certainly a derivitive work under copyright law, and not yours anyway, much like the way a second verse to a copyrighted song isn't yours.
It's not fishy at all. In fact, it's very much what the GPL has in mind. The GPL is about letting people have the freedom to modify the code they run and to distribute those changes, rather than being forced to treat all software as a big black box that they have to beg vendors to fix when it breaks. (Well, that and disclaiming liability.) Giving people the additional freedom to keep those changes secret and still distribute the product is perfectly fine, as long as you wrote all the code (or it was given to you). As the owner of the a program, you have all rights to it, and can give any subset of those rights you want in exchange for anything. There's nothing the GPL can do about that, short of adding a "belongs to RMS" clause.
The GPL is not about keeping money away from code.
Updates to the GPL are going to be about closing the loophole of web applications and the like, not about this.
IIRC, someone did this with video poker in Vegas. A certain series of bet amounts (number of coins inserted) triggered a sure royal flush. They were smart, spread out the wins, and weren't caught for a long time.
There have been a lot of very smart scams that were caught. It makes you wonder how many extremely smart scams were never caught. I remember watching a show about that stuff, and there was a security consultant with this quote: "A casino is the only place in the world where you can steal millions of dollars and if you do it right, no one ever notices that it's missing."
In Windows XP, you get a nice little box informing you that the program caused an error and will be closed and also giving you the option to send a report to Microsoft. It's very similar to Talkback in the Mozilla builds.
This is the perfect example of the divide between us and the rest of the world that I was talking about. To us (including me), illegal on a computer means just what you said, a problem with pointers. But to Grandma, it means the FBI are about to break down the door.
I completely agree. In my opinion, this one sentence has done more to damage the perception of technology among the population of non-techies than any other sentence ever typed into a computer. Microsoft finally fixed it in XP, but that's after over five years of people being scared, not to mention all the 9x installs still out there. Good job, Microsoft.
This is the example I love to use when I use when teaching techies how to communicate with non-techies.
I own and operate the Ultimates, and I didn't know about this until I saw my logs spike from the mini-Slashdotting. (I am an everyday Slashdot reader, just not of Ask Slashdot.) It's really awesome that I got mentioned on Slashdot.
Cliff added the link to nasteric's question. I'm not nasteric. And, of course, I didn't pay for it. Don't be stupid.
No, I mean I'm looking at the Season Pass information, showing which episodes will be recorded. There are check marks next to episodes on multiple channels.
Nope, SPs are definitely not tied to a single channel. I'm looking at Upcoming Episodes for Stargate SG-1 right now, and it covers episodes on three channels (Sci-fi, FOX, and WB).
File locking: The CVS philosophy says you shouldn't use it, so it's a bit obfuscated, but it's still there, in contrib/rcslock.
Code promotion: I don't understand it from your description.
I think "build label"=="release tag", but I'm not entirely sure from your description.
Grouped check-ins: I have *never* had a problem with this, as long as I execute a clean update right before I commit. The CVS database is locked when someone else is checking in, so unless someone is able to get an entire commit done in those seconds between the end of your update and the beginning of your commit, you're fine. If your development team is big enough to make this a real problem, you have bigger things to worry about.
CVS has done everything we need it to, and has saved my butt more than once.
The key to many of the problems is that AOL-TW has lots of money.
1. AOL-TW spends absurd amounts of money for a really nice file converter for every conceivable file type and integrates it into their Linux mail client. Joe will never notice that he doesn't have Word. The method of purchase may be suing MS to get the file type specs, though it might be easier just to do some major reverse engineering. Either way, it's doable. And AOL-TW might release that code to the world just to screw with MS.
2. Joe doesn't go to the mall. Joe's been watching Time Warner Cable, and all they've been doing for the last three months is advertising this great new thing. You just call Time Warner Cable, and they deliver a little box to your house that does everything you need on the Internet, and presto, you're on with blazingly fast speed thanks to integrated Roadrunner technology. Best of all, there's no up-front fee, since Joe doesn't own the box. Joe just pays $x per month, integrated with his existing cable bill. AOL-TW has lots of money to buy one of these boxes for Joe up-front and wait for the investment return.
3. Joe doesn't go to the mall anymore. Instead, he goes to The AOL Store using his great little box and buys a digital camera that carries the AOL-Friendly Logo and works perfectly every time. He just orders it, having it added to his cable bill, and the camera driver RPM is downloaded and installed magically before the camera even gets to his house. Joe doesn't even know what a driver is. And best of all, AOL-TW gets a nice fat commission for every digital camera, or printer, monitor, or CD-R (used of course only for the burning of authorized music files of Atlantic, Elektra, and Rhino labels, added to your cable bill). And Joe better remember that that bill better be paid this month and every month in the future, otherwise he's lost his hardware investment.
It's quite possible. It's not that there aren't problems, it's that AOL-TW has the capital to brute-force most of them and the advertising time to hide the others.
How about this: PS2 KVM Switch. The picture's of a two-way, but there's a 4-way also listed. $29, a dollar under your price. However, the cabling is sold separately.
I reverse engineered the binaries, and came up with this valuable data.
Data compression algorithm:
A JPEG of the sock monkey.
Data decompression algorithm:
The full lyrics to the Goldfinger (James Bond) theme song, namely:
Goldfinger.
He's the man, the man with the midas touch.
A spider's touch.
Such a cold finger.
Beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don't go in.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
The reaction of most people that I talk to about the coming of HDTV is: "You mean I have to buy a new TV?" For people who don't know about the details, all this maneuvering and delaying just makes them more cautious about spending their money. As for myself, I can't say that I'm very impressed with the FCC handling of the transition.
The latest news just shows us that the cable companies already have enough of a foothold to stall indefinitely, and they have obvious motives to do so, since the ultimate goal would be to make it possible to get better-than-current-cable picture quality without purchasing anything, at least in urban areas. At least that's the way I understand the goal, correct me if I'm wrong.
Hey, I was just trying to be funny.
As for myself, I would go with the fumbling phrase-book style manual translation rather than look like a complete clueless American.
In summary, I wouldn't be against the beating.
I think that if you were to walk around a foreign city with a wearable computer that output a computerized voice with the grammatical capability of the Altavista Babelfish, you'd soon be beaten within an inch of your life.
Actually, junk mail gets rates much lower than standard first class mail (at least in the U.S.). Generally, for the standard envelope, the paper spammer pays around 10-15 cents to get it delivered. Of course, it costs more than that to deliver it (the USPS loses money), so the cost is taken out of the 33 (sorry, 34) that we pay for first class. So, in effect, every time you buy a stamp you pay for the privilege of junk mail.
Now, why could that be? Surely it couldn't be the Direct Marketing Association's powerful lobby.
Slashdot Mirror
I was helping to teach a typing class in school and there was a kid who did precisely that. He thought that the shift key was broken on all the keyboards he had used because when he pressed the shift and letter key simultaneously (not shift before the letter), it usually came out lowercase. I tried to get him to stop, but the habit had already become ingrained. He's probably still doing it years later.
Assuming you live in the United States, you should be very careful talking about things like this. Jim Bell is in prison right now for, in part, proposing a system to do almost exactly what you're saying. He even solved the "who will administer it" problem. I won't link to it, but Google for "Assassination Politics".
This is one of the most on-target criticisms of NASA's operations that I've seen.
Perhaps it is time to move this effort to the private sector. On the other hand, I would really like to move to Mars (assuming I can get Internet access there), and I don't see a profit-driven operation accomplishing that anytime soon.
The whole patch issue has been addressed. It comes down to the fact that by submitting a patch to a program under a certain licensing structure, you are implictly consenting to have your code licensed under the same structure. Why else would you have submitted the patch? And anyway, any patch that the original author would want to distribute as part of the application is almost certainly a derivitive work under copyright law, and not yours anyway, much like the way a second verse to a copyrighted song isn't yours.
It's not fishy at all. In fact, it's very much what the GPL has in mind. The GPL is about letting people have the freedom to modify the code they run and to distribute those changes, rather than being forced to treat all software as a big black box that they have to beg vendors to fix when it breaks. (Well, that and disclaiming liability.) Giving people the additional freedom to keep those changes secret and still distribute the product is perfectly fine, as long as you wrote all the code (or it was given to you). As the owner of the a program, you have all rights to it, and can give any subset of those rights you want in exchange for anything. There's nothing the GPL can do about that, short of adding a "belongs to RMS" clause.
The GPL is not about keeping money away from code.
Updates to the GPL are going to be about closing the loophole of web applications and the like, not about this.
IIRC, someone did this with video poker in Vegas. A certain series of bet amounts (number of coins inserted) triggered a sure royal flush. They were smart, spread out the wins, and weren't caught for a long time.
There have been a lot of very smart scams that were caught. It makes you wonder how many extremely smart scams were never caught. I remember watching a show about that stuff, and there was a security consultant with this quote: "A casino is the only place in the world where you can steal millions of dollars and if you do it right, no one ever notices that it's missing."
In Windows XP, you get a nice little box informing you that the program caused an error and will be closed and also giving you the option to send a report to Microsoft. It's very similar to Talkback in the Mozilla builds.
This is the perfect example of the divide between us and the rest of the world that I was talking about. To us (including me), illegal on a computer means just what you said, a problem with pointers. But to Grandma, it means the FBI are about to break down the door.
I completely agree. In my opinion, this one sentence has done more to damage the perception of technology among the population of non-techies than any other sentence ever typed into a computer. Microsoft finally fixed it in XP, but that's after over five years of people being scared, not to mention all the 9x installs still out there. Good job, Microsoft.
This is the example I love to use when I use when teaching techies how to communicate with non-techies.
Cliff added the link to nasteric's question. I'm not nasteric. And, of course, I didn't pay for it. Don't be stupid.
No, I mean I'm looking at the Season Pass information, showing which episodes will be recorded. There are check marks next to episodes on multiple channels.
Nope, SPs are definitely not tied to a single channel. I'm looking at Upcoming Episodes for Stargate SG-1 right now, and it covers episodes on three channels (Sci-fi, FOX, and WB).
File locking: The CVS philosophy says you shouldn't use it, so it's a bit obfuscated, but it's still there, in contrib/rcslock.
Code promotion: I don't understand it from your description.
I think "build label"=="release tag", but I'm not entirely sure from your description.
Grouped check-ins: I have *never* had a problem with this, as long as I execute a clean update right before I commit. The CVS database is locked when someone else is checking in, so unless someone is able to get an entire commit done in those seconds between the end of your update and the beginning of your commit, you're fine. If your development team is big enough to make this a real problem, you have bigger things to worry about.
CVS has done everything we need it to, and has saved my butt more than once.
The key to many of the problems is that AOL-TW has lots of money.
1. AOL-TW spends absurd amounts of money for a really nice file converter for every conceivable file type and integrates it into their Linux mail client. Joe will never notice that he doesn't have Word. The method of purchase may be suing MS to get the file type specs, though it might be easier just to do some major reverse engineering. Either way, it's doable. And AOL-TW might release that code to the world just to screw with MS.
2. Joe doesn't go to the mall. Joe's been watching Time Warner Cable, and all they've been doing for the last three months is advertising this great new thing. You just call Time Warner Cable, and they deliver a little box to your house that does everything you need on the Internet, and presto, you're on with blazingly fast speed thanks to integrated Roadrunner technology. Best of all, there's no up-front fee, since Joe doesn't own the box. Joe just pays $x per month, integrated with his existing cable bill. AOL-TW has lots of money to buy one of these boxes for Joe up-front and wait for the investment return.
3. Joe doesn't go to the mall anymore. Instead, he goes to The AOL Store using his great little box and buys a digital camera that carries the AOL-Friendly Logo and works perfectly every time. He just orders it, having it added to his cable bill, and the camera driver RPM is downloaded and installed magically before the camera even gets to his house. Joe doesn't even know what a driver is. And best of all, AOL-TW gets a nice fat commission for every digital camera, or printer, monitor, or CD-R (used of course only for the burning of authorized music files of Atlantic, Elektra, and Rhino labels, added to your cable bill). And Joe better remember that that bill better be paid this month and every month in the future, otherwise he's lost his hardware investment.
It's quite possible. It's not that there aren't problems, it's that AOL-TW has the capital to brute-force most of them and the advertising time to hide the others.
How about this: PS2 KVM Switch. The picture's of a two-way, but there's a 4-way also listed. $29, a dollar under your price. However, the cabling is sold separately.
I found this in the archives. I wonder when Slashdot gets theirs? =)
Did anyone else imagine the evil supervillain laugh right after this quote?
I reverse engineered the binaries, and came up with this valuable data.
Data compression algorithm: A JPEG of the sock monkey.
Data decompression algorithm: The full lyrics to the Goldfinger (James Bond) theme song, namely:
Goldfinger.
He's the man, the man with the midas touch.
A spider's touch.
Such a cold finger.
Beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don't go in.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
The latest news just shows us that the cable companies already have enough of a foothold to stall indefinitely, and they have obvious motives to do so, since the ultimate goal would be to make it possible to get better-than-current-cable picture quality without purchasing anything, at least in urban areas. At least that's the way I understand the goal, correct me if I'm wrong.
Hey, I was just trying to be funny. As for myself, I would go with the fumbling phrase-book style manual translation rather than look like a complete clueless American. In summary, I wouldn't be against the beating.
The text in the article is a section of the press release translated from English to French and back from French to English with the Fish.
I think that if you were to walk around a foreign city with a wearable computer that output a computerized voice with the grammatical capability of the Altavista Babelfish, you'd soon be beaten within an inch of your life.
Now, why could that be? Surely it couldn't be the Direct Marketing Association's powerful lobby.