The media and political worlds seem to have learned to accept names like Sri Lanka (was Ceylon), Myanmar (was Burma), and even the Congo -> Zaire -> Congo name changes. I've even seen publications use "Brasil" rather than "Brazil". And we've partially accepted the fact that there's no "the" in the name of "Ukraine", since the Ukrainian language doesn't even have a definite article. This shows that we are capable of adjusting our idea of a country's name, to within the limits of English phonology and our illogical spelling system.
So maybe it's time that we learn of the small country whose actual name is "Sakartvelo", and give up on the bizarre "Georgia" misnomer. We should be able to handle the correct name, since it's not terribly difficult to pronounce.
OTOH, it is occasionally useful for this sort of humor. And it's useful over there as an example of the Western world's contempt for insignificant small countries. "They can't even be bothered to learn our name. Oh, well; at least they don't call us by an insulting name, as they do with some other countries."
Another mildly humorous example is what you get if you ask wikipedia about "Sakartvelo".
Most of the people who release their code under the GPL display a woeful lack of understanding of what the license actually says. Even on Slashdot usually the people most vocally advocating the GPL don't actually understand what it says.
This isn't anything special to "open source" licenses. It's a property of nearly every legal agreement. If you've ever hung out with any lawyers, you've probably heard them comment that they don't know what a law or contract really means, and the only way of knowing is to ask a court to decide. And if you're not legally trained in a particular branch of law, there's really no way you can ever understand the actual meaning of legal language. The language may sound straightforward to you, but a lot of the words have different meanings in legal language than they do in everyday English.
And this situation isn't special to legal language. It's a property of every technical subject, which always has a "jargon" in which many words have more precise meaning than in everyday speech. In the computer field, an extreme example of this is "hack" and its derived forms. To us tech geeks, it's a term of approval, while to the general population, it refers to anti-social or criminal behavior.
There's a similar extreme example in physics: "quantum". To a physicist, this generally refers to the smallest change possible, while to everyone else it usually means a very large change. Thus, some time ago I read a news article that referred to the subject's "quantum leap" in income. My reaction was to wonder if their income (annual? monthly?) had actually increased by $0.01, but of course this wasn't what was meant at all. The quantum of US money is the penny, but that was almost certainly not what the journalist writer meant by the term.
Those examples are basically silly, of course, because there's no special harm from the failure of most people to understand such technical terms. But legalese is an interesting case, because it potentially effects all of us. With legalese, people have to use the language despite their inability to fully understand its meaning. And the technical people (lawyers) often can't even give correct explanations of the meaning, because a court may be required to decide (after the fact) what a legal statement actually means.
Except Gmail encourages you to use tags, which are functionally no different to folders/directories if you just use one.
There's no different even if you use multiple tags, as far as I can tell.
The implementation is easy: If the user tags message inbox/123 with "foo" and "bar", the software creates directories tags/foo and tags/bar, and links the message file into both. Finding the tags for message 123 is `ls tags/*/123` and stripping out the "tags/" and "/123" strings.
If your file system supports multiply-linked files, this is a trivial task. It's pretty much why the original Bell Labs unix implemented multiply-linked files. This obviates most of the common uses of databases, if programmers understand how to use it.
So what can you do with tags that can't be done trivially with linking? Maybe I've been missing something important (or at least useful).
It's fairly widely understood among programmers that "folder" and "tag" are simply synonyms for "directory", invented to make it look like some new paradigm was at work. In most cases, their only advantage is being shorter words. But programmers tend to use "dir" for "directory", which wins that contest, too.
WTF? What geek or nerd would even read a PPP, much less trust anything in it?
And is it even possible to transfer actual information via Power Point? I've heard rumors that it can be done, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually do it.
AT&T doesn't care. They don't have to. They're the phone company.
Anyway, why would you use your ISP's nameservers? They're usually among the slowest available in your net neighborhood. Do a bit of research (such as asking local geek friends), and pick a couple that respond faster.
The Clinton administration did far, far worse. Such as using the FBI to perform investigations on suspected members of the "vast rightwing conspiracy".
Actually, if you check the history books, you'll find that the FBI has pretty much always been a political investigative agency. Google for "Palmer Raids" to read of its founding. Then look into the hunt for "communists" and "subversives" during the Cold War. It's true that they have occasionally gotten involved in investigating actual criminal activity, but that can easily be seen as a sort of "cover" to lend them some legitimacy. Most of their crime-fighting reputation comes from Hollywood, not from their real history.
For Clinton to use the FBI this way wasn't an anomaly; he was using them for what they were created to do.
(And the FBI wasn't really any more effective against the right-wing conspirators than they were against the commie subversives.;-)
Countries that fail to have this distinction are, by and large, third world banana republics where every change in administration brings a vast amount of hiring and firing, and is usually accompanied by patronage, corruption, and incompetence. Until recently, that was not how America's federal government was run. Now, I worry the major distinction is that we can't really grow bananas here.
Don't worry so much. The Bush administration has done a commendable job of delaying any action on the climate change (aka global warming) problem. Soon, bananas will be a major crop in much of the US, not just in Hawaii and southern Florida.
However, it is currently law and members of the executive clearly broke that law knowingly and with intent. Is that the kind of behavior you expect from your elected leaders?
The only difference is the repubs just spend the money while the Dems tax you before hand.
My favorite commentary on this was in a Doonesbury comic a few years back. One character was arguing that there's no longer any difference between Democrats and Republicans. Another character replied that there was: When the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong.
As far as I can tell, if the makers of Scrabulous change the name and remove all trademark infringing IP like the game board, they can re-release the game.
Yeah; that was what I suggested. Actually, I think they should do something better: Make part of a game's parameters the board size, and maybe a few other variables like the number of double/triple letter/word squares, and the number of letters that you start with. That way, users could tailor a game for their personal interests. You could get a small board for a quick game, and a big board for a long game with many players.
There is some precedent to this in traditional games. Thus, I've seen some "childrens'" go boards that are a lot smaller than the standard go board. Few 5-year-olds have the patience for a standard game of go, but a 7x7 or 9x9 board would work for them, and teach them strategy that will be useful when they graduate to the full-size board. I once taught a bunch of kids to play go on a checker board, using about 3 sets of checkers, and playing on the intersections as usual, giving a 9x9 board. They had a lot of fun with it.
Also, I once had some Russian-speaking friends who combined a Russian Scrabble set with an English set. Their rules were that the letters could be used in both languages as the letters that they look like. Thus, the English H could be used as a Russian N in two intersecting words, because they look the same. But they only got the number of points printed on the tile. Letter glyphs that didn't exist in both language could be used only in that language's words. So for example you couldn't use a Russian sha or ya in an English word, and you couldn't use an English N or R in a Russian word (not even as an I or ya;-). Their one complaint was that the combined set had too many letters for the board. They talked about making a board that was several cells wider, but I don't think they ever did it. They just ended the game when nobody could make any more words with their letters.
I'd bet that they'd like a Scrabulous site that gave them the ability to play on a larger board than the standard Scrabble board.
Actually, if you murder a US government employee, you can be tried in federal courts and sent to a federal prison. I've read that murdering someone with diplomatic immunity is also handled by the feds, which sorta makes sense.
But yeah, most murders are tried by the state in which they're committed.
There was a funny case many decades ago, in which someone shot and killed someone in another state. I think they were California and Nevada, but I could be wrong. Anyway, it turned out that the law in the state that the bullet was fired from said that the case had to be tried in the jurisdiction where the death occurred, while the other state's law said that the trial had to be in the jurisdiction where the killer was. So both states' laws said that the trial had to be in the other state. They changed the wording of their laws very soon after that, of course, but that killer couldn't legally be tried anywhere.
(Hmmm... I wonder where I read that. I also wonder whether I could find it again, perhaps online. It's a fun example of why the exact wording can sometimes be important.)
If you're running a network and you already have UNIX systems on the network, why on earth would you even consider OS X?
Hey, go back and look at the message that I was originally responding to. The OP explicitly recommended a Mac OSX server for small shops with little net expertise. My post was an explanation of why I thought this was a bad idea. So don't try to accuse me of recommending the very thing I was arguing against.;-)
Fact is, Microsoft and Apple are marketing their systems as a good way to do "Internet Sharing". They are marketing this explicitly to people who wouldn't know a DHCP server from a word processor. If we want to fight this, we need people who have tried it and can explain why it's a bad idea. And that's effectively what I've been doing.
A few years back, there were a lot of comments in the unix/linux arena about how OSX was an interesting new unixoid system, and we should all get acquainted with it. So I did. If I hadn't got one and tried to use it as a server system, I'd have no idea why it's a bad idea. All the PR (and no small number of the/. crowd) encouraged such things. It's not bad as a workstation (and a lot better than Windows), but it has serious drawbacks as a server.
So far, I've managed to get enough experience with OSX that I've successfully persuaded the managers of a number of projects to avoid OSX for any uses but personal workstation. And I've had the fun of explaining to any number of people why they're having so much trouble rsyncing their Mac with the other machines around them. I've warned them that they'd never solve the problems (partly because some of the code is proprietary and unavailable; partly because the internal docs suck). Quite a number of people have eventually told me that they should have listened, because they never have fixed all the problems.
You can't give people good consulting advice on such things unless you've considered them and, in some cases, attempted them. Well, yes you can, but it takes studying others' attempts and taking their stories seriously. But when I started investigating OSX maybe 5 years ago, I couldn't find any of that. All I could find was glowing PR suggesting the very thing that I've been arguing against here (and which you've accused me of supporting;-).
Oh, well; it's not the first time. I've also, for example, worked on SNMP in the past, and implemented a couple of SNMP agents. They can be good tools for the things they were designed for. I've also been to many interviews where they ask me about using SNMP in their package. I go into a detailed explanation of why it's a really bad idea for them. Their conclusion is that I know a lot about SNMP, so they'd like me to implement their agent for them. "Uh, I think you missed something important in what I was explaining..."
[P]urchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"
Well, consider that the US Constitution says that patent and copyright laws are to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and doing a better job than Hasbro would certainly satisfy the "promote the Progress" part, I'd think that's what the Constitution's authors intended.
Of course, you could question the "useful" part when the issue is a game like Scrabble. But that would be petty, wouldn't it?
Still, I'd think that if someone copies a commercial product and improves on it, the laws should support the people who did the improving. Maybe impose some sort of "mechanical license" between the two parties, as is done with with some performances of music, giving both parties a standard portion of the profits.
We've had a problem from the very beginning of patent and copyright, that the owner can (and usually does) use the law to block further progress. If we really want that Progress that the Constitution promised us, we need laws that prevent things like what Hasbro has just done, and what many others have done before them.
Of course, in this case it's primarily a trademark issue. So it'll be interesting to see how Hasbro reacts to a re-release of Scrabulous under another name that doesn't sound like a derivative of Scrabble.
My guess is you were using a codepage instead of Unicode.
Hmmm... I don't grok that at all. If you're using Unicode, you must be using at least one codepage, right? That's how Unicode is organized. Obviously I don't understand something.
I do have a number of test files that contain mixtures of languages, including the worst cases like Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. And some of them contain chars above U+FFFF. It's, uh, interesting to see which apps on which systems can display chars with 5-digit hex codes. Thus, among browsers, firefox 3.0 is slightly edging out opera 9.51 on my Mac, and all the other of my dozen browsers are a bit behind. Meanwhile, Terminal wins over both for codes under U+FFFF, but totally fails for higher codes.
Unicode is the future, convert now or die.:)
Yeah; I've been doing that. Now if we could only use Unicode/UTF-8 here on/.;-)
I have seen warnings that OSX's file names do something weird (can't quite remember what) with combining chars. It might be that you can't use some precombined chars, only the expanded multi-char forms, but I'm probably wrong. I've seen a lot of garbling of marked Latin1 chars, and it might be an example of this, but I don't understand what's happening or how to fix it.
It'd be nice to find a good forum where one can ask dumb questions about i18n on various platforms without being flamed for being an idiot. I've found a lot of forums, but most of my (and others') questions seem to go unanswered on all of them. I have a query out on ubuntuforums.org right now about Chinese and Arabic text in uxterm, but it's not getting any answers. Maybe later, though.
You're probably right. And a check I just did might explain why. There's a "Mac HD" icon on my background, so I pointed at it and did a CMD-I. A "Mac HD Info" window popped up, and part way down is the line "Format: "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".
I note that this doesn't match any of the format names that people have used here. There's nothing that abbreviates to the "HF" at the start of any of the format names. That "Extended" is most likely abbreviated to 'X', but it could be '+'. There is (as far as I can tell) just one partition, the machine boots, and someone said that OSX can't boot from a "HFX" partition, so it probably isn't that. Or "df -a" isn't listing all the partitions. Or I'm not reading df's output correctly.
This is one of the ongoing problems I've found when asking questions about things inside the Mac. Many parts of the system seem to have several different names, depending on which app or doc you're looking at. I'm guessing that "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" is a synonym for "HFS+", but I can't verify that, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong. And if I use the wrong abbreviation, the result is a discussion of my knowledge of Apple's confusing terminology, not of whatever question I was asking. This materially slows down the process of getting useful information.
But for the purposes of this discussion, it's just one more example of why I objected to the recommendation of Mac OSX as a server for a small site with little net expertise. I've been using this Mac for going onto 5 years now, and I keep stumbling across such problems. You could argue that it's because I'm too stupid to learn the system. But note that if you say that, you're supporting my contention that OSX isn't suitable for people like me.
And there is evidence that I'm not all that stupid. I've set up various sorts of network servers using linux, solaris, HP-UX, and various other unixoid systems. All have had their problems, but I haven't had nearly as many problems with any of them that I've had with OSX. If a dummy like me can set up a linux server in a few hours so that it works, but can't do the same with OSX after several years of futzing with them, the simplest explanation is that OSX is materially more difficult for such tasks that is linux. Apple's "extensions" to the file system (caseless matching, extended properties,...) also cause ongoing problems, mostly because they're not clearly documented anywhere that's easy to find. The reason behind this can apparently be summarized as "Don't worry your pretty little head about it." This can be a rather frustrating reply to someone who's trying to learn.
So for a small shop with little net expertise, I'd still suggest that OSX isn't a good choice. Such people are more likely to be happy (or at least less frustrated) with a linux-based system.
(I've looked over various people's shoulders when they were trying to set up a MS Windows-based server. I'd have to agree that OSX would be far better than that. The amount of swearing in such tasks can be truly impressive. But such people usually can't be persuaded that they should consider alternatives. Or they're stuck with what their boss ordered them to use.;-)
If you don't know much about those topics then you shouldn't be running a server operating system in the first place. You should either hire someone who does know these things or you should just get a hardware network appliance where you don't need to know much about servers.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that Apple and Microsoft are both selling systems to novices that provide something called "Internet Sharing", i.e., several computers using a single ISP modem with a single IP address. They and other people, including the OP to my first message, are recommending these for use by people with no net expertise at all. You seem to have just said that this is a bad idea, which is also what I said.
However, ISPs are providing service with a single IP address, and people are buying multiple gadgets that all want to use the Internet. They WILL be hooking them all up to that single modem, and they WILL be following (mostly) Microsoft's or (sometimes) Apple's instructions to turn on Internet Sharing.
And no, they will NOT be hiring an expert to do the job. That would cost several times what their gadgetry cost. Also, Microsoft and Apple say they don't need the expert; they can do it themselves by just checking one box.
Well, not in our house. I have a linux box that runs iptables and NAT and DHCP and maradns and a few other things. That seems to work pretty well. But I'm not expert enough to figure out how to make a Mac do the job right. I'm not saying nobody should; I'm just suggesting that maybe they shouldn't unless they know more about it than I do.;-)
Where the hell did you even find an HFS volume? That's like worrying about compatibility with FAT16.
It came on the disk inside my Mac Powerbook about 4.5 years ago.
(And it also came on the returned disk in the PB some months later.;-)
Back then, Apple gave vague, unspecific warnings that some Mac apps wouldn't work right on a caseless file system. Dunno if they claim to have fixed it. The PB is still running (and I'm typing on it right now), but it's mostly relegated to "network appliance" status. It no longer gets used for serious attempts at software or web-site development.
But it's pretty good for running the dozen or so browsers that I have installed. And the funny thing is that some of those browsers can handle file names that the Mac apps can't. I'm not sure I want to waste more time banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why. It's clear that the machine is unsuitable for use by someone as inexpert as me.
(And note that my original comment was in response to a suggestion that a Mac would be a good network server for a small shop with little net expertise. Unless you have a lot more expertise than I do, I'd recommend against it. It might be OK for an expert Internet hacker, but it's not suitable for use by novices. You're expected to understand things like file-system formats, NAT, DHCP, etc. If you don't, you don't get answers, you just get insults for your lack of understanding. Read the other replies to my message for examples. Those replies show quite well why a novice shouldn't be trying it.;-)
Hmm... I don't think I'd recommend a Mac OSX machine for a server, especially to a small site without technical expertise. When I tried this a couple of years ago, it took me the longest time to figure out why not only that machine, but also a lot of machines in the neighborhood, were so flakey.
One of the issues was the "Internet Sharing" buzz phrase. If you google that now, you'll find lots of warnings that if you enable this in OSX, it silently starts up a DHCP server. If there's already a DNCP server anywhere on the local network, you now have two of them battling it out, and the symptoms aren't something I'd wish on anyone but a networking expert. Apple's CS people were supremely unhelpful, too. They just made it clear that my problem was that we were running non-Apple equipment on the network, and we would have to shut them off before they could diagnose the problem. Yeah, right. I shut the OSX box off instead, and then started learning what it took to explain why that fixed the other machines' problems. If you're a novice, you really don't need a rogue DHCP server on your network. When the other users figure out that it's on your machine, they will not be very friendly.
I've also experimented with an OSX web server. The main problem here is that OSX does funky things with file names, starting with their "caseless" feature. This works if everything was developed on OSX. But if you're running a web server, you're probably going to be including things from other machines in the vicinity. If they're not OSX, you'll go crazy trying to figure out what's going on with the file names. And you probably won't be able to fix it.
The conventional answer you get from the OSX folks is to run the HFS+ file system, which supports case. Well, I tried that. It turns out you have to reformat the disk for HFS+; you can't just flip a bit to turn HFS into HFS+. I did that, and reloaded from backup. Then a couple months later, we had some problems with the disk. I sent it off to Apple for diagnosis, and it came back apparently fixed. Actually, they had replaced it with a new disk, and they copied all our files over. It was formatted as HFS. Oooops! This happened a couple of times with other Macs, so it seems to be a systemic problem. Pointing out to them that you're using HFS+ has no effect.
And even with HFS+, there are some funky file naming problems that I don't understand. I saw a lot of cases where an rsync would produce strange file names on just the OSX system. Linux, Solaris, *BSD systems, and usually even Windows could rsync back and forth, and they'd end up with the same file names (though Windows would proceed to ignore case and get the wrong files at times). But on OSX, we'd see non-ASCII chars simply garbaged with no obvious pattern.
So unless you know that you'll never want to copy directories full of files from a non-OSX machine, I'd advise against using OSX as a serious server. It won't work, and Apple's people won't cooperate with diagnosing the problems. (And you'll just get insults if you mention it here on/.;-). Save yourself the headaches and wasted weekends, and build a server with a real unix-type file system that accepts any bit patterns except '/' and NUL in file names without damaging them.
(And I have occasionally wished that I could use '/' and NUL in file names. I wonder if there's a system that allows all 256 8-bit bytes in a file name...;-)
(And I wonder if there are linux systems that do "intelligent" things with file names. If so, should we also be warning people to avoid them as servers?)
So how do we know what people are measuring when they claim that country C has some number U of internet users? I can't tell from this or any other article I've seen on the topic how they define a user. As far as I can tell, they don't distinguish a person who has used the Internet once from a person who works full time on the Internet.
Is there any actual meaning to such supposed measurements? Or should we just consider them as meaningless PR?
The Chinese authorities will do nothing about this as long as the mob is enforcing its Maoist goals. That will happen as long as the government still has popular support (which it continues to have, unfortunately).
Yeah, probably. But this attitude long predates Maoism, going back to Confucianism which emphasizes this sort of social control. And lots of people are pointing out that the current Chinese rulers are Maoist about like American rulers are Christian: They use the words for their social effects, but their behavior says they don't believe the ideology at all. Both China and the US are now effectively run by the corporate capitalist crowd, no matter what language they use to mask their real goals.
It's common for Chinese people to suggest that in most situations, they have a lot more freedom than people in most Western countries. Their explanation is that the Chinese government only pays attention to people who do something that's directly threatening to the governing clique's power. But other than that, the rulers don't much care what you do. The masses are mostly invisible from the top. It's only by speaking up publicly that you get their attention.
Of course, the down side of this lassez faire attitude from the authorities is that it enables the sort of vigilante activity that we're talking about. People know that, as long as it's not political activity, they can get away with it without punishment. (As long as you don't do something criminal enough to get the attention of the local police.;-) At least that seems to be the explanation from a lot of Chinese.
One of the interesting bits of Chinese government crackdowns is their highly-publicized attempts to do something about the difficulties in driving around the Beijing area. Part of this is about making the streets safer for visitors during the Olympics. The fun aspect is their attempts to fix the often charming "Chinglish" translations on street signs, replacing them with something that actually makes sense in English. A few days ago, there was a nice example of how successful this has been. This site has lots of other great examples, but this one is fun because it's actually a new sign talking about the Olympics.
FWIW, I decided to google that phrase, and was disappointed that "human flesh search engine" got only 755 hits. It seemed funny that there would be so little mention of it online, so I tried hunting down the actual Chinese phrase. Translating it back to Chinese took a minute or so, mostly because there's no "engine" in the Chinese. The phrase turns out to be "", which will probably be garbled by/.'s software (and it's time for another request for permission to use UTF-8;-). The pinyin is "ren2 rou4 sou1 suo3" -- and the Chinese 4-char phrase gets 4,930,000 hits. To put these numbers in some sort of perspective, the 2-char Chinese term for the Olympics gets 17.8 million hits.
So in Chinese, it's apparently a hot topic. I don't read Mandarin well enough to decode much of it, but what little I could follow made it clear that it's considered what we might call "social pathology" by the Chinese writers, too.
And we might note that this isn't primarily something being done to "dissidents" by the Chinese authorities. It's mostly a case of "vigilante action", carried out by people who know they'll get away with it because the authorities aren't particularly interested.
And it's hardly anything unique to Chinese society. This sort of vigilante action is common anywhere that the authorities permit it. It's common wherever there's a particular dominant religious group. But it's not particularly tied to religion. That BBC article is about a woman who was complaining about the TV coverage of the Sichuan earthquake disaster. It was interfering with her access to entertainment. Her attitude was "Who cares about those people? Give me back my TV shows." For some reason, her extreme callous attitude seems to have offended a lot of people.
It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, the Chinese authorities do about this sort of mob rule. Lessee, would I be risking an attack if I predict that they'll do little or nothing?
Slashdot Mirror
The media and political worlds seem to have learned to accept names like Sri Lanka (was Ceylon), Myanmar (was Burma), and even the Congo -> Zaire -> Congo name changes. I've even seen publications use "Brasil" rather than "Brazil". And we've partially accepted the fact that there's no "the" in the name of "Ukraine", since the Ukrainian language doesn't even have a definite article. This shows that we are capable of adjusting our idea of a country's name, to within the limits of English phonology and our illogical spelling system.
So maybe it's time that we learn of the small country whose actual name is "Sakartvelo", and give up on the bizarre "Georgia" misnomer. We should be able to handle the correct name, since it's not terribly difficult to pronounce.
OTOH, it is occasionally useful for this sort of humor. And it's useful over there as an example of the Western world's contempt for insignificant small countries. "They can't even be bothered to learn our name. Oh, well; at least they don't call us by an insulting name, as they do with some other countries."
Another mildly humorous example is what you get if you ask wikipedia about "Sakartvelo".
Most of the people who release their code under the GPL display a woeful lack of understanding of what the license actually says. Even on Slashdot usually the people most vocally advocating the GPL don't actually understand what it says.
This isn't anything special to "open source" licenses. It's a property of nearly every legal agreement. If you've ever hung out with any lawyers, you've probably heard them comment that they don't know what a law or contract really means, and the only way of knowing is to ask a court to decide. And if you're not legally trained in a particular branch of law, there's really no way you can ever understand the actual meaning of legal language. The language may sound straightforward to you, but a lot of the words have different meanings in legal language than they do in everyday English.
And this situation isn't special to legal language. It's a property of every technical subject, which always has a "jargon" in which many words have more precise meaning than in everyday speech. In the computer field, an extreme example of this is "hack" and its derived forms. To us tech geeks, it's a term of approval, while to the general population, it refers to anti-social or criminal behavior.
There's a similar extreme example in physics: "quantum". To a physicist, this generally refers to the smallest change possible, while to everyone else it usually means a very large change. Thus, some time ago I read a news article that referred to the subject's "quantum leap" in income. My reaction was to wonder if their income (annual? monthly?) had actually increased by $0.01, but of course this wasn't what was meant at all. The quantum of US money is the penny, but that was almost certainly not what the journalist writer meant by the term.
Those examples are basically silly, of course, because there's no special harm from the failure of most people to understand such technical terms. But legalese is an interesting case, because it potentially effects all of us. With legalese, people have to use the language despite their inability to fully understand its meaning. And the technical people (lawyers) often can't even give correct explanations of the meaning, because a court may be required to decide (after the fact) what a legal statement actually means.
I would say 9 out of every 10 jobs, that pay 40k or less institute at least a drug test upon the conditional offer of employment.
And roughly 0% of the jobs that pay over $100k require drug tests. If they did, where would employers find anyone that they could hire?
Except Gmail encourages you to use tags, which are functionally no different to folders/directories if you just use one.
There's no different even if you use multiple tags, as far as I can tell.
The implementation is easy: If the user tags message inbox/123 with "foo" and "bar", the software creates directories tags/foo and tags/bar, and links the message file into both. Finding the tags for message 123 is `ls tags/*/123` and stripping out the "tags/" and "/123" strings.
If your file system supports multiply-linked files, this is a trivial task. It's pretty much why the original Bell Labs unix implemented multiply-linked files. This obviates most of the common uses of databases, if programmers understand how to use it.
So what can you do with tags that can't be done trivially with linking? Maybe I've been missing something important (or at least useful).
It's fairly widely understood among programmers that "folder" and "tag" are simply synonyms for "directory", invented to make it look like some new paradigm was at work. In most cases, their only advantage is being shorter words. But programmers tend to use "dir" for "directory", which wins that contest, too.
WTF? What geek or nerd would even read a PPP, much less trust anything in it?
And is it even possible to transfer actual information via Power Point? I've heard rumors that it can be done, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually do it.
-or-
3. you do know of an alternative, but it's from Microsoft.
He should give at&t hell.
AT&T doesn't care. They don't have to. They're the phone company.
Anyway, why would you use your ISP's nameservers? They're usually among the slowest available in your net neighborhood. Do a bit of research (such as asking local geek friends), and pick a couple that respond faster.
The Clinton administration did far, far worse. Such as using the FBI to perform investigations on suspected members of the "vast rightwing conspiracy".
Actually, if you check the history books, you'll find that the FBI has pretty much always been a political investigative agency. Google for "Palmer Raids" to read of its founding. Then look into the hunt for "communists" and "subversives" during the Cold War. It's true that they have occasionally gotten involved in investigating actual criminal activity, but that can easily be seen as a sort of "cover" to lend them some legitimacy. Most of their crime-fighting reputation comes from Hollywood, not from their real history.
For Clinton to use the FBI this way wasn't an anomaly; he was using them for what they were created to do.
(And the FBI wasn't really any more effective against the right-wing conspirators than they were against the commie subversives. ;-)
Countries that fail to have this distinction are, by and large, third world banana republics where every change in administration brings a vast amount of hiring and firing, and is usually accompanied by patronage, corruption, and incompetence. Until recently, that was not how America's federal government was run. Now, I worry the major distinction is that we can't really grow bananas here.
Don't worry so much. The Bush administration has done a commendable job of delaying any action on the climate change (aka global warming) problem. Soon, bananas will be a major crop in much of the US, not just in Hawaii and southern Florida.
However, it is currently law and members of the executive clearly broke that law knowingly and with intent. Is that the kind of behavior you expect from your elected leaders?
Well, yes; it is.
The only difference is the repubs just spend the money while the Dems tax you before hand.
My favorite commentary on this was in a Doonesbury comic a few years back. One character was arguing that there's no longer any difference between Democrats and Republicans. Another character replied that there was: When the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong.
As far as I can tell, if the makers of Scrabulous change the name and remove all trademark infringing IP like the game board, they can re-release the game.
Yeah; that was what I suggested. Actually, I think they should do something better: Make part of a game's parameters the board size, and maybe a few other variables like the number of double/triple letter/word squares, and the number of letters that you start with. That way, users could tailor a game for their personal interests. You could get a small board for a quick game, and a big board for a long game with many players.
There is some precedent to this in traditional games. Thus, I've seen some "childrens'" go boards that are a lot smaller than the standard go board. Few 5-year-olds have the patience for a standard game of go, but a 7x7 or 9x9 board would work for them, and teach them strategy that will be useful when they graduate to the full-size board. I once taught a bunch of kids to play go on a checker board, using about 3 sets of checkers, and playing on the intersections as usual, giving a 9x9 board. They had a lot of fun with it.
Also, I once had some Russian-speaking friends who combined a Russian Scrabble set with an English set. Their rules were that the letters could be used in both languages as the letters that they look like. Thus, the English H could be used as a Russian N in two intersecting words, because they look the same. But they only got the number of points printed on the tile. Letter glyphs that didn't exist in both language could be used only in that language's words. So for example you couldn't use a Russian sha or ya in an English word, and you couldn't use an English N or R in a Russian word (not even as an I or ya ;-). Their one complaint was that the combined set had too many letters for the board. They talked about making a board that was several cells wider, but I don't think they ever did it. They just ended the game when nobody could make any more words with their letters.
I'd bet that they'd like a Scrabulous site that gave them the ability to play on a larger board than the standard Scrabble board.
Actually, if you murder a US government employee, you can be tried in federal courts and sent to a federal prison. I've read that murdering someone with diplomatic immunity is also handled by the feds, which sorta makes sense.
But yeah, most murders are tried by the state in which they're committed.
There was a funny case many decades ago, in which someone shot and killed someone in another state. I think they were California and Nevada, but I could be wrong. Anyway, it turned out that the law in the state that the bullet was fired from said that the case had to be tried in the jurisdiction where the death occurred, while the other state's law said that the trial had to be in the jurisdiction where the killer was. So both states' laws said that the trial had to be in the other state. They changed the wording of their laws very soon after that, of course, but that killer couldn't legally be tried anywhere.
(Hmmm ... I wonder where I read that. I also wonder whether I could find it again, perhaps online. It's a fun example of why the exact wording can sometimes be important.)
If you're running a network and you already have UNIX systems on the network, why on earth would you even consider OS X?
Hey, go back and look at the message that I was originally responding to. The OP explicitly recommended a Mac OSX server for small shops with little net expertise. My post was an explanation of why I thought this was a bad idea. So don't try to accuse me of recommending the very thing I was arguing against. ;-)
Fact is, Microsoft and Apple are marketing their systems as a good way to do "Internet Sharing". They are marketing this explicitly to people who wouldn't know a DHCP server from a word processor. If we want to fight this, we need people who have tried it and can explain why it's a bad idea. And that's effectively what I've been doing.
A few years back, there were a lot of comments in the unix/linux arena about how OSX was an interesting new unixoid system, and we should all get acquainted with it. So I did. If I hadn't got one and tried to use it as a server system, I'd have no idea why it's a bad idea. All the PR (and no small number of the /. crowd) encouraged such things. It's not bad as a workstation (and a lot better than Windows), but it has serious drawbacks as a server.
So far, I've managed to get enough experience with OSX that I've successfully persuaded the managers of a number of projects to avoid OSX for any uses but personal workstation. And I've had the fun of explaining to any number of people why they're having so much trouble rsyncing their Mac with the other machines around them. I've warned them that they'd never solve the problems (partly because some of the code is proprietary and unavailable; partly because the internal docs suck). Quite a number of people have eventually told me that they should have listened, because they never have fixed all the problems.
You can't give people good consulting advice on such things unless you've considered them and, in some cases, attempted them. Well, yes you can, but it takes studying others' attempts and taking their stories seriously. But when I started investigating OSX maybe 5 years ago, I couldn't find any of that. All I could find was glowing PR suggesting the very thing that I've been arguing against here (and which you've accused me of supporting ;-).
Oh, well; it's not the first time. I've also, for example, worked on SNMP in the past, and implemented a couple of SNMP agents. They can be good tools for the things they were designed for. I've also been to many interviews where they ask me about using SNMP in their package. I go into a detailed explanation of why it's a really bad idea for them. Their conclusion is that I know a lot about SNMP, so they'd like me to implement their agent for them. "Uh, I think you missed something important in what I was explaining ..."
It's a funny world.
[P]urchasing the alleged "illegal copy" of their game would have sent the message "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than prosecuting you"
Well, consider that the US Constitution says that patent and copyright laws are to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and doing a better job than Hasbro would certainly satisfy the "promote the Progress" part, I'd think that's what the Constitution's authors intended.
Of course, you could question the "useful" part when the issue is a game like Scrabble. But that would be petty, wouldn't it?
Still, I'd think that if someone copies a commercial product and improves on it, the laws should support the people who did the improving. Maybe impose some sort of "mechanical license" between the two parties, as is done with with some performances of music, giving both parties a standard portion of the profits.
We've had a problem from the very beginning of patent and copyright, that the owner can (and usually does) use the law to block further progress. If we really want that Progress that the Constitution promised us, we need laws that prevent things like what Hasbro has just done, and what many others have done before them.
Of course, in this case it's primarily a trademark issue. So it'll be interesting to see how Hasbro reacts to a re-release of Scrabulous under another name that doesn't sound like a derivative of Scrabble.
My guess is you were using a codepage instead of Unicode.
Hmmm ... I don't grok that at all. If you're using Unicode, you must be using at least one codepage, right? That's how Unicode is organized. Obviously I don't understand something.
I do have a number of test files that contain mixtures of languages, including the worst cases like Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. And some of them contain chars above U+FFFF. It's, uh, interesting to see which apps on which systems can display chars with 5-digit hex codes. Thus, among browsers, firefox 3.0 is slightly edging out opera 9.51 on my Mac, and all the other of my dozen browsers are a bit behind. Meanwhile, Terminal wins over both for codes under U+FFFF, but totally fails for higher codes.
Unicode is the future, convert now or die. :)
Yeah; I've been doing that. Now if we could only use Unicode/UTF-8 here on /. ;-)
I have seen warnings that OSX's file names do something weird (can't quite remember what) with combining chars. It might be that you can't use some precombined chars, only the expanded multi-char forms, but I'm probably wrong. I've seen a lot of garbling of marked Latin1 chars, and it might be an example of this, but I don't understand what's happening or how to fix it.
It'd be nice to find a good forum where one can ask dumb questions about i18n on various platforms without being flamed for being an idiot. I've found a lot of forums, but most of my (and others') questions seem to go unanswered on all of them. I have a query out on ubuntuforums.org right now about Chinese and Arabic text in uxterm, but it's not getting any answers. Maybe later, though.
I think you are getting UFS and HFS+ confused.
You're probably right. And a check I just did might explain why. There's a "Mac HD" icon on my background, so I pointed at it and did a CMD-I. A "Mac HD Info" window popped up, and part way down is the line "Format: "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".
I note that this doesn't match any of the format names that people have used here. There's nothing that abbreviates to the "HF" at the start of any of the format names. That "Extended" is most likely abbreviated to 'X', but it could be '+'. There is (as far as I can tell) just one partition, the machine boots, and someone said that OSX can't boot from a "HFX" partition, so it probably isn't that. Or "df -a" isn't listing all the partitions. Or I'm not reading df's output correctly.
This is one of the ongoing problems I've found when asking questions about things inside the Mac. Many parts of the system seem to have several different names, depending on which app or doc you're looking at. I'm guessing that "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" is a synonym for "HFS+", but I can't verify that, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong. And if I use the wrong abbreviation, the result is a discussion of my knowledge of Apple's confusing terminology, not of whatever question I was asking. This materially slows down the process of getting useful information.
But for the purposes of this discussion, it's just one more example of why I objected to the recommendation of Mac OSX as a server for a small site with little net expertise. I've been using this Mac for going onto 5 years now, and I keep stumbling across such problems. You could argue that it's because I'm too stupid to learn the system. But note that if you say that, you're supporting my contention that OSX isn't suitable for people like me.
And there is evidence that I'm not all that stupid. I've set up various sorts of network servers using linux, solaris, HP-UX, and various other unixoid systems. All have had their problems, but I haven't had nearly as many problems with any of them that I've had with OSX. If a dummy like me can set up a linux server in a few hours so that it works, but can't do the same with OSX after several years of futzing with them, the simplest explanation is that OSX is materially more difficult for such tasks that is linux. Apple's "extensions" to the file system (caseless matching, extended properties, ...) also cause ongoing problems, mostly because they're not clearly documented anywhere that's easy to find. The reason behind this can apparently be summarized as "Don't worry your pretty little head about it." This can be a rather frustrating reply to someone who's trying to learn.
So for a small shop with little net expertise, I'd still suggest that OSX isn't a good choice. Such people are more likely to be happy (or at least less frustrated) with a linux-based system.
(I've looked over various people's shoulders when they were trying to set up a MS Windows-based server. I'd have to agree that OSX would be far better than that. The amount of swearing in such tasks can be truly impressive. But such people usually can't be persuaded that they should consider alternatives. Or they're stuck with what their boss ordered them to use. ;-)
If you don't know much about those topics then you shouldn't be running a server operating system in the first place. You should either hire someone who does know these things or you should just get a hardware network appliance where you don't need to know much about servers.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that Apple and Microsoft are both selling systems to novices that provide something called "Internet Sharing", i.e., several computers using a single ISP modem with a single IP address. They and other people, including the OP to my first message, are recommending these for use by people with no net expertise at all. You seem to have just said that this is a bad idea, which is also what I said.
However, ISPs are providing service with a single IP address, and people are buying multiple gadgets that all want to use the Internet. They WILL be hooking them all up to that single modem, and they WILL be following (mostly) Microsoft's or (sometimes) Apple's instructions to turn on Internet Sharing.
And no, they will NOT be hiring an expert to do the job. That would cost several times what their gadgetry cost. Also, Microsoft and Apple say they don't need the expert; they can do it themselves by just checking one box.
Well, not in our house. I have a linux box that runs iptables and NAT and DHCP and maradns and a few other things. That seems to work pretty well. But I'm not expert enough to figure out how to make a Mac do the job right. I'm not saying nobody should; I'm just suggesting that maybe they shouldn't unless they know more about it than I do. ;-)
Where the hell did you even find an HFS volume? That's like worrying about compatibility with FAT16.
It came on the disk inside my Mac Powerbook about 4.5 years ago.
(And it also came on the returned disk in the PB some months later. ;-)
Back then, Apple gave vague, unspecific warnings that some Mac apps wouldn't work right on a caseless file system. Dunno if they claim to have fixed it. The PB is still running (and I'm typing on it right now), but it's mostly relegated to "network appliance" status. It no longer gets used for serious attempts at software or web-site development.
But it's pretty good for running the dozen or so browsers that I have installed. And the funny thing is that some of those browsers can handle file names that the Mac apps can't. I'm not sure I want to waste more time banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why. It's clear that the machine is unsuitable for use by someone as inexpert as me.
(And note that my original comment was in response to a suggestion that a Mac would be a good network server for a small shop with little net expertise. Unless you have a lot more expertise than I do, I'd recommend against it. It might be OK for an expert Internet hacker, but it's not suitable for use by novices. You're expected to understand things like file-system formats, NAT, DHCP, etc. If you don't, you don't get answers, you just get insults for your lack of understanding. Read the other replies to my message for examples. Those replies show quite well why a novice shouldn't be trying it. ;-)
I don't know how an ISP the size of AT&T is not taking this seriously.
"We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."
(Two points for getting the reference. ;-)
Hmm ... I don't think I'd recommend a Mac OSX machine for a server, especially to a small site without technical expertise. When I tried this a couple of years ago, it took me the longest time to figure out why not only that machine, but also a lot of machines in the neighborhood, were so flakey.
One of the issues was the "Internet Sharing" buzz phrase. If you google that now, you'll find lots of warnings that if you enable this in OSX, it silently starts up a DHCP server. If there's already a DNCP server anywhere on the local network, you now have two of them battling it out, and the symptoms aren't something I'd wish on anyone but a networking expert. Apple's CS people were supremely unhelpful, too. They just made it clear that my problem was that we were running non-Apple equipment on the network, and we would have to shut them off before they could diagnose the problem. Yeah, right. I shut the OSX box off instead, and then started learning what it took to explain why that fixed the other machines' problems. If you're a novice, you really don't need a rogue DHCP server on your network. When the other users figure out that it's on your machine, they will not be very friendly.
I've also experimented with an OSX web server. The main problem here is that OSX does funky things with file names, starting with their "caseless" feature. This works if everything was developed on OSX. But if you're running a web server, you're probably going to be including things from other machines in the vicinity. If they're not OSX, you'll go crazy trying to figure out what's going on with the file names. And you probably won't be able to fix it.
The conventional answer you get from the OSX folks is to run the HFS+ file system, which supports case. Well, I tried that. It turns out you have to reformat the disk for HFS+; you can't just flip a bit to turn HFS into HFS+. I did that, and reloaded from backup. Then a couple months later, we had some problems with the disk. I sent it off to Apple for diagnosis, and it came back apparently fixed. Actually, they had replaced it with a new disk, and they copied all our files over. It was formatted as HFS. Oooops! This happened a couple of times with other Macs, so it seems to be a systemic problem. Pointing out to them that you're using HFS+ has no effect.
And even with HFS+, there are some funky file naming problems that I don't understand. I saw a lot of cases where an rsync would produce strange file names on just the OSX system. Linux, Solaris, *BSD systems, and usually even Windows could rsync back and forth, and they'd end up with the same file names (though Windows would proceed to ignore case and get the wrong files at times). But on OSX, we'd see non-ASCII chars simply garbaged with no obvious pattern.
So unless you know that you'll never want to copy directories full of files from a non-OSX machine, I'd advise against using OSX as a serious server. It won't work, and Apple's people won't cooperate with diagnosing the problems. (And you'll just get insults if you mention it here on /. ;-). Save yourself the headaches and wasted weekends, and build a server with a real unix-type file system that accepts any bit patterns except '/' and NUL in file names without damaging them.
(And I have occasionally wished that I could use '/' and NUL in file names. I wonder if there's a system that allows all 256 8-bit bytes in a file name... ;-)
(And I wonder if there are linux systems that do "intelligent" things with file names. If so, should we also be warning people to avoid them as servers?)
So how do we know what people are measuring when they claim that country C has some number U of internet users? I can't tell from this or any other article I've seen on the topic how they define a user. As far as I can tell, they don't distinguish a person who has used the Internet once from a person who works full time on the Internet.
Is there any actual meaning to such supposed measurements? Or should we just consider them as meaningless PR?
They can read /. but can't express their opinions fluently in English.
Tell them that they'll fit right in here.
(Hmm ... What happens if you translate that word-for-word into Chinese characters?)
The Chinese authorities will do nothing about this as long as the mob is enforcing its Maoist goals. That will happen as long as the government still has popular support (which it continues to have, unfortunately).
Yeah, probably. But this attitude long predates Maoism, going back to Confucianism which emphasizes this sort of social control. And lots of people are pointing out that the current Chinese rulers are Maoist about like American rulers are Christian: They use the words for their social effects, but their behavior says they don't believe the ideology at all. Both China and the US are now effectively run by the corporate capitalist crowd, no matter what language they use to mask their real goals.
It's common for Chinese people to suggest that in most situations, they have a lot more freedom than people in most Western countries. Their explanation is that the Chinese government only pays attention to people who do something that's directly threatening to the governing clique's power. But other than that, the rulers don't much care what you do. The masses are mostly invisible from the top. It's only by speaking up publicly that you get their attention.
Of course, the down side of this lassez faire attitude from the authorities is that it enables the sort of vigilante activity that we're talking about. People know that, as long as it's not political activity, they can get away with it without punishment. (As long as you don't do something criminal enough to get the attention of the local police. ;-) At least that seems to be the explanation from a lot of Chinese.
One of the interesting bits of Chinese government crackdowns is their highly-publicized attempts to do something about the difficulties in driving around the Beijing area. Part of this is about making the streets safer for visitors during the Olympics. The fun aspect is their attempts to fix the often charming "Chinglish" translations on street signs, replacing them with something that actually makes sense in English. A few days ago, there was a nice example of how successful this has been. This site has lots of other great examples, but this one is fun because it's actually a new sign talking about the Olympics.
FWIW, I decided to google that phrase, and was disappointed that "human flesh search engine" got only 755 hits. It seemed funny that there would be so little mention of it online, so I tried hunting down the actual Chinese phrase. Translating it back to Chinese took a minute or so, mostly because there's no "engine" in the Chinese. The phrase turns out to be "", which will probably be garbled by /.'s software (and it's time for another request for permission to use UTF-8 ;-). The pinyin is "ren2 rou4 sou1 suo3" -- and the Chinese 4-char phrase gets 4,930,000 hits. To put these numbers in some sort of perspective, the 2-char Chinese term for the Olympics gets 17.8 million hits.
So in Chinese, it's apparently a hot topic. I don't read Mandarin well enough to decode much of it, but what little I could follow made it clear that it's considered what we might call "social pathology" by the Chinese writers, too.
And we might note that this isn't primarily something being done to "dissidents" by the Chinese authorities. It's mostly a case of "vigilante action", carried out by people who know they'll get away with it because the authorities aren't particularly interested.
And it's hardly anything unique to Chinese society. This sort of vigilante action is common anywhere that the authorities permit it. It's common wherever there's a particular dominant religious group. But it's not particularly tied to religion. That BBC article is about a woman who was complaining about the TV coverage of the Sichuan earthquake disaster. It was interfering with her access to entertainment. Her attitude was "Who cares about those people? Give me back my TV shows." For some reason, her extreme callous attitude seems to have offended a lot of people.
It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, the Chinese authorities do about this sort of mob rule. Lessee, would I be risking an attack if I predict that they'll do little or nothing?