Well, I'd think that it would be a requirement of any government that government documents be readable by citizens. Requiring that a citizen buy a particular piece of software from a particular corporation seems rather dubious. I mean, it's true that governments often make under-the-table deals with the fat cats. We all know that. But something so blatant as saying "You are required to use and obey this document, which can only be read by buying software product X from corporation Y" is way beyond the usual government corruption.
I can see the US government being so corrupt that it requires paying money to an American corporation to read US government documents. But I'd think it unlikely that any other government would do this for long. Paying an American corporation to read your own government's documents is just too bizarre.
This is especially true when the American corporation in question has a history of including spyware in its products. This has gotta scare the people in most other governments.
Ultimately, government documents (at least those available to citizens) will have to be in formats that are formatted to published standards, and it has to be legal for citizens to write software that use those formats. Also, the formats have to be stable over the long term, so that documents from decades in the past remain readable. Anything else is a disaster waiting to happen.
Government documents in a proprietary format is something that just can't be viable over the long term.
Remember the discussions a while back about MS patenting some of their XML encoding schemes? This could well be part of a nefarious plot. Sorta like what happened with the GIF format, y'know. We all start writing software that uses some of MS's XML, some of our software is widely used, and then 10 years from now, MS says "Oh, BTW, you're violating several of our patents. Yes, we said you could use the open parts of our XML, but we didn't say you could use the patented parts."
Legalities of such things can be very, very tricky. See also the various discussions here in which people confuse the various kinds of "IP", such as patent, copyright, and trade secret. Permission to use a copyrighted thing is not the same as permission to use a patented thing, and that's different from permission to use a trade secret.
Before doing anything with any MS "IP", it might be wise to consult a good IP lawyer.
Microsoft has been applying for patents at the rate of several per day. This costs time and money. Presumably there's a reason they're doing this.
In the case of giant corporations, paranoia is always in order. They can easily bankrupt the rest of us with legal fees.
1) when using these store discount cards, are only the discounted items kept in store records?
No; the store will usually keep a record of everything that you bought. The purpose is marketing, after all. The more information they have that can be linked to you, the better they can product targetted ads that will encourage you to buy.
2) when paying with credit card, are the stores retaining a list of my purchases linked to my card?
Yes. That's one of the important reasons that credit cards exist. 30 years ago, disk space was expensive, so not everything was kept (and most of it was on tape). Now, terabyte disks are cheap, so there's no reason not to keep any purchase information that can be captured. Chances are that every purchase you've made with a credit/debit card in the past decade is recorded and sitting on a disk somewhere, quickly accessible to marketing software.
So far, tracking a cash purchase is not very feasible. But they're working on it.
Yeah; this running joke is getting to be less true than it used to be. I've noticed mostly that the package sizes seem to be more varied than they used to be. And, of course, there are more supermarkets with deli sections, where you can just ask for N hot dogs. I mostly get Hebrew National dogs, because they taste good. The small ones are 6 per package; the big ones are 4 per package. (And I always add cheese, to cancel the kosherness.;-)
Do you know the purpose of all of the transistors in your television? You paid for them so you must have wanted them, right?
Yes, of course.;-)
(Actually, I've never bought a TV set. My wife came with one, and she has bought a couple more. But since she found out about Netflix, she has stopped using the TV sets, and we're planning to drop the cable service as soon as we can get the bundled phone transferred to a different supplier. Probably sell the TV sets, because she has found that her Mac Powerbook does a better job with DVDs. TV is obsolete, especially since it no longer has news.)
Of course, products are packaged for the majority of users not the minority.
Here in the US, one of the conventional counterexamples is the fact that hot dogs are sold in packages of 10, while the buns are sold in packages of 8.
This is, of course, a running joke, and every stand-up comedian uses it as an example of our economic rationality. But it can be fun to watch people try to explain that this is done because the customers want it that way.;-)
Fact is, marketing is good at coming up with ways of tricking people into buying something different from what they really want. And Microsoft is an example that nearly everyone understands. Just ask them to explain what a lot of the files on their disk are there for. They paid for them, right? So they must have wanted them, right?
Even the dumbest Joe Sixpack understands the cynicism behind this.
Actually, the fuss over links to such articles is even more interesting than the case at hand. They are basically claiming that it's a crime to help people avoid downloading copyrighted material. It's easy to understand why they'd do this, but when you express it this way, it does seem a bit demented.
"You have a legal obligation to download my ads; if you don't, I'll sue you."
I blame the Arabs for inventing the numbers your website uses to connect to the internet so you can spread information about other terrorist sites...
Heh. Very good.
And I might add that there was an interesting article in Scientific American a few years ago, explaining the Mayan numbering system. Among other things, the article pointed out that the Mayan system is much simpler than the Arabic system. Thus, instead of that big multiplication table that you memorized, in the Mayan system you only need to know that 5*5 = 15 (it's a base-20 system). Everything else follows trivially from that, plus the familiar use of a digit's position to indicate a multiple of a power of the base.
So maybe we need to start a campaign to replace the terrorist-oriented Arabic system with the Mayan system. If enough people fall for it, we could end up with a simpler numbering system. Then all that time in grade school spent memorizing tables could be spent learning something else.
We could get a more rational calendar out of it, too.
So, hyperlinks are not illegal, however be careful what you are linking to. If you know that the content is not legit, you are acting in bad faith...
There is an even funnier case of this in American law. It seems that a lot of local (plant) nurseries routinely sell "Asian poppy" plants that are actually opium poppies. It is apparently quite legal to grow these - if you don't know that they're opium poppies. You can't really tell just by looking at them, because there are a lot of very similar poppy species that have insignificant levels of opiates. There have been reports of people who did a check with a botanical manual, verified that the plants in their gardens were opium poppies, publicised the fact, and were arrested. The nursery they bought the plants from weren't prosecuted, of course; they didn't know that they were growing opium poppies. But if you check and find out what species of poppy you are growing, you can instantly become a criminal.
We have some very showy scarlet poppies that come up every year in our yard. I have no intention of checking to see exactly which species they are.
Then there's the funny thing about the hemp seeds that the local pet store sells. Our cockatiels love them, and we buy a few ounces every few months. Supposedly they are pasteurized - to cut down on possible pathogens, of course. But there have been reports of people who sprouted them. The yield was low, but nonzero. The seeds are grown and sold openly, because it's done in a way that's obviously not a drug operation. (And no, our birds don't fly weird or get the munchies when they eat these seeds.;-)
But the law can be weird at times. Both of these are probably just examples of the law acting in a very reasonable manner. Not at all what you'd expect, but it does happen.
He linked to illegally copied files. That means he told people where the illegal files were and enabled them to acquire them.
This is why this case should be classified as a case of the MPAA shooting at their own foot.
Think about it a bit. Someone has provided links to to infringing files. The copyright owner (actually their agent) doesn't go after the site with the copyrighted files; they go after the site that has tipped them off to the infringement.
Lesson: The MPAA doesn't want you to tell them about copyright infringement. If you find such files, you shouldn't put a list of them in a place that the MPAA can easily find. You should just keep quiet. Maybe you can pass the links around to friends in email. But you shouldn't make it easy for the MPAA and their lawyers about the infringement.
Sounds like really foolish policy on the MPAA's part, to me. What sort of idiot would sue someone who tipped them off like this?
Next we'll hear that libraries are being sued by publishers for making their online "card catalogs" available to the public.
Re:I read this and found it to be terribly funny
on
Microsoft in 2008
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I can't see Linus fitting in that kind of a work environment.
Oh, I dunno. I mean, personally, if billg were to offer me $1,000,000 per year (real money, not options;-), and control over who I had working for me, I'd probably agree to lead a port of the Windows environment to linux.
Of course, I'd watch my back, and be ready to jump ship on short notice. I'd be assuming that it was a PR ruse, to be scuttled at some time in the future. I'd be in it for the money, and on the off chance that I could pull it off before they scuttled it.
I can see Linus thinking similarly. And remember his advice to only do something if it's fun. Such a project could be a lot of fun, if you refused to take it seriously and ignored the politics.
Actually, a lot has been written about Microsoft's organizational style. It could be interesting to see the interaction between them and Linus's organizational style. I wouldn't imagine that he would adopt their style...
... but at work I can only access port 80, and I would never try to get around company's security policy...
Huh? That's an insecurity policy.
I've implemented similar policies at a couple of jobs, but the restriction was always to using port 443 (https). That way, various company sites could put things online for use by others in the company, but the packets would be encrypted, so outsiders couldn't spy on them. The firewalls would also put a few limits on the addresses of incoming port-443 connections, too.
Usually we also opened outgoing connections to port 80, because there are lots of things (such as documentation) available online that we needed, at sites that didn't do https. But along with this went an ongoing educational campaign to teach people of the potential problems with unencrypted connections. Mostly this just means teaching them to never fill in any personal information in web forms unless they see that "https://" in the URL field.
And, of course, there's the ongoing effort to make sure that all machines' browsers and mail readers have all scripting turned off. That's really the security biggie, especially if you have people running IE or Outlook. Such users visiting port-80 web sites can be open doors to all sorts of nasty stuff.
They complain loudly, of course. But it's easy enough to create a few company web pages that do nasty (but recoverable) things to people who violate the rules, and entice people to visit those pages. Most of them learn fast...
I can appreciate that. But as far as I've been able to find, the ability to redefine mouse-button functions is rather limited on Macs. Maybe it's hidden too well for a dummy like me to find?
The first thing I'd like to do is define the X-Windows copy-and-paste scheme:
1. Point at one end of the text, click the left button. 2. Point at the other end of the text, click the right button. 3. Point at the insertion point in some other window, click the middle button.
This is a very fast way to do the job, because it doesn't require switching between mouse and keyboard. Arbitrary-size chunks can be copied in 2 or 3 seconds. And it doesn't have the common problem with holding down a button between 1 and 3 during a long move.
And it's fun to point out the symbolic reason for using the middle button (finger) for insertion.;-)
So is it possible to explain this protocol to a Mac? If so, where are the controls hidden?
I keep finding that a lot of things can be done with the Mac GUI that don't seem to be mentioned anywhere. As far as I can tell, the only way to learn about them is to ask someone who might know. But that can take a LOT of asking.
Or you can experiment. But most of the time, something happens and you find yourself asking "Huh? What did it do? How do I undo the damage?" And you didn't really learn anything except that you really wish there were better documentation somewhere.
My mouse has 18 buttons, and I couldn't possibly do without any of them.
Yeah; my wife used to work with CAD systems, and still complains about not having a 16-button mouse. With a reticle, of course; how do you live without that?
A one-button mouse is sorta like having all your fingers except the middle one amputated.
Maybe, but look at how many vi clones we now have.
Funny thing is, I don't remember ever reading about the reasons for all these clones. In my experience, they all seem to be quite usable, though sometimes I'm surprised by their small differences. Most often, I'm just disappointed by a vi that can't undo more than one change.
(And the main reason for wanting that is that one of our cute little cockatiels just ran across the keyboard. Oh, the perils of working from home...;-)
Except that the biological analogy falls down when you realize that code branches can "interbreed" no matter how far they've evolved. Biological species generally can't do this, if they're much more complex than bacteria.
I'm involved in one of several branches of a program (which one isn't material here) that happened simply because different groups of users needed different features added. Most groups didn't see any need for the others' extensions, so we couldn't get everyone working on a single branch. But as time goes by, the various branches have looked at each others' code and either copied or reimplemented some of the features. I have copies of four of the branches in my ~/bin directory, and I use all of them. Someday I'm going to have to look seriously at merging them. But not now; it would interfere too much with developing the new features that some of us really need. So I'll wait until the active development dies down a bit.
(And by "need", we generally mean "I can't use it for my task without this feature", not "It sure would be nice if someone would implement this for me." Most of the new features were showstoppers for some users until someone implemented them.;-)
That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived.
So they're saying we should drop an asteroid on the XFree86 developers?
Heh. The analogy gets even worse when you consider that at least 6 dinosaur species survived, and they've expanded to about 8000 species now, about twice the number of mammal species. Of course, the dinosaur survivors were the critters we now call "birds", and they were the small, opportunistic "generalist" kind that you'd expect, as were the surviving mammals.
So if you try to apply the analogy, dropping an asteroid on the XFree86 developers would lead to the surviving XFree86 developers expanding to occupy more niches (installed base?) than X.org. But X.org's survivors would produce one very intelligent descendant that would end up controlling much of the market, while other descendants would develop to the software equivalent of elephants and whales (and bats and mice).
Actually, dictionary.com bounces you to acronymfinder.com, and it's noticeably faster to go right there.
I do keep running across acronyms that they don't have. For instance, lately I've seen a rash of uses of JSJ1TG. Neither acronymfinder nor google seems to know what it stands for. There are lots of others being used in newsgroups, etc, for which there are no definitions in the usual places.
Ok, people fall into at least 1 of 2 camps. 1. Zealot: use Free software no matter how painful. 2. "Normal": use whatever software does the best job, is easiest to use, etc.
No, #2 should be called "geek". The real definition of "normal" is:
3. "Normal": Use whatever came with the computer they bought because it was heavily advertised and "everyone uses it". If they can't find software to do the job, they copy some app from a buddy's machine, or as a last resort laboriously download something from whatever web site their browser directed them to.
A major part of the problem with the "market" arguments is that for most people, there really is no market for software. That is, people don't decide in any meaningful sense what software to use, and they don't make informed choices among competing apps (or OSs). They are totally baffled by the supposed "market", and mostly just use whatever someone offers them.
In the computing field, doing comparison shopping immediately qualifies one for the "geek" label.
Speaking of the OSX version, is there any way to discover the version number that real.com is offering? I've downloaded the linux version to my linux box, and I wonder whether it's worth the time to download the OSX version to my PowerBook. But nowhere on the site can I find any clue as to whether the OSX version of RealPlayer 10 is different from the one that I already have.
But the ultimate all-in-one solution is a totally integrated OS with the apps invisible.
Oh, I dunno; I sorta like the situation on my linux and OSX machines, where I have 6 browsers on one and 8 on the other. I've had a bit of fun explaining to puzzled people why this is an advantage.
You know how, with pretty much every browser, all the windows are run by a single process, and if you click on a link, sometimes you find that all of that browser's windows are now hung until the problem clears up?
Well, if you have N browsers, you can simply switch to one of the others, which will still be able to respond. A bit of multitasking, and you can make use of most of that time that you spend waiting for something to download.
Multiple browsers are also an advantage when you come across sites that do nasty things. One of the nastiest is the sites that do auto-refresh, looping "movie" images, flash, and javascript active stuff. All these soak up cpu time. You get a few dozen web pages up, and your cpu usage can be at 100%. News sites and blogs seem to be especially bad for this.
Most of the browsers have ways of limiting this damage, but none seems to handle them all. Firefox and mozilla seem the best in this regard. You can set images to loop only once; you can turn off java and javascript; you can install an extension that blocks flash (until you click on the flash's rectangle, and then it runs). The only thing I haven't found is a reliable way to kill the auto-refresh. Anyone know how do do that with your favorite browser?
I have found that I hardly ever use IE or opera. This is mostly because their controls are sufficiently different from the others that I can't figure out how to do a lot of things that I like to do (such as suppressing background images, and forcing colors and/or fonts to something that I like).
The idea that there is one best browser that everyone with any sense will use strikes me as rather short-sighted. There are so many benefits to having a collection that I'd think the sensible people would all be doing that.
And with a collection of browsers that are all bad at something, you can jump into lots of flame wars with "Browser X can do foo, but browsers Y and Z don't seem to be able to. When are X and Y going to get foo?" You can have lots of fun making all the partisans angry with you.
Not a chance. At 95K, water is a mineral. It won't even sublimate at those temperatures.
The liquid, if that's what it is, would be hydrocarbons. Methane, ethane, etc. A lot of simple HC compounds can be liquid at that temperature.
It would be deadly to you in not very many seconds.
(Which isn't to say that living things couldn't be there. But the solvent in their tissues wouldn't be water; it would methane. Titan's atmosphere is about 6% methane, so there's plenty of solvent around if you want some. But the biochemistry, if any, would be rather different from ours.)
Or maybe you have some alternative definition of "commerce" and/or "viable" ?
Heh. It does seem that, to most American businesses, "commercially viable" means "within the next fiscal year". And that's the long-term ones. It's getting to be fairly common that, if your department (or group) isn't profitable this quarter, you'll be reorged out of your job.
OTOH, there are still companies in Asia that are making decade-long investments. So that's probably where the future of immortality research lies.
There have been any number of analyses explainiing that the reason that solid-state electronics moved to Asia was that it takes years to build a manufacturering plant and get it into production. American (and European) companies became unwilliing to make such long-term investments. Asian developers bet that this would continue, and if they made such investments, they'd end up owning the entire business. This is a bit over-simplified, but it's basically accurate.
Funny thing is, nobody made any secret of this. American business read the analyses, agreed with it, and gave up the business rather than invest in something that wouldn't make money within a year. European businesses were nearly as foolish.
SS's weakness has been known from the day it started - it's a Ponzi scheme paying current beneficiaries out of current receipts.
So you're saying it's run like the typical business?
(Well, ok; the typical business does do some short-term borrowing to account for the fact that income is unevenly distributed while most expenses are ongoing. But this is a detail. On an annual basis, most businesses do pay most expenses from recent-past and near-present income.)
Some years ago, I read an interesting comment on IBM's success. It started with describing the typical presentation, in which the prospective customer asks "How does your product work?" The typical response to this is to dive into technical explanations of how the product works.
IBM, in contrast, taught their salesmen to respond to "How does it work" with "Just fine."
This is, of course, what your typical manager with puchasing authority really wants to hear.
Those other presentations are for the customers' engineers. But engineers are usually not the ones making purchase decisions. If you want to get a signed-off purchase order, you have to sell to the people who make the purchase decision. You have to size them up and talk in a language they understand. If you want to sell to engineering firms, go ahead and polish up your explanations of technical details. If you want to sell to the other 99.99% of companies, IBM's approach is more successful.
Sorry; that's how the business world works. And yes, it does lead to the well-known phenomenon of workers trying to use a broken product that the boss ordered. In our current business world, that's a problem that really doesn't have a solution (to use a currently-common warning buzzword).
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Well, I'd think that it would be a requirement of any government that government documents be readable by citizens. Requiring that a citizen buy a particular piece of software from a particular corporation seems rather dubious. I mean, it's true that governments often make under-the-table deals with the fat cats. We all know that. But something so blatant as saying "You are required to use and obey this document, which can only be read by buying software product X from corporation Y" is way beyond the usual government corruption.
I can see the US government being so corrupt that it requires paying money to an American corporation to read US government documents. But I'd think it unlikely that any other government would do this for long. Paying an American corporation to read your own government's documents is just too bizarre.
This is especially true when the American corporation in question has a history of including spyware in its products. This has gotta scare the people in most other governments.
Ultimately, government documents (at least those available to citizens) will have to be in formats that are formatted to published standards, and it has to be legal for citizens to write software that use those formats. Also, the formats have to be stable over the long term, so that documents from decades in the past remain readable. Anything else is a disaster waiting to happen.
Government documents in a proprietary format is something that just can't be viable over the long term.
Where's the catch?
Remember the discussions a while back about MS patenting some of their XML encoding schemes? This could well be part of a nefarious plot. Sorta like what happened with the GIF format, y'know. We all start writing software that uses some of MS's XML, some of our software is widely used, and then 10 years from now, MS says "Oh, BTW, you're violating several of our patents. Yes, we said you could use the open parts of our XML, but we didn't say you could use the patented parts."
Legalities of such things can be very, very tricky. See also the various discussions here in which people confuse the various kinds of "IP", such as patent, copyright, and trade secret. Permission to use a copyrighted thing is not the same as permission to use a patented thing, and that's different from permission to use a trade secret.
Before doing anything with any MS "IP", it might be wise to consult a good IP lawyer.
Microsoft has been applying for patents at the rate of several per day. This costs time and money. Presumably there's a reason they're doing this.
In the case of giant corporations, paranoia is always in order. They can easily bankrupt the rest of us with legal fees.
1) when using these store discount cards, are only the
discounted items kept in store records?
No; the store will usually keep a record of everything that you bought. The purpose is marketing, after all. The more information they have that can be linked to you, the better they can product targetted ads that will encourage you to buy.
2) when paying with credit card, are the stores retaining
a list of my purchases linked to my card?
Yes. That's one of the important reasons that credit cards exist. 30 years ago, disk space was expensive, so not everything was kept (and most of it was on tape). Now, terabyte disks are cheap, so there's no reason not to keep any purchase information that can be captured. Chances are that every purchase you've made with a credit/debit card in the past decade is recorded and sitting on a disk somewhere, quickly accessible to marketing software.
So far, tracking a cash purchase is not very feasible. But they're working on it.
Yeah; this running joke is getting to be less true than it used to be. I've noticed mostly that the package sizes seem to be more varied than they used to be. And, of course, there are more supermarkets with deli sections, where you can just ask for N hot dogs. I mostly get Hebrew National dogs, because they taste good. The small ones are 6 per package; the big ones are 4 per package. (And I always add cheese, to cancel the kosherness. ;-)
;-)
Do you know the purpose of all of the transistors in your television? You paid for them so you must have wanted them, right?
Yes, of course.
(Actually, I've never bought a TV set. My wife came with one, and she has bought a couple more. But since she found out about Netflix, she has stopped using the TV sets, and we're planning to drop the cable service as soon as we can get the bundled phone transferred to a different supplier. Probably sell the TV sets, because she has found that her Mac Powerbook does a better job with DVDs. TV is obsolete, especially since it no longer has news.)
Of course, products are packaged for the majority of users not the minority.
;-)
Here in the US, one of the conventional counterexamples is the fact that hot dogs are sold in packages of 10, while the buns are sold in packages of 8.
This is, of course, a running joke, and every stand-up comedian uses it as an example of our economic rationality. But it can be fun to watch people try to explain that this is done because the customers want it that way.
Fact is, marketing is good at coming up with ways of tricking people into buying something different from what they really want. And Microsoft is an example that nearly everyone understands. Just ask them to explain what a lot of the files on their disk are there for. They paid for them, right? So they must have wanted them, right?
Even the dumbest Joe Sixpack understands the cynicism behind this.
Actually, the fuss over links to such articles is even more interesting than the case at hand. They are basically claiming that it's a crime to help people avoid downloading copyrighted material. It's easy to understand why they'd do this, but when you express it this way, it does seem a bit demented.
"You have a legal obligation to download my ads; if you don't, I'll sue you."
I blame the Arabs for inventing the numbers your website uses to connect to the internet so you can spread information about other terrorist sites ...
Heh. Very good.
And I might add that there was an interesting article in Scientific American a few years ago, explaining the Mayan numbering system. Among other things, the article pointed out that the Mayan system is much simpler than the Arabic system. Thus, instead of that big multiplication table that you memorized, in the Mayan system you only need to know that 5*5 = 15 (it's a base-20 system). Everything else follows trivially from that, plus the familiar use of a digit's position to indicate a multiple of a power of the base.
So maybe we need to start a campaign to replace the terrorist-oriented Arabic system with the Mayan system. If enough people fall for it, we could end up with a simpler numbering system. Then all that time in grade school spent memorizing tables could be spent learning something else.
We could get a more rational calendar out of it, too.
Think we could pull it off?
So, hyperlinks are not illegal, however be careful what you are linking to. If you know that the content is not legit, you are acting in bad faith ...
;-)
There is an even funnier case of this in American law. It seems that a lot of local (plant) nurseries routinely sell "Asian poppy" plants that are actually opium poppies. It is apparently quite legal to grow these - if you don't know that they're opium poppies. You can't really tell just by looking at them, because there are a lot of very similar poppy species that have insignificant levels of opiates. There have been reports of people who did a check with a botanical manual, verified that the plants in their gardens were opium poppies, publicised the fact, and were arrested. The nursery they bought the plants from weren't prosecuted, of course; they didn't know that they were growing opium poppies. But if you check and find out what species of poppy you are growing, you can instantly become a criminal.
We have some very showy scarlet poppies that come up every year in our yard. I have no intention of checking to see exactly which species they are.
Then there's the funny thing about the hemp seeds that the local pet store sells. Our cockatiels love them, and we buy a few ounces every few months. Supposedly they are pasteurized - to cut down on possible pathogens, of course. But there have been reports of people who sprouted them. The yield was low, but nonzero. The seeds are grown and sold openly, because it's done in a way that's obviously not a drug operation. (And no, our birds don't fly weird or get the munchies when they eat these seeds.
But the law can be weird at times. Both of these are probably just examples of the law acting in a very reasonable manner. Not at all what you'd expect, but it does happen.
He linked to illegally copied files. That means he told people where the illegal files were and enabled them to acquire them.
This is why this case should be classified as a case of the MPAA shooting at their own foot.
Think about it a bit. Someone has provided links to to infringing files. The copyright owner (actually their agent) doesn't go after the site with the copyrighted files; they go after the site that has tipped them off to the infringement.
Lesson: The MPAA doesn't want you to tell them about copyright infringement. If you find such files, you shouldn't put a list of them in a place that the MPAA can easily find. You should just keep quiet. Maybe you can pass the links around to friends in email. But you shouldn't make it easy for the MPAA and their lawyers about the infringement.
Sounds like really foolish policy on the MPAA's part, to me. What sort of idiot would sue someone who tipped them off like this?
Next we'll hear that libraries are being sued by publishers for making their online "card catalogs" available to the public.
I can't see Linus fitting in that kind of a work environment.
;-), and control over who I had working for me, I'd probably agree to lead a port of the Windows environment to linux.
...
Oh, I dunno. I mean, personally, if billg were to offer me $1,000,000 per year (real money, not options
Of course, I'd watch my back, and be ready to jump ship on short notice. I'd be assuming that it was a PR ruse, to be scuttled at some time in the future. I'd be in it for the money, and on the off chance that I could pull it off before they scuttled it.
I can see Linus thinking similarly. And remember his advice to only do something if it's fun. Such a project could be a lot of fun, if you refused to take it seriously and ignored the politics.
Actually, a lot has been written about Microsoft's organizational style. It could be interesting to see the interaction between them and Linus's organizational style. I wouldn't imagine that he would adopt their style
... but at work I can only access port 80, and I would never try to get around company's security policy ...
...
Huh? That's an insecurity policy.
I've implemented similar policies at a couple of jobs, but the restriction was always to using port 443 (https). That way, various company sites could put things online for use by others in the company, but the packets would be encrypted, so outsiders couldn't spy on them. The firewalls would also put a few limits on the addresses of incoming port-443 connections, too.
Usually we also opened outgoing connections to port 80, because there are lots of things (such as documentation) available online that we needed, at sites that didn't do https. But along with this went an ongoing educational campaign to teach people of the potential problems with unencrypted connections. Mostly this just means teaching them to never fill in any personal information in web forms unless they see that "https://" in the URL field.
And, of course, there's the ongoing effort to make sure that all machines' browsers and mail readers have all scripting turned off. That's really the security biggie, especially if you have people running IE or Outlook. Such users visiting port-80 web sites can be open doors to all sorts of nasty stuff.
They complain loudly, of course. But it's easy enough to create a few company web pages that do nasty (but recoverable) things to people who violate the rules, and entice people to visit those pages. Most of them learn fast
I can appreciate that. But as far as I've been able to find, the ability to redefine mouse-button functions is rather limited on Macs. Maybe it's hidden too well for a dummy like me to find?
;-)
The first thing I'd like to do is define the X-Windows copy-and-paste scheme:
1. Point at one end of the text, click the left button.
2. Point at the other end of the text, click the right button.
3. Point at the insertion point in some other window, click the middle button.
This is a very fast way to do the job, because it doesn't require switching between mouse and keyboard. Arbitrary-size chunks can be copied in 2 or 3 seconds. And it doesn't have the common problem with holding down a button between 1 and 3 during a long move.
And it's fun to point out the symbolic reason for using the middle button (finger) for insertion.
So is it possible to explain this protocol to a Mac? If so, where are the controls hidden?
I keep finding that a lot of things can be done with the Mac GUI that don't seem to be mentioned anywhere. As far as I can tell, the only way to learn about them is to ask someone who might know. But that can take a LOT of asking.
Or you can experiment. But most of the time, something happens and you find yourself asking "Huh? What did it do? How do I undo the damage?" And you didn't really learn anything except that you really wish there were better documentation somewhere.
My mouse has 18 buttons, and I couldn't possibly do without any of them.
Yeah; my wife used to work with CAD systems, and still complains about not having a 16-button mouse. With a reticle, of course; how do you live without that?
A one-button mouse is sorta like having all your fingers except the middle one amputated.
Maybe, but look at how many vi clones we now have.
... ;-)
Funny thing is, I don't remember ever reading about the reasons for all these clones. In my experience, they all seem to be quite usable, though sometimes I'm surprised by their small differences. Most often, I'm just disappointed by a vi that can't undo more than one change.
(And the main reason for wanting that is that one of our cute little cockatiels just ran across the keyboard. Oh, the perils of working from home
Except that the biological analogy falls down when you realize that code branches can "interbreed" no matter how far they've evolved. Biological species generally can't do this, if they're much more complex than bacteria.
;-)
I'm involved in one of several branches of a program (which one isn't material here) that happened simply because different groups of users needed different features added. Most groups didn't see any need for the others' extensions, so we couldn't get everyone working on a single branch. But as time goes by, the various branches have looked at each others' code and either copied or reimplemented some of the features. I have copies of four of the branches in my ~/bin directory, and I use all of them. Someday I'm going to have to look seriously at merging them. But not now; it would interfere too much with developing the new features that some of us really need. So I'll wait until the active development dies down a bit.
(And by "need", we generally mean "I can't use it for my task without this feature", not "It sure would be nice if someone would implement this for me." Most of the new features were showstoppers for some users until someone implemented them.
That is why the dinosaurs died out and the mammals survived.
...
So they're saying we should drop an asteroid on the XFree86 developers?
Heh. The analogy gets even worse when you consider that at least 6 dinosaur species survived, and they've expanded to about 8000 species now, about twice the number of mammal species. Of course, the dinosaur survivors were the critters we now call "birds", and they were the small, opportunistic "generalist" kind that you'd expect, as were the surviving mammals.
So if you try to apply the analogy, dropping an asteroid on the XFree86 developers would lead to the surviving XFree86 developers expanding to occupy more niches (installed base?) than X.org. But X.org's survivors would produce one very intelligent descendant that would end up controlling much of the market, while other descendants would develop to the software equivalent of elephants and whales (and bats and mice).
Sometimes analogies aren't all that helpful
Actually, dictionary.com bounces you to acronymfinder.com, and it's noticeably faster to go right there.
I do keep running across acronyms that they don't have. For instance, lately I've seen a rash of uses of JSJ1TG. Neither acronymfinder nor google seems to know what it stands for. There are lots of others being used in newsgroups, etc, for which there are no definitions in the usual places.
Ok, people fall into at least 1 of 2 camps.
1. Zealot: use Free software no matter how painful.
2. "Normal": use whatever software does the best job, is easiest to use, etc.
No, #2 should be called "geek". The real definition of "normal" is:
3. "Normal": Use whatever came with the computer they bought because it was heavily advertised and "everyone uses it". If they can't find software to do the job, they copy some app from a buddy's machine, or as a last resort laboriously download something from whatever web site their browser directed them to.
A major part of the problem with the "market" arguments is that for most people, there really is no market for software. That is, people don't decide in any meaningful sense what software to use, and they don't make informed choices among competing apps (or OSs). They are totally baffled by the supposed "market", and mostly just use whatever someone offers them.
In the computing field, doing comparison shopping immediately qualifies one for the "geek" label.
Speaking of the OSX version, is there any way to discover the version number that real.com is offering? I've downloaded the linux version to my linux box, and I wonder whether it's worth the time to download the OSX version to my PowerBook. But nowhere on the site can I find any clue as to whether the OSX version of RealPlayer 10 is different from the one that I already have.
But the ultimate all-in-one solution is a totally integrated OS with the apps invisible.
Oh, I dunno; I sorta like the situation on my linux and OSX machines, where I have 6 browsers
on one and 8 on the other. I've had a bit of fun explaining to puzzled people why this is an advantage.
You know how, with pretty much every browser, all the windows are run by a single process, and if you click on a link, sometimes you find that all of that browser's windows are now hung until the problem clears up?
Well, if you have N browsers, you can simply switch to one of the others, which will still be able to respond. A bit of multitasking, and you can make use of most of that time that you spend waiting for something to download.
Multiple browsers are also an advantage when you come across sites that do nasty things. One of the nastiest is the sites that do auto-refresh, looping "movie" images, flash, and javascript active stuff. All these soak up cpu time. You get a few dozen web pages up, and your cpu usage can be at 100%. News sites and blogs seem to be especially bad for this.
Most of the browsers have ways of limiting this damage, but none seems to handle them all. Firefox and mozilla seem the best in this regard. You can set images to loop only once; you can turn off java and javascript; you can install an extension that blocks flash (until you click on the flash's rectangle, and then it runs). The only thing I haven't found is a reliable way to kill the auto-refresh. Anyone know how do do that with your favorite browser?
I have found that I hardly ever use IE or opera. This is mostly because their controls are sufficiently different from the others that I can't figure out how to do a lot of things that I like to do (such as suppressing background images, and forcing colors and/or fonts to something that I like).
The idea that there is one best browser that everyone with any sense will use strikes me as rather short-sighted. There are so many benefits to having a collection that I'd think the sensible people would all be doing that.
And with a collection of browsers that are all bad at something, you can jump into lots of flame wars with "Browser X can do foo, but browsers Y and Z don't seem to be able to. When are X and Y going to get foo?" You can have lots of fun making all the partisans angry with you.
Not a chance. At 95K, water is a mineral. It won't even sublimate at those temperatures.
The liquid, if that's what it is, would be hydrocarbons. Methane, ethane, etc. A lot of simple HC compounds can be liquid at that temperature.
It would be deadly to you in not very many seconds.
(Which isn't to say that living things couldn't be there. But the solvent in their tissues wouldn't be water; it would methane. Titan's atmosphere is about 6% methane, so there's plenty of solvent around if you want some. But the biochemistry, if any, would be rather different from ours.)
Or maybe you have some alternative definition of "commerce" and/or "viable" ?
Heh. It does seem that, to most American businesses, "commercially viable" means "within the next fiscal year". And that's the long-term ones. It's getting to be fairly common that, if your department (or group) isn't profitable this quarter, you'll be reorged out of your job.
OTOH, there are still companies in Asia that are making decade-long investments. So that's probably where the future of immortality research lies.
There have been any number of analyses explainiing that the reason that solid-state electronics moved to Asia was that it takes years to build a manufacturering plant and get it into production. American (and European) companies became unwilliing to make such long-term investments. Asian developers bet that this would continue, and if they made such investments, they'd end up owning the entire business. This is a bit over-simplified, but it's basically accurate.
Funny thing is, nobody made any secret of this. American business read the analyses, agreed with it, and gave up the business rather than invest in something that wouldn't make money within a year. European businesses were nearly as foolish.
SS's weakness has been known from the day it started - it's a Ponzi scheme paying current beneficiaries out of current receipts.
So you're saying it's run like the typical business?
(Well, ok; the typical business does do some short-term borrowing to account for the fact that income is unevenly distributed while most expenses are ongoing. But this is a detail. On an annual basis, most businesses do pay most expenses from recent-past and near-present income.)
Actually, most of it is anime pr0n.
Some years ago, I read an interesting comment on IBM's success. It started with describing the typical presentation, in which the prospective customer asks "How does your product work?" The typical response to this is to dive into technical explanations of how the product works.
IBM, in contrast, taught their salesmen to respond to "How does it work" with "Just fine."
This is, of course, what your typical manager with puchasing authority really wants to hear.
Those other presentations are for the customers' engineers. But engineers are usually not the ones making purchase decisions. If you want to get a signed-off purchase order, you have to sell to the people who make the purchase decision. You have to size them up and talk in a language they understand. If you want to sell to engineering firms, go ahead and polish up your explanations of technical details. If you want to sell to the other 99.99% of companies, IBM's approach is more successful.
Sorry; that's how the business world works. And yes, it does lead to the well-known phenomenon of workers trying to use a broken product that the boss ordered. In our current business world, that's a problem that really doesn't have a solution (to use a currently-common warning buzzword).