I don't think I'm the delusional here. I never stated pirating is good. Never would. But that doesn't justify the actions...
Well, I dunno about others, but I've only used BT for two things, neither of which even remotely qualifies as "pirating".
One is that I've downloaded Fedora Core ISOs. Now, unless you believe SCO and Microsoft, this is totally legal. (And their charges haven't been decided in court yet, so for the duration, FC downloads should be presumed legal.)
My other usage is more curious: I've downloaded a lot of ComedyChannel.com's Daily Show video clips - from political blogs, who sometimes put them up as BTs. You might argue that this is some sort of piracy. But they are available free (and without registration) from ComedyChannel.com, so I'm not taking any money away from the CC folks. My reasons for getting the clips from the blogs is simple: The ComedyChannel.com web site is notoriously fscked up, and their clips simply don't work in most browsers. They did on my Powerbook until I upgraded my Real Player and Windows Media Player; after the upgrades, the CC videos didn't work very well. This apparently wasn't intentional on CC's part; their web people are simply incompetent. This has been documented in detail by any number of people. There have been a number of quotes from the CC people implying that they're honored to have their videos mirrored by the bloggers. (And someday, they promise, they'll get their web site right.;-)
Also, I sometimes get the CC videos from blogs because that's where I find them. But this is mostly because ComedyChannel.com doesn't work in any of my browsers any more. If it did, I'd go to them first. And if they were smart, they'd set up BT for their newest clips, to lighten the load on their servers. But it's pretty obvious that, funny as they are, they aren't very smart when it comes to their web site. (Maybe I should send them my resume. If you're a web developer, maybe you should send them a resume.;-)
Anyhow, we seem to have yet another case where someone somewhere is using a P2P package to pirate stuff, so people decide that all P2P users are pirates and thieves, and DoS them. There couldn't be any legit uses of these tools, right?
Actually, unlike some others here, I do suspect that MS might be involved in this. Their growing campaign against linux is pretty well documented here and other places. They have shown themselves to not be above shady practices (such as laundering money through SCO, or setting up web servers to look for opera and delivering defective CSSs to make it look bad). It wouldn't be a surprise if they were behind an attack on BT, because it's the major tool for distributing new linux releases now.
But until we get evidence, we really shouldn't be accusing specific people. Hypothesizing about likely possibilities, sure, but we should admit that we actually know. We oughta track down the people who are doing it, and publicise their names.
Heh. Yes, to a medical person, it's pretty obvious that all adult humans have two breasts. But in common speech, they only qualify as "breasts" if they protrude visibly.
Of course, in this sense, some women lack breasts. And some men have them. In any case, in the common-speech sense, the average (mean) is pretty close to one per adult person.
And in the medical sense, the average is slightly below two, since some adults have had mastectomies.
We might also note that, strictly speaking, the mean number of testicles per adult is somewhat below one. There are slightly more adult females than males, and a few males have had one or both testicles removed.
But none of this really affects the joke, since it's based on mocking the concept of "average" with an utterly silly example.
(Some time back, The Onion had an article that was a detailed comparison of apples and oranges. Actually, it was a variant of an earlier article in the Annals of Irreproducible Results.)
Well, I've been using a Mac Powerbook for over a year now, and I've never run across either the Put Away command or the idea of dragging a disk to Trash to eject it. I don't seem to find either in the Help docs, either. And I'd have to say that dragging a disk to Trash is the most demented way I've heard to eject. What you'd expect is that it should trash the disk's contents, i.e., it should format the disk. (Hopefully it'd ask for confirmation first.)
So where is this Put Away thingy? I don't seem to find it lying about anywhere...
(So far, I'd have to say that all the vaunted intuitiveness of the Mac interface is merely the usual sort of marketing hokum. Few things about it are obvious, and it's difficult to learn about the gimmicks in any manner other than playing dummy and asking about them. Sometimes you get answers that you'd never have guessed. Sometimes you get ridicule for being such a dummy. Sometimes you get both.;-)
A new way to get support...; diss your fav OSS app, and a hord of... monkeys will... have your answer in seconds.
True, but this isn't at all new. I've often used just this sort of approach to good effect in the old IBM/MS-vs-unix marketing war. The argument goes: With proprietary software like the stuff you get from IBM or MS, if you have a problem, and you can't find an answer in your docs, you have to go to the vendor, who has little motive to waste time digging out an answer. You can beg and plead, but unless your questions happen to reach just the right person, you don't get good answers.
OTOH, with most of the unix-like systems, there are public fora (newsgroups, mailing lists, slashdot,...) that are frequented by knowledgeable geeks who enjoy showing off their expertise. You ask a question, go get a cup of coffee, and when you get back, there's and answer (or sometimes 3 or 4) sitting there for you.
Very often, the best way to get an answer is by dissing something that you like. If you just say that you can't get X to do Y, you may get only "RTFM". Instead, say that app X can't do Y, but the competing Z can. Lots of people will try to illustrate your ignorance by explaining how to do to get X to do Y.
You can often save some time by asking your question first. Then you dig around in your docs. Maybe you find an answer, maybe you don't. In any case, you should then check for online answers. Even if you found an answer, there are often several other answers that you didn't find, and you can pick the best. Or there are warnings and qualifications that weren't in your docs. Or there are suggestions that your software should be upgraded for some relevant reason (such as that you've stumbled across a bug that has been fixed).
Yeah, I know you were ragging on people who are out to get free support on/. But it's not all that unreasonable an approach. Well, you might find a more focused forum than/. This is certainly true in this case, since there are lots of good browser newsgroups out there. But asking a crowd of geeks is a viable approach in many cases. And it gives the geeks a chance to show off their expertise.
You just have to learn to tolerate the pseudo-geeks who insult you rather than answer your question.
(Some of them insult you and answer your question. You should learn that that's fine, as long as they answer your question. Some people like to not only show off their expertise, but also tell you how superior they are. Humor them.)
Somehow, this possibility rarely gets mentioned in/. discussions. But in the Real World (TM), it's an ever-present possibility that explains a lot of otherwise inexplicable behavior on the part of management. (And I've noticed that The Market ideologists rarely if ever take this into consideration, perhaps because it throws a huge monkey wrench into their theories.;-)
And, of course, 1), 2) and 3) can all be true for the same admin.
... avoid having to stare at a bright light-bulb thing all day.
One of the more elegant descriptions of the problem that I've run across was someone who suggested the question:
"Would you ask your users to stare at a lit flourescent tube for hours at a time"?
Any sensible person would answer "Of course not!"
Then you just point out that a computer screen is in fact a flourescent tube, and a white window is a fully-lit portion of flourescent tube. If your windows have white for a background color, you are in fact asking your users to stare at a fully-lit flourescent tube. Most laptop screens are a bit better, but not much, and white windows are still painful to look at for a long time.
I've also seen this listed as the simplest way to debunk any "user-friendly" claim. If an app's window defaults to a white background, the app is physically assaulting its users eyes, and any claims of user friendliness are instantly shown to be a lie.
The truly impressive thing is how difficult the software-development industry has made it to use a friendlier dark background. I've tried on lots of systems, and found that I have to give up to avoid black-on-black or other unreadable combinations. Every app seems to have some things whose color simply can't be changed from the default.
The best compromise is a neutral grey background, because hardly anyone ever forces neutral-grey lettering without also specifying the background.
With browsers, I look for and check the Preferences thingy that says "Always use my colors and fonts". This goes a long way to making browsers usable without eyestrain despite the best efforts of the web developers.
For the moment, I'm just letting everything go to pot. I just throw things in whatever directory is convenient, and hope that I remember where I put it later.... I'm obviously an OS X user
Heh. A year ago, I would have replied by commenting on how easy it is on linux (or any earlier unixoid system) to create directories and tell all apps to store their output files in the appropriate places. Then I got a PowerBook. The file system is chaos. Nearly every app has its own scheme for where to store files. Most don't ask; they just store things away in a directory and with a filename that is never displayed. Some do pop up a "Save" window. Some of those only allow a save/don't choice. Some let me type in a file name but not the directory (and most of those strip off any directory that I include;-). A very few let me choose the directory and the file name.
Periodically, I look around in a Terminal window, and try to figure out what the hell all those multi-MB files are, and which I can delete. Many of them have gibberish names. Some of those I can identify by examining their contents; others are pure mysteries that I move into a "tmp" subdirectory with the hope that whatever needs it will complain and give me enough of a clue to restore the file. A few apps have broken, presumably because I moved a file that they want but I couldn't identify.
Quite a lot of the files have clues in their names, and often they are sitting in really bizarre places. Some of my source directories for projects are littered with files from Mac apps, or files that I can't identify.
It sure looks like Apple is consciously working on destroying the usefulness (and simplicity) of a neirarchical file system, so we'll have to use a search mechanism to find files. This does tend to throw a monkey wrench into attempts to build my own packages (or port others') into directories. Strange, unrelated files appear in a package that have nothing to do with it. This goes a long way toward discouraging the use of OS X for the development of commercial packages.
Well, it's been an interesting experience... I do worry about what I'll do when the disk gets filled with files that I can't identify. I give it two years.
I'd agree that the Windows and Mac tools for searching are inadequate. I'd add linux to that list, but add that it's not much of a problem there, since my own directories don't seem to get violated by the installed apps.
In any case, I keep finding that some combination of "find" and "grep" does a better job than any fancier tool that I've yet come across. It can take a while, though.
Yah; it seems to me that if they had even half a brain, they'd be thanking google for making it so easy to find the infringers.
By suing google, they're basically saying that they don't mind people stealing their images, and they don't want someone giving them an easy way to track the thefts.
It's a shame judges aren't allowed to slap plaintiffs and their lawyers, it really is.
What country do you live in? In the US, and in quite a lot of other countries, judges can and do impose fines for frivolous or harrassing lawsuits. And there's even a legal term ("barratry") to cover this sort of crime. Granted, you don't read about it often, but this might be because the plaintiff's lawyers advise against filing suit.
Now, IANAL, so I won't try to give details. Maybe a real lawyer or two would like to expound a bit on where and why judges can do such things.
b) Every single webmaster I met (until I left a few months) ago swore they needed root access to install some apache module or other. No, you don't. You ask the sysadmin and, most times, if he can do it without a huge amount of effort...
I'd agree in general, and I've generally told people that I don't particularly want the root password, because it will make me responsible for the machine's administration, and they're not paying me for that. But I did have an interesting case a few years ago...
Several things came up (important users demanding mod_perl, mod_ssl, a few other mods, and of course the inevitable security upgrades) where su access was required because the port-80 server requires root permissions for a few milliseconds. I set things up, presented them to the admin... and nothing happened. After a few reminders, it became obvious that he just wasn't going to get around to it. More Iportant Things To Do, y'know.
So I did the obvious thing. I started a server with the requested features on a higher port. No big deal. But it turned out that a number of the important users were using browsers that didn't recognize the:port syntax in URLs, so they couldn't get to the web site through the non-port-80 server. (Yes, there are browsers like that, and no, I didn't like it any better than anyone else, but I couldn't do a damned thing about it, and they wouldn't switch to a real browser.;-)
I did make the 80->8080 mapping suggestion. This got me on the admin's shit list real fast. He started publicly complaining about me telling him how to do his job, and stuff like that. This puzzled me at first, because it seemed such an innocuous request. But by asking a few questions, I eventually uncovered the reason: He had no idea how to do it. And he wasn't about to learn from me (or anyone else, probably). I think he was just embarrassed by not knowing something that he obviously should know; we all know people like that.
So I just kept running both servers, the port-80 server that was the default install that the admin set up for me, and the non-port-80 server that was loaded like the users wanted. When people complained about the problems this caused (including for some of their users), I patiently explained that I knew how to fix it, I wasn't permitted to do so, and the person who could give me permission had never gotten around to acting on any of my requests.
The most useful thing I did was that I'd carefully saved the email on the topic as evidence. Eventually this got the admin, uh, "reassigned" to another position. His replacement was someone a lot nicer who put me on the sudo list (as a time saver to himself;-).
But this did take a long time. At times, I was sorely tempted to break into "my" machine. But I decided to play the game. Anyhow, I wasn't the one suffering. I didn't care what port the server was running on. And it was somewhat fun to watch the politics develop.
Yeah, but it would be illegal for Americans do decode it, under the terms of the DMCA. And I've heard that they have a similar law in Europe now. Anyone know whether decoding a ROT-26-encoded message is still legal in Europe.
(Of course, in some European languages, that would be ROT-29 or ROT-32.;-)
Unless you think a person's blog with pictures of their cat and a review of the latest Dashboard Confessional album is important.
Heh. Fact is, lots of historians would love to have stuff like this from past centuries. A standard lament is that people often thought that the only important information was about "kings and wars". It can be extraordinarily difficult to get reliable information about the lives of "ordinary" people in most times and places.
Of course, we now have the opposite problem: Everybody and their dogs have web sites. But most of them are only in digital form. Even if backed up, most electronic backup from 10 years ago is unreadable. So most of the stuff going online now will probably be lost.
Maybe some of it will be kept in the google cache's backup. But if recent computer-industry history is any guide, that will only survive until google undergoes a merger, and then it will all silently disappear by order of the new management.
I have noticed that IBM truly has a mixed record in such things. Sometimes they have cooperated with users and developers, and supported what we now call Free Software or Open Source and independent research. Other times, they have used legal and marketing trickery to squash competitors and steal from contributors. So there is good reason for both hope and distrust. Hearing that some potential victims' lawyers have gone over the fine print and said it's ok will go a long way toward trusting IBM in this case.
This might be a good place to bring up the old suggestion that anything out of print for a year become public domain. A newspaper publisher could then maintain their copyright by setting up a method of reprinting old issues. But most of them wouldn't find this lucrative enough, and would just let the copyright expire. Then the LoC could include most newspapers after a year.
One of the very real problems with copyright law is that it allows publishers to "capture" our history and prevent access to some of the most important primary documents. This really should be fixed, if you think that there's anything to learn from history.
Of course, one of the things that history shows is that we rarely learn anything from history.
the results will be public. everything that runs on the grid will be public domain. when we (ISB) talked with IBM they we're very clear about this
You might want to read the fine print very carefully. IBM has a rather, uh, "mixed" history with regard to such issues. You might find that the actual situation is somewhat different from what the marketing people tell you verbally.
Not that this is anything special to IBM, of course. In the past few years, we've been reading a lot of unpleasant stories about corporate sponsorship of research. The main reason for concern with IBM is their ability to use their large stable of lawyers to bankrupt opponents with legal fees.
Or they could, you know, NOT USE THOSE SEEDS, and instead continue using the strains they've been using for the last few thousand years or so.
There's one practical problem here: How is your typical Iraqi (or American or Canadian or Mexican, for that matter) farmer going to set up a proper testing lab to determine whether their seeds are contaminated with patented DNA? This is not just astronomically expensive; it's far beyond the technical capability of most small farmers everywhere. And much of the technical knowledge is held closely by the GM corporations.
The claim that crops like wheat and barley aren't wind-pollinated is not quite accurate. (A better term might be "disingenuous".) Like all grasses, they are fundamentally wind pollinated. The claim that they're not is based on the fact that seed producers keep the strains sufficiently separated so that they can't cross-pollinate. Pollination within a seed-grain field is partly done by the wind, and partly by mechanical means. The growers can play fast and loose with the terminology because the separation that is maintained between strains forces inbreeding. When they say "no wind pollination", they mean between widely-separated fields.
Also, it would be easy enough for someone to toss a handfull of GM seed into your field. It would cross-pollinate with your grain, and next year's seed would be contaminated with GM DNA. It's real hard to defend against this.
Suggesting that farmers save only non-GM seed is basically cynical in any situation where GM crops may be grown by your neighbor (or introduced into your field) without your knowledge. There is no practical way for most farmers to test their own seed for IP violations. Even if they had the technical know-how, the cost of the lab would typically be far more than their annual profit.
They are building a war fighting and intelligence network. I doubt that they will want civilians, activists, and nuts on "their" internet...
Understandable, but ultimately foolish. Consider that during Gulf War I, we had the fun news stories explaining why the military had turned off the errors in the GPS, because they found that they couldn't get delivery of the mil-grade GPS equipment they needed, so they started buying them from civilian commercial sources.
Also, at least in the early (ARPAnet) days, the mil guys rightly figured out that neither they nor the corporate world was ever going to develop the sort of network that they needed, so they farmed out most of the work to academic hackers. Lots of military folks won't admit it openly, but there was back then understanding (in ARPA) that this was a much more effective way of getting everything tested by people who didn't have to follow orders. We'll probably find (after the fact) that the military network is riddled with holes that every two-bit spy knows how to walk through. But the P2P guys on the open Internet will have become uncrackable by anyone (even the 25th-century security experts in the entertainment industry).
If the DoD folks had any brains, they'd be doing their stuff over the public Internet, and challenging the world's hackers to crack their communications. And they'd publish their code. Then they'd know about problems before the insanity of battlefield conditions. But I wouldn't put a lot of money on them being that sensible.
By the way, how to you throw an election over the internet when the voters use punch cards, like 73% of Ohio? TCP/CHAD?
Nah; we learned that back in 2000. You just use the courts to block recounts. Then it doesn't matter if there's an audit trail. It seems that the Dems go along with this as happily as do the Reps. Even if someone does an audit and reports the frauds, it still doesn't matter. The media just ridicules the paranoid theories without ever bothering to investigate, and everyone is happy that The System Worked.
Nah; my keyboard stutters, too. Well, mine doesn't repeat 2-char strings, but I'm typing this on a PowerBook. I'd bet that MS has keyboards that can frustrate its users with N-char repeats like this. If not, maybe you can special-order them online. Think of all the typing time it could save.
Hmmm... How much credibility should we give to a source that runs IIS and delivers their video clips in WMV format? Sure looks like they're enthralled to a giant corporation with headquarters in the Great Satan's homeland.
Actually, if you look at a few of their other things, some are clearly labelled as satire. It looks like a lot of the others are satirical in part, too, sorta like a Middle-Eastern Daily Show. Some do look quite serious. I wonder how well a cultural outsider could tell the difference?
I keep thinking it could be interesting to learn a bit of Arabic...
Nah; they're going to call it "milnet", and use the.mil domain.;-)
(This has gotta be one of the oldest dups around. After all, the military has had its clone of the Internet several decades ago, long before it was called "the Internet". And where do people think the funding for the old ARPAnet came from? And what do you think the military did with all that code developed by university and contracting-firm hackers?)
We all aren't wired the same, but our learning methods sure act as though we are.
Yeah; that's a major problem with our educational system everywhere. Not many teachers seem to be able to fight it.
A incident in grade school taught me how this can work. At the end of one school year (5th I think), we were taught long division by the usual rote ritual approach. It made no sense at all. No clues why you would ever want to do something so bizarre; no attempt to explain the meaning; I didn't get it at all. At the start of the next year, a different teacher tried teaching the topic. I got it right away. As I recall, the critical points were the teacher's offhand comments that we were just doing repeated subtraction and the blank area inside the triangle represented zeroes (but there was no point in writing them). This produced an "Aha!" reaction in my brain, and it all made sense.
Of course, it probably helped that the second teacher had mentioned what division was good for. It also helped that she had also taught us that 123 = 100 + 20 +3. These parcels of information went a long way to make it comprehensible. Well, to me at least, though it was clear that most of the other kids still didn't understand.
That teacher was also one who figured out that a few of her kids were bright and already understood most of the material. Rather than treat us as nuisances to be repressed, she sat us in the back of the room and told us we could spend our time reading anything we liked. She was available for questions, but she had to spend most of her time trying to teach the "normal" (wink, wink) kids.
Some time later, I ran across a remark that the classroom lecture is the best method known for teaching people who can't read. This teacher had obviously figured this out on her own, and did the best she could to help the few kids trapped in a school system that didn't really want to educate them further.
But she was unusual. She's also the only teacher before high school whose name I can still remember.
(And the two other kids reading in the back were both girls.;-)
Some machine overcounted Cobb by a bunch of votes. This was later fixed.
Well, that's reassuring!
It's funny how often people say such things, and seem to expect that it will calm the discussion. But such things should tell you something about how many problems there are in the voting system.
All the "machine error" and "user error" reports coming from Ohio just tell me that their voting system (using the term lightly) is so screwed up that no thoughtful person would expect that the results are accurate to within a few million votes.
Funny thing is, American-made electronic voting equipment is being used in several other countries, where they demand full auditing and accountability. American companies know full well how to build such equipment. If our own elections don't use the good equipment, we should have strong suspicions about the reasons. And it's not likely that stupidity or incompetence explains it. There is a lot at stake in an election, and there are strong motives for doctoring the results. If there's a way to do it, most of the candidates will attempt it.
Of course, the two major parties both have long histories of voting fraud. So the Ohio results could be off by millions in either direction.
We have a lot of work to do before American elections can be trusted.
IANAL, but there are a bunch of them upstairs in my office (yes, I work for Penguin) looking into this one.
Hmm... You should maybe suggest that the business folks intercept this before the lawyers do something foolish. Coming down on this guy for putting these books online can only make Penguin look clueless. But thanking him for bringing back the memories would make Penguin look like good guys with functioning senses of both humor and history.
They could probably benefit by offering him space on company servers, and maybe a part-time job doing a historical section with other old books illustrating the history of their technical publications. There are a lot of people lamenting the dearth of good historical information in the computing field. Publishers of books like these could easily correct at least part of this problem by making scans of out-of-print books available online to those of us who are interested.
If the lawyers try to shut him down, this will turn into just another textbook (;-) example of the use of copyright to suppress access to historical material.
My wife likes to tell people that one of her first job titles, back in the 1970's, was "computer". This was working for a survey department in the New York state government. She did have an electronic computer available as part of the departmental equipment, and the conflict in the terminology led to a change in the job title after a couple of years.
She got the job partly because she'd done well in math classes in high school and college. While it was true that there was a lot of social pressure on girls to be technically ignorant, there was also a lot of counter-pressure from many parents and teachers, who often didn't agree with the "barefoot and pregnant" approach.
Of course, we really haven't totally outgrown that attitude yet. Lots of young women would still agree with that Barbie doll who said "Math is hard." Lots of parents and teachers are still working hard to overcome all the pressures on kids (girls and boys) to remain technically ignorant. This social battle will go on for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
..., it seems that this is yet another single sign on thing.
To paraphrase an old computer-industry saying:
The nice thing about single-signon schemes is that there are so many to choose from.
I don't think I'm the delusional here. I never stated pirating is good. Never would. But that doesn't justify the actions ...
;-)
;-)
Well, I dunno about others, but I've only used BT for two things, neither of which even remotely qualifies as "pirating".
One is that I've downloaded Fedora Core ISOs. Now, unless you believe SCO and Microsoft, this is totally legal. (And their charges haven't been decided in court yet, so for the duration, FC downloads should be presumed legal.)
My other usage is more curious: I've downloaded a lot of ComedyChannel.com's Daily Show video clips - from political blogs, who sometimes put them up as BTs. You might argue that this is some sort of piracy. But they are available free (and without registration) from ComedyChannel.com, so I'm not taking any money away from the CC folks. My reasons for getting the clips from the blogs is simple: The ComedyChannel.com web site is notoriously fscked up, and their clips simply don't work in most browsers. They did on my Powerbook until I upgraded my Real Player and Windows Media Player; after the upgrades, the CC videos didn't work very well. This apparently wasn't intentional on CC's part; their web people are simply incompetent. This has been documented in detail by any number of people. There have been a number of quotes from the CC people implying that they're honored to have their videos mirrored by the bloggers. (And someday, they promise, they'll get their web site right.
Also, I sometimes get the CC videos from blogs because that's where I find them. But this is mostly because ComedyChannel.com doesn't work in any of my browsers any more. If it did, I'd go to them first. And if they were smart, they'd set up BT for their newest clips, to lighten the load on their servers. But it's pretty obvious that, funny as they are, they aren't very smart when it comes to their web site. (Maybe I should send them my resume. If you're a web developer, maybe you should send them a resume.
Anyhow, we seem to have yet another case where someone somewhere is using a P2P package to pirate stuff, so people decide that all P2P users are pirates and thieves, and DoS them. There couldn't be any legit uses of these tools, right?
Actually, unlike some others here, I do suspect that MS might be involved in this. Their growing campaign against linux is pretty well documented here and other places. They have shown themselves to not be above shady practices (such as laundering money through SCO, or setting up web servers to look for opera and delivering defective CSSs to make it look bad). It wouldn't be a surprise if they were behind an attack on BT, because it's the major tool for distributing new linux releases now.
But until we get evidence, we really shouldn't be accusing specific people. Hypothesizing about likely possibilities, sure, but we should admit that we actually know. We oughta track down the people who are doing it, and publicise their names.
Heh. Yes, to a medical person, it's pretty obvious that all adult humans have two breasts. But in common speech, they only qualify as "breasts" if they protrude visibly.
Of course, in this sense, some women lack breasts. And some men have them. In any case, in the common-speech sense, the average (mean) is pretty close to one per adult person.
And in the medical sense, the average is slightly below two, since some adults have had mastectomies.
We might also note that, strictly speaking, the mean number of testicles per adult is somewhat below one. There are slightly more adult females than males, and a few males have had one or both testicles removed.
But none of this really affects the joke, since it's based on mocking the concept of "average" with an utterly silly example.
(Some time back, The Onion had an article that was a detailed comparison of apples and oranges. Actually, it was a variant of an earlier article in the Annals of Irreproducible Results.)
My favorite comment on the concept of the "average person" is that the average adult has one breast and one testicle.
Well, I've been using a Mac Powerbook for over a year now, and I've never run across either the Put Away command or the idea of dragging a disk to Trash to eject it. I don't seem to find either in the Help docs, either. And I'd have to say that dragging a disk to Trash is the most demented way I've heard to eject. What you'd expect is that it should trash the disk's contents, i.e., it should format the disk. (Hopefully it'd ask for confirmation first.)
...
;-)
So where is this Put Away thingy? I don't seem to find it lying about anywhere
(So far, I'd have to say that all the vaunted intuitiveness of the Mac interface is merely the usual sort of marketing hokum. Few things about it are obvious, and it's difficult to learn about the gimmicks in any manner other than playing dummy and asking about them. Sometimes you get answers that you'd never have guessed. Sometimes you get ridicule for being such a dummy. Sometimes you get both.
A new way to get support ...; diss your fav OSS app, and a hord of ... monkeys will ... have your answer in seconds.
...) that are frequented by knowledgeable geeks who enjoy showing off their expertise. You ask a question, go get a cup of coffee, and when you get back, there's and answer (or sometimes 3 or 4) sitting there for you.
/. But it's not all that unreasonable an approach. Well, you might find a more focused forum than /. This is certainly true in this case, since there are lots of good browser newsgroups out there. But asking a crowd of geeks is a viable approach in many cases. And it gives the geeks a chance to show off their expertise.
True, but this isn't at all new. I've often used just this sort of approach to good effect in the old IBM/MS-vs-unix marketing war. The argument goes: With proprietary software like the stuff you get from IBM or MS, if you have a problem, and you can't find an answer in your docs, you have to go to the vendor, who has little motive to waste time digging out an answer. You can beg and plead, but unless your questions happen to reach just the right person, you don't get good answers.
OTOH, with most of the unix-like systems, there are public fora (newsgroups, mailing lists, slashdot,
Very often, the best way to get an answer is by dissing something that you like. If you just say that you can't get X to do Y, you may get only "RTFM". Instead, say that app X can't do Y, but the competing Z can. Lots of people will try to illustrate your ignorance by explaining how to do to get X to do Y.
You can often save some time by asking your question first. Then you dig around in your docs. Maybe you find an answer, maybe you don't. In any case, you should then check for online answers. Even if you found an answer, there are often several other answers that you didn't find, and you can pick the best. Or there are warnings and qualifications that weren't in your docs. Or there are suggestions that your software should be upgraded for some relevant reason (such as that you've stumbled across a bug that has been fixed).
Yeah, I know you were ragging on people who are out to get free support on
You just have to learn to tolerate the pseudo-geeks who insult you rather than answer your question.
(Some of them insult you and answer your question. You should learn that that's fine, as long as they answer your question. Some people like to not only show off their expertise, but also tell you how superior they are. Humor them.)
or 3) Is on the take.
/. discussions. But in the Real World (TM), it's an ever-present possibility that explains a lot of otherwise inexplicable behavior on the part of management. (And I've noticed that The Market ideologists rarely if ever take this into consideration, perhaps because it throws a huge monkey wrench into their theories. ;-)
Somehow, this possibility rarely gets mentioned in
And, of course, 1), 2) and 3) can all be true for the same admin.
Anyone got a good 4) to contribute to the list?
... avoid having to stare at a bright light-bulb thing all day.
One of the more elegant descriptions of the problem that I've run across was someone who suggested the question:
"Would you ask your users to stare at a lit flourescent tube for hours at a time"?
Any sensible person would answer "Of course not!"
Then you just point out that a computer screen is in fact a flourescent tube, and a white window is a fully-lit portion of flourescent tube. If your windows have white for a background color, you are in fact asking your users to stare at a fully-lit flourescent tube. Most laptop screens are a bit better, but not much, and white windows are still painful to look at for a long time.
I've also seen this listed as the simplest way to debunk any "user-friendly" claim. If an app's window defaults to a white background, the app is physically assaulting its users eyes, and any claims of user friendliness are instantly shown to be a lie.
The truly impressive thing is how difficult the software-development industry has made it to use a friendlier dark background. I've tried on lots of systems, and found that I have to give up to avoid black-on-black or other unreadable combinations. Every app seems to have some things whose color simply can't be changed from the default.
The best compromise is a neutral grey background, because hardly anyone ever forces neutral-grey lettering without also specifying the background.
With browsers, I look for and check the Preferences thingy that says "Always use my colors and fonts". This goes a long way to making browsers usable without eyestrain despite the best efforts of the web developers.
For the moment, I'm just letting everything go to pot. I just throw things in whatever directory is convenient, and hope that I remember where I put it later. ... I'm obviously an OS X user
;-). A very few let me choose the directory and the file name.
... I do worry about what I'll do when the disk gets filled with files that I can't identify. I give it two years.
Heh. A year ago, I would have replied by commenting on how easy it is on linux (or any earlier unixoid system) to create directories and tell all apps to store their output files in the appropriate places. Then I got a PowerBook. The file system is chaos. Nearly every app has its own scheme for where to store files. Most don't ask; they just store things away in a directory and with a filename that is never displayed. Some do pop up a "Save" window. Some of those only allow a save/don't choice. Some let me type in a file name but not the directory (and most of those strip off any directory that I include
Periodically, I look around in a Terminal window, and try to figure out what the hell all those multi-MB files are, and which I can delete. Many of them have gibberish names. Some of those I can identify by examining their contents; others are pure mysteries that I move into a "tmp" subdirectory with the hope that whatever needs it will complain and give me enough of a clue to restore the file. A few apps have broken, presumably because I moved a file that they want but I couldn't identify.
Quite a lot of the files have clues in their names, and often they are sitting in really bizarre places. Some of my source directories for projects are littered with files from Mac apps, or files that I can't identify.
It sure looks like Apple is consciously working on destroying the usefulness (and simplicity) of a neirarchical file system, so we'll have to use a search mechanism to find files. This does tend to throw a monkey wrench into attempts to build my own packages (or port others') into directories. Strange, unrelated files appear in a package that have nothing to do with it. This goes a long way toward discouraging the use of OS X for the development of commercial packages.
Well, it's been an interesting experience
I'd agree that the Windows and Mac tools for searching are inadequate. I'd add linux to that list, but add that it's not much of a problem there, since my own directories don't seem to get violated by the installed apps.
In any case, I keep finding that some combination of "find" and "grep" does a better job than any fancier tool that I've yet come across. It can take a while, though.
Yah; it seems to me that if they had even half a brain, they'd be thanking google for making it so easy to find the infringers.
By suing google, they're basically saying that they don't mind people stealing their images, and they don't want someone giving them an easy way to track the thefts.
It's a shame judges aren't allowed to slap plaintiffs and their lawyers, it really is.
What country do you live in? In the US, and in quite a lot of other countries, judges can and do impose fines for frivolous or harrassing lawsuits. And there's even a legal term ("barratry") to cover this sort of crime. Granted, you don't read about it often, but this might be because the plaintiff's lawyers advise against filing suit.
Now, IANAL, so I won't try to give details. Maybe a real lawyer or two would like to expound a bit on where and why judges can do such things.
b) Every single webmaster I met (until I left a few months) ago swore they needed root access to install some apache module or other. No, you don't. You ask the sysadmin and, most times, if he can do it without a huge amount of effort ...
...
... and nothing happened. After a few reminders, it became obvious that he just wasn't going to get around to it. More Iportant Things To Do, y'know.
:port syntax in URLs, so they couldn't get to the web site through the non-port-80 server. (Yes, there are browsers like that, and no, I didn't like it any better than anyone else, but I couldn't do a damned thing about it, and they wouldn't switch to a real browser. ;-)
;-).
I'd agree in general, and I've generally told people that I don't particularly want the root password, because it will make me responsible for the machine's administration, and they're not paying me for that. But I did have an interesting case a few years ago
Several things came up (important users demanding mod_perl, mod_ssl, a few other mods, and of course the inevitable security upgrades) where su access was required because the port-80 server requires root permissions for a few milliseconds. I set things up, presented them to the admin
So I did the obvious thing. I started a server with the requested features on a higher port. No big deal. But it turned out that a number of the important users were using browsers that didn't recognize the
I did make the 80->8080 mapping suggestion. This got me on the admin's shit list real fast. He started publicly complaining about me telling him how to do his job, and stuff like that. This puzzled me at first, because it seemed such an innocuous request. But by asking a few questions, I eventually uncovered the reason: He had no idea how to do it. And he wasn't about to learn from me (or anyone else, probably). I think he was just embarrassed by not knowing something that he obviously should know; we all know people like that.
So I just kept running both servers, the port-80 server that was the default install that the admin set up for me, and the non-port-80 server that was loaded like the users wanted. When people complained about the problems this caused (including for some of their users), I patiently explained that I knew how to fix it, I wasn't permitted to do so, and the person who could give me permission had never gotten around to acting on any of my requests.
The most useful thing I did was that I'd carefully saved the email on the topic as evidence. Eventually this got the admin, uh, "reassigned" to another position. His replacement was someone a lot nicer who put me on the sudo list (as a time saver to himself
But this did take a long time. At times, I was sorely tempted to break into "my" machine. But I decided to play the game. Anyhow, I wasn't the one suffering. I didn't care what port the server was running on. And it was somewhat fun to watch the politics develop.
ROT-26 is also acceptable.
;-)
Yeah, but it would be illegal for Americans do decode it, under the terms of the DMCA. And I've heard that they have a similar law in Europe now. Anyone know whether decoding a ROT-26-encoded message is still legal in Europe.
(Of course, in some European languages, that would be ROT-29 or ROT-32.
Unless you think a person's blog with pictures of their cat and a review of the latest Dashboard Confessional album is important.
Heh. Fact is, lots of historians would love to have stuff like this from past centuries. A standard lament is that people often thought that the only important information was about "kings and wars". It can be extraordinarily difficult to get reliable information about the lives of "ordinary" people in most times and places.
Of course, we now have the opposite problem: Everybody and their dogs have web sites. But most of them are only in digital form. Even if backed up, most electronic backup from 10 years ago is unreadable. So most of the stuff going online now will probably be lost.
Maybe some of it will be kept in the google cache's backup. But if recent computer-industry history is any guide, that will only survive until google undergoes a merger, and then it will all silently disappear by order of the new management.
That's good to read.
I have noticed that IBM truly has a mixed record in such things. Sometimes they have cooperated with users and developers, and supported what we now call Free Software or Open Source and independent research. Other times, they have used legal and marketing trickery to squash competitors and steal from contributors. So there is good reason for both hope and distrust. Hearing that some potential victims' lawyers have gone over the fine print and said it's ok will go a long way toward trusting IBM in this case.
This might be a good place to bring up the old suggestion that anything out of print for a year become public domain. A newspaper publisher could then maintain their copyright by setting up a method of reprinting old issues. But most of them wouldn't find this lucrative enough, and would just let the copyright expire. Then the LoC could include most newspapers after a year.
One of the very real problems with copyright law is that it allows publishers to "capture" our history and prevent access to some of the most important primary documents. This really should be fixed, if you think that there's anything to learn from history.
Of course, one of the things that history shows is that we rarely learn anything from history.
the results will be public. everything that runs on the grid will be public domain. when we (ISB) talked with IBM they we're very clear about this
You might want to read the fine print very carefully. IBM has a rather, uh, "mixed" history with regard to such issues. You might find that the actual situation is somewhat different from what the marketing people tell you verbally.
Not that this is anything special to IBM, of course. In the past few years, we've been reading a lot of unpleasant stories about corporate sponsorship of research. The main reason for concern with IBM is their ability to use their large stable of lawyers to bankrupt opponents with legal fees.
Or they could, you know, NOT USE THOSE SEEDS, and instead continue using the strains they've been using for the last few thousand years or so.
There's one practical problem here: How is your typical Iraqi (or American or Canadian or Mexican, for that matter) farmer going to set up a proper testing lab to determine whether their seeds are contaminated with patented DNA? This is not just astronomically expensive; it's far beyond the technical capability of most small farmers everywhere. And much of the technical knowledge is held closely by the GM corporations.
The claim that crops like wheat and barley aren't wind-pollinated is not quite accurate. (A better term might be "disingenuous".) Like all grasses, they are fundamentally wind pollinated. The claim that they're not is based on the fact that seed producers keep the strains sufficiently separated so that they can't cross-pollinate. Pollination within a seed-grain field is partly done by the wind, and partly by mechanical means. The growers can play fast and loose with the terminology because the separation that is maintained between strains forces inbreeding. When they say "no wind pollination", they mean between widely-separated fields.
Also, it would be easy enough for someone to toss a handfull of GM seed into your field. It would cross-pollinate with your grain, and next year's seed would be contaminated with GM DNA. It's real hard to defend against this.
Suggesting that farmers save only non-GM seed is basically cynical in any situation where GM crops may be grown by your neighbor (or introduced into your field) without your knowledge. There is no practical way for most farmers to test their own seed for IP violations. Even if they had the technical know-how, the cost of the lab would typically be far more than their annual profit.
They are building a war fighting and intelligence network. I doubt that they will want civilians, activists, and nuts on "their" internet ...
... Unhappy Socialists Slandering America?
Understandable, but ultimately foolish. Consider that during Gulf War I, we had the fun news stories explaining why the military had turned off the errors in the GPS, because they found that they couldn't get delivery of the mil-grade GPS equipment they needed, so they started buying them from civilian commercial sources.
Also, at least in the early (ARPAnet) days, the mil guys rightly figured out that neither they nor the corporate world was ever going to develop the sort of network that they needed, so they farmed out most of the work to academic hackers. Lots of military folks won't admit it openly, but there was back then understanding (in ARPA) that this was a much more effective way of getting everything tested by people who didn't have to follow orders. We'll probably find (after the fact) that the military network is riddled with holes that every two-bit spy knows how to walk through. But the P2P guys on the open Internet will have become uncrackable by anyone (even the 25th-century security experts in the entertainment industry).
If the DoD folks had any brains, they'd be doing their stuff over the public Internet, and challenging the world's hackers to crack their communications. And they'd publish their code. Then they'd know about problems before the insanity of battlefield conditions. But I wouldn't put a lot of money on them being that sensible.
By the way, how to you throw an election over the internet when the voters use punch cards, like 73% of Ohio? TCP/CHAD?
Nah; we learned that back in 2000. You just use the courts to block recounts. Then it doesn't matter if there's an audit trail. It seems that the Dems go along with this as happily as do the Reps. Even if someone does an audit and reports the frauds, it still doesn't matter. The media just ridicules the paranoid theories without ever bothering to investigate, and everyone is happy that The System Worked.
U.S.S.A.???
Nah; my keyboard stutters, too. Well, mine doesn't repeat 2-char strings, but I'm typing this on a PowerBook. I'd bet that MS has keyboards that can frustrate its users with N-char repeats like this. If not, maybe you can special-order them online. Think of all the typing time it could save.
Hmmm ... How much credibility should we give to a source that runs IIS and delivers their video clips in WMV format? Sure looks like they're enthralled to a giant corporation with headquarters in the Great Satan's homeland.
...
Actually, if you look at a few of their other things, some are clearly labelled as satire. It looks like a lot of the others are satirical in part, too, sorta like a Middle-Eastern Daily Show. Some do look quite serious. I wonder how well a cultural outsider could tell the difference?
I keep thinking it could be interesting to learn a bit of Arabic
You mean DARPA-net?
.mil domain. ;-)
Nah; they're going to call it "milnet", and use the
(This has gotta be one of the oldest dups around. After all, the military has had its clone of the Internet several decades ago, long before it was called "the Internet". And where do people think the funding for the old ARPAnet came from? And what do you think the military did with all that code developed by university and contracting-firm hackers?)
We all aren't wired the same, but our learning methods sure act as though we are.
;-)
Yeah; that's a major problem with our educational system everywhere. Not many teachers seem to be able to fight it.
A incident in grade school taught me how this can work. At the end of one school year (5th I think), we were taught long division by the usual rote ritual approach. It made no sense at all. No clues why you would ever want to do something so bizarre; no attempt to explain the meaning; I didn't get it at all. At the start of the next year, a different teacher tried teaching the topic. I got it right away. As I recall, the critical points were the teacher's offhand comments that we were just doing repeated subtraction and the blank area inside the triangle represented zeroes (but there was no point in writing them). This produced an "Aha!" reaction in my brain, and it all made sense.
Of course, it probably helped that the second teacher had mentioned what division was good for. It also helped that she had also taught us that 123 = 100 + 20 +3. These parcels of information went a long way to make it comprehensible. Well, to me at least, though it was clear that most of the other kids still didn't understand.
That teacher was also one who figured out that a few of her kids were bright and already understood most of the material. Rather than treat us as nuisances to be repressed, she sat us in the back of the room and told us we could spend our time reading anything we liked. She was available for questions, but she had to spend most of her time trying to teach the "normal" (wink, wink) kids.
Some time later, I ran across a remark that the classroom lecture is the best method known for teaching people who can't read. This teacher had obviously figured this out on her own, and did the best she could to help the few kids trapped in a school system that didn't really want to educate them further.
But she was unusual. She's also the only teacher before high school whose name I can still remember.
(And the two other kids reading in the back were both girls.
Some machine overcounted Cobb by a bunch of votes. This was later fixed.
Well, that's reassuring!
It's funny how often people say such things, and seem to expect that it will calm the discussion. But such things should tell you something about how many problems there are in the voting system.
All the "machine error" and "user error" reports coming from Ohio just tell me that their voting system (using the term lightly) is so screwed up that no thoughtful person would expect that the results are accurate to within a few million votes.
Funny thing is, American-made electronic voting equipment is being used in several other countries, where they demand full auditing and accountability. American companies know full well how to build such equipment. If our own elections don't use the good equipment, we should have strong suspicions about the reasons. And it's not likely that stupidity or incompetence explains it. There is a lot at stake in an election, and there are strong motives for doctoring the results. If there's a way to do it, most of the candidates will attempt it.
Of course, the two major parties both have long histories of voting fraud. So the Ohio results could be off by millions in either direction.
We have a lot of work to do before American elections can be trusted.
IANAL, but there are a bunch of them upstairs in my office (yes, I work for Penguin) looking into this one.
... You should maybe suggest that the business folks intercept this before the lawyers do something foolish. Coming down on this guy for putting these books online can only make Penguin look clueless. But thanking him for bringing back the memories would make Penguin look like good guys with functioning senses of both humor and history.
Hmm
They could probably benefit by offering him space on company servers, and maybe a part-time job doing a historical section with other old books illustrating the history of their technical publications. There are a lot of people lamenting the dearth of good historical information in the computing field. Publishers of books like these could easily correct at least part of this problem by making scans of out-of-print books available online to those of us who are interested.
If the lawyers try to shut him down, this will turn into just another textbook (;-) example of the use of copyright to suppress access to historical material.
Actually, some of the first computers were women.
My wife likes to tell people that one of her first job titles, back in the 1970's, was "computer". This was working for a survey department in the New York state government. She did have an electronic computer available as part of the departmental equipment, and the conflict in the terminology led to a change in the job title after a couple of years.
She got the job partly because she'd done well in math classes in high school and college. While it was true that there was a lot of social pressure on girls to be technically ignorant, there was also a lot of counter-pressure from many parents and teachers, who often didn't agree with the "barefoot and pregnant" approach.
Of course, we really haven't totally outgrown that attitude yet. Lots of young women would still agree with that Barbie doll who said "Math is hard." Lots of parents and teachers are still working hard to overcome all the pressures on kids (girls and boys) to remain technically ignorant. This social battle will go on for a long time.