Not at all. But lots of people in the US like to pretend that it never happens. Even a cursory investigation is enough to convince most people that they don't want to be whistleblowers. You rarely get any reward at all, much less enough to make up for the end of your career.
And it's pretty impressive how many of the chiefs get away without punishment, while their underlings go to jail. This is the norm in the War on Drugs, for example, where the jails are full of local small-time dealers but very few Drug Lords. (Of course, there are fewer of the top guys to jail, so your statistics look a lot better if you can jail the little guys.;-)
people want wireless, and a fairly significant portion of the market are willing to pay for it, already. That market weight is starting to overcome the big-business reasons for holding all this tech back, it seems...
If you dig around, you can find online all the early docs for the ARPAnet, which led to the Internet. It was a military project, of course; ARPA was/is the US Defense Dept's Advanced Research Projects Agency. One thing very noticeable was that all the early diagrams were wireless. And there was from the start an emphasis on dynamic routing. The military wanted a network of cooperating electronic devices from different vendors that would keep working in battlefield conditions. This means that people are shooting at your routers. Everything was supposed to be dynamic. And you can't connect things on a battlefield (or in the air) with wires; it's all gotta be wireless.
Now it's 40 years later,and we're still acting like this is a new idea.
We might also note that complaining about obstructionism from the business world isn't new. The reason that ARPA farmed out most of the development to universities was that they understood in the 60's that the corporate world wouldn't cooperate with making their gadgets talk to their competitors' gadgets. They will always act like they're cooperating while doing everything in their power to make communication fail (and blame their competitors). If you want cooperation, it must be implemented outside the corporations. And you must plan on a constant battle to prevent their attempts to make standards unworkable by their competitors.
This was all part of the founding of the Internet, and was well understood 40 years ago. And all those diagrams were wireless.
So stop pretending it's something new, dammit; it's how things were supposed to work from the start. Inventing new names for these original designs doesn't mean you've thought of something new.
It is unthinkable to even consider removing the escape key from keyboards in the next 50 years or so, how else will hackers code?!
Huh? Real Hackers know without thinking that CTL-[ is the escape key.
(I do use this occasionally, when I have to used keyboard without an ESC key. There are a lot of weird, crippled keyboards around on specialized devices. And they're all being networked now, so you find that you need to use vi or emacs from them, totally contrary to their very narrow intended use.)
So quick, what's the ESC sequence for the F9 key?;-)
At the very least you need to have a list of trusted sites for which scripting is okay.
Yeah, and the obvious way to do this is as Yet Another Browser Feature. Just as browsers keep per-site cookies, and some keep lists of which sites you want to allow to do popups, they should also keep a list of features enabled for sites. It'd be really useful if I could turn off scripting, but have a list of exceptions.
Lately I've been running firefox with javascript enabled, and the 6 other browsers on my PowerBook have it disabled. (The 8th, IE, doesn't seem to have a control for this, but I almost never use it for anything anyway.;-) Then, when I run across something that doesn't work because it requires JS, I copy the URL to firefox. Of course, this means that I mostly just use firefox for sites that I trust.
Think we should start agitating for this, to make the browsers ever to slightly bigger?
t's a pain in the ass to close multiple tabs quickly in Safari because the location of the x moves with each tab you close (this is even worse in camino).
You might like to know that CMD-W closes the current tab in all of the browsers on my PB. On my linux box, CTL-W seems to do the job. I find that faster than moving the pointer to the tiny x button.
I am fairly sure that ActiveX security is SO broken that IE is not only unsafe but irreparably so.
Actually, you can make a good generalization: Allowing a browser to execute downloaded code isn't safe. In particular, you should turn off any and all "scripting" in any browser.
It's true that ActiveX is worse than most. But none of them are safe.
Part of the problem with IE is that, in most releases, the controls for scripting don't seem to be accessible from the browser. They are system-level controls, and when you turn scripting off, lots of local things will fail. So IE users typically can't figure out how to turn off scripting (and it's different on different releases). If they do, they're punished by all the things in their system that stop working, so they turn the scripting back on.
It's poor engineering design. Most of the other browsers give a way that you can turn off scripting for the browser. Knowledgeable users do this, and turn it back on briefly for selected pages.
Well-engineered browsers will have all such execution of downloaded files disabled by default, and will make it easy to turn this one briefly and back off. IE does the opposite, making it more of a problem than others.
But it's a problem with all browsers (unless there are still some that don't do any sort of scripting).
I've found a simpler usability test: If it's mimicking MS Windows, its usability will probably be minimal, and you'll take just as long to laboriously do simple tasks as one of Bill Gates' happy customers. If it's different from MS Windows, chances are pretty good that they've found a way to make it more usable. If it's different from MS Windows and the Mac, then it's probably very easy to use, because they've ignored all the usual advice to be copycats, and actually given usability some thought. And maybe they've even done some usability testing (what a concept!).
Of course, Gnome seems to lose out on all these grounds. Whenever I'm forced to use it, I find myself grumbling that it's nearly as bad as its MS Windows prototype. KDE does this, too, but not nearly as much as Gnome, so it's materially easier to use (and faster). At least you can unconfigure most of its MS act-alikes and chose something more to your liking.
OTOH, Enlightment is fun. Too bad it needs a terabyte of memory to run, or I'd use it more.
The real gain with X windows is that those turkeys who only believe in following MS's lead can do their thing. Meanwhile, those who want their computer to be easy to use can ignore the MS mimics and install a wm that makes much more efficient use of their time.
(Why oh why don't they ever include xwm any more? Now there's a geek's GUI. Oh, well, fvwm is nearly as good, and you can configure it with vi or emacs.;-)
expose is no better than the taskbar except in "looks and coolness".
Actually, I've found that on my PB it's a whole lot worse.
The main reason is that on a PB, while I'm typing, I usually can see in the corner of my eye that the pointer is flicking on and off and zipping around the screen. Every so often, it zips to one of the corners, the window I'm typing into goes zombie, everything turns pastel colored, and I have to spend half a minute getting control of the pointer back and discovering where that window was. That happened twice while typing this.
I'm about ready to give up on it, unless I can find a way to stop this misbehavior. I've experimented with the various controls on the "mouse", and so far nothing seems to work. I do have it set to ignore the pointer when the keyboard is active. This doesn't seem to work; if the pointer zips to a corner while I'm typing, the keyboard is disables and Expose takes over. So Expose is a huge time sink.
I started using it because it was touted as a solution to the problem of finding a buried window. Now, with X Windows, there's usually a simple way to push a window to the bottom of a stack. It's usually bound to button 2 or 3 in the title bar, and a simple click pushes a window down. But the Mac seems to only have a way to raise windows, not to lower them. So if a window is buried, the only way to uncover it was to close windows until you found it. Then you had to laboriously open windows again, while repeatedly clicking on the one you want to keep it visible. Very time consuming. They said that Expose was the solution I was looking for.
Expose does sorta handle the task of finding a buried window, at least when you can recognize it in shrunken form. But the way Expose gets constantly activated while typing into a window like this is one of the more annoying things I've seen on my PB so far.
Any Mac experts around here that know how to solve this problem?
They are nameless people whom you can't possibly locate while you're writing the code. They discover your app long after you wrote it, and criticise you loudly for not doing it the way they think it should have been done. But they won't tell you the details of what's wrong; they just post vague criticisms of its "usability" that can't be related to anything specific in the UI.
And especially, geeks aren't permitted to be "end users". No software should ever be written for their benefit (or for yours or mine).
If good UI design is targeted at computer novices, as is widely assumed, then why do so many technically talented people love OS X? Answer: Because usability gains for "our grandmothers" are also usability gains for we geeks.
Well, I've been using OSX (a PB G4) for somewhat over a year, and the more I use it, the less I like it. I just don't see what's so wonderful about its GUI. Nearly everything is slow and clumsy compared with any of the dozen or more window handlers I've used on unix/linux systems over the past 20 years of X Windows. Yeah, it's etter than MS Windows, but that's faint praise. And, unlike X Windows, there's not a whole lot anyone can do about it, because the GUI imposes a standard oon all apps.
I have resisted the temptation to install an X server. I wanted to give them a chance, because I'm well aware that people tend to judge new things by how similar they are to what you know. So I've forced myself to learn The Mac Way. After a year, I find that my best times for nearly all GUI operations still take at least twice as long as with even the clumsiest X-Windows manager. I think I'm ready to give up and admit that Apple's GUI is just hopelessly time wasting.
But maybe I'm weird in judging systems by how fast and easy it is to do what I want. I watch people who are happy with MS Windows or Macs, and groan inwardly at how slow they are to do anything. But obviously they enjoy spending so much time persuading their computer to do simple tasks. So, equally obviously, I'm not a good person to do interface design. I have this silly idea that things should be fast and easy, when that's clearly not what most people want.
Just wait. In the next Olympics, they'll decide that an unlabelled bottle is also a terrorist threat. They'll require that anyone with such a bottle (or article of clothing) affix a logo from an official Olympic sponsor.
And in the 2012 Olympics, they'll require that you buy the logos.
-- 7 people have sent me Gmail invites. Ralph won, and will be recieving my soul. Thank you to all who played.
Hmmm... I sometimes wonder if I should ask for one of the leftovers. I wonder how many people collect email addresses? I've had a lot of them. The only one that's lasted is the one that I got from a university some 20 years ago. I wonder if gmail will last as long?
(Yeah, I know it's OT. But I don't read enough comments on sigs here.;-)
No, because set uid bit by itself does not validate the parent process/user against any data store
It certainly does. It verifies that the parent's uid has valid execute permission on the new program by comparing the owner and the x bits. This information is stored in the inode, which is in a filesystem (usually but not always a disk). A unix filesystem would certainly qualify as a "data store".
So unix systems have two different instances of prior art, the setuid (and setgid) bit, and the somewhat later sudo command.
Of course, the main question is whether anyone will be able to afford the effort to get this patent invalidated. Or will Microsoft be able to bankrupt anyone who tries?
I suppose IBM could decide that this is a challenge to the security setup in their aix and linux systems. They probably have the money to successfully fight this one. I don't think I do.
I have several friends who have similar stories with security at airports in Israel. Now, El Al ("Upwards!";-) has a solid reputation for very good security. These people I know, who are Americans, typically take under a minute to clear Israeli security.
Their technique is simple. When the security people start talking to them, they answer - in fluent Hebrew. They have a brief, friendly chat, and are waved through.
There are, of course, Palestinian Arabs who speak fluent Hebrew. But apparently the Israeli security people are confident that none of them will ever be terrorists. If a real terrorist decided to become fluent in Hebrew, he/she could do a lot of damage. But so far, nobody has ever wanted to put this much of an investment into it. Understandable, I suppose. It would mean a lot of time hanging around with the enemy.
[I]f the goal is "Let's make a statement about what *did* actually happen", then inserting or deleting items from the list is historical revisionism and should not be tolerated.
Actually, that's only true if you add people who don't belong on the list. In the Nazi's case, they did specifically enslave and kill Catholics and homosexuals. So adding those groups to Niemoeller's list is just expanding his comment to include other groups that he omitted.
This isn't necessarily a criticism of him, either. There would have been little point to his listing exhaustively all the victim groups, when that wasn't his point.
I have read a few historical comments to the effect that the Catholics were the hardest hit numerically. Exact numbers are impossible, of course, but many have claimed that around half of the 20 million or so victims were Catholics. But percentage-wise, of course, the Catholics lose out to the Jews, of which roughly 3/4 were killed, while it was maybe 10% or 20% of the Catholics. And going on, it seems that percentage-wise, the Jews lose to the Gypsies, of which roughly 90% were killed (though the total count was a lot lower, since there were only 1 to 2 million Gypsies in the area before the Holocaust).
So far, I haven't seen good numbers on the population or slaughter rate for homosexuals or socialists. Don't suppose it would be very easy to get such numbers. It does seem that the Gypsies, Jews and Catholics were the great majority of victims, but there was nuumerically plenty of victimhood to go around.
[T]he Constitution grants only a very few and very specific rights to US citizens. I think voting is just about it.
Actually, it doesn't really say much about who can vote. Read Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 for example. This is about the closest that the original constitution came to addressing the subject. The 14th Ammendment (1868) was the first real mention of any rules for who could vote, and it did this in a double-negative fashion, by saying that a state's representation should be decreased if voting was denied to certain people. It didn't actually say that those people must be allowed to vote.
A lot of historians have dealt with this topic, and explained that before around 1900, most elections in the US were open to anyone who qualified according to local rules. Citizenship wasn't generally a requirement. The most common requirement was that you had to be a land-owning male. In some states this was redundant, as females couldn't own land. In others, married women couldn't own land. There was that awkward line saying that a slave's vote counted for 3/5 of a free man's, but that didn't usually matter much, since slaves votes were usually controlled (or proxied) by their owner. And again, it didn't say that slaves had to be allowed to vote; it just said how their votes (if any) were counted.
The lack of residency requirements made sense to most people, on the grounds of "No taxation without representation". Foreigners weren't exempt from taxation, so usually they were allowed to vote (if they owned land in the precinct).
This was especially true in frontier areas, where a citizenship requirement would have disenfranchised most of the white people. But when the frontier disappeared around 1900, states started requiring residency and citizenship for voting. The intent, of course, was to disenfranchise all that riff-raff immigrating from places like Greece and China. And this is still the real reason behind most of the voting restrictions.
I've long wondered what the effect would be if we had an Ammendment stating that a state's representation in Congress shall be in proportion to the number of actual votes cast in the preceding N elections. This would probably radically loosen the voting requirements in most places.
and conspiratorialists will point to this and say [that] Kennedy is a marked man in the eyes of our new republican overlords.
As far back as I can remember, he always has been.
He's smarter than anyone expected, though.
To quote some conspiratorialist or other: They got his brothers, but they can't get Ted.
We can now return to the jokes about why he prefers flying to driving (although it's probably faster to drive from Boston to Washington than to fly)...
Patriotic for many appears to mean "following your leaders without question".
Of course it does. Didn't you learn that in grade school?
How often do you hear the word used any other way?
My favorite quote on the subject is from The Devil's Dictionary (H.L.Mencken):
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
I assume that the word 'Dutch' is older than the country as an indepent entity.
Actually, it's an ancient word in the Germanic languages. Some instructive examples from German:
deutsch n, adj "German" deutlich adj "clear, plain" bedeuten v "mean, signify"
The term "Teutonic" is derived from the same root. That root basically means "people".
So if you were to talk about what something "means in plain German", you'd use three different forms of the same root. "Deutsch" (or "Dutch") are people who speak clearly.
A lot of languages have a similar set of related words that divide the world into "us" and "everyone else". We're the people who can be easily understood, unlike all those others out there.
And there are words in other languages which have no direct translation into English.
Yes; and usually there are English words that don't translate well to those languages.
OTOH, in a linguistics class I once took, the prof remarked that the main word-formation process in English is called "borrowing". This was only partly in jest.
English routinely handles problems like this by borrowing the term from the other language. Japanese is another example of a language that has done heavy borrowing from its neighbors. Japanese has recently borrowed heavily from English. And English speakers have little resistance to new words from other languages. If there's a Japanese word that we decide we need, we'll just steal it, mispronounce it badly, and add it to our vocabulary.
In any case, no language is fixed. If there is need for a new word, every language has ways to make a new word. It may take a while for the word to spread to the majority of the speakers. But no language is permanently limited by lack of a word for a concept.
In the original story, the people in question could very easily pick up Spanish or Portuguese number words. It's likely that many them know those words already. It's just that in their everyday life, they don't much need them. If they do, the change could happen very quickly.
Whenever someone says, "I understand it, I just can't articulate it," what they really mean is, "I don't understand it."
Not necessarily. I often find myself saying something like that when I mean "I have up a name for a concept that will explain that, but it's a word that I (or a small group) just made up, so I'd first have to go through a long explanation before you'd understand."
This isn't at all odd for software geeks. Every time you type a variable declaration, you are in fact making up a private name for a concept, and that name is only defined in the context where you declared it. Sometimes you may use variable names that are words in English or some other spoken language, but I think most programmers understand that such usage is really very rough, and to understand the code, you have to understand each name's meaning within that code.
On a more general level, there's a widespread observation that one of the most important part of any scientific field is developing the field's terminology. Many histories of science have illustrated this with one or more historical examples where a field went through a list of closely-related terms before finally settling on what seems to be the right one.
One of the ongoing battles with terminology is the need for biological education to instill in students the idea that "function" is a well-defined technical term, but "purpose" is not. The basic debate between these somewhat similar terms happened mostly in the 1800's, of course, but the general public (and the media) still uses these terms interchangeably. To someone who uses "purpose" in biological discussions, you could reasonably tell them that you can't articulate something, because they don't understand the terminology well enough to understand what you'd say. They'd get annoyed with you, of course, but you'd be right.
In general, to "articulate" anything, i.e., to communicate it to a listener, it's necessary that both parties not only use the same words, but have the same understanding of the words' meanings. If this has been shown to be not true, then you could very well be unable to articulate something (in terms that your listeners would understand).
In the case of software, we have a deeper problem: Even if your code is clear, it's often very difficult for a reader to dig out the meanings of all those names you've used. All too often, a name's meaning can only be learned by thoroughly studying the entire body of code, until you understand all the names and how they relate to each other. Since programmers rarely document the meanings of all their code's names, we often end up with "write-only" code whose meaning is understood (if at all) only by the original programmer.
The warning was ignored because someone thought that software released in the US would remain isolated within the target market. Americans understanding Arabic? or software released in the US ending up in the middle east? What were the odds of that, eh?
Actually, this is the norm in software development.
Every project I've ever worked on started off with a fairly narrow, well-defined target area. Then, as that got working, the users/clients started sending in bug reports. A large percent of those "bugs" could be summarized as "This software doesn't do something that I want it to do." But that something wasn't in the original design specs.
The management never, ever understands this (because they don't understand the design specs). They just want the bugs fixed. So the developers have to do a quick redesign in incorporate the new demands.
Chances are that the original MS developers (or whoever they were) even asked about other languages, regionalization, etc., and were explicitly told not to worry about it. "We need something deliverable; we can't worry about all that stuff now."
It's an old story. And nearly every software developer will tell you stories about the same process. The good ones will anticipate this, and "over-engineer" their code so that it works for a wider range of input than expected. But even then, you're often surprised by demands for new things that you didn't think of.
What if you had a pen-pal in Iraq?
If you're an American, you'd be on several lists of suspects, and you'd be hauled aside for questioning any time you tried to fly anywhere.
OTOH, on the Internet, nobody knows if you're an Iraqi (or an American dog). Unless you tell them. And even then you could be lying.
[B]ased on UN research, the figure is actually much lower than 10% in the US, between 1 and 5% depending on which study you look at.
There are a lot of definitions of "functional illiteracy", so the variation isn't surprising.
I saw a good example of this when, as a grad student, I was the techie in charge of a small departmental computer lab. Repeatedly, users would come to me looking for an explanation of how something worked. I'd usually find the documentation (which was fairly complete), ask them if they'd read it, and usually the answer was "Yes, but it didn't make sense".
After a while, I got suspicious, and what I started to do was to just read the appropriate passage of the documentation to them. Invariably, they would understand it then. And they never realized that I'd merely read the page; they always thought I was explaining it.
After repeated instances of this, I understood that most of these students were functionally illiterate. They could sound out the words on the page, yes, but they couldn't extract the meaning.
This was in the CS department at a major university. I'd bet it's similar at most of them. And I'd also bet that most tests wouldn't label these students as functionally illiterate. But, in the most obvious meaning of the phrase, they certainly were.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. But lots of people in the US like to pretend that it never happens. Even a cursory investigation is enough to convince most people that they don't want to be whistleblowers. You rarely get any reward at all, much less enough to make up for the end of your career.
;-)
And it's pretty impressive how many of the chiefs get away without punishment, while their underlings go to jail. This is the norm in the War on Drugs, for example, where the jails are full of local small-time dealers but very few Drug Lords. (Of course, there are fewer of the top guys to jail, so your statistics look a lot better if you can jail the little guys.
people want wireless, and a fairly significant portion of the market are willing to pay for it, already. That market weight is starting to overcome the big-business reasons for holding all this tech back, it seems...
If you dig around, you can find online all the early docs for the ARPAnet, which led to the Internet. It was a military project, of course; ARPA was/is the US Defense Dept's Advanced Research Projects Agency. One thing very noticeable was that all the early diagrams were wireless. And there was from the start an emphasis on dynamic routing. The military wanted a network of cooperating electronic devices from different vendors that would keep working in battlefield conditions. This means that people are shooting at your routers. Everything was supposed to be dynamic. And you can't connect things on a battlefield (or in the air) with wires; it's all gotta be wireless.
Now it's 40 years later,and we're still acting like this is a new idea.
We might also note that complaining about obstructionism from the business world isn't new. The reason that ARPA farmed out most of the development to universities was that they understood in the 60's that the corporate world wouldn't cooperate with making their gadgets talk to their competitors' gadgets. They will always act like they're cooperating while doing everything in their power to make communication fail (and blame their competitors). If you want cooperation, it must be implemented outside the corporations. And you must plan on a constant battle to prevent their attempts to make standards unworkable by their competitors.
This was all part of the founding of the Internet, and was well understood 40 years ago. And all those diagrams were wireless.
So stop pretending it's something new, dammit; it's how things were supposed to work from the start. Inventing new names for these original designs doesn't mean you've thought of something new.
And if we want it, we have to build it ourselves.
It is unthinkable to even consider removing the escape key from keyboards in the next 50 years or so, how else will hackers code?!
;-)
Huh? Real Hackers know without thinking that CTL-[ is the escape key.
(I do use this occasionally, when I have to used keyboard without an ESC key. There are a lot of weird, crippled keyboards around on specialized devices. And they're all being networked now, so you find that you need to use vi or emacs from them, totally contrary to their very narrow intended use.)
So quick, what's the ESC sequence for the F9 key?
At the very least you need to have a list of trusted sites for which scripting is okay.
;-) Then, when I run across something that doesn't work because it requires JS, I copy the URL to firefox. Of course, this means that I mostly just use firefox for sites that I trust.
Yeah, and the obvious way to do this is as Yet Another Browser Feature. Just as browsers keep per-site cookies, and some keep lists of which sites you want to allow to do popups, they should also keep a list of features enabled for sites. It'd be really useful if I could turn off scripting, but have a list of exceptions.
Lately I've been running firefox with javascript enabled, and the 6 other browsers on my PowerBook have it disabled. (The 8th, IE, doesn't seem to have a control for this, but I almost never use it for anything anyway.
Think we should start agitating for this, to make the browsers ever to slightly bigger?
t's a pain in the ass to close multiple tabs quickly in Safari because the location of the x moves with each tab you close (this is even worse in camino).
You might like to know that CMD-W closes the current tab in all of the browsers on my PB. On my linux box, CTL-W seems to do the job. I find that faster than moving the pointer to the tiny x button.
I am fairly sure that ActiveX security is SO broken that IE is not only unsafe but irreparably so.
Actually, you can make a good generalization: Allowing a browser to execute downloaded code isn't safe. In particular, you should turn off any and all "scripting" in any browser.
It's true that ActiveX is worse than most. But none of them are safe.
Part of the problem with IE is that, in most releases, the controls for scripting don't seem to be accessible from the browser. They are system-level controls, and when you turn scripting off, lots of local things will fail. So IE users typically can't figure out how to turn off scripting (and it's different on different releases). If they do, they're punished by all the things in their system that stop working, so they turn the scripting back on.
It's poor engineering design. Most of the other browsers give a way that you can turn off scripting for the browser. Knowledgeable users do this, and turn it back on briefly for selected pages.
Well-engineered browsers will have all such execution of downloaded files disabled by default, and will make it easy to turn this one briefly and back off. IE does the opposite, making it more of a problem than others.
But it's a problem with all browsers (unless there are still some that don't do any sort of scripting).
Heh, heh.
;-)
I've found a simpler usability test: If it's mimicking MS Windows, its usability will probably be minimal, and you'll take just as long to laboriously do simple tasks as one of Bill Gates' happy customers. If it's different from MS Windows, chances are pretty good that they've found a way to make it more usable. If it's different from MS Windows and the Mac, then it's probably very easy to use, because they've ignored all the usual advice to be copycats, and actually given usability some thought. And maybe they've even done some usability testing (what a concept!).
Of course, Gnome seems to lose out on all these grounds. Whenever I'm forced to use it, I find myself grumbling that it's nearly as bad as its MS Windows prototype. KDE does this, too, but not nearly as much as Gnome, so it's materially easier to use (and faster). At least you can unconfigure most of its MS act-alikes and chose something more to your liking.
OTOH, Enlightment is fun. Too bad it needs a terabyte of memory to run, or I'd use it more.
The real gain with X windows is that those turkeys who only believe in following MS's lead can do their thing. Meanwhile, those who want their computer to be easy to use can ignore the MS mimics and install a wm that makes much more efficient use of their time.
(Why oh why don't they ever include xwm any more? Now there's a geek's GUI. Oh, well, fvwm is nearly as good, and you can configure it with vi or emacs.
expose is no better than the taskbar except in "looks and coolness".
Actually, I've found that on my PB it's a whole lot worse.
The main reason is that on a PB, while I'm typing, I usually can see in the corner of my eye that the pointer is flicking on and off and zipping around the screen. Every so often, it zips to one of the corners, the window I'm typing into goes zombie, everything turns pastel colored, and I have to spend half a minute getting control of the pointer back and discovering where that window was. That happened twice while typing this.
I'm about ready to give up on it, unless I can find a way to stop this misbehavior. I've experimented with the various controls on the "mouse", and so far nothing seems to work. I do have it set to ignore the pointer when the keyboard is active. This doesn't seem to work; if the pointer zips to a corner while I'm typing, the keyboard is disables and Expose takes over. So Expose is a huge time sink.
I started using it because it was touted as a solution to the problem of finding a buried window. Now, with X Windows, there's usually a simple way to push a window to the bottom of a stack. It's usually bound to button 2 or 3 in the title bar, and a simple click pushes a window down. But the Mac seems to only have a way to raise windows, not to lower them. So if a window is buried, the only way to uncover it was to close windows until you found it. Then you had to laboriously open windows again, while repeatedly clicking on the one you want to keep it visible. Very time consuming. They said that Expose was the solution I was looking for.
Expose does sorta handle the task of finding a buried window, at least when you can recognize it in shrunken form. But the way Expose gets constantly activated while typing into a window like this is one of the more annoying things I've seen on my PB so far.
Any Mac experts around here that know how to solve this problem?
Who are these 'end users' you speak of?
They aren't you, and they aren't me.
They are nameless people whom you can't possibly locate while you're writing the code. They discover your app long after you wrote it, and criticise you loudly for not doing it the way they think it should have been done. But they won't tell you the details of what's wrong; they just post vague criticisms of its "usability" that can't be related to anything specific in the UI.
And especially, geeks aren't permitted to be "end users". No software should ever be written for their benefit (or for yours or mine).
If good UI design is targeted at computer novices, as is widely assumed, then why do so many technically talented people love OS X? Answer: Because usability gains for "our grandmothers" are also usability gains for we geeks.
Well, I've been using OSX (a PB G4) for somewhat over a year, and the more I use it, the less I like it. I just don't see what's so wonderful about its GUI. Nearly everything is slow and clumsy compared with any of the dozen or more window handlers I've used on unix/linux systems over the past 20 years of X Windows. Yeah, it's etter than MS Windows, but that's faint praise. And, unlike X Windows, there's not a whole lot anyone can do about it, because the GUI imposes a standard oon all apps.
I have resisted the temptation to install an X server. I wanted to give them a chance, because I'm well aware that people tend to judge new things by how similar they are to what you know. So I've forced myself to learn The Mac Way. After a year, I find that my best times for nearly all GUI operations still take at least twice as long as with even the clumsiest X-Windows manager. I think I'm ready to give up and admit that Apple's GUI is just hopelessly time wasting.
But maybe I'm weird in judging systems by how fast and easy it is to do what I want. I watch people who are happy with MS Windows or Macs, and groan inwardly at how slow they are to do anything. But obviously they enjoy spending so much time persuading their computer to do simple tasks. So, equally obviously, I'm not a good person to do interface design. I have this silly idea that things should be fast and easy, when that's clearly not what most people want.
Just wait. In the next Olympics, they'll decide that an unlabelled bottle is also a terrorist threat. They'll require that anyone with such a bottle (or article of clothing) affix a logo from an official Olympic sponsor.
... I sometimes wonder if I should ask for one of the leftovers. I wonder how many people collect email addresses? I've had a lot of them. The only one that's lasted is the one that I got from a university some 20 years ago. I wonder if gmail will last as long?
;-)
And in the 2012 Olympics, they'll require that you buy the logos.
--
7 people have sent me Gmail invites. Ralph won, and will be recieving my soul. Thank you to all who played.
Hmmm
(Yeah, I know it's OT. But I don't read enough comments on sigs here.
So it's not sudo that they've patented; it's the X server.
No, because set uid bit by itself does not validate the parent process/user against any data store
It certainly does. It verifies that the parent's uid has valid execute permission on the new program by comparing the owner and the x bits. This information is stored in the inode, which is in a filesystem (usually but not always a disk). A unix filesystem would certainly qualify as a "data store".
So unix systems have two different instances of prior art, the setuid (and setgid) bit, and the somewhat later sudo command.
Of course, the main question is whether anyone will be able to afford the effort to get this patent invalidated. Or will Microsoft be able to bankrupt anyone who tries?
I suppose IBM could decide that this is a challenge to the security setup in their aix and linux systems. They probably have the money to successfully fight this one. I don't think I do.
I have several friends who have similar stories with security at airports in Israel. Now, El Al ("Upwards!";-) has a solid reputation for very good security. These people I know, who are Americans, typically take under a minute to clear Israeli security.
Their technique is simple. When the security people start talking to them, they answer - in fluent Hebrew. They have a brief, friendly chat, and are waved through.
There are, of course, Palestinian Arabs who speak fluent Hebrew. But apparently the Israeli security people are confident that none of them will ever be terrorists. If a real terrorist decided to become fluent in Hebrew, he/she could do a lot of damage. But so far, nobody has ever wanted to put this much of an investment into it. Understandable, I suppose. It would mean a lot of time hanging around with the enemy.
[I]f the goal is "Let's make a statement about what *did* actually happen", then inserting or deleting items from the list is historical revisionism and should not be tolerated.
Actually, that's only true if you add people who don't belong on the list. In the Nazi's case, they did specifically enslave and kill Catholics and homosexuals. So adding those groups to Niemoeller's list is just expanding his comment to include other groups that he omitted.
This isn't necessarily a criticism of him, either. There would have been little point to his listing exhaustively all the victim groups, when that wasn't his point.
I have read a few historical comments to the effect that the Catholics were the hardest hit numerically. Exact numbers are impossible, of course, but many have claimed that around half of the 20 million or so victims were Catholics. But percentage-wise, of course, the Catholics lose out to the Jews, of which roughly 3/4 were killed, while it was maybe 10% or 20% of the Catholics. And going on, it seems that percentage-wise, the Jews lose to the Gypsies, of which roughly 90% were killed (though the total count was a lot lower, since there were only 1 to 2 million Gypsies in the area before the Holocaust).
So far, I haven't seen good numbers on the population or slaughter rate for homosexuals or socialists. Don't suppose it would be very easy to get such numbers. It does seem that the Gypsies, Jews and Catholics were the great majority of victims, but there was nuumerically plenty of victimhood to go around.
Groan!!!
[T]he Constitution grants only a very few and very specific rights to US citizens. I think voting is just about it.
Actually, it doesn't really say much about who can vote. Read Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 for example. This is about the closest that the original constitution came to addressing the subject. The 14th Ammendment (1868) was the first real mention of any rules for who could vote, and it did this in a double-negative fashion, by saying that a state's representation should be decreased if voting was denied to certain people. It didn't actually say that those people must be allowed to vote.
A lot of historians have dealt with this topic, and explained that before around 1900, most elections in the US were open to anyone who qualified according to local rules. Citizenship wasn't generally a requirement. The most common requirement was that you had to be a land-owning male. In some states this was redundant, as females couldn't own land. In others, married women couldn't own land. There was that awkward line saying that a slave's vote counted for 3/5 of a free man's, but that didn't usually matter much, since slaves votes were usually controlled (or proxied) by their owner. And again, it didn't say that slaves had to be allowed to vote; it just said how their votes (if any) were counted.
The lack of residency requirements made sense to most people, on the grounds of "No taxation without representation". Foreigners weren't exempt from taxation, so usually they were allowed to vote (if they owned land in the precinct).
This was especially true in frontier areas, where a citizenship requirement would have disenfranchised most of the white people. But when the frontier disappeared around 1900, states started requiring residency and citizenship for voting. The intent, of course, was to disenfranchise all that riff-raff immigrating from places like Greece and China. And this is still the real reason behind most of the voting restrictions.
I've long wondered what the effect would be if we had an Ammendment stating that a state's representation in Congress shall be in proportion to the number of actual votes cast in the preceding N elections. This would probably radically loosen the voting requirements in most places.
and conspiratorialists will point to this and say [that] Kennedy is a marked man in the eyes of our new republican overlords.
...
As far back as I can remember, he always has been.
He's smarter than anyone expected, though.
To quote some conspiratorialist or other: They got his brothers, but they can't get Ted.
We can now return to the jokes about why he prefers flying to driving (although it's probably faster to drive from Boston to Washington than to fly)
Patriotic for many appears to mean "following your leaders without question".
Of course it does. Didn't you learn that in grade school?
How often do you hear the word used any other way?
My favorite quote on the subject is from The Devil's Dictionary (H.L.Mencken):
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
I assume that the word 'Dutch' is older than the country as an indepent entity.
Actually, it's an ancient word in the Germanic languages. Some instructive examples from German:
deutsch n, adj "German"
deutlich adj "clear, plain"
bedeuten v "mean, signify"
The term "Teutonic" is derived from the same root. That root basically means "people".
So if you were to talk about what something "means in plain German", you'd use three different forms of the same root. "Deutsch" (or "Dutch") are people who speak clearly.
A lot of languages have a similar set of related words that divide the world into "us" and "everyone else". We're the people who can be easily understood, unlike all those others out there.
And there are words in other languages which have no direct translation into English.
Yes; and usually there are English words that don't translate well to those languages.
OTOH, in a linguistics class I once took, the prof remarked that the main word-formation process in English is called "borrowing". This was only partly in jest.
English routinely handles problems like this by borrowing the term from the other language. Japanese is another example of a language that has done heavy borrowing from its neighbors. Japanese has recently borrowed heavily from English. And English speakers have little resistance to new words from other languages. If there's a Japanese word that we decide we need, we'll just steal it, mispronounce it badly, and add it to our vocabulary.
In any case, no language is fixed. If there is need for a new word, every language has ways to make a new word. It may take a while for the word to spread to the majority of the speakers. But no language is permanently limited by lack of a word for a concept.
In the original story, the people in question could very easily pick up Spanish or Portuguese number words. It's likely that many them know those words already. It's just that in their everyday life, they don't much need them. If they do, the change could happen very quickly.
Whenever someone says, "I understand it, I just can't articulate it," what they really mean is, "I don't understand it."
Not necessarily. I often find myself saying something like that when I mean "I have up a name for a concept that will explain that, but it's a word that I (or a small group) just made up, so I'd first have to go through a long explanation before you'd understand."
This isn't at all odd for software geeks. Every time you type a variable declaration, you are in fact making up a private name for a concept, and that name is only defined in the context where you declared it. Sometimes you may use variable names that are words in English or some other spoken language, but I think most programmers understand that such usage is really very rough, and to understand the code, you have to understand each name's meaning within that code.
On a more general level, there's a widespread observation that one of the most important part of any scientific field is developing the field's terminology. Many histories of science have illustrated this with one or more historical examples where a field went through a list of closely-related terms before finally settling on what seems to be the right one.
One of the ongoing battles with terminology is the need for biological education to instill in students the idea that "function" is a well-defined technical term, but "purpose" is not. The basic debate between these somewhat similar terms happened mostly in the 1800's, of course, but the general public (and the media) still uses these terms interchangeably. To someone who uses "purpose" in biological discussions, you could reasonably tell them that you can't articulate something, because they don't understand the terminology well enough to understand what you'd say. They'd get annoyed with you, of course, but you'd be right.
In general, to "articulate" anything, i.e., to communicate it to a listener, it's necessary that both parties not only use the same words, but have the same understanding of the words' meanings. If this has been shown to be not true, then you could very well be unable to articulate something (in terms that your listeners would understand).
In the case of software, we have a deeper problem: Even if your code is clear, it's often very difficult for a reader to dig out the meanings of all those names you've used. All too often, a name's meaning can only be learned by thoroughly studying the entire body of code, until you understand all the names and how they relate to each other. Since programmers rarely document the meanings of all their code's names, we often end up with "write-only" code whose meaning is understood (if at all) only by the original programmer.
The warning was ignored because someone thought that software released in the US would remain isolated within the target market. Americans understanding Arabic? or software released in the US ending up in the middle east? What were the odds of that, eh?
Actually, this is the norm in software development.
Every project I've ever worked on started off with a fairly narrow, well-defined target area. Then, as that got working, the users/clients started sending in bug reports. A large percent of those "bugs" could be summarized as "This software doesn't do something that I want it to do." But that something wasn't in the original design specs.
The management never, ever understands this (because they don't understand the design specs). They just want the bugs fixed. So the developers have to do a quick redesign in incorporate the new demands.
Chances are that the original MS developers (or whoever they were) even asked about other languages, regionalization, etc., and were explicitly told not to worry about it. "We need something deliverable; we can't worry about all that stuff now."
It's an old story. And nearly every software developer will tell you stories about the same process. The good ones will anticipate this, and "over-engineer" their code so that it works for a wider range of input than expected. But even then, you're often surprised by demands for new things that you didn't think of.
What if you had a pen-pal in Iraq?
If you're an American, you'd be on several lists of suspects, and you'd be hauled aside for questioning any time you tried to fly anywhere.
OTOH, on the Internet, nobody knows if you're an Iraqi (or an American dog). Unless you tell them. And even then you could be lying.
Idaho?
You realize, of course, that Idaho doesn't exist.
[B]ased on UN research, the figure is actually much lower than 10% in the US, between 1 and 5% depending on which study you look at.
There are a lot of definitions of "functional illiteracy", so the variation isn't surprising.
I saw a good example of this when, as a grad student, I was the techie in charge of a small departmental computer lab. Repeatedly, users would come to me looking for an explanation of how something worked. I'd usually find the documentation (which was fairly complete), ask them if they'd read it, and usually the answer was "Yes, but it didn't make sense".
After a while, I got suspicious, and what I started to do was to just read the appropriate passage of the documentation to them. Invariably, they would understand it then. And they never realized that I'd merely read the page; they always thought I was explaining it.
After repeated instances of this, I understood that most of these students were functionally illiterate. They could sound out the words on the page, yes, but they couldn't extract the meaning.
This was in the CS department at a major university. I'd bet it's similar at most of them. And I'd also bet that most tests wouldn't label these students as functionally illiterate. But, in the most obvious meaning of the phrase, they certainly were.