If he'd put it in HTML, it would be Microsoft HTML. Then it'd be even bigger than a Word of PDF document, and only recent IE releases would render it correctly. And it would come with a CSS that made it unreadable on opera.;-)
Here in the US, the Comedy Channel is now widely considered to have the best news and political reporting. The Daily Show can be especially good at times (and just silly at other times, but any Monty Python fans will appreciate that).
It's too bad that ComedyChannel.com sends out such bizarre, often-broken HTML. They have some good clips there, but pretty much everyone I know who has looked at it complains about how confusing and, well, "broken" it is.
The fact that they seem to send only Real and Windows media formats might be part of their problem. But there are a number of blogs that link to their clips, and those usually work pretty well. So if we had a good way of extracting the bare URLs from the javascript, we could all see them online, and the whole world would understand US politics.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that it's also a problem for Windows users. If you have a version of Word that's very different from the one used to generate the form, there's a good chance that it'll be garbled for you, too.
The funny thing is that university admin types tend to use ancient, unpatched versions of W98 (or even W95), so it's students with an up-to-date XP machine that are likely to have problems. OO on linux can often read such files better than recent versions of Word.
Of course, the real solution is to somehow educate them to the risks of using Word docs. But they're university people; they probably can't be educated.
Star Trek and a lot of SF is based on faster-than-light travel. One of the real possibilities is that the universe just doesn't permit this, and travel to the stars will always be prohibitively slow.
From an SF writer's viewpoint, this doesn't led to very interesting stories, so most of them have assumed some solution to the FTL problem. A few, such as Ursula LeGuin, have written stories in an "Einsteinian" universe, but have added the gimmick that FLT communication turns out to be possible. This does lead to more interesting universes than the one that we appear to live in, but even she does eventually give in and have someone discover FTL travel.
But it's quite likely that FTL travel or communication will never be possible in our universe. This does rather limit the possible contacts that we will have with any aliens. Some of the closest stars might just be possible, but with ping times measured in decades, travel isn't really practical, unless you accept the idea that when you get back home, everyone you ever knew will be long dead.
It would be interesting if we found that FTL communication but not travel is possible. Then we could have a galactic "network" and share ideas, but we couldn't go out conquering (and they couldn't conquer us). I think that if I were a cosmic engineer, that's the sort of universe that I'd build. Then a marginally intelligent but aggressive species couldn't wipe out all the other promising species in their neighborhood. How would you behave toward someone if you could exchange messages with them, but neither could ever reach the other physically?
They are running Windows for the same reason that they are connected to a network, some pinhead PHB somewhere is trying to save a buck.
Well, that should be easy enough to fix. Just hit them with a malpractice suit whenever there's a medical problem traceable to instability or malware on a Windows system. The security problems with Windows are so thoroughly documented that using them in such situations should be considered irresponsible in the extreme. That should convince the bean counters very quickly that they won't save money by buying from Bill.
Of course, this shouldn't be entirely restricted to Windows. They're merely the worst of a bad lot. Maybe the linux kernel and basic libraries are known to be stable and (nearly) immune to breakins. But installing any commercial distro should be viewed with the same sort of jaundiced eye, simply because they are full of software that hasn't been vetted as thoroughly as the low-level stuff. That may be fine for a home box; it's not fine when lives or health are at stake.
Maybe the Gentoo folks could get a bit of publicity out of this. "Hey, with our system, you select exactly the components you want, then you compile and install them yourself." Sounds like to good sales pitch for software to be used in any critical environment.
You might also insist that every piece of off-the-shelf software come complete with links to bug-report sites. And you'd want a staff that knows how to read such things, and make a reasoned judgement (plus thorough tests) of which patches are safe to apply.
But MS Windows has such an atrocious record that its use should be considered direct evidence of either incompetence or malpractice.
Meanwhile, works that are not economically viable to be "sold" by the "owners" simply become unavailable,...
A simple solution to this problem has been proposed: Any work not available from the copyright owner for a year or more should lose its copyright and become public domain.
This would quickly end the lockup of unprofitable works. It would also probably eliminate the fear of eternal copyright. Such copyright would require that the owner make the works available at all times, or lose their copyright.
This has been especially suggested for software. In this case, the rule should be that if the owner doesn't provide support for the software, it becomes public domain. Think of all the great pre-bloat versions of useful programs that would become available.
Of course, we'd have to worry about someone like Disney saying "Sure, I'll sell you a DVD of that. Just give me a check for $1,000,000."
We'd probably need a "reasonable price" clause in the legislation.
I've written scripts and/or aliases to do just this on several projects. Somehow, the code-format nazis never seem to appreciate it.
But it makes a lot of sense to me. Different people have different preferences. Some have poor eyesight or are working on small displays or have to have too many windows open at once, and for them it makes sense to have narrow, vertically-formatted code. OTOH, people always complain about my tiny fonts and wide code, which I do because I find that I can only work on what I can see on the screen at once. Wasting a line to hold just a brace can materially limit what I can work on.
If someone with vision limitations wants to read my code, I'd encourage them to reformat it however is best for their eyes.
And in most languages, if your code can't handle this reformatting, there's something wrong with it. Canonicalizing it to a standard format shouldn't effect anything but its surface appearance.
There are a few languages for which this isn't quite true, of course.
When I say 'as long as you need them', that isn't an invitation to write programs with 700-character lines;...
Oh, I dunno. Some years back, a particularly obnoxious programmer on the team produced a ridiculously-long routine to do a certain task. I opined that I could do it in a lot less code. His response was something sarcastic along the lines of "Oh, yeah; I suppose you could do it in one line of C." I paused a few beats, and said that, yes, I could. He sneered at this, so I offered a wager, which he accepted. A few hours later, I presented the group with a single-line routine that did the same thing, and demanded that he pay up.
The single line was actually his code, with all the newlines removed (and the more useless comments dropped). It was several thousand bytes wide, of course, but one line.
Well, it was good for a joke. I also produced an equivalent, well-formatted code that was only about 10% as much code as his "solution", and ran much faster. That's what earned me his eternal enmity.
All this is why the "obfuscated" C and perl contests limit the byte count of entries. And, of course, some entries each year are usually a single long line, to fit within the limit by eliminating all unnecessary white space. But for such contests, such code is "good".
Hmmm... I wonder what percent of the readers these days can tell you where both of these numbers came from. Probably a lot have read where the 80 came from, but the 72?
(I have actually used IBM punch cards, and I still have a few souvenir cards hidden away in a drawer.;-)
Of course, this relic isn't nearly as amazing as the US railroad gauge. (Not to mention the myths about where it came from.)
In any case, I'm frequently bemused by email and newsgroup messages that, in their multiple levels of quotes, show the effects of multiple line wraps at column 72. It's usually pretty easy to verify that that's what happened.
So let's get together a list of the browsers that can either send an exact mimic of an IE ID string, or that can be given the ID string in a config window or such.
Lynx and Opera can do this. The reqwireless browser on my BlackBerry can do it to (and even asked me if I wanted it to pretend to be IE the first time I fired it up;-).
Which other browsers can pass for IE to idiotic sites like this?
Or just burn to CD and re-encode, but who wants to waste cd's and time doing that?
Why bother? All I did on my PB was tell iTunes to convert its files to MP3, which it was happy to do. I then scp'd them to my linux box, and the software there played them just fine. I put them up (in a hidden directory so I couldn't be charged with a crime;-) on the linux box's web server, and downloaded them back to the PB, and that worked fine, too. Funny thing was that the browser on the PB (I forget which one) just handed them to iTunes, which apparently recognized them as the same as the tunes it already had, because rather than entering them as new tunes, it just played the tunes that were already in its iTunes directory tree.
I'm tempted to do this copy cycle a few more times, and see if the limit to copying is enforced. I wonder if there's a place for Apple's DRM data in an MP3 file? Or maybe it's in those *.m4a and *.m4p files that I see here and there.
There is the minor objection that the initial conversion to MP3 is lossy. I wonder if there's an approach that isn't? Can iTunes convert to WAV? I don't see that as an option.
How odd. How did you miss the first couple decades of the Internet's existence? Too bad. You too could now complain about how it has all gone downhill since they let those <gag>commercial</gag> folks online.
You missed the days when you really could say or put just about anything online without worrying about someone hitting you with a C&D order. And you could help your friends (and enemies) by running an open relay mail server without worrying about the <gag>commercial</gag> folks bringing your tiny server to its knees by using it as a spam relay.
(And you could tell people that you remember the day when "spam" was an awful, oversalted <gag>commercial</gag> lunch meat product.;-)
Yeah, but I've spent some time in Finland, and all I could find there was wimpy light ales. Better than most of the commercial American beers, I'll grant you, but nothing comparable to Guinness or Murphy's.
Of course, Linus may have moved to the US so that he could get better beer. Anyone know what his favorite brands are? Hmmm... I wonder if google knows... Yup; it found several conflicting answers, Red Hat (;-) and Guinness.
Silicon Valley does have a few good brew pubs, as does the Boston area.
I owned an IBM T20 which qualifies as a business notebook computer and it shipped with Linux years ago.
So does IBM offer any laptops with linux today? I've browsed around their online sales pages, and I've never stumbled across even a mention of linux. I suppose I could talk to a sales person, but somehow I'm a bit reluctant to do that until I've almost made up my mind about what I'd like to buy.
To double check, I went to ibm.com, which actually got me www.ibm.com/us/, and clicked on the "Notebook finder" link. This got a page listing two versions of XP but not linux. I followed several links from there and tried configuring a couple of Thinkpads. Never was I offered the choice of linux, and the firefox's "Find" window told me that "linux" didn't appear in any of these pages.
As far as I can tell, IBM won't sell me a laptop with linux installed.
(This is a troll, of course, to get people to prove how wrong I am. Sometimes that's the only way to get the info you want. You claim that something can't be done, and finally people speak up just to show what a dummy you are. But will I get moderated "troll". Let's see...;-)
Hmmm... I've seen the term "survey inch", but I'd never seen it defined, or realized that it wasn't quite the same as an "inch". Ya learn something new here every day.
(In this case, I learned that the US system of measurements is even more demented than I'd thought.;-)
There are also those "fishermen's rulers" that you see in sporting-good stores. I wonder if NIST has officially defined any of them...
Actually, Metric is the standard in the US since President Gerald R. Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.
There was a funny NRP article back in the 1980s about the non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US going metric.
They had to explain, of course. It seems that the US, like most countries, has never actually had a legally-enforced standard system of measurements. Rather, there is a government bureau (whose name has changed several times) that defines official meanings to units of measurements. They basically just say "If you are to use units like ounces or grams or inches or meters, you must use our definitions of those units, else you'll be liable to charges of consumer fraud."
The official definitions of the units have changed occasionally, as newer and more precise means of measuring were developed. What happened in the 1880's is that the standards bureau decided that the most precise system at that time was the one in Paris. So they redefined all the Imperial units in terms of the metric units. At that time, the metric system became the basic legal units in the US, but all the other units were also legally defined. This situation has continued to this day.
So when you read that an inch is 2.54 cm, that's not an approximation. It is exact, because in the US, that has been the legal definition of an inch for about 125 years.
Some people have characterized the US system as an "extended metric system". They probably say or write this with an evil grin on their faces. We all know what "extended" means in such phrases.
(So "embrace and extend" wasn't invented by Microsoft; the US government has used it for over a century.;-)
The closest that the US government has come to establishing SI units as a legal requirement has been in decreeing that certain products must be labelled in SI units. Most kinds of food and medicine are covered by this now, though they may also be labelled in Imperial units. Some manufacturers have gone to SI units only, for simplicity, but not very many. Usually the conversion has happened when there was an influx of imported goods. Thus, around half the cars sold in the US now come from other countries. It's a bother to have half your parts metric and half Imperial, so there has been a slow move to all-metric car parts. But the change has been slow.
I think the subdivision of a foot into 12 inches is fantastic; it allows one to easily divide dimensions into thirds,...
Various mathematicians have explained why it would be so much better if we would switch to duodecimal (base 12) for all calculations. Somehow, I doubt if it will ever happen.
Another funny thing is that some linguists and historians have argued that there was a competition between bases 10 and 12 in Europe around 2000 years ago. It seems that there are a lot of Roman writings in which the numbers make more sense if you assume they were base 12. This starts with some docs where, for example, both iiii and iv are used, as well as viiii and ix. Why would they do this unless they thought that these were different numbers? And there are some historic dates that don't seem to be consistent in base 10, but make more sense in base 12.
The main linguistic evidence is that the Europoean languages all seem to have morphemes for the numbers from 1 to 12, and then the words become compound. It's not much, but it's one more item.
It must have created a bit of confusion, since some Romans apparently did count in base 10, while others probably used base 12.
But then the Arabs taught them a better way to write numbers, and it was all over for base 12.
It may not have actually mattered all that much anyway, since Roman trade and engineering was mostly carried out in Greek, and they had their own number notation that was a base-10 system, much like the notation used in Hebrew. It was a bit clumsy, but a lot better than Roman notation (and not as good as Arabic).
What sane, intelligent person honestly thinks they'll be sued for *using* Linux?
Hmmm... I'd think that any sane, intelligent person who has been following the "Intellectual Property" development of recent years would be very worried. To be more precise, while I might not think that I'll be sued, but I certainly should fear that I'll be sued.
And the main reason for such fears is not that I might know personally of people who have been sued. The reason is that I keep reading things by reasonably knowledgeable techies and lawyers who have looked at things like software patents, and said that 1) They don't really know what these things mean due to their vague wording; 2) The legal situation is sufficiently vague that we must wait for the courts to decide; and 3) The courts' decisions will be made by judges who don't understand the technical details or by juries who are chosen explicitly for their ignorance of the topic.
We have read stories about donations of computers to charitable organizations who are then hit up by the vendor (Microsoft) for the price of the software that was pre-installed. The vendor has already been paid for it, and it seems that the laws might actually say that they can demand to be paid again. So I can become a criminal by merely opening a gift and turning it on.
We also read the stories about people who bought CDs or DVDs that didn't play on their equipment, but they were programmers, so they wrote a few lines of code to make the thing play, and suddenly they're criminals for using the disk for the only thing that it's goood for on their own equipment.
SCO have sent threatening legal notices to people who are not their customers threatening them with lawsuits if they run software from some of SCO's competitors. Maybe this will come to nothing. But you'd have to be rather foolhardy to remain unworried, given recent stories in this subject area.
Also, note that "receiving stolen goods" is a crime in much of the world. So it's sane and reasonable to guess that, if the courts decide that linux contains stolen goods, then everyone using it is a criminal. Or not; we can't know because the courts haven't told us yet.
It sure seems that the legal system has gone berserk when it comes to computer software, and the only rational response is to be very worried. Nobody can quite determine what the laws are any more. We can only watch and wait, and hope we're not caught in the crossfire.
Well, after a week without access to ComedyCentral.com after I made the mistake of trying RealPlayer10 on my PowerBook, I certainly wouldn't use the word "love".
OTOH, I did just manage to re-install the RealOne Player that came with the machine, after a lot of stumbling around through pages that told me it was no longer supported. Now I can finally see their coverage of the Democratic Convention without waiting til 11 pm and hoping they rebroadcast it on TV.
Yes, google found lots of discussions of the problem. Even some suggestions for fixes. None of them worked. Eventually I stumbled across explanations of why this and a long list of other sites don't work. Maybe the next release will fix the problem.
But next time, I'll do a thorough google search before attempting to install anything of theirs. They seem to believe in letting their users do most of the testing. (And you might note that the download file has the string "beta" in its name.)
I might mention, though, that RealPlayer 10 comes with its own browser, and it's actually a fairly nice addition to my growing list of browsers. But even their own browser didn't show Comedy Central, or a number of other less important sites. Those it did show, worked much better than their older players.
(I've started seeing quite a lot of claims that the best coverage of the American election is at ComedyCentral.com, and I think I agree. If you really want to know what's going on, check them out. Unfortunately, they only post videos in Real format.)
Not to worry; when Diebold and other voting-equipment companies re-elect Dubya as promised, you can bet that one of the main items on the agenda will be finally extending the blessings of US law to the rest of the planet.
(Oooh - Flamebait. I haven't got that rating for weeks.;-)
if the insurance companies were to show that the mississippi river is really an ancient and dormant fault line then you would see home owners buying up earthquake insurance like crazy.
You might google for "New Madrid earthquake", or read this page. On Dec 16, 1811, the first of three magnitude-8 earthquakes hit this area in southern Misssouri, near the Mississippi.
(Any readers in the area? Do you have earthquake insurance? If so, how much does it cost?)
Probably true, but remember that Microsoft's strategy isn't based on winning lawsuits. Their behavior is based on the understanding that they can drag the case out for a decade or more, so the legal fees will bankrupt you long before you win.
[Slashdot] site is owned by a corporation. You should question every single thing posted on it.
Very true. But the first sentence is irrelevant. You should question everything on any supposed "news" site.
One of the useful things about news.google.com is the link that say " - and N related >>". Those typically include all of the online articles with similar keywords. If you're only looking at gooogle's first few links for a story, you're missing many of the significant articles. Google's page ranking is basically a sort of popularity poll, so the first-listed articles likely have a bias similar to the most common biases of the entire news industry.
But google does give you the long list. Dig into them, and you can learn a lot that the mass media will never tell you.
(It would be nice to have a real competitor for google, though. And slashdot. MSN clearly doesn't qualify.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
If he'd put it in HTML, it would be Microsoft HTML. Then it'd be even bigger than a Word of PDF document, and only recent IE releases would render it correctly. And it would come with a CSS that made it unreadable on opera. ;-)
Here in the US, the Comedy Channel is now widely considered to have the best news and political reporting. The Daily Show can be especially good at times (and just silly at other times, but any Monty Python fans will appreciate that).
It's too bad that ComedyChannel.com sends out such bizarre, often-broken HTML. They have some good clips there, but pretty much everyone I know who has looked at it complains about how confusing and, well, "broken" it is.
The fact that they seem to send only Real and Windows media formats might be part of their problem. But there are a number of blogs that link to their clips, and those usually work pretty well. So if we had a good way of extracting the bare URLs from the javascript, we could all see them online, and the whole world would understand US politics.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that it's also a problem for Windows users. If you have a version of Word that's very different from the one used to generate the form, there's a good chance that it'll be garbled for you, too.
The funny thing is that university admin types tend to use ancient, unpatched versions of W98 (or even W95), so it's students with an up-to-date XP machine that are likely to have problems. OO on linux can often read such files better than recent versions of Word.
Of course, the real solution is to somehow educate them to the risks of using Word docs. But they're university people; they probably can't be educated.
Star Trek and a lot of SF is based on faster-than-light travel. One of the real possibilities is that the universe just doesn't permit this, and travel to the stars will always be prohibitively slow.
From an SF writer's viewpoint, this doesn't led to very interesting stories, so most of them have assumed some solution to the FTL problem. A few, such as Ursula LeGuin, have written stories in an "Einsteinian" universe, but have added the gimmick that FLT communication turns out to be possible. This does lead to more interesting universes than the one that we appear to live in, but even she does eventually give in and have someone discover FTL travel.
But it's quite likely that FTL travel or communication will never be possible in our universe. This does rather limit the possible contacts that we will have with any aliens. Some of the closest stars might just be possible, but with ping times measured in decades, travel isn't really practical, unless you accept the idea that when you get back home, everyone you ever knew will be long dead.
It would be interesting if we found that FTL communication but not travel is possible. Then we could have a galactic "network" and share ideas, but we couldn't go out conquering (and they couldn't conquer us). I think that if I were a cosmic engineer, that's the sort of universe that I'd build. Then a marginally intelligent but aggressive species couldn't wipe out all the other promising species in their neighborhood. How would you behave toward someone if you could exchange messages with them, but neither could ever reach the other physically?
They are running Windows for the same reason that they are connected to a network, some pinhead PHB somewhere is trying to save a buck.
Well, that should be easy enough to fix. Just hit them with a malpractice suit whenever there's a medical problem traceable to instability or malware on a Windows system. The security problems with Windows are so thoroughly documented that using them in such situations should be considered irresponsible in the extreme. That should convince the bean counters very quickly that they won't save money by buying from Bill.
Of course, this shouldn't be entirely restricted to Windows. They're merely the worst of a bad lot. Maybe the linux kernel and basic libraries are known to be stable and (nearly) immune to breakins. But installing any commercial distro should be viewed with the same sort of jaundiced eye, simply because they are full of software that hasn't been vetted as thoroughly as the low-level stuff. That may be fine for a home box; it's not fine when lives or health are at stake.
Maybe the Gentoo folks could get a bit of publicity out of this. "Hey, with our system, you select exactly the components you want, then you compile and install them yourself." Sounds like to good sales pitch for software to be used in any critical environment.
You might also insist that every piece of off-the-shelf software come complete with links to bug-report sites. And you'd want a staff that knows how to read such things, and make a reasoned judgement (plus thorough tests) of which patches are safe to apply.
But MS Windows has such an atrocious record that its use should be considered direct evidence of either incompetence or malpractice.
Meanwhile, works that are not economically viable to be "sold" by the "owners" simply become unavailable, ...
A simple solution to this problem has been proposed: Any work not available from the copyright owner for a year or more should lose its copyright and become public domain.
This would quickly end the lockup of unprofitable works. It would also probably eliminate the fear of eternal copyright. Such copyright would require that the owner make the works available at all times, or lose their copyright.
This has been especially suggested for software. In this case, the rule should be that if the owner doesn't provide support for the software, it becomes public domain. Think of all the great pre-bloat versions of useful programs that would become available.
Of course, we'd have to worry about someone like Disney saying "Sure, I'll sell you a DVD of that. Just give me a check for $1,000,000."
We'd probably need a "reasonable price" clause in the legislation.
I've written scripts and/or aliases to do just this on several projects. Somehow, the code-format nazis never seem to appreciate it.
But it makes a lot of sense to me. Different people have different preferences. Some have poor eyesight or are working on small displays or have to have too many windows open at once, and for them it makes sense to have narrow, vertically-formatted code. OTOH, people always complain about my tiny fonts and wide code, which I do because I find that I can only work on what I can see on the screen at once. Wasting a line to hold just a brace can materially limit what I can work on.
If someone with vision limitations wants to read my code, I'd encourage them to reformat it however is best for their eyes.
And in most languages, if your code can't handle this reformatting, there's something wrong with it. Canonicalizing it to a standard format shouldn't effect anything but its surface appearance.
There are a few languages for which this isn't quite true, of course.
When I say 'as long as you need them', that isn't an invitation to write programs with 700-character lines; ...
...
Oh, I dunno. Some years back, a particularly obnoxious programmer on the team produced a ridiculously-long routine to do a certain task. I opined that I could do it in a lot less code. His response was something sarcastic along the lines of "Oh, yeah; I suppose you could do it in one line of C." I paused a few beats, and said that, yes, I could. He sneered at this, so I offered a wager, which he accepted. A few hours later, I presented the group with a single-line routine that did the same thing, and demanded that he pay up.
The single line was actually his code, with all the newlines removed (and the more useless comments dropped). It was several thousand bytes wide, of course, but one line.
Well, it was good for a joke. I also produced an equivalent, well-formatted code that was only about 10% as much code as his "solution", and ran much faster. That's what earned me his eternal enmity.
All this is why the "obfuscated" C and perl contests limit the byte count of entries. And, of course, some entries each year are usually a single long line, to fit within the limit by eliminating all unnecessary white space. But for such contests, such code is "good".
There is amazingly little logic to all this
Hmmm ... I wonder what percent of the readers these days can tell you where both of these numbers came from. Probably a lot have read where the 80 came from, but the 72?
;-)
(I have actually used IBM punch cards, and I still have a few souvenir cards hidden away in a drawer.
Of course, this relic isn't nearly as amazing as the US railroad gauge. (Not to mention the myths about where it came from.)
In any case, I'm frequently bemused by email and newsgroup messages that, in their multiple levels of quotes, show the effects of multiple line wraps at column 72. It's usually pretty easy to verify that that's what happened.
So let's get together a list of the browsers that can either send an exact mimic of an IE ID string, or that can be given the ID string in a config window or such.
;-).
Lynx and Opera can do this. The reqwireless browser on my BlackBerry can do it to (and even asked me if I wanted it to pretend to be IE the first time I fired it up
Which other browsers can pass for IE to idiotic sites like this?
Or just burn to CD and re-encode, but who wants to waste cd's and time doing that?
;-) on the linux box's web server, and downloaded them back to the PB, and that worked fine, too. Funny thing was that the browser on the PB (I forget which one) just handed them to iTunes, which apparently recognized them as the same as the tunes it already had, because rather than entering them as new tunes, it just played the tunes that were already in its iTunes directory tree.
Why bother? All I did on my PB was tell iTunes to convert its files to MP3, which it was happy to do. I then scp'd them to my linux box, and the software there played them just fine. I put them up (in a hidden directory so I couldn't be charged with a crime
I'm tempted to do this copy cycle a few more times, and see if the limit to copying is enforced. I wonder if there's a place for Apple's DRM data in an MP3 file? Or maybe it's in those *.m4a and *.m4p files that I see here and there.
There is the minor objection that the initial conversion to MP3 is lossy. I wonder if there's an approach that isn't? Can iTunes convert to WAV? I don't see that as an option.
...prior to 1995.
;-)
How odd. How did you miss the first couple decades of the Internet's existence? Too bad. You too could now complain about how it has all gone downhill since they let those <gag>commercial</gag> folks online.
You missed the days when you really could say or put just about anything online without worrying about someone hitting you with a C&D order. And you could help your friends (and enemies) by running an open relay mail server without worrying about the <gag>commercial</gag> folks bringing your tiny server to its knees by using it as a spam relay.
(And you could tell people that you remember the day when "spam" was an awful, oversalted <gag>commercial</gag> lunch meat product.
... Linus likes his beer.
... I wonder if google knows ... Yup; it found several conflicting answers, Red Hat (;-) and Guinness.
Yeah, but I've spent some time in Finland, and all I could find there was wimpy light ales. Better than most of the commercial American beers, I'll grant you, but nothing comparable to Guinness or Murphy's.
Of course, Linus may have moved to the US so that he could get better beer. Anyone know what his favorite brands are? Hmmm
Silicon Valley does have a few good brew pubs, as does the Boston area.
I owned an IBM T20 which qualifies as a business notebook computer and it shipped with Linux years ago.
... ;-)
So does IBM offer any laptops with linux today? I've browsed around their online sales pages, and I've never stumbled across even a mention of linux. I suppose I could talk to a sales person, but somehow I'm a bit reluctant to do that until I've almost made up my mind about what I'd like to buy.
To double check, I went to ibm.com, which actually got me www.ibm.com/us/, and clicked on the "Notebook finder" link. This got a page listing two versions of XP but not linux. I followed several links from there and tried configuring a couple of Thinkpads. Never was I offered the choice of linux, and the firefox's "Find" window told me that "linux" didn't appear in any of these pages.
As far as I can tell, IBM won't sell me a laptop with linux installed.
(This is a troll, of course, to get people to prove how wrong I am. Sometimes that's the only way to get the info you want. You claim that something can't be done, and finally people speak up just to show what a dummy you are. But will I get moderated "troll". Let's see
Hmmm ... I've seen the term "survey inch", but I'd never seen it defined, or realized that it wasn't quite the same as an "inch". Ya learn something new here every day.
;-)
...
(In this case, I learned that the US system of measurements is even more demented than I'd thought.
There are also those "fishermen's rulers" that you see in sporting-good stores. I wonder if NIST has officially defined any of them
Actually, Metric is the standard in the US since President Gerald R. Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.
;-)
There was a funny NRP article back in the 1980s about the non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US going metric.
They had to explain, of course. It seems that the US, like most countries, has never actually had a legally-enforced standard system of measurements. Rather, there is a government bureau (whose name has changed several times) that defines official meanings to units of measurements. They basically just say "If you are to use units like ounces or grams or inches or meters, you must use our definitions of those units, else you'll be liable to charges of consumer fraud."
The official definitions of the units have changed occasionally, as newer and more precise means of measuring were developed. What happened in the 1880's is that the standards bureau decided that the most precise system at that time was the one in Paris. So they redefined all the Imperial units in terms of the metric units. At that time, the metric system became the basic legal units in the US, but all the other units were also legally defined. This situation has continued to this day.
So when you read that an inch is 2.54 cm, that's not an approximation. It is exact, because in the US, that has been the legal definition of an inch for about 125 years.
Some people have characterized the US system as an "extended metric system". They probably say or write this with an evil grin on their faces. We all know what "extended" means in such phrases.
(So "embrace and extend" wasn't invented by Microsoft; the US government has used it for over a century.
The closest that the US government has come to establishing SI units as a legal requirement has been in decreeing that certain products must be labelled in SI units. Most kinds of food and medicine are covered by this now, though they may also be labelled in Imperial units. Some manufacturers have gone to SI units only, for simplicity, but not very many. Usually the conversion has happened when there was an influx of imported goods. Thus, around half the cars sold in the US now come from other countries. It's a bother to have half your parts metric and half Imperial, so there has been a slow move to all-metric car parts. But the change has been slow.
We'll probably never change over completely.
I think the subdivision of a foot into 12 inches is fantastic; it allows one to easily divide dimensions into thirds, ...
Various mathematicians have explained why it would be so much better if we would switch to duodecimal (base 12) for all calculations. Somehow, I doubt if it will ever happen.
Another funny thing is that some linguists and historians have argued that there was a competition between bases 10 and 12 in Europe around 2000 years ago. It seems that there are a lot of Roman writings in which the numbers make more sense if you assume they were base 12. This starts with some docs where, for example, both iiii and iv are used, as well as viiii and ix. Why would they do this unless they thought that these were different numbers? And there are some historic dates that don't seem to be consistent in base 10, but make more sense in base 12.
The main linguistic evidence is that the Europoean languages all seem to have morphemes for the numbers from 1 to 12, and then the words become compound. It's not much, but it's one more item.
It must have created a bit of confusion, since some Romans apparently did count in base 10, while others probably used base 12.
But then the Arabs taught them a better way to write numbers, and it was all over for base 12.
It may not have actually mattered all that much anyway, since Roman trade and engineering was mostly carried out in Greek, and they had their own number notation that was a base-10 system, much like the notation used in Hebrew. It was a bit clumsy, but a lot better than Roman notation (and not as good as Arabic).
What sane, intelligent person honestly thinks they'll be sued for *using* Linux?
... I'd think that any sane, intelligent person who has been following the "Intellectual Property" development of recent years would be very worried. To be more precise, while I might not think that I'll be sued, but I certainly should fear that I'll be sued.
Hmmm
And the main reason for such fears is not that I might know personally of people who have been sued. The reason is that I keep reading things by reasonably knowledgeable techies and lawyers who have looked at things like software patents, and said that 1) They don't really know what these things mean due to their vague wording; 2) The legal situation is sufficiently vague that we must wait for the courts to decide; and 3) The courts' decisions will be made by judges who don't understand the technical details or by juries who are chosen explicitly for their ignorance of the topic.
We have read stories about donations of computers to charitable organizations who are then hit up by the vendor (Microsoft) for the price of the software that was pre-installed. The vendor has already been paid for it, and it seems that the laws might actually say that they can demand to be paid again. So I can become a criminal by merely opening a gift and turning it on.
We also read the stories about people who bought CDs or DVDs that didn't play on their equipment, but they were programmers, so they wrote a few lines of code to make the thing play, and suddenly they're criminals for using the disk for the only thing that it's goood for on their own equipment.
SCO have sent threatening legal notices to people who are not their customers threatening them with lawsuits if they run software from some of SCO's competitors. Maybe this will come to nothing. But you'd have to be rather foolhardy to remain unworried, given recent stories in this subject area.
Also, note that "receiving stolen goods" is a crime in much of the world. So it's sane and reasonable to guess that, if the courts decide that linux contains stolen goods, then everyone using it is a criminal. Or not; we can't know because the courts haven't told us yet.
It sure seems that the legal system has gone berserk when it comes to computer software, and the only rational response is to be very worried. Nobody can quite determine what the laws are any more. We can only watch and wait, and hope we're not caught in the crossfire.
A betting pool on when exactly SCO will file their next lawsuit.
Yeah. Note that they didn't promise to stop suing non-customers. And that includes all linux users.
Or maybe this time they'll claim that there is stolen SCO code in OSX. That could supply our SCO news fixes for a while.
Well, after a week without access to ComedyCentral.com after I made the mistake of trying RealPlayer10 on my PowerBook, I certainly wouldn't use the word "love".
OTOH, I did just manage to re-install the RealOne Player that came with the machine, after a lot of stumbling around through pages that told me it was no longer supported. Now I can finally see their coverage of the Democratic Convention without waiting til 11 pm and hoping they rebroadcast it on TV.
Yes, google found lots of discussions of the problem. Even some suggestions for fixes. None of them worked. Eventually I stumbled across explanations of why this and a long list of other sites don't work. Maybe the next release will fix the problem.
But next time, I'll do a thorough google search before attempting to install anything of theirs. They seem to believe in letting their users do most of the testing. (And you might note that the download file has the string "beta" in its name.)
I might mention, though, that RealPlayer 10 comes with its own browser, and it's actually a fairly nice addition to my growing list of browsers. But even their own browser didn't show Comedy Central, or a number of other less important sites. Those it did show, worked much better than their older players.
(I've started seeing quite a lot of claims that the best coverage of the American election is at ComedyCentral.com, and I think I agree. If you really want to know what's going on, check them out. Unfortunately, they only post videos in Real format.)
Not to worry; when Diebold and other voting-equipment companies re-elect Dubya as promised, you can bet that one of the main items on the agenda will be finally extending the blessings of US law to the rest of the planet.
;-)
(Oooh - Flamebait. I haven't got that rating for weeks.
This is an insurance company who has created a new "product" (OS insurance) ...
... have they applied for a patent on it?
I wonder
if the insurance companies were to show that the mississippi river is really an ancient and dormant fault line then you would see home owners buying up earthquake insurance like crazy.
You might google for "New Madrid earthquake", or read this page. On Dec 16, 1811, the first of three magnitude-8 earthquakes hit this area in southern Misssouri, near the Mississippi.
(Any readers in the area? Do you have earthquake insurance? If so, how much does it cost?)
Probably true, but remember that Microsoft's strategy isn't based on winning lawsuits. Their behavior is based on the understanding that they can drag the case out for a decade or more, so the legal fees will bankrupt you long before you win.
[Slashdot] site is owned by a corporation. You should question every single thing posted on it.
;-)
Very true. But the first sentence is irrelevant. You should question everything on any supposed "news" site.
One of the useful things about news.google.com is the link that say " - and N related >>". Those typically include all of the online articles with similar keywords. If you're only looking at gooogle's first few links for a story, you're missing many of the significant articles. Google's page ranking is basically a sort of popularity poll, so the first-listed articles likely have a bias similar to the most common biases of the entire news industry.
But google does give you the long list. Dig into them, and you can learn a lot that the mass media will never tell you.
(It would be nice to have a real competitor for google, though. And slashdot. MSN clearly doesn't qualify.