Hey, thanks! I'd looked around mozilla.org and not found it. I now have firefox 0.8 back, and it works fine.
Funny thing; I thought I'd uninstalled it. I'd also hunted down everything with "irefox" in its name, and deleted them all. But the reinstalled firefox 0.8 has all its old bookmarks back. I wonder where it found them?
It goes into a crash&restart loop that is tedious to stop.
Yeah, I've noticed that, too.;-)
I even tried a restart, and a little windpw popped up saying that the restart had been cancelled by firefox. So it goes into a loop eating 100% of the cpu, and it blocks attempts to kill it by rebooting. Very clever, if you ask me.
I found that if I keep hitting the "eject" icon for the.dmg, eventually I hit the window and it works.
One clue I found is that the console log has zillions of messages:
The file named exists, and is a directory. The permissions look normal as far as I can tell, though I could easily be wrong here. I don't know much about such app directories.
I checked the support pages, and found a notice that "The forums are in overload mode." Guess that explains why it takes forever to get any pages from them.
I've deleted the 0.9 firefox. Unfortunately, the 0.8 version seems to be dead, too, and I don't seem to find it on the mozilla.org site to reinstall. So I guess I'm not using firefox for a while.
Good thing I've got 7 other browsers installed.;-)
Well, I had an even bigger disaster with firefox 0.9 on my Powerbook (OSX). After installing, I moved the firefox icon to the dock as usual and tried starting it. It's sitting there now spawning a new one every one or two seconds. The little arrowhead saying it's running appears briefly, then fades out. The icon bounces a few more times, the arrowhead appears, and fades. The menu says the app isn't responding.
It tried lots of things to kill it, all to no avail. I tried restarting the computer, and a window popped up saying that firefox had cancelled the restart. According to top and the Activity Monitor, a new firefox-bin process appears every few seconds, started by someone, and then it disappears. The cpu is pegged at 100% and everything else is slow as molasses.
I did do a reboot by starting a terminal window and using "sudo reboot now". This didn't get cancelled by firefox. Then I hunted down everything with "[Ff]irefox" in its name, deleted it, and downloaded a new 0.9. That one behaves the same way.
Looks like I'llhave to totally purge all traces of firefox from the disk and not bother getting another until I hear that others have successfully run it on OSX. Too bad; it was an interesting alternative.
(It is useful to have lots of browsers. That way, when one fscks up, you can try the others until you find one that works.;-)
Ah, banana slugs. Big, yellow with brown spots, and disgusting when you stepped on them, which was often if you didn't watch your step. If you're a kid, they're much better than frogs for dropping down someone's neck.
Remember a few years ago, when California decided it needed an official state mollusc, and there was a large movement to make it the banana slug? What a disappointment that they picked some obscure sea creature instead.
Anyone who has lived on the West Coast north of San Francisco knows them well.
Oh and that you can't post any reply in 72 hours is bullshit. If there was anything of importance, mirrors, google cache etc. would pop up everywhere making whatever they were trying to censor 10x as well known.
Well, maybe, if the topic is something of political or financial importance. But if the topic is an obscure composition by an obscure 17th-century composer or songwriter, you'd have a bit of a problem getting a groundswell of support and mirrors.
Of course, google doesn't care about that. If you've taken care to make sure that your site is indexed by google, a few emails to your crowd of weirdo afficionados could get it all mirrored from their cache. Still, it probably wouldn't make the front page of any major media publication. You probably couldn't even get the story on slashdot.;-)
Isn't there a risk when you are not using primary sources?
Of course; it's a serious problem in any sort of historical research.
Back in the 50's, when the Baroque Revival got going, there was a lot of frustration with the centuries of "interpretation" of pre-1750 music by editors who thought that the music wouldn't appeal to current customers unless it was enhanced. It took a lot of work by a lot of people to rediscover the primary sources and learn to interpret them. Nowadays, though, there are a lot of musicians who prefer to use the urtext editions. And many of them prefer to use period instruments.
This work is going on now with a lot of kinds of folk music. Digging through centuries of misinterpretation and enhancement by publishers is a difficult task. It's especially bad in this case because much of the written material was produced by non-practitioners, usually musicians trained in other styles. Undoing their helpful editing can take a lot of time, thought, and playing with the material. Again, it helps to have the right instrument in your hands. A modern perlon-strung guitar isn't a substitute for a 16th-century silk-strung lute, regardless of how closely they're related.
It's a difficult task, but someone's gotta do it...;-)
Here in the Boston/Cambridge area, the first cafes that got wifi access points reported that the extra business paid the monthly cost in 2 or 3 days. As more places got wifi, this time may have gone up, but not by that much.
Most food places are full for only a few hours three times a day. They are nearly empty other times. An access point doesn't increase your business during the mealtimes, but it does increase business the rest of the day.
For a similar situation, back when I was in grad school, many of the bars and restaurants near campus supplied some classroom material like black/white boards, projectors, etc. I had a number of classes that used part of the first session to decide where to meet for the rest of the term. The class would then meet at the eaterie, most of the students would order coffee and maybe pastry, and the owner's investment in classroom equipment was justified.
It's an old story. An acronym like WIFI doesn't change it much.
Are there really people like Bill Gates and Donald Trump out to get you?
Yes. Well, maybe not quite as powerful as those two turkeys, but powerful enough.
An interesting case: I've been involved for some years with a crowd that's putting a lot of old music online. It's not at all unusual for some publisher to send C&D letters demanding that some music from the 1800's or earlier be removed because they own the copyright on it.
I've received a few of these, but my web site is on an academic machine, and the admins who run it are well aware of such problems. They just forward such messages to me, and I deal with them.
For people using commercial ISPs, it's common for the ISP to delete such files without notifying the file's owner.
One funny thing is that we often have documentation of when something was first published. We then send back a reply of the form "That music was published in 1735 in London by Georg F Handel; the file in question is clearly not a copy of your publication and the music is public domain. How are you claiming to own the file's content?" We never hear from the publisher again. Not surprising, actually, as we've told them that we can prove that their claim was fraudulent. Their lawyers then advise them to try some other sucker.
Of course, if you scan in a recently published copy of, say, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, you are illegally copying a current publication. But if you enter the music by hand using any of the many music editing packages, the result is not legally a "copy" when the music itself is pubic domain. This is something that tends to be obscured or glossed over in most copyright discussions.
We generally do warn people about putting scanned images of published music online, unless you can prove that your paper copy is out of copyright. But if you've created the files yourself without scanning (with anything but your eyes;-), and the material is old enough, what you're doing is legal everywhere (as far as we can tell).
Still, ISPs can and do take such things down without notice and without recourse. An outstanding question is whether an ISP can be sued for such invalid actions. You can certainly sue a publisher for making a fraudulent copyright claim, at least if they don't back off when you present them with the evidence.
But it's likely that an ISP is immune to prosecution in many countries. They can censor as they like.
Anyone know different?
This could be used as an argument for government-run ISPs. In the US and many other countries, a government agency couldn't censor users' content without a court order, and you have legal recourse. With private ISPs, you apparently have no legal protection at all.
Create a journal consisting of peer-reviewed links.
This is happening, slowly.
Something missing from the discussion is the observation that most of the costs of journals is due to printing the physical journal. There is a small editorial staff that gets paid, true, but the real costs are printing and mailing all those dead trees.
An online "journal" that does the editing and reviewing would have much lower costs. This can be supported as part of the dues to professional societies. Thus, Science is published by the AAAS, which is a professional society. We can see them starting the process of morphing into an online edit/review/archive site.
Scientific reputations in the past have included publication in peer-reviewed journals as a major component. We can expect this to turn into "publication" in professional web sites. And there will always be reasons to have a membership, even if the papers are available free. There are many reasons for professional societies, not just to get the journal.
While it's true that we will always have lots of pseudo-scientific web sites, too, that's a red herring. It's not difficult for a technically trained person to distinguish a scientific site from a pseudo-scientific site. If you don't have training in a field, you can get some good clues by simply asking someone with the appropriate training.
There is a lot of Comp Sci research going on in the area of specialized search techniques. One of the well-known results is that links tend to cluster, with related sites linking to each other, and many fewer cross-links to other clusters. One example I've seen is that the divide between evolutionary biologists and creationists can be seen clearly in the link clustering. Each group tends to link to their colleagues' sites and not to the other group. A search site that can make this clustering clear would make it easy to find the scientific sites and avoid the pseudo-science (or vice-versa if that's what you want).
Science has always proceeded by building on the discoveries of others. This was difficult when journals were expensive and difficult to find. It is now becoming much easier, with a growing portion of the world's scientific knowledge available online. We just need to develop the online structures to organize it, so we can find the real stuff quickly and weed out what's less valuable.
Stick around; it may happen faster than you think. As a few people have commented here, there are a few fields that already work mostly via the Internet now.
There's still the frustration of finding things in 50-year-old papers. Putting all that online is expensive. But it's happening.
Why would I want to illegaly copy software that I get no support for and that makes the author call me a thief?
Yeah; that's pretty much the attitude that I was talking about. In my esperience, the typical unix/linux user would agree with you.
The typical user of either IBM or Microsoft systems would be honestly baffled by this sort of comment. In their experience, "support" is usually frustrating and not very helpful. Yes, managers (who don't have to deal with CS) want support. But the people down in the trenches usually deal with CS as a last resort, because they know how worthless it usually is. And who cares what the PR people in some giant, faceless corporation call you?
OTOH, over in the unix part of the industry, our experience is very different. We see a lot of vendors. Some are nearly as bad as IBM and Microsoft. Others are very helpful and are honestly interested in their customers' welfare. So we don't tend to generalize, and we often want to reward those who help us.
IBM is an interesting case. I've worked on a couple of projects that used AIX boxes. Nice machines, in many respects. But dealing with IBM's CS was invariably a nightmare. I'd make a call, and they'd have to verify that I was authorized to get support. Invariably, the name on the support contract would be some manager N levels away from me. We'd have to go through a week-long dance of getting messages back and forth to verify that, yes, that techie that the manager had never heard of was indeed working on that project, and was authorized to make support calls. This rarely took less than a week. But when I finally got through to an IBM techie, they were inevitably friendly and helpful. And often even knowledgeable. This produces a very mixed attitude towards today's IBM.
Microsoft CS, OTOH, is a nightmare for everyone. MS users know this, and think that it's the way the entire computer industry works. One of the results is that they have few qualms about "stealing" software when they have the chance. And they think you're a wussy do-gooder if you look askance at their behavior.
Well, not all of them. But this is the most common attitude.
An interesting case: My wife was a Windows user for years, and she used a lot of pirated software. Then she got a Mac Powerbook. She loves Apple, and really wants them to succeed. So she gets most of her software by ordering it from Apple, to make sure that they get a cut of the money. I've installed a few things like mozilla, firefox and opera, and she likes those. I installed opera just last week (because it was the only browser we could find that rendered Arabic sensibly - but don't tell John Ashcroft;-). She's happy enough with it that she's thinking of paying them for an official copy.
But she hates Microsoft, from years of bad experience with them. She sees nothing wrong with getting back at them by using pirated copies of their software.
I can double-click on a.ps file and it immediately renders as a PDF.
Hmmm... Converting PS to PDF hardly qualifies as "PostScript compatible". And when I just tried it, it took several minutes for the preview window (which did say....pdf, not....ps) to pop up on the screen. On my "non-PostScript compatible" linux box, this only takes a few seconds. Granted, it's displayed via the gv that I downloaded. But for a 3rd-party app like gv to be orders of magnitude faster than the Mac's Preview program is rather, uh, disappointing. I think this flunks the "compatibility" test rather spectacularly.
All print dialogues have the option to save as PDF, and most have an output option to save as raw PostScript.
Hmmm... again. I tried this in a few windows on my screen. I couldn't find any that mention PostScript. All did have a button for PDF output. But again, handling PS by converting it to PDF is not exactly what one would expect from a "PostScript compatible" claim. You'd expect the software to deal with PS directly, not to convert it to some other format.
So I still don't see anything at all that justifies a "PostScript compatible" claim.
Also, the two browsers that came with the Powerbook (IE and Safari) both seem at a loss as to how to handle *.ps files. I tried pointing them at the GSview program, and they accepted it, but it doesn't display anything (not even a blank window), and there are no error messages.
I'd have probably modded that "funny", but of course there's a HHOS note to it. I've noticed an interesting cultural difference between Windows and unix/linux users.
When you dig a bit into Windows systems, you find that they almost always have lots of commercial software that hasn't been paid for. The users aren't ashamed of this; they think there's nothing wrong with it. They know very well that the vendors don't like it, and most are aware that it's illegal. But they grin and shrug when you try to get them to justify their "theft".
On the other side of the Great Divide, you find the unix/linux crowd really concerned with "IP" issues and unwilling to pirate their software. Many of them even do things like pay RedHat or Debian for a set of CDs when they could probably download them faster and legally for free, because they think these small companies should be supported.
Not that either attitude is guaranteed in either camp. But it's interesting that software "piracy" is common and accepted among Windows users but not among unix/linux users.
Maybe this is why so much unix/linux software is given out free. All software developers want their stuff used. If you can't get a group to pirate your stuff, maybe you're reduced to giving it away for free?
I keep seeing this claim, but on my year-old Powerbook, I see no evidence of anything that would support it. I've tried with lots of apps, and none of them will load a.ps file. Terminal does, but it displays the ASCII version, not a rendered version of the PS doc. I installed GSview; it works but runs under Classic. For PDF, I have Acrobat, and apparently nothing else can handle those files.
So in what sense does OSX have any PS "compatibility"? If software shows me something like:
I don't consider this to be PS "compatibility". If it is, then linux is also completely PS "compatible".
Of course, I'm still baffled by a lot of what OSX does and what a lot of its supporters claim. Maybe it was built for someone smarter than I am. It seems slow and clumsy compared with linux or *BSD or even Solaris. But I suppose the cosmetics are pretty. Drop shadows, wooo...
(OTOH, an hour of playing with my Powerbook totally weaned my wife of her Windows addiction. She dashed out and bought one, and gave me her old Windows box, which I use for testing web pages against IE.;-)
Many years ago, I started noticing when job shopping that the MS DOS (and later MS Windows) programming jobs never paid as well as the unix programming jobs. This didn't strike me as odd, as working on bottom-of-the-market jobs (whether fast food, auto mechanics, or software development) never pays very well. You're better off going with quality goods, and then you get jobs from people who are willing to pay for quality.
I did get tricked into working on DOS and/or Windows on a few projects. But in interviews, I've always been careful to tell them that my experience on MS systems is limited and not very recent. This encourages them to consider me for only the higher-quality unix (and now linux) job openings.
The Mac was always interesting for similar reasons. But the cost of entry was high before OSX, and I always had plenty of unix jobs, so I never invested the time and money that it took to deal with a Mac.
Way back when, I did some work on IBM mainframes. I'm sure glad that I managed to escape from that ghetto. Actually, this happened because the engineers where I was working wanted to bring in Amdahl's unix that ran on top of VM, so they could have a decent place to work on the mainframe. I volunteered to be the admin, though I knew little about unix at the time. It was such a relief that I concentrated on writing as much software for it as I could. I had lots of time to do this, as it took almost no adminning (unlike the IBM OSs). I managed to get enough resume material to hop to a real unix-based development job. Life has been a lot better ever since then.
Yeah, money. And achievement. It's great to be able to write software that "just works", and doesn't crash unpredictably somewhere inside a system library routine.
I'd guess that your home and church have tall, strong fences surrounding the entire property, and gates that are always locked, right? I mean, if not, then people can sneak in when you're not there and start selling kiddie port or pirated recordings from the driveway or parking lot. Right?
Hmmm... Why is it that chuch parking los always seem to be open, unfenced and unguarded? Aren't they worried about the liability? Are they secretly supporting the selling of porn and pirated recordings on their property?
For that matter, look at our road system. I can drive almost everywhere without any tolls, and nobody ever challenges me.
Of course, society long ago figued out that having a toll collector at every intersection (or property line) was a huge expense and made travel impossible. So we went to a (mostly) tax-supported road system. By putting taxes on the vehicles and fuels, you can have a system that is "free" in the important sense that you can use it without wasting time paying tolls or getting permission.
Eventually society will figue out that the Internet should work the same way. Actually, part of society has figured it out already. If you look at where the Internet was actually developed, you'll find that it was almost entirely in academic environments. And access was "free" in the same sense as the roads. That is, the students (who were most of the developers) could use it as much as they liked without being charged for access time. The money came out of grants and fees, and was a semi-hidden, fixed overhead.
The reason for this was well understood. Some universities tried to meter network time. When they did this, the students became very cost conscious and tried to minimize their timeonline. The result was that nothing new was ever developed in those universities. Innovations mostly came from the places where network time was "free". There, the students could spend hours working on ideas without worrying about being hit by a huge bill at the end of the month.
Very little innovation has come from the people forced to use the phone system for Internet access, for the same reason. And wireless development is mostly happening in places where wifi is "free", i.e., isn't metered.
It's understandable that companies see the Internet as solely a source of income. This is why they do so little real innovation.
(Of course, in most companies, "innovation" means taking something that someone else developed, making small tweaks, and "branding" the results. Insert standard Microsoft bash here...;-)
To give you another dangerous parallel, look at the secrecy surrounding the "terrorists" at Guantanamo - all information is censored from the public, so you effectively get the situation where you must trust your government to tell you that they are in fact terrorists as opposed to poor schmucks caught up in the US dragnet as it swept through Afghanistan.
Nah; a good fraction of the American population just concludes that our government is hiding the facts from us. They're not permitting trials for any of those supposed terrorists? Must be because the government has no evidence against them, probably because they were picked up as innocent bystanders. They won't let reporters in to watch the proceedings? Must be because they don't want us to know about the way the prisoners are being treated and/or interrogated.
And we have a lot of history telling us that government censorship is mostly used to cover up the government's own misdeeds. Not all of us fall for the "national security" scam; many understand that the phrase mostly means hiding information from the citizenry.
And as for ISPs blocking porn, as lot of us have noted the reports of this being used to block access to competitors' sites.
Well, there have been repeated stories of medical sites blocked as porn. One of the more common is breast-cancer support group sites, which a lot of ISPs have blocked. AOL was reported to have done this with their own mailing lists and chat groups three times last year. When the cancer patients complained, AOL apologized, restored the lists, and then a few months later blocked them again. Anyone talking about breasts must be involved in porn, right?
One problem is that blocking a single site by hand is easy, but to get effective blocking, few organizations can afford the thousands of employees that it would take to examine every site on the Web. So software is used, and that software usually does some sort of pattern matching. It can be tricky to write patterns that match only porn, but not valid medical information about assorted body parts.
If history is any guide, we can expect that the BT blocking will hit quite a number of paediatric sites along with the porn sites.
Right. Or, as one fellow put it: This command removes all your files, especially those whose names end with ".bak".
This is one of my all-time favorite examples of a command with a seriously f-ed-up "UI". The behavior when you forget the "-name" option is nothing short of berserk, in the original sense of the term.
There is a fair amount of precedent in science and math for this sort of terminology.
For example, a few centuries ago some mathematicians started studying the funny numbers like the diagonal of a unit square, and proved that they weren't the ratio of two integers. The idea that there were such numbers was widely ridiculed. The mathematicians' reaction was to say "We need a name for these new numbers. People are calling us irrational for talking about them. Why don't we just call them `irrational' numbers?" And so it was.
Some time later, in the 1800's, some mathematicians started talking about numbers whose squares were negative. Others criticised this as saying that there were no such numbers. Again, a name for these new numbers was needed, and someone suggested adopting the critics' terminology and calling them `imaginary'. And again mathematicians liked the sound of this, and adopted the term, with `real' the name for the numbers that their critics believed in.
Part of the education of a mathematician or scientist is learning to take a disconnected, "objective" view on such terminological quibbles. Adopting your critics taunts is a good way to get across the idea that "it's just a word" with no connotations other than the technical definition.
In the computer field, we have the term `hacker' that originated as an insult, and is still used as such by outsiders. But to us, it's a useful technical term with no negative connotations.
Just as `irrational' and `imaginary' are considered simply descriptive terms by mathematicians, with no value judgement implied, we can expect that biologists will use `junk DNA' as a technical term for specific kinds of DNA long after they fully understand the function of the `junk'. You'll find it precisely defined in textbooks, and people will use the term without thinking that it's derogatory.
Knowning when the ladies are in heat... Evolution took this out because we don't need it to survive.
Actually, "Evolution" probably took it out for a positive reason, not just because we didn't need it.
There are a number of other species in which the female estrus is weak or nonexistent and females are sexually active much of the time. These species have a number of characteristics that they share with us humans: They are mostly social species in which the males contribute a great deal to the raising of the young. Female sexual availability is a pretty good way to encourage males stick around and contribute to the welfare of the social group.
Not that all social species do this, of course. But in those that do, it's probably not just loss of unused genes; it's more likely a direct adaptation to a social lifestyle.
[Y]ou could always NFS-mount your home directory and thus get the same dotfiles everywhere.
How do you do this? I have several guest accounts where I don't have permission to use NFS. On most machines, that requires super-user privileges, after all, and I don't have such privileges everywhere.
Is there a way to do an NFS mount of a directory on a machine where you don't have root privileges, or don't have permissions to run any server? If not, how do you make this work?
(To establish that I'm not totally ignorant here, I might mention that I have in fact solved this problem on several projects that I've worked on. It's not all that difficult to write a distributed file system that runs entirely with normal user permissions. You still do need the right to run a background daemon under your own permissions. But to my knowledge, NFS can't be made to work without root privileges. I've seen people try it; they've always failed.)
It took a bit of digging (made longer by the way that firefox's "find" thingy behaves in a none-too-helpful fashion if the string isn't found at all;-), but I finally found it. And decided quickly that it wasn't useful at all.
Why not? Well, it uses FTP to store and retrieve the bookmarks file. On every system where I have an account, FTP has been phased out (except for a few uses of anonymous FTP) because it sends passwords across the Net in the clear. This is now an unacceptable practice in the unix part of the Net. It has been replaced nearly everywhere by scp, which encrypts everything.
Whatever motivated them to do something like this? I'd think that the sensible way to do it would be to use ssh (as scp does) so that 1) You don't need permission to run a file server on the remote machine, and 2) everything is encrypted. Then it could be used by nearly everyone.
Well, it would still be inaccessible to those (like Windows users) who don't have ssh-enabled login accounts anywhere. I'm not too sure that you can do much to help those people, though, short of setting up a hotmail- or AOL-type system of servers.
Maybe I should learn what it takes to build a firefox extension, and write my own bookmark server. I wonder how long that would take?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, thanks! I'd looked around mozilla.org and not found it. I now have firefox 0.8 back, and it works fine.
Funny thing; I thought I'd uninstalled it. I'd also hunted down everything with "irefox" in its name, and deleted them all. But the reinstalled firefox 0.8 has all its old bookmarks back. I wonder where it found them?
It goes into a crash&restart loop that is tedious to stop.
;-)
.dmg, eventually I hit the window and it works.
/Volumes/Firefox/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefo x-bin: can't map file: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Java Applet.plugin ((os/kern) invalid argument)
;-)
Yeah, I've noticed that, too.
I even tried a restart, and a little windpw popped up saying that the restart had been cancelled by firefox. So it goes into a loop eating 100% of the cpu, and it blocks attempts to kill it by rebooting. Very clever, if you ask me.
I found that if I keep hitting the "eject" icon for the
One clue I found is that the console log has zillions of messages:
*** loading the extensions datasource
The file named exists, and is a directory. The permissions look normal as far as I can tell, though I could easily be wrong here. I don't know much about such app directories.
I checked the support pages, and found a notice that "The forums are in overload mode." Guess that explains why it takes forever to get any pages from them.
I've deleted the 0.9 firefox. Unfortunately, the 0.8 version seems to be dead, too, and I don't seem to find it on the mozilla.org site to reinstall. So I guess I'm not using firefox for a while.
Good thing I've got 7 other browsers installed.
Well, I had an even bigger disaster with firefox 0.9 on my Powerbook (OSX). After installing, I moved the firefox icon to the dock as usual and tried starting it. It's sitting there now spawning a new one every one or two seconds. The little arrowhead saying it's running appears briefly, then fades out. The icon bounces a few more times, the arrowhead appears, and fades. The menu says the app isn't responding.
;-)
It tried lots of things to kill it, all to no avail. I tried restarting the computer, and a window popped up saying that firefox had cancelled the restart. According to top and the Activity Monitor, a new firefox-bin process appears every few seconds, started by someone, and then it disappears. The cpu is pegged at 100% and everything else is slow as molasses.
I did do a reboot by starting a terminal window and using "sudo reboot now". This didn't get cancelled by firefox. Then I hunted down everything with "[Ff]irefox" in its name, deleted it, and downloaded a new 0.9. That one behaves the same way.
Looks like I'llhave to totally purge all traces of firefox from the disk and not bother getting another until I hear that others have successfully run it on OSX. Too bad; it was an interesting alternative.
(It is useful to have lots of browsers. That way, when one fscks up, you can try the others until you find one that works.
But I'm starting to look at [Linus] like I look at Elvis ...
Attention, California! Linus has left the state.
Ah, banana slugs. Big, yellow with brown spots, and disgusting when you stepped on them, which was often if you didn't watch your step. If you're a kid, they're much better than frogs for dropping down someone's neck.
Remember a few years ago, when California decided it needed an official state mollusc, and there was a large movement to make it the banana slug? What a disappointment that they picked some obscure sea creature instead.
Anyone who has lived on the West Coast north of San Francisco knows them well.
Oh and that you can't post any reply in 72 hours is bullshit. If there was anything of importance, mirrors, google cache etc. would pop up everywhere making whatever they were trying to censor 10x as well known.
;-)
Well, maybe, if the topic is something of political or financial importance. But if the topic is an obscure composition by an obscure 17th-century composer or songwriter, you'd have a bit of a problem getting a groundswell of support and mirrors.
Of course, google doesn't care about that. If you've taken care to make sure that your site is indexed by google, a few emails to your crowd of weirdo afficionados could get it all mirrored from their cache. Still, it probably wouldn't make the front page of any major media publication. You probably couldn't even get the story on slashdot.
Isn't there a risk when you are not using primary sources?
... ;-)
Of course; it's a serious problem in any sort of historical research.
Back in the 50's, when the Baroque Revival got going, there was a lot of frustration with the centuries of "interpretation" of pre-1750 music by editors who thought that the music wouldn't appeal to current customers unless it was enhanced. It took a lot of work by a lot of people to rediscover the primary sources and learn to interpret them. Nowadays, though, there are a lot of musicians who prefer to use the urtext editions. And many of them prefer to use period instruments.
This work is going on now with a lot of kinds of folk music. Digging through centuries of misinterpretation and enhancement by publishers is a difficult task. It's especially bad in this case because much of the written material was produced by non-practitioners, usually musicians trained in other styles. Undoing their helpful editing can take a lot of time, thought, and playing with the material. Again, it helps to have the right instrument in your hands. A modern perlon-strung guitar isn't a substitute for a 16th-century silk-strung lute, regardless of how closely they're related.
It's a difficult task, but someone's gotta do it
Here in the Boston/Cambridge area, the first cafes that got wifi access points reported that the extra business paid the monthly cost in 2 or 3 days. As more places got wifi, this time may have gone up, but not by that much.
Most food places are full for only a few hours three times a day. They are nearly empty other times. An access point doesn't increase your business during the mealtimes, but it does increase business the rest of the day.
For a similar situation, back when I was in grad school, many of the bars and restaurants near campus supplied some classroom material like black/white boards, projectors, etc. I had a number of classes that used part of the first session to decide where to meet for the rest of the term. The class would then meet at the eaterie, most of the students would order coffee and maybe pastry, and the owner's investment in classroom equipment was justified.
It's an old story. An acronym like WIFI doesn't change it much.
Are there really people like Bill Gates and Donald Trump out to get you?
;-), and the material is old enough, what you're doing is legal everywhere (as far as we can tell).
Yes. Well, maybe not quite as powerful as those two turkeys, but powerful enough.
An interesting case: I've been involved for some years with a crowd that's putting a lot of old music online. It's not at all unusual for some publisher to send C&D letters demanding that some music from the 1800's or earlier be removed because they own the copyright on it.
I've received a few of these, but my web site is on an academic machine, and the admins who run it are well aware of such problems. They just forward such messages to me, and I deal with them.
For people using commercial ISPs, it's common for the ISP to delete such files without notifying the file's owner.
One funny thing is that we often have documentation of when something was first published. We then send back a reply of the form "That music was published in 1735 in London by Georg F Handel; the file in question is clearly not a copy of your publication and the music is public domain. How are you claiming to own the file's content?" We never hear from the publisher again. Not surprising, actually, as we've told them that we can prove that their claim was fraudulent. Their lawyers then advise them to try some other sucker.
Of course, if you scan in a recently published copy of, say, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, you are illegally copying a current publication. But if you enter the music by hand using any of the many music editing packages, the result is not legally a "copy" when the music itself is pubic domain. This is something that tends to be obscured or glossed over in most copyright discussions.
We generally do warn people about putting scanned images of published music online, unless you can prove that your paper copy is out of copyright. But if you've created the files yourself without scanning (with anything but your eyes
Still, ISPs can and do take such things down without notice and without recourse. An outstanding question is whether an ISP can be sued for such invalid actions. You can certainly sue a publisher for making a fraudulent copyright claim, at least if they don't back off when you present them with the evidence.
But it's likely that an ISP is immune to prosecution in many countries. They can censor as they like.
Anyone know different?
This could be used as an argument for government-run ISPs. In the US and many other countries, a government agency couldn't censor users' content without a court order, and you have legal recourse. With private ISPs, you apparently have no legal protection at all.
Create a journal consisting of peer-reviewed links.
This is happening, slowly.
Something missing from the discussion is the observation that most of the costs of journals is due to printing the physical journal. There is a small editorial staff that gets paid, true, but the real costs are printing and mailing all those dead trees.
An online "journal" that does the editing and reviewing would have much lower costs. This can be supported as part of the dues to professional societies. Thus, Science is published by the AAAS, which is a professional society. We can see them starting the process of morphing into an online edit/review/archive site.
Scientific reputations in the past have included publication in peer-reviewed journals as a major component. We can expect this to turn into "publication" in professional web sites. And there will always be reasons to have a membership, even if the papers are available free. There are many reasons for professional societies, not just to get the journal.
While it's true that we will always have lots of pseudo-scientific web sites, too, that's a red herring. It's not difficult for a technically trained person to distinguish a scientific site from a pseudo-scientific site. If you don't have training in a field, you can get some good clues by simply asking someone with the appropriate training.
There is a lot of Comp Sci research going on in the area of specialized search techniques. One of the well-known results is that links tend to cluster, with related sites linking to each other, and many fewer cross-links to other clusters. One example I've seen is that the divide between evolutionary biologists and creationists can be seen clearly in the link clustering. Each group tends to link to their colleagues' sites and not to the other group. A search site that can make this clustering clear would make it easy to find the scientific sites and avoid the pseudo-science (or vice-versa if that's what you want).
Science has always proceeded by building on the discoveries of others. This was difficult when journals were expensive and difficult to find. It is now becoming much easier, with a growing portion of the world's scientific knowledge available online. We just need to develop the online structures to organize it, so we can find the real stuff quickly and weed out what's less valuable.
Stick around; it may happen faster than you think. As a few people have commented here, there are a few fields that already work mostly via the Internet now.
There's still the frustration of finding things in 50-year-old papers. Putting all that online is expensive. But it's happening.
Why would I want to illegaly copy software that I get no support for and that makes the author call me a thief?
;-). She's happy enough with it that she's thinking of paying them for an official copy.
Yeah; that's pretty much the attitude that I was talking about. In my esperience, the typical unix/linux user would agree with you.
The typical user of either IBM or Microsoft systems would be honestly baffled by this sort of comment. In their experience, "support" is usually frustrating and not very helpful. Yes, managers (who don't have to deal with CS) want support. But the people down in the trenches usually deal with CS as a last resort, because they know how worthless it usually is. And who cares what the PR people in some giant, faceless corporation call you?
OTOH, over in the unix part of the industry, our experience is very different. We see a lot of vendors. Some are nearly as bad as IBM and Microsoft. Others are very helpful and are honestly interested in their customers' welfare. So we don't tend to generalize, and we often want to reward those who help us.
IBM is an interesting case. I've worked on a couple of projects that used AIX boxes. Nice machines, in many respects. But dealing with IBM's CS was invariably a nightmare. I'd make a call, and they'd have to verify that I was authorized to get support. Invariably, the name on the support contract would be some manager N levels away from me. We'd have to go through a week-long dance of getting messages back and forth to verify that, yes, that techie that the manager had never heard of was indeed working on that project, and was authorized to make support calls. This rarely took less than a week. But when I finally got through to an IBM techie, they were inevitably friendly and helpful. And often even knowledgeable. This produces a very mixed attitude towards today's IBM.
Microsoft CS, OTOH, is a nightmare for everyone. MS users know this, and think that it's the way the entire computer industry works. One of the results is that they have few qualms about "stealing" software when they have the chance. And they think you're a wussy do-gooder if you look askance at their behavior.
Well, not all of them. But this is the most common attitude.
An interesting case: My wife was a Windows user for years, and she used a lot of pirated software. Then she got a Mac Powerbook. She loves Apple, and really wants them to succeed. So she gets most of her software by ordering it from Apple, to make sure that they get a cut of the money. I've installed a few things like mozilla, firefox and opera, and she likes those. I installed opera just last week (because it was the only browser we could find that rendered Arabic sensibly - but don't tell John Ashcroft
But she hates Microsoft, from years of bad experience with them. She sees nothing wrong with getting back at them by using pirated copies of their software.
I can double-click on a .ps file and it immediately renders as a PDF.
... Converting PS to PDF hardly qualifies as "PostScript compatible". And when I just tried it, it took several minutes for the preview window (which did say ....pdf, not ....ps) to pop up on the screen. On my "non-PostScript compatible" linux box, this only takes a few seconds. Granted, it's displayed via the gv that I downloaded. But for a 3rd-party app like gv to be orders of magnitude faster than the Mac's Preview program is rather, uh, disappointing. I think this flunks the "compatibility" test rather spectacularly.
... again. I tried this in a few windows on my screen. I couldn't find any that mention PostScript. All did have a button for PDF output. But again, handling PS by converting it to PDF is not exactly what one would expect from a "PostScript compatible" claim. You'd expect the software to deal with PS directly, not to convert it to some other format.
Hmmm
All print dialogues have the option to save as PDF, and most have an output option to save as raw PostScript.
Hmmm
So I still don't see anything at all that justifies a "PostScript compatible" claim.
Also, the two browsers that came with the Powerbook (IE and Safari) both seem at a loss as to how to handle *.ps files. I tried pointing them at the GSview program, and they accepted it, but it doesn't display anything (not even a blank window), and there are no error messages.
I'd have probably modded that "funny", but of course there's a HHOS note to it. I've noticed an interesting cultural difference between Windows and unix/linux users.
When you dig a bit into Windows systems, you find that they almost always have lots of commercial software that hasn't been paid for. The users aren't ashamed of this; they think there's nothing wrong with it. They know very well that the vendors don't like it, and most are aware that it's illegal. But they grin and shrug when you try to get them to justify their "theft".
On the other side of the Great Divide, you find the unix/linux crowd really concerned with "IP" issues and unwilling to pirate their software. Many of them even do things like pay RedHat or Debian for a set of CDs when they could probably download them faster and legally for free, because they think these small companies should be supported.
Not that either attitude is guaranteed in either camp. But it's interesting that software "piracy" is common and accepted among Windows users but not among unix/linux users.
Maybe this is why so much unix/linux software is given out free. All software developers want their stuff used. If you can't get a group to pirate your stuff, maybe you're reduced to giving it away for free?
OSX has native PostScript compatibility, ...
.ps file. Terminal does, but it displays the ASCII version, not a rendered version of the PS doc. I installed GSview; it works but runs under Classic. For PDF, I have Acrobat, and apparently nothing else can handle those files.
...
;-)
I keep seeing this claim, but on my year-old Powerbook, I see no evidence of anything that would support it. I've tried with lots of apps, and none of them will load a
So in what sense does OSX have any PS "compatibility"? If software shows me something like:
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Title: foobar.txt
%%Creator: txt2ps 1.3.0
%%CreationDate: Jun 1 18:50 2004
%%LanguageLevel: 2
I don't consider this to be PS "compatibility". If it is, then linux is also completely PS "compatible".
Of course, I'm still baffled by a lot of what OSX does and what a lot of its supporters claim. Maybe it was built for someone smarter than I am. It seems slow and clumsy compared with linux or *BSD or even Solaris. But I suppose the cosmetics are pretty. Drop shadows, wooo
(OTOH, an hour of playing with my Powerbook totally weaned my wife of her Windows addiction. She dashed out and bought one, and gave me her old Windows box, which I use for testing web pages against IE.
Sanity
Nah, money.
Many years ago, I started noticing when job shopping that the MS DOS (and later MS Windows) programming jobs never paid as well as the unix programming jobs. This didn't strike me as odd, as working on bottom-of-the-market jobs (whether fast food, auto mechanics, or software development) never pays very well. You're better off going with quality goods, and then you get jobs from people who are willing to pay for quality.
I did get tricked into working on DOS and/or Windows on a few projects. But in interviews, I've always been careful to tell them that my experience on MS systems is limited and not very recent. This encourages them to consider me for only the higher-quality unix (and now linux) job openings.
The Mac was always interesting for similar reasons. But the cost of entry was high before OSX, and I always had plenty of unix jobs, so I never invested the time and money that it took to deal with a Mac.
Way back when, I did some work on IBM mainframes. I'm sure glad that I managed to escape from that ghetto. Actually, this happened because the engineers where I was working wanted to bring in Amdahl's unix that ran on top of VM, so they could have a decent place to work on the mainframe. I volunteered to be the admin, though I knew little about unix at the time. It was such a relief that I concentrated on writing as much software for it as I could. I had lots of time to do this, as it took almost no adminning (unlike the IBM OSs). I managed to get enough resume material to hop to a real unix-based development job. Life has been a lot better ever since then.
Yeah, money. And achievement. It's great to be able to write software that "just works", and doesn't crash unpredictably somewhere inside a system library routine.
I'd guess that your home and church have tall, strong fences surrounding the entire property, and gates that are always locked, right? I mean, if not, then people can sneak in when you're not there and start selling kiddie port or pirated recordings from the driveway or parking lot. Right?
... Why is it that chuch parking los always seem to be open, unfenced and unguarded? Aren't they worried about the liability? Are they secretly supporting the selling of porn and pirated recordings on their property?
... ;-)
Hmmm
For that matter, look at our road system. I can drive almost everywhere without any tolls, and nobody ever challenges me.
Of course, society long ago figued out that having a toll collector at every intersection (or property line) was a huge expense and made travel impossible. So we went to a (mostly) tax-supported road system. By putting taxes on the vehicles and fuels, you can have a system that is "free" in the important sense that you can use it without wasting time paying tolls or getting permission.
Eventually society will figue out that the Internet should work the same way. Actually, part of society has figured it out already. If you look at where the Internet was actually developed, you'll find that it was almost entirely in academic environments. And access was "free" in the same sense as the roads. That is, the students (who were most of the developers) could use it as much as they liked without being charged for access time. The money came out of grants and fees, and was a semi-hidden, fixed overhead.
The reason for this was well understood. Some universities tried to meter network time. When they did this, the students became very cost conscious and tried to minimize their timeonline. The result was that nothing new was ever developed in those universities. Innovations mostly came from the places where network time was "free". There, the students could spend hours working on ideas without worrying about being hit by a huge bill at the end of the month.
Very little innovation has come from the people forced to use the phone system for Internet access, for the same reason. And wireless development is mostly happening in places where wifi is "free", i.e., isn't metered.
It's understandable that companies see the Internet as solely a source of income. This is why they do so little real innovation.
(Of course, in most companies, "innovation" means taking something that someone else developed, making small tweaks, and "branding" the results. Insert standard Microsoft bash here
To give you another dangerous parallel, look at the secrecy surrounding the "terrorists" at Guantanamo - all information is censored from the public, so you effectively get the situation where you must trust your government to tell you that they are in fact terrorists as opposed to poor schmucks caught up in the US dragnet as it swept through Afghanistan.
...
Nah; a good fraction of the American population just concludes that our government is hiding the facts from us. They're not permitting trials for any of those supposed terrorists? Must be because the government has no evidence against them, probably because they were picked up as innocent bystanders. They won't let reporters in to watch the proceedings? Must be because they don't want us to know about the way the prisoners are being treated and/or interrogated.
And we have a lot of history telling us that government censorship is mostly used to cover up the government's own misdeeds. Not all of us fall for the "national security" scam; many understand that the phrase mostly means hiding information from the citizenry.
And as for ISPs blocking porn, as lot of us have noted the reports of this being used to block access to competitors' sites.
Cynicism? Nah
Well, there have been repeated stories of medical sites blocked as porn. One of the more common is breast-cancer support group sites, which a lot of ISPs have blocked. AOL was reported to have done this with their own mailing lists and chat groups three times last year. When the cancer patients complained, AOL apologized, restored the lists, and then a few months later blocked them again. Anyone talking about breasts must be involved in porn, right?
One problem is that blocking a single site by hand is easy, but to get effective blocking, few organizations can afford the thousands of employees that it would take to examine every site on the Web. So software is used, and that software usually does some sort of pattern matching. It can be tricky to write patterns that match only porn, but not valid medical information about assorted body parts.
If history is any guide, we can expect that the BT blocking will hit quite a number of paediatric sites along with the porn sites.
Hey, I wish I had some mod points. That was worth a +1 Funny.
Right. Or, as one fellow put it: This command removes all your files, especially those whose names end with ".bak".
This is one of my all-time favorite examples of a command with a seriously f-ed-up "UI". The behavior when you forget the "-name" option is nothing short of berserk, in the original sense of the term.
2. At the command prompt, type "rm -rf /"
;-)
This is far too unsubtle. What I prefer is to suggest that they learn to use the find(1) command, one of unix's more powerful search tools:
2. At the command prompt, type "find / '*.bak' -exec rm -rf {} ';' "
The fun thing is that many unix experts can't tell you what this does and why it's not such a good idea.
There is a fair amount of precedent in science and math for this sort of terminology.
For example, a few centuries ago some mathematicians started studying the funny numbers like the diagonal of a unit square, and proved that they weren't the ratio of two integers. The idea that there were such numbers was widely ridiculed. The mathematicians' reaction was to say "We need a name for these new numbers. People are calling us irrational for talking about them. Why don't we just call them `irrational' numbers?" And so it was.
Some time later, in the 1800's, some mathematicians started talking about numbers whose squares were negative. Others criticised this as saying that there were no such numbers. Again, a name for these new numbers was needed, and someone suggested adopting the critics' terminology and calling them `imaginary'. And again mathematicians liked the sound of this, and adopted the term, with `real' the name for the numbers that their critics believed in.
Part of the education of a mathematician or scientist is learning to take a disconnected, "objective" view on such terminological quibbles. Adopting your critics taunts is a good way to get across the idea that "it's just a word" with no connotations other than the technical definition.
In the computer field, we have the term `hacker' that originated as an insult, and is still used as such by outsiders. But to us, it's a useful technical term with no negative connotations.
Just as `irrational' and `imaginary' are considered simply descriptive terms by mathematicians, with no value judgement implied, we can expect that biologists will use `junk DNA' as a technical term for specific kinds of DNA long after they fully understand the function of the `junk'. You'll find it precisely defined in textbooks, and people will use the term without thinking that it's derogatory.
Knowning when the ladies are in heat... Evolution took this out because we don't need it to survive.
Actually, "Evolution" probably took it out for a positive reason, not just because we didn't need it.
There are a number of other species in which the female estrus is weak or nonexistent and females are sexually active much of the time. These species have a number of characteristics that they share with us humans: They are mostly social species in which the males contribute a great deal to the raising of the young. Female sexual availability is a pretty good way to encourage males stick around and contribute to the welfare of the social group.
Not that all social species do this, of course. But in those that do, it's probably not just loss of unused genes; it's more likely a direct adaptation to a social lifestyle.
[Y]ou could always NFS-mount your home directory and thus get the same dotfiles everywhere.
How do you do this? I have several guest accounts where I don't have permission to use NFS. On most machines, that requires super-user privileges, after all, and I don't have such privileges everywhere.
Is there a way to do an NFS mount of a directory on a machine where you don't have root privileges, or don't have permissions to run any server? If not, how do you make this work?
(To establish that I'm not totally ignorant here, I might mention that I have in fact solved this problem on several projects that I've worked on. It's not all that difficult to write a distributed file system that runs entirely with normal user permissions. You still do need the right to run a background daemon under your own permissions. But to my knowledge, NFS can't be made to work without root privileges. I've seen people try it; they've always failed.)
It took a bit of digging (made longer by the way that firefox's "find" thingy behaves in a none-too-helpful fashion if the string isn't found at all ;-), but I finally found it. And decided quickly that it wasn't useful at all.
Why not? Well, it uses FTP to store and retrieve the bookmarks file. On every system where I have an account, FTP has been phased out (except for a few uses of anonymous FTP) because it sends passwords across the Net in the clear. This is now an unacceptable practice in the unix part of the Net. It has been replaced nearly everywhere by scp, which encrypts everything.
Whatever motivated them to do something like this? I'd think that the sensible way to do it would be to use ssh (as scp does) so that 1) You don't need permission to run a file server on the remote machine, and 2) everything is encrypted. Then it could be used by nearly everyone.
Well, it would still be inaccessible to those (like Windows users) who don't have ssh-enabled login accounts anywhere. I'm not too sure that you can do much to help those people, though, short of setting up a hotmail- or AOL-type system of servers.
Maybe I should learn what it takes to build a firefox extension, and write my own bookmark server. I wonder how long that would take?