I really doubt that Apple is losing money on iTMS. There is zero overhead
What, zero? What is this utopia Apple lives in, where bandwidth is free, servers generate their own electricity, and system administrators maintain complex online stores in their spare time as a hobby?
Most consoles have some dedicated hardware to do some pretty nifty effects that would be almost impossible on a home computer of the day. Eg the SNES had sprite scaling and rotation and perspective that could all be done in real time. Try doing that on a Spectrum.
Uh... your chronology is rather inaccurate. The SNES reached the West in 1991, nearly a full decade after the ZX Spectrum.
By the time the SNES appeared, sprite scaling and rotation and perspective were trivial and commonplace on home computers. For example, the 3D space combat in Wing Commander (1990) is based entirely around smooth scaling and rotation of sprites in real time. And within a year of the SNES launch, PC gamers were enjoying titles like Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld (1992) that totally blew away anything that was ever achieved on unextended 16-bit console hardware.
I wish people would stop calling people who share software, pirates.
People don't call people who share software "pirates". Nobody accuses RMS or Linus Torvalds of piracy. The people we call pirates are the people who make unlicensed copies of other people's software, which is not exactly "sharing" in the neighbourly sense.
As for calling people who make unlicensed copies of other people's work "pirates", well, according to the SOED in front of me, people have been using the noun "pirate" to mean "someone who infringes on the copyright of another" since 1701, and the verb "pirate" to mean "to appropriate or reproduce the work or invention of another without authority" since at least 1706. So, no - given that we've been using the word that way for at least 300 years, I rather doubt we're going to stop now.
Oh, quite. Though Windows isn't really any worse than Linux in my experience. As long as you always use a version of the same vintage as your hardware, at any rate.
Perhaps ironically, the only platform I remember having showstopper hardware compatibility issues with in the last six or seven years has been OS X. There was a period around 2000-2001 when people were advertising printers as Mac-compatible but only providing OS 9 drivers. It wasn't pretty for those who foolishly assumed that Apple would have provided an easy way of using an OS 9 driver from OS X.
Am I the only one that finds clicking the mousewheel to be a stupid way of middle clicking.
No, it's not just you. But then I use one of the wireless Intellimouse Explorers where the mousewheel is so stiff that it's almost impossible to click without turning it.
So what I do is remap one of the thumb buttons on the side to act as button 3. It's surprisingly comfortable and convenient. (The other thumb button is so far forward that it's totally useless, but there you go.)
Why shouldn't a blind person want to install Photoshop?
I honestly don't know whether your assumption that there is nothing that a blind person could do in Photoshop is justified or not, but it doesn't matter, because even if that is the case, there would still be plenty of situations where it would be reasonable for a blind person to expect to be able to install such a program.
Hint: many computers are used by more than one person.
It's clear that the submitter of the article doesn't think the moral case for this type of thing is strong enough to stand on its own. He has to help it along, and slightly mislead his audience despite the fact that the vast majority of the copies this is used for will be pirated copies rather than backup copies.
Huh? The submitter wrote, right there in the summary, "it will be mainly used for piracy". I really don't see how he could have been any blunter about it. It does not look to me like there is any attempt being made to mislead readers in any way whatsoever.
But I'm not surprised to see a response like yours. However someone phrases it, there's always someone who thinks they should have phrased it more strongly. I expect that even if the submitter had opened the article with "Filthy bloodsucking terrorist pedophile pirates have raped America's freedom once again in a savage assault on the copyright protections that keep our children safe", then someone would still have complained that he was being too sympathetic to them...;)
The quote specifically says a site that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be forced to change.
So... any chemical supplier that sells mercury and concentrated acids will have to switch to a.xxx domain, then?
I love bad laws.
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong
on
Unusual Open Source
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The trouble with dictionaries these days is they've completely abdicated their responsibility and gone to a role of simply reflecting usage. So when a word is often misused, the misuse winds up being legitimised by the dictionary entries.
What "responsibility"? What "misuse"? A word cannot be "often misused" - if it's often used a certain way, then that is how it is used, and it is the fact of the usage that legitimises its inclusion in dictionaries, not the other way round!
As the poet wrote:
licuit semperque licebit signatum praesente nota producere nomen . . . multa renascentur quae iam cecidere cadentque quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula si volet usus quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi
...in other words, language changes, language is supposed to change, and the only "authority" that controls it and determines what is right and what is wrong is popular usage.
I can't believe that people today, in this age of progress and enlightenment, more than two thousand years after Horace wrote the words above (and he certainly wasn't the first person to make this observation), are still trying to pretend that there is some kind of objective right or wrong to language that can be fixed in stone and preserved for ever.
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong
on
Unusual Open Source
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Except that anarchism, as a philosophy, has a serious theoretical basis in the works of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, etc, which date back centuries.
Sorry, your Oxford dictionary is the definition that has been modified from its true original meaning.
Sorry, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
Kropotkin was born in 1842, Bakunin in 1814, and Proudhon in 1809, right? Well, the OED provides citations for "anarchy" in the sense of "lawlessness" dating back to 1539, and for "anarchy" in the sense of "moral or intellectual disorder" dating back to 1656.
If we assume that words have such a thing as a "true original meaning", then I would be inclined to say that the way the word was used in 1539 (and is still most commonly used today) is more likely to be the "true original meaning" than the way the word was used by a handful of philosphers in the 1850s. Unless you're about to propose that they invented the time machine as well?
Perhaps we should apply a similar rule to physical communications. You know those letters your girlfriend sent you back in the '80s? I know you haven't seen her since you split up 20 years ago, but you'd better track her down and make sure she consents to your keeping them, and if you can't get her permission for whatever reason, you'd better shred them.
Never mind that she's an up-and-coming diplomat who is destined to gain world fame when she introduces democracy to North Korea, and that the views on politics she wrote to you back then would be invaluable to historians of the future in charting the way she came up with the ideas that changed the world.
In fact, forget about asking for permission. She didn't explicitly state, when she wrote them, that she was giving you any right to keep them, let alone show them to historians. So you'd damn well better respect her copyright and shred them right now, okay?
You know, I'm glad past generations didn't think like you think, because the incidental, throwaway letters and diaries of the past, whose writers never thought for a moment that they would ever be read by anyone but their intended recipient, or kept for five minutes after they'd been read, have become today's invaluable insights into past ages. USENET is no different. If people like you force us to consign all those primary sources to the great bitbucket in the sky, our descendants will curse you, because you are stealing from them their right to know what people thought and said during the dawn of the information age.
A parallel being torrents that bring you linux Distributions vs torrents that bring you copyrighted media.
Newsflash - Linux distributions usually contain large quantities of copyrighted media. And that doesn't make them illegal.
Please refrain from saying "copyrighted" when you mean "unlicensed", as this helps spread the dangerous myth that content under free licenses is somehow different from other copyrighted content.
Considering there's controversy over whether or not Shakespeare wrote those plays or if it was someone else that was the real author(Bacon, IIRC), things haven't changed.
Only in the same sense that there's controversy over whether or not the US government is covering up the presence of aliens among us. You'll always get a handful of crazies who pick a silly theory and devote their lives to trying to prove it. That doesn't alter the fact that the vast majority of scholars have considered the many, many theories of alternative authorship, and soundly rejected them all.
If you want real controversies, there are some very interesting ones related to which of the plays that have been attributed to Shakespeare were really written by him, and which of the plays attributed to him alone were really collaborative works with other playwrights. There's some good nerdy meat in that, with computerised statistical text analysis playing a major role.
Shakespeare's plays were never published in his lifetime.
On the contrary, the majority of his plays were published in his lifetime, and often very soon after they were first written. Hamlet, for example, was probably written some time between 1599 and 1601: the first authorised printed edition was published in 1604, at most 5 years after the work was written, and some 12 years before Shakespeare's death.
(Hamlet is an interesting example, actually, because it's thought to be a remake of a previous play by someone else, which was probably less than 10 years old when Shakespeare wrote his version. Try doing something like that today, and see how long it takes for the lawsuit to arrive...)
The idea that plays could be read for pleasure, that English drama was something more than disposable popular entertainment scarcely exists before the death of Shakespeare.
This is also incorrect. Printed playscripts were extremely popular within Shakespeare's own lifetime, as witness the vast number of unauthorised editions of his plays (the first pirated Hamlet appeared in 1603, a year before the first authorised edition). Nobody would have gone to the considerable expense of printing a text that they did not expect to sell, and they did not sell these playscripts to other acting companies.
In future, please consider doing a little basic fact-checking before you stand up and start pretending to be an expert.
case in point: the pop-up key-stealer, when apps suddenly thrust themselves forward and steal a keystroke for the [ignore] [retry] [cancel] [OK] whatever prompt and vanish if it meets the input expectation.
The what? I vaguely recall that being a problem in Win98, but I run Win2k here, and when an inactive application demands input, it stays right down in the taskbar where it belongs - all that happens is that the taskbar icon flashes to notify me. Surely this is the case in WinXP too? It would seem strange for Microsoft to introduce the correct behaviour in one version of Windows, only to take it out again in the next.
What I repeatedly hear from Mac enthusiasts is how quickly a new user can sit down and get right to business, without thinking half as hard where things are or how settings work.
And that's total bullshit. OS X is arguably easier to learn for someone who's new to computers altogether, but anyone who has only ever used Windows before, faced with a Mac, is going to have a terribly frustrating time just trying to resize a window ("I click on the left edge and drag, to make it wider, and the window moves instead! What's with that?"), let alone figuring out how on earth the Dock is supposed to work.
What it comes down to is, people like what they're used to. That means Mac users love Macs, Windows users say they hate Windows but hate trying other platforms even more, and Linux users can't figure out how anyone can find Linux difficult to use. Which is why it is sensible for Linux to behave more like Windows (KDE), or more like OS X (Gnome) - because with greater familiarity will come greater uptake.
I expect in a while people will start complaining about our unfounded notions of temporal superiority, and we will have to stop believing we are superior to past civilisations.
What do you mean, "in a while"? People have been complaining about chronological snobbery since the mid-20th century at least. And people have been believing in a lost Golden Age long ago, when everything was superior, ever since the end of the Golden Age.:P
Won't it be easier to defeat this anti-phishing scheme since Firefox is open source? (Seriously. If not, please post why not and educate me.)
No, it won't, for the simple reason that obscurity does not provide security. Whether the source code is available or not, it's always possible for a smart hacker to figure out how a program works. So whenever you're doing anything related to security, you assume that the bad guy knows every last detail about your code does what it does. And you design your code so that that doesn't matter.
For example, if you're blocking phishing attempts by having a database of known phishing sites (which is how the Netcraft toolbar works, IIRC), then it doesn't really help the phishers to know the details of exactly how your browser connects to the database and looks up their URL in it. Because even though they know what's happening, there isn't actually anything they can do to stop it happening.
I suppose there are schemes that could be defeated by seeing the source. For example, a naive scheme that tried to identify phishing sites by running a fixed series of tests on them (check if site is in Russia but claims to be American bank, check URL to see if it contains dodgy characters, etc) would be slightly weaker in open source code because the tests would be visible for all to see. But such a scheme would be basically useless anyway - not because it's open source, but because it would be a fundamentally weak technique.
For this reason, it would seem stupid to use UTF-8 or UTF-16. Those don't encode everything that need to be encoded, if we're to have a truly international system. Based on the current definitions, we should be looking at UTF-32... The Unicode FAQ talks a lot about how nobody needs more character sets than UTF-16 can support, but (a) they don't represent all languages, or even a reasonable set, because UTF-16 can't handle that many...
With due respect, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 encode exactly the same characters. There is no character that can be encoded in UTF-32 that cannot be represented in UTF-16 or UTF-8. And there is no character that is needed to write any text in the world that would not fit into the range of characters that Unicode allows for. Period.
Moreover, the efficiency implications of decoding UTF-16 surrogate pairs or long UTF-8 sequences are hugely overblown. Yes, UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable-length encodings, but in practice that is totally irrelevant. Even UTF-32 represents many logical characters as multi-codepoint sequences, with things like combining diacritics. The complexity of processing things like Arabic text, which is full of ligatures and positional glyph variants, dwarfs the perceived complexity of performing a few bit shifts to convert three or four UTF-8 bytes into a Unicode codepoint.
In the nicest possible way, please go and learn about how these things really work before you come back and mouth off about things you don't fully understand.
Ever heard of Coca-Cola? They've been incredibly successful using trade secrets to protect their most important IP: their formulas.
Good God, you don't seriously believe that, do you?
Coca-Cola's formula is worthless. If you produced a product that was identical down to the last molecule (either by acquiring their formula somehow, or simply by buying Coke and rebranding it), you would sell no better than any of the myriad other fizzy brown sugar waters, and I would be able to produce thousands of witnesses willing to stand up in court and swear on everything they hold sacred that "real" Coke tasted better than your perfect clone.
The only things the Coca-Cola company has that it needs to protect are its trademarks. The myth of the irreproducible formula is just a facet of the brand; it's the brand, and the brand alone, that turns their fizzy water into something the masses actually want to buy.
I'm not too keen on british law, so I was hoping someone would correct me. That's pretty frightening, if the definition is the same across the pond (deliberate, premeditated homicide). So a mafia killing is treated the same as say, a father murdering the kid-next-door who was messing around with his daughter?
Well... the thing is that in British law, life doesn't mean life.
I'm not an expert, but my citizen's understanding of it is that the judge also sets a tariff, which is a number of years after which you are eligible for release, if you can convince a parole board that you've reformed and won't offend again. After release, you remain on parole for the rest of your life - if at any time you commit another crime, or if at any time it is suspected that you have begun to pose a threat to society again, then you can be recalled to prison very easily.
Obviously in the very worst cases (serial killers and the like) the judge will set a whole-life tariff, which really does mean life in prison. But a case that in America would be second-degree murder, translates in Britain to "life" with a tariff of 10-20 years, after which it is possible for a rehabilitated offender to be released and to rebuild some semblance of a life.
Soccer is european football, not the other way around. Most families probably have both footballs and soccer balls, or for you european types, footballs and footballs: round edition.
No, in Europe we have footballs and rugby balls.
Note for Americans: Rugby football is the European equivalent of American football. The main differences:
Rugby players don't wear body armour, helmets, or silly breeches.
People don't watch major rugby matches for the advertising.
International rugby involves more than one country.
there was one case - I believe in 1997, when the Tory vote collapsed spectacularly - where one seat which the Tories had considered safely theirs for decades had returned a Liberal Democrat MP, by a very small majority. The Tory demanded a recount, as was his right, and the recount was held. Yep, the Liberal won, but the majority was even smaller than we thought the first time (in single figures, IIRC). The Tory then somehow forced the vote to be retaken... which resulted in a massive majority for the Liberal.
This is because unlike the USA, the UK is a three-party state. There was therefore a large group of Labour supporters available to switch their votes to the Lib Dems, in order to keep the Tory out. (The way you tell the story, it almost sounds like you might be suggesting some Tory supporters tried to punish their candidate for wasting time, which seems unlikely.)
I note that you have totally failed to identify a single feature that OpenOffice.org lacks. All the features you name exist in OpenOffice.org, so presumably you're referring to problems with their implementation?
Sorry, but we can't actually read your mind. Simply waving your hands vaguely and saying "my needs are too complex, I can't use it" does not an argument make. Would you care to reveal precisely what it is you have in mind that Word 4 for Mac can do but OpenOffice.org cannot?
LaTeX is hopeless for anything that doesn't use a Latin character set. I've been trying on and off to get it to display Japanese for years, with no success. A couple of months ago I finally got pLaTeX to output a Japanese DVI that I could preview in a special Japanese-enabled DVI viewer, but I'm buggered if I can get it to print.
Quite simply, the TeX system was designed to typeset scientific papers written in English, which it does brilliantly. But for other tasks, it simply hasn't kept up with technology - as soon as you leave the core areas, it rapidly degenerates into layer upon layer of flaky hacks. The existence of LaTeX-generated Japanese PDFs proves that it's possible to get it to do what I want... but life's too short, and OpenOffice.org just works out of the box.
suppose those licenses became unavailible? would you still wan't to use mysql knowing it would force any code you based on it to be released only under the GPL period?
What's the alternative? Pay even more for a proprietary database like Oracle, and then be totally screwed if licenses become unavailable, because you don't even have the option of switching to a GPL version? Forgive me if I don't quite see the advantage here...
Slashdot Mirror
I really doubt that Apple is losing money on iTMS. There is zero overhead
What, zero? What is this utopia Apple lives in, where bandwidth is free, servers generate their own electricity, and system administrators maintain complex online stores in their spare time as a hobby?
Most consoles have some dedicated hardware to do some pretty nifty effects that would be
almost impossible on a home computer of the day. Eg the SNES had sprite scaling and rotation and perspective that could all be done in real time. Try doing that on a Spectrum.
Uh... your chronology is rather inaccurate. The SNES reached the West in 1991, nearly a full decade after the ZX Spectrum.
By the time the SNES appeared, sprite scaling and rotation and perspective were trivial and commonplace on home computers. For example, the 3D space combat in Wing Commander (1990) is based entirely around smooth scaling and rotation of sprites in real time. And within a year of the SNES launch, PC gamers were enjoying titles like Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld (1992) that totally blew away anything that was ever achieved on unextended 16-bit console hardware.
I wish people would stop calling people who share software, pirates.
People don't call people who share software "pirates". Nobody accuses RMS or Linus Torvalds of piracy. The people we call pirates are the people who make unlicensed copies of other people's software, which is not exactly "sharing" in the neighbourly sense.
As for calling people who make unlicensed copies of other people's work "pirates", well, according to the SOED in front of me, people have been using the noun "pirate" to mean "someone who infringes on the copyright of another" since 1701, and the verb "pirate" to mean "to appropriate or reproduce the work or invention of another without authority" since at least 1706. So, no - given that we've been using the word that way for at least 300 years, I rather doubt we're going to stop now.
Oh, quite. Though Windows isn't really any worse than Linux in my experience. As long as you always use a version of the same vintage as your hardware, at any rate.
Perhaps ironically, the only platform I remember having showstopper hardware compatibility issues with in the last six or seven years has been OS X. There was a period around 2000-2001 when people were advertising printers as Mac-compatible but only providing OS 9 drivers. It wasn't pretty for those who foolishly assumed that Apple would have provided an easy way of using an OS 9 driver from OS X.
Am I the only one that finds clicking the mousewheel to be a stupid way of middle clicking.
No, it's not just you. But then I use one of the wireless Intellimouse Explorers where the mousewheel is so stiff that it's almost impossible to click without turning it.
So what I do is remap one of the thumb buttons on the side to act as button 3. It's surprisingly comfortable and convenient. (The other thumb button is so far forward that it's totally useless, but there you go.)
Blind person installing photoshop.. interesting.
Why shouldn't a blind person want to install Photoshop?
I honestly don't know whether your assumption that there is nothing that a blind person could do in Photoshop is justified or not, but it doesn't matter, because even if that is the case, there would still be plenty of situations where it would be reasonable for a blind person to expect to be able to install such a program.
Hint: many computers are used by more than one person.
It's clear that the submitter of the article doesn't think the moral case for this type of thing is strong enough to stand on its own. He has to help it along, and slightly mislead his audience despite the fact that the vast majority of the copies this is used for will be pirated copies rather than backup copies.
;)
Huh? The submitter wrote, right there in the summary, "it will be mainly used for piracy". I really don't see how he could have been any blunter about it. It does not look to me like there is any attempt being made to mislead readers in any way whatsoever.
But I'm not surprised to see a response like yours. However someone phrases it, there's always someone who thinks they should have phrased it more strongly. I expect that even if the submitter had opened the article with "Filthy bloodsucking terrorist pedophile pirates have raped America's freedom once again in a savage assault on the copyright protections that keep our children safe", then someone would still have complained that he was being too sympathetic to them...
The quote specifically says a site that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be forced to change.
.xxx domain, then?
So... any chemical supplier that sells mercury and concentrated acids will have to switch to a
I love bad laws.
What "responsibility"? What "misuse"? A word cannot be "often misused" - if it's often used a certain way, then that is how it is used, and it is the fact of the usage that legitimises its inclusion in dictionaries, not the other way round!
As the poet wrote:
I can't believe that people today, in this age of progress and enlightenment, more than two thousand years after Horace wrote the words above (and he certainly wasn't the first person to make this observation), are still trying to pretend that there is some kind of objective right or wrong to language that can be fixed in stone and preserved for ever.
Except that anarchism, as a philosophy, has a serious theoretical basis in the works of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, etc, which date back centuries.
Sorry, your Oxford dictionary is the definition that has been modified from its true original meaning.
Sorry, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
Kropotkin was born in 1842, Bakunin in 1814, and Proudhon in 1809, right? Well, the OED provides citations for "anarchy" in the sense of "lawlessness" dating back to 1539, and for "anarchy" in the sense of "moral or intellectual disorder" dating back to 1656.
If we assume that words have such a thing as a "true original meaning", then I would be inclined to say that the way the word was used in 1539 (and is still most commonly used today) is more likely to be the "true original meaning" than the way the word was used by a handful of philosphers in the 1850s. Unless you're about to propose that they invented the time machine as well?
Perhaps we should apply a similar rule to physical communications. You know those letters your girlfriend sent you back in the '80s? I know you haven't seen her since you split up 20 years ago, but you'd better track her down and make sure she consents to your keeping them, and if you can't get her permission for whatever reason, you'd better shred them.
Never mind that she's an up-and-coming diplomat who is destined to gain world fame when she introduces democracy to North Korea, and that the views on politics she wrote to you back then would be invaluable to historians of the future in charting the way she came up with the ideas that changed the world.
In fact, forget about asking for permission. She didn't explicitly state, when she wrote them, that she was giving you any right to keep them, let alone show them to historians. So you'd damn well better respect her copyright and shred them right now, okay?
You know, I'm glad past generations didn't think like you think, because the incidental, throwaway letters and diaries of the past, whose writers never thought for a moment that they would ever be read by anyone but their intended recipient, or kept for five minutes after they'd been read, have become today's invaluable insights into past ages. USENET is no different. If people like you force us to consign all those primary sources to the great bitbucket in the sky, our descendants will curse you, because you are stealing from them their right to know what people thought and said during the dawn of the information age.
A parallel being torrents that bring you linux Distributions vs torrents that bring you copyrighted media.
Newsflash - Linux distributions usually contain large quantities of copyrighted media. And that doesn't make them illegal.
Please refrain from saying "copyrighted" when you mean "unlicensed", as this helps spread the dangerous myth that content under free licenses is somehow different from other copyrighted content.
Considering there's controversy over whether or not Shakespeare wrote those plays or if it was someone else that was the real author(Bacon, IIRC), things haven't changed.
Only in the same sense that there's controversy over whether or not the US government is covering up the presence of aliens among us. You'll always get a handful of crazies who pick a silly theory and devote their lives to trying to prove it. That doesn't alter the fact that the vast majority of scholars have considered the many, many theories of alternative authorship, and soundly rejected them all.
If you want real controversies, there are some very interesting ones related to which of the plays that have been attributed to Shakespeare were really written by him, and which of the plays attributed to him alone were really collaborative works with other playwrights. There's some good nerdy meat in that, with computerised statistical text analysis playing a major role.
But this is getting rather off topic.
Shakespeare's plays were never published in his lifetime.
On the contrary, the majority of his plays were published in his lifetime, and often very soon after they were first written. Hamlet, for example, was probably written some time between 1599 and 1601: the first authorised printed edition was published in 1604, at most 5 years after the work was written, and some 12 years before Shakespeare's death.
(Hamlet is an interesting example, actually, because it's thought to be a remake of a previous play by someone else, which was probably less than 10 years old when Shakespeare wrote his version. Try doing something like that today, and see how long it takes for the lawsuit to arrive...)
The idea that plays could be read for pleasure, that English drama was something more than disposable popular entertainment scarcely exists before the death of Shakespeare.
This is also incorrect. Printed playscripts were extremely popular within Shakespeare's own lifetime, as witness the vast number of unauthorised editions of his plays (the first pirated Hamlet appeared in 1603, a year before the first authorised edition). Nobody would have gone to the considerable expense of printing a text that they did not expect to sell, and they did not sell these playscripts to other acting companies.
In future, please consider doing a little basic fact-checking before you stand up and start pretending to be an expert.
case in point: the pop-up key-stealer, when apps suddenly thrust themselves forward and steal a keystroke for the [ignore] [retry] [cancel] [OK] whatever prompt and vanish if it meets the input expectation.
The what? I vaguely recall that being a problem in Win98, but I run Win2k here, and when an inactive application demands input, it stays right down in the taskbar where it belongs - all that happens is that the taskbar icon flashes to notify me. Surely this is the case in WinXP too? It would seem strange for Microsoft to introduce the correct behaviour in one version of Windows, only to take it out again in the next.
What I repeatedly hear from Mac enthusiasts is how quickly a new user can sit down and get right to business, without thinking half as hard where things are or how settings work.
And that's total bullshit. OS X is arguably easier to learn for someone who's new to computers altogether, but anyone who has only ever used Windows before, faced with a Mac, is going to have a terribly frustrating time just trying to resize a window ("I click on the left edge and drag, to make it wider, and the window moves instead! What's with that?"), let alone figuring out how on earth the Dock is supposed to work.
What it comes down to is, people like what they're used to. That means Mac users love Macs, Windows users say they hate Windows but hate trying other platforms even more, and Linux users can't figure out how anyone can find Linux difficult to use. Which is why it is sensible for Linux to behave more like Windows (KDE), or more like OS X (Gnome) - because with greater familiarity will come greater uptake.
I expect in a while people will start complaining about our unfounded notions of temporal superiority, and we will have to stop believing we are superior to past civilisations.
:P
What do you mean, "in a while"? People have been complaining about chronological snobbery since the mid-20th century at least. And people have been believing in a lost Golden Age long ago, when everything was superior, ever since the end of the Golden Age.
Won't it be easier to defeat this anti-phishing scheme since Firefox is open source?
(Seriously. If not, please post why not and educate me.)
No, it won't, for the simple reason that obscurity does not provide security. Whether the source code is available or not, it's always possible for a smart hacker to figure out how a program works. So whenever you're doing anything related to security, you assume that the bad guy knows every last detail about your code does what it does. And you design your code so that that doesn't matter.
For example, if you're blocking phishing attempts by having a database of known phishing sites (which is how the Netcraft toolbar works, IIRC), then it doesn't really help the phishers to know the details of exactly how your browser connects to the database and looks up their URL in it. Because even though they know what's happening, there isn't actually anything they can do to stop it happening.
I suppose there are schemes that could be defeated by seeing the source. For example, a naive scheme that tried to identify phishing sites by running a fixed series of tests on them (check if site is in Russia but claims to be American bank, check URL to see if it contains dodgy characters, etc) would be slightly weaker in open source code because the tests would be visible for all to see. But such a scheme would be basically useless anyway - not because it's open source, but because it would be a fundamentally weak technique.
For this reason, it would seem stupid to use UTF-8 or UTF-16. Those don't encode everything that need to be encoded, if we're to have a truly international system.
Based on the current definitions, we should be looking at UTF-32...
The Unicode FAQ talks a lot about how nobody needs more character sets than UTF-16 can support, but (a) they don't represent all languages, or even a reasonable set, because UTF-16 can't handle that many...
With due respect, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 encode exactly the same characters. There is no character that can be encoded in UTF-32 that cannot be represented in UTF-16 or UTF-8. And there is no character that is needed to write any text in the world that would not fit into the range of characters that Unicode allows for. Period.
Moreover, the efficiency implications of decoding UTF-16 surrogate pairs or long UTF-8 sequences are hugely overblown. Yes, UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable-length encodings, but in practice that is totally irrelevant. Even UTF-32 represents many logical characters as multi-codepoint sequences, with things like combining diacritics. The complexity of processing things like Arabic text, which is full of ligatures and positional glyph variants, dwarfs the perceived complexity of performing a few bit shifts to convert three or four UTF-8 bytes into a Unicode codepoint.
In the nicest possible way, please go and learn about how these things really work before you come back and mouth off about things you don't fully understand.
Ever heard of Coca-Cola? They've been incredibly successful using trade secrets to protect their most important IP: their formulas.
Good God, you don't seriously believe that, do you?
Coca-Cola's formula is worthless. If you produced a product that was identical down to the last molecule (either by acquiring their formula somehow, or simply by buying Coke and rebranding it), you would sell no better than any of the myriad other fizzy brown sugar waters, and I would be able to produce thousands of witnesses willing to stand up in court and swear on everything they hold sacred that "real" Coke tasted better than your perfect clone.
The only things the Coca-Cola company has that it needs to protect are its trademarks. The myth of the irreproducible formula is just a facet of the brand; it's the brand, and the brand alone, that turns their fizzy water into something the masses actually want to buy.
I'm not too keen on british law, so I was hoping someone would correct me. That's pretty frightening, if the definition is the same across the pond (deliberate, premeditated homicide). So a mafia killing is treated the same as say, a father murdering the kid-next-door who was messing around with his daughter?
Well... the thing is that in British law, life doesn't mean life.
I'm not an expert, but my citizen's understanding of it is that the judge also sets a tariff, which is a number of years after which you are eligible for release, if you can convince a parole board that you've reformed and won't offend again. After release, you remain on parole for the rest of your life - if at any time you commit another crime, or if at any time it is suspected that you have begun to pose a threat to society again, then you can be recalled to prison very easily.
Obviously in the very worst cases (serial killers and the like) the judge will set a whole-life tariff, which really does mean life in prison. But a case that in America would be second-degree murder, translates in Britain to "life" with a tariff of 10-20 years, after which it is possible for a rehabilitated offender to be released and to rebuild some semblance of a life.
No, in Europe we have footballs and rugby balls.
Note for Americans: Rugby football is the European equivalent of American football. The main differences:
there was one case - I believe in 1997, when the Tory vote collapsed spectacularly - where one seat which the Tories had considered safely theirs for decades had returned a Liberal Democrat MP, by a very small majority. The Tory demanded a recount, as was his right, and the recount was held. Yep, the Liberal won, but the majority was even smaller than we thought the first time (in single figures, IIRC). The Tory then somehow forced the vote to be retaken... which resulted in a massive majority for the Liberal.
This is because unlike the USA, the UK is a three-party state. There was therefore a large group of Labour supporters available to switch their votes to the Lib Dems, in order to keep the Tory out. (The way you tell the story, it almost sounds like you might be suggesting some Tory supporters tried to punish their candidate for wasting time, which seems unlikely.)
I note that you have totally failed to identify a single feature that OpenOffice.org lacks. All the features you name exist in OpenOffice.org, so presumably you're referring to problems with their implementation?
Sorry, but we can't actually read your mind. Simply waving your hands vaguely and saying "my needs are too complex, I can't use it" does not an argument make. Would you care to reveal precisely what it is you have in mind that Word 4 for Mac can do but OpenOffice.org cannot?
LaTeX is hopeless for anything that doesn't use a Latin character set. I've been trying on and off to get it to display Japanese for years, with no success. A couple of months ago I finally got pLaTeX to output a Japanese DVI that I could preview in a special Japanese-enabled DVI viewer, but I'm buggered if I can get it to print.
Quite simply, the TeX system was designed to typeset scientific papers written in English, which it does brilliantly. But for other tasks, it simply hasn't kept up with technology - as soon as you leave the core areas, it rapidly degenerates into layer upon layer of flaky hacks. The existence of LaTeX-generated Japanese PDFs proves that it's possible to get it to do what I want... but life's too short, and OpenOffice.org just works out of the box.
suppose those licenses became unavailible? would you still wan't to use mysql knowing it would force any code you based on it to be released only under the GPL period?
What's the alternative? Pay even more for a proprietary database like Oracle, and then be totally screwed if licenses become unavailable, because you don't even have the option of switching to a GPL version? Forgive me if I don't quite see the advantage here...