So, the act of taking out your gun, loading it and placing it in your desk drawer, cracked open shows no intent on what is to happen when the next person walks thur the door?
Correct: it does not.
I presume from what you say that you believe the only possible motive for doing that is if you are planning to shoot the next person who enters the room. Here are some alternative explanations:
You are planning to commit suicide, but have not yet plucked up the courage.
You have received anonymous death threats, and want to be able to defend yourself.
You are planning to discharge it into the air from your balcony to signal the start of a revolution.
You have serious psychological problems that lead you to believe you are going to assassinate the president today. (As you live in Sweden, it's unlikely you'll have the opportunity.)
You are fifteen, drunk, and did it because your friend dared you to.
Hmm, I seem to see an awful lot of possible interpretations, and only one of them involves murder.
Now, note in particular the "self defense" one. This one is actually analogous to the situation Microsoft is in! Microsoft is regularly threatened, or even attacked, with software patents. Given that they therefore have a clear, obvious, and verifiable motive to patent things, why are so many people determined to believe in conspiracies instead?
Translation of a game's text into continental European languages costs real money.
Newsflash: in England people speak a language called "English". By all accounts it's fairly similar to English, so I don't think it can be too expensive to translate games into it.
As for the digitally-signed scripts, how do I write my own scripts? Presumably I have to digitally sign them before I can use them, if what you say is true.
Right. You create yourself a certificate (free, if you don't need it certified by a commercial entity), and then you sign your scripts with it.
What's to stop a script from getting other scripts/executables that it modifies re-signed through that same mechanism?
Well, either it won't be signed (so it won't run unless you're stupid), or it'll be signed but not with a certificate you trust (so it won't run unless you're careless). So it shouldn't be modifying anything in the first place. But even if you're stupid or careless, I assume it can only sign things with certificates it has access to, right? Which, unless you're both stupid and careless, again won't include any certificates you trust.
How well it will work in practice remains to be seen. But as it stands, it sounds to me like it'll be at least as secure as Linux.
Ah... Linux, where even smart people regularly run scripts they've downloaded from the internet, as root, without checking what they do -- they just take it on trust that "sudo make install" will not install a rootkit, and get away with it because virus writers know that exploiting actual vulnerabilities in an operating system is considerably more effective than trying to get people to jump through hoops to run malicious scripts.
If you want to be sure, you can compare the file size to the official one. If it matches, you can be all but completely confidant that it's real.
This doesn't work for media, though! Depending on the codec used, the quality settings, and the resolution, the file size of (for example) a single episode of a TV series can be anything from 50 megabytes to 500 megabytes, and there can be dozens of equally-real sources, all of them with different file sizes.
If you pick one at random, you have absolutely no way of knowing whether it's genuine or not.
Admittedly this is only a problem when there isn't a single official source, and mostly that's only the case when the media in question is being distributed illegally. But there are also legitimate usage scenarios. We should surely encourage the development of anything that has legitimate benefits, right?
Or shall we go back to living naked in caves, because clothes and houses can help make terrorists comfortable?
After all, there are probably far fewer people trying to flood P2P with bogus files just for the hell of it then there are trying to flood P2P with bogus files in an attempt to protect copyright.
There is a third group you haven't thought of: the people who are trying to flood P2P with bogus files in order to spread spyware and viruses. If this can be used against them, then it should be.
Isn't it better to risk helping people steal songs (sometimes not even a criminal offence) than to do nothing and thereby help criminal gangs spam, hack, and phish (major fraud)?
so what's ArsTechnica talking about with the no speaker business?
Which "no speaker business"? Try reading the actual article, instead of just the part Slashdot quoted out of context. In context, it makes no such claim.
Because that someone else didn't put any resources into developing the idea, but you did. It's as simple as that.
Okay: if you pour resources into developing something, it does seem fair that you should be given the chance to recoup your investment without being undercut by competitors who have spent nothing.
But that's only one case. Out here in the real world, it isn't "as simple as that".
What about the common case where the other person came up with a similar idea at roughly the same time? You get a patent first, and suddenly that someone else suddenly can't use their idea, even though they didn't copy you and they did put resources into developing it.
Currently, all the patent system has to say is: "Whoops, too bad. You lose."
Or what about when the idea didn't actually take all that many resources to develop? Patents on wonder-drugs that cost billions of dollars to research are one thing. Patents on "$(everyday act)... on the internet!" are quite another matter.
I'm not an extremist where patents are concerned. I am even willing to believe that some form of software patents might be beneficial, though I have yet to see a clear case in favour. But you don't have to be an extremist to see that we could do better than the current system.
No, you see, this is why distros have defaults that newbies can't change without knowing what they've done.
You don't say "which desktop are you using", you say "what kind of Linux are you using". If they say "Red Hat" or "Ubuntu", you know they've got Gnome. And if they say "SuSE" or "Linspire", you know they've got KDE. Simple, see?
Someone who runs Linspire shouldn't say "I run Linux" any more than someone who runs Mac OS should say "I run FreeBSD".
Nonsense. Linspire is a GNU/Linux distribution, because the Linspire kernel is Linux and the Linspire userland is GNU. Then Linspire's desktop is based on the same systems that are used by practically every other GNU/Linux distribution there is - X, KDE, and so on. Fundamentally, Linspire is Debian with a bunch of user-friendly frontends.
On the other hand OS X is not FreeBSD in any sense. Darwin, the open source platform that forms the core of OS X, is a hybrid that has code in common with FreeBSD - much of it is indeed derived from FreeBSD - but has never been remotely the same thing: for example, Darwin is based on the Mach microkernel, while FreeBSD's kernel is monolithic. OS X's userland is a GNU/BSD hybrid (the default shell is GNU bash, which is not even installed by default in FreeBSD), and its desktop - the only part of the system that the vast majority of users ever see - is entirely based on Apple's own proprietary code.
Take FFT (the original Tactics, not Tactics Advance) and Xenogears, both of which had very good stories, IMO. Neither of those games felt like clicking through a nice story; playing them felt like playing through a nice story.
I'm guessing you never made it onto the second disc of Xenogears, then?
If people actually installed something other than Windows once in a while, they would never put up with the giant heap of shit that MS calls an OS installer.
Most people never install any OS, full stop. So the number of computer users who care about OS installation issues is vanishingly small.
Moreover, the number of those who consider the amount of time it takes (once working unattended) to be the most important factor is, again, probably a minority. I don't have any statistics for that, but I would point out that a lot of people are working very hard on Linux installers - and while I see a lot of distros boasting about how easy they are to install, you're the first person I've seen who's boasted about how fast it is.
Why? Surely "click six times, then go and have lunch, and it's done when you get back" is better than "babysit convoluted install process for 20 minutes"?
An hour and ten minutes is still totally unacceptable.
Why? We're talking about installation - something that power users will do precisely once, and Joe Average will never do at all because his PC came with Vista ready-installed.
Businesses won't notice, either, because they'll upgrade their PCs by reimaging them, not by shoving DVDs in the drives and upgrading them all manually.
(Don't bother trotting out the "it's windoze which is teh sux0rs adn u have to reformat it every day or it B$oDs u lol" - that was always BS, and has never been further from the truth than today.)
The fact that Windows apparently was formerly worse doesn't help things.
Fact? What "fact" is this? I haven't installed Windows for a while, but I remember it taking about 20-40 minutes for previous versions, which is competitive with any desktop OS installation I've ever seen. And I'd be willing to bet that Vista will take considerably less than 70 minutes when it's finally released. There's probably a lot of debug code and error checking in there that isn't strictly necessary, for example.
In particular, if you look at the screenshots (e.g. this one), you'll see that Vista isn't using naive transparency a la OS X or the recent X.org work - it seems to be using actual translucency, so the parts of the background windows you can see through the title bar are blurred. The effect is that you can get an idea of what's there, but you're not distracted by crisp text in the background.
It remains to be seen how well it will work in practice, but despite what Apple fanboys like to think, it isn't actually a slavish copy of OS X...
Microsoft: Oh we love C++, now it's Visual C++! (embrace, extend), in order to help maintain vendor lock-in.
Would this be the wrong moment to point out that Visual C++ is currently one of Microsoft's most standards-compliant products?
Compare Microsoft's extensions with GCC's. Quiz: which of Microsoft and GNU do you think are introducing more portability problems by embracing and extending the C and C++ languages?
Er, yes. Of course, Blaster does not, in fact, infect 2000/XP, whether connected to a network or not, if you have actually updated the operating system at any time since the Blaster patch was released in, let's see, yes, it was July 2003.
And, no, it does not necessarily infect you while you're getting the updates for a fresh unpatched Windows installation. I've installed Windows dozens of times over the last two years, and each time gone online and downloaded updates including the Blaster patch. Number of Blaster infections I've seen in that time: zero.
Face it - a fully patched Windows installation, operated by a competent user, is effectively as secure as any other operating system. Unless they've patched OS X against that nasty "cd / && sudo rm -rf *, then type your password" social-engineering vulnerability?
It's not the GIMP's fault you can't handle a few windows, folks.
It is, however, the GIMP's fault that it makes such a half-assed attempt at running on Windows that it actually does more harm to the cause of Free Software than good. People see GIMP - with its interface that (whatever its merits) is a nightmare to use in Windows, and its GTK toolkit that (however well it runs in Linux) drags, flickers, and generally looks and feels crap in Windows,* and they say: "People tell me that this is one of the best Free Software applications out there. Yet I do not like this application at all. If this is good Free Software, then I would like the rest even less. Thus I reject Free Software."
And if anyone has the unbelievable cheek to identify the specific usability problems that are causing them to dislike GIMP, what do they get? Smug Linux weenies telling them that it's their fault they're so stupid, and they'd like it if they were smart enough, and only idiots use M$ $oftwar€ anyway, so they should just shut up and suck it down. Do you really think that's a helpful attitude? I sure don't.
If you can't produce a Windows port that Windows users will feel happy using, you shouldn't produce a Windows port at all.
Compare and contrast this with Firefox, which runs so well on Windows that many people fail to realise it's using its own widget set.
People who complain about the GIMP's interface are usually the sort of people who think MDI is a good interface idea.
Now this is a funny thing. You see, I'm finding it a bit hard to see any real difference at all between a maximised MDI window (Photoshop on Windows) and the solution GIMP fanatics tend to suggest to the GIMP's usability issues, namely "use a dedicated virtual desktop for GIMP". Except that the MDI solution is portable, whereas the virtual desktop solution only works for some window managers. Oh, and the MDI solution means that the application takes care of setting up the workspace for you, while the virtual desktop solution requires users to manage things themselves.
It's also interesting to compare Firefox again here. What is the single feature that causes the greatest usability enhancement in Firefox over Internet Explorer? Most people will immediately say "Tabbed browsing". Now, what is tabbed browsing? Well, it's an Interface that places Multiple Documents in one window. This "multiple document interface", as one might call it, has attracted quite a few fans even among Linux users.
I do hope that whatever web browser you use is configured with tabs disabled. In fact, you should probably have it set up so that the menu bar is in one window, the navigation buttons in another dialog, the address bar in yet another, and every single website you open comes up in yet another window. That way it would be just like your beloved GIMP.
* The GTK problem applies to Inkscape as well. I'm trying it now. The program itself is very nice: it has a lot of neat features, and, unlike GIMP, Inkscape's interface manages to be intuitive and usable in Windows as well as in its native GNOME. But the GTK widgets really do flicker rather visibly. Not a problem to me, but it may put a lot of potential users off...
I (as a user) don't need for my apps to be able to see every file that I own. Even though I as a user have r-x access to a directory, if I'm running firefox, it should probably only have --x, and rwx only under it's own application directory.
Evidently you only use Firefox to browse the web. Unfortunately, your usage pattern is not the only usage pattern there is.
A lot of people like to view HTML files stored on their computer, and to save websites to their computer. That implies that Firefox needs read/write access to home directories as a bare minimum - and once it has that, it has access to a lot of sensitive information right off the bat.
As far as any normal user is concerned, there is no GM update, since going to the Extensions manager and clicking update for GM yields "Firefox was not able to find any available updates" (this is the case for me at least).
I just tried this: it immediately found, downloaded, and installed the Greasemonkey update that fixes this issue. Presumably you were just too quick off the mark.
As much as I like using it, I'm uninstalling. And this gives me the willies about all those semi-random but cool extensions that have made the Firefox experience so great for me. This is very bad.
I'm sorry you're so susceptible to FUD, and I'm particularly sorry that you're going to throw away a valuable tool on the basis of a security flaw that has already been fixed - and one that has never been exploited maliciously, and, since Greasemonkey users are relatively few and almost all techies who will have upgraded by now, almost certainly never will be exploited.
As for me, I've assessed the risks rationally, and I'm happy to say I'll be continuing to use Greasemonkey.
Creative commons allows you to stipulate how you wish your licensed works to be used...
While your statement is correct, sadly that sort of phrasing leaves a loophole for trolls like Dvorak to twist your words.
A better way of saying it would be that "Creative Commons helps you", not "allows" - that makes it clear that CC is not doing anything funky, it's just providing a simple and straightforward framework that empowers ordinary people to share their creative works on their own terms.
I have checked this for you, and you are absolutely wrong. The usual place for photo attributions in a book is in the list of illustrations; I've only found one book that has no such list, and in that book the attributions were actually printed over a corner of each photo.
Now look in a magazine, which is where you're actually likely to find photos from external sources, and a much better analogy to most web pages. In magazines, you will find that the attribution is usually given very explicitly next to every single photo. It may be in extremely small text, and often it's written sideways down one edge of the picture, to make it less obtrusive - but it's always right there, "slathered over every page", not hidden away in source code.
Hmm, it compiled. And note the conspicuous absence of any errors or warnings whatsoever, which indicate that the code in question is 100% strict valid C in accordance with the current C standard (ISO C99).
Ultimately hardware options are not a solution pirates can use, since watermarking could easily identify which person freed some content from DRM.
Watermarking in what? It sounds like you're thinking of "trusted computing". But all that would tell you would be that, ah, yes, it was reported stolen yesterday by a 95-year-old Chinese grandmother.
And even if you can identify the actual individual who copied the media and uploaded the first copy onto the internet, what good's it going to do you when you find out they live somewhere you don't have an extradition treaty with, or even somewhere which doesn't recognise international copyright law?
Sooner or later these people are going to have to accept that it's going to be very hard to stuff this cat back in the bag without getting some pretty vicious scratches.
Tell you what, guys, how about we do a deal? You come up with a business model that lets me buy what I want, when I want, and I'll buy stuff. You force me to buy what I can find, when I have time to drive out to the mall, and I won't. It's really and truly that simple. I've bought... let's see... about seven computer games this year. And fully five of those were download purchases. Low prices, no waiting for delivery, no expensive international shipping charges, and more of my money going straight to the people who actually created the content. I win. They win. What's so hard about this?
That may be true for you personally, but it is acceptable in certain limited contexts: for example, "I got straight A's in my exams" is correctly punctuated. (Many people think it's ugly, but it's definitely not wrong, and some style guides mandate it.)
It is, of course, not really "correct" to shorten words in this manner, so it probably will not pass muster in a formal paper of any sort.
I made it through a top university with high grades while using common contractions regularly. That was studying English, of course; it's possible that other disciplines have stricter constraints.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct: it does not.
I presume from what you say that you believe the only possible motive for doing that is if you are planning to shoot the next person who enters the room. Here are some alternative explanations:
- You are planning to commit suicide, but have not yet plucked up the courage.
- You have received anonymous death threats, and want to be able to defend yourself.
- You are planning to discharge it into the air from your balcony to signal the start of a revolution.
- You have serious psychological problems that lead you to believe you are going to assassinate the president today. (As you live in Sweden, it's unlikely you'll have the opportunity.)
- You are fifteen, drunk, and did it because your friend dared you to.
Hmm, I seem to see an awful lot of possible interpretations, and only one of them involves murder.Now, note in particular the "self defense" one. This one is actually analogous to the situation Microsoft is in! Microsoft is regularly threatened, or even attacked, with software patents. Given that they therefore have a clear, obvious, and verifiable motive to patent things, why are so many people determined to believe in conspiracies instead?
Translation of a game's text into continental European languages costs real money.
Newsflash: in England people speak a language called "English". By all accounts it's fairly similar to English, so I don't think it can be too expensive to translate games into it.
As for the digitally-signed scripts, how do I write my own scripts? Presumably I have to digitally sign them before I can use them, if what you say is true.
Right. You create yourself a certificate (free, if you don't need it certified by a commercial entity), and then you sign your scripts with it.
What's to stop a script from getting other scripts/executables that it modifies re-signed through that same mechanism?
Well, either it won't be signed (so it won't run unless you're stupid), or it'll be signed but not with a certificate you trust (so it won't run unless you're careless). So it shouldn't be modifying anything in the first place. But even if you're stupid or careless, I assume it can only sign things with certificates it has access to, right? Which, unless you're both stupid and careless, again won't include any certificates you trust.
How well it will work in practice remains to be seen. But as it stands, it sounds to me like it'll be at least as secure as Linux.
Ah... Linux, where even smart people regularly run scripts they've downloaded from the internet, as root, without checking what they do -- they just take it on trust that "sudo make install" will not install a rootkit, and get away with it because virus writers know that exploiting actual vulnerabilities in an operating system is considerably more effective than trying to get people to jump through hoops to run malicious scripts.
If you want to be sure, you can compare the file size to the official one. If it matches, you can be all but completely confidant that it's real.
This doesn't work for media, though! Depending on the codec used, the quality settings, and the resolution, the file size of (for example) a single episode of a TV series can be anything from 50 megabytes to 500 megabytes, and there can be dozens of equally-real sources, all of them with different file sizes.
If you pick one at random, you have absolutely no way of knowing whether it's genuine or not.
Admittedly this is only a problem when there isn't a single official source, and mostly that's only the case when the media in question is being distributed illegally. But there are also legitimate usage scenarios. We should surely encourage the development of anything that has legitimate benefits, right?
Or shall we go back to living naked in caves, because clothes and houses can help make terrorists comfortable?
After all, there are probably far fewer people trying to flood P2P with bogus files just for the hell of it then there are trying to flood P2P with bogus files in an attempt to protect copyright.
There is a third group you haven't thought of: the people who are trying to flood P2P with bogus files in order to spread spyware and viruses. If this can be used against them, then it should be.
Isn't it better to risk helping people steal songs (sometimes not even a criminal offence) than to do nothing and thereby help criminal gangs spam, hack, and phish (major fraud)?
so what's ArsTechnica talking about with the no speaker business?
Which "no speaker business"? Try reading the actual article, instead of just the part Slashdot quoted out of context. In context, it makes no such claim.
Good lord, that must be a deliberate joke. A pure CSS-based layout that works in IE and not in standards-compliant browsers? Sheer genius...
Because that someone else didn't put any resources into developing the idea, but you did. It's as simple as that.
Okay: if you pour resources into developing something, it does seem fair that you should be given the chance to recoup your investment without being undercut by competitors who have spent nothing.
But that's only one case. Out here in the real world, it isn't "as simple as that".
What about the common case where the other person came up with a similar idea at roughly the same time? You get a patent first, and suddenly that someone else suddenly can't use their idea, even though they didn't copy you and they did put resources into developing it.
Currently, all the patent system has to say is: "Whoops, too bad. You lose."
Or what about when the idea didn't actually take all that many resources to develop? Patents on wonder-drugs that cost billions of dollars to research are one thing. Patents on "$(everyday act)... on the internet!" are quite another matter.
I'm not an extremist where patents are concerned. I am even willing to believe that some form of software patents might be beneficial, though I have yet to see a clear case in favour. But you don't have to be an extremist to see that we could do better than the current system.
No, you see, this is why distros have defaults that newbies can't change without knowing what they've done.
You don't say "which desktop are you using", you say "what kind of Linux are you using". If they say "Red Hat" or "Ubuntu", you know they've got Gnome. And if they say "SuSE" or "Linspire", you know they've got KDE. Simple, see?
Someone who runs Linspire shouldn't say "I run Linux" any more than someone who runs Mac OS should say "I run FreeBSD".
Nonsense. Linspire is a GNU/Linux distribution, because the Linspire kernel is Linux and the Linspire userland is GNU. Then Linspire's desktop is based on the same systems that are used by practically every other GNU/Linux distribution there is - X, KDE, and so on. Fundamentally, Linspire is Debian with a bunch of user-friendly frontends.
On the other hand OS X is not FreeBSD in any sense. Darwin, the open source platform that forms the core of OS X, is a hybrid that has code in common with FreeBSD - much of it is indeed derived from FreeBSD - but has never been remotely the same thing: for example, Darwin is based on the Mach microkernel, while FreeBSD's kernel is monolithic. OS X's userland is a GNU/BSD hybrid (the default shell is GNU bash, which is not even installed by default in FreeBSD), and its desktop - the only part of the system that the vast majority of users ever see - is entirely based on Apple's own proprietary code.
The two cases are not at all analogous.
Take FFT (the original Tactics, not Tactics Advance) and Xenogears, both of which had very good stories, IMO. Neither of those games felt like clicking through a nice story; playing them felt like playing through a nice story.
I'm guessing you never made it onto the second disc of Xenogears, then?
If people actually installed something other than Windows once in a while, they would never put up with the giant heap of shit that MS calls an OS installer.
Most people never install any OS, full stop. So the number of computer users who care about OS installation issues is vanishingly small.
Moreover, the number of those who consider the amount of time it takes (once working unattended) to be the most important factor is, again, probably a minority. I don't have any statistics for that, but I would point out that a lot of people are working very hard on Linux installers - and while I see a lot of distros boasting about how easy they are to install, you're the first person I've seen who's boasted about how fast it is.
The amount of interaction is irrelevant.
Why? Surely "click six times, then go and have lunch, and it's done when you get back" is better than "babysit convoluted install process for 20 minutes"?
An hour and ten minutes is still totally unacceptable.
Why? We're talking about installation - something that power users will do precisely once, and Joe Average will never do at all because his PC came with Vista ready-installed.
Businesses won't notice, either, because they'll upgrade their PCs by reimaging them, not by shoving DVDs in the drives and upgrading them all manually.
(Don't bother trotting out the "it's windoze which is teh sux0rs adn u have to reformat it every day or it B$oDs u lol" - that was always BS, and has never been further from the truth than today.)
The fact that Windows apparently was formerly worse doesn't help things.
Fact? What "fact" is this? I haven't installed Windows for a while, but I remember it taking about 20-40 minutes for previous versions, which is competitive with any desktop OS installation I've ever seen. And I'd be willing to bet that Vista will take considerably less than 70 minutes when it's finally released. There's probably a lot of debug code and error checking in there that isn't strictly necessary, for example.
In particular, if you look at the screenshots (e.g. this one), you'll see that Vista isn't using naive transparency a la OS X or the recent X.org work - it seems to be using actual translucency, so the parts of the background windows you can see through the title bar are blurred. The effect is that you can get an idea of what's there, but you're not distracted by crisp text in the background.
It remains to be seen how well it will work in practice, but despite what Apple fanboys like to think, it isn't actually a slavish copy of OS X...
Microsoft: Oh we love C++, now it's Visual C++! (embrace, extend), in order to help maintain vendor lock-in.
Would this be the wrong moment to point out that Visual C++ is currently one of Microsoft's most standards-compliant products?
Compare Microsoft's extensions with GCC's. Quiz: which of Microsoft and GNU do you think are introducing more portability problems by embracing and extending the C and C++ languages?
Er, yes. Of course, Blaster does not, in fact, infect 2000/XP, whether connected to a network or not, if you have actually updated the operating system at any time since the Blaster patch was released in, let's see, yes, it was July 2003.
And, no, it does not necessarily infect you while you're getting the updates for a fresh unpatched Windows installation. I've installed Windows dozens of times over the last two years, and each time gone online and downloaded updates including the Blaster patch. Number of Blaster infections I've seen in that time: zero.
Face it - a fully patched Windows installation, operated by a competent user, is effectively as secure as any other operating system. Unless they've patched OS X against that nasty "cd / && sudo rm -rf *, then type your password" social-engineering vulnerability?
It's not the GIMP's fault you can't handle a few windows, folks.
It is, however, the GIMP's fault that it makes such a half-assed attempt at running on Windows that it actually does more harm to the cause of Free Software than good. People see GIMP - with its interface that (whatever its merits) is a nightmare to use in Windows, and its GTK toolkit that (however well it runs in Linux) drags, flickers, and generally looks and feels crap in Windows,* and they say: "People tell me that this is one of the best Free Software applications out there. Yet I do not like this application at all. If this is good Free Software, then I would like the rest even less. Thus I reject Free Software."
And if anyone has the unbelievable cheek to identify the specific usability problems that are causing them to dislike GIMP, what do they get? Smug Linux weenies telling them that it's their fault they're so stupid, and they'd like it if they were smart enough, and only idiots use M$ $oftwar€ anyway, so they should just shut up and suck it down. Do you really think that's a helpful attitude? I sure don't.
If you can't produce a Windows port that Windows users will feel happy using, you shouldn't produce a Windows port at all.
Compare and contrast this with Firefox, which runs so well on Windows that many people fail to realise it's using its own widget set.
People who complain about the GIMP's interface are usually the sort of people who think MDI is a good interface idea.
Now this is a funny thing. You see, I'm finding it a bit hard to see any real difference at all between a maximised MDI window (Photoshop on Windows) and the solution GIMP fanatics tend to suggest to the GIMP's usability issues, namely "use a dedicated virtual desktop for GIMP". Except that the MDI solution is portable, whereas the virtual desktop solution only works for some window managers. Oh, and the MDI solution means that the application takes care of setting up the workspace for you, while the virtual desktop solution requires users to manage things themselves.
It's also interesting to compare Firefox again here. What is the single feature that causes the greatest usability enhancement in Firefox over Internet Explorer? Most people will immediately say "Tabbed browsing". Now, what is tabbed browsing? Well, it's an Interface that places Multiple Documents in one window. This "multiple document interface", as one might call it, has attracted quite a few fans even among Linux users.
I do hope that whatever web browser you use is configured with tabs disabled. In fact, you should probably have it set up so that the menu bar is in one window, the navigation buttons in another dialog, the address bar in yet another, and every single website you open comes up in yet another window. That way it would be just like your beloved GIMP.
* The GTK problem applies to Inkscape as well. I'm trying it now. The program itself is very nice: it has a lot of neat features, and, unlike GIMP, Inkscape's interface manages to be intuitive and usable in Windows as well as in its native GNOME. But the GTK widgets really do flicker rather visibly. Not a problem to me, but it may put a lot of potential users off...
I (as a user) don't need for my apps to be able to see every file that I own. Even though I as a user have r-x access to a directory, if I'm running firefox, it should probably only have --x, and rwx only under it's own application directory.
Evidently you only use Firefox to browse the web. Unfortunately, your usage pattern is not the only usage pattern there is.
A lot of people like to view HTML files stored on their computer, and to save websites to their computer. That implies that Firefox needs read/write access to home directories as a bare minimum - and once it has that, it has access to a lot of sensitive information right off the bat.
As far as any normal user is concerned, there is no GM update, since going to the Extensions manager and clicking update for GM yields "Firefox was not able to find any available updates" (this is the case for me at least).
I just tried this: it immediately found, downloaded, and installed the Greasemonkey update that fixes this issue. Presumably you were just too quick off the mark.
As much as I like using it, I'm uninstalling. And this gives me the willies about all those semi-random but cool extensions that have made the Firefox experience so great for me. This is very bad.
I'm sorry you're so susceptible to FUD, and I'm particularly sorry that you're going to throw away a valuable tool on the basis of a security flaw that has already been fixed - and one that has never been exploited maliciously, and, since Greasemonkey users are relatively few and almost all techies who will have upgraded by now, almost certainly never will be exploited.
As for me, I've assessed the risks rationally, and I'm happy to say I'll be continuing to use Greasemonkey.
Creative commons allows you to stipulate how you wish your licensed works to be used...
While your statement is correct, sadly that sort of phrasing leaves a loophole for trolls like Dvorak to twist your words.
A better way of saying it would be that "Creative Commons helps you", not "allows" - that makes it clear that CC is not doing anything funky, it's just providing a simple and straightforward framework that empowers ordinary people to share their creative works on their own terms.
The HTML source is a lot more interesting, as it is there, easy to read, and viewable if you look for it. I would point out that the copyright notice on a book is just inside the front cover, and not slathered over every page, so it is quite legitimate in my opinion, as it's where it can reasonably be expected to be. Much like a book, people aren't going to see the © without knowing where to look or doing a very thorough search.
I have checked this for you, and you are absolutely wrong. The usual place for photo attributions in a book is in the list of illustrations; I've only found one book that has no such list, and in that book the attributions were actually printed over a corner of each photo.
Now look in a magazine, which is where you're actually likely to find photos from external sources, and a much better analogy to most web pages. In magazines, you will find that the attribution is usually given very explicitly next to every single photo. It may be in extremely small text, and often it's written sideways down one edge of the picture, to make it less obtrusive - but it's always right there, "slathered over every page", not hidden away in source code.
is there a way to set ulimit without writing code? here's man ulimit from debian etch:
[snip]
For the shell command ulimit, see bash(1).
Hmm, do you see anything there that might be pertinent?
(Hint, in case you're new to *nix: type "man bash", and then "/ulimit".)
Really? Let's try it!Hmm, it compiled. And note the conspicuous absence of any errors or warnings whatsoever, which indicate that the code in question is 100% strict valid C in accordance with the current C standard (ISO C99).
Ultimately hardware options are not a solution pirates can use, since watermarking could easily identify which person freed some content from DRM.
Watermarking in what? It sounds like you're thinking of "trusted computing". But all that would tell you would be that, ah, yes, it was reported stolen yesterday by a 95-year-old Chinese grandmother.
And even if you can identify the actual individual who copied the media and uploaded the first copy onto the internet, what good's it going to do you when you find out they live somewhere you don't have an extradition treaty with, or even somewhere which doesn't recognise international copyright law?
Sooner or later these people are going to have to accept that it's going to be very hard to stuff this cat back in the bag without getting some pretty vicious scratches.
Tell you what, guys, how about we do a deal? You come up with a business model that lets me buy what I want, when I want, and I'll buy stuff. You force me to buy what I can find, when I have time to drive out to the mall, and I won't. It's really and truly that simple. I've bought... let's see... about seven computer games this year. And fully five of those were download purchases. Low prices, no waiting for delivery, no expensive international shipping charges, and more of my money going straight to the people who actually created the content. I win. They win. What's so hard about this?
> do you ever use a "'" with a plural?
No.
That may be true for you personally, but it is acceptable in certain limited contexts: for example, "I got straight A's in my exams" is correctly punctuated. (Many people think it's ugly, but it's definitely not wrong, and some style guides mandate it.)
It is, of course, not really "correct" to shorten words in this manner, so it probably will not pass muster in a formal paper of any sort.
I made it through a top university with high grades while using common contractions regularly. That was studying English, of course; it's possible that other disciplines have stricter constraints.
Romans in space just didn't seem very appealing at all.
It worked for Star Trek...