SE-Linux is linux with a capabilities system added. That is very different from Palladium, which was the addition of tamperproof components to control and provide remote-attestation of the programs running on the computer.
Capabilities are great, and I hope we see them in normal operating systems (not just the likes of EROS) some time. User hostile hardware chips meant to prove to record companies that the DRM software on the machine is not circumvented I hope we never see.
Please stop making the mistake of thinking that NGSCB was ever a security project. It is simply the newer name for "Palladium", Microsoft's total lockdown and DRM system to create a "trusted" (by the music industry, not by you) computer.
Microsoft dropping this is good in every way, except that it's ghost will return in other forms for sure...
Can we please get this modded past all the responses that seem to think that NGSCB has something to do with security. NGSCB aka Palladium is/was Microsoft's locked down "trusted" computer project, meant to facilitate DRM. It never had anything to with security save for in name and spin.
This is a good thing of course, but I seriously doubt it means that that Microsoft won't find other ways of sneaking locked down computer on us in the future...
The current playlist in my computer contains 6764 songs in 502 albums. I shuffle only by album, and I dare say that I like all of them. And if one comes up that I don't particularly feel like listening to, my playlist manager can skip to the next album.
I have a first generation 5 gig iPod, and I feel limited by the harddisk space in that. It's not that I can't fill it with enough music to that I won't get tired of listening to the same thing even on a fairly long trip, but it is annoying that I have to hook it to the computer once a week or so and figure out a new selection of albums. If I had a fourty gig model, then I could just mirror my entire collection (which contains, more or less, all the music I have ever heard that I liked).
Of course, I'm not going to generalize and say that there aren't people who want just space for a couple of hundred songs. But I think that a lot of these people are fooling themselves: coming from CDs it is easy to think "Why would I need more than 50 albums worth?" but as one adapts to the different kind of musical experience, one begins to crave more variation.
Anyone who gives a ton of interviews and appears all over the press talking about the revolutionary promise of some technology that never quite delivers ought to be ashamed of themselves!
I do not have a windows installation at all, and I have absolutely no want or need for one, so Win4Lin is not what I am looking for.
I should just port Waste myself, but in that case I find myself thinking I should start from scratch so as to avoid the tainted code. But in that case it wouldn't be waste, as I think the protocol can be improved on....
If whoever put the GPL block there did not have the permission of the copyright owner to license it so, then it isn't worth the electrons it is written on.
I can't take a copy of the leaked Windows code, put a GPL notice at the top of every file, and claim then claim it has been GPLed. AOL owned the source code (because Frankel was an idiot and sold his sole to them), and if they never OKed it to be released, then it is not under the GPL.
Does anybody know if this can interoperate with Waste networks? I tried to get it into our waste network, and after changing the key header I got the keys to import into the waste clients, but connections still failed.
Anybody had more luck? Waste runs under wine, but there are a lot of annoying issues, and the port seems dead in the water.
The Sun's energy was used to evaporate the water, which carried it up into the atmosphere, and then it rained down over high altitude. Water at altitude has potential energy, equal to g times the height times the mass - this is the energy that is used for hydroelectric power.
The dam uses the potential energy difference between the water at the top of the dam, and the water at a bottom of the dam. Nothing more. When water is released at the top, this potential energy turns into kinetic energy, which is used to run generators.
Where there is NOT a dam, this potential energy is used to accelerate the water (which is why rapids move fast, while dammed rivers don't!)
So as long as the guy's private energy generation doesn't sink the water level behind the large dam (pretty unlikely) he isn't taking any of the energy that the hydroelectric plant uses. He is simply slowing the flow of water in his section of the river marginally.
Finally "Where does gravity get its power?" Power is energy per second, and since gravity doesn't have any energy as such, nor does it have power. Gravity is simply a force, and by counteracting this force we can store potential energy, but that is exactly the same energy that comes back. Remember that current theory is that all matter started at the same point, so any energy that is created by objects in the universe falling towards one another is really just the return of the energy once used to pull them apart. If you are asking where the gravity get its force, well, that is a deeper question for which we would have to leave 7th grade physics.
Do we expect most car drivers to change their own oil, perform maintinence, and change their timing belts? Most people don't. I know many people who have never even opened their hood.
Do we expect users to write, or even compile, their own software? Do we expect to them to manually fix and patch security exploits? Obviously not. Most people don't even know where the programs are stored. I know people who have never even looked in their root.
In the same way ease of use is vital for unix to gain marketshare. Most of the "computer users" I know haven't the slightest idea what brand their audio or video cards are, much less where to find and install drivers.
And this is an argument against Linux how? Linux distributions are considerably better than Windows at auto-detecting and never requiring driver downloads.
Your absolutly correct when it comes to COMPUTER USERS. But we are talking about the need to make the shift to computers as appliances. We don't call people that can operate microwaves 'microwave users'.
After more than a hundred years, people who drive cars are still drivers. Computers are not microwaves.
10. How much code would you take from the source of a single program without permission?
Blocks of code comprising up to 5% of the program
Blocks of code comprising up to 10% of the program
Blocks of code comprising up to 25% of the program
Blocks of code comprising up to 50% of the program
Blocks of code comprising more than 50% of the program
Where is I wouldn't copy a single line without permission? (I would be nuts to, if everything you write is open source, you can loose the entire program that way!)
And I'm sure that you had to make sure that those pieces of hardware worked with Linux before actually buying them. The nice thing about Windows is that you can pick any random piece of hardware off the "PC" shelf at the store and know that it ships with drivers and support for Windows.
And when I go to the auto-parts store to buy something for my car, I have to check that it actually works with my model before I buy it! I know, it was better back in the good old days of the T-Ford when there was only one model, and all the accessories fit. And you could get it in any color you like - as long as it was black!
Having to check that an accessory works with your system before you buy it is the natural state of things. It holds not only for cars, but for just about anything else (lightbulbs for Christs sake!) I do not rate the fact that there is a monopoly that has perverted this state of affairs as something positive.
This is a bit of a generalization here, don't you think? Not all Windows software is either shareware or costs money. There's plenty of free software for Windows, perhaps you just aren't very aware of it. In fact, there's even Cygwin, so all that free Unix software can run on Windows!
I'm aware that there is software that has been ported from Linux which is good and useful. But why should I use a platform that feels inferior to me in every sense (and that I have to pay a lot more money for) in order to run applications ported from their native version?
Typical zealot response. It came in an email, it's for Windows, it's executable, so it must be a virus. No, I've seen these programs before. Cute little things like "elf bowling" or executable Flash greeting cards. Old people love them.
This has nothing to do with being a "zealot". Passing around executables that run with full privileges and running them from your mailbox is horrible security on ANY operating system. Talk about the equivalent of passing a needle!
You know what I do? I have one FreeBSD machine connected to my desktop with an ethernet cable. That's the best of both worlds. Windows XP is a great desktop, it's got all of the software I want and need, it's pretty damn reliable (oh no, I can't get 3 year uptimes, guess I'll just have to settle with getting months at a time), and working with it on a day to day basis is less of a hassle to me. If I want to use Unix software, guess what? I just SSH in or use the X server running on my desktop to do what I need to do. Why would I confine myself to just using a FreeBSD (or Linux) desktop? It's pointless with the kind of setup I have.
I cannot think of a single reason why I would want to use Windows. Seriously. Everything I want, Linux provides, and provides easier, cheaper, and better.
I don't know what hassles you are talking about. But I know the advantages. I relish the choice: that I have many desktops to choose from. Many browsers. Many distributions. I relish the availability of applications and the ease with which they can be installed. I relish the security and stability (hell, I do relish those year long uptimes). I relish the freedom, both from cost and from having the software I depend on developed by somebody who may not have my best interests in mind: and that there will always be a fork if they do. I relish the flexibility: that I can have Linux running on my oldest computer to my newest, as a server, as a firewall, as a desktop. I relish the fact that I know the next version of my operating system will not be tied to Palladium and shackle like DRM schemes.
Linux is fantastic on the desktop. You would need to go through my dead body to get a Windows disk anywhere near my computer.
I use a Windows desktop because after all the years of using Linux, despite knowing all these subtle little nuances, I found it more trouble than it's worth to use Linux/FreeBSD as my desktop when it's a lot less hassle to just use Windows.
You are basing this on three years worth of using Linux IN THE MID 90'S????
I first installed Linux in the mid 90's. It was hell. Half the hardware didn't work. The other had to coaxed into working. The desktops, KDE in it's ugly duckling infancy and gnome far from mature. The desktop applications were not much to cheer for - stuck with lousy closed sourced Netscape 4 and after a while there was a half-assed port of WordPerfect. When I finally got sound working, there was maybe a console mp3 player and not much more.
Things could not possibly be more different today. The last computer I bought, everything worked right out of the box: granted, I had bought the hardware knowing I was going to run Linux, but even things I had thought were write-offs (like the MB built in sound) worked immediately. The install programs are beautiful, helpful, and make installing Linux considerably easier then Windows (and with Knoppix, not even necessary!)
KDE and Gnome have both matured into completely usable desktops, and they look & feel just as state of the art as one would expect. Today we have browsers like FireFox with are best available on any platform, and OpenOffice 1.1 and beyond which is a perfectly good (and now decently fast) office suite. The Gimp now does everything I ever used Photoshop for. MPlayer and even Xine run circles around any of the media players my windows using friends have.
Today my digital carmera works with Linux. My PDA works with Linux. My iPod works with Linux.
Less hassle to run Windows? When I want a new application, I click on the Synaptic icon, find the application and press the install button. In Windows, one had to wade through crap on some shareware site, and then finally end up with a crippled and time limited program (even for the most trivial things!) that then needs more hassle to either register or the endless hassle that of trying to crack or find a serial (immoral, whatever: I'll never do it again because it is such a bitch, yet all windows users I know do it).
In Linux, I never have any trouble with viruses or worms. I can keep my software up to date with a single click in GUI app, and that really means up to date: I never have to purchase and install a newer version. I don't ever have to bother with hassle like product activation, whatever new hardware I buy. The software I run obeys me, and never has alterior motives to control me.
A lot less hassle? Ok, have your own little world, it might be cosy in there.
As for the guys mother, I think we can all be glad she won't be able to run the cute little program (read trojan horse or worm) that her friends sent her. And as for the genealogy application, I would come over, install oneof the many available and explain to her that she does not need to open her wallet for software again.
(The real problem with mother's and Linux, and the reason my moth doesn't use it, is the fact that "guy next door who knows computers" typically doesn't know it. If my mother didn't like ten thousand kilometer's from here, I could see no downside to moving her.)
This way you would lock out all external links though. The point is that infoworld are locking out links from linuxtoday.com, but reaching the same story from google.com works just fine.
Without the browser assisting them, they could not do that.
So you are claiming that dyslexia causes you to mix up homophones like "it's" and "its"?
"Referrer" is just an easy word to spell wrong. I'm not the slightest bit dyslexic, and I had to check it before posting. You would lead a fuller life if you took responsibility for your mistakes rather than trying to put things off on medical conditions. I'm not saying you are not dyslexic, you may well be, but you are also a bad speller regardless of your vision (so am I: I bet this thread is full of my misspellings. I could blame it on a medical condition, or I could blame it on not being a native speaker, but I don't - I spell badly because I'm careless, lazy, and I don't try hard enough. I am striving to improve this.)
Personally, I suffer from dyspunctuality though. It causes me to come late for everything, but I get no respect at meetings even after I say that!
Nice try, but dyslexia causes you to mix up the order of the letters, it doesn't cause you to miss double consonants. It also doesn't cause you to confuse the contraction of "it is" with possessive "it":-P. Some things are just bad spelling.
Who cares if it is standard. It will be useful to those browsers who do support it whether it is ever standardized or not.
Whether the W3C like it or not hardly matters anyways, since Microsoft would obviously NEVER implement it (they do not put their users first, and never have), standard or not.
Requiring me to do something first is fair game. Asking my own browser to do the dirty work of controling me for them is not. What my browser does, and whether it obeys any RFCs, is entirely up to me.
This is a matter of principle. My own software should never act in anybody's interest but my own.
BTW, see my other note regarding the RFC. 2616 acknowleges that "Referer" is a privacy concern, and that it ought to be possible to disable it. Going from disabling to forging is, IMHO, a smaller deviation from the RFC then the fact that current browser make it difficult or impossible to turn it off.
It should be noted that RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) backs up my concern about the "Referer" (great, like if programmers needed help spelling badly):
Because the source of a link might be private information or might
reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly
recommended that the user be able to select whether or not the
Referer field is sent. For example, a browser client could have a
toggle switch for browsing openly/anonymously, which would
respectively enable/disable the sending of Referer and From
information.
As far as I know, no browser contains a GUI dialog for toggling "referer". Not even the "privacy" pain discusses it at all. In Galeon at least, it can be turned off by using middle button and opening in a new tab, which sends no "referer" in the HTTP request. I don't remember if this goes for mozilla too.
The referrer field is, especially when it is used to act against my interest (by blocking access to something), my own browser being hostile toward me. Without the active participation of my _own_ browser, they would not be able to block me from accessing the site. This is on the level of DRM, and ought not be acceptable in the free software world.
Now, in mozilla you can turn of referrer all together, but that is not good enough, because then they can simpyl start blocking access to deep pages when there is no referrer (this will create problems for instance for emailed links, but I know some sites do it (porn...)).
So mozilla needs to go further to assist it's users, rather than be party restrictions on them. My software should serve me, and me alone. Here is what it needs:
- Always set "Referrer" to the root of the host. - Always set "Referrer" to one directory above the current page. - And, most importantly, support for an html extension where the "a" tag (or any other, now that other things can be links) has a parameter that tells the browser referrer to use. So that Mozilla could be set to respect links like this:
and then set the HTTP referrer field accordingly. That way the browser would not betraying me my providing the source of my link to the destination site, so that they can use it against me.
So in other words, you pulled the numbers straight out of your ass with a reference to what somebody told you some time, and got moderated up as informative. I love Slashdot!
MPEG2 video on a DVD/SVCD is digital with 8 bits per color channel. If Gollum looks "fake" and Frodo not when you are watching Return of the King at home, it won't be because of the color depth. It might be that the color and lighting calculations, with regard to shading techniques and blending, do not give a realistic enough result: but this has nothing to do with the color depth that human vision can percieve.
I take some issue with the mathematics of the cited reviewer as well though. He says:
Not only is this optimism controversial and expressed without adequate justification, it is also inconsistent with the equally controversial and equally unjustified pessimism expressed on the final page of the main text, where we are told that a problem with which Cantor wrestled throughout his life - whether any set is intermediate in size between the set of positive integers and the set of sets of positive integers - is 'for ever undecidable'.
The problem Cantor wrestled with was the Continuum Hypothesis, the question of whether there is a cardinality of sets between the countable sets (like the integers) and the uncountable sets like the real numbers (and the set of subsets of the integers). In fact, this _is_ undecidable as it has been shown that one can assume either that the hypothesis is true, or that it is false, and still derive no contradiction with the standard axioms of set theory. From Mathworld:
Godel showed that no contradiction would arise if the continuum hypothesis were added to conventional Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. However, using a technique called forcing, Paul Cohen (1963, 1964) proved that no contradiction would arise if the negation of the continuum hypothesis was added to set theory. Together, Godel's and Cohen's results established that the validity of the continuum hypothesis depends on the version of set theory being used, and is therefore undecidable (assuming the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms together with the Axiom of choice).
IANA logician, but I think this is solid ground for claiming that the hypothesis is "forever undeciable".
Slashdot Mirror
SE-Linux is linux with a capabilities system added. That is very different from Palladium, which was the addition of tamperproof components to control and provide remote-attestation of the programs running on the computer.
Capabilities are great, and I hope we see them in normal operating systems (not just the likes of EROS) some time. User hostile hardware chips meant to prove to record companies that the DRM software on the machine is not circumvented I hope we never see.
Please stop making the mistake of thinking that NGSCB was ever a security project. It is simply the newer name for "Palladium", Microsoft's total lockdown and DRM system to create a "trusted" (by the music industry, not by you) computer.
Microsoft dropping this is good in every way, except that it's ghost will return in other forms for sure...
Can we please get this modded past all the responses that seem to think that NGSCB has something to do with security. NGSCB aka Palladium is/was Microsoft's locked down "trusted" computer project, meant to facilitate DRM. It never had anything to with security save for in name and spin.
This is a good thing of course, but I seriously doubt it means that that Microsoft won't find other ways of sneaking locked down computer on us in the future...
In statistics there is a saying: "The plural of anecdote is not data."
Your girlfriend got better. Good for her. It proves nothing.
The current playlist in my computer contains 6764 songs in 502 albums. I shuffle only by album, and I dare say that I like all of them. And if one comes up that I don't particularly feel like listening to, my playlist manager can skip to the next album.
I have a first generation 5 gig iPod, and I feel limited by the harddisk space in that. It's not that I can't fill it with enough music to that I won't get tired of listening to the same thing even on a fairly long trip, but it is annoying that I have to hook it to the computer once a week or so and figure out a new selection of albums. If I had a fourty gig model, then I could just mirror my entire collection (which contains, more or less, all the music I have ever heard that I liked).
Of course, I'm not going to generalize and say that there aren't people who want just space for a couple of hundred songs. But I think that a lot of these people are fooling themselves: coming from CDs it is easy to think "Why would I need more than 50 albums worth?" but as one adapts to the different kind of musical experience, one begins to crave more variation.
Anyone who gives a ton of interviews and appears all over the press talking about the revolutionary promise of some technology that never quite delivers ought to be ashamed of themselves!
:-P
Right?
For 400 bucks, I want real magnesium alloy, damn it!
I do not have a windows installation at all, and I have absolutely no want or need for one, so Win4Lin is not what I am looking for.
I should just port Waste myself, but in that case I find myself thinking I should start from scratch so as to avoid the tainted code. But in that case it wouldn't be waste, as I think the protocol can be improved on....
If whoever put the GPL block there did not have the permission of the copyright owner to license it so, then it isn't worth the electrons it is written on.
I can't take a copy of the leaked Windows code, put a GPL notice at the top of every file, and claim then claim it has been GPLed. AOL owned the source code (because Frankel was an idiot and sold his sole to them), and if they never OKed it to be released, then it is not under the GPL.
Does anybody know if this can interoperate with Waste networks? I tried to get it into our waste network, and after changing the key header I got the keys to import into the waste clients, but connections still failed.
Anybody had more luck? Waste runs under wine, but there are a lot of annoying issues, and the port seems dead in the water.
Nobody is taking free energy from anywhere.
The Sun's energy was used to evaporate the water, which carried it up into the atmosphere, and then it rained down over high altitude. Water at altitude has potential energy, equal to g times the height times the mass - this is the energy that is used for hydroelectric power.
The dam uses the potential energy difference between the water at the top of the dam, and the water at a bottom of the dam. Nothing more. When water is released at the top, this potential energy turns into kinetic energy, which is used to run generators.
Where there is NOT a dam, this potential energy is used to accelerate the water (which is why rapids move fast, while dammed rivers don't!)
So as long as the guy's private energy generation doesn't sink the water level behind the large dam (pretty unlikely) he isn't taking any of the energy that the hydroelectric plant uses. He is simply slowing the flow of water in his section of the river marginally.
Finally "Where does gravity get its power?" Power is energy per second, and since gravity doesn't have any energy as such, nor does it have power. Gravity is simply a force, and by counteracting this force we can store potential energy, but that is exactly the same energy that comes back. Remember that current theory is that all matter started at the same point, so any energy that is created by objects in the universe falling towards one another is really just the return of the energy once used to pull them apart. If you are asking where the gravity get its force, well, that is a deeper question for which we would have to leave 7th grade physics.
Do we expect most car drivers to change their own oil, perform maintinence, and change their timing belts? Most people don't. I know many people who have never even opened their hood.
Do we expect users to write, or even compile, their own software? Do we expect to them to manually fix and patch security exploits? Obviously not. Most people don't even know where the programs are stored. I know people who have never even looked in their root.
In the same way ease of use is vital for unix to gain marketshare. Most of the "computer users" I know haven't the slightest idea what brand their audio or video cards are, much less where to find and install drivers.
And this is an argument against Linux how? Linux distributions are considerably better than Windows at auto-detecting and never requiring driver downloads.
Your absolutly correct when it comes to COMPUTER USERS. But we are talking about the need to make the shift to computers as appliances. We don't call people that can operate microwaves 'microwave users'.
After more than a hundred years, people who drive cars are still drivers. Computers are not microwaves.
Also:
10. How much code would you take from the source of a single program without permission?
Blocks of code comprising up to 5% of the program
Blocks of code comprising up to 10% of the program
Blocks of code comprising up to 25% of the program
Blocks of code comprising up to 50% of the program
Blocks of code comprising more than 50% of the program
Where is I wouldn't copy a single line without permission? (I would be nuts to, if everything you write is open source, you can loose the entire program that way!)
And I'm sure that you had to make sure that those pieces of hardware worked with Linux before actually buying them. The nice thing about Windows is that you can pick any random piece of hardware off the "PC" shelf at the store and know that it ships with drivers and support for Windows.
And when I go to the auto-parts store to buy something for my car, I have to check that it actually works with my model before I buy it! I know, it was better back in the good old days of the T-Ford when there was only one model, and all the accessories fit. And you could get it in any color you like - as long as it was black!
Having to check that an accessory works with your system before you buy it is the natural state of things. It holds not only for cars, but for just about anything else (lightbulbs for Christs sake!) I do not rate the fact that there is a monopoly that has perverted this state of affairs as something positive.
This is a bit of a generalization here, don't you think? Not all Windows software is either shareware or costs money. There's plenty of free software for Windows, perhaps you just aren't very aware of it. In fact, there's even Cygwin, so all that free Unix software can run on Windows!
I'm aware that there is software that has been ported from Linux which is good and useful. But why should I use a platform that feels inferior to me in every sense (and that I have to pay a lot more money for) in order to run applications ported from their native version?
Typical zealot response. It came in an email, it's for Windows, it's executable, so it must be a virus. No, I've seen these programs before. Cute little things like "elf bowling" or executable Flash greeting cards. Old people love them.
This has nothing to do with being a "zealot". Passing around executables that run with full privileges and running them from your mailbox is horrible security on ANY operating system. Talk about the equivalent of passing a needle!
You know what I do? I have one FreeBSD machine connected to my desktop with an ethernet cable. That's the best of both worlds. Windows XP is a great desktop, it's got all of the software I want and need, it's pretty damn reliable (oh no, I can't get 3 year uptimes, guess I'll just have to settle with getting months at a time), and working with it on a day to day basis is less of a hassle to me. If I want to use Unix software, guess what? I just SSH in or use the X server running on my desktop to do what I need to do. Why would I confine myself to just using a FreeBSD (or Linux) desktop? It's pointless with the kind of setup I have.
I cannot think of a single reason why I would want to use Windows. Seriously. Everything I want, Linux provides, and provides easier, cheaper, and better.
I don't know what hassles you are talking about. But I know the advantages. I relish the choice: that I have many desktops to choose from. Many browsers. Many distributions. I relish the availability of applications and the ease with which they can be installed. I relish the security and stability (hell, I do relish those year long uptimes). I relish the freedom, both from cost and from having the software I depend on developed by somebody who may not have my best interests in mind: and that there will always be a fork if they do. I relish the flexibility: that I can have Linux running on my oldest computer to my newest, as a server, as a firewall, as a desktop. I relish the fact that I know the next version of my operating system will not be tied to Palladium and shackle like DRM schemes.
Linux is fantastic on the desktop. You would need to go through my dead body to get a Windows disk anywhere near my computer.
I use a Windows desktop because after all the years of using Linux, despite knowing all these subtle little nuances, I found it more trouble than it's worth to use Linux/FreeBSD as my desktop when it's a lot less hassle to just use Windows.
You are basing this on three years worth of using Linux IN THE MID 90'S????
I first installed Linux in the mid 90's. It was hell. Half the hardware didn't work. The other had to coaxed into working. The desktops, KDE in it's ugly duckling infancy and gnome far from mature. The desktop applications were not much to cheer for - stuck with lousy closed sourced Netscape 4 and after a while there was a half-assed port of WordPerfect. When I finally got sound working, there was maybe a console mp3 player and not much more.
Things could not possibly be more different today. The last computer I bought, everything worked right out of the box: granted, I had bought the hardware knowing I was going to run Linux, but even things I had thought were write-offs (like the MB built in sound) worked immediately. The install programs are beautiful, helpful, and make installing Linux considerably easier then Windows (and with Knoppix, not even necessary!)
KDE and Gnome have both matured into completely usable desktops, and they look & feel just as state of the art as one would expect. Today we have browsers like FireFox with are best available on any platform, and OpenOffice 1.1 and beyond which is a perfectly good (and now decently fast) office suite. The Gimp now does everything I ever used Photoshop for. MPlayer and even Xine run circles around any of the media players my windows using friends have.
Today my digital carmera works with Linux. My PDA works with Linux. My iPod works with Linux.
Less hassle to run Windows? When I want a new application, I click on the Synaptic icon, find the application and press the install button. In Windows, one had to wade through crap on some shareware site, and then finally end up with a crippled and time limited program (even for the most trivial things!) that then needs more hassle to either register or the endless hassle that of trying to crack or find a serial (immoral, whatever: I'll never do it again because it is such a bitch, yet all windows users I know do it).
In Linux, I never have any trouble with viruses or worms. I can keep my software up to date with a single click in GUI app, and that really means up to date: I never have to purchase and install a newer version. I don't ever have to bother with hassle like product activation, whatever new hardware I buy. The software I run obeys me, and never has alterior motives to control me.
A lot less hassle? Ok, have your own little world, it might be cosy in there.
As for the guys mother, I think we can all be glad she won't be able to run the cute little program (read trojan horse or worm) that her friends sent her. And as for the genealogy application, I would come over, install one of the many available and explain to her that she does not need to open her wallet for software again.
(The real problem with mother's and Linux, and the reason my moth doesn't use it, is the fact that "guy next door who knows computers" typically doesn't know it. If my mother didn't like ten thousand kilometer's from here, I could see no downside to moving her.)
This way you would lock out all external links though. The point is that infoworld are locking out links from linuxtoday.com, but reaching the same story from google.com works just fine.
Without the browser assisting them, they could not do that.
So you are claiming that dyslexia causes you to mix up homophones like "it's" and "its"?
"Referrer" is just an easy word to spell wrong. I'm not the slightest bit dyslexic, and I had to check it before posting. You would lead a fuller life if you took responsibility for your mistakes rather than trying to put things off on medical conditions. I'm not saying you are not dyslexic, you may well be, but you are also a bad speller regardless of your vision (so am I: I bet this thread is full of my misspellings. I could blame it on a medical condition, or I could blame it on not being a native speaker, but I don't - I spell badly because I'm careless, lazy, and I don't try hard enough. I am striving to improve this.)
Personally, I suffer from dyspunctuality though. It causes me to come late for everything, but I get no respect at meetings even after I say that!
Hey, its not my fault I have dyslexia.
:-P. Some things are just bad spelling.
Nice try, but dyslexia causes you to mix up the order of the letters, it doesn't cause you to miss double consonants. It also doesn't cause you to confuse the contraction of "it is" with possessive "it"
Who cares if it is standard. It will be useful to those browsers who do support it whether it is ever standardized or not.
Whether the W3C like it or not hardly matters anyways, since Microsoft would obviously NEVER implement it (they do not put their users first, and never have), standard or not.
Requiring me to do something first is fair game. Asking my own browser to do the dirty work of controling me for them is not. What my browser does, and whether it obeys any RFCs, is entirely up to me.
This is a matter of principle. My own software should never act in anybody's interest but my own.
BTW, see my other note regarding the RFC. 2616 acknowleges that "Referer" is a privacy concern, and that it ought to be possible to disable it. Going from disabling to forging is, IMHO, a smaller deviation from the RFC then the fact that current browser make it difficult or impossible to turn it off.
It should be noted that RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) backs up my concern about the "Referer" (great, like if programmers needed help spelling badly):
Because the source of a link might be private information or might
reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly
recommended that the user be able to select whether or not the
Referer field is sent. For example, a browser client could have a
toggle switch for browsing openly/anonymously, which would
respectively enable/disable the sending of Referer and From
information.
As far as I know, no browser contains a GUI dialog for toggling "referer". Not even the "privacy" pain discusses it at all. In Galeon at least, it can be turned off by using middle button and opening in a new tab, which sends no "referer" in the HTTP request. I don't remember if this goes for mozilla too.
The referrer field is, especially when it is used to act against my interest (by blocking access to something), my own browser being hostile toward me. Without the active participation of my _own_ browser, they would not be able to block me from accessing the site. This is on the level of DRM, and ought not be acceptable in the free software world.
Now, in mozilla you can turn of referrer all together, but that is not good enough, because then they can simpyl start blocking access to deep pages when there is no referrer (this will create problems for instance for emailed links, but I know some sites do it (porn...)).
So mozilla needs to go further to assist it's users, rather than be party restrictions on them. My software should serve me, and me alone. Here is what it needs:
- Always set "Referrer" to the root of the host.
- Always set "Referrer" to one directory above the current page.
- And, most importantly, support for an html extension where the "a" tag (or any other, now that other things can be links) has a parameter that tells the browser referrer to use. So that Mozilla could be set to respect links like this:
<a href="http://slashdot.org" referrer="http://www.google.com">
and then set the HTTP referrer field accordingly. That way the browser would not betraying me my providing the source of my link to the destination site, so that they can use it against me.
So in other words, you pulled the numbers straight out of your ass with a reference to what somebody told you some time, and got moderated up as informative. I love Slashdot!
MPEG2 video on a DVD/SVCD is digital with 8 bits per color channel. If Gollum looks "fake" and Frodo not when you are watching Return of the King at home, it won't be because of the color depth. It might be that the color and lighting calculations, with regard to shading techniques and blending, do not give a realistic enough result: but this has nothing to do with the color depth that human vision can percieve.
I take some issue with the mathematics of the cited reviewer as well though. He says:
Not only is this optimism controversial and expressed without adequate justification, it is also inconsistent with the equally controversial and equally unjustified pessimism expressed on the final page of the main text, where we are told that a problem with which Cantor wrestled throughout his life - whether any set is intermediate in size between the set of positive integers and the set of sets of positive integers - is 'for ever undecidable'.
The problem Cantor wrestled with was the Continuum Hypothesis, the question of whether there is a cardinality of sets between the countable sets (like the integers) and the uncountable sets like the real numbers (and the set of subsets of the integers). In fact, this _is_ undecidable as it has been shown that one can assume either that the hypothesis is true, or that it is false, and still derive no contradiction with the standard axioms of set theory. From Mathworld:
Godel showed that no contradiction would arise if the continuum hypothesis were added to conventional Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. However, using a technique called forcing, Paul Cohen (1963, 1964) proved that no contradiction would arise if the negation of the continuum hypothesis was added to set theory. Together, Godel's and Cohen's results established that the validity of the continuum hypothesis depends on the version of set theory being used, and is therefore undecidable (assuming the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms together with the Axiom of choice).
IANA logician, but I think this is solid ground for claiming that the hypothesis is "forever undeciable".