The day I will see Mr. RIAA give us the _SOURCE_ of a track for free to download, I will raise my glass of wine to them, even if I'm north of the border.
Huh? What exactly do you mean by _SOURCE_? Original audio tracks? Well, this isn't exactly that, because the original format would be less usable by most people; this was taken from the original tracks and converted into a format that would be easier to work with (and smaller to download).
Or do you mean sheet music? That's even less helpful to most people, especially since I'd expect a lot of what they play was never written down to begin with - certainly not the drum track, for example (even if the drummer reads off a lead sheet, that would only give him cues about where to put fills, where to change meter or tempo, that sort of thing).
What would you say the _SOURCE_ of Michelangelo's David was? Music, like sculpture, is art.
Speaking as a lifelong Mac user... I hate the.sit archive format. StuffIt Expander has had it's day, and it ended when OS X came out. The.dmg and.zip formats are built into the OS (both creation and extraction), and they are faster and more reliable (and.zip is cross platform to boot, although the default OS X zip engine doesn't support things like password protection unfortunately.)
Agreed! We should see more.dmg.bz2 downloads, and fewer.sit.hqx downloads. I actually saw a.dmg.hqx the other day; I was appalled.
On a site I'm developing for a client, I have a box at the left with username/password fields and a "Log In" button. Above the actual form fields, they're labeled "Username:" and "Password:". Nothing tricky here. Works fine in Firefox and Safari. Works mostly fine in MSIE/Mac*.
But then there's IE/Win.
The "Username:" and "Password:" labels don't show up. Actually, if I change the colors so I can see what's going on, they're actually getting drawn, then they immediately disappear, as if they're being drawn behind the background graphic. But get this: if you double-click the blank space where the text is supposed to be, the text appears! Click away (to de-select), and the text remains, looking just like it's supposed to. Select All, and the labels disappear again. Alt-tab to another application (not maximized), and the labels appear; alt-tab back to IE and they disappear.
I did some research, and finally found it: this is known as the "peekaboo" bug, and the solution was to add a "line-height" definition to the CSS for the left sidebar div. Not the login box div, but the parent of that. It doesn't matter what you set the line-height to (so you can pick something that looks reasonable), but it just has to be defined.
This took me a couple of hours to track down (since I didn't know what I was tracking down at first, and I had to experiment).
By the way, apparently when I did the initial page layout, I ran into another bug; I don't remember why, but there's a comment in my HTML indicating that the peculiar spacing of a couple of tags is a workaround for an MSIE bug. I don't mean spacing as in where things appear on the web page, I mean spacing as in not putting indents and line breaks where you normally would in the HTML. I don't remember what happens if you don't do it in just that way.
My only fear about IE7 is that it will introduce new bugs while breaking the workarounds for the old bugs.
[ * In IE/Mac, the submit button is getting the width of a parent div applied to it, so the submit button is the same width as the login box. I might look into fixing this, but I really don't expect many IE/Mac users, and it's a purely cosmetic issue, so for the moment I don't care. Note that IE/Mac and IE/Win have virtually nothing in common; they have totally different bugs (and IE/Win has far more of them). ]
Actually, it cost Microsoft ADDITIONAL development and testing, above and beyond what they spent to develop the normal version of XP, to cripple what they already had. And it'll continue to cost them money, since every time they release a security patch or service pack, they'll have to make sure it works on the crippled version as well.
Owning Network Solutions somehow precludes them from being a registrar? I don't get it. VeriSign owns NetSol. NetSol = Registar VeriSign = Registrar
Sorry, but the parent post is correct. Verisign is a Registry, not a Registrar. Network Solutions is a Registrar, which Verisign used to own, but no longer does.
Network Solutions was both a Registry and Registrar before Verisign bought them. They tried dropping the Network Solutions name, but then changed their minds, split the Registry and Registrar into two separate parts of the company, started using the Network Solutions name for the Registrar part, then sold Network Solutions to some management group.
Finding Nemo isn't a Disney movie, it's a Pixar movie, that Disney distributed. My understanding is that Disney's distribution contract expires after Cars, and Pixar is refusing to renew. Hopefully, people will stop confusing Pixar with Disney after that.
Is anyone aware of Disney making any changes to Pixar films? Does Disney have any creative control whatsoever? (I know Disney has sequel rights, so e.g. Toy Story 3 is Disney, not Pixar...)
Hold on. The GPL is not a EULA. You are free to use GPL'd software that you have legally obtained, without accepting the terms of the GPL, but you cannot redistribute the software because it is protected by copyright law, which prohibits redistribution. I'm pretty sure that there's nothing in the copyright law to prohibit using a copyrighted piece of software that has been legally obtained in order to provide a service directly to customers!
EULAs put restrictions on what you're allowed to do with software you have obtained, and you're not allowed to use the software unless you accept the EULA, but the GPL is not a EULA, so unless they want to turn it into one, I don't see how they can put restrictions on how you can use the software.
CAPULET: But saying o'er what I have said before: My child is yet a stranger in the world; She hath not seen the change of fourteen years, Let two more summers wither in their pride, Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
...
LADY CAPULET: This is the matter: --Nurse, give leave awhile, We must talk in secret: --nurse, come back again; I have remember'd me, thou's hear our counsel. Thou know'st my daughter's of a pretty age.
NURSE: Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.
LADY CAPULET: She's not fourteen.
NURSE: I'll lay fourteen of my teeth,-- And yet, to my teeth be it spoken, I have but four-- She is not fourteen. How long is it now To Lammas-tide?
Be gentle with those whose native language requires all pronouns to be either male or female, and who have difficulty mastering a language where pronouns can also be gender-neutral.
Occasionally there are problems like that are the ISP's fault and affect large numbers of customers. The tech may KNOW that the problem you're describing is something that could ONLY affect a large number of customers; if you're the only one having the problem, it MUST be something on your end. And as far as the tech knows, you're the only one having a problem - therefore, it's probably on your end.
Of course, when you hang up, they overhear another tech talking to another customer about a similar problem, and they wonder if there might be a connection. Sure enough, they check the phone queue, and there are more people calling in that usual. So they tell their supervisor, who calls the NOC, who reports that as far as they know, there is no problem.
So, techs are told that, according to the NOC, there is no problem, but if more of these calls come in, they should take notes. 15 minutes later, the supervisor compiles a list of complaints, including information about each customer such as which POP they're connecting to, notices a pattern, and calls the NOC with this information. They check, and this time they notice that something is, in fact, broken - but it doesn't affect everybody, only a quarter of the users on that one POP, which is why they didn't notice it when they checked the first time (the other 3/4 of the users on that POP are working fine, and users on other POPs are also working fine). So, they confirm the problem, and the tech support supervisor communicates this new information to the techs, who can NOW begin telling customers that there is a confirmed outage.
This is about half an hour after you called.
I assure you, from the tech's perspective, it sucks.
Of course, when I did tech support, I tried to work around the chain of command, and become friends with people in the NOC, so I could bypass my supervisor and ask somebody in the NOC via AIM if there might be a problem, and possibly gain access to systems I wasn't officially authorized to have access to so that I could look for these sorts of problems myself. As long as company management never found out what was going on and my boss didn't ask too many questions, everything worked out great - but you can't EXPECT that kind of thing!
They've asked you to "cease and decist immediately" from using their brand? You could point out that you aren't using it - they are. You simply provided an address that THEY could use in order to contact you, but YOU aren't using the address - you aren't sending anything from that address, aren't sending anything to that address, and aren't advertising that address publicly (you only provided it to the DMV upon request). If THEY don't want to use it, they aren't in any way obligated to do so.
IANAL, and you might want to talk to one.
You may want to seek clarification: are they contacting you about a trademark dispute, or something else? If something else, what exactly is their complaint?
My understanding is that government agencies CAN hold trademarks, and the laws vary by state as to whether local agencies can hold copyrights. Anything created by the federal government is public domain, but copyright can be assigned to the federal government by a third party, even if the third party was contracted by the government for that purpose. Somebody please correct me on this.
Consider offering stupiddrivingagency@[yourdomain] or ambulancechasingweenies@[yourdomain] as an alternative. Pick something offensive but not obscene, and not unreasonably long since they may have a character limit.
I recall a time in the 90s when April Fools news did a great job of walking the thin line of perfectly plausible. Great effort was put into crafting stories that took days and even years to refute. Sheng Long from early 90s April EGM comes to mind. Of course, I understand that the wealth of information available on the 'net these days has changed things signifigantly. However, most of these articles really didn't even try. Lets have less Photoshop and more though next year.
Sure, Slashdot is stupid and there are a lot of lame jokes out there, but this is one of the better ones. The download is on a page with other legitimate software, and links to a legitimate-looking review on MacWorld magazine's site. It's a real downloadable app, which actually runs, sits for 10 minutes apparently doing nothing, then wipes your screen clean with a dust cloth. Of course it's a prank, but it's a very good one.
(During the 10 minutes, it gradually darkens your screen, slow enough that most people won't notice.)
TriMet in Portland will already tell you how many minutes until the next bus arrives at a given stop. I don't have a WAP phone, but if you know the stop number, you can call a phone number and enter the stop number, and it'll give you the info over the phone. It's available on the web, and they have readerboards at several of the train stations (both MAX and Portland Streetcar). The TV displays at the bus stops downtown still only display the scheduled time, rather than an actual countdown, but they're not usually that far off.
Every movie has a web site, but there's no way you could possibly guess the URL to most of them. If there were a restricted.movie TLD, studios could register the title of the movie under that TLD. Sure, there'd be a few conflicts, but it wouldn't be that bad.
Every radio and television station is assigned call letters by the FCC (well, the station chooses, but the FCC actually assigns it). Stations usually also choose a name that they use for marketing, usually related to their call letters somehow. There would be quite a bit of overlap if radio stations could register their chosen marketing name under the.radio TLD, but registering their call letters seems like a pretty good idea to me (many already have with.com anyway, but there's really not much consistency here).
I'm not sure if.stock is the best choice here, but it'd be nice to be able to enter a company's ticker symbol and get their web site. For example, mot.com and hpq.com are owned by those companies, but again this isn't standardized. I'd expect this TLD to be used mostly for redirects to a more attractive domain name (notice how www.mot.com redirects to www.motorola.com).
Again, these TLDs would be useless if they weren't carefully restricted, but if usage became common enough that you could expect the domains to be registered, it would probably be pretty useful.
I'd buy one if it had two ethernet ports. Think of what a leat--yet small--router you could have. My current webserver/router/firewall/dhcp/dns/etc server is a 466mhz celeron I found in a dumpster and replaced the hard drive on. heh. At least it has two NIC cards though.
Consider a USB NIC. I wouldn't want to rely on one for anything mission-critical, but for home use it should be fine.
Of course you can also run multiple IPs on the same NIC, plug your DSL/cable modem into the LAN switch, and trust the switch not to broadcast all your LAN traffic to your ISP (don't try this with a hub).
In particular: does this decision make it illegal to a) use a proxy domain registration services (e.g. DomainsByProxy.com or similar) to register a domain name on your behalf, with their contact info, keeping your contact info confidential; b) pay the actual domain registrar (e.g. GoDaddy, the ones who are so freaked out about this) to do the same? In both cases, actual valid contact information is listed in WHOIS - but it's contact info for the registrar or proxy service, rather than the person actually using the domain. I see no reason why this should not be permitted, nor have I seen evidence that the NTIA has actually decided it will not be permitted.
I suspect they may be talking about something else: an option from the.us registry to not list any contact information in WHOIS. This is just a guess, as I've never registered a.us domain and I don't know if such a feature has been available. If so, I'm not aware of any other registry offering this feature, and while it definitely sucks that they'd offer it and then change their minds, I really don't see why they felt the need to offer it in the first place (if this guess is correct) when registrars and third parties already offer proxy registration.
Slashdot Mirror
The day I will see Mr. RIAA give us the _SOURCE_ of a track for free to download, I will raise my glass of wine to them, even if I'm north of the border.
Huh? What exactly do you mean by _SOURCE_? Original audio tracks? Well, this isn't exactly that, because the original format would be less usable by most people; this was taken from the original tracks and converted into a format that would be easier to work with (and smaller to download).
Or do you mean sheet music? That's even less helpful to most people, especially since I'd expect a lot of what they play was never written down to begin with - certainly not the drum track, for example (even if the drummer reads off a lead sheet, that would only give him cues about where to put fills, where to change meter or tempo, that sort of thing).
What would you say the _SOURCE_ of Michelangelo's David was? Music, like sculpture, is art.
Speaking as a lifelong Mac user... I hate the .sit archive format. StuffIt Expander has had it's day, and it ended when OS X came out. The .dmg and .zip formats are built into the OS (both creation and extraction), and they are faster and more reliable (and .zip is cross platform to boot, although the default OS X zip engine doesn't support things like password protection unfortunately.)
.dmg.bz2 downloads, and fewer .sit.hqx downloads. I actually saw a .dmg.hqx the other day; I was appalled.
Agreed! We should see more
I am someone well versed in programming in many languages, but professionally never learned javascript.
O'Reilly's "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" is excellent, and will open your eyes to the power of JavaScript like you probably never imagined.
On a site I'm developing for a client, I have a box at the left with username/password fields and a "Log In" button. Above the actual form fields, they're labeled "Username:" and "Password:". Nothing tricky here. Works fine in Firefox and Safari. Works mostly fine in MSIE/Mac*.
But then there's IE/Win.
The "Username:" and "Password:" labels don't show up. Actually, if I change the colors so I can see what's going on, they're actually getting drawn, then they immediately disappear, as if they're being drawn behind the background graphic. But get this: if you double-click the blank space where the text is supposed to be, the text appears! Click away (to de-select), and the text remains, looking just like it's supposed to. Select All, and the labels disappear again. Alt-tab to another application (not maximized), and the labels appear; alt-tab back to IE and they disappear.
I did some research, and finally found it: this is known as the "peekaboo" bug, and the solution was to add a "line-height" definition to the CSS for the left sidebar div. Not the login box div, but the parent of that. It doesn't matter what you set the line-height to (so you can pick something that looks reasonable), but it just has to be defined.
This took me a couple of hours to track down (since I didn't know what I was tracking down at first, and I had to experiment).
By the way, apparently when I did the initial page layout, I ran into another bug; I don't remember why, but there's a comment in my HTML indicating that the peculiar spacing of a couple of tags is a workaround for an MSIE bug. I don't mean spacing as in where things appear on the web page, I mean spacing as in not putting indents and line breaks where you normally would in the HTML. I don't remember what happens if you don't do it in just that way.
My only fear about IE7 is that it will introduce new bugs while breaking the workarounds for the old bugs.
[ * In IE/Mac, the submit button is getting the width of a parent div applied to it, so the submit button is the same width as the login box. I might look into fixing this, but I really don't expect many IE/Mac users, and it's a purely cosmetic issue, so for the moment I don't care. Note that IE/Mac and IE/Win have virtually nothing in common; they have totally different bugs (and IE/Win has far more of them). ]
On a related note, bug 151249 is apparently fixed, and middle-clicking will work in Firefox 1.1.
Actually, it cost Microsoft ADDITIONAL development and testing, above and beyond what they spent to develop the normal version of XP, to cripple what they already had. And it'll continue to cost them money, since every time they release a security patch or service pack, they'll have to make sure it works on the crippled version as well.
Owning Network Solutions somehow precludes them from being a registrar?
I don't get it.
VeriSign owns NetSol.
NetSol = Registar
VeriSign = Registrar
Sorry, but the parent post is correct. Verisign is a Registry, not a Registrar. Network Solutions is a Registrar, which Verisign used to own, but no longer does.
Network Solutions was both a Registry and Registrar before Verisign bought them. They tried dropping the Network Solutions name, but then changed their minds, split the Registry and Registrar into two separate parts of the company, started using the Network Solutions name for the Registrar part, then sold Network Solutions to some management group.
"F$#% that" is actually a Perl-snippet. No, I will not run it to see what it does.. Revenge of the Perli, indeed..
Sorry, although $#F is valid perl, F$#% is not.
(Unless you've messed with things you shouldn't mess with, $#F gives you the index of the last element of the array @F.)
Uh.
Finding Nemo isn't a Disney movie, it's a Pixar movie, that Disney distributed. My understanding is that Disney's distribution contract expires after Cars, and Pixar is refusing to renew. Hopefully, people will stop confusing Pixar with Disney after that.
Is anyone aware of Disney making any changes to Pixar films? Does Disney have any creative control whatsoever? (I know Disney has sequel rights, so e.g. Toy Story 3 is Disney, not Pixar...)
Hold on. The GPL is not a EULA. You are free to use GPL'd software that you have legally obtained, without accepting the terms of the GPL, but you cannot redistribute the software because it is protected by copyright law, which prohibits redistribution. I'm pretty sure that there's nothing in the copyright law to prohibit using a copyrighted piece of software that has been legally obtained in order to provide a service directly to customers!
EULAs put restrictions on what you're allowed to do with software you have obtained, and you're not allowed to use the software unless you accept the EULA, but the GPL is not a EULA, so unless they want to turn it into one, I don't see how they can put restrictions on how you can use the software.
CAPULET:
But saying o'er what I have said before:
My child is yet a stranger in the world;
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years,
Let two more summers wither in their pride,
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
...
LADY CAPULET:
This is the matter: --Nurse, give leave awhile,
We must talk in secret: --nurse, come back again;
I have remember'd me, thou's hear our counsel.
Thou know'st my daughter's of a pretty age.
NURSE:
Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.
LADY CAPULET:
She's not fourteen.
NURSE:
I'll lay fourteen of my teeth,--
And yet, to my teeth be it spoken, I have but four--
She is not fourteen. How long is it now
To Lammas-tide?
Be gentle with those whose native language requires all pronouns to be either male or female, and who have difficulty mastering a language where pronouns can also be gender-neutral.
Occasionally there are problems like that are the ISP's fault and affect large numbers of customers. The tech may KNOW that the problem you're describing is something that could ONLY affect a large number of customers; if you're the only one having the problem, it MUST be something on your end. And as far as the tech knows, you're the only one having a problem - therefore, it's probably on your end.
Of course, when you hang up, they overhear another tech talking to another customer about a similar problem, and they wonder if there might be a connection. Sure enough, they check the phone queue, and there are more people calling in that usual. So they tell their supervisor, who calls the NOC, who reports that as far as they know, there is no problem.
So, techs are told that, according to the NOC, there is no problem, but if more of these calls come in, they should take notes. 15 minutes later, the supervisor compiles a list of complaints, including information about each customer such as which POP they're connecting to, notices a pattern, and calls the NOC with this information. They check, and this time they notice that something is, in fact, broken - but it doesn't affect everybody, only a quarter of the users on that one POP, which is why they didn't notice it when they checked the first time (the other 3/4 of the users on that POP are working fine, and users on other POPs are also working fine). So, they confirm the problem, and the tech support supervisor communicates this new information to the techs, who can NOW begin telling customers that there is a confirmed outage.
This is about half an hour after you called.
I assure you, from the tech's perspective, it sucks.
Of course, when I did tech support, I tried to work around the chain of command, and become friends with people in the NOC, so I could bypass my supervisor and ask somebody in the NOC via AIM if there might be a problem, and possibly gain access to systems I wasn't officially authorized to have access to so that I could look for these sorts of problems myself. As long as company management never found out what was going on and my boss didn't ask too many questions, everything worked out great - but you can't EXPECT that kind of thing!
If you're doing custom engineering anyway, maybe you should look into mass-producing them to undercut the competition?
They've asked you to "cease and decist immediately" from using their brand? You could point out that you aren't using it - they are. You simply provided an address that THEY could use in order to contact you, but YOU aren't using the address - you aren't sending anything from that address, aren't sending anything to that address, and aren't advertising that address publicly (you only provided it to the DMV upon request). If THEY don't want to use it, they aren't in any way obligated to do so.
IANAL, and you might want to talk to one.
You may want to seek clarification: are they contacting you about a trademark dispute, or something else? If something else, what exactly is their complaint?
My understanding is that government agencies CAN hold trademarks, and the laws vary by state as to whether local agencies can hold copyrights. Anything created by the federal government is public domain, but copyright can be assigned to the federal government by a third party, even if the third party was contracted by the government for that purpose. Somebody please correct me on this.
Consider offering stupiddrivingagency@[yourdomain] or ambulancechasingweenies@[yourdomain] as an alternative. Pick something offensive but not obscene, and not unreasonably long since they may have a character limit.
Grab.app wasn't able to properly capture the dustcloth while it was moving, but this should give you some idea of what Screen Cleaner Pro looks like.
I recall a time in the 90s when April Fools news did a great job of walking the thin line of perfectly plausible. Great effort was put into crafting stories that took days and even years to refute. Sheng Long from early 90s April EGM comes to mind. Of course, I understand that the wealth of information available on the 'net these days has changed things signifigantly. However, most of these articles really didn't even try. Lets have less Photoshop and more though next year.
Sure, Slashdot is stupid and there are a lot of lame jokes out there, but this is one of the better ones. The download is on a page with other legitimate software, and links to a legitimate-looking review on MacWorld magazine's site. It's a real downloadable app, which actually runs, sits for 10 minutes apparently doing nothing, then wipes your screen clean with a dust cloth. Of course it's a prank, but it's a very good one.
(During the 10 minutes, it gradually darkens your screen, slow enough that most people won't notice.)
Wow, you got fooled pretty good.
IT'S STILL A JOKE. Just a damn good one.
The "dust" it's wiping off wasn't there 10 minutes ago.
Of course not - if you'll remember, they kicked him off the train for not having a validated ticket. :-P
Works fine for me in Camino on Mac OS X. No ActiveX here.
TriMet in Portland will already tell you how many minutes until the next bus arrives at a given stop. I don't have a WAP phone, but if you know the stop number, you can call a phone number and enter the stop number, and it'll give you the info over the phone. It's available on the web, and they have readerboards at several of the train stations (both MAX and Portland Streetcar). The TV displays at the bus stops downtown still only display the scheduled time, rather than an actual countdown, but they're not usually that far off.
Agreed. Oh well, it was a nice thought.
.movie .radio .stock
.movie TLD, studios could register the title of the movie under that TLD. Sure, there'd be a few conflicts, but it wouldn't be that bad.
.radio TLD, but registering their call letters seems like a pretty good idea to me (many already have with .com anyway, but there's really not much consistency here).
.stock is the best choice here, but it'd be nice to be able to enter a company's ticker symbol and get their web site. For example, mot.com and hpq.com are owned by those companies, but again this isn't standardized. I'd expect this TLD to be used mostly for redirects to a more attractive domain name (notice how www.mot.com redirects to www.motorola.com).
Every movie has a web site, but there's no way you could possibly guess the URL to most of them. If there were a restricted
Every radio and television station is assigned call letters by the FCC (well, the station chooses, but the FCC actually assigns it). Stations usually also choose a name that they use for marketing, usually related to their call letters somehow. There would be quite a bit of overlap if radio stations could register their chosen marketing name under the
I'm not sure if
Again, these TLDs would be useless if they weren't carefully restricted, but if usage became common enough that you could expect the domains to be registered, it would probably be pretty useful.
I'd buy one if it had two ethernet ports. Think of what a leat--yet small--router you could have. My current webserver/router/firewall/dhcp/dns/etc server is a 466mhz celeron I found in a dumpster and replaced the hard drive on. heh. At least it has two NIC cards though.
Consider a USB NIC. I wouldn't want to rely on one for anything mission-critical, but for home use it should be fine.
Of course you can also run multiple IPs on the same NIC, plug your DSL/cable modem into the LAN switch, and trust the switch not to broadcast all your LAN traffic to your ISP (don't try this with a hub).
In particular: does this decision make it illegal to a) use a proxy domain registration services (e.g. DomainsByProxy.com or similar) to register a domain name on your behalf, with their contact info, keeping your contact info confidential; b) pay the actual domain registrar (e.g. GoDaddy, the ones who are so freaked out about this) to do the same? In both cases, actual valid contact information is listed in WHOIS - but it's contact info for the registrar or proxy service, rather than the person actually using the domain. I see no reason why this should not be permitted, nor have I seen evidence that the NTIA has actually decided it will not be permitted.
.us registry to not list any contact information in WHOIS. This is just a guess, as I've never registered a .us domain and I don't know if such a feature has been available. If so, I'm not aware of any other registry offering this feature, and while it definitely sucks that they'd offer it and then change their minds, I really don't see why they felt the need to offer it in the first place (if this guess is correct) when registrars and third parties already offer proxy registration.
I suspect they may be talking about something else: an option from the