Yes. Before a couple years ago, QuickTime Player was so crippled that it couldn't play movies in full-screen mode, but they've finally fixed that. Perhaps because when iTunes added video support, it was able to play QuickTime movies in full-screen mode just fine, and Apple realized that making their music player more functional than their video player when playing videos was kind of stupid.
It takes a lot of hard work (well, if you considering shmoozing hard work like me) to raise money. Lots of traveling and staying in hotels... Uh, you missed the part about... well, the entire thing we were discussing: public funding. If every campaign is paid for by the government, then you don't have to go around trying to raise private funding.
Here is the perfect opportunity for open source. It's the *only* legal possibility. Perhaps you meant to say it's the only moral or ethical or logical or reasonable or sensible possibility, but legal possibilities are defined by Congress. Don't forget that.
My understanding is that it's more energy-efficient to make an LED appear "dim" by blinking it on and off rapidly at full brightness than to simply add a resistor, so it's a very common thing to do.
Just to clarify, in case anyone failed to grasp the irony of the parent post:
We need a protocol that prevents this by makes it clear if an access point is intended for public use. Say, publicly open access points broadcast a signal saying they are their and ready for connects, This is called an SSID broadcast. Most consumer wireless routers are configured to do this by default, using the vendor name as the SSID.
then the client must request permission to connect to the access point The client checks to see if the connection is encrypted (WEP or WPA).
and then once connected must also ask for permission and details on how connect to the internet. The client sends a DHCP request, and the router replies with an IP address, subnet mask, default gateway address, a DNS server or two, and probably a couple other useful settings.
Only then should someone be able to know for sure they aren't stealing bandwidth from someone who didn't want to share. It shouldn't be too hard to implement such a protocol, since it's already supported by most WiFi boxes. Precisely.
Can you imagine driving to work one day and finding roads blocked because of a contract dispute? Can you imagine trying to ride the subway to work one day and finding they weren't running because of a contractdispute?
We are told that we live in an "advanced", "civilized" society, where people have abandoned brutal, cruel, petty and bigoted ways of life. That's a crock. The only thing that has happened is that it has become taboo to support such things in public life. This is one of the things I've always disliked about Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry believed that in the future, such things would be behind us - or at least, that by painting such an optimistic picture, he could encourage people to look forward to such a utopia. But, as you say, it's a crock. Human nature has never changed and never will. Society has changed - we don't have slavery anymore, and racism seems to be on the way out - but we're still human, and I think it's far more useful to understand that than to believe that the lessons of history don't apply to us because humanity has evolved since then, or that the same things won't happen in the future because humanity will have evolved by then.
You don't know a whole lot about how email actually works, do you? Yes, it's a pain in the ass. You sound like you're having more problems with it than a couple state universities I know of though. Read up on the RFC's and learn how to get rid of most of your spam rather than go 'Chicken Little' will ya? I don't know whether you understand how e-mail works, but you certainly don't appear to understand spam at all. Sure, of course familiarizing yourself with the SMTP RFCs is a good first step, but since most spam is RFC compliant, where does that get you? If you're not 1) spending a lot of time working on blocking spam, 2) spending a lot of money on blocking spam, or 3) letting someone else spend a lot of time or money to block spam for you, then your e-mail address just hasn't gotten distributed to very many mailing lists yet. Publish it on a few web pages; it won't take long for the deluge to begin.
Either that, or you don't actually use e-mail for anything important, so the spam doesn't really get in your way. But if that's the case, please try to understand that many of us do need to use e-mail for business purposes.
I run a very small mail server at home with a handful of users. My first line of defense against spam is DNSRBLs - blacklists of IP addresses that are known to be spam sources, or happen to be in certain countries such as China or Korea that I would otherwise get a ton of spam from but currently have no need to receive legitimate mail from. I reject all SMTP connections from blacklisted IPs, before even bothering to look at the message they're trying to send. Would it surprise you to learn that I'm currently blocking an average of 78 connections per hour, or 685,000 connections per year, just based on blacklisted IPs? That's one attempted connection every 46 seconds, every hour of every day, all the time. And that doesn't count all the spam blocked by the myriad of rules I've got set up to handle incoming messages once they've been accepted, nor does it count the spam that unfortunately finds its way to my inbox anyway - remember, DNSRBLs are just the first line of defense. But this is a very small server, as mail servers go. Imagine what the numbers would look like if I ran a large ISP.
Personally, I see any implementation of this as a massive intrusion on my privacy- if YouTube implemented this, I'd stop going there. If YouTube reported their data back to the advertisers, I'd consider that a massive intrusion on my privacy, but Google doesn't know any more about me than what I give them. Google doesn't know anything about me that I've chosen to keep private from them, so the only way they could possibly intrude on my privacy is if they share my private info with third parties, and I've seen no indication that they're doing this.
Come to think of it, I'd also consider it an intrusion on my privacy if Google acquired personal data about me from a third party, and correlated their own data about me with that. They don't appear to be doing that either.
And on top of all that, what Apple is doing happens to be a bad (i.e. not useful) idea (from society's point of view, not Apple's). Having music that isn't interoperable with other players, is a regression in useful sciences and arts. Everybody who buys music from iTMS is worse off than they would be if the store didn't exist. Why should society grant a monopoly to incentivize the development of business models that have a negative value? (Well, ok, I can think of a reason: to limit its deployment.;-) FYI: it took years of negotiations with the record companies, but some music tracks from EMI and some non-RIAA labels are now available on the iTunes Store without DRM. This "iTunes Plus" music is interoperable with other players, and Apple deserves credit for convincing EMI to allow them to do this. The main reason other labels haven't followed suit is that they're afraid of Apple having too much monopoly power.
And how do you plan to foster scientific innovation if you remove the patent system?? Simple: by allowing innovative companies to compete in the marketplace on the merit of their products and services.
Removing the patent system might have reduced the incentive for ZapMedia Services to... well, I don't know. It doesn't sound like having this patent encouraged them to bring anything to market. Apple, on the other hand, didn't have this patent, and it doesn't seem to have slowed down their innovation much.
Children simply don't have the psychological makeup to understand and process 'modern' idiot parenting techniques such as time-outs. Hence they grow up to be horrors as they age. There is an age at which time-outs are effective. It's a pretty brief window, but until it stops working, it's not a bad deterrent.
That's not a particularly good way to determine whether or not someone is a terrorist, because it would be trivially easy for a terrorist group to arrange for someone to spend some time building up a pattern of behaviour before carrying out whetever they have in mind. Very true, but what we're doing how isn't a particularly good way either. If terrorists can spend time to build up a pattern like that, they can just as easily book roundtrip tickets a month in advance using a credit card.
Mind you, I think most of it is bull anyhow. I haven't forgotten how many senior politicians in the UK went on the news after 9/11 to say "The most important thing we can do is change nothing, because changing everything about our culture through fear is what the terrorists want". Yeah, over here on this side of the pond, all they said was that it's important for us to keep going shopping.
That's not a particularly good way to determine whether or not someone is a terrorist, because it would be trivially easy for a terrorist group to arrange for someone to spend some time building up a pattern of behaviour before carrying out whetever they have in mind.
Very true, but what we're doing how isn't a particularly good way either. If terrorists can spend time to build up a pattern like that, they can just as easily book roundtrip tickets a month in advance using a credit card.
Mind you, I think most of it is bull anyhow. I haven't forgotten how many senior politicians in the UK went on the news after 9/11 to say "The most important thing we can do is change nothing, because changing everything about our culture through fear is what the terrorists want". Yeah, over here on this side of the pond, all they said was that it's important for us to keep going shopping.
You would think that TSA would figure out some way of tracking how many times you've flown before, and whether this behavior is unusual for you, so that they wouldn't need to search you every single time...
on a more serious note, has there ever been a record of someone attempting to sneak a bomb onto a plane via a laptop? no? then pay attention to real dangers pls just for once. Right, because terrorists only try things that have been done before...
I agree that this was pretty silly, but there is a reason TSA x-rays all laptops.
Anyhow, my question is if you miss a flight because of these TSA guys, does your airline put you on the next available flight at no extra cost? Generally yes, but if it was an evening flight, the next available option may be the next morning, and they probably won't put you up in a hotel for the night. And you won't see your checked baggage again until after you've arrived at your destination. Even during the day, if things are busy, you get last choice of the available options, so the next flight could be several hours later, and you may end up with a multi-hour layover somewhere that wasn't part of your original travel plans.
On the other hand, your airline did tell you to show up two hours before your departure time, and if you'd done that, you wouldn't have missed your flight in the first place.:-P
How can Postini/Google possibly know what strategies spammers intend to pursue? It seems unlikely that the spammers would volunteer this sort of information ahead of time.
With the touch, they've already accounted for your purchase, so there's some arcane rule that says they can't give you additional functionality without charging you for it. I'm betting the "nominal" fee really will be nominal--like $2 or something. This is correct, but it's not an "arcane rule", it's the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which Congress passed in response to the Enron scandal.
What I mean to say is, they are focusing on the wrong thing, IMO. esp with the bad reputation they have already - I think they would do much better if they first catch up (doing it properly) and then release all the copied ideas... Many of these new features are attempts to catch up. As others have pointed out, the Activities feature is vaguely similar to Mac OS X's Services menu (except the Services menu is available to any Cocoa application, not just within a browser). IE8's WebSlice feature is equivalent to Safari's WebClip feature on Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard". The newly-renamed visible-by-default Favorites bar is equivalent to the Bookmarks bar in Firefox and Safari. Automatic crash recovery is similar to a Firefox feature, but improved. The new Safety Filter is a simple improvement to the phishing filter.
These are new features they can advertise to normal everyday users, that we Slashdotters don't care about (because we already have them, or because they don't appeal to us). That doesn't mean they aren't also fixing a bunch of stuff at the same time.
That's not what annoys me the most about it. What annoys me is the fact that they can't keep anything the same from one version to another. Not just IE but all MS apps and OSes as well; it's apparently a dilbertesque company policy. Also what annoys me is they can't stand to call anything the same thing everyone else calls it.
What do you want them to do: keep things the same from one version to another, or call it what everyone else calls it? Microsoft has called bookmarks "favorites" consistently in every version of IE that ever existed, and they are continuing to do so. Changing the name could be confusing to anyone who has never used a non-Microsoft browser. They've decided to remain consistent.
And "favorites" highlights both these idiotic user-hostile Microsoft insanities. Everyone else calls them "bookmarks" so MS has to call them "favorites". Well, if they change the "favorites" to "bookmarks" like everyone else (it would surprise me) that's great,
They should have decided to call them "bookmarks" twelve and a half years ago, but they didn't. That decision is in the past; it's done. They may decide that the benefit of changing the name outweighs the benefit of remaining consistent, but they haven't reached that point yet. If Firefox, Safari and Opera continue to grow in popularity, I suspect Microsoft will reconsider this decision.
but why do they have to confuse their present customers by naming something else with that name?
What we're talking about here is renaming the Links toolbar to the Favorites toolbar. The Links bar is equivalent to what other browsers call the Bookmarks bar, so it makes perfect sense for IE to call it the Favorites bar. Currently, few IE users are aware that it exists at all because 1) they don't recognize the name, and 2) it's not prominently displayed by default (by default only the word "Links" is visible on the right side of the screen, and users don't know they can move it to where they want it).
Naming it the Links toolbar originally was, of course, a terrible idea; I believe that decision had something to do with a poorly-named feature in Windows Explorer that they were trying to integrate with. They did something stupid, and they're finally fixing it now.
Trying to change anything from its default has always been incredibly hard with a new version of IE because it's in a different place in the menu system with every release. Once it was under "file", once it was under "edit", once it was under "tools", and IIRC once it was under a menu that isn't in IE any more.
I'm assuming you're talking about the "Internet Options" menu item. It was originally under the View menu (consistent with the "Folder Options" menu item in Windows Explorer, which was logical to put under the View menu). In IE5, the Tools menu was added and "Internet Options" was moved there. This became the standard menu location for preferences across all Windows applications.
It's Apple you're thinking of who put Preferences under the Edit menu, and Netscape followed this standard on Windows and Linux. When Microsoft created their own standard location, other Windows applications (including Netscape) adopted it, except for anything made by Apple, which still puts Preferences under the Edit menu. Mac OS X, meanwhile, puts Preferences under the new Application menu (between the Apple and File menus, labeled with the name of the frontmost application), and has defined Command-, as the standard keyboard shortcut. Several Windows applications including Firefox have adopted the equivalent Control-, shortcut for Options, but I don't expect Microsoft to follow suit.
As for IE7, since by default there is no menu bar, there is only a Tools menu on the right side of the screen, and Internet Options is under that.
And I'm completely with you on the last part. I don't want my web browser opening a spreadsheet or word processing document! I don't even want it
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Yes. Before a couple years ago, QuickTime Player was so crippled that it couldn't play movies in full-screen mode, but they've finally fixed that. Perhaps because when iTunes added video support, it was able to play QuickTime movies in full-screen mode just fine, and Apple realized that making their music player more functional than their video player when playing videos was kind of stupid.
My understanding is that it's more energy-efficient to make an LED appear "dim" by blinking it on and off rapidly at full brightness than to simply add a resistor, so it's a very common thing to do.
Just to clarify, in case anyone failed to grasp the irony of the parent post: We need a protocol that prevents this by makes it clear if an access point is intended for public use. Say, publicly open access points broadcast a signal saying they are their and ready for connects, This is called an SSID broadcast. Most consumer wireless routers are configured to do this by default, using the vendor name as the SSID. then the client must request permission to connect to the access point The client checks to see if the connection is encrypted (WEP or WPA). and then once connected must also ask for permission and details on how connect to the internet. The client sends a DHCP request, and the router replies with an IP address, subnet mask, default gateway address, a DNS server or two, and probably a couple other useful settings. Only then should someone be able to know for sure they aren't stealing bandwidth from someone who didn't want to share. It shouldn't be too hard to implement such a protocol, since it's already supported by most WiFi boxes. Precisely.
You said "whoever's wrong, get over it." The problem is that each side thinks the other side is wrong.
"Those who study history are doomed to know it's repeating."
Repeat after me:
Copyright infringement is not theft.
Either that, or you don't actually use e-mail for anything important, so the spam doesn't really get in your way. But if that's the case, please try to understand that many of us do need to use e-mail for business purposes.
I run a very small mail server at home with a handful of users. My first line of defense against spam is DNSRBLs - blacklists of IP addresses that are known to be spam sources, or happen to be in certain countries such as China or Korea that I would otherwise get a ton of spam from but currently have no need to receive legitimate mail from. I reject all SMTP connections from blacklisted IPs, before even bothering to look at the message they're trying to send. Would it surprise you to learn that I'm currently blocking an average of 78 connections per hour, or 685,000 connections per year, just based on blacklisted IPs? That's one attempted connection every 46 seconds, every hour of every day, all the time. And that doesn't count all the spam blocked by the myriad of rules I've got set up to handle incoming messages once they've been accepted, nor does it count the spam that unfortunately finds its way to my inbox anyway - remember, DNSRBLs are just the first line of defense. But this is a very small server, as mail servers go. Imagine what the numbers would look like if I ran a large ISP.
Come to think of it, I'd also consider it an intrusion on my privacy if Google acquired personal data about me from a third party, and correlated their own data about me with that. They don't appear to be doing that either.
Removing the patent system might have reduced the incentive for ZapMedia Services to... well, I don't know. It doesn't sound like having this patent encouraged them to bring anything to market. Apple, on the other hand, didn't have this patent, and it doesn't seem to have slowed down their innovation much.
You would think that TSA would figure out some way of tracking how many times you've flown before, and whether this behavior is unusual for you, so that they wouldn't need to search you every single time...
I agree that this was pretty silly, but there is a reason TSA x-rays all laptops.
On the other hand, your airline did tell you to show up two hours before your departure time, and if you'd done that, you wouldn't have missed your flight in the first place.
How can Postini/Google possibly know what strategies spammers intend to pursue? It seems unlikely that the spammers would volunteer this sort of information ahead of time.
These are new features they can advertise to normal everyday users, that we Slashdotters don't care about (because we already have them, or because they don't appeal to us). That doesn't mean they aren't also fixing a bunch of stuff at the same time.
That's not what annoys me the most about it. What annoys me is the fact that they can't keep anything the same from one version to another. Not just IE but all MS apps and OSes as well; it's apparently a dilbertesque company policy. Also what annoys me is they can't stand to call anything the same thing everyone else calls it.
What do you want them to do: keep things the same from one version to another, or call it what everyone else calls it? Microsoft has called bookmarks "favorites" consistently in every version of IE that ever existed, and they are continuing to do so. Changing the name could be confusing to anyone who has never used a non-Microsoft browser. They've decided to remain consistent.
And "favorites" highlights both these idiotic user-hostile Microsoft insanities. Everyone else calls them "bookmarks" so MS has to call them "favorites". Well, if they change the "favorites" to "bookmarks" like everyone else (it would surprise me) that's great,
They should have decided to call them "bookmarks" twelve and a half years ago, but they didn't. That decision is in the past; it's done. They may decide that the benefit of changing the name outweighs the benefit of remaining consistent, but they haven't reached that point yet. If Firefox, Safari and Opera continue to grow in popularity, I suspect Microsoft will reconsider this decision.
but why do they have to confuse their present customers by naming something else with that name?
What we're talking about here is renaming the Links toolbar to the Favorites toolbar. The Links bar is equivalent to what other browsers call the Bookmarks bar, so it makes perfect sense for IE to call it the Favorites bar. Currently, few IE users are aware that it exists at all because 1) they don't recognize the name, and 2) it's not prominently displayed by default (by default only the word "Links" is visible on the right side of the screen, and users don't know they can move it to where they want it).
Naming it the Links toolbar originally was, of course, a terrible idea; I believe that decision had something to do with a poorly-named feature in Windows Explorer that they were trying to integrate with. They did something stupid, and they're finally fixing it now.
Trying to change anything from its default has always been incredibly hard with a new version of IE because it's in a different place in the menu system with every release. Once it was under "file", once it was under "edit", once it was under "tools", and IIRC once it was under a menu that isn't in IE any more.
I'm assuming you're talking about the "Internet Options" menu item. It was originally under the View menu (consistent with the "Folder Options" menu item in Windows Explorer, which was logical to put under the View menu). In IE5, the Tools menu was added and "Internet Options" was moved there. This became the standard menu location for preferences across all Windows applications.
It's Apple you're thinking of who put Preferences under the Edit menu, and Netscape followed this standard on Windows and Linux. When Microsoft created their own standard location, other Windows applications (including Netscape) adopted it, except for anything made by Apple, which still puts Preferences under the Edit menu. Mac OS X, meanwhile, puts Preferences under the new Application menu (between the Apple and File menus, labeled with the name of the frontmost application), and has defined Command-, as the standard keyboard shortcut. Several Windows applications including Firefox have adopted the equivalent Control-, shortcut for Options, but I don't expect Microsoft to follow suit.
As for IE7, since by default there is no menu bar, there is only a Tools menu on the right side of the screen, and Internet Options is under that.
And I'm completely with you on the last part. I don't want my web browser opening a spreadsheet or word processing document! I don't even want it