Very few of the "old timer" Red Hat users will switch away from Fedora, and that includes me. I suppose Eric is an "old timer" also, but he has time to learn new distros. The rest of us have work to do, and generally stick with "what we know" until there's a very compelling reason to switch.
I have Ubuntu marked down, as the major platform to test my company's next release on. MOST of the new Linux users I get questions from run Ubuntu, and are not comfortable with any software or documentation that "assumes" Redhat/Fedora (to the point that many can't chmod +x on a compiled file, due to GUI-only experience).
The real test of Ubuntu is when I rebuild my MythTV box, which is currently FC6 based. I'll make time to dual-boot MythTV on 2 distros so I don't feel rushed comparing them...
Reading Eric's message, did anyone get CHILLS down their spine?...at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable."
ACTUALLY, it was using --force that rendered the system unusable. It's called a SAFETY mechanism.
Quick... someone give this man a nail gun, and show him how 'limiting' it is that the nailgun has to make contact with wood before firing. Someday, we'll read about how ESR dropped something out his car door, reach for it without using PARK, and then we'll hear about how his CAR rendered his shooting finger "unusable". It's always someone else's fault Eric.
There used to be a name for users like this on IRC. I remember seeing new Debian users who install Debian stable, then wontonly mix in Debian Unstable and nightly. The next time they did an apt-get update, this class of user would demand to know why "apt broke my system".
This guy is a poster child for why conservative managers stick with Windows. It's been YEARS since he wrote anything that was genuinely useful and NOT designed to get a headline ('zork' style kernel config manus, anyone?). Did anyone else get a laugh on at the Fedora list quote, how 2006 New Years Resolution was to help the Fedora package folks? Gee it's 2007 now.
Every word or letter from him is blatent self promootion, and should be viewed with the same skepticism reserved for Paul Therriot and their kind. Right now it appears Ubuntu is becoming more popular than Fedora (or at least there's that PERCEPTION), and this alone is ESR's motive for switching.
This blast is not squarely aimed at you, but you triggered it. Treat this in the spirit it is meant please (if I didn't give a crap at all, I wouldn't comment. Show this to your insulated bosses who don't know the first thing about community and transparency. Kudos to you BTW for showing initiative and acting on a Slashdot post. Honestly, I would not have given the "new Netscape" that much credit.).
>I only wish that someone had brought it to our attention so that I didn't have to find out about it from Slashdot.
This rankles.
Have you EVER tried contacting Netscape from the outside world? Seriously, I can count the number of times:
*) When my.netscape.com locked out Konqueror (1998?) *) When my.netscape.com WITHDREW the ability to embed RSS feed on your "my" page -- actually this was PRE-RSS if I recall. Way before it was commonplace, you could embed Slashdot and Linux Today feeds. Then they killed it, presumably because they got enough users or some pointy haired reason. 1999. *) When my.netscape.com adopted a shitty policy of DELETING all your mail if you don't login for 30 days. This did not seem to be publicised by an actual email. They don't seem to delete the mailbox itself, which violates RFCs I'm sure and basically insinuates the mailbox is active. I lost tons of mail from 1996-2003 (yeah yeah backups. Some things I didn't think I would need later). ?? Happened in 2003. Note that mailboxes were only 5MB still, so I quickly bailed for a 100MB Yahoo account. *) The 2001 deletion of Netscape Developer. This lost a ton of Netscape copyrighted Javascript documentation.
Just TRY contacting Netscape from their page. The best you can do is use the WRONG FORM to submit to some contracter who won't forward it. Or, oh yeah - there's a 900 number for by the minute Support.
Back when it mattered, there was no 'Google Guy' for Netscape, who would act as an unofficial liason. After Jamie Z left, no one internally tried to fill the shoes of a community facing employee.
While I'll be eternally grateful for Netscape's open sourcing of their browser. What a different world it is now. Too bad that step is something the current management would never have allowed (that's the perception). I can't think of a more opaque Internet company than today's Netscape. I'm sure there are people who disagree or wish it could be changed (you're here..) but that and a $1 gets you a cup of black coffee. Show this to your boss - there are suggestions here:-)
>I suspect it's "OS X" like my PDA runs "Windows".
Close. I suspect this is different.
We already know that "OS X" is CPU independent, and probably will always remain so since this only needs to be maintained. There was a time once where Windows NT was CPU architecture independent, but this was just an experiment to if Microsoft customers could be used as a scare tactic and as pawns to strongarm Intel (Microsoft had no serious intent to be CPU portable).
Windows CE is not really a cousin of Windows NT (XP etc..). They have no genes in common.
Where OSX Intel and OS PowerPC do have much (most things) in common. Linux in the OpenWRT project is just as much "Linux" as the Intel "Linux" in my server.
You're obviously not going to get the same kernel features, floating point support, etc. in the iPhone, but that's customization. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is an OS X platform. We call "Linux" Linux when it runs on a MMU-deprived CPU on 8MB RAM.
[sarcasm] Science has a liberal agenda anyways. Here's the GOP/Republican* philosophy towards education and the economy in general.
1) Become politically active and fight for tax breaks, which then reduce funding and scholarships for public supported schools. 2) Lobby against all forms of US funded science: Science contradicts the Priesthood on global warming and stem cells anyways.
Besides, given a sufficient ignorance, ALL science is a miracle. (yes, I am inverting the Heinlein quote). 3) Pull your US blue chop stocks and shuffle all that cash to China and India funds. OK, leave a few bucks in Coca-Cola and McDonalds... the school you just shortchanged has been forced to invite fast food vendors into the cafeteria to make up for the lost funds. Mmmm revenue! 4) PROFIT!
5) For extra credit, move yourself to New Hampshire or Alaska USA where you won't have to pay any state taxes. Or, better still, become a citizen of Bermuda or some banana republic with very favorable tax laws for foreign nationals (you can always visit the US...) [/sarcasm]
* = Not intentionally swiping all conservatives with this brush. SOME conservatives believe the US economy would be best served if it were "managed like a business". This would imply investing in education to the point of maximum return for the dollar. Somehow it doesn't make business sense to cut university funding, which drives up tuition and saddles students with lifetime debt.
Does anyone else here believe that MASSIVE Bush cuts in federal support for schools and students, is all just to make people choose between a lifetime of debt, and joining the military (when they were not otherwise leaning towards that decision)? Cutting education money is NOT about the budget -- after all we're borrowing PLENTY of billions from China to fund the war and education would be just a sliver of it.
The real problem is it's easier to adjust to the momentum in job migration, than it is to fight inertia and try to make the US competitive.
Yeah, you and me both. Blame the author (Tom Clynes) for focusing too much on the gee-whiz stuff, and failing in his job of evenly reporting facts with a bit of skeptacism.
The nail folks completely skirted the 'third test' -- the one a SKEPTIC would have wanted -- which is to rebuild the same structure using SCREWS. Notice the author failed to CALL them on this? This isn't "science" it is a press release! (Yes, screws are more expensive. So is rebuilding your home. No one disputes this.)
If the real 'point' is the cost savings of these pseudo-screw nails because they can be used in (some to many - not all) common nailguns, making them MUCH cheaper to install than screws.... then please elaborate and detail the costs. HOW MUCH more expensive would traditional screws be compared to this new 'invention'?
Popular Science gets it right sometimes, but other times they're as useless as USA Today.
>>If you make the text bigger, the page layout goes toast in FF
>Not true... this depends on how the page was coded. If the dev used relative sizes for everything (em)
It is a little-known (and rarely used) trick to use 'em' units on IMAGES.
Most web developers will look at you like you have 3 heads if you suggest it -- myself included (and I always sneak in accessibility features if I can).
Calculating em for images requires knowing the target resolution or DPI I believe. I can't think of a single site that sets 'em' width on images instead of PIXELS.
[disclaimer: this could have snuck in FF 2RC3 and I wouldn't have known... I only tested RC2, and don't see this feature in the RC3 release notes]
FireFox 2 lacks page zooming, which from a my perspective is impossible to live without on certain displays. I'm a web developer (sometimes), and I love FireFox. As a developer I love FireFox because the Gecko team show consistent progress towards standards. From this perspective, FireFox is what the web should be. The worst thing about developing for FireFox is... writing broken code with comment hacks to support IE's nonstandard ways. But that's not FireFox's fault.
For DEMO or home theater purposes, FireFox is (on a high-res display) very very unusable. Why? FireFox 2 has no page Zoom. FireFox offers unchanged as a featurem plain old "Text zoom", which is not the same.
The fact that many pages don't scale to different resolutions well is not FireFox's fault. But until all websites adopt a consistent method of page scaling, the workaround is going to be Page Zoom.
On a 42" LCD (1920x1080p), a fullscreen FireFox browser is legible from about 3 feet away (with my eyes). If you make the text bigger, the page layout goes toast in FF. SURE, you can go in and change your video resolution to a non-native size and cause everything to get bigger, but that is not fun and it messes with other apps. The solution for now is some kind of liner scaling on the page.
On a 42" LCD (1920x1080p), a fullscreen Opera browser is legible from about 6 feet away (with my eyes), if you use Page Zoom of 180-200%. 200% really isn't needed, but there's some annoying artifacing In Opera if you resize at a factor of 1.8. 2x looks very nice!
I see IE has page zoom now, and I've done a little bit of testing. It seems no better than opera's at first glance. But it's THERE.
I'll continue rooting for FireFox privately, but it's hard to sell people on FireFox's importance... when you have to use Opera or MSIE on the big panel display.
Here's to FF 2.5 including this feature. One hopes!:-)
I'll add my vote, kids second. Too many people are "kids first", which is why television is a big crap pile of commercials for kids stuff. They even have CAR and SUV commercials with the kids "approving" or selecting their parents next vehicle.
As a child, most of my expensive presents lasted me more than 1 year. Why? Because to get them I had to save an allowance, birthday and xmas money. The year after I bought my Atari 2600 I was 11. The next year I wanted a ColecoVision because of Donkey Kong. I COULD have emptied my bank account, but since it was MY money I realized that would be a waste, and I passed.
be true to yourself first to some degree, your spouse second to a fairness degree.
People don't stay in crappy jobs if they're not in debt. Employed people generally don't get into debt if they budget. People living in a fantasy world just spend to put the kids first. I'm using money as an example, but time with the spouse matters.
Not always, but often times when people start living through their kids, it's because it's a reality show and somehow they can "start over" with someone else's life. Some parents take kids on EVERY vacation, because you're just sick of the "other half". Some people take the kids into the master bed every night, as a barrier against sexual relations with the person they married.
Kids need to grow up into adults, not be pampered. Otherwise they'll be spoiled brats who outgrow their Playstation2 the moment the X-Box 360 comes out (not like they PAID for it out of their allowance now...). Then kinds grow into a whiny, soft, ignororant population up to their eyeballs in debt and dependent on prescriptions to function. Oh wait, that happened. No wonder the population of the middle class US is being targeted for extinction -- they're too distracted, neutered, undisciplined, irresponsible, too comfy and too buried in their kids to think.
Just post a link, or post the quote as AC. It's not cool to pimp someone else's content trying to get Karma points. Block copy and paste is supposed to me moderated Redundant, as it is blatent karma whoring.
I'm SURE that was not your goal -- just like I'm sure you didn't mean to be snide to the grandparent poster. All he did was call you out on YOUR bad move.
>>Common sense suggests that there are billions of planets in the galaxy
>How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets could harbor life?
The grandparent poster meant to say HYPOTHESIS or THEORY (the latter being the strict definition, since you can't PROVE such extrapolation of planet types -- not the way you can prove say 2+2=4). Everyone knew the earth was round LONG before it could be PROVEN.
There are lots of planets and moons discovered that exhibit characteristics between the ranges of Venus and Mars and Europa. While these bodies have not been PROVEN to harbor life, and are at the fringes of what we consider life-supporting, they are still in the range of life-capable. We've discovered life at the bottom of the ocean, deep in the antarctic, and even in water so hot that we previously expected to kill life by causing the cells to explode.
Surely you can deduce that he was arguing this is the "most supportable theory given the current data".
How? Using COMMON SENSE. Of course, you could be the type that argues with laymen that there's no "motor" in a car. Semantics do not make you smarter - it only makes someone put a bananna in your tailpipe.
Slashdot editorial operations is a good old boy buddy system. I've been with this site since it was.org, and I remember the fuss when people's postings were DELETED because they indicated shall we say "room for improvement" with the site.
Editors used to have recursive macro's to apply -1 moderation to controversial posts, so even if 50 users moderated something up the post would tank.
Today I think it's more benign editor abuse -- they simply MISUSE the "friend or foe" system so they can sometimes publish their friend's postings first. Sometimes they publish a sensational headline from someone who registered for Slashdot THAT SAME DAY.
There's no weighting for how long you've been registered, and how much you have participated. I must have a black mark on my account "never allow to moderate", so I stopped participating here. No metamoderation anymore. There's no need to fork/. - it's just an automated news blog and there are better codebases for this.
I happen to like the Digg site (although they are going the way of "big self-hype like Slashdot" so some foolish dot-com investor can buy Digg for one MILLION dollars).
>Is it Jigsaw's responsibility to police how people use their service? >Now answer again, pretending that Jigsaw is an ISP or a filesharing software developer.
Wrong question.
Legal filesharing is a fact of life no matter what the RIAA/MPAA do to taint the P2P market. P2P makes it easier to publish works (good), and so harder to shut down sources faster than they appear (bad, if you are a reactionary, or if your copyright is being violated).
You can draw an analogy to the block printing press, which in its time was just as controversial on both counts.
And by the way, the answer is YES, service providers (P2P or otherwise) ARE subject to copyright law -- they must act in accordance to a takedown notice, or court order, on any identifiable copyrighted work. The printng press manufacturer is not liable for copied books - but the press operator is.
I don't think the question should be, are they policing how the data is used. I think the question should be, are they acting in accordance to established privacy rules and regulations.
I think anyone can argue that P2P has many legal uses. Collecting personal data on people, and "pretexting", is akin to hacking into someone's privacy. There are a patchwork of laws against this, but poorly enforced. Companies that ARE allowed to collect data on people are tightly regulated (probably not this one).
This is a database about collecting data on taxpayers - other people. There doesn't seem to be any gray area, like there is say with file distribution.
This is more for the sibling posters - the parent poster `gets it`.
I've got extra HDMI and DVIHDMI adapters. I really don't want any more!
The irony is: I ordered my HDMI cable from one of those "direct cable" sites online (works great). This was for a Sceptre LCD TV ordered online from Costco. The online info clearly listed a bunch of other cables and parts, but did -not- mention HDMI, so I thought I needed one.
Opened up the TV crate, and there was the HDMI cable.
Then the Comcast guy shows up to hookup the HD DVR... another set of HDMI cables.
Bottom line: all the babies crying there's no HDMI cable, don't have HDTV to begin with. Sony is promising a LOT for the PS3... they've overpromised in fact, and there's no going back on the big specs. Sony made a big gamble on the BlueRay player, which to me is more significant than the Cell CPU. EVERY PS3 is going to have a BlueRay drive, so the installed base will be 100% unlike the X-Box360, which will have an "add on" HD-DVD drive.
To this day, I bet most Windows games ship on CD not DVD (correct me if I am wrong, but if this has changed it is very recent and still no clear market format)
50GB is an amazing platform to write games, and even though the first generation of games will not take advantage of it, eventually they will. This is true even if the extra "bloat" doesn't add to gameplay - not right away anyways. I used to remember all the C64 games were written for 64K, and all the ATARI XL/XE games were written for 48K... even during the twilight of the 8-bit platform.
As far as I'm concerned, game systems should ship with NO AV cable since whatever they include is not going to satisfy everyone: A lot of people wil be looking for adapter cables to operate the nexgen game systems with: DVI (plenty of early HD sets have this instead of HDMI) VGA (ditto) component S-Video
I have a draw full of old composite cables, and a ton more in the garage.
The point is, people never upgrade game platforms. Never. It's a stretch I know to factor HDMI cables in here, but every nickel you can save somewhere just makes the rest of the platform more viable. (I understand the Blue-Ray gamble, but the Cell-processor gamble is just stupid "not invented here". I would have chopped the Cell processor - too big of a question mark. What's to be gained??).
Anyways - anyone still not believing this "excusing" of the HDMI cable, please take an moment to window-shop a brand-new car. Then you'll really understand what it means to have to "option" things out.
I'm pretty sure the OGG Vorbis people have a FAQ, which tells you OGG is NOT GPL licensed.
What keeps me from relying on OGG is the players. All my CD collection is in FLAC format and I can batch convert to any format. Problem is, I want a OGG-capable MP3 player that is "dock compatible" with the iPod. I'm not holding my breath for Apple to start supporting OGG - aint happening.:-/
I hope Page Zoom makes it into the FF2 feature set.
I still use FireFox every day on my PC, but Opera and IE7 has a a REAL page Zoom (not just simple text-resize like FF).
Page Zoom is important on larger-screen hi-res displays. Opera 9.01 is really usable on a 42" display, from 5 feet away, running at 1920x1080 (HTPC setup). FireFox would only be usable if I keep changing the resolution to a much lower res.
The real problem of course is Windows and Linux don't have solid, consistent and well-supported methods for adapting to displays that aren't 72dpi. The OS doesn't know how to scale the UI to different DPIs, as you expect a printer to do. When you change resolution, things should simply be *sharper* but the same size (well, not always the same size or the resolution can be wasted, but you know what I mean).
I realize I'm trivializing the problems in the technology. Until it's fixed, multimedia apps (including browsers) can hack around the problem by offering scaling mechanisms. WinAMP does it. Opera's 200% zoom rocks.
But really, is the browser so important anymore now that there is competition? It's pretty amazing how much better IE7 is than the older versions (and I am a web UI developer who hated IE). Not perfect, but lots better. It's really a crime though if you think how Microsoft abused their market share from 1999-2006 and basically did NOTHING with CSS and standards. I'm convinced if MS remained competitive during that time, the web would be far better a place today, technology-wise.
>>"Linux users have better support for iPods than windows itunes users do - they can copy songs off the iPod to another computer (without stupid third party addons, weird hacks, or scary warnings)."
>Hmmmm, as there is no official iPod software for Linux users at all, I'd say all Linux software to use iPods would fall under "stupid third party addons" and "weird hacks", no?
That's a clever troll - you're being deliberately obtuse and ignoring the fact that (typical) Linux distros ship with a wide range of tools and applications.
AND if these tools are not officially from Apple, they are "stupid third party hacks".
AND, we know from Windows experience that "weird scary" utilities typically come with viruses and spyware.
It's so scary not having DRM enforcement on my DVDs, the sky is falling..
Now you have me REALLY worried, because I just noticed NONE of the software on my Linux box is "official".
What if the old coot's intent is to CAUSE exactly this type of escalaton? Here in the US, you can kill people for invading your home.
The old coot could be sleeping with a shotgun full of rocksalt, or worse. Or he might have a camera on it so he can have the kid arrested for trespassing.
Sometimes it takes a lawyer to get the police to do their job. That's the reason nuisances are tolerated in some neighborhoods more than others... poor people don't get lawyers (unless there's a jackpot involved, or an especially idealist young lawyer who doesn't need to eat or anything).
>its really no different from any other "discount membership club" except the product you save on.
Bingo! I posted exactly this sentiment in a post just moments ago. Amazon's threshhold for patentability is, 'has this scenario' been patented. A scenario is a situation, not an invention.
Now, I bet you $2 either: * you get marked down redundant (even though you were first -- moderators don't REALLY check timestamps), OR * A testy moderator marks this post 'flamebait', for no reason other than noting the above. (WTH, my karma's maxed for the last 5 years anyway. Bad moderators burn in hell.).
>Off the top of my head, I can't think of any prior art for 'all-you-can-eat' shipping
There's plenty of prior art for an 'up front fee' (membership) that gets you a discount on further purchases. Costcos, BJ's Warehouse and Sams club folow this model.
Yes, it's not SHIPPING, but that's Semantics. It's a customer fee to lower an undertermined number of recurring future fees. Even if you believe a BUSINESS PROCESS is a valid patent (and that is debatable), this example does not pass the non-obvious invention test.
I would not be surprised if USPO they allow a patent for a particlar COLOR. Just describe the physics of bouncing white light off it, and how the resulting light is affected (colored). You think of a slick marketing name for it to nudge the clerk that this is legit. I'm pretty sure anyone can come up with a color shade that will thwart ALL attempts at prooving prior art. It's still fails the obvious test.
The kids are full of shit, and the article summary's got more spn than a Fox story on the inheritance tax ('death tax').
* They're on "public" land, and they "remove a few small dead branches from a cherry tree" is sandwiched between references that they were "playing in the tree"..... What was that about breaking off branches? Oh, you mean they were DESTROYING the cherry tree. Vandalism. OK No matter. Those kind of trees grow like weeds anyway. Especially in the UK, where there are an overabundance of trees to begin with...
Here's what the story real says: * The kids were looking for material to build a "treehouse". It doesn't say if they were going to build it on THEIR property, or SOMEONE ELSE'S property. Most likely the latter.
As far as I'm concerned, they all aught to get switched, and then spend their next few weekends working for the park service cleaning up OTHER people's vandalism. This boo-hoo about their "DNS" and all is a bit overblown. The kids set out to break someone else's property, cart off the goodies, and now they are deliberately misleading (or lying even) by portraying it as "playing in a tree". The details ARE in the story if anyone bothers to RTFA.
>With all do respect, I shouldn't have to be a "decent" web designer to be able to put up a personal homepage that looks the same in all browsers.
True, but your blame is misplaced.
CSS isn't perfect, but it's far easier if you wipe away ALL MSIE HACKS (or "browser hacks" if you can't bear to disrespect Microsoft). I've been working on an internal-use web control panel for a hosting company, and CSS is a breeze. Templates are so much easier to manage, and there's less temptation to inject HTML tags into PHP.
I validate for CSS2.1, and on RARE occasions I add browser hacks. We're content to drop MSIE6 support as this is an internal application. We don't use something so exotic in CSS that it isn't supported in FireFox, which says FireFox is pretty good. If Microsoft chooses not to comply with CSS2, I blame them, and I am relieved this is not an external website... otherwise I WOULD be doing stupid box model tricks that escaped the attention of Microsoft software QA.
I'm glad MSIE7 is getting better. Microsoft tried to break the web and force their own fork of CSS. They lost. Now they are playing nice in this space... at least until they catch up.
(I can just see in a few years, MS encouraging "Avalon" XML and Windows forms on websites... *shudder*).
Slashdot Mirror
Very few of the "old timer" Red Hat users will switch away from Fedora, and that includes me.
I suppose Eric is an "old timer" also, but he has time to learn new distros. The rest of us have work to do, and generally stick with "what we know" until there's a very compelling reason to switch.
I have Ubuntu marked down, as the major platform to test my company's next release on. MOST of the new Linux users I get questions from run Ubuntu, and are not comfortable with any software or documentation that "assumes" Redhat/Fedora (to the point that many can't chmod +x on a compiled file, due to GUI-only experience).
The real test of Ubuntu is when I rebuild my MythTV box, which is currently FC6 based. I'll make time to dual-boot MythTV on 2 distros so I don't feel rushed comparing them...
(not you, the parent poster).
...at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable."
Reading Eric's message, did anyone get CHILLS down their spine?
ACTUALLY, it was using --force that rendered the system unusable. It's called a SAFETY mechanism.
Quick... someone give this man a nail gun, and show him how 'limiting' it is that the nailgun has to make contact with wood before firing. Someday, we'll read about how ESR dropped something out his car door, reach for it without using PARK, and then we'll hear about how his CAR rendered his shooting finger "unusable". It's always someone else's fault Eric.
There used to be a name for users like this on IRC. I remember seeing new Debian users who install Debian stable, then wontonly mix in Debian Unstable and nightly. The next time they did an apt-get update, this class of user would demand to know why "apt broke my system".
This guy is a poster child for why conservative managers stick with Windows. It's been YEARS since he wrote anything that was genuinely useful and NOT designed to get a headline ('zork' style kernel config manus, anyone?). Did anyone else get a laugh on at the Fedora list quote, how 2006 New Years Resolution was to help the Fedora package folks? Gee it's 2007 now.
Every word or letter from him is blatent self promootion, and should be viewed with the same skepticism reserved for Paul Therriot and their kind. Right now it appears Ubuntu is becoming more popular than Fedora (or at least there's that PERCEPTION), and this alone is ESR's motive for switching.
This blast is not squarely aimed at you, but you triggered it. Treat this in the spirit it is meant please (if I didn't give a crap at all, I wouldn't comment. Show this to your insulated bosses who don't know the first thing about community and transparency. Kudos to you BTW for showing initiative and acting on a Slashdot post. Honestly, I would not have given the "new Netscape" that much credit.).
:-)
>I only wish that someone had brought it to our attention so that I didn't have to find out about it from Slashdot.
This rankles.
Have you EVER tried contacting Netscape from the outside world? Seriously, I can count the number of times:
*) When my.netscape.com locked out Konqueror (1998?)
*) When my.netscape.com WITHDREW the ability to embed RSS feed on your "my" page -- actually this was PRE-RSS if I recall. Way before it was commonplace, you could embed Slashdot and Linux Today feeds. Then they killed it, presumably because they got enough users or some pointy haired reason. 1999.
*) When my.netscape.com adopted a shitty policy of DELETING all your mail if you don't login for 30 days. This did not seem to be publicised by an actual email. They don't seem to delete the mailbox itself, which violates RFCs I'm sure and basically insinuates the mailbox is active. I lost tons of mail from 1996-2003 (yeah yeah backups. Some things I didn't think I would need later). ?? Happened in 2003. Note that mailboxes were only 5MB still, so I quickly bailed for a 100MB Yahoo account.
*) The 2001 deletion of Netscape Developer. This lost a ton of Netscape copyrighted Javascript documentation.
Just TRY contacting Netscape from their page. The best you can do is use the WRONG FORM to submit to some contracter who won't forward it. Or, oh yeah - there's a 900 number for by the minute Support.
Back when it mattered, there was no 'Google Guy' for Netscape, who would act as an unofficial liason. After Jamie Z left, no one internally tried to fill the shoes of a community facing employee.
While I'll be eternally grateful for Netscape's open sourcing of their browser. What a different world it is now. Too bad that step is something the current management would never have allowed (that's the perception). I can't think of a more opaque Internet company than today's Netscape. I'm sure there are people who disagree or wish it could be changed (you're here..) but that and a $1 gets you a cup of black coffee. Show this to your boss - there are suggestions here
>I suspect it's "OS X" like my PDA runs "Windows".
Close. I suspect this is different.
We already know that "OS X" is CPU independent, and probably will always remain so since this only needs to be maintained.
There was a time once where Windows NT was CPU architecture independent, but this was just an experiment to if Microsoft customers could be used as a scare tactic and as pawns to strongarm Intel (Microsoft had no serious intent to be CPU portable).
Windows CE is not really a cousin of Windows NT (XP etc..). They have no genes in common.
Where OSX Intel and OS PowerPC do have much (most things) in common. Linux in the OpenWRT project is just as much "Linux" as the Intel "Linux" in my server.
You're obviously not going to get the same kernel features, floating point support, etc. in the iPhone, but that's customization. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is an OS X platform. We call "Linux" Linux when it runs on a MMU-deprived CPU on 8MB RAM.
What sort of pri0n do cows watch anyways?
[sarcasm]
Science has a liberal agenda anyways. Here's the GOP/Republican* philosophy towards education and the economy in general.
1) Become politically active and fight for tax breaks, which then reduce funding and scholarships for public supported schools.
2) Lobby against all forms of US funded science:
Science contradicts the Priesthood on global warming and stem cells anyways.
Besides, given a sufficient ignorance, ALL science is a miracle. (yes, I am inverting the Heinlein quote).
3) Pull your US blue chop stocks and shuffle all that cash to China and India funds. OK, leave a few bucks in Coca-Cola and McDonalds... the school you just shortchanged has been forced to invite fast food vendors into the cafeteria to make up for the lost funds. Mmmm revenue!
4) PROFIT!
5) For extra credit, move yourself to New Hampshire or Alaska USA where you won't have to pay any state taxes. Or, better still, become a citizen of Bermuda or some banana republic with very favorable tax laws for foreign nationals (you can always visit the US...)
[/sarcasm]
* = Not intentionally swiping all conservatives with this brush. SOME conservatives believe the US economy would be best served if it were "managed like a business". This would imply investing in education to the point of maximum return for the dollar. Somehow it doesn't make business sense to cut university funding, which drives up tuition and saddles students with lifetime debt.
Does anyone else here believe that MASSIVE Bush cuts in federal support for schools and students, is all just to make people choose between a lifetime of debt, and joining the military (when they were not otherwise leaning towards that decision)? Cutting education money is NOT about the budget -- after all we're borrowing PLENTY of billions from China to fund the war and education would be just a sliver of it.
The real problem is it's easier to adjust to the momentum in job migration, than it is to fight inertia and try to make the US competitive.
Somebody missed the point.
Yeah, you and me both. Blame the author (Tom Clynes) for focusing too much on the gee-whiz stuff, and failing in his job of evenly reporting facts with a bit of skeptacism.
The nail folks completely skirted the 'third test' -- the one a SKEPTIC would have wanted -- which is to rebuild the same structure using SCREWS. Notice the author failed to CALL them on this? This isn't "science" it is a press release!
(Yes, screws are more expensive. So is rebuilding your home. No one disputes this.)
If the real 'point' is the cost savings of these pseudo-screw nails because they can be used in (some to many - not all) common nailguns, making them MUCH cheaper to install than screws.... then please elaborate and detail the costs. HOW MUCH more expensive would traditional screws be compared to this new 'invention'?
Popular Science gets it right sometimes, but other times they're as useless as USA Today.
>>If you make the text bigger, the page layout goes toast in FF
>Not true... this depends on how the page was coded. If the dev used relative sizes for everything (em)
It is a little-known (and rarely used) trick to use 'em' units on IMAGES.
Most web developers will look at you like you have 3 heads if you suggest it -- myself included (and I always sneak in accessibility features if I can).
Calculating em for images requires knowing the target resolution or DPI I believe. I can't think of a single site that sets 'em' width on images instead of PIXELS.
[disclaimer: this could have snuck in FF 2RC3 and I wouldn't have known... I only tested RC2, and don't see this feature in the RC3 release notes]
:-)
FireFox 2 lacks page zooming, which from a my perspective is impossible to live without on certain displays.
I'm a web developer (sometimes), and I love FireFox. As a developer I love FireFox because the Gecko team show consistent progress towards standards. From this perspective, FireFox is what the web should be. The worst thing about developing for FireFox is... writing broken code with comment hacks to support IE's nonstandard ways. But that's not FireFox's fault.
For DEMO or home theater purposes, FireFox is (on a high-res display) very very unusable.
Why?
FireFox 2 has no page Zoom. FireFox offers unchanged as a featurem plain old "Text zoom", which is not the same.
The fact that many pages don't scale to different resolutions well is not FireFox's fault.
But until all websites adopt a consistent method of page scaling, the workaround is going to be Page Zoom.
On a 42" LCD (1920x1080p), a fullscreen FireFox browser is legible from about 3 feet away (with my eyes).
If you make the text bigger, the page layout goes toast in FF. SURE, you can go in and change your video resolution to a non-native size and cause everything to get bigger, but that is not fun and it messes with other apps. The solution for now is some kind of liner scaling on the page.
On a 42" LCD (1920x1080p), a fullscreen Opera browser is legible from about 6 feet away (with my eyes), if you use Page Zoom of 180-200%. 200% really isn't needed, but there's some annoying artifacing In Opera if you resize at a factor of 1.8. 2x looks very nice!
I see IE has page zoom now, and I've done a little bit of testing. It seems no better than opera's at first glance. But it's THERE.
I'll continue rooting for FireFox privately, but it's hard to sell people on FireFox's importance... when you have to use Opera or MSIE on the big panel display.
Here's to FF 2.5 including this feature. One hopes!
I'll add my vote, kids second. Too many people are "kids first", which is why television is a big crap pile of commercials for kids stuff. They even have CAR and SUV commercials with the kids "approving" or selecting their parents next vehicle.
As a child, most of my expensive presents lasted me more than 1 year. Why? Because to get them I had to save an allowance, birthday and xmas money. The year after I bought my Atari 2600 I was 11. The next year I wanted a ColecoVision because of Donkey Kong. I COULD have emptied my bank account, but since it was MY money I realized that would be a waste, and I passed.
be true to yourself first to some degree, your spouse second to a fairness degree.
People don't stay in crappy jobs if they're not in debt. Employed people generally don't get into debt if they budget. People living in a fantasy world just spend to put the kids first. I'm using money as an example, but time with the spouse matters.
Not always, but often times when people start living through their kids, it's because it's a reality show and somehow they can "start over" with someone else's life. Some parents take kids on EVERY vacation, because you're just sick of the "other half". Some people take the kids into the master bed every night, as a barrier against sexual relations with the person they married.
Kids need to grow up into adults, not be pampered. Otherwise they'll be spoiled brats who outgrow their Playstation2 the moment the X-Box 360 comes out (not like they PAID for it out of their allowance now...). Then kinds grow into a whiny, soft, ignororant population up to their eyeballs in debt and dependent on prescriptions to function. Oh wait, that happened. No wonder the population of the middle class US is being targeted for extinction -- they're too distracted, neutered, undisciplined, irresponsible, too comfy and too buried in their kids to think.
Hey Junior,
Just post a link, or post the quote as AC. It's not cool to pimp someone else's content trying to get Karma points. Block copy and paste is supposed to me moderated Redundant, as it is blatent karma whoring.
I'm SURE that was not your goal -- just like I'm sure you didn't mean to be snide to the grandparent poster.
All he did was call you out on YOUR bad move.
>>Common sense suggests that there are billions of planets in the galaxy
>How do you deduce, using common sense, that one in a thousand planets could harbor life?
The grandparent poster meant to say HYPOTHESIS or THEORY (the latter being the strict definition, since you can't PROVE such extrapolation of planet types -- not the way you can prove say 2+2=4). Everyone knew the earth was round LONG before it could be PROVEN.
There are lots of planets and moons discovered that exhibit characteristics between the ranges of Venus and Mars and Europa. While these bodies have not been PROVEN to harbor life, and are at the fringes of what we consider life-supporting, they are still in the range of life-capable. We've discovered life at the bottom of the ocean, deep in the antarctic, and even in water so hot that we previously expected to kill life by causing the cells to explode.
Surely you can deduce that he was arguing this is the "most supportable theory given the current data".
How? Using COMMON SENSE. Of course, you could be the type that argues with laymen that there's no "motor" in a car. Semantics do not make you smarter - it only makes someone put a bananna in your tailpipe.
Slashdot editorial operations is a good old boy buddy system. I've been with this site since it was .org, and I remember the fuss when people's postings were DELETED because they indicated shall we say "room for improvement" with the site.
/. - it's just an automated news blog and there are better codebases for this.
Editors used to have recursive macro's to apply -1 moderation to controversial posts, so even if 50 users moderated something up the post would tank.
Today I think it's more benign editor abuse -- they simply MISUSE the "friend or foe" system so they can sometimes publish their friend's postings first. Sometimes they publish a sensational headline from someone who registered for Slashdot THAT SAME DAY.
There's no weighting for how long you've been registered, and how much you have participated. I must have a black mark on my account "never allow to moderate", so I stopped participating here. No metamoderation anymore. There's no need to fork
I happen to like the Digg site (although they are going the way of "big self-hype like Slashdot" so some foolish dot-com investor can buy Digg for one MILLION dollars).
1517 * 3... damn, I knew I joined /. too early.
I should never have cancelled AOL...
>Is it Jigsaw's responsibility to police how people use their service?
>Now answer again, pretending that Jigsaw is an ISP or a filesharing software developer.
Wrong question.
Legal filesharing is a fact of life no matter what the RIAA/MPAA do to taint the P2P market.
P2P makes it easier to publish works (good), and so harder to shut down sources faster than they appear (bad, if you are a reactionary, or if your copyright is being violated).
You can draw an analogy to the block printing press, which in its time was just as controversial on both counts.
And by the way, the answer is YES, service providers (P2P or otherwise) ARE subject to copyright law -- they must act in accordance to a takedown notice, or court order, on any identifiable copyrighted work. The printng press manufacturer is not liable for copied books - but the press operator is.
I don't think the question should be, are they policing how the data is used.
I think the question should be, are they acting in accordance to established privacy rules and regulations.
I think anyone can argue that P2P has many legal uses. Collecting personal data on people, and "pretexting", is akin to hacking into someone's privacy. There are a patchwork of laws against this, but poorly enforced. Companies that ARE allowed to collect data on people are tightly regulated (probably not this one).
This is a database about collecting data on taxpayers - other people. There doesn't seem to be any gray area, like there is say with file distribution.
This is more for the sibling posters - the parent poster `gets it`.
m )
I've got extra HDMI and DVIHDMI adapters.
I really don't want any more!
The irony is:
I ordered my HDMI cable from one of those "direct cable" sites online (works great). This was for a Sceptre LCD TV ordered online from Costco. The online info clearly listed a bunch of other cables and parts, but did -not- mention HDMI, so I thought I needed one.
Opened up the TV crate, and there was the HDMI cable.
Then the Comcast guy shows up to hookup the HD DVR... another set of HDMI cables.
Bottom line: all the babies crying there's no HDMI cable, don't have HDTV to begin with. Sony is promising a LOT for the PS3... they've overpromised in fact, and there's no going back on the big specs. Sony made a big gamble on the BlueRay player, which to me is more significant than the Cell CPU. EVERY PS3 is going to have a BlueRay drive, so the installed base will be 100% unlike the X-Box360, which will have an "add on" HD-DVD drive.
No one has EVER successfully "added" formats to a gaming console:
For the Atari VCS, failed (Spectra SuperCharger: http://members.cox.net/rcolbert/schookup.htm)
Coleco failed (Coleco Adam expansion kit: http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/comp/adam.ht
Sega failed (Genesis Megadrive: http://cgfm2.emuviews.com/gen.php)
To this day, I bet most Windows games ship on CD not DVD (correct me if I am wrong, but if this has changed it is very recent and still no clear market format)
50GB is an amazing platform to write games, and even though the first generation of games will not take advantage of it, eventually they will. This is true even if the extra "bloat" doesn't add to gameplay - not right away anyways. I used to remember all the C64 games were written for 64K, and all the ATARI XL/XE games were written for 48K... even during the twilight of the 8-bit platform.
As far as I'm concerned, game systems should ship with NO AV cable since whatever they include is not going to satisfy everyone:
A lot of people wil be looking for adapter cables to operate the nexgen game systems with:
DVI (plenty of early HD sets have this instead of HDMI)
VGA (ditto)
component
S-Video
I have a draw full of old composite cables, and a ton more in the garage.
The point is, people never upgrade game platforms. Never. It's a stretch I know to factor HDMI cables in here, but every nickel you can save somewhere just makes the rest of the platform more viable. (I understand the Blue-Ray gamble, but the Cell-processor gamble is just stupid "not invented here". I would have chopped the Cell processor - too big of a question mark. What's to be gained??).
Anyways - anyone still not believing this "excusing" of the HDMI cable, please take an moment to window-shop a brand-new car. Then you'll really understand what it means to have to "option" things out.
I'm pretty sure the OGG Vorbis people have a FAQ, which tells you OGG is NOT GPL licensed.
:-/
What keeps me from relying on OGG is the players. All my CD collection is in FLAC format and I can batch convert to any format.
Problem is, I want a OGG-capable MP3 player that is "dock compatible" with the iPod.
I'm not holding my breath for Apple to start supporting OGG - aint happening.
I hope Page Zoom makes it into the FF2 feature set.
I still use FireFox every day on my PC, but Opera and IE7 has a a REAL page Zoom (not just simple text-resize like FF).
Page Zoom is important on larger-screen hi-res displays. Opera 9.01 is really usable on a 42" display, from 5 feet away, running at 1920x1080 (HTPC setup). FireFox would only be usable if I keep changing the resolution to a much lower res.
The real problem of course is Windows and Linux don't have solid, consistent and well-supported methods for adapting to displays that aren't 72dpi. The OS doesn't know how to scale the UI to different DPIs, as you expect a printer to do. When you change resolution, things should simply be *sharper* but the same size (well, not always the same size or the resolution can be wasted, but you know what I mean).
I realize I'm trivializing the problems in the technology. Until it's fixed, multimedia apps (including browsers) can hack around the problem by offering scaling mechanisms. WinAMP does it. Opera's 200% zoom rocks.
But really, is the browser so important anymore now that there is competition? It's pretty amazing how much better IE7 is than the older versions (and I am a web UI developer who hated IE). Not perfect, but lots better. It's really a crime though if you think how Microsoft abused their market share from 1999-2006 and basically did NOTHING with CSS and standards. I'm convinced if MS remained competitive during that time, the web would be far better a place today, technology-wise.
Have him work for the state parks system.
With his help, the UK could reintroduce the "tree" into their ecosystem.
>>"Linux users have better support for iPods than windows itunes users do - they can copy songs off the iPod to another computer (without stupid third party addons, weird hacks, or scary warnings)."
>Hmmmm, as there is no official iPod software for Linux users at all, I'd say all Linux software to use iPods would fall under "stupid third party addons" and "weird hacks", no?
That's a clever troll - you're being deliberately obtuse and ignoring the fact that (typical) Linux distros ship with a wide range of tools and applications.
AND if these tools are not officially from Apple, they are "stupid third party hacks".
AND, we know from Windows experience that "weird scary" utilities typically come with viruses and spyware.
It's so scary not having DRM enforcement on my DVDs, the sky is falling..
Now you have me REALLY worried, because I just noticed NONE of the software on my Linux box is "official".
What if the old coot's intent is to CAUSE exactly this type of escalaton?
Here in the US, you can kill people for invading your home.
The old coot could be sleeping with a shotgun full of rocksalt, or worse.
Or he might have a camera on it so he can have the kid arrested for trespassing.
Sometimes it takes a lawyer to get the police to do their job. That's the reason nuisances are tolerated in some neighborhoods more than others... poor people don't get lawyers (unless there's a jackpot involved, or an especially idealist young lawyer who doesn't need to eat or anything).
>its really no different from any other "discount membership club" except the product you save on.
;-)
Bingo! I posted exactly this sentiment in a post just moments ago. Amazon's threshhold for patentability is, 'has this scenario' been patented. A scenario is a situation, not an invention.
Now, I bet you $2 either:
* you get marked down redundant (even though you were first -- moderators don't REALLY check timestamps), OR
* A testy moderator marks this post 'flamebait', for no reason other than noting the above. (WTH, my karma's maxed for the last 5 years anyway. Bad moderators burn in hell.).
Let's see.
>Off the top of my head, I can't think of any prior art for 'all-you-can-eat' shipping
There's plenty of prior art for an 'up front fee' (membership) that gets you a discount on further purchases. Costcos, BJ's Warehouse and Sams club folow this model.
Yes, it's not SHIPPING, but that's Semantics. It's a customer fee to lower an undertermined number of recurring future fees. Even if you believe a BUSINESS PROCESS is a valid patent (and that is debatable), this example does not pass the non-obvious invention test.
I would not be surprised if USPO they allow a patent for a particlar COLOR. Just describe the physics of bouncing white light off it, and how the resulting light is affected (colored). You think of a slick marketing name for it to nudge the clerk that this is legit. I'm pretty sure anyone can come up with a color shade that will thwart ALL attempts at prooving prior art. It's still fails the obvious test.
The kids are full of shit, and the article summary's got more spn than a Fox story on the inheritance tax ('death tax').
.... What was that about breaking off branches?
* They're on "public" land, and they "remove a few small dead branches from a cherry tree" is sandwiched between references that they were "playing in the tree".
Oh, you mean they were DESTROYING the cherry tree. Vandalism. OK
No matter. Those kind of trees grow like weeds anyway. Especially in the UK, where there are an overabundance of trees to begin with...
Here's what the story real says:
* The kids were looking for material to build a "treehouse".
It doesn't say if they were going to build it on THEIR property, or SOMEONE ELSE'S property. Most likely the latter.
As far as I'm concerned, they all aught to get switched, and then spend their next few weekends working for the park service cleaning up OTHER people's vandalism.
This boo-hoo about their "DNS" and all is a bit overblown. The kids set out to break someone else's property, cart off the goodies, and now they are deliberately misleading (or lying even) by portraying it as "playing in a tree". The details ARE in the story if anyone bothers to RTFA.
>With all do respect, I shouldn't have to be a "decent" web designer to be able to put up a personal homepage that looks the same in all browsers.
True, but your blame is misplaced.
CSS isn't perfect, but it's far easier if you wipe away ALL MSIE HACKS (or "browser hacks" if you can't bear to disrespect Microsoft).
I've been working on an internal-use web control panel for a hosting company, and CSS is a breeze. Templates are so much easier to manage, and there's less temptation to inject HTML tags into PHP.
I validate for CSS2.1, and on RARE occasions I add browser hacks. We're content to drop MSIE6 support as this is an internal application. We don't use something so exotic in CSS that it isn't supported in FireFox, which says FireFox is pretty good. If Microsoft chooses not to comply with CSS2, I blame them, and I am relieved this is not an external website... otherwise I WOULD be doing stupid box model tricks that escaped the attention of Microsoft software QA.
I'm glad MSIE7 is getting better. Microsoft tried to break the web and force their own fork of CSS. They lost. Now they are playing nice in this space... at least until they catch up.
(I can just see in a few years, MS encouraging "Avalon" XML and Windows forms on websites... *shudder*).