Does Microsoft need more free publicity? If they could choose, would they want their name appearing next to words like Ruckus? That sounds like BAD publicity. The NYT headline is dubious at best. It is not a great way to get their message accross. They have much more advantageous means at their disposal.
All advertising is aggressive, but passive-aggressive is the least likely to offend.
I quit watching tv, mostly because of the adds. It infuriated me to be paying for a service and then not recieving anything useful. It was really hard for me to enjoy Law and Order with all those commercials interrupting. And I got the feeling the show was being structured around the commercial breaks, and that was too much like pot psychosis for me to handle.
Since the internet came along, I quit subscribing to the daily paper. I get more news than I need online, and it suits me better.
When I'm browsing the web, I disable java and animated gifs and don't allow images to load that come from external servers. So, a lot of add content is effectively blocked. What I do see I can tolerate, because it isn't blinking at me. (Flash notwithstanding. I like it for stuff like BBC and the Requiem for a Dreampage. As soon as advertisers go too far in co-opting it, it's hasta la vista Flash.)
What has my dander up lately is product-placements in movies. And the fact that movie makers need to invent words like "toyables" to explain themselves. That's just one more reason to prefer independent and foriegn films to Hollywood films.
Most of the adds that reach me still come through the mail. Since we have listed our names with the DMA, most of the junk mail we receive is stuff we actually asked for, or catalogues from retailers that we actually use. (N.B., the DMA also has services to cut down on junk phone calls and email.)
Targetted adds that accompany subscriptions are acceptable to me in principle, but the service I'm subscribing for better be pretty darned good, and the adds better be right on target. When it comes to media, there's just too information out there to put up with a lot of distractions.
I use google/linux quite a bit, and agree that that sort of service contains the germ of a revenue stream. And yet...
Anybody know how they filter? You know, if you search google/bsd for GNU/Darwin, it returns 187 hits, but if you plain google BSD GNU/Darwin you get 933. And most of those seem pretty darned relevant and potentially useful. So I wonder what value the/bsd filter adds.
My presumption is that in order for this kind of service to work, a knowledgable person would have to cull and sort and make decisions about what to include in a topic area. This is not the kind of thing you can do once and leave it at that, as knowledge in many fields is constantly evolving, or at least appearing to change. Can anybody imagine what kind of technology google would be needed to obviate the need for hiring a googleplex of librarians?
I for one am heartened. Microsoft knows that people use Opera and Mozilla and Konq-- and they're frightened. They can't even pretend to compete. They so firmly believe in their own inadequacy, they design websites to compensate for it, and even their rationalizations are strangely inadequate. Faced with the prospect of existential anhiliation, they cringe.
IMHO Locust Abortion Technician is the best Butthole Surfers record. Why shouldn't Touch n Go want to make money off of it? Didn't they provide the sound techs or studio engineers? That record did a lot to promote the Surfers. They shouldn't feel too exploited.
Did you ever go to a Butthole Surfers show? Now that was insane. The second time they came to town, they could have charged $100 a head and still sold out. Without Locust, they wouldn't have had that level of success. Maybe they didn't need to deal with Touch n Go in order to make Locust, but they did and they should live with it.
Even if Touch n Go wants to make money, it's not the same as what the Music Recording Cartel is doing, i.e. using their monopoly of distribution networks to jack up prices and then going after the kids who use MP3's and just don't respect the suits who want to shake them down. And indies like Touch n Go aren't writing legislation to strip us of our liberties. (Granted, they're probably not too upset about shit like the Bono extension. But as long as they stay out of the RIAA, I don't have a problem with them. But hell, if indy X pisses you off, be pissed off.)
So just fuck the RIAA, and fuck the poor jerks who signed with RIAA members. If a "recording artist" wants my money, he's going to have to sign with a decent label. And if a musician wants my money, he's going to have to come to my town and perform.
If you're offended by the RIAA, don't buy anything from these companies. For the music I like (jazz), there are a few alternatives, but it will suck not to buy ECM or Chesky or Blue Note. But so be it.
The mail in question supposedly came from Malaysia. Most Malays are Muslim, and Malays are the largest ethnic group in Malaysia, making up about half the population. The rest are ethnically Chinese, Indian, or indiginous (Dayak, Kadazan, what have you). AFAIK Neither the ethnicity nor the religion of the person who sent the letter has been reported on the wires.
In breaking news, the Observer quotes US intelligence sourcres pointing to Iraq as the origin of the Anthrax.
how can you possibly use all those cycles and all that RAM?
Nautilus.
Seriously though, some GIMP filters totally eat up my memory (196MB and a 128MB swap) and hammer my 534Mhz Celeron.
As things are, I tend to handle image browsing and image editing as distinct activities. Ideally, I would like to use GIMP in conjuntion with Nautilus or something like it to do both at once.
For me it's not a question of bloat. (Not that Nautilus couldn't be faster.) What's bloat to you is useful to me, and I want to use it to full advantage. So a 1.6Ghz processor with 512MB RAM is definitely on my wishlist.
And I don't think there's a single browser on the market that fully implements PNG
The png homepage has a pretty good summary of png support in browsers.
Most of these I haven't tried, but Mozilla (incl. Galeon) and Konqueror seem to render my pngs correctly.
If full support includes mng, perhaps you're correct. If you mean full support for alpha transparency and gamma, then you need to find a better browser.
Senators' websites include form-submits for sending email. They all seem to have email addresses at senate.gov. My conclusion: Senators want you to send them email.
Furthermore, the Congress debates and enacts stupid laws that impact the way we use the internet. If they can't be bothered to respond to email, that is a sign of the poor quality of their representation.
Our Representative in the House has responded personally to at least one email. Our Senators have sent form letters.
I think auto-responders are appropriate in some cases. As long somebody is tallying the fors and againsts on a given piece of legislation, I'm not dreadfully concerned that my emails aren't answered personally.
So, to summarize the benefits of emailing your Congressperson:
Email is better than saying nothing.
Email can index the compentency of your Congressperson to legislate internet use
Email is fast. Did your letter in opposition to the USA Act arrive on time?
that annoying PDF plug-in that usually crashes my browser [mozilla.org].
I use xpdf with Mozilla 0.9.3. It doesn't crash, and it's not bloated at all. Also, I've had success with ggv. These are standard with many Linux distros.
One of the goals of the Patent Policy Working Group is to address the issue of "submarine patents" (see the w3c's patent-response ). The RAND proposal, however, is patently ill-suited to remedy this problem. Fundamentally, submarine patents represent a hostile and abusive relationship towards the w3c and open standards. In these cases it is the patent-holders who are responsible for the squandering of human resources and amicability (if such things can be squandered). It should not be the responsibility of the working groups or the w3c as a whole to fix things. Rather what is needed is a fair procedure for excluding those members who refuse to co-operate.
The Patent Group's
working draft identified the need for disclosure of patents as a point of consesus:
* Better disclosure: A clear process, to which Members are committed and/or bound to ensure better disclosure of essential patents as a condition of Membership, is vital.
What does the RAND liscencing scheme add to this proposed solution? My view is that it creates more problems than it solves. If the intent is truly to solve the problem of submarine patents, nothing further is needed than to establish rules of patent disclosure.
____
Funny thing, the way this works out on a personal computer is that pretty much every program the user runs needs the ability to access the user's data. Otherwise the user is continually tripping over the restrictions and being forced to enter passwords.
Uh, I'm not sure what you mean here by user's data, but under Linux I have no problem running most all programs unprivileged. User data is stored in hidden directories in the home directory. Files I can't access unprivileged include config files and programs in/sbin that could radically alter the system. In short, the system is both secure and usable.
As for personal stuff, I keep things I really want to keep in a separate partition. That way, when I do re-install my OS, for whatever reason, nothing valuable is lost.
Multiuser OSs are just that, and not optimally designed for personal computers.
When I was like a total newbie at Linux, I might have agreed. But not anymore. It's trivial for example to edit fstab to allow users to mount local drives. In our home, we share a computer and an internet connection. Having a multiuser system ensures that each of us has a desktop environment optimized for our computing needs. Home networks are becoming increasingly common, and multiuser systems are ideally suited to meeting the requirements of such small networks.
The sudo man in Linux (Redhat 7.1) is the same. It's unclear from this description that the user's password refers to the target user. So, if a user wants to su root, they must supply the root password, not their normal password.
You don't need Nautilus to enjoy the benefits of Ximian. And you certainly don't need to let it cripple your desktop.
If you want to keep Nautilus as a file manager but not have it draw your desktop, go to Preferences--Windows & Desktop and deselect "Use Nautilus to draw the desktop." This will improve the speed and usability of your Gnome.
You may want to add gmc to your menus if any of your users are uncomfortable with cli.
IMO Nautilus offers many features not present in gmc; for instance, the ability to easily work with hidden files. But gmc is still indispensable for quick file browsing.
I don't want to experience anything sold, boxed or processed, as a career.
I don't want to process anything boxed, sold, or experienced.
I don't want to buy or sell or repair anything boxed, processed or experienced. You know, as a career. I don't want to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Microsoft need more free publicity? If they could choose, would they want their name appearing next to words like Ruckus? That sounds like BAD publicity. The NYT headline is dubious at best. It is not a great way to get their message accross. They have much more advantageous means at their disposal.
All advertising is aggressive, but passive-aggressive is the least likely to offend.
I quit watching tv, mostly because of the adds. It infuriated me to be paying for a service and then not recieving anything useful. It was really hard for me to enjoy Law and Order with all those commercials interrupting. And I got the feeling the show was being structured around the commercial breaks, and that was too much like pot psychosis for me to handle.
Since the internet came along, I quit subscribing to the daily paper. I get more news than I need online, and it suits me better.
When I'm browsing the web, I disable java and animated gifs and don't allow images to load that come from external servers. So, a lot of add content is effectively blocked. What I do see I can tolerate, because it isn't blinking at me. (Flash notwithstanding. I like it for stuff like BBC and the Requiem for a Dream page. As soon as advertisers go too far in co-opting it, it's hasta la vista Flash.)
What has my dander up lately is product-placements in movies. And the fact that movie makers need to invent words like "toyables" to explain themselves. That's just one more reason to prefer independent and foriegn films to Hollywood films.
Most of the adds that reach me still come through the mail. Since we have listed our names with the DMA, most of the junk mail we receive is stuff we actually asked for, or catalogues from retailers that we actually use. (N.B., the DMA also has services to cut down on junk phone calls and email.)
Targetted adds that accompany subscriptions are acceptable to me in principle, but the service I'm subscribing for better be pretty darned good, and the adds better be right on target. When it comes to media, there's just too information out there to put up with a lot of distractions.
I use google/linux quite a bit, and agree that that sort of service contains the germ of a revenue stream. And yet...
Anybody know how they filter? You know, if you search google/bsd for GNU/Darwin, it returns 187 hits, but if you plain google BSD GNU/Darwin you get 933. And most of those seem pretty darned relevant and potentially useful. So I wonder what value the /bsd filter adds.
My presumption is that in order for this kind of service to work, a knowledgable person would have to cull and sort and make decisions about what to include in a topic area. This is not the kind of thing you can do once and leave it at that, as knowledge in many fields is constantly evolving, or at least appearing to change. Can anybody imagine what kind of technology google would be needed to obviate the need for hiring a googleplex of librarians?
Fradie cats. Fradie cats. Fradie cats.
I for one am heartened. Microsoft knows that people use Opera and Mozilla and Konq-- and they're frightened. They can't even pretend to compete. They so firmly believe in their own inadequacy, they design websites to compensate for it, and even their rationalizations are strangely inadequate. Faced with the prospect of existential anhiliation, they cringe.
Point your gecko to Chadwicks. It works just fine with Mozilla 0.9.5.
IMHO Locust Abortion Technician is the best Butthole Surfers record. Why shouldn't Touch n Go want to make money off of it? Didn't they provide the sound techs or studio engineers? That record did a lot to promote the Surfers. They shouldn't feel too exploited.
Did you ever go to a Butthole Surfers show? Now that was insane. The second time they came to town, they could have charged $100 a head and still sold out. Without Locust, they wouldn't have had that level of success. Maybe they didn't need to deal with Touch n Go in order to make Locust, but they did and they should live with it.
Even if Touch n Go wants to make money, it's not the same as what the Music Recording Cartel is doing, i.e. using their monopoly of distribution networks to jack up prices and then going after the kids who use MP3's and just don't respect the suits who want to shake them down. And indies like Touch n Go aren't writing legislation to strip us of our liberties. (Granted, they're probably not too upset about shit like the Bono extension. But as long as they stay out of the RIAA, I don't have a problem with them. But hell, if indy X pisses you off, be pissed off.)
So just fuck the RIAA, and fuck the poor jerks who signed with RIAA members. If a "recording artist" wants my money, he's going to have to sign with a decent label. And if a musician wants my money, he's going to have to come to my town and perform.
Disagree. A member list can be found here.
If you're offended by the RIAA, don't buy anything from these companies. For the music I like (jazz), there are a few alternatives, but it will suck not to buy ECM or Chesky or Blue Note. But so be it.
The mail in question supposedly came from Malaysia. Most Malays are Muslim, and Malays are the largest ethnic group in Malaysia, making up about half the population. The rest are ethnically Chinese, Indian, or indiginous (Dayak, Kadazan, what have you). AFAIK Neither the ethnicity nor the religion of the person who sent the letter has been reported on the wires.
In breaking news, the Observer quotes US intelligence sourcres pointing to Iraq as the origin of the Anthrax.
how can you possibly use all those cycles and all that RAM?
Nautilus.
Seriously though, some GIMP filters totally eat up my memory (196MB and a 128MB swap) and hammer my 534Mhz Celeron.
As things are, I tend to handle image browsing and image editing as distinct activities. Ideally, I would like to use GIMP in conjuntion with Nautilus or something like it to do both at once.
For me it's not a question of bloat. (Not that Nautilus couldn't be faster.) What's bloat to you is useful to me, and I want to use it to full advantage. So a 1.6Ghz processor with 512MB RAM is definitely on my wishlist.
And I don't think there's a single browser on the market that fully implements PNG
The png homepage has a pretty good summary of png support in browsers.
Most of these I haven't tried, but Mozilla (incl. Galeon) and Konqueror seem to render my pngs correctly.
If full support includes mng, perhaps you're correct. If you mean full support for alpha transparency and gamma, then you need to find a better browser.
___
Senators' websites include form-submits for sending email. They all seem to have email addresses at senate.gov. My conclusion: Senators want you to send them email.
Furthermore, the Congress debates and enacts stupid laws that impact the way we use the internet. If they can't be bothered to respond to email, that is a sign of the poor quality of their representation.
Our Representative in the House has responded personally to at least one email. Our Senators have sent form letters.
I think auto-responders are appropriate in some cases. As long somebody is tallying the fors and againsts on a given piece of legislation, I'm not dreadfully concerned that my emails aren't answered personally.
So, to summarize the benefits of emailing your Congressperson:
___
that annoying PDF plug-in that usually crashes my browser [mozilla.org].
I use xpdf with Mozilla 0.9.3. It doesn't crash, and it's not bloated at all. Also, I've had success with ggv. These are standard with many Linux distros.
__
The Patent Group's working draft identified the need for disclosure of patents as a point of consesus:
* Better disclosure: A clear process, to which Members are committed and/or bound to ensure better disclosure of essential patents as a condition of Membership, is vital.
What does the RAND liscencing scheme add to this proposed solution? My view is that it creates more problems than it solves. If the intent is truly to solve the problem of submarine patents, nothing further is needed than to establish rules of patent disclosure.
____
Funny thing, the way this works out on a personal computer is that pretty much every program the user runs needs the ability to access the user's data. Otherwise the user is continually tripping over the restrictions and being forced to enter passwords.
/sbin that could radically alter the system. In short, the system is both secure and usable.
Uh, I'm not sure what you mean here by user's data, but under Linux I have no problem running most all programs unprivileged. User data is stored in hidden directories in the home directory. Files I can't access unprivileged include config files and programs in
As for personal stuff, I keep things I really want to keep in a separate partition. That way, when I do re-install my OS, for whatever reason, nothing valuable is lost.
Multiuser OSs are just that, and not optimally designed for personal computers.
When I was like a total newbie at Linux, I might have agreed. But not anymore. It's trivial for example to edit fstab to allow users to mount local drives. In our home, we share a computer and an internet connection. Having a multiuser system ensures that each of us has a desktop environment optimized for our computing needs. Home networks are becoming increasingly common, and multiuser systems are ideally suited to meeting the requirements of such small networks.
___
The sudo man in Linux (Redhat 7.1) is the same. It's unclear from this description that the user's password refers to the target user. So, if a user wants to su root, they must supply the root password, not their normal password.
You don't need Nautilus to enjoy the benefits of Ximian. And you certainly don't need to let it cripple your desktop.
If you want to keep Nautilus as a file manager but not have it draw your desktop, go to Preferences--Windows & Desktop and deselect "Use Nautilus to draw the desktop." This will improve the speed and usability of your Gnome.
You may want to add gmc to your menus if any of your users are uncomfortable with cli.
IMO Nautilus offers many features not present in gmc; for instance, the ability to easily work with hidden files. But gmc is still indispensable for quick file browsing.
I don't want to experience anything sold, boxed or processed, as a career.
I don't want to process anything boxed, sold, or experienced.
I don't want to buy or sell or repair anything boxed, processed or experienced. You know, as a career. I don't want to do that.