to not allow javascript code which opens a new window to execute, unless that code is executed in direct response to a mouse click.
Boy, it's a good thing advertisers aren't hiring good programmers, because there sure seems to be a hole there you could drive a truck through.
Of course, you could also block pop-ups completely with a different option, but "in response to mouse-click" usually seems liek a good compromise because it sometimes is actually desired, like for sites that open (real, desired) content in new windows (much as we may wish they wouldn't).
Actually, I've lost track of how Mozilla's preferences handle this in the various versions. I know "Open unrequested windows" used to be just another one of the checkboxes under things to allow scripts to do, but then they moved it out into a whole separate pane for pop-ups. I seem to remember (vaguely) that there was a version (or maybe it was a different browser) where instead of just yes/no, it was multiple-choice, like:
Allow scripts to open new windows? ( ) Yes ( ) No (X) Only on mouse click
Lacking such an option, you can always still just turn JavaScript off completely (or site-by-site?)
I know, we're all lawful good
Actually, I've always thought of myself as Neutral Good (but with Lawful tendencies).
Wow. Moral dilemma. I could tell you what bill_mcgonigle's talking about, but I don't exactly like the idea of spreading such dangerous knowledge either. Then again, it's not like it's non-obvious or anything.
Your black-and-white portrayal of the situation is your weakness.
And your faith in your friends is yours...
Uh, sorry.
Seriously, yes, there are no doubt at least three groups of people who download music: (A) those who would otherwise have bought it, but don't because they got it for free (B) those who would not have bought it otherwise (C) those who "try-before-they-buy" and like what they download so much they go buy it when they otherwise would not have.
I don't think anyone can honestly claim to have a really good idea of just what fraction of downloading falls in each category.
We need to admit that the argument that "(C) is more than (A), so it'd be in their own best interest to just leave us alone, the idiots" is a bit short on supporting evidence -- not that it isn't true, but just that some hard numbers would make it more credible.
However, I'd say the industry's PR is far worse in the honesty department, as they consistently, completely ignore the entire concept of both (B) and (C), accusing everybody of being in (A).
And, regardless of the truth of the (A)/(B)/(C) breakdown, they are certainly shooting themselves in the foot by being so heavy-handed, simply because alienating your customers and making them hate you is just not good business. You shouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
they see "music" on it, and they either think that it is somehow necessary to get those, or that their music will somehow sound better with those.
Can you absolutely confirm that they are in fact wrong to believe this? Because, though I believe you're right, this very question has had me doubting my own sanity for the past week or so.
I was trying to convince my girlfriend that the pieces of plastic are physically identical and the "music" CD-Rs are just overpriced due to the RIAA tax, but she insists there's a difference (and I was just barely smart enough to stop arguing before it became a major fight). Thing is, she claims (fiercely) that she's had a CD burned on a "data" blank not work on somebody's CD player, while the same music, burned on the same PC, but on a "music" blank, did work on the same CD player. It's hard to argue against a first-hand account of something I didn't see, but then again, I know people who swear up and down that they personally saw a VHS cassette melt when they attempted to copy it.
Before reading this thread, my understanding was that the only compatibility issues were with very old (like, first-generation) CD players -- something about the brightness of the laser and/or darkness of the dyes making the old players unable to read CD-R at all (or in some cases, CD-Rs work but not CD-RWs (?)). I can summarize my understanding of this thread so far as: there are actually physical differences between "data" and "music" CD-Rs, but the only machines that should have compatibility issues are standalone recorders, e.g., the Phillips ones.
But that would still contradict the anecdote: as near as I can figure from what she says, her CDs were both burned on a normal PC, not a standalone recorder, and if it was an old player, it shouldn't have been able to read either CD-R. Are there also players that (whether due to technical shortcomings or AHRA compliance) are sensitive to the ATIP (or for whatever other reason), and can read "music" but not "data"?
The only other possibilities that I can think of are: 1. What she thought was a "data" CD-R was actually a CD-RW. 2. We're wrong (i.e., there actually is a difference that matters in some cases). 3. She's wrong (which is of only academic interest, since there'd be no point in my restarting the argument, but I'd still like to know the truth for myself).
It ain't successful 'til it's consummated. (I guess they could cyber, but that wouldn't really count.) Let's get him down safe, and then call it successful.
WNight gave more detail, but basically, the way I heard it is that Ctrl-Alt-Del is a non-maskable interrupt, which guarantees that the kernel gets it, so you know you're typing to a real login prompt and not a password-grabber.
Having the sheepish/apologetic call come from McBride is a little weird; having him talking about bodily fluids might be a bit more appropriate. The phone call should be about McBride, from some other OSS figure (Maybe RedHat, maybe Linus, maybe ESR?), and to IBM. Then you'd have:
ESR to IBM: "One of our distribution publishers... went a little funny in the head... he went and did a silly thing."
Also, "the suits" should be "the license":
"You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the license.... The license, Dmitri.... The General Public License!"
Please explain sub-clause (b) of point #2 some more.
GPL has caused an amazing mess where copyrights, patents and trademarks have been thrown in
Yes, there is a mess, and there's been at least some quiet hand-wringing for years over the fact that it hasn't been really tested and nobody really knows how much force it has. [*1]
but it arrogantly claims to supercede governmental authority to determine the assignment and licensing of ownership.
Eh? I'm not going to go into my own redundant version of how the GPL works, but where exactly do you get "supercede" from? So I decide that I'm willing to grant you certain rights regarding use of something for which I own the copyright, but only subject to certain conditions, which you can either agree to, or not accept the rights that I'm offering to grant. How does this "supercede governmental authority" more than any other commercial/proprietary EULA?
-- By the way, that's the real danger of this situation: even if(/when?) SCOs claims are found to be baseless, nobody will ever forget that the basic scenario of non-free code being mistakenly incorporated into an open codebase is plausible, and that such an event really could expose everybody involved to some liability. So the new FUD angle, which will be really hard to counter, will be "Well, what if the next IP claim turns out to be for real...?"
I guess mine is that I can still bring down a whole system with a single runaway process. I've done scalability tests on sone Java servlets where, when Tomcat hit the JVM's memory limit, the java process pinned the CPU at 99.9% and even a "kill -9" failed to get rid of it. That was the last thing I saw before all my ssh sessions froze and I was forced to go for the Big Red Button. This didn't happen all the time, or even all that often, but there were definitely a couple of times that a hard reset was required.
Sure, Tomcat's poor handling of the out-of-memory condition may be Java'a and/or Tomcat's fault, but locking up the whole system is Linux' fault. I have found Linux to be "very" stable, but "very" is still short of "perfectly".
Maybe I spent too much time at IBM hanging around the mainframe snobs (who are to us Unix guys as we are to Windows guys), but I do consider a "real" OS to be one that will simply never allow itself to be brought down by one errant user, no matter what he's doing.
Where the fuck is the start button on either of the 'easy to use' desktops for unix? It's a button with a stupid smarmy little bugger of an icon
You're right, that's nowhere near as intuitive as clicking "Start" in order to Stop (i.e., shut down), or pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del in order to Start (i.e., log in).
(And, yes, I know that the Ctrl-Alt-Del is actually a good security feature -- it's still normally the shutdown command.)
As a friend of mine pointed out, the answer to the crowd of "RTFM!"-shouters at large is: "Well, WTFM!" -- "Write The _ Manual!" (or, "Where's The _ Manual?")
Don't just think about solving a static problem faster, it's also about solving a problem better through the use of more variables.
You're right and all, but the pedant in me can't help but point out that it's not necessarily sucha qualitative difference as you suggest. First, pick the numebr of variables that you want to use. Now, it's a static problem, and the only difference between two machines is how fast each one will solve it.
On th other hand, you've got a good point, in that the difference can be "all-or-nothing" for a given problem if it crosses an externally-imposed threshold, such that the results are only timely for so long, and are only useful if they come within that period. A weather "prediction" program that doesn't complete until after the weather has happened is still intellectually interesting (worth doing for evaluating the post-dictive power of your model, and in anticipation of someday having a faster computer), but you could have just looked out the window.
Oh, and the other way that a more powerful computer can be qualitatively superior is if your dataset / model / algorithm requires more memory than the smaller computer has, so it can't run at all.
Funny, I thought the biggest profit for cell phone companies was retention of customers.
From what I've seen, their biggest profit must be from contract-termination. Seeing as those highwaymen charge you the full base-rate for the remainder of the contract term if you cancel early, the real money must be coming from the young girls [*1] (for values of "young" including not just teenagers, but up into the early/mid 20s) who don't know anything about money and sign up only to cancel it three months later. They'd probably rather not keep you as a customer -- then they'd have to actually provide you with a service, instead of just taking your money for nothing.
I thought one year was bad when I first got mine, but now I guess it's two, and aren't some of them asking for -- Dear Lord -- THREE years? At ~$40/month, that's almost $1500 that you're committing to pay, whether you stay with the service or not! It's pure piracy.
-- [1] Is it still sexist if it's based on true personal observations? I know several girls, ~24 years old, who've done this, some of them more than once in just a few months.
Since the postfix increment operator yields an rvalue (unlike the prefix increment operator, which yields an lvalue), ++c++ is not a valid expression in C++.
"...in C", I would have said, since in order for the original joke to work, it has to be interpreted in plain C syntax.
But anyway, you bring up a good point: C++ should really have been called "++C" all along, since the expression "C++" increments C (as intended) but returns the old value, not the new incremented value, but you'd want the expression to evaluate to the new language.
Also, my language-laywering is a bit rusty, but if the pre-increment operator yields an lvalue as you claim, doesn't that mean that "++++C" should be valid? If so, why does it give me an error "invalid lvalue in increment"? Note: "invalid lvalue", not "not an lvalue" -- are there different kinds of lvalues, or something?
I noticed that too -- it's pretty predicatable that pilots' attitude is to want complete control of their planes and to oppose anything that compromises that. But if you read on, this guy's comment is not quite as dumb as you think: he points out that, while of course the pilots aren't expected to like the idea, the practical thing would be to realize that their other alternatives are:
- If we protect cities with surface-to-air missiles instead, you can just get shot down, but at least you're still in control.
- The other proposed electronic systems would remotely commandeer the plane's controls completely, which you'd think they'd find even more offensive.
- Do they really want to change nothing, seeing that the status quo is "hijacking == near-certain death"?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you could also block pop-ups completely with a different option, but "in response to mouse-click" usually seems liek a good compromise because it sometimes is actually desired, like for sites that open (real, desired) content in new windows (much as we may wish they wouldn't).
Actually, I've lost track of how Mozilla's preferences handle this in the various versions. I know "Open unrequested windows" used to be just another one of the checkboxes under things to allow scripts to do, but then they moved it out into a whole separate pane for pop-ups. I seem to remember (vaguely) that there was a version (or maybe it was a different browser) where instead of just yes/no, it was multiple-choice, like:
Allow scripts to open new windows?
( ) Yes
( ) No
(X) Only on mouse click
Lacking such an option, you can always still just turn JavaScript off completely (or site-by-site?)
I know, we're all lawful good
Actually, I've always thought of myself as Neutral Good (but with Lawful tendencies).
Wow. Moral dilemma. I could tell you what bill_mcgonigle's talking about, but I don't exactly like the idea of spreading such dangerous knowledge either. Then again, it's not like it's non-obvious or anything.
Your black-and-white portrayal of the situation is your weakness.
And your faith in your friends is yours...
Uh, sorry.
Seriously, yes, there are no doubt at least three groups of people who download music:
(A) those who would otherwise have bought it, but don't because they got it for free
(B) those who would not have bought it otherwise
(C) those who "try-before-they-buy" and like what they download so much they go buy it when they otherwise would not have.
I don't think anyone can honestly claim to have a really good idea of just what fraction of downloading falls in each category.
We need to admit that the argument that "(C) is more than (A), so it'd be in their own best interest to just leave us alone, the idiots" is a bit short on supporting evidence -- not that it isn't true, but just that some hard numbers would make it more credible.
However, I'd say the industry's PR is far worse in the honesty department, as they consistently, completely ignore the entire concept of both (B) and (C), accusing everybody of being in (A).
And, regardless of the truth of the (A)/(B)/(C) breakdown, they are certainly shooting themselves in the foot by being so heavy-handed, simply because alienating your customers and making them hate you is just not good business. You shouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
they see "music" on it, and they either think that it is somehow necessary to get those, or that their music will somehow sound better with those.
Can you absolutely confirm that they are in fact wrong to believe this? Because, though I believe you're right, this very question has had me doubting my own sanity for the past week or so.
I was trying to convince my girlfriend that the pieces of plastic are physically identical and the "music" CD-Rs are just overpriced due to the RIAA tax, but she insists there's a difference (and I was just barely smart enough to stop arguing before it became a major fight). Thing is, she claims (fiercely) that she's had a CD burned on a "data" blank not work on somebody's CD player, while the same music, burned on the same PC, but on a "music" blank, did work on the same CD player. It's hard to argue against a first-hand account of something I didn't see, but then again, I know people who swear up and down that they personally saw a VHS cassette melt when they attempted to copy it.
Before reading this thread, my understanding was that the only compatibility issues were with very old (like, first-generation) CD players -- something about the brightness of the laser and/or darkness of the dyes making the old players unable to read CD-R at all (or in some cases, CD-Rs work but not CD-RWs (?)). I can summarize my understanding of this thread so far as: there are actually physical differences between "data" and "music" CD-Rs, but the only machines that should have compatibility issues are standalone recorders, e.g., the Phillips ones.
But that would still contradict the anecdote: as near as I can figure from what she says, her CDs were both burned on a normal PC, not a standalone recorder, and if it was an old player, it shouldn't have been able to read either CD-R. Are there also players that (whether due to technical shortcomings or AHRA compliance) are sensitive to the ATIP (or for whatever other reason), and can read "music" but not "data"?
The only other possibilities that I can think of are:
1. What she thought was a "data" CD-R was actually a CD-RW.
2. We're wrong (i.e., there actually is a difference that matters in some cases).
3. She's wrong (which is of only academic interest, since there'd be no point in my restarting the argument, but I'd still like to know the truth for myself).
I'm sure Photoshop and Outlook cost a ton of money of develop. Does that mean nobody should use Gimp and Evolution?
No, that's not the reason.
It ain't successful 'til it's consummated. (I guess they could cyber, but that wouldn't really count.) Let's get him down safe, and then call it successful.
WNight gave more detail, but basically, the way I heard it is that Ctrl-Alt-Del is a non-maskable interrupt, which guarantees that the kernel gets it, so you know you're typing to a real login prompt and not a password-grabber.
Having the sheepish/apologetic call come from McBride is a little weird; having him talking about bodily fluids might be a bit more appropriate. The phone call should be about McBride, from some other OSS figure (Maybe RedHat, maybe Linus, maybe ESR?), and to IBM. Then you'd have:
ESR to IBM: "One of our distribution publishers
Also, "the suits" should be "the license":
"You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the license.
Please explain sub-clause (b) of point #2 some more.
GPL has caused an amazing mess where copyrights, patents and trademarks have been thrown in
Yes, there is a mess, and there's been at least some quiet hand-wringing for years over the fact that it hasn't been really tested and nobody really knows how much force it has. [*1]
but it arrogantly claims to supercede governmental authority to determine the assignment and licensing of ownership.
Eh? I'm not going to go into my own redundant version of how the GPL works, but where exactly do you get "supercede" from? So I decide that I'm willing to grant you certain rights regarding use of something for which I own the copyright, but only subject to certain conditions, which you can either agree to, or not accept the rights that I'm offering to grant. How does this "supercede governmental authority" more than any other commercial/proprietary EULA?
--
By the way, that's the real danger of this situation: even if(/when?) SCOs claims are found to be baseless, nobody will ever forget that the basic scenario of non-free code being mistakenly incorporated into an open codebase is plausible, and that such an event really could expose everybody involved to some liability. So the new FUD angle, which will be really hard to counter, will be "Well, what if the next IP claim turns out to be for real...?"
I guess mine is that I can still bring down a whole system with a single runaway process. I've done scalability tests on sone Java servlets where, when Tomcat hit the JVM's memory limit, the java process pinned the CPU at 99.9% and even a "kill -9" failed to get rid of it. That was the last thing I saw before all my ssh sessions froze and I was forced to go for the Big Red Button. This didn't happen all the time, or even all that often, but there were definitely a couple of times that a hard reset was required.
Sure, Tomcat's poor handling of the out-of-memory condition may be Java'a and/or Tomcat's fault, but locking up the whole system is Linux' fault. I have found Linux to be "very" stable, but "very" is still short of "perfectly".
Maybe I spent too much time at IBM hanging around the mainframe snobs (who are to us Unix guys as we are to Windows guys), but I do consider a "real" OS to be one that will simply never allow itself to be brought down by one errant user, no matter what he's doing.
Where the fuck is the start button on either of the 'easy to use' desktops for unix? It's a button with a stupid smarmy little bugger of an icon
You're right, that's nowhere near as intuitive as clicking "Start" in order to Stop (i.e., shut down), or pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del in order to Start (i.e., log in).
(And, yes, I know that the Ctrl-Alt-Del is actually a good security feature -- it's still normally the shutdown command.)
As a friend of mine pointed out, the answer to the crowd of "RTFM!"-shouters at large is: "Well, WTFM!" -- "Write The _ Manual!" (or, "Where's The _ Manual?")
Guess Russia's not so Soviet anymore...
Don't just think about solving a static problem faster, it's also about solving a problem better through the use of more variables.
You're right and all, but the pedant in me can't help but point out that it's not necessarily sucha qualitative difference as you suggest. First, pick the numebr of variables that you want to use. Now, it's a static problem, and the only difference between two machines is how fast each one will solve it.
On th other hand, you've got a good point, in that the difference can be "all-or-nothing" for a given problem if it crosses an externally-imposed threshold, such that the results are only timely for so long, and are only useful if they come within that period. A weather "prediction" program that doesn't complete until after the weather has happened is still intellectually interesting (worth doing for evaluating the post-dictive power of your model, and in anticipation of someday having a faster computer), but you could have just looked out the window.
Oh, and the other way that a more powerful computer can be qualitatively superior is if your dataset / model / algorithm requires more memory than the smaller computer has, so it can't run at all.
Funny, I thought the biggest profit for cell phone companies was retention of customers.
From what I've seen, their biggest profit must be from contract-termination. Seeing as those highwaymen charge you the full base-rate for the remainder of the contract term if you cancel early, the real money must be coming from the young girls [*1] (for values of "young" including not just teenagers, but up into the early/mid 20s) who don't know anything about money and sign up only to cancel it three months later. They'd probably rather not keep you as a customer -- then they'd have to actually provide you with a service, instead of just taking your money for nothing.
I thought one year was bad when I first got mine, but now I guess it's two, and aren't some of them asking for -- Dear Lord -- THREE years? At ~$40/month, that's almost $1500 that you're committing to pay, whether you stay with the service or not! It's pure piracy.
--
[1] Is it still sexist if it's based on true personal observations? I know several girls, ~24 years old, who've done this, some of them more than once in just a few months.
Nearly half of all people are below average
A bit more than half, I should think.
...Hell residents brace for blizzard conditions.
Seriously, you're right. I'm highly surprised that they of all companies would be doing this. Strange world.
shaking in his/her proverbial space boots
Remind me, how does the proverb about the space boots go? I don't recall hearing that one.
You forgot the strangely appropriate "Mac user: Muser".
Pro is to Con as Progress is to ___________?
Regress.
So the joke was that you increment it, but it returns the old value.
Wow, you're right -- it's even funnier that way. Thanks.
Refcounting was a Microsoft innovation...
Sigh.
Since the postfix increment operator yields an rvalue (unlike the prefix increment operator, which yields an lvalue), ++c++ is not a valid expression in C++.
"...in C", I would have said, since in order for the original joke to work, it has to be interpreted in plain C syntax.
But anyway, you bring up a good point: C++ should really have been called "++C" all along, since the expression "C++" increments C (as intended) but returns the old value, not the new incremented value, but you'd want the expression to evaluate to the new language.
Also, my language-laywering is a bit rusty, but if the pre-increment operator yields an lvalue as you claim, doesn't that mean that "++++C" should be valid? If so, why does it give me an error "invalid lvalue in increment"? Note: "invalid lvalue", not "not an lvalue" -- are there different kinds of lvalues, or something?
I noticed that too -- it's pretty predicatable that pilots' attitude is to want complete control of their planes and to oppose anything that compromises that. But if you read on, this guy's comment is not quite as dumb as you think: he points out that, while of course the pilots aren't expected to like the idea, the practical thing would be to realize that their other alternatives are:
- If we protect cities with surface-to-air missiles instead, you can just get shot down, but at least you're still in control.
- The other proposed electronic systems would remotely commandeer the plane's controls completely, which you'd think they'd find even more offensive.
- Do they really want to change nothing, seeing that the status quo is "hijacking == near-certain death"?
Pop-up control. I used IE for the first time in quite awhile today. Good gods, how do people stand it?
IHNTA. IJLS "Good gods, how do people stand it?" I mean, really -- Good Gods! How do people stand it?