You know, I had the exact same issue this guy is having and, guess what - google gave me that exact answer (Openfire).
Of course, I used MirandaIM because I knew Miranda had Jabber support and it's a decent little client, but yeah, another vote for both Openfire and "just fucking google it next time".
When I saw this stupid "story" on the firehose I voted it down but just as I was doing it I knew a let-me-google-this-for-you kind of question like this would get posted. What a waste.
That really is a big part of the problem. People wanted Outlook/Exchange here because "Groupwise was too hard", but the funny thing is we spend more time now "Training" the same people on this product that is "so much better" and we actually get more complaints!
Well, mileage varies for everyone. I hated and loathed Groupwise and I'm very happy now that we've moved to Outlook 07. It IS different and it made me bang my head against the keyboard the first day I tried to change some email's sensitivity from normal to personal.
Other than that I didn't hear a single soul complain because whatever they use works pretty much the same.
Not that one should take at face value what Microsoft or Apple announce at their conferences, but in their developer conference the MS guys explained this evolutionary path. I saw several videos about it around the time.
The underlying tech is quite different between the Dock and the Taskbar, also they have similar but not equal philosopies behind them. I have been using XP's toolbars in pretty much the way Microsoft has done with the Taskbar.
And what happens when everybody is using the same algorithm and it tells them "go left to avoid jam" and everybody flocks in the same way? it seems a centralized monitoring would be more useful in this sense. But a lot of people don't like to be centrally monitored...
I asked about that metamod thing and I got this reply from CmdrTaco. I still don't like what they did but thought I'd share it.
I'll keep this brief. I dislike the new meta-moderation at/. system because
I think it detracts from it's original purpose of identifying and clearing
abuse in the 'normal' moderation system.
The plus/minus signs do not convevy any information about the moderation,
they seem to focus more on the post itself, and because they are a binary
choice users are put in a sort of agree/disagree situation that doesn't add
to the discussion and rather substracts from it.
Here's the thing... if I ask you "Is this comment insightful" I know
really very little about your opinion on the VERY related questsions
("Is this comment informative/troll/offtopic etc").
The old system asked you to agree or disagree with a single
moderation. Any particular comment can have 10 different
moderations...
The simple truth is that we don't have enough meta moderation in our
system to get enough votes on every single mod in the system, so we
chose to make it more broad.
I absolutely agree that the +/- is less accurate. But if you '+' a
comment, I can make an algorithmic guess on EVERY moderation done to
that comment...
I see where you're coming from, but this is a practical decision...
I'd rather rate every mod in the system then just a few, and this was
the best way to do it.
The don't have to be 100% effective to be effective. If they can say we are stopping 99%, then they can claim victory. Protecting the childern just means doing something 99% of the children find too difficult to circumvent. No law or technology is ever 100% effective in achieving its purpose.
Yeah mate, but if my own childhood is any indication, you only need to find the one child that got around X prohibition and ask him how. In my times it was pr0n betamax movies.
They may prevent 99% of children from stumbling upon some of the truly horrific stuff that exists on the intratubes BUT it is bloody hard to sutmble upon it to begin with. Most of the stuff you have to *actively* search for.
Back before the web I searched alt.pictures. out of curiosity and it was very hard to find the stuff. Around 96 I remembered about that and did some digging, still bloody hard. Only last year I did another rather extensive search and it was still nowhere near trivial.
Truly dark stuff is not lurking around the corner of sesamestreet.com just waiting to jump upon The Children. Anybody thinking otherwise is either misinformed or disingenuous. Chat and social sites may be good places for disturbed people to try and contact their pray but if anything, legislation should be placed to EDUCATE parents about tech rather than trying to Nanny them.
Its ironic and frustrating that parents can't and don't want to care for their own children but the govt wants to act like every adult's parent and "protect" them and babysit them.
Nature is not the enemy, but she is hardly our friend. She will quite happily get rid of us to preserve herself if we screw up.
"Nature" is just a convenient handle for the environment that surrounds us, and which includes other humans too. I am nature, as you are, and even that genetically engineered baby is nature. It will be no different from any other baby that naturally didn't have the gene, because all they did was screen.
If we 'screw up' we will kill our own species, and the environment will go on existing as it does now. All life modifies its surroundings. If we modify ours in such a way that we remove ourselves out of the picture AND take down some other life forms, that won't piss off some personified entity. As far as we know, only humans are capable of reasoning and if we die, there will be nothing left around to be happy or sad about out demise. But the environment that we call Nature will still be there just as it was before we evolved into the scene. [/anthropocentric rant]
1. Cui bono? Why would they bother to do this, except just to be a dick?
2. I rather suspect that the penalty for supplying false information will be comparably stiff to not supplying it at all, which would seem to be sufficient deterrent.
Because I, that do NOT live in the US, would never enter YOUR address in the registry. We both know there aren't Mofos on the tubes...
I don't see a great number of professional graphic artists willing to brave the murky linux technowaters. They love Apple because to them it's basically a TV.
No, wait, hold your flamethrowers! I don't mean it isn't a powerful OS, what I mean is that they don't have to do anything to make their tools work. When was the last time that you needed to upgrade, configure or recompile something to watch a show on a consumer television set? Yes, the signal goes digital so you ditch the old box and get on with the shinies. Exactly as in the Mac world. Need more functionality — channels — then get cable, satellite, TiVo, younameit. No messing about with the appliance itself, just plug the add-on and bother about using it. Want a car analogy? You need know nothing about carburetors or lack thereof to drive. As long as you heed the lights on the dashboard and shell out at the mechanic when the issue goes beyond them, all a user needs to know is how to operate the thing, not how to service it.
The average/. enthusiast's personal anecdote is irrelevant because they are a vanishing small percentage of the target market. For instance, Automakers don't cater to blingers, modders and assorted $YOURHOBBY$ers, those are a niche markets serviced by niche players.
I believe this is the reason you won't see Photoshop on linux until there is a rock solid OSX-like distro that the userbase (the pros, mostly) can use with a kitchen microwave level of ease. If you are an enthusiast you'd be MUCH better off supporting GIMP with both your time and bug reports as with your bucks donating to the project. Check out 2.6, its orders of magnitude better than, say, 2.4 (my previous version).
I only wish they'd change the name to G-Imp or Imp/G or even GNU-Imp because most of the time the stupid name is the biggest objection people cite to not even give it a chance. English being my second language, the name means jack to me, but I've encountered the argument often enough...
Many computer terms tend to be cut and pasted from English into foreign languages, especially if the word is exclusive to computing/technology developed. Something like 'Laptop' would have a foreign equivalent since it's a word made from existing words but something like 'Modem' and all the acronyms we know and love probably won't be any different.
Which only goes to show that common sense, logic and knowledge are not the same thing. The French are ferociously territorial with their language and the make up francophone terminology for everything they can. I guess it stems from the days that French was the Lingua Franca of the the world. Spanish speaking countries for instance are perfectly happy to say "software" (although there is a little-known native word coined, programalógica, everybody I've ever known that's heard it hates its guts). But the French word is 'logicielle'. There are heaps of other examples. So, no, it doesn't apply to French.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've been using Chrome since it became available and I really don't think the "big memory footprint" is an issue at all. I have only 512MB of RAM on the machine I'm running it, and it hasn't slowed it to a crawl the way other browser did. FF2 was gawdawful in that regard.
Chrome has out of the box some basic features that are really useful and ought to be default in others —cough-FF3,IE-cough— such as spell check enabled by default and the ability to resize text boxes on the fly. Plus its garbage collection and memory handling so far seem superb. I really ache to compare FF3 against Chrome, I'm torn between the lightning-fast Google browser and the amazing customization capabilities of Mozilla's.
Other than the lack of extensions that other posters have mourned, the only problem I've found so far is that it doesn't like something about my auto-configuration proxy file (it shares the same one as IE by default). FF3 doesn't like it either but add FoxyProxy and voila, browse away.
I was impressed that Chrome was able to work out of the box with one Citrix. It didn't ask to download or install anything, it just did. Same goes for flash. I haven't figured out yet whether it uses FF's or IE's plug ins for this, I wouldn't be surprised that it can use either or them.
All in all, this is a very solid beta and it has a promising future. But as the Mozilla guys pointed out, Firefox is not dead yet. I just installed yesterday their Ubiquity tool... if there was an Ideal browser it would be Chrome with Firefoxe's add ons. They can't cross-pollinate soon enough.
For me, I would find that to be a useful feature -- two browsers with two profiles, and as long as the two have distinct visual settings, you can have the best of both worlds.
Cheers
You may want to give my approach a go. I have Sandboxie installed and I run firefox sandboxed by default. To run it unsandboxed I have a batch that launches it, so I'm aware I'm doing something "unsafe". There is an option to allow the sandboxed browser to directly access your favorites, so even if you empty the sandbox whatever you bookmarked remains.
That alone should stop most attacks, but if you want to be even more paranoid you can also install SysInternals' tools. They come with a wonderful little tool called psexec that will allow you to launch any process as a limited user like this: psexec -ld firefox.exe The "-ld" switches mean '[l]imited' and '[d]ont wait for process to end'.
So the sandboxed firefox (and IE, for the work-related or other odd sites that demand it) also run as limited users. In fact you can use the windows START command in your sandboxed batch file to run them in high priority (START "annoying mandatory title"/HIGH "psexec -ld c:\prog~1\mozilla\firefox.exe") and your browsing experience should be a blazingly fast and safe;)
You can also take provisions to have the code run in a secured environment. Have a look into the Windows Steady State if you want to maintain an immutable desktop that gets reset to an initial configuration chosen by you every time you restart the PC. That will prevent enterprising users like myself from fiddling with everything from windows themes and UI (I love Royale Noir!) up to installing all manner of unsanctioned programmes like Geany, Python, whathaveyou. Or run the OS on a virtual machine.
Or if that is too inflexible/cumbersome, have the most "dangerous" apps run sandboxed with something like Sandboxy http://www.sandboxie.com/
I realize this does nothing to insure that your programs are trustworthy, but you can at least keep an eye on those programs that you need to run but are unsure of, and minimize the damage they can do to your system. I particularly find running web browsers sandboxed most useful.
Seriously what does Cuil do better for users than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft?
Cuil seems to suck at languages other than English at the moment. I tried a few French and Spanish searches for stuff that I know is not commonly found in English, and the only references it finds are English translations or English articles talking about the matter, but no direct sources. Google is happy to flood you with so many results that the Surf Canyon firefox extension has been a great and welcome addition.
Also, Cuil interface is ugly. It's home page is black so as to underline the difference with Google's, but the results page is again white background on black foreground and the arrangement of results seems messy because of different-lenght snippets on the columns. That should either be a configurable option, a web 2.0 fancy expandable/on_hover gizmo, or the fields should at least be of the same size; it doen't help when one wants to quickly skim the results to find some relevant title. This arrangement also wastes more screen real estate because you can fit less results per screen. That wouldn't be a big issue if it provided more spot-on results, but it doesn't at this time.
I wanted to find another search engine recently reviewed whose name I couldn't remember so I searched for "list+of+internet+seach+engines". Cuil's list was useless, but Google delivered in the fist link. In fact, Cuil doesn't cope with typos as well as Google does (I typed "seach" instead of "search"). Or search on it for "Cuil page rank" and see what comes up.
Finally, by choosing a strange looking name that plays in the quirks of English pronunciation they are failing to come up with a compeling name. I wouldn't pronounce that letter combination as "cool", and i'm sure the same will happen to a lot of people. An unscientific, informal poll around the office showed the same. I don't see people "cooling" for an answer the way they nowadays google it. Addmitedly, this is has nothing to do with search efficiency per se, but the name just bugs me:P
On the plus side, it's blazingly fast, and it has that Explore by category box. They have been online for an extremely short time so maybe I'll check them out in a few months.
I still prefer Google as my main search engine choice but when it fails (and it's increasingly struggling to deliver relevant results) I turn to http:www.Clusty.com first and then to Live. I don't think I've used Yahoo more than 20 times since it went online.
So my Mickey Mouse / Prince hentei slash rape movie set in the Palladium universe using music from Metallica is perfectly legal. Sweet. Intertube fame, here I come!
No. you need to mash the music with something else also, or at least the use of the unaltered music will be problematic.
You know, that's an interesting point. I'm making a musicalized version of Metropolis as a pet project —since before the mentioned extra footage was discovered— and redoing all the title bits.
I'm using mostly free Nine Inch Nails music but there are a few songs by other industrial bands. Since I will use YouTube to "distribute" it privately to a few friends that might be willing to put up with it I wouldn't be too concerned with being prosecuted by copyright violations. But I will mash up those songs that are not released under CC anyway and hopefully I will be on the clear.
Plus, copyright laws are saner on the planet where I live and are irrelevant at my friends' planets, neener neener:)
the idea of finding books you should read but don't know about seems a problem particularly poorly suited to an automated solution.
Er... -1,Wrong*: You don't seem to be considering the impact of statistical analysis and Very Large Sets of Data (C)(TM). It's becoming increasingly possible not only to know that 125K other people all over the world bought books B, C and D along with book A that you purchased, but now you can also index and analyse their content so it will be even easier to fine tune.
Imagine this: On the first iteration (first purchase) it can only out-of-the-blue recommend to you those books more consistently purchased along with the one you chose. But on subsequent transactions it can remember what you bought and compare the contents of the books. Now if you bought The Silmarillion, Kontakto and The Unfolding of Language over time, it would be possible to suggest that you read Shakespeare's works in their original Klingon once it realizes that you are equally interested in languages as in fictional civilizations.
I agree with you that the day an algorithm can make value judgements on the artistic merits of any work is still far ahead, but there was just recently a story about this FireFox plug in that sumarizes user reviews. Combine the two and...
*Didn't we have this conversation before, or is it just a popular.sig? If there was a "-1,Wrong" moderation, you would be told that the info is wrong but you would lose any insight provided by a direct reply of somebody that bothers to correct you AND post the right facts. With Slashdot being a discussion forum, it's on its best interest to actually promote discussion so you most likely will never see that mod option implemented.
Yeah, that sounds about right:) I'll agree with you on that. I'll just add as a side-comment that the idea of social sites is for people to do online what they do IRL, so I'm not surprised they behave this way;)
Hm... as it's been said above, the internet and particularly YouTube may be public toilets, but when I lock myself on a cubicle/my studio to "go" I do have the expectation that no AC is going to take pictures of me and hand'em over to Viacom. This logs are pictures of me on the WC/YouTube doing my private business.
You forgot your irony tag. Someone might accidentally take you seriously.
Nay. Most likely you aren't taking into consideration that there are age ranges and those have different interests. The people I know of on my age bracket do use FB to keep in touch with friends and family.
The people I know of below my age group do this too, but they also do a bit of that exhibitionist dance as well. I don't know of anybody above my age range that uses social sites. Finally, I have seen people that I don't know personally doing really stupid things on those places, but that is the exact reason I found about them. There are thousand others that use social sites in an unremarkable way and we find out little about them.
So, as is true of anything in life, one-size-fits-all usually doesn't.
What I meant was, we don't know of anything that was already alive when we 'arrived' as a species and continues to be alive. I seem to remember there was a tree somewhere that's a thousand years old and it's still alive so, who knows?
Put the "Happy" thoughts aside and realize the DYING AND AGING ARE AN ESSENTIAL PART OF LIFE.
Not to rain on your parade but, how many immortal people do you know of to be able to claim that it is an essential part of life? What were the side effects of not ever dying? How did not dying affect their environment?
It is a part of life because we don't know of anything that has *never* died, so we concluded that everything does. No evidence on why it must be so.
Boy, today I woke up on the ranting side of the bed:)
Maybe he is sitting out there waiting to meet us *in person* -- but only when we, as a species, are mature enough that people can fly a million years out past the boundaries of the universe to say "hi."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there was an article just a couple of days ago saying that brand recognition for Ask Jeeves in the UK was greater, so they revived it there.
You know, I had the exact same issue this guy is having and, guess what - google gave me that exact answer (Openfire). Of course, I used MirandaIM because I knew Miranda had Jabber support and it's a decent little client, but yeah, another vote for both Openfire and "just fucking google it next time".
When I saw this stupid "story" on the firehose I voted it down but just as I was doing it I knew a let-me-google-this-for-you kind of question like this would get posted. What a waste.
While an argument shouldn't be cast aside just because someone uses M$, I don't agree that it is "a concise, efficient and - IMO - accurate moniker".
You don't agree that text in bold is HIS opinion? I don't agree with your disagreement :P
That really is a big part of the problem. People wanted Outlook/Exchange here because "Groupwise was too hard", but the funny thing is we spend more time now "Training" the same people on this product that is "so much better" and we actually get more complaints!
Well, mileage varies for everyone. I hated and loathed Groupwise and I'm very happy now that we've moved to Outlook 07. It IS different and it made me bang my head against the keyboard the first day I tried to change some email's sensitivity from normal to personal.
Other than that I didn't hear a single soul complain because whatever they use works pretty much the same.
Not that one should take at face value what Microsoft or Apple announce at their conferences, but in their developer conference the MS guys explained this evolutionary path. I saw several videos about it around the time.
The underlying tech is quite different between the Dock and the Taskbar, also they have similar but not equal philosopies behind them. I have been using XP's toolbars in pretty much the way Microsoft has done with the Taskbar.
And what happens when everybody is using the same algorithm and it tells them "go left to avoid jam" and everybody flocks in the same way? it seems a centralized monitoring would be more useful in this sense. But a lot of people don't like to be centrally monitored...
I'll keep this brief. I dislike the new meta-moderation at /. system because
I think it detracts from it's original purpose of identifying and clearing
abuse in the 'normal' moderation system.
The plus/minus signs do not convevy any information about the moderation, they seem to focus more on the post itself, and because they are a binary choice users are put in a sort of agree/disagree situation that doesn't add to the discussion and rather substracts from it.
Here's the thing... if I ask you "Is this comment insightful" I know really very little about your opinion on the VERY related questsions ("Is this comment informative/troll/offtopic etc").
The old system asked you to agree or disagree with a single moderation. Any particular comment can have 10 different moderations...
The simple truth is that we don't have enough meta moderation in our system to get enough votes on every single mod in the system, so we chose to make it more broad.
I absolutely agree that the +/- is less accurate. But if you '+' a comment, I can make an algorithmic guess on EVERY moderation done to that comment...
I see where you're coming from, but this is a practical decision... I'd rather rate every mod in the system then just a few, and this was the best way to do it.
The don't have to be 100% effective to be effective. If they can say we are stopping 99%, then they can claim victory. Protecting the childern just means doing something 99% of the children find too difficult to circumvent. No law or technology is ever 100% effective in achieving its purpose.
Yeah mate, but if my own childhood is any indication, you only need to find the one child that got around X prohibition and ask him how. In my times it was pr0n betamax movies.
They may prevent 99% of children from stumbling upon some of the truly horrific stuff that exists on the intratubes BUT it is bloody hard to sutmble upon it to begin with. Most of the stuff you have to *actively* search for.
Back before the web I searched alt.pictures. out of curiosity and it was very hard to find the stuff. Around 96 I remembered about that and did some digging, still bloody hard. Only last year I did another rather extensive search and it was still nowhere near trivial.
Truly dark stuff is not lurking around the corner of sesamestreet.com just waiting to jump upon The Children. Anybody thinking otherwise is either misinformed or disingenuous. Chat and social sites may be good places for disturbed people to try and contact their pray but if anything, legislation should be placed to EDUCATE parents about tech rather than trying to Nanny them.
Its ironic and frustrating that parents can't and don't want to care for their own children but the govt wants to act like every adult's parent and "protect" them and babysit them.
Nature is not the enemy, but she is hardly our friend. She will quite happily get rid of us to preserve herself if we screw up.
"Nature" is just a convenient handle for the environment that surrounds us, and which includes other humans too. I am nature, as you are, and even that genetically engineered baby is nature. It will be no different from any other baby that naturally didn't have the gene, because all they did was screen.
If we 'screw up' we will kill our own species, and the environment will go on existing as it does now. All life modifies its surroundings. If we modify ours in such a way that we remove ourselves out of the picture AND take down some other life forms, that won't piss off some personified entity. As far as we know, only humans are capable of reasoning and if we die, there will be nothing left around to be happy or sad about out demise. But the environment that we call Nature will still be there just as it was before we evolved into the scene. [/anthropocentric rant]
So Obama or his mp3-aide know what Rockbox is or that Vorbis even exists? wow...
1. Cui bono? Why would they bother to do this, except just to be a dick?
2. I rather suspect that the penalty for supplying false information will be comparably stiff to not supplying it at all, which would seem to be sufficient deterrent.
Because I, that do NOT live in the US, would never enter YOUR address in the registry. We both know there aren't Mofos on the tubes...
I don't see a great number of professional graphic artists willing to brave the murky linux technowaters. They love Apple because to them it's basically a TV.
No, wait, hold your flamethrowers! I don't mean it isn't a powerful OS, what I mean is that they don't have to do anything to make their tools work. When was the last time that you needed to upgrade, configure or recompile something to watch a show on a consumer television set? Yes, the signal goes digital so you ditch the old box and get on with the shinies. Exactly as in the Mac world. Need more functionality — channels — then get cable, satellite, TiVo, younameit. No messing about with the appliance itself, just plug the add-on and bother about using it. Want a car analogy? You need know nothing about carburetors or lack thereof to drive. As long as you heed the lights on the dashboard and shell out at the mechanic when the issue goes beyond them, all a user needs to know is how to operate the thing, not how to service it.
The average /. enthusiast's personal anecdote is irrelevant because they are a vanishing small percentage of the target market. For instance, Automakers don't cater to blingers, modders and assorted $YOURHOBBY$ers, those are a niche markets serviced by niche players.
I believe this is the reason you won't see Photoshop on linux until there is a rock solid OSX-like distro that the userbase (the pros, mostly) can use with a kitchen microwave level of ease. If you are an enthusiast you'd be MUCH better off supporting GIMP with both your time and bug reports as with your bucks donating to the project. Check out 2.6, its orders of magnitude better than, say, 2.4 (my previous version).
I only wish they'd change the name to G-Imp or Imp/G or even GNU-Imp because most of the time the stupid name is the biggest objection people cite to not even give it a chance. English being my second language, the name means jack to me, but I've encountered the argument often enough...
Many computer terms tend to be cut and pasted from English into foreign languages, especially if the word is exclusive to computing/technology developed. Something like 'Laptop' would have a foreign equivalent since it's a word made from existing words but something like 'Modem' and all the acronyms we know and love probably won't be any different.
Which only goes to show that common sense, logic and knowledge are not the same thing. The French are ferociously territorial with their language and the make up francophone terminology for everything they can. I guess it stems from the days that French was the Lingua Franca of the the world. Spanish speaking countries for instance are perfectly happy to say "software" (although there is a little-known native word coined, programalógica, everybody I've ever known that's heard it hates its guts). But the French word is 'logicielle'. There are heaps of other examples. So, no, it doesn't apply to French.
I've been using Chrome since it became available and I really don't think the "big memory footprint" is an issue at all. I have only 512MB of RAM on the machine I'm running it, and it hasn't slowed it to a crawl the way other browser did. FF2 was gawdawful in that regard.
Chrome has out of the box some basic features that are really useful and ought to be default in others —cough-FF3,IE-cough— such as spell check enabled by default and the ability to resize text boxes on the fly. Plus its garbage collection and memory handling so far seem superb. I really ache to compare FF3 against Chrome, I'm torn between the lightning-fast Google browser and the amazing customization capabilities of Mozilla's.
Other than the lack of extensions that other posters have mourned, the only problem I've found so far is that it doesn't like something about my auto-configuration proxy file (it shares the same one as IE by default). FF3 doesn't like it either but add FoxyProxy and voila, browse away.
I was impressed that Chrome was able to work out of the box with one Citrix. It didn't ask to download or install anything, it just did. Same goes for flash. I haven't figured out yet whether it uses FF's or IE's plug ins for this, I wouldn't be surprised that it can use either or them.
All in all, this is a very solid beta and it has a promising future. But as the Mozilla guys pointed out, Firefox is not dead yet. I just installed yesterday their Ubiquity tool... if there was an Ideal browser it would be Chrome with Firefoxe's add ons. They can't cross-pollinate soon enough.
For me, I would find that to be a useful feature -- two browsers with two profiles, and as long as the two have distinct visual settings, you can have the best of both worlds.
Cheers
You may want to give my approach a go. I have Sandboxie installed and I run firefox sandboxed by default. To run it unsandboxed I have a batch that launches it, so I'm aware I'm doing something "unsafe". There is an option to allow the sandboxed browser to directly access your favorites, so even if you empty the sandbox whatever you bookmarked remains.
That alone should stop most attacks, but if you want to be even more paranoid you can also install SysInternals' tools. They come with a wonderful little tool called psexec that will allow you to launch any process as a limited user like this: psexec -ld firefox.exe The "-ld" switches mean '[l]imited' and '[d]ont wait for process to end'.
So the sandboxed firefox (and IE, for the work-related or other odd sites that demand it) also run as limited users. In fact you can use the windows START command in your sandboxed batch file to run them in high priority ( START "annoying mandatory title" /HIGH "psexec -ld c:\prog~1\mozilla\firefox.exe" ) and your browsing experience should be a blazingly fast and safe ;)
You can also take provisions to have the code run in a secured environment. Have a look into the Windows Steady State if you want to maintain an immutable desktop that gets reset to an initial configuration chosen by you every time you restart the PC. That will prevent enterprising users like myself from fiddling with everything from windows themes and UI (I love Royale Noir!) up to installing all manner of unsanctioned programmes like Geany, Python, whathaveyou. Or run the OS on a virtual machine.
Or if that is too inflexible/cumbersome, have the most "dangerous" apps run sandboxed with something like Sandboxy http://www.sandboxie.com/
I realize this does nothing to insure that your programs are trustworthy, but you can at least keep an eye on those programs that you need to run but are unsure of, and minimize the damage they can do to your system. I particularly find running web browsers sandboxed most useful.
Seriously what does Cuil do better for users than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft?
Cuil seems to suck at languages other than English at the moment. I tried a few French and Spanish searches for stuff that I know is not commonly found in English, and the only references it finds are English translations or English articles talking about the matter, but no direct sources. Google is happy to flood you with so many results that the Surf Canyon firefox extension has been a great and welcome addition.
Also, Cuil interface is ugly. It's home page is black so as to underline the difference with Google's, but the results page is again white background on black foreground and the arrangement of results seems messy because of different-lenght snippets on the columns. That should either be a configurable option, a web 2.0 fancy expandable/on_hover gizmo, or the fields should at least be of the same size; it doen't help when one wants to quickly skim the results to find some relevant title. This arrangement also wastes more screen real estate because you can fit less results per screen. That wouldn't be a big issue if it provided more spot-on results, but it doesn't at this time.
I wanted to find another search engine recently reviewed whose name I couldn't remember so I searched for "list+of+internet+seach+engines". Cuil's list was useless, but Google delivered in the fist link. In fact, Cuil doesn't cope with typos as well as Google does (I typed "seach" instead of "search"). Or search on it for "Cuil page rank" and see what comes up.
Finally, by choosing a strange looking name that plays in the quirks of English pronunciation they are failing to come up with a compeling name. I wouldn't pronounce that letter combination as "cool", and i'm sure the same will happen to a lot of people. An unscientific, informal poll around the office showed the same. I don't see people "cooling" for an answer the way they nowadays google it. Addmitedly, this is has nothing to do with search efficiency per se, but the name just bugs me :P
On the plus side, it's blazingly fast, and it has that Explore by category box. They have been online for an extremely short time so maybe I'll check them out in a few months.
I still prefer Google as my main search engine choice but when it fails (and it's increasingly struggling to deliver relevant results) I turn to http:www.Clusty.com first and then to Live. I don't think I've used Yahoo more than 20 times since it went online.
So my Mickey Mouse / Prince hentei slash rape movie set in the Palladium universe using music from Metallica is perfectly legal. Sweet. Intertube fame, here I come!
No. you need to mash the music with something else also, or at least the use of the unaltered music will be problematic.
You know, that's an interesting point. I'm making a musicalized version of Metropolis as a pet project —since before the mentioned extra footage was discovered— and redoing all the title bits.
I'm using mostly free Nine Inch Nails music but there are a few songs by other industrial bands. Since I will use YouTube to "distribute" it privately to a few friends that might be willing to put up with it I wouldn't be too concerned with being prosecuted by copyright violations. But I will mash up those songs that are not released under CC anyway and hopefully I will be on the clear.
Plus, copyright laws are saner on the planet where I live and are irrelevant at my friends' planets, neener neener :)
the idea of finding books you should read but don't know about seems a problem particularly poorly suited to an automated solution.
Er... -1,Wrong* : You don't seem to be considering the impact of statistical analysis and Very Large Sets of Data (C)(TM). It's becoming increasingly possible not only to know that 125K other people all over the world bought books B, C and D along with book A that you purchased, but now you can also index and analyse their content so it will be even easier to fine tune.
Imagine this: On the first iteration (first purchase) it can only out-of-the-blue recommend to you those books more consistently purchased along with the one you chose. But on subsequent transactions it can remember what you bought and compare the contents of the books. Now if you bought The Silmarillion, Kontakto and The Unfolding of Language over time, it would be possible to suggest that you read Shakespeare's works in their original Klingon once it realizes that you are equally interested in languages as in fictional civilizations.
I agree with you that the day an algorithm can make value judgements on the artistic merits of any work is still far ahead, but there was just recently a story about this FireFox plug in that sumarizes user reviews. Combine the two and...
* Didn't we have this conversation before, or is it just a popular .sig? If there was a "-1,Wrong" moderation, you would be told that the info is wrong but you would lose any insight provided by a direct reply of somebody that bothers to correct you AND post the right facts. With Slashdot being a discussion forum, it's on its best interest to actually promote discussion so you most likely will never see that mod option implemented.
Yeah, that sounds about right :) I'll agree with you on that. I'll just add as a side-comment that the idea of social sites is for people to do online what they do IRL, so I'm not surprised they behave this way ;)
Hm... as it's been said above, the internet and particularly YouTube may be public toilets, but when I lock myself on a cubicle/my studio to "go" I do have the expectation that no AC is going to take pictures of me and hand'em over to Viacom. This logs are pictures of me on the WC/YouTube doing my private business.
You forgot your irony tag. Someone might accidentally take you seriously.
Nay. Most likely you aren't taking into consideration that there are age ranges and those have different interests. The people I know of on my age bracket do use FB to keep in touch with friends and family.
The people I know of below my age group do this too, but they also do a bit of that exhibitionist dance as well. I don't know of anybody above my age range that uses social sites. Finally, I have seen people that I don't know personally doing really stupid things on those places, but that is the exact reason I found about them. There are thousand others that use social sites in an unremarkable way and we find out little about them.
So, as is true of anything in life, one-size-fits-all usually doesn't.
Actually, I've never died.
p0wn3d :)
s/*never*/*never in recorded human history*/
What I meant was, we don't know of anything that was already alive when we 'arrived' as a species and continues to be alive. I seem to remember there was a tree somewhere that's a thousand years old and it's still alive so, who knows?
Put the "Happy" thoughts aside and realize the DYING AND AGING ARE AN ESSENTIAL PART OF LIFE.
Not to rain on your parade but, how many immortal people do you know of to be able to claim that it is an essential part of life? What were the side effects of not ever dying? How did not dying affect their environment?
It is a part of life because we don't know of anything that has *never* died, so we concluded that everything does. No evidence on why it must be so.
Boy, today I woke up on the ranting side of the bed :)
Maybe he is sitting out there waiting to meet us *in person* -- but only when we, as a species, are mature enough that people can fly a million years out past the boundaries of the universe to say "hi."
I like your idea. I'd believe in *that* God :)