"<BGSOUND SRC="exploit.MID" > IE plays these by default."
Luckily, background noise on web-pages is annoying enough to prompt people to turn the bastard off anyway. Nothing worse than browsing with your speakers on in MSIE.
"the broader Internet was developed by ISP's trying to get $10, $20, or even $50 a month from avid consumers."
Yep. And we need mesh networks as fast as we can build them.
Bandwidth restrictions? P2P blocking? Working on a constantly-tapped line because the UK gov't is too busy listening to us to listen to us? If it's going to be kazaa-blocking one day and anti-government view blocking the next, we're gonna want peer-to-peer connectivity between individual houses.
"Are you stateing that Film is a far simpler medium, thus more easy to understand, or were you implying that a GUI is by defantion "easy and Simple"?"
The article does note that it's an elitist attitude amongst the linguistic that they prefer using the command line to a GUI, but that if you can use it, it provides less limitations. If you need to do something in a GUI, you can only do so if the designer of the GUI has put a function in to do what you want. In command-line, you can do many things far more powerful than the designer of each tool ever envisioned.
If you want to search MP3 tags on a GUI, you have to find somebody who's written a program especially to do that. If you want to find the largest files on your disk with a GUI, you'll need a different program especially to do that. For some other task (searching autocad file titles or something), it's likely not possible because nobody's programmed the GUI for it.
But with a command-line, you get to arrange a number of general-purpose tools to do exactly what you want. The person who wrote a program to extract tags from MP3 probably never knew that you'd use it to auto-generate a website, while the website-autogeneration guy probably never knew that you could use it with MP3s. If they were both GUI tools, you'd never be able to use them together. But with a linguistic interface, you have no such limitations.
It's possible that you could design a labview-like GUI to run command-line programs, and draw lines to create pipes, files, outputs, etc. but it doesn't seem to have been done (or become popular) yet.
"This implies that film is an inherently inferior medium, which I think is incorect."
Inferior is not really a good description of film compared to books. "different" would be how I'd describe them. A films is a lot easier to watch than the equivalent book is to read, in the same way that the Windows' 'find' tool is easier to use than grep or find. However, each film contains less information than the equivalent book, and there are certain things which can be done in books (characters' thoughts, etc.) which are limited in films. Whether or not these limitations are a problem is hardly the point, simply that the visual medium imposes limitations, just as a text medium won't accurately convey visual information.
Just as a command-line sucks for drawing and viewing pictures, writing documents, and anything else which doesn't require an inconvenient amount of abstractions. Just because a command-line can process loads of complicated stuff at once, doesn't mean you should use it when you don't need to.
This wasn't a dig at dysle xics, nor at GUIs, just a note of a good article which explains some of the thinking behind *nix-style commands.
In summary: a GUI-only interfaces is to a text-interface as film is to literature. It may feel easier to use at first, but the limitations are significant, it makes it more difficult to think outside the designers' box, and it cripples the linguistic abilities which most people love to practise.
"So how would I go about paying someone online? Today I could use a credit card or Paypal at someone's web site.."
You do it by publishing your P.O.Box on a website, freenet, invisiblog, or whatever. People can then pay you anonymously by posting cash.
This gives plenty of options, such as "use this to enable username x" or "to support blog y" or "for general use on project z". It allows you to pay for services such as email accounts, web proxies, etc. without having to trust some online e-tailer who almost certainly doesn't give a yahoo about your privacy, and will give out your IP logs and credit-card details to anyone who asks (police, people pretending to be police, marketers, crackers, friends of the sysadmin...)
It's not secure, you can't prove receipt, but then that's all a part of anyonymous payments anyway. Posting cash is certainly better worth considering than some hyped web scheme, for when you need to contribute to a distributed project. You can even get receipts, in the form of "value of $x received [date] with the number [long random number] on the packet"
Plus it works with foreign currency, and costs less than bankers drafts.
"Problem is, computer expertise is not a matter of intelligence, but rather a matter of practice"
Probably that theory was best demonstrated with Mitnick getting all the popup ads etc. on a new computer... go away for a while, and forget just how much less ethical the advertisers have become.
"I always buy my printers based on how much it'll run me to replace the ink afterwards."
Tom's hardware had some useful reviews which assessed the total cost of the printers under review as purchase price + ink cost of 1000 pages of b&w + ink cost of 1000 pages of colour. It's actually a very useful way of comparing printers, and my family have been quite happy with the 2 printers they bought on the basis of that review.
"But someone from the RIAA uses it to download a copyrighted song, wouldn't they then be able to sue all users of Freenet as accessories to the crime?"
If you've narrowed down the suspect to five thousand people, that's not going to get you very far in a court. When a shoplifter hides in a crowded shopping centre, you can hardly prosecute every person in the place as accessories.
To be technical about it, freenet guarantees common carrier status, simply through not knowing the content it's hosting. A freenet node is no more suspicious than any of millions of email servers which allow encrypted messages.
Asking freenet for people who've downloaded the client is hardly going to be a roaring success either, as you try to track down dynamic IPs that're months old and in different timezones. It's also pretty damned stupid, the equivalent of asking for the names of everyone who was given Internet Explorer on their computer, then suing them all. The AOL transparent proxy will be getting a lot of court-orders...
Not that anybody needs reveal an IP address to download something nowadays. What else is BitTorrent for?
Not a critisism of the thought, just that freenet is legally pretty safe. It's been directly taunting $cientology for years, and if there were a legal attack against it, it would long-since have been discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
"but if you outsource to India you don't have to pay benefits"
Nor do they pay U.S. income tax, so then who's going to pay for the next war?
Way to go, letting your big companies screw the country out of money by quietly transferring it overseas as indian wages.
"When reading the "Terms of Service", it says that purchases are not available outside of the US and the "service" is not used outside of the US."
Well, they've limited their sales to mac users, now they want to limit their sales to americans. They plan to become popular how?
"Didn't anyone tell them porn and piracy are the main reasons for broadband?"
Don't worry, the politicians will know...
"Yeah, I wish slashdot would pick up on this whole SCO thing. I cannot understand why SCO is being completely and uttely ignored here."
humorix
IE plays these by default."
Luckily, background noise on web-pages is annoying enough to prompt people to turn the bastard off anyway. Nothing worse than browsing with your speakers on in MSIE.
"the broader Internet was developed by ISP's trying to get $10, $20, or even $50 a month from avid consumers."
Yep. And we need mesh networks as fast as we can build them.
Bandwidth restrictions? P2P blocking? Working on a constantly-tapped line because the UK gov't is too busy listening to us to listen to us? If it's going to be kazaa-blocking one day and anti-government view blocking the next, we're gonna want peer-to-peer connectivity between individual houses.
"Yeah, I'm sure we'll se ASSLOADS of innovation from IE7"
Longhorn being a large, dumb animal which consumes vast quantities of resources and turns most of them into shit?
pic
"You live in a cheap rental apartment downtown in the basement. You get home, and the apartment is cold."
So what, run the servers at home and get free heating, is that the idea?
"And did I mention, go fuck yourselves buy.com"
Go buy fuckyourselves.com?
"WHY do these folks have to RESTRICT access to these sites to people ONLY running IE?"
Dunno, but they're about to get 20,000 hits from Mozilla, so their server-logs will be doing the talking...
"Don't worry, we'll set up a linux only site featuring RMS' greatest hits!"
not a problem
"Are you stateing that Film is a far simpler medium, thus more easy to understand, or were you implying that a GUI is by defantion "easy and Simple"?"
The article does note that it's an elitist attitude amongst the linguistic that they prefer using the command line to a GUI, but that if you can use it, it provides less limitations. If you need to do something in a GUI, you can only do so if the designer of the GUI has put a function in to do what you want. In command-line, you can do many things far more powerful than the designer of each tool ever envisioned.
If you want to search MP3 tags on a GUI, you have to find somebody who's written a program especially to do that. If you want to find the largest files on your disk with a GUI, you'll need a different program especially to do that. For some other task (searching autocad file titles or something), it's likely not possible because nobody's programmed the GUI for it.
But with a command-line, you get to arrange a number of general-purpose tools to do exactly what you want. The person who wrote a program to extract tags from MP3 probably never knew that you'd use it to auto-generate a website, while the website-autogeneration guy probably never knew that you could use it with MP3s. If they were both GUI tools, you'd never be able to use them together. But with a linguistic interface, you have no such limitations.
It's possible that you could design a labview-like GUI to run command-line programs, and draw lines to create pipes, files, outputs, etc. but it doesn't seem to have been done (or become popular) yet.
"This implies that film is an inherently inferior medium, which I think is incorect."
Inferior is not really a good description of film compared to books. "different" would be how I'd describe them. A films is a lot easier to watch than the equivalent book is to read, in the same way that the Windows' 'find' tool is easier to use than grep or find. However, each film contains less information than the equivalent book, and there are certain things which can be done in books (characters' thoughts, etc.) which are limited in films. Whether or not these limitations are a problem is hardly the point, simply that the visual medium imposes limitations, just as a text medium won't accurately convey visual information.
Just as a command-line sucks for drawing and viewing pictures, writing documents, and anything else which doesn't require an inconvenient amount of abstractions. Just because a command-line can process loads of complicated stuff at once, doesn't mean you should use it when you don't need to.
This wasn't a dig at dysle xics, nor at GUIs, just a note of a good article which explains some of the thinking behind *nix-style commands.
it's likely the organization will continue with both aggressive games-as-free-speech lobbying and similarly aggressive copyright enforcement
And they start off by stealing someone's name?
European Space Agency
Yeah, I have a great idea for my company, I'll call it NASA.
"I think OS's should have even more time spent on making better GUI's, with as much written language removed from it as possible"
Hackers and painters
In summary: a GUI-only interfaces is to a text-interface as film is to literature. It may feel easier to use at first, but the limitations are significant, it makes it more difficult to think outside the designers' box, and it cripples the linguistic abilities which most people love to practise.
Ever use the Lego programming language?
"So how would I go about paying someone online? Today I could use a credit card or Paypal at someone's web site.."
You do it by publishing your P.O.Box on a website, freenet, invisiblog, or whatever. People can then pay you anonymously by posting cash.
This gives plenty of options, such as "use this to enable username x" or "to support blog y" or "for general use on project z". It allows you to pay for services such as email accounts, web proxies, etc. without having to trust some online e-tailer who almost certainly doesn't give a yahoo about your privacy, and will give out your IP logs and credit-card details to anyone who asks (police, people pretending to be police, marketers, crackers, friends of the sysadmin...)
It's not secure, you can't prove receipt, but then that's all a part of anyonymous payments anyway. Posting cash is certainly better worth considering than some hyped web scheme, for when you need to contribute to a distributed project. You can even get receipts, in the form of "value of $x received [date] with the number [long random number] on the packet"
Plus it works with foreign currency, and costs less than bankers drafts.
"You know what'd be really impressive? Finding a way to make FreeNet slower."
It's written in Java, what more could you do?
"I don't think you'd be looking at the shoe bomber or the plane if he'd decided to pull his stunt in the bathroom instead of from his seat."
This probably explains the "we're not filming bathrooms" statement: probably more close to "we're not claiming to film in bathrooms"
"Learn to play by others' rules or until then, STFU."
Well said, SLAVE
"Don't like it, don't fly their airline."
Fair enough. Best keep an eye on the things we want to buy at S.E.Airline's bankrupcy auction in a couple of years' time. Don't damage those cameras!
"Problem is, computer expertise is not a matter of intelligence, but rather a matter of practice"
Probably that theory was best demonstrated with Mitnick getting all the popup ads etc. on a new computer... go away for a while, and forget just how much less ethical the advertisers have become.
"I always buy my printers based on how much it'll run me to replace the ink afterwards."
Tom's hardware had some useful reviews which assessed the total cost of the printers under review as purchase price + ink cost of 1000 pages of b&w + ink cost of 1000 pages of colour. It's actually a very useful way of comparing printers, and my family have been quite happy with the 2 printers they bought on the basis of that review.
"Of course a simple search of *his HD would prove otherwise."
http://www.rubberhose.org/
"how can I apply FreeNet to misusing GPL'd software for my own benefit?"
You're welcome to distribute my GPL'd programs on freenet. If you want to be really cheeky you can even distribute the source.
Seriously, how can you possibly abuse GPL on freenet? By offering binaries without corresponding source or something?
"But someone from the RIAA uses it to download a copyrighted song, wouldn't they then be able to sue all users of Freenet as accessories to the crime?"
If you've narrowed down the suspect to five thousand people, that's not going to get you very far in a court. When a shoplifter hides in a crowded shopping centre, you can hardly prosecute every person in the place as accessories.
To be technical about it, freenet guarantees common carrier status, simply through not knowing the content it's hosting. A freenet node is no more suspicious than any of millions of email servers which allow encrypted messages.
Asking freenet for people who've downloaded the client is hardly going to be a roaring success either, as you try to track down dynamic IPs that're months old and in different timezones. It's also pretty damned stupid, the equivalent of asking for the names of everyone who was given Internet Explorer on their computer, then suing them all. The AOL transparent proxy will be getting a lot of court-orders...
Not that anybody needs reveal an IP address to download something nowadays. What else is BitTorrent for?
Not a critisism of the thought, just that freenet is legally pretty safe. It's been directly taunting $cientology for years, and if there were a legal attack against it, it would long-since have been discovered.