Or perhaps they could buy them out to shut them down?
Wouldn't anti-trust laws prevent this, or put MS in deep shit?
In any case, if MS wanted a *ix, they would buy SCO (I seem to remember that MS's Xenix, a *ix, was sold to them some time ago). They'd never ever admit there was anything good about GPL'd software.
n some cases yeah, but I've had some malware (ok not a virus as such, but close) completely kill a Windows 98SE box's network stack after it got in by trying to "patch" the Winsock libraries and assuming it was XP.
Well, I didn't mean go naked. I've got Win98 and am running Opera as a browser, with Zone Alarm as a firewall. Never had a successful penetration or attack; never got any viruses.
Think of it this way. Many musicians don't have a problem when people do remixes of their stuff, some do
The flaw in this analogy is that remixes are published by the mixer to third parties. Maybe a better music one would be complaining if you adjusted the bass higher than he intended when you're listening on your walkman. Is that reasonable? In any case, he's welcome to try to make his site GM-proof; but it seems perverse to piss off your audience in this way.
This version of windows in unsupported and will no longer receive AV updates, please upgrade to the newest OS"
On the bright side, once your OS falls behind so do the number of virus attacks. Win98 is pretty safe now, for instance, because most attacks only work on XP.
If you expect slashdot to be good, you have to give to it. I've never had mod privileges, and I've always wanted to, if for no other reason but to mod down posts like your own.
Mod privileges aren't distributed randomly. You earn them by making posts, and more so if they're modded up. So I have contributed, a couple of thousand posts actually, not that that's anything to be proud of. So if you want to mod me down you'll have to write something worthwhile first. The mod system for comments does work fairly well; it's the disconnect between allowing feedback for these and the insularity of the editors that irks me.
If you don't like my posts, click on my name, go to relationships, make me a foe, then go to your preferences to make foes downmodded below your threshold. You'll never see me again.
Which leads to the question i have had for a while now: where is the better slashdot? I am looking for a site that cover the same range of topics as/. but has a better mod system in place......
Bruce Perens' technocrat.org, but they've had hosting problems recently. I just heard Bruce was on holiday and his hosting company pulled the plug -- he says it'll be back online next week. The quality of the articles is as good or better, but the lack is the community for comments. One with a viable but small community is Kuro5hin, though not as focussed on tech, fewer articles but better written.
What you dont understand is that i dont care if its a dupe.
I understand, and I don't care that you don't care. And so on. I think I understand why the editors dupe, it's because they're jaded and don't give a shit, not because they want to give you a second chance to read a story. (This isn't radio, you know. Stories don't need to be repeated on the hour, you can just page back and see every story ever posted if you feel like it.) I do care about the lack of professionalism. If you don't like that; put me on your foe/freak list, however that works (I've never bothered to find out), maybe it'll filter me out.
"For a text-only version, please go to www.oursite.com/newslettes/2005-05-14" or something.
The opposite. Send a text version, and have a link encouraging recipients to see the HTML version in all its glory, on a web page, where HTML is supposed to be used. Some nesletters I get do exactly this. For those who like HTML, it's only a click away, and is much more efficient all around. Your marketing guy can use Flash, play music or whatever crap takes their fancy. Also tell the PHB that it's less likely to be flagged as spam.
Not everybody checks slashdot with religious zeal. By having dupes the important stories can be shown to those who missed it (cause maybe the first posting was at a wierd time).
Stories aren't reposted because they're "important". They're reposted because the editors are careless and didn;t notice. If I can't read Slashdot for a few days, I just browse through the "Older Stuff" stories linked conveniently on the right side of the front page.
I get annoyed at this because Slashdot regularly asks me to moderate posts, to improve the quality of the site, but provides no usable mechanism to moderate the editors. Even the email address on is encouraged to send warnings of dupes and errors is rarely answered, sometimes bounces, and is ignored in almost all cases. So now I rarely boither to mod at all; why should I care about the quality of the site when the editors obviously don't? In work I've found it similarly disheartening to be concerned with quality when the managemnent doesn't give more than lip service to the concept.
NO NO NO!!!! The blog article is from 2001. For once Slashdot were right in rejecting. Bruce tried Technocrat in a different form back then, and did shut it down until a few months ago when he reopened it. But I don't think its recent sudden disappeance from the web -- I can't even get its DNS to resolve -- is deliberate on his part. His personal domain, Perens.com, is similarly AWOL, and as that's where the only email address of his I know is, I haven't been able to follow up. Something is going on, but I have no idea what -- domain hijacks?
The number of words in the English language, however, remains the same
Actually, English is acquiring new words at a fast pace, probably thousands per year. Even the staid Oxford Dictionary records many new words in each edition.
On trademark infringement, companies don't sue other companies to try to cash in. They do it because if they don't attempt to protect their trademark...
From TFA "... evidence of over 200 federal registrations of marks containing the term "Tiger" -- including 24 companies, other than TigerDirect, which employ Tiger marks to promote computer products and services."
So will these 200 companies lose their marks because they didn't challenge the 201st?
It has to be a similar product with a similar mark, the degrees of similarity being the things a judge decides on. In this case, not very, just the word "Tiger" isn't enough.
Did you try to get them to use something like Docbook?
Hilarious. I can't get most authors to save to RTF, and that takes 10 minutes coaching over the phone. Mostly these aren't continuing relationships, it's years between books for most authors, so there's no return on trying to teach them, and even those I do invariably forget it all should they have another project a year or more later.
If we were all at the same workplace; yes I'd enforce rules, but freelancing you gotta smile and take it (or not smile, but still take it).
What i really find odd is that the pdf files are compressed in some self extracting zip file executable.
Ar they much, if any, smaller? PDF has pretty good compression. I just zipped a few random PDFs and they were less than 1% smaller than the original. Possibly it's to fuck with non-Windows users, or Google which indexes PDFs on the web. But it does indicate a rapprochement with Adobe; also the new OTF font format, which combines Adobe's Type 1 and the MS/Apple Truetype. I've heard installing recent Adobe apps (Acrobat 7) requires IE to be present. All a bit disturbing.
But is the Nazi parallel really that strong? To my knowledge, Microsoft hasn't been exterminating people.
There was a lot more to the Nazis than simply killing. Most apposite would be the very professional use of propaganda, (they had an actual "Propaganda Ministry", directed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels), and the "Big Lie" method, used in these corporate days under the "FUD" label.
but yeah, I really hate pdf for tiny stuff like this
They've got a jpeg thumbnail. The PDF is supposed to be for printing. Unfortunately, the PDF is just a jpeg image ; the line art and fonts are all rendered at fixed resolution, so they loss all the benefits of the PDF format (smooth scalable graphics and type). It's a little odd to see MS using PDF format, but at least they didn't put it a BMP.
Huh? ctrl-a; ctrl-c; ctrl-n; Edit>Paste Special... > Unformatted Text
What do you do for the other 59 minutes and 50 seconds?
Make smart arse posts on slashdot?
I'm talking about documents with some structure: footnotes (which may be misnumbered), tables (done with tabs or God knows how); inserted illustrations which have to be extracted, or re-sourced, headings (which are never consistently applied using Styles); spellchecking (which alone can take hours for a book length work with lots of place names, foreign words, etc); fixing up the usual confusions between hyphens, em and en dashes, and probably more.
Even a novel, about the plainest text in terms of formatting, will have chapter heads, extra line spacing (which may or may not be significant), italic, bold, underlined text (the latter probably will be converted to italics). Poetry presents another set of problems, with rhyming being out of fashion, determining which line breaks are significant metrically, or are just random wraps, is non-trivial.
After all that, then I save as Wordperfect for DOS, and import that to my layout app (WP DOS is a very well known format, and MS went to a lot of trouble to convert to that cleanly); and finally save it again from the layout app as ASCII with mark up (similar to HTML).
is this going to do us any good? Seriously, throw up any custom restricted webpage
The idea is not to find deliberately hidden information, but to detect patterns in freely available information. Aside from the breathless "detect terrorism" spin to get funding, it sounds like a very interesting project. Pretty useless for predicting terrorism though; but for crimes or plots advanced by larger, more bureaucratic (generating lots of documents) groups -- military, companies, etc -- it could reveal much. Think of loading up the tons of evidence in big antitrust cases; even after they've "lost" the obviously incriminating files, there well could be a trail left in the rest.
And why are we exploring the stars if we can't even find rodent's on earth?
We're exploring the stars? Unless you mean Janet Jackson; no, we're a long, long way from doing that. And do you really think a team of astronomers would be effective at seaching through Lao markets for new rodents?
Our local schools all have evening programs teaching MS Office skills. which remain marketable in a very tough environment. Anyone substituting OpenOffice.org as a matter of principle wouldn't last a week.
"MS Office skills"? I work in DTP, and deal with files sent to me by all kinds of people, mostly highly educated professionals. Everyone uses MS Word, hardly any of them have a fucking clue how to use it beyond the basic formatting bar. I usually spend an hour or more straightening out a file before I can get down to looking at the actual text.
Most people would be more productive using a typewriter than Word. They'd waste less time looking for things in the menus and playing Solitaire. Actually, the best and most productive "Office skill" to learn is still touch typing, which is not, yet, MS specific. Excel? yes, good for adding up numbers and making charts. I used Lotus 123 for that 15 years ago. (Don't tell me about massive macro applications; anyone who writes complex apps in MSOffice is building his house on sand.)
If everyone had linux - that would of course be great but - when someone took a new job they'd have to spend ages getting used to the differnt desktop enviroments,
I've been messing around tryin several bootable CDs -- Knoppix, Ubuntu Live, Dynabolic, Mepis, etc. Sure the desktop looks different. But basically, no different than Windows with different themes, wallpaper, etc from the user's perspective. If I wanted to use Open Office, or a browser, click on the icon and there it is. You spend most of your time using apps, not desktops. The structure behind that -- Gnome, KDE; RPM, apt, can be very different, but the average user isn't going to touch that.
It might be libel, but really it's stalking and a massive invasion of privacy. O'Gara gave Jones' home addersses, phone numbers, photos of her house, gossip from her neighbours. And this is in "Linux World", not a supermarket tabloid.
In any case, Jones, if not a lawyer, certainly knows enough about it to put O'Gara's tits in a wringer now and sue her.
Perhaps because Christianity is the one that has the biggest head about how 'correct/right' their beliefs are and how 'wrong' other religions beliefs are.
I don't want to name any other religions, but conversion by the sword and terrible punishments for unbelievers is very common throughout history, and people are dying today over this all over the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since America abdicated from that position it became up for grabs.
Wouldn't anti-trust laws prevent this, or put MS in deep shit?
In any case, if MS wanted a *ix, they would buy SCO (I seem to remember that MS's Xenix, a *ix, was sold to them some time ago). They'd never ever admit there was anything good about GPL'd software.
Well, I didn't mean go naked. I've got Win98 and am running Opera as a browser, with Zone Alarm as a firewall. Never had a successful penetration or attack; never got any viruses.
The flaw in this analogy is that remixes are published by the mixer to third parties. Maybe a better music one would be complaining if you adjusted the bass higher than he intended when you're listening on your walkman. Is that reasonable? In any case, he's welcome to try to make his site GM-proof; but it seems perverse to piss off your audience in this way.
On the bright side, once your OS falls behind so do the number of virus attacks. Win98 is pretty safe now, for instance, because most attacks only work on XP.
Mod privileges aren't distributed randomly. You earn them by making posts, and more so if they're modded up. So I have contributed, a couple of thousand posts actually, not that that's anything to be proud of. So if you want to mod me down you'll have to write something worthwhile first. The mod system for comments does work fairly well; it's the disconnect between allowing feedback for these and the insularity of the editors that irks me.
If you don't like my posts, click on my name, go to relationships, make me a foe, then go to your preferences to make foes downmodded below your threshold. You'll never see me again.
Bruce Perens' technocrat.org, but they've had hosting problems recently. I just heard Bruce was on holiday and his hosting company pulled the plug -- he says it'll be back online next week. The quality of the articles is as good or better, but the lack is the community for comments. One with a viable but small community is Kuro5hin, though not as focussed on tech, fewer articles but better written.
I understand, and I don't care that you don't care. And so on. I think I understand why the editors dupe, it's because they're jaded and don't give a shit, not because they want to give you a second chance to read a story. (This isn't radio, you know. Stories don't need to be repeated on the hour, you can just page back and see every story ever posted if you feel like it.) I do care about the lack of professionalism. If you don't like that; put me on your foe/freak list, however that works (I've never bothered to find out), maybe it'll filter me out.
The opposite. Send a text version, and have a link encouraging recipients to see the HTML version in all its glory, on a web page, where HTML is supposed to be used. Some nesletters I get do exactly this. For those who like HTML, it's only a click away, and is much more efficient all around. Your marketing guy can use Flash, play music or whatever crap takes their fancy. Also tell the PHB that it's less likely to be flagged as spam.
Stories aren't reposted because they're "important". They're reposted because the editors are careless and didn;t notice. If I can't read Slashdot for a few days, I just browse through the "Older Stuff" stories linked conveniently on the right side of the front page.
I get annoyed at this because Slashdot regularly asks me to moderate posts, to improve the quality of the site, but provides no usable mechanism to moderate the editors. Even the email address on is encouraged to send warnings of dupes and errors is rarely answered, sometimes bounces, and is ignored in almost all cases. So now I rarely boither to mod at all; why should I care about the quality of the site when the editors obviously don't? In work I've found it similarly disheartening to be concerned with quality when the managemnent doesn't give more than lip service to the concept.
NO NO NO!!!! The blog article is from 2001. For once Slashdot were right in rejecting. Bruce tried Technocrat in a different form back then, and did shut it down until a few months ago when he reopened it. But I don't think its recent sudden disappeance from the web -- I can't even get its DNS to resolve -- is deliberate on his part. His personal domain, Perens.com, is similarly AWOL, and as that's where the only email address of his I know is, I haven't been able to follow up. Something is going on, but I have no idea what -- domain hijacks?
Actually, English is acquiring new words at a fast pace, probably thousands per year. Even the staid Oxford Dictionary records many new words in each edition.
From TFA "... evidence of over 200 federal registrations of marks containing the term "Tiger" -- including 24 companies, other than TigerDirect, which employ Tiger marks to promote computer products and services."
So will these 200 companies lose their marks because they didn't challenge the 201st?
It has to be a similar product with a similar mark, the degrees of similarity being the things a judge decides on. In this case, not very, just the word "Tiger" isn't enough.
Hilarious. I can't get most authors to save to RTF, and that takes 10 minutes coaching over the phone. Mostly these aren't continuing relationships, it's years between books for most authors, so there's no return on trying to teach them, and even those I do invariably forget it all should they have another project a year or more later.
If we were all at the same workplace; yes I'd enforce rules, but freelancing you gotta smile and take it (or not smile, but still take it).
Ar they much, if any, smaller? PDF has pretty good compression. I just zipped a few random PDFs and they were less than 1% smaller than the original. Possibly it's to fuck with non-Windows users, or Google which indexes PDFs on the web. But it does indicate a rapprochement with Adobe; also the new OTF font format, which combines Adobe's Type 1 and the MS/Apple Truetype. I've heard installing recent Adobe apps (Acrobat 7) requires IE to be present. All a bit disturbing.
There was a lot more to the Nazis than simply killing. Most apposite would be the very professional use of propaganda, (they had an actual "Propaganda Ministry", directed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels), and the "Big Lie" method, used in these corporate days under the "FUD" label.
They've got a jpeg thumbnail. The PDF is supposed to be for printing. Unfortunately, the PDF is just a jpeg image ; the line art and fonts are all rendered at fixed resolution, so they loss all the benefits of the PDF format (smooth scalable graphics and type). It's a little odd to see MS using PDF format, but at least they didn't put it a BMP.
What do you do for the other 59 minutes and 50 seconds?
Make smart arse posts on slashdot?
I'm talking about documents with some structure: footnotes (which may be misnumbered), tables (done with tabs or God knows how); inserted illustrations which have to be extracted, or re-sourced, headings (which are never consistently applied using Styles); spellchecking (which alone can take hours for a book length work with lots of place names, foreign words, etc); fixing up the usual confusions between hyphens, em and en dashes, and probably more.
Even a novel, about the plainest text in terms of formatting, will have chapter heads, extra line spacing (which may or may not be significant), italic, bold, underlined text (the latter probably will be converted to italics). Poetry presents another set of problems, with rhyming being out of fashion, determining which line breaks are significant metrically, or are just random wraps, is non-trivial.
After all that, then I save as Wordperfect for DOS, and import that to my layout app (WP DOS is a very well known format, and MS went to a lot of trouble to convert to that cleanly); and finally save it again from the layout app as ASCII with mark up (similar to HTML).
The idea is not to find deliberately hidden information, but to detect patterns in freely available information. Aside from the breathless "detect terrorism" spin to get funding, it sounds like a very interesting project. Pretty useless for predicting terrorism though; but for crimes or plots advanced by larger, more bureaucratic (generating lots of documents) groups -- military, companies, etc -- it could reveal much. Think of loading up the tons of evidence in big antitrust cases; even after they've "lost" the obviously incriminating files, there well could be a trail left in the rest.
We're exploring the stars? Unless you mean Janet Jackson; no, we're a long, long way from doing that. And do you really think a team of astronomers would be effective at seaching through Lao markets for new rodents?
"MS Office skills"? I work in DTP, and deal with files sent to me by all kinds of people, mostly highly educated professionals. Everyone uses MS Word, hardly any of them have a fucking clue how to use it beyond the basic formatting bar. I usually spend an hour or more straightening out a file before I can get down to looking at the actual text.
Most people would be more productive using a typewriter than Word. They'd waste less time looking for things in the menus and playing Solitaire. Actually, the best and most productive "Office skill" to learn is still touch typing, which is not, yet, MS specific. Excel? yes, good for adding up numbers and making charts. I used Lotus 123 for that 15 years ago. (Don't tell me about massive macro applications; anyone who writes complex apps in MSOffice is building his house on sand.)
I've been messing around tryin several bootable CDs -- Knoppix, Ubuntu Live, Dynabolic, Mepis, etc. Sure the desktop looks different. But basically, no different than Windows with different themes, wallpaper, etc from the user's perspective. If I wanted to use Open Office, or a browser, click on the icon and there it is. You spend most of your time using apps, not desktops. The structure behind that -- Gnome, KDE; RPM, apt, can be very different, but the average user isn't going to touch that.
Try this: The Jones O'Gara feud.
In any case, Jones, if not a lawyer, certainly knows enough about it to put O'Gara's tits in a wringer now and sue her.
I don't want to name any other religions, but conversion by the sword and terrible punishments for unbelievers is very common throughout history, and people are dying today over this all over the world.