Here I am, sitting in a tiny room with a very small oscillating fan trying in vain to fight the muggy late-night heat. In the other corner, my computer is quite happily chugging away, heating the room up even more.
And, here, a story about air conditioning. That I don't have. Meanies.
This is my fundamental problem with Liberty Alliance and Passport and whatever-all-else.
What, really, is the point?
I am, in fact, actually capable of taking two seconds to type in my username and password on several different sites every day. If I don't want to, there are a number of programs--including Mozilla and IE--that are willing to save them for me and re-input them every time I visit that site, without holding any of my personal information on someone else's computer.
So why is this Passport stuff supposed to be all that important? Until the day comes that I/have/ to sign up for something like that to access a service I can't get anywhere else, I don't care what they do or who else offers the same type of service. The day I must sign up to get that service...
I stop using that service.
Really, I don't see why the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, no matter who happens to be running it.
Not that switching over to Linux is, of course, a bad thing, but what I'd like to know from Mr. Anthony is--What made him change to Linux, and how he progressed in switching over? What parts were most difficult?
I was employed for awhile at a company where, while you couldn't clock in until your official start time, it was mandatory to be there getting your computer started up 10-15 minutes before your start time. If you weren't actively doing whatever they defined as your 'job responsibilities' by your start time, you were late, no matter when you actually arrived. (And there were a lot of things that needed done that somehow never made it under the aegis of 'job responsibilities.)
Didn't like it? Well, you didn't have to work there. I didn't like it. I no longer work there.
Someone translate this into plain language for me, perhaps? It sounds like this is some kind of important breakthrough, but what does it actually mean on a practical level?
The problem with advances like these is that everyone looks at them and thinks, "Oh, great stuff! Before long, we'll be able to let all the blind people see."
Which may happen... or may not. But in the meantime, people see it as a little less important to make sure that the world is accessible to those who are disabled, when they're convinced that a 'cure' is right around the corner.
Cochlear implants and bionic eyes and so on and so forth... they all sound terrific. And there will be people helped by these advances. Just don't let yourselves get caught expecting too much of them. And remember, programmers and designers out there, to make sure that your projects are accessible. Text needs to be readable by a screen-reader. Audio should have available captions. All that jazz.
Re:apt-get is nice
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Mandrake's Software Manager is very nice. The problem isn't RPM, or the Software Manager, or any of that, as I see it.
The problem is Mandrake. Or whoever puts out these RPMs.
"Oops, sorry, we're going to start doing everything on gcc 3.1 for the next version, so... if you wanted newer packages of anything, you're out of luck."
Or replace that with any of a million other things. It's not the software format itself, it's the distrobutions that insist on putting together all these RPMs so that you can't upgrade one without upgrading your entire system.
But some of us aren't yet advanced enough to switch to Debian or Gentoo or Sorcerer, so what can we do?
My last office job, we had a defined amount of time between which we had to change passwords. No minimum lengths, which would have been good, too, but it was something, right?
Every time passwords got changed, people would take down their old post-it and write up a new one. And you were also required to keep your password on file with your supervisor. Most people just kept incrementing the default password, which was a very short word--so you probably could have gotten 75% of the company just by using default1, default2, etc. ('Default' wasn't the word itself.)
Now, I'm headed off to college in the fall. I've just gotten my university email account, and been informed that you cannot, in fact, have a password longer than eight characters. You just aren't allowed. (Thankfully, they also don't allow less than 6.) We were then recommended to keep it all lower-case and something we could easily remember.
For non-geeks, I've concluded, ease of use trumps security every time. Nothing's ever going to change that, and nothing easy is ever going to be truly secure. Such is life.
Quote: The employees have been typing at a rate of about 200 items per day.
A whole 200 items per day, huh? No wonder it's going to take so long. Unless they've having to enter a/shitload/ of information on each and every person, they should be able to manage at least twice that. If they can't, they need to bring in some temps or something--people who actually have some clue how to do data entry properly.
At least the subject of everything was a business and could therefore *possibly* have monetary loss over all of it.
I run a forum. Thus far, I've been fortunate in that nobody's actually gone through with a lawsuit threat. "Waah! Somebody said I was wrong! I'm gonna sue!" Everybody's first line of defense is a threat like that, especially if they're unable to come up with any sort of decent reply.
Now, if the guy's posts to this list in response actually got blocked, I do feel for him a bit. What was the moderator thinking? If you're going to run something like that, you have to learn to be impartial with your kewl powerz, or pretty soon all the decent people will flee, and rightly so.
Once upon a time, people worried about trademarks. They worried about trademarks because 'aspirin' had become a generic, and they worried that this might happen to them. They wanted to protect what was theirs. Companies competed with each other, and it was good.
Capitalism is good, in its pure and properly practiced form--unfortunately, so is any other form of economy. The bigger companies contributed to political campaigns, and so they began to get judges to rule in their favor even when, perhaps, it wasn't something they really had a right to. They paid for privacy when someone should have looked over their shoulders.
And then it gradually came to the point where large businesses *expected* this privilege. I can't blame Intel because they're behaving in a way which corporate America not only accepts but encourages. They're no longer motivated by a search for prosperity but by mere greed--they are the gluttons who want more food even when they can't eat anymore.
These lawsuits are the symptoms, not the disease. People need to become aware of the business practices of the companies they patronize, and modify their spending habits appropriately. They need to let their representatives know that the interests of business aren't *their* interests.
Once the people take the power *back* from the corporations, maybe the world will regain some of its sanity again. Remember, in America, even if you can't vote, you are an all-important Consumer--pay attention to the choices you make.
If you'll look at it, while it doesn't specifically say Yahoo! on every one of them, there's still a separate portion for third-parties--Yahoo! Delivers stuff--and every single one of the options is related to an area where Yahoo! themselves provides services.
These are new options, as far as I can tell, so nothing's been 'reset', and I think they just made it the default that yes, you as a Yahoo! member would want to hear about Yahoo! services.
My Yahoo! Delivers options are completely untouched.
On the other hand, don't. I'd rather have beige everything than salmon. How did they determine it was salmon, anyway? Are they sure it isn't coral? Or sunset pink? Or...
Someone find a box of crayons for these researchers. In the name of research, of course.
Doesn't it say something about society?
on
AdCritic To Return
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
We're so steeped in our own commercialism now that we watch advertisements for entertainment on their own.
This scares me. Of course, I'm in front of the television for about two hours a week--but I don't get what the attraction is. They're trying to sell you stuff. Most likely, stuff you don't need and frequently stuff you wouldn't want if you knew the whole story behind it.
I guess this is one of those cases where I just smile and nod and go back to reading.
Obviously they're not going to change their minds for one person. That's why you enlist your friends, your family, everyone you know to write similar letters. One letter means nothing. A letter from everyone in town tells them something.
...to my representatives on this one. Long, detailed letters, in fact. I encourage everyone else to do the same. Make sure that they're well and fully aware of how their own constituents feel on the issue.
Personally, I don't care how many people use IE and how many Mozilla... or Opera, or Konqueror, or any of the others.
What I care about is that at this moment, when I browse the web, I'm still seeing pages designed for 'features' in Internet Explorer that nobody else has. Backgrounds that're supposed to be fixed and end up tiling in a manner that makes the text very difficult to read; things like that.
Once Mozilla reaches 1.0, and AOL starts using Gecko as their rendering engine, more people--which is not to say everyone, but more than were before--will be using standards-compliant browsers. Hopefully a number large enough to stop people from designing things that will only work in one browser.
Mozilla, despite the fact that I use it, is not god. It's come a long way, but it's not the browser to replace IE... it's just another choice. Choice is good. These websites need to figure it out as much as the consumers.
Not all that long ago, MozillaZine went down because of bandwidth issues, had to get a new host, was soliciting for donations all over the place.
Now, in gratitude, the site gets submitted to Slashdot. Yeah. Exactly *why* was it necessary to submit *MozillaZine* for this? Couldn't the main Mozilla website have served just as well? Presumably, it'd be better able to support the bandwidth usage. Not to mention that it's better to reference directly to the source--i.e., Mozilla--than another reference--i.e., MozillaZine, which just hosts a forum and some news and occasionally has reviews of nightly builds.
It makes me feel guilty for even reading this site. Can't people post responsibly for once?
...I was extremely pleased.
Blade 2 was not meant to be an Oscar-caliber movie. Blade, the original, had plenty of plot holes and iffy science and all the rest, and you know what? I don't give a damn about that, it was a marvel of effects and/atmosphere/.
Blade 2 improved on the original in all those ways. The plotline wasn't as intriguing, but the choreography was jaw-dropping.
Note that I didn't say 'good'. I said 'jaw-dropping'. As in, during the first serious fight scene, I could barely breathe. Hats off to Donnie Yen--who should have been given more chance to shine himself, but sadly we can't have everything. It was visual poetry, as smooth and elegant as anything you could hope for. Snipes happens to have a fifth-degree black belt and also practices capoeira, the spelling of which I know I'm slaughtering, and all of that really shows; martial artistry is not limited to Asians!
The plot was imperfect. I'd go back to see it again, though, just to watch them move.
What if, instead of having an abortion, a woman were given the option of transplanting the fetus into another woman... or into a contraption like this? In essence, putting it up for adoption *without* the continued trouble of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth?
I--and yes, I'm female--would jump on that option in a minute if I became pregnant and didn't want to keep it. Perhaps some would still find it repulsive, but some people always will...
Trillian has been updated twice in the past 24 hours to work around the blocks AOL is throwing up to prevent the popular IM client from interoperating with the AOL Instant Messenger service.
Isn't this inflating things a bit? All you had to do to fix it in the first place was turn off secure IM. They fixed it so that you could once again use secure IM. At no point did I really see AOL 'blocking' Trillian.
You're not the only one. I tried Ultima Online once, shortly after it came out... and since then, have never looked back. If I play a multiplayer game, it's text-based, period. If the future FFs are multiplayer... well, I won't be buying them, either.
But then, I put story over anything else, and it's pretty hard for a MMORPG to have much of a story. Give me one of the great SNES RPGs any day over a MMORPG--no matter how great the graphics are.
Slashdot Mirror
Here I am, sitting in a tiny room with a very small oscillating fan trying in vain to fight the muggy late-night heat. In the other corner, my computer is quite happily chugging away, heating the room up even more.
And, here, a story about air conditioning. That I don't have. Meanies.
This is my fundamental problem with Liberty Alliance and Passport and whatever-all-else.
/have/ to sign up for something like that to access a service I can't get anywhere else, I don't care what they do or who else offers the same type of service. The day I must sign up to get that service...
What, really, is the point?
I am, in fact, actually capable of taking two seconds to type in my username and password on several different sites every day. If I don't want to, there are a number of programs--including Mozilla and IE--that are willing to save them for me and re-input them every time I visit that site, without holding any of my personal information on someone else's computer.
So why is this Passport stuff supposed to be all that important? Until the day comes that I
I stop using that service.
Really, I don't see why the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, no matter who happens to be running it.
Not that switching over to Linux is, of course, a bad thing, but what I'd like to know from Mr. Anthony is--What made him change to Linux, and how he progressed in switching over? What parts were most difficult?
Forget paying them extra.
I was employed for awhile at a company where, while you couldn't clock in until your official start time, it was mandatory to be there getting your computer started up 10-15 minutes before your start time. If you weren't actively doing whatever they defined as your 'job responsibilities' by your start time, you were late, no matter when you actually arrived. (And there were a lot of things that needed done that somehow never made it under the aegis of 'job responsibilities.)
Didn't like it? Well, you didn't have to work there. I didn't like it. I no longer work there.
Someone translate this into plain language for me, perhaps? It sounds like this is some kind of important breakthrough, but what does it actually mean on a practical level?
The problem with advances like these is that everyone looks at them and thinks, "Oh, great stuff! Before long, we'll be able to let all the blind people see."
Which may happen... or may not. But in the meantime, people see it as a little less important to make sure that the world is accessible to those who are disabled, when they're convinced that a 'cure' is right around the corner.
Cochlear implants and bionic eyes and so on and so forth... they all sound terrific. And there will be people helped by these advances. Just don't let yourselves get caught expecting too much of them. And remember, programmers and designers out there, to make sure that your projects are accessible. Text needs to be readable by a screen-reader. Audio should have available captions. All that jazz.
Mandrake's Software Manager is very nice. The problem isn't RPM, or the Software Manager, or any of that, as I see it.
The problem is Mandrake. Or whoever puts out these RPMs.
"Oops, sorry, we're going to start doing everything on gcc 3.1 for the next version, so... if you wanted newer packages of anything, you're out of luck."
Or replace that with any of a million other things. It's not the software format itself, it's the distrobutions that insist on putting together all these RPMs so that you can't upgrade one without upgrading your entire system.
But some of us aren't yet advanced enough to switch to Debian or Gentoo or Sorcerer, so what can we do?
...is this film eventually going to be made available on video or something for those of us living in the back of beyond?
Does anyone know?
I can't exactly take off work and drive to one of the remote places where it's showing, but I'd love to see it anyway.
My last office job, we had a defined amount of time between which we had to change passwords. No minimum lengths, which would have been good, too, but it was something, right?
Every time passwords got changed, people would take down their old post-it and write up a new one. And you were also required to keep your password on file with your supervisor. Most people just kept incrementing the default password, which was a very short word--so you probably could have gotten 75% of the company just by using default1, default2, etc. ('Default' wasn't the word itself.)
Now, I'm headed off to college in the fall. I've just gotten my university email account, and been informed that you cannot, in fact, have a password longer than eight characters. You just aren't allowed. (Thankfully, they also don't allow less than 6.) We were then recommended to keep it all lower-case and something we could easily remember.
For non-geeks, I've concluded, ease of use trumps security every time. Nothing's ever going to change that, and nothing easy is ever going to be truly secure. Such is life.
Quote: The employees have been typing at a rate of about 200 items per day.
/shitload/ of information on each and every person, they should be able to manage at least twice that. If they can't, they need to bring in some temps or something--people who actually have some clue how to do data entry properly.
A whole 200 items per day, huh? No wonder it's going to take so long. Unless they've having to enter a
At least the subject of everything was a business and could therefore *possibly* have monetary loss over all of it.
I run a forum. Thus far, I've been fortunate in that nobody's actually gone through with a lawsuit threat. "Waah! Somebody said I was wrong! I'm gonna sue!" Everybody's first line of defense is a threat like that, especially if they're unable to come up with any sort of decent reply.
Now, if the guy's posts to this list in response actually got blocked, I do feel for him a bit. What was the moderator thinking? If you're going to run something like that, you have to learn to be impartial with your kewl powerz, or pretty soon all the decent people will flee, and rightly so.
Whether it warranted a lawsuit? I dunno.
Once upon a time, people worried about trademarks. They worried about trademarks because 'aspirin' had become a generic, and they worried that this might happen to them. They wanted to protect what was theirs. Companies competed with each other, and it was good.
Capitalism is good, in its pure and properly practiced form--unfortunately, so is any other form of economy. The bigger companies contributed to political campaigns, and so they began to get judges to rule in their favor even when, perhaps, it wasn't something they really had a right to. They paid for privacy when someone should have looked over their shoulders.
And then it gradually came to the point where large businesses *expected* this privilege. I can't blame Intel because they're behaving in a way which corporate America not only accepts but encourages. They're no longer motivated by a search for prosperity but by mere greed--they are the gluttons who want more food even when they can't eat anymore.
These lawsuits are the symptoms, not the disease. People need to become aware of the business practices of the companies they patronize, and modify their spending habits appropriately. They need to let their representatives know that the interests of business aren't *their* interests.
Once the people take the power *back* from the corporations, maybe the world will regain some of its sanity again. Remember, in America, even if you can't vote, you are an all-important Consumer--pay attention to the choices you make.
I bet you could convince more kids to brush if, say, you had a toothbrush that played the Barney theme song while you were brushing.
Yes, it sounds dumb, and I doubt it'd be too successful with grown-ups, but kids are a completely different ball game.
If you'll look at it, while it doesn't specifically say Yahoo! on every one of them, there's still a separate portion for third-parties--Yahoo! Delivers stuff--and every single one of the options is related to an area where Yahoo! themselves provides services.
These are new options, as far as I can tell, so nothing's been 'reset', and I think they just made it the default that yes, you as a Yahoo! member would want to hear about Yahoo! services.
My Yahoo! Delivers options are completely untouched.
Someone should inform the offices of the world.
On the other hand, don't. I'd rather have beige everything than salmon. How did they determine it was salmon, anyway? Are they sure it isn't coral? Or sunset pink? Or...
Someone find a box of crayons for these researchers. In the name of research, of course.
We're so steeped in our own commercialism now that we watch advertisements for entertainment on their own.
This scares me. Of course, I'm in front of the television for about two hours a week--but I don't get what the attraction is. They're trying to sell you stuff. Most likely, stuff you don't need and frequently stuff you wouldn't want if you knew the whole story behind it.
I guess this is one of those cases where I just smile and nod and go back to reading.
Obviously they're not going to change their minds for one person. That's why you enlist your friends, your family, everyone you know to write similar letters. One letter means nothing. A letter from everyone in town tells them something.
...to my representatives on this one. Long, detailed letters, in fact. I encourage everyone else to do the same. Make sure that they're well and fully aware of how their own constituents feel on the issue.
Personally, I don't care how many people use IE and how many Mozilla... or Opera, or Konqueror, or any of the others.
What I care about is that at this moment, when I browse the web, I'm still seeing pages designed for 'features' in Internet Explorer that nobody else has. Backgrounds that're supposed to be fixed and end up tiling in a manner that makes the text very difficult to read; things like that.
Once Mozilla reaches 1.0, and AOL starts using Gecko as their rendering engine, more people--which is not to say everyone, but more than were before--will be using standards-compliant browsers. Hopefully a number large enough to stop people from designing things that will only work in one browser.
Mozilla, despite the fact that I use it, is not god. It's come a long way, but it's not the browser to replace IE... it's just another choice. Choice is good. These websites need to figure it out as much as the consumers.
Not all that long ago, MozillaZine went down because of bandwidth issues, had to get a new host, was soliciting for donations all over the place. Now, in gratitude, the site gets submitted to Slashdot. Yeah. Exactly *why* was it necessary to submit *MozillaZine* for this? Couldn't the main Mozilla website have served just as well? Presumably, it'd be better able to support the bandwidth usage. Not to mention that it's better to reference directly to the source--i.e., Mozilla--than another reference--i.e., MozillaZine, which just hosts a forum and some news and occasionally has reviews of nightly builds. It makes me feel guilty for even reading this site. Can't people post responsibly for once?
...I was extremely pleased. /atmosphere/.
Blade 2 was not meant to be an Oscar-caliber movie. Blade, the original, had plenty of plot holes and iffy science and all the rest, and you know what? I don't give a damn about that, it was a marvel of effects and
Blade 2 improved on the original in all those ways. The plotline wasn't as intriguing, but the choreography was jaw-dropping.
Note that I didn't say 'good'. I said 'jaw-dropping'. As in, during the first serious fight scene, I could barely breathe. Hats off to Donnie Yen--who should have been given more chance to shine himself, but sadly we can't have everything. It was visual poetry, as smooth and elegant as anything you could hope for. Snipes happens to have a fifth-degree black belt and also practices capoeira, the spelling of which I know I'm slaughtering, and all of that really shows; martial artistry is not limited to Asians!
The plot was imperfect. I'd go back to see it again, though, just to watch them move.
What if, instead of having an abortion, a woman were given the option of transplanting the fetus into another woman... or into a contraption like this? In essence, putting it up for adoption *without* the continued trouble of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth?
I--and yes, I'm female--would jump on that option in a minute if I became pregnant and didn't want to keep it. Perhaps some would still find it repulsive, but some people always will...
Trillian has been updated twice in the past 24 hours to work around the blocks AOL is throwing up to prevent the popular IM client from interoperating with the AOL Instant Messenger service.
Isn't this inflating things a bit? All you had to do to fix it in the first place was turn off secure IM. They fixed it so that you could once again use secure IM. At no point did I really see AOL 'blocking' Trillian.
You're not the only one. I tried Ultima Online once, shortly after it came out... and since then, have never looked back. If I play a multiplayer game, it's text-based, period. If the future FFs are multiplayer... well, I won't be buying them, either.
But then, I put story over anything else, and it's pretty hard for a MMORPG to have much of a story. Give me one of the great SNES RPGs any day over a MMORPG--no matter how great the graphics are.