Why is X written for network transparent operation when 99% of the usage of a desktop windowing system is local (I'm not knocking the feature, just saying it shouldn't be the central assumption of a desktop windowing system)?
99% of X-Window terminals don't run on desktops. They run on Workstations, that are usually connected to very fast LANS.
Like the cheap, fast lan network that connects my laptop to the machine on which this browser is running. Thin client is a very, very old concept, and by enabling me to remotely fire up and operate Mozilla on my desktop computer, it regularly saves me from flogging this portable to death by running a browser locally.
Re:Ten Reasons Why TeX/LaTeX is Better than Word
on
Writing Documentation
·
· Score: 3, Funny
There are no LaTeX "macro" viruses.
Unless you count the liveware virus that makes you want to escape every period\. I'd call that pretty macro\.
The simple truth is that if a person in England tries to sue someone in the US of A for slander, (because there the burden of proof is on the defendant) they'd be laughed out of court.
The reality is slightly more murky than that. One UK litigant successfully obtained a summary judgement in the British courts against a Canadian defendant who was resident in the USA, for on line defamation in a USENET newsgroup. He used this judgement to obtain an advantageous settlement with the defendant's university.
Although there did appear to be a question over whether the plaintiff could collect on his default judgement, in fact he appears to have successfully leveraged such judgements to obtain monetary settlements.
The Amateur Action BBS case (1994, confirmed on appeal 1996) established in the Federal jurisdiction that the community standards of the recipient's physical locale apply for the purpose of obscenity law whether transmission is electronic or otherwise (18USC 1465).
Why in gods name would someone buy this at $100 a crack ?????
That, as they say, is a very good question.
It isnt gooing to be ANYWHERE (Windows isnt stable you say, Ok , whatever but for running Windows apps youre going to tell me a hacked emulator is) near as stable for windows apps as windows,
A key stability issue with Windows is the kernel--if you run under a Linux or BSD/Mach/whatever kernel then a wobbly bit of software isn't going to cream it a la BSOD. And if the basic IP services and whatnot are on top of the thing like in UNIX then you don't have that "now reboot your computer" nonsense.
and the Linux stuff is going to get dragged down by bloating everything to the moon for compatibilty ???
You mean like with Gnome/KDE/Evolution Mozilla? Run mutt and lynx!:)
I wish nobody else had, either. Gods, leave him alone, people!
Yep, that kind of personality seems to bring out the worst in people, sooner or later.
However, my point is that the reported activities of this Shifman character, if he exists, appear to be well within the bell curve for internet stupidity. It doesn't look much like a hoax to me.
Bringing a TI-58 programmable calculator home from work to play with--I got some very weird looks.
1979, the first PET and TRS-80 personal computers were in the shops, but hardly anybody was buying, and computers were expensive things in big air conditioned rooms with noisy fans and reel-to-reel tape decks, and ours had a cool vector scan terminals that did screen prints to expensive, glossy thermal paper.
Our fax machine had a spinning roller that you wrapped an A4 sheet around. The thing spun for twenty minutes whilst what was probably a single photocell scanned it in a corkscrew pattern and sent the bits through an acoustic coupler.
Engineers, we all possessed sliderules, and used them every day.
I did some Oracle development on Solaris on (Sun-provided) Intel hardware back in '98/9. We would have been better to just buy a third party PC and install Solaris, but the people who bought the kit were suits and I was paid handsomely by the hour.:)
First thing we did was start installing GNU stuff. Standard free tools like that, and keen competition in mid-range from Microsoft's excellent marketing teams, killed the proprietary UNIXes on Intel. Looks like the UNIX world is settling around BSD (and/or Mach) and Linux. Not before time.
Remember turtle graphics? No you don't because you were still in diapers.
I wish. Of course, you won't remember/. from then. It was on a 8" CP/M format floppy. When we were finished reading it we'd use it to archive that week's net.sources postings. The first fifty messages on/. were always full of crap like "f1rst b00t", but it had a neat howto section, I remember one particular article on how to convert an eight track cartridge deck to store your C64 programs. Then Jerry Pournelle split and things started to go downhill.
By the way, PacBell is phasing in $50/mo as the DSL rate.
NTL in the UK is providing broadband at 512kpbs for 25 pounds, 128kbps at 15 pounds to existing cable customers. Dunno what the normal US/Canada speeds are, but I assume they're comparable or better. The standard cable TV set top box has a cable modem so all customers are broadband-ready.
Ah yes, Bob Shaw's Slow Glass stories. I once saw him talk on the subject. He had a Northern Irish accent and told us all about his idea for a novel about life on a Dyson Sphere, which turned out to be Orbitsville.
Re:Data protection acts protect many Europeans
on
Making It Personal
·
· Score: 1
But any company purchasing this information will be unable to use it to trade in most European countries.
eg. The UK data protection act says that personal data must be "lawfuly and fairly obtained"
I don't know if there are any court rulings on this, but I don't see that data bought at auction necessarily falls afoul of this. If the company has bought a section of the business at auction (not _just_ a list of addresses), then it has most probably bought an interest in the customers, in the eyes of the law.
The existence of the data and the purposes for which it was to be used would have to be filed with the data protection registrar.
Having said that, the data protection acts of most European states probably do deterthe worst kinds of abuse that may be carried out. I suspect that an outside-Europe business could sell profiling services to European businesses, however. There's nearly always a loophole where boundaries are concerned.
found this site [titech.ac.jp] run by a Disney employee
Ah, another Mickey Mouse website about to be slashdotted.;)
Seriously, Squeak is an interesting implementation of Smalltalk-80, reported to be faithful to the original language, though the GUI seemed to be rather outdated last time I tried it on a pentium box--it doesn't seem to do asynchronous screen updates. It's supported by
a team at Disney (no kidding!) including famous Smalltalk guru Alan Kay.
The IDE for Pocketsmalltalk, for Palmos is being ported to use Squeak instead of the commercial Dolphin implementation. Squeak itself doesn't run on palmos, however (as far as I know).
Is there an equivalent of babelfish for marketingspeak? Alternatively can anybody point me at any academic publications or patent applications these guys have made that might relate to their revolutionary claims?
Their website is an irritating mass of fussy flash animations, and their html site is apparently down until January 13th.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about humanity as if it were just another species when it comes to extincton. What other species sets up farms? Sure, we may wipe ourselves out, but not in a manner even remotely similar to the ways that the dinosaurs or other species were wiped out.
We could wipe ourselves out, sure. But we're just as likely, or perhaps more likely, to be wiped out in a global extinction event. There isn't a lot we could do about it. Escaping to space isn't an option, or at least, not as yet a realistic method of diversifying our habitats.
High intelligence gives us a fighting chance, sure.
But before that happened, I'd expect the species to decline naturally. We cannot assume that civilisation will remain the common, sustainable mode of human existence, or that our intelligence and civilisation will be enough to enable us to adapt indefinitely to whatever ecological changes we might encounter over periods of millions of years.
There is also an electronic version of this book available [here] which is a living version of the printed book
Another site that carries it is the slashcoded Andamooka (with which I am not associated), which has the dual advantage of carrying many more open source books and permitting registered users to enter their own annotations on line.
There is no reason humanity shouldn't last a few hundred years longer to get here
That appears to be a website devoted to some kind of quasi-religious belief in the transformation of humans to some kind of machine form. Whatever the result, I suspect that it would not be us, and it would certainly not be human. Interesting idea, though.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't alligators, and crocodiles been around for something like 300+ million?
The fossil record shows that the crocodile family has been subject to the usual flow of evolution and species extinction. You're mistaking a family for a species. We're not concerned here with whether there will be simians in n zillion years, but whether there will be humans. There are many species of simians, but only one of those species is currently human (all the other candidates are extinct). So the odds are fairly long.
hard to imagine that after 5.7 billion years we'll still be worried about something as banal as the expanding sun. No, by then we'll have figured out a way to transmute our living soul into pure electronic energy and we will roam the cosmos, imortal and all-powerful.
Or we'll die out. How long did the dinosaurs live?
Well, the dinosaurs as a family lasted for over a hundred million years, but individual species didn't last anything like as long. Ten million years is a very respectable age for a species, though some become extince much earlier and others last much longer. Given our presence at the top of every food chain on the planet, we're in a rather vulnerable position because we could easily wipe out our food sources. I won't go down the doom route, but I'll simply say that it's _far_ from a foregone conclusion that humans will be around even a million years.
And there are no competitor species waiting around to take our place as articulate and intelligent tool users--apparently we outcompeted the nearest competitors in our niche. That's to be expected, and nothing unusual, but it does mean that worrying about piddling things like novae is a little silly.
Slashdot Mirror
99% of X-Window terminals don't run on desktops. They run on Workstations, that are usually connected to very fast LANS.
Like the cheap, fast lan network that connects my laptop to the machine on which this browser is running. Thin client is a very, very old concept, and by enabling me to remotely fire up and operate Mozilla on my desktop computer, it regularly saves me from flogging this portable to death by running a browser locally.
Unless you count the liveware virus that makes you want to escape every period\. I'd call that pretty macro\.
#include
#include <rants/msvapple.h>
#include <rants/nextstep.h>
#include <slashdot/troll.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
puts("Real programmers use curses");
return 0;
}
The reality is slightly more murky than that. One UK litigant successfully obtained a summary judgement in the British courts against a Canadian defendant who was resident in the USA, for on line defamation in a USENET newsgroup. He used this judgement to obtain an advantageous settlement with the defendant's university.
Here are a notice about the lawsuit, a Wired article about some of Godfrey's other suits, and a notice abour Cornell University's settlement with Godfrey. Again, several other cases are mentioned.
Although there did appear to be a question over whether the plaintiff could collect on his default judgement, in fact he appears to have successfully leveraged such judgements to obtain monetary settlements.
http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/aabbs/aabbs.html
That, as they say, is a very good question.
It isnt gooing to be ANYWHERE (Windows isnt stable you say, Ok , whatever but for running Windows apps youre going to tell me a hacked emulator is) near as stable for windows apps as windows,
A key stability issue with Windows is the kernel--if you run under a Linux or BSD/Mach/whatever kernel then a wobbly bit of software isn't going to cream it a la BSOD. And if the basic IP services and whatnot are on top of the thing like in UNIX then you don't have that "now reboot your computer" nonsense.
and the Linux stuff is going to get dragged down by bloating everything to the moon for compatibilty ???
You mean like with Gnome/KDE/Evolution Mozilla? Run mutt and lynx! :)
Yep, that kind of personality seems to bring out the worst in people, sooner or later.
However, my point is that the reported activities of this Shifman character, if he exists, appear to be well within the bell curve for internet stupidity. It doesn't look much like a hoax to me.
1979, the first PET and TRS-80 personal computers were in the shops, but hardly anybody was buying, and computers were expensive things in big air conditioned rooms with noisy fans and reel-to-reel tape decks, and ours had a cool vector scan terminals that did screen prints to expensive, glossy thermal paper.
Our fax machine had a spinning roller that you wrapped an A4 sheet around. The thing spun for twenty minutes whilst what was probably a single photocell scanned it in a corkscrew pattern and sent the bits through an acoustic coupler.
Engineers, we all possessed sliderules, and used them every day.
People prolly think I'm making this stuff up... :)
First thing we did was start installing GNU stuff. Standard free tools like that, and keen competition in mid-range from Microsoft's excellent marketing teams, killed the proprietary UNIXes on Intel. Looks like the UNIX world is settling around BSD (and/or Mach) and Linux. Not before time.
I wish. Of course, you won't remember /. from then. It was on a 8" CP/M format floppy. When we were finished reading it we'd use it to archive that week's net.sources postings. The first fifty messages on /. were always full of crap like "f1rst b00t", but it had a neat howto section, I remember one particular article on how to convert an eight track cartridge deck to store your C64 programs. Then Jerry Pournelle split and things started to go downhill.
There's something extreme here. it smells like comedy..
At the risk of raising an almighty fuss, I suggest you haven't heard of Edmond Wollmann and his gaggle of kookchasers...
Yet another excuse to avoid those fussy, bloated, overrated flash sites.
NTL in the UK is providing broadband at 512kpbs for 25 pounds, 128kbps at 15 pounds to existing cable customers. Dunno what the normal US/Canada speeds are, but I assume they're comparable or better. The standard cable TV set top box has a cable modem so all customers are broadband-ready.
Ah yes, Bob Shaw's Slow Glass stories. I once saw him talk on the subject. He had a Northern Irish accent and told us all about his idea for a novel about life on a Dyson Sphere, which turned out to be Orbitsville.
Th hl t snt.
eg. The UK data protection act says that personal data must be "lawfuly and fairly obtained"
I don't know if there are any court rulings on this, but I don't see that data bought at auction necessarily falls afoul of this. If the company has bought a section of the business at auction (not _just_ a list of addresses), then it has most probably bought an interest in the customers, in the eyes of the law. The existence of the data and the purposes for which it was to be used would have to be filed with the data protection registrar.
Having said that, the data protection acts of most European states probably do deterthe worst kinds of abuse that may be carried out. I suspect that an outside-Europe business could sell profiling services to European businesses, however. There's nearly always a loophole where boundaries are concerned.
Ah, another Mickey Mouse website about to be slashdotted. ;)
Seriously, Squeak is an interesting implementation of Smalltalk-80, reported to be faithful to the original language, though the GUI seemed to be rather outdated last time I tried it on a pentium box--it doesn't seem to do asynchronous screen updates. It's supported by a team at Disney (no kidding!) including famous Smalltalk guru Alan Kay.
The IDE for Pocketsmalltalk, for Palmos is being ported to use Squeak instead of the commercial Dolphin implementation. Squeak itself doesn't run on palmos, however (as far as I know).
You are in a beowulf cluster of Zaurus PDA's, all alike.
Their website is an irritating mass of fussy flash animations, and their html site is apparently down until January 13th.
We could wipe ourselves out, sure. But we're just as likely, or perhaps more likely, to be wiped out in a global extinction event. There isn't a lot we could do about it. Escaping to space isn't an option, or at least, not as yet a realistic method of diversifying our habitats.
High intelligence gives us a fighting chance, sure.
But before that happened, I'd expect the species to decline naturally. We cannot assume that civilisation will remain the common, sustainable mode of human existence, or that our intelligence and civilisation will be enough to enable us to adapt indefinitely to whatever ecological changes we might encounter over periods of millions of years.
Another site that carries it is the slashcoded Andamooka (with which I am not associated), which has the dual advantage of carrying many more open source books and permitting registered users to enter their own annotations on line.
That appears to be a website devoted to some kind of quasi-religious belief in the transformation of humans to some kind of machine form. Whatever the result, I suspect that it would not be us, and it would certainly not be human. Interesting idea, though.
The fossil record shows that the crocodile family has been subject to the usual flow of evolution and species extinction. You're mistaking a family for a species. We're not concerned here with whether there will be simians in n zillion years, but whether there will be humans. There are many species of simians, but only one of those species is currently human (all the other candidates are extinct). So the odds are fairly long.
Or we'll die out. How long did the dinosaurs live?
Well, the dinosaurs as a family lasted for over a hundred million years, but individual species didn't last anything like as long. Ten million years is a very respectable age for a species, though some become extince much earlier and others last much longer. Given our presence at the top of every food chain on the planet, we're in a rather vulnerable position because we could easily wipe out our food sources. I won't go down the doom route, but I'll simply say that it's _far_ from a foregone conclusion that humans will be around even a million years.
And there are no competitor species waiting around to take our place as articulate and intelligent tool users--apparently we outcompeted the nearest competitors in our niche. That's to be expected, and nothing unusual, but it does mean that worrying about piddling things like novae is a little silly.
You're right, except in this case I am TG rather than female. :)