There is another sort of filter you can use.... your eyes. All you had to do was see "John Katz" in the blurb and ignore the story - instead this stupid thread is wasting the time of everyone who IS actually interested. Do you really dislike John Katz stories so much that even seeing them on your front page is offensive ?
I honestly thought I was missing my shot when I was a lot younger, like it was a golden age in the early development on PCs, and I was really frustrated that I wasn't there.
This struck a chord with me. I remember at eleven to fourteen or so thinking that to be a great hacker I'd have to have produced something by sixteen, and feeling genuinely worried about it. It makes me laugh now, particularly seen I never put in the work to be a junior uberhacker - I was far more interesting in looking than doing at the time, and the hacking I did (C64 display interrupt tricks and the like) was far more investigative than doing. But at the time, it looked like you had to have done something by the time you were sixteen or eighteen to be a great hacker. I hope no one ever felt like I did and got put off hacking because they couldn't measure up to the super high standards. Some people must feel the same way looking at Anna Kournakova (sp?), or worldclass youngsters in their fields of interest. Our Western media cult of celebrity means we often get hellishly high standards shown to us.
This is one of the few internet issues where I'd really like to see a legal remedy... I don't know the American disability laws, but I would imagine that the same accessibility laws that mean you have to put in wheelchair ramps and the like would apply for these situations - I don't know how strong your disabled rights legislation is, but it seems pretty strong. One lawsuit with damages in the tens or hundreds of millions would hopefully be enough to get corporates off their butts and making their websites accessible. Mabye even use a blind celebrity to get publicity (get Stevie Wonder complaining he can't read the site of his record company for example!).
But money is the only thing that will move the corparates on this, and I don't think the loss of the blind dollar is enough. It looks like the AOL case is still going on, hopefully the damages there could be pretty big if the Judge is reasonable, as AOL have been entirely uncooperative in being blind friendly. The National Federation of the Blind states the technology exists, and other providers are using it including Mindspring and AT&T http://www. seattletimes.com/news/nation-world/html98/aoll_199 91105.htm
Wherever there is no assigned top yerarchy it is always designed according to the self-organizing system principles (see routing protos like BGP). Anarchy is eliminated during operation. This is the way it is designed.
I would have to say that anarchists would consider a workable anarchy to be a self organising system (people will voluntarily form bonds between each other that benefit themselves and others)
For starters, this bill makes Bret Easton Ellis's work illegal, along with Hunter Thompson, and many other authors. In fact, it pretty much makes it impossible to write fiction containing any variety of realistic drug use. With broad interpretation, there goes some big popular songs (think reggae - "smoke marijuana" - that's information on how to use a controlled substance. And this bill is broad enough to cover that, easily. In fact, it now covers my post:-). I'm sure at least one of my songs on mp3.com mentions drug use, and if not now, in the future one will - I won't be able to host these on mp3.com, or in America anymore. And reports on the news of busted speed labs and the like will not be legal - letting on that speed is made in a lab (note the wording or to distribute by any means information pertaining to, in whole or in part. I know it won't be used that broadly, because it'll make the government look silly, but it covers that broad a scope.)
But the big problem here is that this doesn't stop people using illegal drugs - it just makes it much harder to use them safely. The example of needle exchanges shows this. Here in New Zealand, and other places around the world, needle exchanges allow people to get information on the safe use of needles, sterile needles and works, and other information and services. These programs have been shown to reduce the spread of Hepititis C and AIDS through the needle using population, and for those who don't care about "junkie scum", from the needle users to the general population. This is important. Something like half of the needle using population in Palmerston North (my town in New Zealand) has Hepititis C. And for those who wonder, no the number of needle users is not going up because of the needle exchange.
Another point of concern is that this measure will seriously hamper discussion of drug policy - how can you discuss a drug without discussing it's use and manafacture.
Overall, I'm feeling real glad I don't live in the States at the moment
This only matters if you care about Linux World Domination(tm). Most of us don't. As the poster above you said "I want software that doesn't suck. It's as simple as that.". So if Linux isn't suitable for running a million hits per second website right now, who cares. Use a tool that is suitable. And because of opensource, if Linux's networking does suck, and people want better networking, they will develop it. Look at what happening with SMP.
If Linux develops rock solid networking, then it could become very widely used in business. If not, I don't care. I can still use it on my desktop and have a great experience. And if I don't like it on my desktop, I can improve it, or I can switch to BSD, or HURD, or something else, and not lose any license fees, and still port across anything from Linux I like. This is the beauty of open source.
It's meaningless to say Linux needs anything. Users and potential users may wish that it had certain features, but that's different. You may think Linux needs to be more suitable for larger purposes, but I may not. I may be quite happy with text consoles on a Pentium-90. It's like saying a house needs a paint job. The owners may think the house needs painting, but I might think that it looks nice and rustic with the paint worn. Software has no needs, only it's users.
The AC reply to this states that I am on the WordPerfect 2000 Office Beta testing program. They are not using Winelib as you claim. They are using the Wine program loader. However, regardless of whether they use wine, or winelib, is this really the way Corel should do their Linux coding. I would expect this from a predominently Windows shop which is dabbling with Linux, but Corel are positioning themselves as a Linux player, with their own distribution and the like. The simple fact of the matter is that apps written for Windows and then run through Winelib would not be as effective as apps written to compile for both Windows and Linux. I would expect Corel to be making native Linux versions of their applications, taking full advantage of Linux libraries and with command line functionality. If this is an iterim measure until Corel can write full Linux versions, then that is cool, otherwise I'm not impressed. PS. is WordPerfect for Linux native Linux, or Linux/Wine?
Somebody somewhere in the bowels of MS must have made a decision to 'disable' ports above 1024 for whatever reason - debugging, etc. - thereby causing the problem to be by design. Even though it was overlooked to put that functionality back. But, you can't try telling me that when the requirements for SP6 were drawn up, one of the items was "disable ports above 1024" - mabye someone turned it off intentionally during testing, but this is not the same thing as by design. By contrast, AOL 5 appears to have been explicitly designed to disable the other ISPs.
It's pretty hard to write software that deletes 'unneeded' files by accident. Therefore, this 'functionality' was designed. Now I'm confused - do you mean the service pack, or AOL. If you mean SP6, it didn't delete files, just replaced the TCP/IP DLL with a one that didn't work. If you mean AOL, I agree. AOL deletes entries for other ISPs if you let it install itself as the default ISP, and this is by design.
Of course this is all trival for both of us, living in New Zealand (nice to see another on Slashdot)
But as others have pointed out this discussion, AOL is not installing itself as the default ISP, but the only ISP. There is a world of difference between these two things. If the installer stated "no other ISP will work after this install", then cool as. But the mid-level people who use two ISPs and are getting screwed by this know that "default" is not the same thing as "break everything else", and trust the AOL installer
There is no way that Microsoft would have broken these ports by design though, so we are talking about two different things. AOL 5 breaks other ISPs if you install it as the default - by design.
This is just so typical. Here's a lifecycle of this phenomena
1. Particular result of bureaucracy is criticized. 2. Bureaucracy diverts resources from other just as important areas 3. The particular result improves - everyone is happy 4. Other results go down hill 5. Some one notices one of the bad results - go back to step 1
The problem is that bureaucracies are afraid to ask for more resources if they need it - because everyone "knows" government is bad, and so even legitimate and important functions get neglected.
For those who didn't read the whole article: A unique software developed by Dasa Bremen will enable every internet user to follow "Mission 2000" over the distance of more than 100.000 miles in real time. The website www.return-home.com is activated on January 21, and contains information about the mission. The flight simulation opens on the day of the launch at 6.p.m..
I went to http://www.return-home.com to see if what platforms are supported, and what license the software is released under, and found that the site won't run on win95 w/ IE 3.0 (my @work setup), I think because of Javascript. If there is any content that needs javascript, I would like to know, but it looks like they've used it because they were lazy.
With this in mind I don't see much chance of there being anything but Win95 and possibly Mac clients on the site... shame because while the idea of being able to pretend pilot the mission is gimicky, I would like to watch the mission through the net.
What I've noticed is that most of the data we're accumulating is quickly becoming useless. 10 year old schoolwork isn't something so worthy of archiving. The data you really want to keep shouldn't be very large anyway...
I would have to disagree on this point.
Firstly, people will start using digital media instead of photo albums, family videos, and the like. I for one intend to digital video my family every six months and archive it (once I have a digital video camera). This data I'll want to keep until the day I die, and presumably my descendants will wish to keep it after that. This is gigabytes of data that anyone using digital media for a record of family and friends will wish to archive for a very long term basis
Secondly, what about digital artists? I use my computer to do audio multitrack recording - a five minute song with four or five tracks can take up two or three hundred megabytes, and a bigger more complex track can be a gigabyte or more. Although I probably won't get famous, someone who uses home studio digital recording will. Now if someone wishes to remix one of the tracks these people did in the future (and someone will, look at the remixes of old songs coming out now), an archival copy of the individual tracks will be invaluable. For my own stuff, it will be very hard to remix, as I've only got space to keep the mp3 version of my songs, and not a version with each track seperate (I need a CDR burner!)
Problem is that the DVD companies are currently doing their darndest to stop anyone from making any copies at all - fair use doctrine or no fair use doctrine. At the moment you cannot make any copies of a DVD without doing some sort of hacking (eg De-CSS, screen capture, etc) and with a replacement for CSS planned, it doesn't look like this is changing, and won't unless someone actually goes to court using the fair use law. So the reason the DVD companies are not worried about DVD writers becoming commonplace is that these DVDs (like all commercial DVDs) will not copyable using consumer hardware, fair use or not (I don't count hacked firmware or whatever as consumer hardware).
(And yes, I realise "DVD companies" is a bit of a generalisation, you know what I mean:-)
Right now, what use is one of these robots. The gimmick robots I saw advertised five years were more use, at least they could bring a drink into you. When the robot has a better manipulator than the mouth, I'll be interested (although you could use it to get the paper I guess)
So the question is, has anyone used their AIBO for any actual practical purpose. (including getting the paper, but not impressing the neighbours)
Be careful of quotes like " RSI is now much less common in Australia, where a system of education, combined with more openminded diagnoses has helped differentiate between natural fatigues and the beginnings of physical problems. "
This sounds exactly like what the New Zealand ACC (Accident Compensation Corp) would say about the incidences of OOS/RSI/CTS in New Zealand. In fact, what is happening is that ACC is putting pressure on staff to get diagnoses of Fibromialgia (spelling?), as this is not ruled work related, and no compensation is payed. This seems to be practice on long term cases where expenses could go on for years. I know of people who have had OOS or RSI for a year or two, and then it has "mysteriously changed" into Fibromialgia.
OOS sufferers in New Zealand, be warned
Caveat, this is only from what I have heard from OOS sufferers and "through the grapevine", I couldn't give statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
There is another sort of filter you can use .... your eyes. All you had to do was see "John Katz" in the blurb and ignore the story - instead this stupid thread is wasting the time of everyone who IS actually interested. Do you really dislike John Katz stories so much that even seeing them on your front page is offensive ?
This struck a chord with me. I remember at eleven to fourteen or so thinking that to be a great hacker I'd have to have produced something by sixteen, and feeling genuinely worried about it. It makes me laugh now, particularly seen I never put in the work to be a junior uberhacker - I was far more interesting in looking than doing at the time, and the hacking I did (C64 display interrupt tricks and the like) was far more investigative than doing. But at the time, it looked like you had to have done something by the time you were sixteen or eighteen to be a great hacker. I hope no one ever felt like I did and got put off hacking because they couldn't measure up to the super high standards. Some people must feel the same way looking at Anna Kournakova (sp?), or worldclass youngsters in their fields of interest. Our Western media cult of celebrity means we often get hellishly high standards shown to us.
The digital version of "my friend played golf with Shaquille O'Neall!"
This is one of the few internet issues where I'd really like to see a legal remedy... I don't know the American disability laws, but I would imagine that the same accessibility laws that mean you have to put in wheelchair ramps and the like would apply for these situations - I don't know how strong your disabled rights legislation is, but it seems pretty strong. One lawsuit with damages in the tens or hundreds of millions would hopefully be enough to get corporates off their butts and making their websites accessible. Mabye even use a blind celebrity to get publicity (get Stevie Wonder complaining he can't read the site of his record company for example!).
But money is the only thing that will move the corparates on this, and I don't think the loss of the blind dollar is enough. It looks like the AOL case is still going on, hopefully the damages there could be pretty big if the Judge is reasonable, as AOL have been entirely uncooperative in being blind friendly. The National Federation of the Blind states the technology exists, and other providers are using it including Mindspring and AT&T http://www. seattletimes.com/news/nation-world/html98/aoll_199 91105.htm
I would have to say that anarchists would consider a workable anarchy to be a self organising system (people will voluntarily form bonds between each other that benefit themselves and others)
But the big problem here is that this doesn't stop people using illegal drugs - it just makes it much harder to use them safely. The example of needle exchanges shows this. Here in New Zealand, and other places around the world, needle exchanges allow people to get information on the safe use of needles, sterile needles and works, and other information and services. These programs have been shown to reduce the spread of Hepititis C and AIDS through the needle using population, and for those who don't care about "junkie scum", from the needle users to the general population. This is important. Something like half of the needle using population in Palmerston North (my town in New Zealand) has Hepititis C. And for those who wonder, no the number of needle users is not going up because of the needle exchange.
Another point of concern is that this measure will seriously hamper discussion of drug policy - how can you discuss a drug without discussing it's use and manafacture.
Overall, I'm feeling real glad I don't live in the States at the moment
What's that dream system's specs now ?
How about Linux-2.4 - IBM S/390 Mainframe <grin>
This only matters if you care about Linux World Domination(tm). Most of us don't. As the poster above you said "I want software that doesn't suck. It's as simple as that.". So if Linux isn't suitable for running a million hits per second website right now, who cares. Use a tool that is suitable. And because of opensource, if Linux's networking does suck, and people want better networking, they will develop it. Look at what happening with SMP.
If Linux develops rock solid networking, then it could become very widely used in business. If not, I don't care. I can still use it on my desktop and have a great experience. And if I don't like it on my desktop, I can improve it, or I can switch to BSD, or HURD, or something else, and not lose any license fees, and still port across anything from Linux I like. This is the beauty of open source.
It's meaningless to say Linux needs anything. Users and potential users may wish that it had certain features, but that's different. You may think Linux needs to be more suitable for larger purposes, but I may not. I may be quite happy with text consoles on a Pentium-90. It's like saying a house needs a paint job. The owners may think the house needs painting, but I might think that it looks nice and rustic with the paint worn. Software has no needs, only it's users.
The AC reply to this states that I am on the WordPerfect 2000 Office Beta testing program. They are not using Winelib as you claim. They are using the Wine program loader. However, regardless of whether they use wine, or winelib, is this really the way Corel should do their Linux coding. I would expect this from a predominently Windows shop which is dabbling with Linux, but Corel are positioning themselves as a Linux player, with their own distribution and the like. The simple fact of the matter is that apps written for Windows and then run through Winelib would not be as effective as apps written to compile for both Windows and Linux. I would expect Corel to be making native Linux versions of their applications, taking full advantage of Linux libraries and with command line functionality. If this is an iterim measure until Corel can write full Linux versions, then that is cool, otherwise I'm not impressed. PS. is WordPerfect for Linux native Linux, or Linux/Wine?
It's pretty hard to write software that deletes 'unneeded' files by accident. Therefore, this 'functionality' was designed. Now I'm confused - do you mean the service pack, or AOL. If you mean SP6, it didn't delete files, just replaced the TCP/IP DLL with a one that didn't work. If you mean AOL, I agree. AOL deletes entries for other ISPs if you let it install itself as the default ISP, and this is by design.
Of course this is all trival for both of us, living in New Zealand (nice to see another on Slashdot)
But as others have pointed out this discussion, AOL is not installing itself as the default ISP, but the only ISP. There is a world of difference between these two things. If the installer stated "no other ISP will work after this install", then cool as. But the mid-level people who use two ISPs and are getting screwed by this know that "default" is not the same thing as "break everything else", and trust the AOL installer
There is no way that Microsoft would have broken these ports by design though, so we are talking about two different things. AOL 5 breaks other ISPs if you install it as the default - by design.
This is just so typical. Here's a lifecycle of this phenomena
1. Particular result of bureaucracy is criticized.
2. Bureaucracy diverts resources from other just as important areas
3. The particular result improves - everyone is happy
4. Other results go down hill
5. Some one notices one of the bad results - go back to step 1
The problem is that bureaucracies are afraid to ask for more resources if they need it - because everyone "knows" government is bad, and so even legitimate and important functions get neglected.
For those who didn't read the whole article:
A unique software developed by Dasa Bremen will enable every internet user to follow "Mission 2000" over the distance of more than 100.000 miles in real time. The website www.return-home.com is activated on January 21, and contains information about the mission. The flight simulation opens on the day of the launch at 6.p.m..
I went to http://www.return-home.com to see if what platforms are supported, and what license the software is released under, and found that the site won't run on win95 w/ IE 3.0 (my @work setup), I think because of Javascript. If there is any content that needs javascript, I would like to know, but it looks like they've used it because they were lazy.
With this in mind I don't see much chance of there being anything but Win95 and possibly Mac clients on the site... shame because while the idea of being able to pretend pilot the mission is gimicky, I would like to watch the mission through the net.
What I've noticed is that most of the data we're accumulating is quickly becoming useless. 10 year old schoolwork isn't something so worthy of archiving. The data you really want to keep shouldn't be very large anyway...
I would have to disagree on this point.
Firstly, people will start using digital media instead of photo albums, family videos, and the like. I for one intend to digital video my family every six months and archive it (once I have a digital video camera). This data I'll want to keep until the day I die, and presumably my descendants will wish to keep it after that. This is gigabytes of data that anyone using digital media for a record of family and friends will wish to archive for a very long term basis
Secondly, what about digital artists? I use my computer to do audio multitrack recording - a five minute song with four or five tracks can take up two or three hundred megabytes, and a bigger more complex track can be a gigabyte or more. Although I probably won't get famous, someone who uses home studio digital recording will. Now if someone wishes to remix one of the tracks these people did in the future (and someone will, look at the remixes of old songs coming out now), an archival copy of the individual tracks will be invaluable. For my own stuff, it will be very hard to remix, as I've only got space to keep the mp3 version of my songs, and not a version with each track seperate (I need a CDR burner!)
Problem is that the DVD companies are currently doing their darndest to stop anyone from making any copies at all - fair use doctrine or no fair use doctrine. At the moment you cannot make any copies of a DVD without doing some sort of hacking (eg De-CSS, screen capture, etc) and with a replacement for CSS planned, it doesn't look like this is changing, and won't unless someone actually goes to court using the fair use law. So the reason the DVD companies are not worried about DVD writers becoming commonplace is that these DVDs (like all commercial DVDs) will not copyable using consumer hardware, fair use or not (I don't count hacked firmware or whatever as consumer hardware).
:-)
(And yes, I realise "DVD companies" is a bit of a generalisation, you know what I mean
Right now, what use is one of these robots. The gimmick robots I saw advertised five years were more use, at least they could bring a drink into you. When the robot has a better manipulator than the mouth, I'll be interested (although you could use it to get the paper I guess)
So the question is, has anyone used their AIBO for any actual practical purpose. (including getting the paper, but not impressing the neighbours)
Be careful of quotes like " RSI is now much less common in Australia, where a system of education, combined with more openminded diagnoses has helped differentiate between natural fatigues and the beginnings of physical problems. "
This sounds exactly like what the New Zealand ACC (Accident Compensation Corp) would say about the incidences of OOS/RSI/CTS in New Zealand. In fact, what is happening is that ACC is putting pressure on staff to get diagnoses of Fibromialgia (spelling?), as this is not ruled work related, and no compensation is payed. This seems to be practice on long term cases where expenses could go on for years. I know of people who have had OOS or RSI for a year or two, and then it has "mysteriously changed" into Fibromialgia.
OOS sufferers in New Zealand, be warned
Caveat, this is only from what I have heard from OOS sufferers and "through the grapevine", I couldn't give statistics.