I wonder how much of your observations are application-based.
For example, I've been bothered for a while about the long time to launch Mozilla. Trivial things like saving images to disk would result in a "beachball" for several seconds, whereas the Windows version would run incredibly fast.
Then last night I installed FireFox and found that those problems went away. Really fast launching, and no beachballs.
Languages should be open source, be it C, C++, Java, or C#. If they aren't, they don't seem like good languages to me!
The language specification should be open. This should include the specification of conformance tests. Otherwise we end up with many dialects that are not completely interoperable.
On the other hand, I don't think matters either way if any particular language's implementation is open-sourced. You shouldn't need to see Sun's source code in order to write a fully-compliant Java compiler/interpreter/runtime. Just like you don't need to see AT&T's (or Microsoft's or Borland's or anyone else's) C-compiler sources in order to develop a compiler that fully complies with the ISO standard. Having those sources would make it easier to port the language to a new platform, but they should never be necessary. If they are necessary, then the language specification isn't specific enough.
Mind you, I would love to be able to see Sun's sources as much as the next guy, but I really fail to see how their choice to keep their code proprietary in any way lessens the value of the language itself.
Re:Or, this can IMPROVE your car
on
Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
Wouldn't it be nice if the engine computer turned off the air conditioner when the RPMs got too high or when you put your foot through the floor?
Funny, my old 1988 Nissan has a mechanically activated switch to turn off the compressor whenever the car is under hard acceleration. Newer cars don't do this anymore?
My 1991 Geo Prizm also did this. Much to my discomfort when driving over the Pennsylvania mountains on a hot summer day with three passengers and their baggage. The AC would cut off while going up every steep hill, and come back on while going down the other side. Making me and my passengers sweat a lot.
I would assume that my current car (a 2002 Prizm) does the same thing. (I haven't made that trip in this car yet.) Of course, the 2002 has a 125hp engine (compared with the 85hp engine of the 1991 model), so it may not have to turn off the AC while driving up those hills.
I realize that this is third-hand information, but according to this article, Rush limbaugh was fitted with the "Clarion CII Bionic Ear with the HiFocus electrode array".
As for why he chose that brand over other possibilities, I don't remember what he said on the air at the time (around January 2002). Here is his site's collection of articles regarding his implant.
I don't know if you will find these articles useful or not, but hopefully it will help you with your decision-making process.
These days, hardware has way outpaced the software's ability to use it... I mean, when's WinXP for 64-bit Athlons coming out? This summer/fall or something? Why would you even consider buying hardware before the software is even available? Either wait, and the hardware prices of what you want today will drop, or get something cheaper (and in this case 32-bit, and save your money!)
Gee, this sounds familiar.
How many years were 286 systems shipping before anybody shipped a mainstream OS to take advantage of it? When OS/2, Xenix and other 286-savvy operating systems shipped, how many of us chose to stick with MS-DOS and use the chip as a fast 8088?
How many years were 386 systems shipping before anybody shipped a mainstream OS to take advantage of that? How many years were 386's and 486's available before the market finally decided to move from DOS to Win95 and WinNT?
So I don't think it's at all strange if the market ends up using 64-bit processors as little more than fast 386's (the way most use Pentium-class systems right now) for several more years before finally deciding to use a 64-bit OS. And this is the way it should be - the average user has more than enough processing power to do everything he needs - e-mail, web surfing, MS Office, etc. Why should they switch to something new and relatively unproven just because it will take better advantage of their new hardware?
Us/.'ers who like to live on the bleeding edge may decided to move now (probably using some flavor of UNIX), but the rest of the world will take much longer to make that switch. This is the way it's always been, and I see no sign of anything being different this time around.
Seriously, it doesn't have a "connector" - it has that craddle with a usb interface. It's a difference, when you look at what's available today.
The universal cradle interface is nothing more than USB pins, plus serial port pins, plus power pins (for the battery charger.) You may find this diagram of interest. Note that the only "circuitry" inside a cradle is a bunch of wires, a pushbutton and a resistor.
If you look at what's available today, you'll find that all but the cheapest models (Zire, Zire 21 and Tungsten E) still use the universal-connector and a USB cradle.
I used to "with it". But they they changed what "it" was. Now what i'm "with" isn't "it" and what's "it" seems new and scary. It'll happen to you.
</SIMPSONS>
Ummm.... The m515 definitely has a USB connector. It has the universal sync port that all the current models have. I've been performing USB hotsyncs on it for well over a year. Perhaps you're thinking of the m1xx series, which has a different connector.
I understand that this is primitive compared to today's models. But it isn't that old, and it was second from the top of the line when I bought it (only the Tungsten:T was higher-end at the time.) Even so, it's a great device. The exact same unit, upgraded to a 320x320 display, would be close to perfect.
(I've never understood those users who feel their palmtop must be able to do everything their desktop PC does - adding all that processing power doesn't make the device more useful, but it does raise the price and kill your battery life. I figured this out a long time ago, when I was still trying to choose between a PalmOS device and a WinCE device.)
I realize that there are some very good technical reasons why Palm has refused to port PalmOS 5 and 6 to the older devices. But this doesn't change my opinion. They could still have ported the new/optimized bundled apps. Many features (like color themes) certainly don't require a high-end processor. Note also that owners of ARM-based Palm devices can't upgrade either. As far as I can tell, there has never been an upgrade for people to go from 5.0 to 5.1 to 5.2. (And their store no longer sells the CD to upgrade older models to 4.1.)
This attitude is relatively new. When I bought my first Palm (a III), I was able to buy upgrades for versions 3 and 4. Had I known that they were never again going to offer upgrades, I would not have spent the extra money on a model with flash memory. I could easily have bought the cheaper m125, which is effectively the same device, except for the lack of flash and a different dock connector. I won't make this mistake again.
I wrote to Palm. Their answer was "our engineers are working on it". Yeah, right. I might've believed that a year ago. Today, I interpret it as "I would like to tell you to drop dead, but I'm not allowed to say that to customers."
As for battery life - that's never been an issue. I place the unit on its cradle for syncing 2-3 times a week. The battery-level indicator has never gone below 75%. But I usually leave beam-receive, sound, and the backlight turned off. The battery lasts much longer with these disabled. I don't get as much life as my III did on a pair of AAA batteries, but since I've never been away from a charger long enough to get a low-battery warning, it's never been an issue.
Does anyone know the policy of Palm with regard to upgrading the OS?
Since the m-series came out, their policy seems to be "go jump off a cliff".
When I had my Palm III, I was able to upgrade it from version 2 to 3 and then to 4.
With my current unit (the m515), it came with 4.1. Palm has never offered an upgrade to 5. They probably won't offer an upgrade to 6.
I feel very cheated. I paid good money to get a unit with flash memory, expecting to be able to upgrade the system software. I could've bougt the much cheaper m125 (which doesn't have flash) if I had known that there would never be an upgrade.
I won't make that mistake again. The next time I need to replace my Palm, it will either be from a different manufacturer, or it will be a really cheap model, since I know there won't be any upgrades available.
One caution, especially for those considering using this service. Loudeye are the guys who screwed the pooch for the MIT LAMP system by selling material that they did not have the right to actually sell.
I can see it now. Millions of people buy on-line music and download DRM-protected WMA files from Loudeye-based sites. Then the RIAA announces that Loudeye has no rights to be selling music and immediately sends threatening letters to Loudeye's customers (that's you and I). Meanwhile, Microsoft issues a patch for Media Player that revokes all of Loudeye's DRM keys, making the files unplayable.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a distinct possibility here?
What I'm wondering though is if I want to use this service with multiple sites, will I have to download new software for each separate site?
They will probably all be standard WMA files - playable through any WMA-compatible device that supports the DRM facilities.
The real question is if each separate specialty store will have a separate license key for the DRM, or if you'll use a common Loudeye key.
If it's the former, the result is going to be a nightmare. You buy a new computer, and find that some of your songs can be brought to the new machine and some can't because some keys are portable and some are not.
It's already bad enough that the big players (except for Apple) have different DRM rights on a per-song basis. But now we have the possibility of even worse problems from lots of separate stores with their own unique rules and licenses. It'll get to the point where you have a hard drive full of music and no clue what you can and can't do with it.
I don't want to think of what will happen if your hard drive dies and you have to restore all the song files from a backup tape.
Apple's worked out these problems, by making sure that every song in the ITMS has the same DRM, and that keys are transportable to new computers. I haven't heard anything about this from the other stores, which leads me to assume the worst.
IIRC the Rio Karma supports AAC, but not the (proprietary and unlicensable?) Apple DRM, hence it doesn't work with iTunes.
Just a clarification: not all iTunes AAC files have DRM. Only the ones you purchase through ITMS. If you rip tracks from CD into AAC format, there will be no DRM on the resulting files.
If (and I don't know for sure, since I don't have a Karma) the Karms supports non-DRM AAC files, and it supports iTunes for MP3, then it will also support iTunes for non-DRM AAC.
Of course, if you purchase a song from ITMS, it will have DRM. You'll have to burn a CD and re-rip to get it into a non-DRM file, which will degrade the quality somewhat.
... to the point where you can walk into Best Buy and go up to a terminal and burn yourself a CD of whatever you want...
It will be interesting to see if this ever happens again.
It was tried in the past. A system called Personics was once available for this. You'd go into your local Sam Goody store and browse through songs at a listening station, writing down track numbers for whatever you wanted. Then you'd give the list to a clerk, who would quickly make a cassette with your mix. Tapes were pretty inexpensive - about $10 for an 8-song tape, IIRC.
I thought it was a great idea. I made several such tapes. But it obviously was not a financial success, since it's gone and there is no successor taking its place.
Or, order the product using your credit card. The next day, in good faith, try to cancel the order.... Vendors with many cancelled transactions have their credit card account terminated.
Sounds good, in theory. But what makes you think Mr. Spammer isn't going to sell your card information to other criminals?
As much as I'd love to make a spammer's life miserable, I really don't think it's worth making myself an identity-theft victim over.
And if anybody doesn't think spammers are involved in identity theft rings, please let me know. I've got a bridge to sell you - real cheap.
I use fvwm2 (fvwm2-2.4.6-1.rpm). Unfortunately, RedHat no longer distributes fvwm, but the RPM leftover from the older release that I upgraded from works fine.
I have configured a custom.fvwm2rc file to make it look and behave like the really old mwm window manager. I've got sizing borders around the windows, a title bar with menu/min/max buttons, context menus on the desktop and some frame controls, and nothing else.
I explicitly turned off all of the "desktop" features and "docked" applets. They just get in the way. I launch programs by typing commands from an xterm. I have a menu item on the root window for launching new xterms.
If anyone is interested in how to do this, I can post my.fvwm2rc file somewhere. It's about 200 lines, including some stuff I don't actually use (leftover from the RedHat-provided file tat I used as my original template.)
I'm not saying that ISP's can be trusted with your privacy. I personally believe that they can't be. And I'm certain that government routinely snoops on all kinds of communication, whether they're officially allowed to or not. But this has no impact on whether or not you should be relaying your outbound mail through an ISP server. It's just as easy to transparently proxy-and-store packets that are being sent "directly" to a remote host.
Without encyrption at the source, there is no security. With encryption (assuming a reasonably secure cipher), either choice (send directly or through an ISP server) will be equally secure.
Well, using the ISP as smarthost will mean that their mailspool will contain any email you send out.
If you're really that paranoid, I suggest you encrypt your mail at the source.
If you don't think you can trust your ISP to keep your spooled mail private, then what makes you think they can be trusted to not packet-sniff your direct connections?
And once you're encrypting your mail, it won't matter if your ISP has it spooled or not.
Oh joy. What a good thing the ISP is doing! They are censoring users that say things they might not link
You didn't even bother reading my post before writing this, did you?
I said nothing about censorship. I have yet to hear of a single case where an ISP blocked a customer's mail access because of the content of his private communications.
Thes blocks are put in place because of spammers. You know, the people who send out millions of solicitations for black-market Viagra. And before you claim that you have a right to do that, read the terms of service for your ISP. I can guarantee you that as a part of your subscription, you agreed to not engage in that sort of activity.
So let's see here. Mr. Vidal believes that electronic voting systems are not to be trusted because of the policitcal contributions of the manufacturers.
OK, I don't agree, but I can understand the logic. If you assume that everybody belonging to a party is corrupt then you have to reject everything produced by that party's supporters. If, however, you believe that both sides are corrupt, or if you believe that neither side is completely corrupt, then the logic pretty much falls apart.
Then he says they need to have paper trails. Why? If the software is rigged, that same software will rig the paper.
And what about older mechanical voting machines. They also have raw-number output with a paper trail. But does anyone begin to understand how they work? Do you think anybody could tell if one was rigged? And couldn't their paper-trails be similarly rigged?
What about punch cards? If the ballots are printed directly on the cards, then they can't be rigged. (Of course, if they're punched via a machine, that machine can be rigged, and tabulation machines can be rigged.) But hand-counts are extremely time-consuming and error prone (remember hanging chads?) And every recount causes more chads to fall off, so repeated recounting destroys any hope at accuracy.
OK, so we're now down to someone writing an "X" in a box on a piece of paper. Do we really want to force this system on the entire country? And even that is subject to tampering, since they'll be read by optical scanners (which can be rigged) or by human volunteers (who can be bribed.) And hand-counts will be time-consuming and error-prone (but not as error-prone as visually reading punched cards.) But at lesat they won't get repeatedly damaged as the candidates repeatedly demand new recounts.
But mandating paper ballots will bring back all the corruption problems that voting machines were supposed to eliminate - like ballot-stuffing (where corrupt poll workers literally stuffed extra ballots into the boxes). And there will still be disputes when someone checks two contradictory boxes, or when a circle is partly filled-in. So in many respects, we get back to the same nonsense that Florida's punch-cards produced.
Every voting system can be hacked and abused by corrupt individuals. Modern software-based systems are no more or less secure than other systems. They replace one set of flaws for another set. You can't just point to the flaws of one mechanism and automatically declare it evil without comparing it to all the flaws of the other competing systems.
Actually, if you double-click on this (or any).plist file... it will open in Property List Editor
I think the Property List Editor is part of the developer tools, and so isn't installed by default. But every distribution of OS X includes an installer for them, so this shouldn't be a big deal.
Many ISP's (including Earthlink, which I use) block access to port 25 - meaning you can't send directly to a remote mail server. As a part of this, they tell you that all outbound mail must go through thair provided mail server.
This is an anti-spam procedure that works well. If all of their customers must send mail through a single server, that server can filter and block those customers that have abused their mail privileges. In other words, these blocks are (for the most part) a good thing.
But this doesn't rule out running your own internal mail server. You just have to configure it to relay all outbound mail (that is, everything leaving your LAN) through your ISP's mail server instead of sending directly to the recipient's server. I know that sendmail can be configured to do this (I've done this on my Linux PC in order to allow me to use/usr/ucb/mail.) I would assume that any other halfway decent mail server should be able to do the same thing.
I'd be curious to know what the nature of the distortion is.
When I first got my Mac, I made the mistake of getting the Apple Pro speakers. These things look good and sound OK at low volumes. But when you turn up the volume, they start emitting buzzing sounds under all the bass notes. A pretty lousy product, since these speakers are designed for use with a Mac G4 and can't handle the full 10W power output of the proprietary speaker jack that they plug in to. (FWIW, I quickly replaced them with a set of Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 speakers, which are MUCH better.)
But there are many other kinds of distortions. Analog clipping doesn't sound like digital clipping, which doesn't sound like a speaker "bottoming out", which doesn't sound like the Apple Pro distortion. Some kinds of distortion are tolerable, while some kinds are not. Some kinds gradually increase as you increase the volume, and others appear in full force when the volume crosses a threshold.
I mention all this because the 1" drivers in the inMotion look very similar to the drivers in the Apple Pro speakers. (I am aware that they're not the same - Apple's speakers are made by Harmon Kardon, not Altec Lansing.) If they distort in the same way, then I wouldn't want to use them even if I got them for free.
On the other hand, if they distort in a less annoying manner (perhaps the way my clock radio distorts when I turn the volume up too far), and only do so at a relatively high level, then it wouldn't be a problem.
You bought a $500 MP3 player, and you're bitching that the speakers cost too much?
The fact that I may buy an expensive item doesn't mean I want to be gouged on everything I purchase. The fact that I may think $500 is a good price for a 40G iPod does not mean I'm automatically going to think $150 is a good price for a cheap set of travel speakers.
I suppose you'd say that someone driving a Porsche should be willing to spend $250 on a travel mug for his coffee, and is a whining idiot if he refuses.
PS: How much do you think is a fair price for an MP3 player with a 40G capacity?
Slashdot Mirror
For example, I've been bothered for a while about the long time to launch Mozilla. Trivial things like saving images to disk would result in a "beachball" for several seconds, whereas the Windows version would run incredibly fast.
Then last night I installed FireFox and found that those problems went away. Really fast launching, and no beachballs.
The language specification should be open. This should include the specification of conformance tests. Otherwise we end up with many dialects that are not completely interoperable.
On the other hand, I don't think matters either way if any particular language's implementation is open-sourced. You shouldn't need to see Sun's source code in order to write a fully-compliant Java compiler/interpreter/runtime. Just like you don't need to see AT&T's (or Microsoft's or Borland's or anyone else's) C-compiler sources in order to develop a compiler that fully complies with the ISO standard. Having those sources would make it easier to port the language to a new platform, but they should never be necessary. If they are necessary, then the language specification isn't specific enough.
Mind you, I would love to be able to see Sun's sources as much as the next guy, but I really fail to see how their choice to keep their code proprietary in any way lessens the value of the language itself.
Funny, my old 1988 Nissan has a mechanically activated switch to turn off the compressor whenever the car is under hard acceleration. Newer cars don't do this anymore?
My 1991 Geo Prizm also did this. Much to my discomfort when driving over the Pennsylvania mountains on a hot summer day with three passengers and their baggage. The AC would cut off while going up every steep hill, and come back on while going down the other side. Making me and my passengers sweat a lot.
I would assume that my current car (a 2002 Prizm) does the same thing. (I haven't made that trip in this car yet.) Of course, the 2002 has a 125hp engine (compared with the 85hp engine of the 1991 model), so it may not have to turn off the AC while driving up those hills.
As for why he chose that brand over other possibilities, I don't remember what he said on the air at the time (around January 2002). Here is his site's collection of articles regarding his implant.
I don't know if you will find these articles useful or not, but hopefully it will help you with your decision-making process.
Depends on which side of the decimal point you put them on :-)
Gee, this sounds familiar.
How many years were 286 systems shipping before anybody shipped a mainstream OS to take advantage of it? When OS/2, Xenix and other 286-savvy operating systems shipped, how many of us chose to stick with MS-DOS and use the chip as a fast 8088?
How many years were 386 systems shipping before anybody shipped a mainstream OS to take advantage of that? How many years were 386's and 486's available before the market finally decided to move from DOS to Win95 and WinNT?
So I don't think it's at all strange if the market ends up using 64-bit processors as little more than fast 386's (the way most use Pentium-class systems right now) for several more years before finally deciding to use a 64-bit OS. And this is the way it should be - the average user has more than enough processing power to do everything he needs - e-mail, web surfing, MS Office, etc. Why should they switch to something new and relatively unproven just because it will take better advantage of their new hardware?
Us /.'ers who like to live on the bleeding edge may decided to move now (probably using some flavor of UNIX), but the rest of the world will take much longer to make that switch. This is the way it's always been, and I see no sign of anything being different this time around.
The universal cradle interface is nothing more than USB pins, plus serial port pins, plus power pins (for the battery charger.) You may find this diagram of interest. Note that the only "circuitry" inside a cradle is a bunch of wires, a pushbutton and a resistor.
If you look at what's available today, you'll find that all but the cheapest models (Zire, Zire 21 and Tungsten E) still use the universal-connector and a USB cradle.
I used to "with it". But they they changed what "it" was. Now what i'm "with" isn't "it" and what's "it" seems new and scary. It'll happen to you.
</SIMPSONS>
I understand that this is primitive compared to today's models. But it isn't that old, and it was second from the top of the line when I bought it (only the Tungsten:T was higher-end at the time.) Even so, it's a great device. The exact same unit, upgraded to a 320x320 display, would be close to perfect.
(I've never understood those users who feel their palmtop must be able to do everything their desktop PC does - adding all that processing power doesn't make the device more useful, but it does raise the price and kill your battery life. I figured this out a long time ago, when I was still trying to choose between a PalmOS device and a WinCE device.)
I realize that there are some very good technical reasons why Palm has refused to port PalmOS 5 and 6 to the older devices. But this doesn't change my opinion. They could still have ported the new/optimized bundled apps. Many features (like color themes) certainly don't require a high-end processor. Note also that owners of ARM-based Palm devices can't upgrade either. As far as I can tell, there has never been an upgrade for people to go from 5.0 to 5.1 to 5.2. (And their store no longer sells the CD to upgrade older models to 4.1.)
This attitude is relatively new. When I bought my first Palm (a III), I was able to buy upgrades for versions 3 and 4. Had I known that they were never again going to offer upgrades, I would not have spent the extra money on a model with flash memory. I could easily have bought the cheaper m125, which is effectively the same device, except for the lack of flash and a different dock connector. I won't make this mistake again.
I wrote to Palm. Their answer was "our engineers are working on it". Yeah, right. I might've believed that a year ago. Today, I interpret it as "I would like to tell you to drop dead, but I'm not allowed to say that to customers."
As for battery life - that's never been an issue. I place the unit on its cradle for syncing 2-3 times a week. The battery-level indicator has never gone below 75%. But I usually leave beam-receive, sound, and the backlight turned off. The battery lasts much longer with these disabled. I don't get as much life as my III did on a pair of AAA batteries, but since I've never been away from a charger long enough to get a low-battery warning, it's never been an issue.
Since the m-series came out, their policy seems to be "go jump off a cliff".
When I had my Palm III, I was able to upgrade it from version 2 to 3 and then to 4.
With my current unit (the m515), it came with 4.1. Palm has never offered an upgrade to 5. They probably won't offer an upgrade to 6.
I feel very cheated. I paid good money to get a unit with flash memory, expecting to be able to upgrade the system software. I could've bougt the much cheaper m125 (which doesn't have flash) if I had known that there would never be an upgrade.
I won't make that mistake again. The next time I need to replace my Palm, it will either be from a different manufacturer, or it will be a really cheap model, since I know there won't be any upgrades available.
I can see it now. Millions of people buy on-line music and download DRM-protected WMA files from Loudeye-based sites. Then the RIAA announces that Loudeye has no rights to be selling music and immediately sends threatening letters to Loudeye's customers (that's you and I). Meanwhile, Microsoft issues a patch for Media Player that revokes all of Loudeye's DRM keys, making the files unplayable.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a distinct possibility here?
They will probably all be standard WMA files - playable through any WMA-compatible device that supports the DRM facilities.
The real question is if each separate specialty store will have a separate license key for the DRM, or if you'll use a common Loudeye key.
If it's the former, the result is going to be a nightmare. You buy a new computer, and find that some of your songs can be brought to the new machine and some can't because some keys are portable and some are not.
It's already bad enough that the big players (except for Apple) have different DRM rights on a per-song basis. But now we have the possibility of even worse problems from lots of separate stores with their own unique rules and licenses. It'll get to the point where you have a hard drive full of music and no clue what you can and can't do with it.
I don't want to think of what will happen if your hard drive dies and you have to restore all the song files from a backup tape.
Apple's worked out these problems, by making sure that every song in the ITMS has the same DRM, and that keys are transportable to new computers. I haven't heard anything about this from the other stores, which leads me to assume the worst.
Just a clarification: not all iTunes AAC files have DRM. Only the ones you purchase through ITMS. If you rip tracks from CD into AAC format, there will be no DRM on the resulting files.
If (and I don't know for sure, since I don't have a Karma) the Karms supports non-DRM AAC files, and it supports iTunes for MP3, then it will also support iTunes for non-DRM AAC.
Of course, if you purchase a song from ITMS, it will have DRM. You'll have to burn a CD and re-rip to get it into a non-DRM file, which will degrade the quality somewhat.
It will be interesting to see if this ever happens again.
It was tried in the past. A system called Personics was once available for this. You'd go into your local Sam Goody store and browse through songs at a listening station, writing down track numbers for whatever you wanted. Then you'd give the list to a clerk, who would quickly make a cassette with your mix. Tapes were pretty inexpensive - about $10 for an 8-song tape, IIRC.
I thought it was a great idea. I made several such tapes. But it obviously was not a financial success, since it's gone and there is no successor taking its place.
Here you go
It's not exactly like MWM, but it's close enough in all the ways that I consider important. And it looks OK at low resolutions.
Sounds good, in theory. But what makes you think Mr. Spammer isn't going to sell your card information to other criminals?
As much as I'd love to make a spammer's life miserable, I really don't think it's worth making myself an identity-theft victim over.
And if anybody doesn't think spammers are involved in identity theft rings, please let me know. I've got a bridge to sell you - real cheap.
I have configured a custom .fvwm2rc file to make it look and behave like the really old mwm window manager. I've got sizing borders around the windows, a title bar with menu/min/max buttons, context menus on the desktop and some frame controls, and nothing else.
I explicitly turned off all of the "desktop" features and "docked" applets. They just get in the way. I launch programs by typing commands from an xterm. I have a menu item on the root window for launching new xterms.
If anyone is interested in how to do this, I can post my .fvwm2rc file somewhere. It's about 200 lines, including some stuff I don't actually use (leftover from the RedHat-provided file tat I used as my original template.)
You miss my point.
I'm not saying that ISP's can be trusted with your privacy. I personally believe that they can't be. And I'm certain that government routinely snoops on all kinds of communication, whether they're officially allowed to or not. But this has no impact on whether or not you should be relaying your outbound mail through an ISP server. It's just as easy to transparently proxy-and-store packets that are being sent "directly" to a remote host.
Without encyrption at the source, there is no security. With encryption (assuming a reasonably secure cipher), either choice (send directly or through an ISP server) will be equally secure.
If you're really that paranoid, I suggest you encrypt your mail at the source.
If you don't think you can trust your ISP to keep your spooled mail private, then what makes you think they can be trusted to not packet-sniff your direct connections?
And once you're encrypting your mail, it won't matter if your ISP has it spooled or not.
You didn't even bother reading my post before writing this, did you?
I said nothing about censorship. I have yet to hear of a single case where an ISP blocked a customer's mail access because of the content of his private communications.
Thes blocks are put in place because of spammers. You know, the people who send out millions of solicitations for black-market Viagra. And before you claim that you have a right to do that, read the terms of service for your ISP. I can guarantee you that as a part of your subscription, you agreed to not engage in that sort of activity.
OK, I don't agree, but I can understand the logic. If you assume that everybody belonging to a party is corrupt then you have to reject everything produced by that party's supporters. If, however, you believe that both sides are corrupt, or if you believe that neither side is completely corrupt, then the logic pretty much falls apart.
Then he says they need to have paper trails. Why? If the software is rigged, that same software will rig the paper.
And what about older mechanical voting machines. They also have raw-number output with a paper trail. But does anyone begin to understand how they work? Do you think anybody could tell if one was rigged? And couldn't their paper-trails be similarly rigged?
What about punch cards? If the ballots are printed directly on the cards, then they can't be rigged. (Of course, if they're punched via a machine, that machine can be rigged, and tabulation machines can be rigged.) But hand-counts are extremely time-consuming and error prone (remember hanging chads?) And every recount causes more chads to fall off, so repeated recounting destroys any hope at accuracy.
OK, so we're now down to someone writing an "X" in a box on a piece of paper. Do we really want to force this system on the entire country? And even that is subject to tampering, since they'll be read by optical scanners (which can be rigged) or by human volunteers (who can be bribed.) And hand-counts will be time-consuming and error-prone (but not as error-prone as visually reading punched cards.) But at lesat they won't get repeatedly damaged as the candidates repeatedly demand new recounts.
But mandating paper ballots will bring back all the corruption problems that voting machines were supposed to eliminate - like ballot-stuffing (where corrupt poll workers literally stuffed extra ballots into the boxes). And there will still be disputes when someone checks two contradictory boxes, or when a circle is partly filled-in. So in many respects, we get back to the same nonsense that Florida's punch-cards produced.
Every voting system can be hacked and abused by corrupt individuals. Modern software-based systems are no more or less secure than other systems. They replace one set of flaws for another set. You can't just point to the flaws of one mechanism and automatically declare it evil without comparing it to all the flaws of the other competing systems.
I think the Property List Editor is part of the developer tools, and so isn't installed by default. But every distribution of OS X includes an installer for them, so this shouldn't be a big deal.
Many ISP's (including Earthlink, which I use) block access to port 25 - meaning you can't send directly to a remote mail server. As a part of this, they tell you that all outbound mail must go through thair provided mail server.
This is an anti-spam procedure that works well. If all of their customers must send mail through a single server, that server can filter and block those customers that have abused their mail privileges. In other words, these blocks are (for the most part) a good thing.
But this doesn't rule out running your own internal mail server. You just have to configure it to relay all outbound mail (that is, everything leaving your LAN) through your ISP's mail server instead of sending directly to the recipient's server. I know that sendmail can be configured to do this (I've done this on my Linux PC in order to allow me to use /usr/ucb/mail.) I would assume that any other halfway decent mail server should be able to do the same thing.
When I first got my Mac, I made the mistake of getting the Apple Pro speakers. These things look good and sound OK at low volumes. But when you turn up the volume, they start emitting buzzing sounds under all the bass notes. A pretty lousy product, since these speakers are designed for use with a Mac G4 and can't handle the full 10W power output of the proprietary speaker jack that they plug in to. (FWIW, I quickly replaced them with a set of Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 speakers, which are MUCH better.)
But there are many other kinds of distortions. Analog clipping doesn't sound like digital clipping, which doesn't sound like a speaker "bottoming out", which doesn't sound like the Apple Pro distortion. Some kinds of distortion are tolerable, while some kinds are not. Some kinds gradually increase as you increase the volume, and others appear in full force when the volume crosses a threshold.
I mention all this because the 1" drivers in the inMotion look very similar to the drivers in the Apple Pro speakers. (I am aware that they're not the same - Apple's speakers are made by Harmon Kardon, not Altec Lansing.) If they distort in the same way, then I wouldn't want to use them even if I got them for free.
On the other hand, if they distort in a less annoying manner (perhaps the way my clock radio distorts when I turn the volume up too far), and only do so at a relatively high level, then it wouldn't be a problem.
The fact that I may buy an expensive item doesn't mean I want to be gouged on everything I purchase. The fact that I may think $500 is a good price for a 40G iPod does not mean I'm automatically going to think $150 is a good price for a cheap set of travel speakers.
I suppose you'd say that someone driving a Porsche should be willing to spend $250 on a travel mug for his coffee, and is a whining idiot if he refuses.
PS: How much do you think is a fair price for an MP3 player with a 40G capacity?