I was looking to browse and copy files bnetween a variety of platforms in a really friendly way that wouldn't show up on most script kiddy scans. Gopher was the obvious protocol, unfortunately the server was a WinXP box and I was unable to find an appropriate gopher server for it. IE & Mozilla still support gopher://, does Safari?
BTW, for those reminiscing about text-based gopher don't forget GopherVR that came out just as http/html hit. An interesting experiment in 3D virtualization of online resources I've yet to see it equalled for other protocols.
For those not literate enough to read the linked story (yet apparently compulsively posting here) let me quote the second sentence(emphasis mine):
The FTC and 36 other government agencies from 26 countries have launched Operation Secure Your Server.
All of those who have already posted inane comments about the US's FTC not having extra-territorial jurisdiction, and the fools who moderated them up, are now asked to read the original article out loud to themselves and in the future refrain from posting until they're sure they're not making public asses of themselves.
One of the marvelous features of AppleScript is that nearly every Mac native application supports it to some degree, and you don't need to use AppleScript to use those hooks
Apple offers their "Open Scripting Architecture", code away in whatever you're most comfortable in and take advantage of those AppleScript hooks. Perl, TCL, Phython, JavaScript, whatever, all can manipulate the applications using their built-in AppleScript support
Thus this book isn't just for hardcore Mac folks, it's also for anyone who uses Macs and would like to write scripts that interact with Adobe Photoshop and MS Excel and and, well, pretty much anything else "Mac".
Clearly you don't realize that Slashdot doesn't post original material either. Indeed it's a regular question why/. doesn't simply cut a deal with PBS and reprint Cringely's columns honestly instead of noting nearly each one and then having some schmoe "helpfully" copy it for 'em. Same for almost everything else, by the time it hits/. it's old news in other circles.
That journalists (including Usenet posters, bloggers, bbs users, other online discussion forums plus talk show producers and newsdesk editors) get many of their ideas from their peers is hardly new. That the process is becoming more widely transparent only speaks to the increasing breadth and depth of information resources available to more and more people.
Indeed this is what the Google News service relies on - clusters of stories on topics. Those stories aren't always about "breaking news", quite often they're simply topics that have suddenly become widely discussed: Successful Memes.
So yes, if one reads a number of news sources, particularly ones focused on specific topics, one will indeed often note a topic begin in one place, jumps from source to source, evolve, and oftentimes come full circle. Furthermore if one back-tracks a story it rarely "began" where most of us first became aware of it but had already bubbled up through several layers of reportage.
Welcome to the Global Village where what was old is new again.
HowTo IPv6 for the Home
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The State of IPv6
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So, for those of us working from home, how do we take advantage of IPv6?
I've got two houses (different countries), each with a generic router/NAT box, cable modem service, and a coupla Mandrake, coupla WinXP, a MacOS 9, and a MacOS X box. Oh, and i the US a TiVo with Home Media Option. Also the sweetheart needs to boot into Win2K sometimes for work.
I'm willing to swap out the router/NAT boxes if someone can point to ones that supports IPv6. I've already installed IPv6 on the XP boxes, I'm told it's straightforward on MacOS X, I assume it's no biggie for Mandrake. MacOS 9 - I recall Apple making some noise about IPv6 for it years ago but it's not a deal-breaker for me.
The needs are the usual (web browsing/email/listening to streaming audio, etc.) plus I need some way of connecting the two houses so they appear on the same private network.
Any suggestions? Boxes to buy? I strongly prefer to use a consumer router/NAT box over a PC for my gateway but don't see any of them mentioning IPv6 support, anyone got a firmware retrofit? How about getting IPv6 IP#s assigned while inside my ISP's (cable company) IPv4 space, without a fixed IP there? Is there an IPv6-friendly dynamic DNS service out there?
Lotsa questions I know, but I bet lotsa folks would be willing to start getting experience at home if there were some "How-To-IPv6-for-the-Home" pages out there (I've looked, haven't found anything appropriate yet.)
For those of us using MSIE for one reason or another I can't recommend strongly enough MyIE2. A free shell for MSIE it adds another 2MB but in that include features like tabs, mouse gestures, various sorts of filtering including by string and by domain, and yes, trivially enabling & disabling Flash. There are other similar products but IMHO this is the smoothest.
Next I'm betting the the Google Toolbar will be revved pretty quickly to counter this, they'd be fools not to. Indeed I'm betting nearly every pop-up blocker will be jumping on these. FWIW I use Norton Internet Security Pro and it's ad-filtering is pretty good once one undoes it's favored-partners exceptions.
Finally there will indeed be a rush to block the offending IP's, unless the advertisers get crafty and start making their adverts appear to come from the content IP's, then it'll be ugly everywhere. Hopefully things won't come to that and over the next few days we'll start seeing handy "filter these" notices.
And yes, there will be the flood of "Switch to Mozilla", "Use Linux" & "Use MacOS X & Safari" etc. postings. Thanks folks but most of us are well aware of those options and for one reason or another aren't taking advantage of 'em, or are but also using MSWin & MSIE too. Just deal with the fact that there are unenlightened or dissenting or locked-in folks and not be annoying proselytizers please. Oh, and MyIE2 is beta-ing Mozilla support for those wanting/needing to keep a foot in each camp.
For example, if I asked you "what type of door interface do you prefer-a copper knob or a steel one," unless you were neurotic, you probably wouldn't care.
Actually for a door interface a knob is almost always the worst possible common interface. Difficult to manipulate for folks with limited articulation they're also singularly uncommunicative about the two most important questions one usually has with a door - is it locked and which was will it open?
The better alternative is indeed a large (not sharp) hook. At least it's easier to grasp and requires a more universal range of motion to open. This is why they're now mandated in most public facilites and long standard in hospitals and nursing homes.
The preferred-by-folks-interested-in-such-things is bars - horizontal on the swinging-out side of doors and vertical on the the swinging-in side. For a positive action to open 'push' is best for the horizontal and 'pull for the vertical; which are of course the actions one uses with them naturally anyway.
What to get really annoyed with is incompetent architects and designers who ignore these conventions and do inane things like put matching handles on both sides of a door. This is particularly common with glass doors in malls and hotels and office buildings, apparently so "they match up". This is of course completely wrongheaded and the next time you find yourself tussling with such a door trying to figure out if it goes in or out make a vow to never hire the dolts who inflicted this bit of style-over-function on you.
So yes, just as with computer GUIs real world interfaces have their own conventions and a right way (and sometimes a Right way) and a wrong way and usually an even more wrong way to do things.
BTW, yes doors should always "open out" in case of emergency but sometimes "out" isn't immediately obvious to casual users, or at times there really is no clear this-way or that-way for "out".
UI in general is based on display PDF, so parts of it could very well be vector based (fonts, of course.) but the icons are not.
Suprisingly none of the MacOS X GUI is vector based, fonts indeed being about the only exception.
All of the lovely chrome is bitmapped, something that shocked lots of folks when it first shipped and continues to puzzle everyone. To this day whenever someone replaces the default GUI elements with the alternate charcoal versions or a third party package it's all hardcoped fixed-size bitmaps.
For a walkthrough of 'em, and how to create your own GUI theme for MacOS X check out ThemePark.
I'll put in another vote for Rockport brand shoes. They're widely available, reasonably priced, attractive enough, come in lengths & widths, and are easily some of the most comfortable no-break-in shoes on the market.
With all that said some errata:
Rockports used to have a metal shim embedded in them to control their mechanical qualities and yes, this set off metal detectors. However soon after 9-11 and resultant increased security measures that piece of metal was replaced with a hard plastic component for the same purpose. I assume by now anything you buy in the channel will be TSA-friendly, my new ones for the past year or so have been.
Rockports aren't cheap. They're not terribly expensive but if you're coming from the world of $25 shoes these run $50 and up. But as I said they're good quality. FWIW my foot doctors approve of 'em (I've fallen arches, deformed legs putting on foot stress, now diabetes) and shoe quality is vital to me. The way I look at it I've only got one pair of feet, use 'em a lot, plan to keep on doing so, treating 'em right is well worth the shoe investment.
Rockports go on sale about twice a year. Check their corporate website for sale coupons you can print out for some real savings. Also they do have their own Reebok/Rockport stores and a few (former factory) outlets where prices are good with discounted prices and a running 3-for-2 deal (comes out quite well!) The one I'm familiar is in Marlborough Mass. and worth the trip from within state.
As I said, Rockports are attractive enough. They're not very trendy, aren't gonna get commented on, in the words of a Queer-Eye-for-the-Queer-Guy (a buddy to me): "Your shoes are always kinda... plain." Works for me.
Me? I've got an array of Rockport wingtips for dress-up, "ProWalkers" for the rest of the time, and a pair of surprisingly good Rockport sandals (I can light-hike in 'em!) Oh, and I bought a coupla packs of socks on closeout last time I was there that are now easily my favorites; black athletic socks with what appears to be a white Nat'l Semiconductor logo on 'em (this is News for Nerds).
Effective as administrative grease
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Source Code Escrow
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I've used escrow.
We were a medium large company with a package we wanted developed. For reasons I wasn't in on it wasn't being done in-house. The big concern was the small shop we were considering hiring going belly-up halfway through, or just as bad not being responsive to future maintenance issues or possible further development.
So I suggested escrow and it reassured the right folks in the right offices and the outside developer was also agreeable. So the next week our lawyers wrote something everybody was happy with and the contract was given and the project went ahead. A month or so later along with delivery of the application we got the code we'd paid for, our coders looked it over and liked the internals, it passed our QA, all good.
Later we paid for some bells and whistles to be added by the original developer. I also know our coders made some trivial changes to the cosmetic side. Beyond that it's probably still running pretty much as-was.
The escrow bit was really there to reassure folks; it sounded good and responsible to the folks nervous about hiring a small shop. In reality it probably would have cost us more in legal fees and meeting time (plus come-up-to-speed time for the coders) to rescue & reuse the escrowed code then just sending out the contract again or doing it in-house. But as administrative grease it worked fine.
Oh, Open Source? First off that company didn't think that way (insurance/HMO-type folks) so that battle would have been twice as tough as escrow was. Furthermore as the code was intended to touch our partners/owners/clients letting it free could have freaked them out too. These days at least they'd have heard of the OS though might still be hard to sell on actually implementing it (it'd publicize their internal data structures or something.)
Would I do it again? Sure in that kind of butt-covering situation. In an adversarial situation, particularly one possibly turning such early on, it'd be far too easy to poison (the benefits could never outweigh the costs of that sort of disaster anyhow).
I'd also not go with escrow alone for something big and complex and vital, too hard for someone else to pick up. In that situation either we'd bring it in-house, make damn sure of the developers, or perhaps require our interests being protected with our own team actively involved and vetting it.
The original project and the final one were indeed two separate beasts. Had all the required work been done separately it would have taken 30 years and left western Massachustts in far worse shape the entire time. Combining it all into one megaproject was only practical.
The old Central Artery structure could not have been "renovated". Categorically impossible. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is completely ignorant or lying wildly. The existing structure was literally collapsing and no replacement in situ was possible. No room for an additional or replacement structure alongside or above either, much less the ramps that would have been required.
Yeah, federal taxes paid for part of the new highway system. They also paid for untold miles of lightly traveled interstate in Utah & Montana too. It's called an highway system and Boston is a vital hub for the northeastern US: It locks solid and so does much of the rest of the region economically. By the way, if it makes you feel any better the elevated highway at the heart of the whole project was originally built entirely by the State of Massachusetts.
"Several groups are lobbying" = You and your two sister/brother/cousins. The reality is that most anyone with any sense of the traffic situation in the northeast is well aware that this megaproject only brings it up to current needs and had it not been undertaken things would be far more dire.
"Democratic cabal" so now you show your true rabidly partisan colors. Pity the actual makeup of the statehouse doesn't match your warped portrayal of it.
We now return you to squarooticus' regular rant: Fluoridation of water: A Communist plot to invade our vital bodily fluids!
Anyway, I haven't had a chance to mess around with outlook much but so far I found one feature to be extremely useful: SPAM protection.
Well, sorta.
MS included a rilly rilly simple "Junk" system that's already been figured out and workarounds devised. Apple's Mail.app and others have got it right - go Bayesian. Heck MS uses it in their help systems, why not in mail filtering? That way there'd be no universal set of rules/MS monoculture that's easy to circumvent.
Indeed for some of my clients the default MS built-in filter is a problem, they work in human services where sex discussion is part of their jobs. Those built-in rules block some of their legitimate material yet let other stuff through unchecked.
My suggestion? Use SpamBayes for Outlook - free, trivially trainable, integrates nicely. Or for more filtering beyond spam look into the POPfile-based Outclass, it can do an excellent job of automagically sorting ones mail with some straightforward training. Best both of them learn and adapt to your needs, don't provide a sitting target for the spammers.
I upgraded (if you call it that) from a plextor 16x to a sony 52x (really 48x).
Actually you've got a rebadged Liteon, all of Sony's high speed drives are Liteon's. The good bit about that is though Sony never issues upgraded formware (with faster speeds, more formats, etc.) Liteon does and they can be tweaked so the drive still reports itself as a Sony whatever.
For downloads of tweaked firmware & flashers check out www.sonycrx2xx.org and for a list of the drives that can be upgraded check out Sony Compatability Chart. Made my $20 Sony drive a lot faster & a lot more reliable, got rid of that "hold button for full speed" sillyness.
Fer chrissakes you don't even have to read the linked article, the blurb itself says why the project was undertaken.
And no, I'm not gonna quote it. It's the entire second half of the blurb at the top of this subject. If you're not able to scroll up and spell out the words for yourself there's no helping you, the sooner you forget to breathe and stop annoying the rest of us the better.
Why is this being done? Is it so that...? Can I run blah then? What about Aqua? So I can now put it on my Dell? What's an IOkit?
The next time anyone notes how the quality of postings on/. has gone down you buffoons should slink out of the thread, some of you are just too pathetic for words.
Prepress color printing is a specialized field. Beyond all of the usual business requirements there are issues like printing languages, versions, rasterizers, licensed-vs-unlicensed implementations, ppds, color quality, accuracy, etc. Unless someone is well familiar in these topics and up to date with the products on the market the recommendations you get aren't going to be of any use.
So instead of making blind recommendations ('cause I'm not in the printing field any longer and am not up to date on the various offerings) I'm gonna suggest you better places to find more appropriate assistance:
Your local tech consultants. Every city has a tech head shop that specializes in serving the print/marketing/advertising folks, get in touch with yours. They'll know what other folks in your position are using, how happy they are with it, have a good idea of the costs, benefits, trade offs, etc.
The techies at a larger house. While their uses are going to be bigger/faster/more expensive then yours their staff is likely aware of the range of products, can point you to what they've heard & used themselves. Call up someone up-market of you and offer to take take their alpha printing-geek out to lunch, get some recommendations.
Ask your printer what they recommend. They're obviously dealing with a lot of outfits like yours, undoubtedly have some in-house experience with your requirements, their staff is probably well aware of what their clients are using. Sure they may be losing some business if you're not doing proofs at them, on the other hand they'll also be keeping a customer happy by helping you out.
Any of those venues is going to get you better quality answer then here. Also don't be too cheap to pay for advice & support in this. Getting everything set up right, all of the parts properly meshed together, making sure any glitches are not endemic but isolated incidents that can be properly resolved, that takes some sophisticated knowledge and skills. The same as you'll save money using a prepress printer in-house the same goes for having a smooth pre-press process in-house.
Sadly Adobe has quietly stopped much of it's SVG evangelizing & development and now seems more interested in supporting the defacto Flash standard. This is probably their just being pragmatic as the Flash plugins have at least a magnitude greater market penetration then SVG support but it doesn't bode at all well for SVG.
History has shown folks are loathe to download plugins to view content, and without a market for content there's little for content creation tools, leading to little content etc. Thus SVG may suffer the same fate as PNG & VRML: Better formats ignored by an indifferent market, relegated to a niche arena of hard-core standards & web technology geeks.
Using SVG, or indeed any vector-based GUI, is indeed a probable long-term win and "the right thing" to do. However there's also the strong possibility that SVG may remain stillborn and this could all be a dead end. Time will tell but right now SVG isn't the obvious next big thing it was a year or two, is following a trajectory disturbingly similar to, again, PNG, VRML, and many other also-rans.
ps. Yes there amy be folks out there using PNG & VMRL but let's be honest they're not exactly common formats, and they don't seem to be becoming any more so in proportion to everything else.
"How do you manage IT requests in your organization?"
Small opaque paper envelopes.
Folks write down the issue, typically add some small cash (not cheques!) "gift", leave it in my mailbox and I'll see what I can do. Baked goods of sufficient quality are also highly motivationial but nothin' sez lovin' like cash.
Yes, Apple keeps a public port of MacOS X to x86, it's the open Source "Darwin".
There are also reliable reports that Apple keeps a feature-complete implementation of MacOS X on x86 internally. Supposedly ensuring that code compiles and runs succesfully on the MacOS x86 implementation is a formal part of Apple's internal QA testing. Does any of this means that Apple is planning to jump to x86 tomorrow? No, but it means they're keeping their options open, all of their options open.
MacOS X evolved from NextStep (capitalize as you wish) which went through 5 platforms in it's lifetime. MacOS pre X went through it's own migration from 68K to PPC code, Apple pulled it off and doubtless learned a lot, among them thinking ahead pays off and not costs a lot.
Indeed NextStep's aborted descendant Rhapsody was originally targetted for both PP & x86, betas were released for both sides. Apple would be a fool to give up that kind of portability and apparently knows that, uses it to their development advantage.
By testing code on platforms as disparate as x86 booting off of BIOS & PPC using Open Firmware Apple is sure it's wares will run nearly anywhere. Big endian, little endian, should be fine. Has been tested to be fine. No lock-in, no platform-specific dead-ends or migration traps, sanity checked every step of the way.
Will Apple ever release MacOS X x86? Probably not. There's no reason for them to. Apple makes it's money elling hardware, the OS is a means to that end. Besides there'd be a steep marketing cost to adopting x86 after all these years. If anything I'd expect Apple to move to something significantly different, I'd hoped Alpha for a long time but with that dead it's anyone's guess, if anything other then PPC in the forseeable future.
Heck, with Motorola spinning off their chip manufacturing Apple might just buy it and take it all in-house. They're a signifcent Motorola customer, already dedicate a good deal of internal R&D to PPC work, have the cash laying around (US$-something billion cash these days.) It wouldn't be an entirely unreasonable thing for Apple to do, as a division or more likely as an invested-in separate company.
(For all of those folks who argue so vociferously that Apple should go x86 or sell MacOS on it's own or that Apple should become a software co. & not a hardware one: Go tell it to Apple's board don't preach at us here.)
What was his response when you pointed out his mail server wasn't filtering the damn viruses in the first place?
What part of this bozo installing his own email client and then downloading his own infected personal email from some non-company server to the company's desktop PC without going through the company systems eluded you?
The corporate email filter may well have been working fine. Indeed it seems that the only thing saving the company from a possible nasty outbreak was that on-access scanner our protagonist is so bitter about.
I'd also guess that after this bozo showing up often enough on the virus scans with mbox's full of infected emails there's going to be a discussion with his supervisors about this sort of activity, possible repercussions, and the phrase "career limiting behavior & attitude".
I just got a call from the Data Security guy in my office. I've had run-ins with him before, because their scans of my PC would occasionally find that I run Eudora for my personal email rather than routing it through the corporate virus portal known as Outlook Express.
You on the clock? In the company office? Using company hardware? On an account with access to material the company would probably rather not get corrupted, infected, or randomly sent out to strangers?
Uh huh.
So you wanna read your personal email at the office. Fine if your company supports that.
But then you just absolutely positively gotta use only your favorite email client, not the one already installed, not a web portal. The email client now installed by you, presumably licensed to you, that is not owned or supported by IS. The one that makes IS's day that much tougher by throwing one more ingredient into the stew that is the company's desktop computer.
Now on top if it your personal email client reading your personal email is bringing in viruses to the company. Onto that corporate PC logged into the corporate network. And dammit those nasty folks in IS aren't willing to spend their time making exceptions to the virus scanning so your unique-in-the-company personal email client reading your personal, virus-infected email is exempted.
e-smith is a free distro based on Red Hat but managed via web browser and a powerful set of script templates. Thus it's trivially easy to set up and manage (I've set up office admins in non-profit human service organizations, likely the least techie environment outside of field hands, and they've had no problems managing their servers).
Currently version 6 is in beta, probably to be released real-soon-now, and it includes the dovecot IMAP server. This is proving to be a champ of an IMAP server, particularly when integrated with the e-smith automation. It runs great on even low-end hardware, is proving robust yet easy to manage; a real winner.
My suggestion is to download a copy and take a look. Also check out the add-ons that take advantage of the e-smith templating & web management systems. There's even a marvelous set of Lazy Administrators command line tools for making bulk changes to accounts and settings. For a nearly turn-key solution it is quite impressive.
For those looking for support Mitel has a commercial version of e-smith called the Mitel Networks 6000 Managed Application Server which offers more groupware features and other nice things.
That's why mod_gzip is trivial in fairly static sites, becomes serious in very dynamic ones.
On the static sites the files are compressed once and served from the cache. On dynamic ones that doesn't happen as much, there's a lot more to compress.
Wouldn't it be possible to serve compressed text pages that get de-compressed at the browser's end, there by actually reducing the actual number of bytes used to transfer information?
Yeah, that's the mod_gzip everyone is talking about.
It's a a web server plug in that compresses pages as they're sent using the standard gzip algorithm. Every major browser supports automagically unzipping the file and reading it as any other http/html.
Upside - smaller files to be sent. Downside is some CPU time spent at each end compressing/decompressing the files. This can be trivial in fairly static sites, become serious in very dynamic ones.
Oh, and your modem throughput will take small hit with the gzipped pages the same as it does with other compressed files. 'Course it's less of a hit then if it had to play compression games itself.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, for those reminiscing about text-based gopher don't forget GopherVR that came out just as http/html hit. An interesting experiment in 3D virtualization of online resources I've yet to see it equalled for other protocols.
Other now-obscure technologies from the same era:
Apple offers their "Open Scripting Architecture", code away in whatever you're most comfortable in and take advantage of those AppleScript hooks. Perl, TCL, Phython, JavaScript, whatever, all can manipulate the applications using their built-in AppleScript support
Thus this book isn't just for hardcore Mac folks, it's also for anyone who uses Macs and would like to write scripts that interact with Adobe Photoshop and MS Excel and and, well, pretty much anything else "Mac".
From Unix.
Pretty powerful, eh?
Now it's widely interesting!
Clearly you don't realize that Slashdot doesn't post original material either. Indeed it's a regular question why /. doesn't simply cut a deal with PBS and reprint Cringely's columns honestly instead of noting nearly each one and then having some schmoe "helpfully" copy it for 'em. Same for almost everything else, by the time it hits /. it's old news in other circles.
That journalists (including Usenet posters, bloggers, bbs users, other online discussion forums plus talk show producers and newsdesk editors) get many of their ideas from their peers is hardly new. That the process is becoming more widely transparent only speaks to the increasing breadth and depth of information resources available to more and more people.
Indeed this is what the Google News service relies on - clusters of stories on topics. Those stories aren't always about "breaking news", quite often they're simply topics that have suddenly become widely discussed: Successful Memes.
So yes, if one reads a number of news sources, particularly ones focused on specific topics, one will indeed often note a topic begin in one place, jumps from source to source, evolve, and oftentimes come full circle. Furthermore if one back-tracks a story it rarely "began" where most of us first became aware of it but had already bubbled up through several layers of reportage.
Welcome to the Global Village where what was old is new again.
I've got two houses (different countries), each with a generic router/NAT box, cable modem service, and a coupla Mandrake, coupla WinXP, a MacOS 9, and a MacOS X box. Oh, and i the US a TiVo with Home Media Option. Also the sweetheart needs to boot into Win2K sometimes for work.
I'm willing to swap out the router/NAT boxes if someone can point to ones that supports IPv6. I've already installed IPv6 on the XP boxes, I'm told it's straightforward on MacOS X, I assume it's no biggie for Mandrake. MacOS 9 - I recall Apple making some noise about IPv6 for it years ago but it's not a deal-breaker for me.
The needs are the usual (web browsing/email/listening to streaming audio, etc.) plus I need some way of connecting the two houses so they appear on the same private network.
Any suggestions? Boxes to buy? I strongly prefer to use a consumer router/NAT box over a PC for my gateway but don't see any of them mentioning IPv6 support, anyone got a firmware retrofit? How about getting IPv6 IP#s assigned while inside my ISP's (cable company) IPv4 space, without a fixed IP there? Is there an IPv6-friendly dynamic DNS service out there?
Lotsa questions I know, but I bet lotsa folks would be willing to start getting experience at home if there were some "How-To-IPv6-for-the-Home" pages out there (I've looked, haven't found anything appropriate yet.)
The better alternative is indeed a large (not sharp) hook. At least it's easier to grasp and requires a more universal range of motion to open. This is why they're now mandated in most public facilites and long standard in hospitals and nursing homes.
The preferred-by-folks-interested-in-such-things is bars - horizontal on the swinging-out side of doors and vertical on the the swinging-in side. For a positive action to open 'push' is best for the horizontal and 'pull for the vertical; which are of course the actions one uses with them naturally anyway.
What to get really annoyed with is incompetent architects and designers who ignore these conventions and do inane things like put matching handles on both sides of a door. This is particularly common with glass doors in malls and hotels and office buildings, apparently so "they match up". This is of course completely wrongheaded and the next time you find yourself tussling with such a door trying to figure out if it goes in or out make a vow to never hire the dolts who inflicted this bit of style-over-function on you.
So yes, just as with computer GUIs real world interfaces have their own conventions and a right way (and sometimes a Right way) and a wrong way and usually an even more wrong way to do things.
BTW, yes doors should always "open out" in case of emergency but sometimes "out" isn't immediately obvious to casual users, or at times there really is no clear this-way or that-way for "out".
All of the lovely chrome is bitmapped, something that shocked lots of folks when it first shipped and continues to puzzle everyone. To this day whenever someone replaces the default GUI elements with the alternate charcoal versions or a third party package it's all hardcoped fixed-size bitmaps.
For a walkthrough of 'em, and how to create your own GUI theme for MacOS X check out ThemePark.
With all that said some errata:
- Rockports used to have a metal shim embedded in them to control their mechanical qualities and yes, this set off metal detectors. However soon after 9-11 and resultant increased security measures that piece of metal was replaced with a hard plastic component for the same purpose. I assume by now anything you buy in the channel will be TSA-friendly, my new ones for the past year or so have been.
- Rockports aren't cheap. They're not terribly expensive but if you're coming from the world of $25 shoes these run $50 and up. But as I said they're good quality. FWIW my foot doctors approve of 'em (I've fallen arches, deformed legs putting on foot stress, now diabetes) and shoe quality is vital to me. The way I look at it I've only got one pair of feet, use 'em a lot, plan to keep on doing so, treating 'em right is well worth the shoe investment.
- Rockports go on sale about twice a year. Check their corporate website for sale coupons you can print out for some real savings. Also they do have their own Reebok/Rockport stores and a few (former factory) outlets where prices are good with discounted prices and a running 3-for-2 deal (comes out quite well!) The one I'm familiar is in Marlborough Mass. and worth the trip from within state.
- As I said, Rockports are attractive enough. They're not very trendy, aren't gonna get commented on, in the words of a Queer-Eye-for-the-Queer-Guy (a buddy to me): "Your shoes are always kinda... plain." Works for me.
Me? I've got an array of Rockport wingtips for dress-up, "ProWalkers" for the rest of the time, and a pair of surprisingly good Rockport sandals (I can light-hike in 'em!) Oh, and I bought a coupla packs of socks on closeout last time I was there that are now easily my favorites; black athletic socks with what appears to be a white Nat'l Semiconductor logo on 'em (this is News for Nerds).We were a medium large company with a package we wanted developed. For reasons I wasn't in on it wasn't being done in-house. The big concern was the small shop we were considering hiring going belly-up halfway through, or just as bad not being responsive to future maintenance issues or possible further development.
So I suggested escrow and it reassured the right folks in the right offices and the outside developer was also agreeable. So the next week our lawyers wrote something everybody was happy with and the contract was given and the project went ahead. A month or so later along with delivery of the application we got the code we'd paid for, our coders looked it over and liked the internals, it passed our QA, all good.
Later we paid for some bells and whistles to be added by the original developer. I also know our coders made some trivial changes to the cosmetic side. Beyond that it's probably still running pretty much as-was.
The escrow bit was really there to reassure folks; it sounded good and responsible to the folks nervous about hiring a small shop. In reality it probably would have cost us more in legal fees and meeting time (plus come-up-to-speed time for the coders) to rescue & reuse the escrowed code then just sending out the contract again or doing it in-house. But as administrative grease it worked fine.
Oh, Open Source? First off that company didn't think that way (insurance/HMO-type folks) so that battle would have been twice as tough as escrow was. Furthermore as the code was intended to touch our partners/owners/clients letting it free could have freaked them out too. These days at least they'd have heard of the OS though might still be hard to sell on actually implementing it (it'd publicize their internal data structures or something.)
Would I do it again? Sure in that kind of butt-covering situation. In an adversarial situation, particularly one possibly turning such early on, it'd be far too easy to poison (the benefits could never outweigh the costs of that sort of disaster anyhow).
I'd also not go with escrow alone for something big and complex and vital, too hard for someone else to pick up. In that situation either we'd bring it in-house, make damn sure of the developers, or perhaps require our interests being protected with our own team actively involved and vetting it.
But used it once, to good effect, yes.
- The original project and the final one were indeed two separate beasts. Had all the required work been done separately it would have taken 30 years and left western Massachustts in far worse shape the entire time. Combining it all into one megaproject was only practical.
- The old Central Artery structure could not have been "renovated". Categorically impossible. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is completely ignorant or lying wildly. The existing structure was literally collapsing and no replacement in situ was possible. No room for an additional or replacement structure alongside or above either, much less the ramps that would have been required.
- Yeah, federal taxes paid for part of the new highway system. They also paid for untold miles of lightly traveled interstate in Utah & Montana too. It's called an highway system and Boston is a vital hub for the northeastern US: It locks solid and so does much of the rest of the region economically. By the way, if it makes you feel any better the elevated highway at the heart of the whole project was originally built entirely by the State of Massachusetts.
- "Several groups are lobbying" = You and your two sister/brother/cousins. The reality is that most anyone with any sense of the traffic situation in the northeast is well aware that this megaproject only brings it up to current needs and had it not been undertaken things would be far more dire.
- "Democratic cabal" so now you show your true rabidly partisan colors. Pity the actual makeup of the statehouse doesn't match your warped portrayal of it.
We now return you to squarooticus' regular rant: Fluoridation of water: A Communist plot to invade our vital bodily fluids!MS included a rilly rilly simple "Junk" system that's already been figured out and workarounds devised. Apple's Mail.app and others have got it right - go Bayesian. Heck MS uses it in their help systems, why not in mail filtering? That way there'd be no universal set of rules/MS monoculture that's easy to circumvent.
Indeed for some of my clients the default MS built-in filter is a problem, they work in human services where sex discussion is part of their jobs. Those built-in rules block some of their legitimate material yet let other stuff through unchecked.
My suggestion? Use SpamBayes for Outlook - free, trivially trainable, integrates nicely. Or for more filtering beyond spam look into the POPfile-based Outclass, it can do an excellent job of automagically sorting ones mail with some straightforward training. Best both of them learn and adapt to your needs, don't provide a sitting target for the spammers.
- I for one welcome our new personal droid overlords
- All your droids belong to us
and of course*address intentionially wrong
Actually you've got a rebadged Liteon, all of Sony's high speed drives are Liteon's. The good bit about that is though Sony never issues upgraded formware (with faster speeds, more formats, etc.) Liteon does and they can be tweaked so the drive still reports itself as a Sony whatever.
For downloads of tweaked firmware & flashers check out www.sonycrx2xx.org and for a list of the drives that can be upgraded check out Sony Compatability Chart. Made my $20 Sony drive a lot faster & a lot more reliable, got rid of that "hold button for full speed" sillyness.
And no, I'm not gonna quote it. It's the entire second half of the blurb at the top of this subject. If you're not able to scroll up and spell out the words for yourself there's no helping you, the sooner you forget to breathe and stop annoying the rest of us the better.
The next time anyone notes how the quality of postings on /. has gone down you buffoons should slink out of the thread, some of you are just too pathetic for words.
Thus "WiFry", as in "Would you like WiFry with your Happy Meal(tm)?"
So instead of making blind recommendations ('cause I'm not in the printing field any longer and am not up to date on the various offerings) I'm gonna suggest you better places to find more appropriate assistance:
Any of those venues is going to get you better quality answer then here. Also don't be too cheap to pay for advice & support in this. Getting everything set up right, all of the parts properly meshed together, making sure any glitches are not endemic but isolated incidents that can be properly resolved, that takes some sophisticated knowledge and skills. The same as you'll save money using a prepress printer in-house the same goes for having a smooth pre-press process in-house.
History has shown folks are loathe to download plugins to view content, and without a market for content there's little for content creation tools, leading to little content etc. Thus SVG may suffer the same fate as PNG & VRML: Better formats ignored by an indifferent market, relegated to a niche arena of hard-core standards & web technology geeks.
Using SVG, or indeed any vector-based GUI, is indeed a probable long-term win and "the right thing" to do. However there's also the strong possibility that SVG may remain stillborn and this could all be a dead end. Time will tell but right now SVG isn't the obvious next big thing it was a year or two, is following a trajectory disturbingly similar to, again, PNG, VRML, and many other also-rans.
ps. Yes there amy be folks out there using PNG & VMRL but let's be honest they're not exactly common formats, and they don't seem to be becoming any more so in proportion to everything else.
Folks write down the issue, typically add some small cash (not cheques!) "gift", leave it in my mailbox and I'll see what I can do. Baked goods of sufficient quality are also highly motivationial but nothin' sez lovin' like cash.
Yes, Apple keeps a public port of MacOS X to x86, it's the open Source "Darwin".
There are also reliable reports that Apple keeps a feature-complete implementation of MacOS X on x86 internally. Supposedly ensuring that code compiles and runs succesfully on the MacOS x86 implementation is a formal part of Apple's internal QA testing. Does any of this means that Apple is planning to jump to x86 tomorrow? No, but it means they're keeping their options open, all of their options open.
MacOS X evolved from NextStep (capitalize as you wish) which went through 5 platforms in it's lifetime. MacOS pre X went through it's own migration from 68K to PPC code, Apple pulled it off and doubtless learned a lot, among them thinking ahead pays off and not costs a lot.
Indeed NextStep's aborted descendant Rhapsody was originally targetted for both PP & x86, betas were released for both sides. Apple would be a fool to give up that kind of portability and apparently knows that, uses it to their development advantage.
By testing code on platforms as disparate as x86 booting off of BIOS & PPC using Open Firmware Apple is sure it's wares will run nearly anywhere. Big endian, little endian, should be fine. Has been tested to be fine. No lock-in, no platform-specific dead-ends or migration traps, sanity checked every step of the way.
Will Apple ever release MacOS X x86? Probably not. There's no reason for them to. Apple makes it's money elling hardware, the OS is a means to that end. Besides there'd be a steep marketing cost to adopting x86 after all these years. If anything I'd expect Apple to move to something significantly different, I'd hoped Alpha for a long time but with that dead it's anyone's guess, if anything other then PPC in the forseeable future.
Heck, with Motorola spinning off their chip manufacturing Apple might just buy it and take it all in-house. They're a signifcent Motorola customer, already dedicate a good deal of internal R&D to PPC work, have the cash laying around (US$-something billion cash these days.) It wouldn't be an entirely unreasonable thing for Apple to do, as a division or more likely as an invested-in separate company.
(For all of those folks who argue so vociferously that Apple should go x86 or sell MacOS on it's own or that Apple should become a software co. & not a hardware one: Go tell it to Apple's board don't preach at us here.)
What part of this bozo installing his own email client and then downloading his own infected personal email from some non-company server to the company's desktop PC without going through the company systems eluded you?
The corporate email filter may well have been working fine. Indeed it seems that the only thing saving the company from a possible nasty outbreak was that on-access scanner our protagonist is so bitter about.
I'd also guess that after this bozo showing up often enough on the virus scans with mbox's full of infected emails there's going to be a discussion with his supervisors about this sort of activity, possible repercussions, and the phrase "career limiting behavior & attitude".
Get those resumes ready folks.
Uh huh.
So you wanna read your personal email at the office. Fine if your company supports that.
But then you just absolutely positively gotta use only your favorite email client, not the one already installed, not a web portal. The email client now installed by you, presumably licensed to you, that is not owned or supported by IS. The one that makes IS's day that much tougher by throwing one more ingredient into the stew that is the company's desktop computer.
Now on top if it your personal email client reading your personal email is bringing in viruses to the company. Onto that corporate PC logged into the corporate network. And dammit those nasty folks in IS aren't willing to spend their time making exceptions to the virus scanning so your unique-in-the-company personal email client reading your personal, virus-infected email is exempted.
Cry me a river.
Currently version 6 is in beta, probably to be released real-soon-now, and it includes the dovecot IMAP server. This is proving to be a champ of an IMAP server, particularly when integrated with the e-smith automation. It runs great on even low-end hardware, is proving robust yet easy to manage; a real winner.
My suggestion is to download a copy and take a look. Also check out the add-ons that take advantage of the e-smith templating & web management systems. There's even a marvelous set of Lazy Administrators command line tools for making bulk changes to accounts and settings. For a nearly turn-key solution it is quite impressive.
For those looking for support Mitel has a commercial version of e-smith called the Mitel Networks 6000 Managed Application Server which offers more groupware features and other nice things.
That's why mod_gzip is trivial in fairly static sites, becomes serious in very dynamic ones.
On the static sites the files are compressed once and served from the cache. On dynamic ones that doesn't happen as much, there's a lot more to compress.
It's a a web server plug in that compresses pages as they're sent using the standard gzip algorithm. Every major browser supports automagically unzipping the file and reading it as any other http/html.
Upside - smaller files to be sent. Downside is some CPU time spent at each end compressing/decompressing the files. This can be trivial in fairly static sites, become serious in very dynamic ones.
Oh, and your modem throughput will take small hit with the gzipped pages the same as it does with other compressed files. 'Course it's less of a hit then if it had to play compression games itself.