There are quite a few places that let you access Internet anonymously - libraries, corporate networks (as far as employees are concerned), anonymizer.com, prepaid ISPs, prepaid cell phones etc. Some of them are even specially designed to be untracable. And unless I am very mistaken, they have never even been asked by law enforcement to shutdown their access, only to cooperate in tracing a particular person. In this case, I can just ask a cop to come to the same parking lot and then he will have the same access to all the wireless traffic as I do. As an added advantage, the person to be arrested and his incriminating notebook can be both found nearby.
That's really all there is to it:-) Some of the damage can be undone, but it seams a lot of effort to bring in dozens of small things that made KDE look so high-class compared to gnome. You can turn on icon scaling but the ones provided by RedHat will not not scale. Gone are the soft sounds when you do things with windows and menus. You don't even get konsole on the default taskbar and you have to hunt for it in an obscure menu! And no easy way to download mp3 plugins for various KDE media players.
The distribution is also buggy in other ways:
- If you have an NVIDIA card with a DVI cable to the flat panel monitor, you will get nothing but blue static when you run the installer. Since there is no way to run anaconda with VESA or good NVIDIA driver and text based installer is not complete, I ended up undusting my old CRT monitor to get through this stage.
- The provided kernel source is broken and you will not be able to build modules (such as NTFS or the working NVIDIA driver), unless you include rhconfig.h into modsetver.h. You also need to run genksyms by hand because Makefile somehow will not get the compiler name right.
- Redhat can't decide on which encoding to use for a locale. Try to login with russian language if you can. Now half of the programs will come up with a bunch of blank squares where text should be and "man ls" is not a pretty site. That's because they switched to UTF8 encoding but most programs and man-pages-ru still use KOI8 encoding. Basically, logging in with russian language is unusable. Even with English login, man still displays garbage instead of dashes. The only cure is alias man='LANG= man'.
The sad thing is, you will probably swallow those things (if you can use English desktop anyway). Part of it is because of smooth fonts, up-to-date packages (it's no fun to download new versions of gcc etc over dialup) and a subdued look of Bluecurve which is pretty easy on the eyes. Mostly though, it's rpmfind.net, since most of the things just work with RedHat without having to install tons of support packages.
This are the same reasons as to boot into XP though. Any suggestions are welcome:-)
Actually, I would expect that C#/Java will be way slower than FORTRAN right now, but only because current compilers were written with other things in mind (such as Reflection API and platform-independent class files) rather than raw performance.
If I am giving some private lessons in my house/appartment, do I now have to make it handicapt-accessible? I hope that the law is similar to the tax law, that is I only have to spend some fixed portion of my income to comply with it. I would imagine that airlines are loosing money nowadays. While it might not be that expensive to keep a text version of the website, is it really fair to ask them for a form of charity (something they wouldn't to for business reasons) when they are not turning any profit? Also, are there any sanity checks - do I have to make my 3D game accessible?
What's wrong with Java then, once you have a native optimizing compiler? It has very limited aliasing (one array can not point in the middle of another array) and garbage collection will not take much time for typical FORTRAN-style programs (a bunch of arrays without embedded pointers).
As for teaching, it's a waste of time to use any of the structured languages in the first class. First show a student how to use computer as a calculator with the BASIC "?" statement. Then show how INPUT can be used in a several-line program that solves a quadratic equation. Then add a goto to the beginning so that you can solve a bunch of equations without re-running the program. Don't teach loops, subroutines, classes etc until they are actually capable of writting a program where it makes a difference. As it stands now, we are trying to explain dance movements to students who don't know yet how to walk.
Let's take this program:
5 input a 10 ? sqr(a) 15 goto 5
How exactly can it be made clearer by using any of the structered, OO etc programming techniques?
Actually it's not about color text, it's about white background. Did you actually try reading slashdot in dark-green on light-green screen? Palm V has the highest contrast LCD I have ever seen, but you still don't want to read it for more than a few minutes. And by the way, most people occasionally go to parties or meetings and need a vibrating phone.
While I dislike political tricks, it's probably intended to disrupt any bills with the opposite language that might be about to pass and/or give people time to think until it's re-introduced during the next session. By the way, Zoe Lofgren is from the San Jose, home of a big chunk of the slashdot crowd. I trust those of you with US citizenship (still waiting for mine!) know what to do during the next election.
Well, have a look here and tell me how this thing is better? For Palm phones, you can already download thousands of applications and write your own ones. No waiting for the "future SDK". Some of them (Kyocera) are in the same price range. I mean, this is like opening a automotive magazine and seeing a Hyundai on the front page. Sure, some people might decide to buy it, but it's hardly what anyone would want with a free choice. For example, a grayscale LCD really sucks for reading your UNLIMITED data, no matter how good is your fantastic HTML parser.
But why exactly is it news for nerds? There are already scores of Palm phones (Samsung, Treo) that look way better than that. Toshiba also makes a Pocket PC gadget. Did I miss an article about slashdot doing product placements now? I for one, can think about more interesting things to read than a "larger impression piece".
On the other hand, if I am missing something please educate me. Is that thing running Linux (Palm/PPC phones already run Java)? Or is it dirt cheap? There must be some explanation here...
I dunno. Never heard from a slashdoter who wants to be prevented from listening to his/her music at work or in the car. Or who will be upset if radio played more music variety. For most people I know, paying for songs is no more trouble than dropping coins into a parking meter. If they are not buying, it's because RIAA is refusing to sell what they want. Happens all the time in a capitalist society.
How many people here bought a CLIE with MP3? Ok, so a few of you might have installed the OpenMG "jukebox" by mistake, but did anyone actually keep it, buy a white memory stick and actually tolerate the checkout thing? Rather than just drag mp3 files to the memory stick drive?
I bet most users will install DRM and listen to free tracks. But nobody will actually pay for restricted music or record their own collection in this way. Not when they can get a geek coworker to install MusicMatch and show them how to rip to MP3.
Anyway, I don't have anything against someone giving me a free preview or a stream-only Internet radio service. In both of these cases I don't assume I own any songs. If I like something though, I will only buy it if I can listen to it whereever I want. If they don't let me do it, I will just wiggle a voice recorder in front of my speakers and happily trade off lower quality for convinience.
The question is not so simple though:-) Where exactly do I go to buy real music produced by humanely treated artists? Not computer-synthesized/experimental stuff. Some songs where I can hear the words and empasize with them. Since it will not be on the radio, I want to be able to preview a good portion of it before ordering or going to a concert.
It must be a badly broken design then. I can't see how you will have more than 50 users per channel and still be able to talk. You'll have to split it like Yahoo chat does. A good protocol will choose one server to "host" a channel (or maybe one server per country, coast, 1K miles etc) and have everyone joining talk directly to that server(s), instead of having them bother the rest of the network. You could even do peer to peer - have one of the users run a temporary server and automatically migrate it to the next user with the best ping when s\he leaves. This will not add any load, since anyway each user gets all the messages in a channel.
The server network will then just have to synchronize channel information. With 100K users, there will be maybe 10K channels which is a pretty small amount of information. Even then, you can have servers partition this information, let's say based on MD5 of channel name. Then, let's say 10 servers will synchronize channels with given hash range between each other to guard against network failures.
What I am waiting for is an MP3 player with bluetooth that will automatically "discover" its relatives in a subway, office, concert etc and swap songs using predefined criteria. Of course it should also be able to talk to PCs and send songs manually, using bluetooth multicast. This will get RIAA off our backs. Unless they try to harass people in subways, then they'll probably just get mugged.
I am also sure there is no law in Japan against this guy sharing his opinion about the COMPANY with business magazines, top Ph.D. students about to look for industry jobs and so on. He can make a point that this company is known to screw it's employees and is therefore also likely to screw it's business partners. Him being a Nobel winner, people will listen much more to him than say to slashdot posts. If he still works on LEDs in some form, he can also develop impovements to the process and then license them to Nichia for a "reasonable" fee. He can also move to some country that would recognize his rather than company's right to the patent and flood the marker with cheap blue LEDs.
The bottom line is that a corporation is much like a person. I have a legal right to do a lot of nasty things but then eventually nobody will deal with me. On the other hand, if the company shared 0.1% of it's profit from blue LEDs with the inventor, they would right now have to fight off the world's best scientists trying to sign up.
Think about most cases you are using a public wireless network. You are probably in a hurry to check e-mail or anyway do something. Will you really click a banner ad? I don't think people will mind that much but they probably will not pay attention to them either - even less than banners on a regular network.
Try mp3.com. No I don't work for them and a lot of stuff really sucks, but it's worth it to sort through it and find some nice music you don't always hear on the radio. They let you listen to low-rate MP3s for free and charge 4 bucks for an MP3 version of a "CD". Try "The front porch country band" for something that is not all noise.
It seams to me that all we are doing is complaining about Microsoft or looking for pirated copies of Windows when we should be supporting better alternatives. I don't mind the songs on the radio, but I don't want to hear them so many times, or buy an album that I didn't listen to completely. And of course, if I buy a song I want to listen to it where and in any format I choose. Anyone knows other good music services with good independent songs? I think we should demand at least the following:
Must have some regular music, not just "experimental" stuff. My definitition is that I have to be hear the words and empasize with their meaning (not having a gangster, drug, etc lifestyle).
No subscriptions! I want to pay only for what I buy, and buy as much or as little as I want. Even $3 per song would be Ok, if I can listen to it first and see that's exactly what I like.
I should be able to say that I don't want any contact by e-mail or otherwise except to confirm my orders.
If they sell albums, I want to be able to listen to a low-rate version of at least half of the songs first, to make sure I like more than one.
Must support mp3. If ogg or wma is used to avoid license fees, I want to be able to pay whatever I have to per file when I download a payed-for song, so that I don't have to listen to a degraded version on my CLIE. Anyway, no obscure or copy-protected formats.
Must be fair to the artist. If all the songs are free, I guess fair is only mentioning the artist's name. But the artist must be payed a good fraction of what everyone in the company gets as a salary for selling the song.
Who mentioned an mp3 player with bluetooth?? I always wanted an mp3 player that "bluetoothed" to all its cousins in a subway car and sucked all the music that matches your preferences. I want to join the collective. Assimulate me...
... which is saving money for the artists by letting them distributed high-quality samples of their music on a cheap CD(-R,-RW). An average consumer can use the same method to make remixes of their Audio DVDs. As for pirates, they generally don't care that much about top quality, so anyway they won't go and buy an Audio DVD and get an MP3. If someone just released every song as a 32MHz/Mono MP3, sales would go way up because non-pirates will discover and buy what they like and pirates wouldn't bother making higher quality tracks easily available.
Slashdot Mirror
There are quite a few places that let you access Internet anonymously - libraries, corporate networks (as far as employees are concerned), anonymizer.com, prepaid ISPs, prepaid cell phones etc. Some of them are even specially designed to be untracable. And unless I am very mistaken, they have never even been asked by law enforcement to shutdown their access, only to cooperate in tracing a particular person. In this case, I can just ask a cop to come to the same parking lot and then he will have the same access to all the wireless traffic as I do. As an added advantage, the person to be arrested and his incriminating notebook can be both found nearby.
That's really all there is to it :-) Some of the damage can be undone, but it seams a lot of effort to bring in dozens of small things that made KDE look so high-class compared to gnome. You can turn on icon scaling but the ones provided by RedHat will not not scale. Gone are the soft sounds when you do things with windows and menus. You don't even get konsole on the default taskbar and you have to hunt for it in an obscure menu! And no easy way to download mp3 plugins for various KDE media players.
:-)
The distribution is also buggy in other ways:
- If you have an NVIDIA card with a DVI cable to the flat panel monitor, you will get nothing but blue static when you run the installer. Since there is no way to run anaconda with VESA or good NVIDIA driver and text based installer is not complete, I ended up undusting my old CRT monitor to get through this stage.
- The provided kernel source is broken and you will not be able to build modules (such as NTFS or the working NVIDIA driver), unless you include rhconfig.h into modsetver.h. You also need to run genksyms by hand because Makefile somehow will not get the compiler name right.
- Redhat can't decide on which encoding to use for a locale. Try to login with russian language if you can. Now half of the programs will come up with a bunch of blank squares where text should be and "man ls" is not a pretty site. That's because they switched to UTF8 encoding but most programs and man-pages-ru still use KOI8 encoding. Basically, logging in with russian language is unusable. Even with English login, man still displays garbage instead of dashes. The only cure is alias man='LANG= man'.
The sad thing is, you will probably swallow those things (if you can use English desktop anyway). Part of it is because of smooth fonts, up-to-date packages (it's no fun to download new versions of gcc etc over dialup) and a subdued look of Bluecurve which is pretty easy on the eyes. Mostly though, it's rpmfind.net, since most of the things just work with RedHat without having to install tons of support packages.
This are the same reasons as to boot into XP though. Any suggestions are welcome
Actually, I would expect that C#/Java will be way slower than FORTRAN right now, but only because current compilers were written with other things in mind (such as Reflection API and platform-independent class files) rather than raw performance.
If I am giving some private lessons in my house/appartment, do I now have to make it handicapt-accessible? I hope that the law is similar to the tax law, that is I only have to spend some fixed portion of my income to comply with it. I would imagine that airlines are loosing money nowadays. While it might not be that expensive to keep a text version of the website, is it really fair to ask them for a form of charity (something they wouldn't to for business reasons) when they are not turning any profit? Also, are there any sanity checks - do I have to make my 3D game accessible?
What's wrong with Java then, once you have a native optimizing compiler? It has very limited aliasing (one array can not point in the middle of another array) and garbage collection will not take much time for typical FORTRAN-style programs (a bunch of arrays without embedded pointers).
As for teaching, it's a waste of time to use any of the structured languages in the first class. First show a student how to use computer as a calculator with the BASIC "?" statement. Then show how INPUT can be used in a several-line program that solves a quadratic equation. Then add a goto to the beginning so that you can solve a bunch of equations without re-running the program. Don't teach loops, subroutines, classes etc until they are actually capable of writting a program where it makes a difference. As it stands now, we are trying to explain dance movements to students who don't know yet how to walk.
Let's take this program:
5 input a
10 ? sqr(a)
15 goto 5
How exactly can it be made clearer by using any of the structered, OO etc programming techniques?
This way we'll get RMS off our backs (it has all leters of GNU in it) and we don't have to change the way we pronounce it.
Actually it's not about color text, it's about white background. Did you actually try reading slashdot in dark-green on light-green screen? Palm V has the highest contrast LCD I have ever seen, but you still don't want to read it for more than a few minutes. And by the way, most people occasionally go to parties or meetings and need a vibrating phone.
While I dislike political tricks, it's probably intended to disrupt any bills with the opposite language that might be about to pass and/or give people time to think until it's re-introduced during the next session. By the way, Zoe Lofgren is from the San Jose, home of a big chunk of the slashdot crowd. I trust those of you with US citizenship (still waiting for mine!) know what to do during the next election.
Well, have a look here and tell me how this thing is better? For Palm phones, you can already download thousands of applications and write your own ones. No waiting for the "future SDK". Some of them (Kyocera) are in the same price range. I mean, this is like opening a automotive magazine and seeing a Hyundai on the front page. Sure, some people might decide to buy it, but it's hardly what anyone would want with a free choice. For example, a grayscale LCD really sucks for reading your UNLIMITED data, no matter how good is your fantastic HTML parser.
On the other hand, if I am missing something please educate me. Is that thing running Linux (Palm/PPC phones already run Java)? Or is it dirt cheap? There must be some explanation here...
I dunno. Never heard from a slashdoter who wants to be prevented from listening to his/her music at work or in the car. Or who will be upset if radio played more music variety. For most people I know, paying for songs is no more trouble than dropping coins into a parking meter. If they are not buying, it's because RIAA is refusing to sell what they want. Happens all the time in a capitalist society.
I bet most users will install DRM and listen to free tracks. But nobody will actually pay for restricted music or record their own collection in this way. Not when they can get a geek coworker to install MusicMatch and show them how to rip to MP3.
Anyway, I don't have anything against someone giving me a free preview or a stream-only Internet radio service. In both of these cases I don't assume I own any songs. If I like something though, I will only buy it if I can listen to it whereever I want. If they don't let me do it, I will just wiggle a voice recorder in front of my speakers and happily trade off lower quality for convinience.
Obviously you have a single client connect to a server for each channel it joined. I would guess few people join more than 5 channels at once.
The question is not so simple though :-) Where exactly do I go to buy real music produced by humanely treated artists? Not computer-synthesized/experimental stuff. Some songs where I can hear the words and empasize with them. Since it will not be on the radio, I want to be able to preview a good portion of it before ordering or going to a concert.
It must be a badly broken design then. I can't see how you will have more than 50 users per channel and still be able to talk. You'll have to split it like Yahoo chat does. A good protocol will choose one server to "host" a channel (or maybe one server per country, coast, 1K miles etc) and have everyone joining talk directly to that server(s), instead of having them bother the rest of the network. You could even do peer to peer - have one of the users run a temporary server and automatically migrate it to the next user with the best ping when s\he leaves. This will not add any load, since anyway each user gets all the messages in a channel.
The server network will then just have to synchronize channel information. With 100K users, there will be maybe 10K channels which is a pretty small amount of information. Even then, you can have servers partition this information, let's say based on MD5 of channel name. Then, let's say 10 servers will synchronize channels with given hash range between each other to guard against network failures.
What I am waiting for is an MP3 player with bluetooth that will automatically "discover" its relatives in a subway, office, concert etc and swap songs using predefined criteria. Of course it should also be able to talk to PCs and send songs manually, using bluetooth multicast. This will get RIAA off our backs. Unless they try to harass people in subways, then they'll probably just get mugged.
Did you actually try jogging with an IPOD on your arm band? Or dropping it on the floor a couple of times? Not every player has the same function...
How will it prevent virtual machine from interacting with virtual hardware that doesn't happen to enforce any restrictions?
I am also sure there is no law in Japan against this guy sharing his opinion about the COMPANY with business magazines, top Ph.D. students about to look for industry jobs and so on. He can make a point that this company is known to screw it's employees and is therefore also likely to screw it's business partners. Him being a Nobel winner, people will listen much more to him than say to slashdot posts. If he still works on LEDs in some form, he can also develop impovements to the process and then license them to Nichia for a "reasonable" fee. He can also move to some country that would recognize his rather than company's right to the patent and flood the marker with cheap blue LEDs. The bottom line is that a corporation is much like a person. I have a legal right to do a lot of nasty things but then eventually nobody will deal with me. On the other hand, if the company shared 0.1% of it's profit from blue LEDs with the inventor, they would right now have to fight off the world's best scientists trying to sign up.
Think about most cases you are using a public wireless network. You are probably in a hurry to check e-mail or anyway do something. Will you really click a banner ad? I don't think people will mind that much but they probably will not pay attention to them either - even less than banners on a regular network.
I should go to the country where government doesn't use Microsoft word? This is taking monopoly way too far, don't you think?
It seams to me that all we are doing is complaining about Microsoft or looking for pirated copies of Windows when we should be supporting better alternatives. I don't mind the songs on the radio, but I don't want to hear them so many times, or buy an album that I didn't listen to completely. And of course, if I buy a song I want to listen to it where and in any format I choose. Anyone knows other good music services with good independent songs? I think we should demand at least the following:
Who mentioned an mp3 player with bluetooth?? I always wanted an mp3 player that "bluetoothed" to all its cousins in a subway car and sucked all the music that matches your preferences. I want to join the collective. Assimulate me...
... which is saving money for the artists by letting them distributed high-quality samples of their music on a cheap CD(-R,-RW). An average consumer can use the same method to make remixes of their Audio DVDs. As for pirates, they generally don't care that much about top quality, so anyway they won't go and buy an Audio DVD and get an MP3. If someone just released every song as a 32MHz/Mono MP3, sales would go way up because non-pirates will discover and buy what they like and pirates wouldn't bother making higher quality tracks easily available.
And why would any of this legacy software need XP and especially SP3? Sounds like it should work well with Win3.1. Or WINE for that matter.