> For future reference EVERYTHING is a consequence of global warming.
Some things are consequences of Y2K instead. As yet, no causal relationship has been established (in either direction) between Y2K and global warming, so they appear to be separate forces, dueling as it were for control of the universe.
> We know we are special because we have the best Rugby team.
If that's the best you can come up with, it might be best not to admit it. Rugby is, if possible, an even less interesting game than football. Indeed, I think it could go head-to-head with soccer for the title "second most boring sport, after baseball".
> I thought the problem with Mars was the geodynamic thing with the molten core that forms > a magneosphere that would prevent solar winds from blowing away an atmosphere?
There are several problems. Mars does not have enough mass to hold an Earth-like atmosphere, for one thing. The article title is misleading, because it's not really talking about terraforming in the traditional "you can take off your helmet and breathe freely" sense. It's just talking about a measure that would make exploration of the surface, by astronauts in pressure suits, a bit easier.
> I just did a quick test with the 1812 Overture (the Telarc release, if it > matters), and it went from 160MB to 69MB for a 14-minute piece of music. > Admittedly, this is probably one of the best results I have seen with flac,
That's rather better compression than I would ever expect (losslessly) on recorded music. (MIDI is another matter, of course, but that's more like sheet music (err, sort of) than recorded music.)
Perhaps I will have a look at FLAC when I get another round tuit.
> With more *ahem* modern music
Music without counterpoint is like spaghetti without noodles.
(Okay, okay, so I do listen to some modern music, from several different genres. I don't have any metal in my collection though, although I do have two or three rock tracks that are sufficiently hard that I've heard industrial metal that's not as hard. The combination of instruments is wrong for metal, though, and the group in question (Petra) is definitely rock and does a lot of much lighter stuff; only the two or three tracks that I have are really hard.)
Actually, I'd changed it to the analyzer, which is somewhat less annoying... but neither is anything like as bad as what Windows Media Player does, which looks like a bad cross between a poor immitation of Disney's Fantasia and a B-movie special effects concept for a marajuana-smoking scene.
Off is altogether better than any of the above, though. Thank you.
(I should note that the version of WMP I'm referring to is the one that comes with Win98SE and WinMe. I do not recall seeing the version that comes with WinXP, because none of the computers at my house have XP. We have XP on a number of systems at work, but in that context I have rather a better idea what the TCP/IP settings dialog looks like, or for that matter the registry editor, than the media player. We've also got WS2003 on two systems, but for similar reasons I have no idea what its version of Windows Media Player looks like either.)
> So by your logic xmms is teh ultimate suck.
Defaults are allowed (indeed, expected) to suck, because they are (or should be) designed for clueless end users. For the rest of us, there are preferences.
With that said, the xmms prefs are not all that well organized, so that it's not always easy to figure out how to change even simple things about its setup. (I say that as someone who uses Emacs and has customized it extensively, mostly by writing a bunch of custom elisp, so it's not like I expect all apps to have unrealistically simple preference systems. The fact that there are options in the context menus that aren't in the preferences dialog is a good example of how things ought _not_ to be done.)
FWIW, I haven't ever found a pref for turning off the visualizations in Windows Media Player, either.
> Right click on the visualisation, choose 'No Visualisation'.
Oh, hey, yeah. (Actually, it's Visualization Mode Off, but close enough.) I had looked all through the preferences, numerous times, but I never context-clicked on the visualization area itself. That did it. Thanks.
I was thinking about it, but I haven't gotten around to it. I keep waiting for it to become widely supported, and it's happening _very_ gradually. I'll probably get around to trying it out eventually.
Although, a savings of 50% without loss of information seems _very_ unlikely on WAV files. They don't compress well, because they don't have a lot of redundancy in them. (A quick test with a Vivaldi concerto and bzip2 -9 yields less than 18% savings. I realize bzip2 compression is not the best available, but it's good enough that I don't see anything improving on it by an entire order of magnitude without loss of information. 20% space savings, to my way of thinking, isn't worth the computational overhead of running decompression every time I play a track.)
I've often wondered why solar power isn't harnessed to distill seawater. It ought to be a simple matter to hook up a glass-topped insulated-on-the-bottom pyramid or somesuch with an inlet that lets seawater in (and the concentrated result back out for that matter) whenever a larger-than-average wave passes, set it up so the seawater passes over a metal plate, add some mirrors and/or lenses to heat the thing enough to create some steam, and pipe the steam out the top and over to a shaded receptacle with a non-insulated bottom (so it's heatsinked to the ocean basically) for the condensing. With a good design, it ought to be possible to do something like this so that it runs more-or-less unattended and requires only enough energy input to keep the mirrors and lenses aimed correctly as the sun moves across the sky at one cycle per day.
I'm familiar with BMP as a file format, but I can't seem to find a media player with that name in the ports tree. Apparently it is more dead than xmms.
> (Audacious was another), and BMPx is the rewrite of BMP
Those two do seem to be in the ports tree. If xmms stops working or I start having problems with it, maybe I'll try one of them.
Bear in mind, pretty much all I want a media player to do is play music and otherwise stay out of my way. The only format I really need it to support is WAV. (I don't like lossy compression. It sounds bad. I guess I'm picky.) It doesn't even need shuffle or advanced playlist features -- if it can open a directory full of symbolic links and play them in asciibetical order, I'm good. (I have my own Perl/MySQL solution for generating the list and creating the symlinks. My shuffling algorithm is very good, plays songs that I've rated higher more often, spread out evenly through the list, never puts the same genre back-to-back, generates in parallel a special playlist consisting only of tracks with no lyrics (for when I want background music that won't distract me), et cetera.) Basically, all it's gotta do is play music.
The only problem I ever had with xmms was when I tried to get that scrobbler thing to work. I'm pretty sure it was the scrobbler thing that was the problem there, and in any case I was only fooling around with it on a whim. (I don't really expect to get good music recommendations from such a service. My tastes are fairly particular. My current playlist is over 45% baroque, although that percentage might go down a bit when I get my other hard drive hooked back up, which contains most of my a capella music collection; then again, it might not -- there's quite a bit of Bach on there too, including most of the Wendy Carlos boxed set. If there's any such thing as too much Bach music, I'm sure my budget cannot afford to buy that amount of it -- at least, not in good quality recordings.) So anyway, scrobbler is not a sufficiently enticing prospect to lure me to experiment with new music players. What I have works.
> Yeah, I heard those Linux media players suck, too.
Yeah, they suck, because all they do mostly is just play your music and stuff. They don't have all those totally cool features the popular commerical media players have, like connecting the web to look for plugins and updates, nagging you every time you play anything that you need to buy another related product (*cough* Real *cough*), and filling up your screen with stupid "visualizations" of your music. (Okay, so xmms does have the stupid visualizations, although by default it's just an oscilloscope-like thing, nowhere near so annoying as that nonsense Windows Media Player shows you. I'm sure there must be a way to turn the visualizations off altogether. Maybe someday I'll find it.) I mean, if you don't use Windows, then you're really missing out on all those *extra* features that a media player could have, besides just playing media.
But we're getting pretty far off track. The reason businesses don't care about DRM in the operating system is because they have other things to worry about than philosophical issues about user rights. Frankly they're more interested in whether they can lock down the user's desktop to have only the shortcuts they want than they are in whether the user can shift music from one computer to another. What they really want to know is more along the lines of, "Can we buy this product from our regular vendor, does it come with a support contract, and what has my boss read about it in his management magazines?"
The headline doesn't actually say DNS, but it implies it. But the article makes it clear that it's not actually an internet domain that is being offered, but a "Windows Internet Computing Name", which is resolved using a protocol other than DNS (specifically, PNRP, whatever that is).
An uniformed vote isn't better than no vote, but you might consider informing yourself a bit. I don't mean that you should obsessively follow all things political, but generally there are at least some things on the ballot that are pretty easy to figure out. In Ohio today, for instance, there's a state constitutional amendment that would make anti-smoking laws unconstitutional in Ohio. It's pretty easy to figure out the implications of that one.
So inform yourself as much as you do have time to do (within reason), go, and vote on the stuff you do know about. If you see candidates you don't know anything about running for a particular office, just leave that one blank and move on to the next. There's no law that says you have to vote on every item or none of them.
You can also leave an item blank if there's no acceptable candidate running. I had to do that an election or so ago in the Ohio gubernatorial race, when Bob Taft was running against Lee Fisher, neither of whom I could ever make myself vote for, for any office. Fortunately Taft's out now. (I think maybe his maximum term expired or something -- anyway, he didn't run today.)
The smoking gun normally is the evidence that ties the perpetrator to the crime. I don't see how the polar bears are in any way a smoking gun. That would mean they had somehow been used to *cause* global warming.
If that's what the author of this article really means to say, it's one of the most bizzarre harebrained environmentalists theories I've heard yet, right up there with the Gaia Hypothesis. It could hardly be further "out there" if it claimed space aliens are plotting to assasinate Arnold Schwartzeneggar and take control of California.
I suspect what the author actually meant is that the polar bear thing constitutes a dead body, not a smoking gun.
High is relative. There are people living as little as 100 feet above sea level who are not terribly afraid of global warming. Galion (where I currently live) sits at around 1100 feet (give or take a bit), and that is relatively low. Places that are known for being high (e.g., Denver) have got to be rather higher. Many people live at elevations of several thousand feet.
> I live in the Netherlands, and with the water levels rising half our > country is threatened by flooding. I do fear the global warming.
Half your country is threatened by flooding even if the water levels *don't* rise. You don't need global warming to drown you: wouldn't a couple of broken dikes do just about as well?
Indeed, a couple of broken dikes would cause a sudden, unexpected flood, which could cost many lives, because people might not have enough hours to evacuate. Global warming is so gradual, the people have plenty of time to move to higher ground. Indeed, it's so gradual that there are a lot of people who aren't convinced it's even happening.
You've got *lots* of time -- not just hours or days, but weeks, months, possibly years, potentially even decades. That's not just enough time to escape with your life -- it's quite likely enough time to make arrangements to sell your house to somebody who's less afraid of global warming than you are and so get away with not just your life but most of your possessions as well. (There's always somebody less afraid. Your house could be on the lee side of a geyser next door to a toxic waste dump below sea level on a major fault line in the caldera of an active stratovolcano in a country with political unrest, perpetual ethnic violence, and an ongoing military coup, and somebody would buy it.)
Well, *maybe* you've got enough time to do all that. If the dikes don't break.
My point was, how many of the people in the US who made such a big deal over 9/11 and paid less attention to the tsunami know or care about any of that other third-world stuff? Yes, there are people who do pay attention, but the reason the tsunami got less press in the US than 9/11 is because of where it took place, *not* because it was a natural disaster as opposed to a deliberate action. Hurricane Katrina for instance had probably a smaller real impact than 9/11 but got (and continues to get) quite a bit of press, notwithstanding that it was a natural disaster, rather than a deliberate act. In the midwest, you *still* hear about the blizzard of 1978, and it had a *much* smaller real impact than either Katrina or 9/11. But, you know, the impact it did have took place *in* the midwest, so the people there remember and care. I suspect if you ask about the blizzard of '78 in Nevada, you'll probably get blank stares. I know the hip thing now is to say that with television and the internet distance no longer matters, but the truth is that proximity is still a pretty big deal to people.
> There are others, of course, and not everybody will be struck by the same event.
Indeed, I don't recall where I was when I found out about the September 11th attacks. Mostly I just remember the endless media coverage over the subsquent several days. And I don't remember where I was when I found out about the Challenger explosion (well, not in any detail; presumably I was in school, but beyond that I have no idea), though I certainly remember the event, and I remember seeing the video footage on the television that evening. I don't remember what grade I was in though.
I do, however, remember exactly where I was when I found out that Reagan was elected in 1980. I was standing in line, just inside the door of the classroom, when they announced the election results over the school P.A. system. We were getting ready to go out into the hall, I think for a bathroom break. We all cheered, the whole class. We were too young to know what a President was really, and we were certainly too young to know anything about Ronald Regain, but we all knew our parents wanted him to win, so we cheered. We were in two lines (ostensibly parallel, but as you can imagine they were not either of them perfectly straight, much less exactly parallel), and I was in the line on the right, nearer to the wall of the classroom. I was near the middle of the line, approximately, not very close to either the front or the back of the line.
That tsunami happened in the third world. Few people in the first or second[1] world care very much about the third world.
Quick, off the top of your head, what's going on in the Sudan right now? Anything? Is the Darfur conflict still going on, or did it come to an end several months ago?
How long has it been since there was any large-scale ethnic cleansing in Rwanda? Months? Years? Days?
How long has it been since the last time control of the government changed hands in the Central African Republic?
What ever happened with that coup in Thailand? Did that ever get resolved? Peacefully?
The tsunami to which you refer made *big* headlines throughout the US. Not as big as the September 11 attacks, but nonetheless pretty much everyone in the US heard about it. This is a testament to how big a deal it was, because we ordinarily don't hear jack diddly squat about what goes in in the third world.
--- [1] No, the second world has _not_ ceased to exist. The Soviet Union broke up, yes, but culturally and economically the second world is still much as it was, although there is less hostility between Russia and the US.
You stand to lose much more than you stand to gain. Yes, *if* you can convince the right people at the company that you are a benevolent security researcher, then *potentially* you might make a small consultancy fee, but it's not going to be anything like as large as the hurt that the company can put on you if they decide your research is a threat, which with a lot of large companies is more likely and with practically all large companies is an entirely possible outcome. The risk is great.
My advice is to go to a public library that allows anonymous web access, sign up for a free webmail account, and notify them anonymously, with as much detail as you can put together. (Make sure you send it to the company's security team, not just some random person at the company.) If you don't hear back after a few days, try again, and Cc someone a bit higher up the corporate food chain. After some predetermined amount of time, if you haven't heard back from them and they haven't taken visible steps to fix it, disclose it (again, anonymously) to some well-known independent security researchers who will have a better chance of getting the company's ear.
If too ridiculously much time passes and they take no action and do not acknowledge the issue, post it anonymously to the most relevant usenet group and/or a major security mailing list.
Under no circumstances publically admit it was you. It's not worth it. The legal hassles that a large company can throw your way far outweigh any potential benefit.
Last I checked, the leading cause of such things was putting the infant in an adult bed with mom and dad, instead of a crib, and the second leading cause was parents who use drugs (not just illegal drugs, but also alcohol and especially tobacco and caffein). Or are they discounting all those as "not really SIDS, since we know a cause" and looking for additional, less common causes?
I restart when there's a power outage, or when a software update requires my desktop environment to be restarted anyway (e.g., if I have to update something pretty fundamental (like GTK for instance) because an application update that I want requires a new version of it). This can be several months, potentially.
It's annoying to have to close all of my windows, because I lose track of everything I was in the middle of.
Windows I leave open for weeks or months at a time include: * Typically about three Emacs windows: one for Gnus and one for each relevant major project I'm in the middle of. * Several gnome-terminal windows: one regular one for miscellaneous stuff, one root terminal for administrative stuff (such as doing a portupgrade -- that in itself can take a couple of weeks), and usually a couple of others related to projects I'm in the middle of (e.g., if I'm doing a dev project that involves a database, there'll be one for the db console; if I'm doing a web dev project, there'll be one tailing the error log; and so forth). * One Firefox window, with a number of tabs. * OpenOffice.org will almost always have at least one window open. Often this will be my financial spreadsheet, or if nothing else I'll leave the last-used thing open to keep the app in memory so I don't have to wait for it to load next time I need it. * xmms * do my two panels count as windows?
That's just the stuff I practically never close. At any given time I typically have several other windows open, sometimes for up to several days at a time.
> If that "something" is Debian, then remember that next stable > is sheduled for released in December:)
_Which_ December? Surely you don't mean _this coming_ December already?
Really? No way. You're pulling my leg. Sarge just came out last year, so there's no way Etch could be officially released this year. That would be less than two years. My whole understanding of Debian would be disrupted. I can still remember when Sarge was released, for crying out loud.
Maybe now I should consider upgrading my workstation at work to Dapper. After all, I upgraded to Breezy once Dapper was released. Staying a release behind isn't so bad, when releases come out fairly often like with Ubuntu. It's still more up to date than the _latest_ release of something with a long release cycle, but you avoid the worst early adopter problems.
> Because they need to be well-formed (syntactically correct), > XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed > using a standard XML library--unlike HTML, which requires a > relatively complex, lenient, and generally custom parser
> To laymen like me, this sounds rather cryptic. Could any of > you web gurus please elaborate, and/or list other advantages of XHTML?
It means, XHTML is a *lot* easier for programs to deal with than legacy HTML. A function that can read XHTML markup and turn it into a usable data structure is about three lines of Perl code; whereas, a function that can read HTML4.0 markup and turn it into a usable data structure is about three hundred lines of Perl code and much more prone to error.
# "In Windows Vista with Protected Mode, IE7 is the first browser to # "put itself into a sandbox" and run with low privileges."
> It may be the first browser in Windows land but Browsers have been > running in protected mode on Linux for years.
That's not the same.
You've keyed in on the phrase "Protected Mode", but the way I understood his answer, he's claiming that IE actually does what a lot of server apps do, divesting itself right after it starts of any operating privileges it doesn't need and running in a sandbox. If this is true, it's a major step forward for browsers (though, as noted, other types of software have been doing it for a while).
Can someone veryify whether IE7 does in fact do this?
You've got it backwards. They *didn't* make sense then, and they *do* now.
Microsoft also does not understand this and may be reasoning, "early versions of IE for Unix were a flop and therefore a mistake, one we have no wish to repeat".
It is also possible that early versions of IE for Unix were developed at the behest of a small number of large enterprise customers who no longer care, for whatever reason. (Maybe they've replaced their Unix systems with NT or Windows Server. Maybe they no longer think it's important to standardize their whole enterprise on one browser. Maybe they've standardized on another browser. Who knows.) If this is the reason, then the guy answering the questions may not even know it (and indeed may be thinking along the lines of the paragraph above).
There is a third possibility: IE is today more tightly integrated with Windows than it was in 1996, so developing a version for another platform such as Unix would be harder. (It was always harder for the Mac version, but that was done by the MBU, not by the IE team.)
Slashdot Mirror
> For future reference EVERYTHING is a consequence of global warming.
Some things are consequences of Y2K instead. As yet, no causal relationship has been established (in either direction) between Y2K and global warming, so they appear to be separate forces, dueling as it were for control of the universe.
> We know we are special because we have the best Rugby team.
If that's the best you can come up with, it might be best not to admit it. Rugby is, if possible, an even less interesting game than football. Indeed, I think it could go head-to-head with soccer for the title "second most boring sport, after baseball".
What about that manned Mars mission?
> I thought the problem with Mars was the geodynamic thing with the molten core that forms
> a magneosphere that would prevent solar winds from blowing away an atmosphere?
There are several problems. Mars does not have enough mass to hold an Earth-like atmosphere, for one thing. The article title is misleading, because it's not really talking about terraforming in the traditional "you can take off your helmet and breathe freely" sense. It's just talking about a measure that would make exploration of the surface, by astronauts in pressure suits, a bit easier.
> I just did a quick test with the 1812 Overture (the Telarc release, if it
> matters), and it went from 160MB to 69MB for a 14-minute piece of music.
> Admittedly, this is probably one of the best results I have seen with flac,
That's rather better compression than I would ever expect (losslessly) on recorded music. (MIDI is another matter, of course, but that's more like sheet music (err, sort of) than recorded music.)
Perhaps I will have a look at FLAC when I get another round tuit.
> With more *ahem* modern music
Music without counterpoint is like spaghetti without noodles.
(Okay, okay, so I do listen to some modern music, from several different genres. I don't have any metal in my collection though, although I do have two or three rock tracks that are sufficiently hard that I've heard industrial metal that's not as hard. The combination of instruments is wrong for metal, though, and the group in question (Petra) is definitely rock and does a lot of much lighter stuff; only the two or three tracks that I have are really hard.)
> I find oscillocope displays the most annoying.
Actually, I'd changed it to the analyzer, which is somewhat less annoying... but neither is anything like as bad as what Windows Media Player does, which looks like a bad cross between a poor immitation of Disney's Fantasia and a B-movie special effects concept for a marajuana-smoking scene.
Off is altogether better than any of the above, though. Thank you.
(I should note that the version of WMP I'm referring to is the one that comes with Win98SE and WinMe. I do not recall seeing the version that comes with WinXP, because none of the computers at my house have XP. We have XP on a number of systems at work, but in that context I have rather a better idea what the TCP/IP settings dialog looks like, or for that matter the registry editor, than the media player. We've also got WS2003 on two systems, but for similar reasons I have no idea what its version of Windows Media Player looks like either.)
> So by your logic xmms is teh ultimate suck.
Defaults are allowed (indeed, expected) to suck, because they are (or should be) designed for clueless end users. For the rest of us, there are preferences.
With that said, the xmms prefs are not all that well organized, so that it's not always easy to figure out how to change even simple things about its setup. (I say that as someone who uses Emacs and has customized it extensively, mostly by writing a bunch of custom elisp, so it's not like I expect all apps to have unrealistically simple preference systems. The fact that there are options in the context menus that aren't in the preferences dialog is a good example of how things ought _not_ to be done.)
FWIW, I haven't ever found a pref for turning off the visualizations in Windows Media Player, either.
> Right click on the visualisation, choose 'No Visualisation'.
Oh, hey, yeah. (Actually, it's Visualization Mode Off, but close enough.) I had looked all through the preferences, numerous times, but I never context-clicked on the visualization area itself. That did it. Thanks.
> Why not use FLAC, then?
I was thinking about it, but I haven't gotten around to it. I keep waiting for it to become widely supported, and it's happening _very_ gradually. I'll probably get around to trying it out eventually.
Although, a savings of 50% without loss of information seems _very_ unlikely on WAV files. They don't compress well, because they don't have a lot of redundancy in them. (A quick test with a Vivaldi concerto and bzip2 -9 yields less than 18% savings. I realize bzip2 compression is not the best available, but it's good enough that I don't see anything improving on it by an entire order of magnitude without loss of information. 20% space savings, to my way of thinking, isn't worth the computational overhead of running decompression every time I play a track.)
I've often wondered why solar power isn't harnessed to distill seawater. It ought to be a simple matter to hook up a glass-topped insulated-on-the-bottom pyramid or somesuch with an inlet that lets seawater in (and the concentrated result back out for that matter) whenever a larger-than-average wave passes, set it up so the seawater passes over a metal plate, add some mirrors and/or lenses to heat the thing enough to create some steam, and pipe the steam out the top and over to a shaded receptacle with a non-insulated bottom (so it's heatsinked to the ocean basically) for the condensing. With a good design, it ought to be possible to do something like this so that it runs more-or-less unattended and requires only enough energy input to keep the mirrors and lenses aimed correctly as the sun moves across the sky at one cycle per day.
> XMMS is dead. Long dead. For three years.
Oddly, it seems to still work here.
> BMP was the main fork
I'm familiar with BMP as a file format, but I can't seem to find a media player with that name in the ports tree. Apparently it is more dead than xmms.
> (Audacious was another), and BMPx is the rewrite of BMP
Those two do seem to be in the ports tree. If xmms stops working or I start having problems with it, maybe I'll try one of them.
Bear in mind, pretty much all I want a media player to do is play music and otherwise stay out of my way. The only format I really need it to support is WAV. (I don't like lossy compression. It sounds bad. I guess I'm picky.) It doesn't even need shuffle or advanced playlist features -- if it can open a directory full of symbolic links and play them in asciibetical order, I'm good. (I have my own Perl/MySQL solution for generating the list and creating the symlinks. My shuffling algorithm is very good, plays songs that I've rated higher more often, spread out evenly through the list, never puts the same genre back-to-back, generates in parallel a special playlist consisting only of tracks with no lyrics (for when I want background music that won't distract me), et cetera.) Basically, all it's gotta do is play music.
The only problem I ever had with xmms was when I tried to get that scrobbler thing to work. I'm pretty sure it was the scrobbler thing that was the problem there, and in any case I was only fooling around with it on a whim. (I don't really expect to get good music recommendations from such a service. My tastes are fairly particular. My current playlist is over 45% baroque, although that percentage might go down a bit when I get my other hard drive hooked back up, which contains most of my a capella music collection; then again, it might not -- there's quite a bit of Bach on there too, including most of the Wendy Carlos boxed set. If there's any such thing as too much Bach music, I'm sure my budget cannot afford to buy that amount of it -- at least, not in good quality recordings.) So anyway, scrobbler is not a sufficiently enticing prospect to lure me to experiment with new music players. What I have works.
> Yeah, I heard those Linux media players suck, too.
Yeah, they suck, because all they do mostly is just play your music and stuff. They don't have all those totally cool features the popular commerical media players have, like connecting the web to look for plugins and updates, nagging you every time you play anything that you need to buy another related product (*cough* Real *cough*), and filling up your screen with stupid "visualizations" of your music. (Okay, so xmms does have the stupid visualizations, although by default it's just an oscilloscope-like thing, nowhere near so annoying as that nonsense Windows Media Player shows you. I'm sure there must be a way to turn the visualizations off altogether. Maybe someday I'll find it.) I mean, if you don't use Windows, then you're really missing out on all those *extra* features that a media player could have, besides just playing media.
But we're getting pretty far off track. The reason businesses don't care about DRM in the operating system is because they have other things to worry about than philosophical issues about user rights. Frankly they're more interested in whether they can lock down the user's desktop to have only the shortcuts they want than they are in whether the user can shift music from one computer to another. What they really want to know is more along the lines of, "Can we buy this product from our regular vendor, does it come with a support contract, and what has my boss read about it in his management magazines?"
The headline doesn't actually say DNS, but it implies it. But the article makes it clear that it's not actually an internet domain that is being offered, but a "Windows Internet Computing Name", which is resolved using a protocol other than DNS (specifically, PNRP, whatever that is).
An uniformed vote isn't better than no vote, but you might consider informing yourself a bit. I don't mean that you should obsessively follow all things political, but generally there are at least some things on the ballot that are pretty easy to figure out. In Ohio today, for instance, there's a state constitutional amendment that would make anti-smoking laws unconstitutional in Ohio. It's pretty easy to figure out the implications of that one.
So inform yourself as much as you do have time to do (within reason), go, and vote on the stuff you do know about. If you see candidates you don't know anything about running for a particular office, just leave that one blank and move on to the next. There's no law that says you have to vote on every item or none of them.
You can also leave an item blank if there's no acceptable candidate running. I had to do that an election or so ago in the Ohio gubernatorial race, when Bob Taft was running against Lee Fisher, neither of whom I could ever make myself vote for, for any office. Fortunately Taft's out now. (I think maybe his maximum term expired or something -- anyway, he didn't run today.)
The smoking gun normally is the evidence that ties the perpetrator to the crime. I don't see how the polar bears are in any way a smoking gun. That would mean they had somehow been used to *cause* global warming.
If that's what the author of this article really means to say, it's one of the most bizzarre harebrained environmentalists theories I've heard yet, right up there with the Gaia Hypothesis. It could hardly be further "out there" if it claimed space aliens are plotting to assasinate Arnold Schwartzeneggar and take control of California.
I suspect what the author actually meant is that the polar bear thing constitutes a dead body, not a smoking gun.
> You must live somewhere high.
High is relative. There are people living as little as 100 feet above sea level who are not terribly afraid of global warming. Galion (where I currently live) sits at around 1100 feet (give or take a bit), and that is relatively low. Places that are known for being high (e.g., Denver) have got to be rather higher. Many people live at elevations of several thousand feet.
> I live in the Netherlands, and with the water levels rising half our
> country is threatened by flooding. I do fear the global warming.
Half your country is threatened by flooding even if the water levels *don't* rise. You don't need global warming to drown you: wouldn't a couple of broken dikes do just about as well?
Indeed, a couple of broken dikes would cause a sudden, unexpected flood, which could cost many lives, because people might not have enough hours to evacuate. Global warming is so gradual, the people have plenty of time to move to higher ground. Indeed, it's so gradual that there are a lot of people who aren't convinced it's even happening.
You've got *lots* of time -- not just hours or days, but weeks, months, possibly years, potentially even decades. That's not just enough time to escape with your life -- it's quite likely enough time to make arrangements to sell your house to somebody who's less afraid of global warming than you are and so get away with not just your life but most of your possessions as well. (There's always somebody less afraid. Your house could be on the lee side of a geyser next door to a toxic waste dump below sea level on a major fault line in the caldera of an active stratovolcano in a country with political unrest, perpetual ethnic violence, and an ongoing military coup, and somebody would buy it.)
Well, *maybe* you've got enough time to do all that. If the dikes don't break.
My point was, how many of the people in the US who made such a big deal over 9/11 and paid less attention to the tsunami know or care about any of that other third-world stuff? Yes, there are people who do pay attention, but the reason the tsunami got less press in the US than 9/11 is because of where it took place, *not* because it was a natural disaster as opposed to a deliberate action. Hurricane Katrina for instance had probably a smaller real impact than 9/11 but got (and continues to get) quite a bit of press, notwithstanding that it was a natural disaster, rather than a deliberate act. In the midwest, you *still* hear about the blizzard of 1978, and it had a *much* smaller real impact than either Katrina or 9/11. But, you know, the impact it did have took place *in* the midwest, so the people there remember and care. I suspect if you ask about the blizzard of '78 in Nevada, you'll probably get blank stares. I know the hip thing now is to say that with television and the internet distance no longer matters, but the truth is that proximity is still a pretty big deal to people.
> There are others, of course, and not everybody will be struck by the same event.
Indeed, I don't recall where I was when I found out about the September 11th attacks. Mostly I just remember the endless media coverage over the subsquent several days. And I don't remember where I was when I found out about the Challenger explosion (well, not in any detail; presumably I was in school, but beyond that I have no idea), though I certainly remember the event, and I remember seeing the video footage on the television that evening. I don't remember what grade I was in though.
I do, however, remember exactly where I was when I found out that Reagan was elected in 1980. I was standing in line, just inside the door of the classroom, when they announced the election results over the school P.A. system. We were getting ready to go out into the hall, I think for a bathroom break. We all cheered, the whole class. We were too young to know what a President was really, and we were certainly too young to know anything about Ronald Regain, but we all knew our parents wanted him to win, so we cheered. We were in two lines (ostensibly parallel, but as you can imagine they were not either of them perfectly straight, much less exactly parallel), and I was in the line on the right, nearer to the wall of the classroom. I was near the middle of the line, approximately, not very close to either the front or the back of the line.
It's funny, the things you remember.
That tsunami happened in the third world. Few people in the first or second[1] world care very much about the third world.
Quick, off the top of your head, what's going on in the Sudan right now? Anything? Is the Darfur conflict still going on, or did it come to an end several months ago?
How long has it been since there was any large-scale ethnic cleansing in Rwanda? Months? Years? Days?
How long has it been since the last time control of the government changed hands in the Central African Republic?
What ever happened with that coup in Thailand? Did that ever get resolved? Peacefully?
The tsunami to which you refer made *big* headlines throughout the US. Not as big as the September 11 attacks, but nonetheless pretty much everyone in the US heard about it. This is a testament to how big a deal it was, because we ordinarily don't hear jack diddly squat about what goes in in the third world.
---
[1] No, the second world has _not_ ceased to exist. The Soviet Union broke up, yes, but culturally and economically the second world is still much as it was, although there is less hostility between Russia and the US.
You stand to lose much more than you stand to gain. Yes, *if* you can convince the right people at the company that you are a benevolent security researcher, then *potentially* you might make a small consultancy fee, but it's not going to be anything like as large as the hurt that the company can put on you if they decide your research is a threat, which with a lot of large companies is more likely and with practically all large companies is an entirely possible outcome. The risk is great.
My advice is to go to a public library that allows anonymous web access, sign up for a free webmail account, and notify them anonymously, with as much detail as you can put together. (Make sure you send it to the company's security team, not just some random person at the company.) If you don't hear back after a few days, try again, and Cc someone a bit higher up the corporate food chain. After some predetermined amount of time, if you haven't heard back from them and they haven't taken visible steps to fix it, disclose it (again, anonymously) to some well-known independent security researchers who will have a better chance of getting the company's ear.
If too ridiculously much time passes and they take no action and do not acknowledge the issue, post it anonymously to the most relevant usenet group and/or a major security mailing list.
Under no circumstances publically admit it was you. It's not worth it. The legal hassles that a large company can throw your way far outweigh any potential benefit.
Last I checked, the leading cause of such things was putting the infant in an adult bed with mom and dad, instead of a crib, and the second leading cause was parents who use drugs (not just illegal drugs, but also alcohol and especially tobacco and caffein). Or are they discounting all those as "not really SIDS, since we know a cause" and looking for additional, less common causes?
I restart when there's a power outage, or when a software update requires my desktop environment to be restarted anyway (e.g., if I have to update something pretty fundamental (like GTK for instance) because an application update that I want requires a new version of it). This can be several months, potentially.
It's annoying to have to close all of my windows, because I lose track of everything I was in the middle of.
Windows I leave open for weeks or months at a time include:
* Typically about three Emacs windows: one for Gnus and one for each relevant major project I'm in the middle of.
* Several gnome-terminal windows: one regular one for miscellaneous stuff, one root terminal for administrative stuff (such as doing a portupgrade -- that in itself can take a couple of weeks), and usually a couple of others related to projects I'm in the middle of (e.g., if I'm doing a dev project that involves a database, there'll be one for the db console; if I'm doing a web dev project, there'll be one tailing the error log; and so forth).
* One Firefox window, with a number of tabs.
* OpenOffice.org will almost always have at least one window open. Often this will be my financial spreadsheet, or if nothing else I'll leave the last-used thing open to keep the app in memory so I don't have to wait for it to load next time I need it.
* xmms
* do my two panels count as windows?
That's just the stuff I practically never close. At any given time I typically have several other windows open, sometimes for up to several days at a time.
> If that "something" is Debian, then remember that next stable :)
> is sheduled for released in December
_Which_ December? Surely you don't mean _this coming_ December already?
Really? No way. You're pulling my leg. Sarge just came out last year, so there's no way Etch could be officially released this year. That would be less than two years. My whole understanding of Debian would be disrupted. I can still remember when Sarge was released, for crying out loud.
Maybe now I should consider upgrading my workstation at work to Dapper. After all, I upgraded to Breezy once Dapper was released. Staying a release behind isn't so bad, when releases come out fairly often like with Ubuntu. It's still more up to date than the _latest_ release of something with a long release cycle, but you avoid the worst early adopter problems.
> Because they need to be well-formed (syntactically correct),
> XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed
> using a standard XML library--unlike HTML, which requires a
> relatively complex, lenient, and generally custom parser
> To laymen like me, this sounds rather cryptic. Could any of
> you web gurus please elaborate, and/or list other advantages of XHTML?
It means, XHTML is a *lot* easier for programs to deal with than legacy HTML. A function that can read XHTML markup and turn it into a usable data structure is about three lines of Perl code; whereas, a function that can read HTML4.0 markup and turn it into a usable data structure is about three hundred lines of Perl code and much more prone to error.
# "In Windows Vista with Protected Mode, IE7 is the first browser to
# "put itself into a sandbox" and run with low privileges."
> It may be the first browser in Windows land but Browsers have been
> running in protected mode on Linux for years.
That's not the same.
You've keyed in on the phrase "Protected Mode", but the way I understood his answer, he's claiming that IE actually does what a lot of server apps do, divesting itself right after it starts of any operating privileges it doesn't need and running in a sandbox. If this is true, it's a major step forward for browsers (though, as noted, other types of software have been doing it for a while).
Can someone veryify whether IE7 does in fact do this?
> Why did they make sense then and not now?
You've got it backwards. They *didn't* make sense then, and they *do* now.
Microsoft also does not understand this and may be reasoning, "early versions of IE for Unix were a flop and therefore a mistake, one we have no wish to repeat".
It is also possible that early versions of IE for Unix were developed at the behest of a small number of large enterprise customers who no longer care, for whatever reason. (Maybe they've replaced their Unix systems with NT or Windows Server. Maybe they no longer think it's important to standardize their whole enterprise on one browser. Maybe they've standardized on another browser. Who knows.) If this is the reason, then the guy answering the questions may not even know it (and indeed may be thinking along the lines of the paragraph above).
There is a third possibility: IE is today more tightly integrated with Windows than it was in 1996, so developing a version for another platform such as Unix would be harder. (It was always harder for the Mac version, but that was done by the MBU, not by the IE team.)