> IIS Free ? Last time I looked you have to pay big money if you want to have > more than 50 (IIRC) simultaneous concurrent user-connections from your >.asp(x) app to a MSSQL server.
The price of MS SQL Server CALs is not really germaine to this discussion. I wouldn't call IIS free ("sunk cost", *maybe*, but not free), but the price of another product by the same vendor is neither here nor there.
> > If you exorcise Nautilus from your Gnome session, memory usage goes down by more than half.''
> So how do I do that, in a clean way?
I don't know whether the Gnome people would officially consider this "clean" or not, but I just go into the control center to Advanced, Sessions, select the Current Session tab, select the thing I don't want, click the Remove button, Apply.
> By the way, the browser is what uses most memory on my system.
I wasn't counting the browser as part of Gnome, since I use a mozilla.org browser that I obtain separately from Gnome. I also wasn't counting the X server as part of Gnome. Those things do use RAM too, of course, but it was Gnome's memory usage we were discussing in this thread. Nautilus uses a significant amount of the RAM that *Gnome* uses; this may or may not be a significant amount of the total RAM use on your system, depending on your usage pattern.
For me it's probably not; I have this habbit of leaving a number of applications open all the time (at least three windows each of Emacs, OpenOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, and Deer Park, plus about eight gnome-terminal windows, and assorted other apps with fewer windows each... yeah, so this absolutely dwarfs what I save by not using Nautlus, but like you I've been doing all my file management from the command line since I discovered tab completion, plus I go weeks between minimizing enough windows to see the wallpaper, so having Nautilus running is pretty pointless). Oh, and my window manager probably uses more RAM than the one that Gnome ships by default, since I use sawfish instead of metacity, because of assorted minor features it has that I became addicted to back when sawfish *was* the default window manager in Gnome (Gnome was better then... the panel had more features then too... although the newer gnome-terminal is better. Actually, besides sawfish, which works fine with Gnome2, it's really only the panel from 1.4 that I want back.)
Why would this occasion a license change? It's a *port*, as in, the code will now run on more systems than it used to. Licensing doesn't have anything to do with that; it's still fundamentally the same codebase, so I'm sure the code will still be covered by the same licensing terms it already was released under.
To create a BSD-licensed version, someone would have to *clone* it, which is different from porting.
> What I don't understand about Gnome is how it can have so few features and > take up so much memory.
This is *mostly* Nautilus. If you exorcise Nautilus from your Gnome session, memory usage goes down by more than half. It's a tradeoff, though, because Nautilus is what draws your wallpaper, so your background will be blank. Still, on a low-memory system it can be worth it. (I'm assuming here that you don't have any need for Nautilus as a graphical file manager, because the whole idea of graphical file managers is exceedingly inane, but if you are one of those people who like to have such a thing, then by all means, keep it around.)
The other thing that can make Gnome take up a lot of memory is the large number of libraries it depends on. Gnome depends on _approximately_ every library on your system, give or take half a dozen.
> Don't you mean "more creative than we are"? "Us" is an object pronoun, dude.
Conventionally. However, case inflections have been, over the course of the last several hundred years, in the process of gradually dropping out of the English language. The case inflection system has already been for some time (since before Gutenberg, really) all but gone from the language for nouns, leaving possessives as a last remnant proving that nouns were once inflected for case. Second-person personal pronouns have also already lost their inflective distinction for subjective versus objective case. (When was the last time you used the word "ye" for any reason _other_ than deliberately sounding archaic? The possessive form is again the still-common exception.)
The reason this is happening is that the language has rigidified its word order systems to the point where case can be determined based on that alone; it is obvious for instance that in the sentence, "It's me", the word "me" is functioning as the predicate nominative and so is in the nominative (or subjective) case, even if the form is one that used to always indicate the objective case, once upon a time. If "me" were *really* in the objective case, in terms of its function, there would be a transitive verb or preposition preceding it; there is not, so it is functioning in the subjective case. Every native speaker of the English language understands this intuitively, whether or not he's had any formal introduction to the concept of grammatical case, because the word order carries the meaning.
English, for as long as it has been English, has always been classified as an SVO language, in that that was the most common order, but this used to be rather more flexible and has rigidified considerably over the last several centuries. In another couple of centuries (give or take a bit; the exact timeframe is impossible to predict), the subjective/objective distinction will be carried *entirely* by word order, and the remaining case forms will consolidate or become synonymous, possibly excepting the possessive forms.
The days are pretty well gone when we can say things like "These things understandest thou?" and be easily understood by any random person whose first language is English. If you modernise the forms that becomes "These things you understand?" or possibly "These things you do understand?", but in order to make that comprehensibly valid English, the word order needs to be corrected: "Do you understand these things?" The pronoun here is theoretically objective (and plural!), or used to be, but we now consider the sentence correct, because the word order is correct; the other sentence, with the incorrect word order, is no longer valid in modern English.
> No, you should design for standards, and then sit back and relax. Let it > look suboptimal in non-compliant browsers; it'll give them incentive to > upgrade.
I take an approach that's sort of a compromise between these positions. First, I design the site using documentation that's based on standards (e.g., the XHTML and CSS documentation at w3schools.com is mostly pretty decent). Then I validate it at validator.w3.org. Then I test it in several web browsers and make sure it adheres to the following:
First, the site should look basically the way I intended it to look in recent versions of Gecko at resolutions from 640x480 through 1600x1200, at 24 bits per pixel. This generally is not a problem.
Second, the site should look reasonable (not necessarily exactly as intended) in the latest version of every major browser that I have at my disposal, at resolutions from 320x200 through 2560x2048, at 16 bits per pixel and higher. (I try to keep a copy of the latest at my disposal for this testing, even though it's usually the hardest one to please, because it's so widely deployed.) The definition of "reasonable" fluxes a little depending on how important aesthetics are to the site and how important the site is to me. Images are allowed to be ugly at 16bpp.
The site must be legible and navigable (i.e., the text can be read and the links can be followed) in all browsers, including really old and crufty and horrible ones, even at very low resolutions, and in 16-color mode (4bpp), and in 256-shade greyscale. It's allowed to look suboptimal, even very suboptimal, but it should be usable. This usually is not a problem with well-designed sites.
I do not attempt to support 1-bit color. Sorry, not going there.
Oh, is that all? And people are *upset*? I'd have thought anything that takes money *away* from SCO would be widely viewed on slashdot as a Good Thing. Now, if MySQL had *paid* SCO money for something, then that would be Bad.
> The problem with Mozilla is that they're so swamped with bugs that some > developers at least seem to have stopped caring about *any* bugs at all > whatsoever anymore - to the point where they will not only not fix them, > but actively try to prevent others from fixing them. Give bug 18574 a > look some time, for example...
If this bug is typical of the sort of thing you're complaining about, go soak your head. If it were me, I'd have closed that bug as NOTABUG aeons ago. There are an infinite number of bizarroid image formats out there that, for one reason or another (in some cases good reasons, in some cases not, but that is neither here nor there) have not become important or common on the web. MNG is an ideal example and practically a case study in irrelevancy; it has been languishing in irrelevancy for years and shows absolutely ZERO signs of EVER breaking out of that and gaining any significant mindshare or import. The component owner is absolutely right to exclude this sort of nonsense. Mozilla is *not* primarily an image viewer; it is primarily a web browser, so the image formats it should support are ones that are *used on the web*, not every single obscure image format someone thinks is cool. (And that's quite aside from the fact that the main selling point of MNG is that it supports animation, something right-thinking people have been wanting to rid the web of since some misguided cretinous loser decided to introduce looping animated GIFs in Netscape 2.0; the only thing worse than animations on the web was the <blink> tag, may it rest in pieces.)
You speak of preventing bugs from being fixed, but if this is what you're talking about, you should speak of preventing irrelevant features that aren't even vaguely web-related from being needlessly introduced into a web browser.
> Seeing a nice yellow "secure" address bar is reassuring for most people
Err, no. Yellow is *not* a reassuring color. Blue is a reassuring color. Green, maybe. Yellow is usually associated with warnings and danger. And of course there's the obvious truism that most computer users don't know what SSL is or what the implications are.
No, actually, I only know one hard-core gamer. Most of the people I know who own Doom only own half a dozen PC games or so. The *one* person I know who owned Myst also had at the time, I think, Freecell and Encarta.
A lot of people here are saying non-gamers bought Myst, but this must be non-gamers in some demographic I've never encountered. I know more non-gamers who own copies of the PC version of Wheel of Fortune than ones who have Myst. I know more non-gamers who own copies of Reader Rabbit than ones who have Myst.
And I still think the Mario series has "most popular computer game series of all time" totally sewn up.
> They have "Refill only with Kikkoman" printed on them. I've been tempted > every time I see those to sneak a few drops of La Choy soy sauce into one > of them
Refilling Kikkoman bottles with La Choy would be like refilling Dr. Pepper bottles with flat off-brand diet cola. Kikkoman makes soy sauce, as in, sauce made from soy beans, which has a distinctive soy flavour. La Choy makes colored saltwater, which does not taste anything like soy sauce.
> It's interesteding that everyone remembers the mind control parasites > from "Star Trek II", but no one has mentioned the Goa'uld yet.
There are a handful of reasons for this.
Probably the most important reason is that STII:TWOK is almost certainly the best of all the Star Trek movies (or, at least, all the ones that have Shatner in them). Not that it's perfect or anything, but it's actually quite a solid movie in many respects. Additionally, scene with the critter in question is easily one of the three most famous scenes in the movie (the other two probably being when Kirk yells "Kahn!" and the scene at the end containing the line "His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking").
A second reason is that Star Trek is, in sci-fi, the *most* legendary franchise in terms of the abject fanaticism of such large numbers of fans. The reason for this, in my opinion, probably stems largely from the timing of its introduction -- when Star Trek debuted, the *best* television sci-fi up to that point was probably Doctor Who, which if you've ever seen it, is actually in a number of ways rather less well executed than Star Trek. (Note to Dr. Who fans: I don't want to get into a flamewar about this, and note that I said "in a number of ways", not "in all ways", and also please note that I called Dr. Who the best televised sci-fi up to that time.) When you look at sci-fi television from that era, there was a lot of utterly bogus zero-budget poorly-written, poorly-acted virtually-plotless stuff with few developed characters, a lot of real junk predicated on the assumption that one interesting sci-fi concept (e.g., Martians' blowing up the Earth to make room in its former orbit for Mars) was in and of itself enough interesting material for an entire series. (Yes, that was a real example, and Leonard Nimoy played one of the Martians. It was called, I kid you not, Zombies of the Stratosphere.) Sci-fi fans were *starved* for decent sci-fi television, and Star Trek stepped into that void. So it's got a rather large and devoted following. No other sci-fi series gets more people wearing ridiculous costumes, makeup, fake ears, and forehead ridges, spending hours reading starship technical manuals, and so on and so forth, than Star Trek.
> Killing the host produces stronger evolutionary pressure in the host > species to find defenses.
The hosts here are insects. Insects' cheif defense against anything is to overwhelm the odds with sheer numbers. That doesn't really bother the parasite too much.
> A mellower strategy of letting the host live after releasing the parasite > will reduce the selection pressure against it. Aids is sometimes considered > an "immature" virus because of this.
HIV infects human hosts; this thing parasitizes grasshoppers. There are some differences in terms of the defense mechanisms of the host. Humans, for instance, have a rather more sophisticated immune system (which HIV attacks, incidentally, and disables when the virus succeeds). Humans have a much lower birth rate than grasshoppers, live longer, and value individual lives more, all of which goes together to make for rather different considerations when you're looking at us as a host.
> Why is it that scientists are quick to publish results they don't understand?
It has to do with the prestige of being published.
> I'd much rather read about this in six months or a year when they have > more details and practical uses.
The thing in question has to do with brain function -- of simple organisms, granted, but brain function nonetheless. They're not going to fully understand it in six months to a year, much less have practical uses. The field of study is over fifty years old and we know, to a first approximation, nothing. Just the fact that this is *possible* is significant, because it has implications that would potentially allow some flawed models of brain function to be discarded.
But if you're looking for a technical reference guide that explains how and why brains work the way they do at a level that is adequately detailed for developing an understanding of exactly how it is that mind control can work, you're going to have to wait more than six months to a year, I think. You might as well ask Charles Babbage for production-ready Network Attached Storage.
I know Interactive Fiction games have gotten a *lot* easier over the decades. I mean, just compare the hit games from back then, such as Zork, Acheton, to more recent favorites, such as Photopia. Zork was *HARD*. Photopia is interesting, but it barely requires cognitive brain function to figure out the puzzles (err, what pass for puzzles). And the parsers are so much better in modern games... occasionally in a poorly-designed modern game you end up with a guess-the-verb issue, but you almost NEVER end up having to guess at the syntax or preposition words, and with nouns these days you can generally use any word the game uses to describe the thing. With a modern Inform game, you can almost forget you're talking to a parser.
> Most copies sold. Not so hard to come up with...
Did Myst really sell more copies than, say, Doom 2? I'd find that a fairly surprising statistic, and if it's true, Id must have suffered a terrible piracy rate, because I'm pretty sure there are about fifty times as many copies of the Doom series floating around, as compared to Myst.
(Not that I'm a Doom fan; I actually loathe the whole FPS genre. But that's another matter.)
> Myst, at its peak, was far more popular than Doom at its peak.
I have a pretty hard time believing that. Every gamer and 5% of the rest of the PC-owning world has a copy of at least one of the Doom games. I only ever actually met (IRL) *one* person who owned a copy of Myst.
But, again, how do are we defining "more popular"? More people played it? They spent more hours on it? They liked it better? They talked about it more? What exactly are we talking about here? You're making an assertion, but it's vague, and you neither explain it nor back it up with any reasoning or evidence.
> Until it was recently overtaken by The Sims, the Myst series was the > most popular computer game series of all time.
I'm really struggling with this one, in terms of definitions. I'm not sure exactly how the word "popular", for instance, could be defined to make this true. Popular in terms of how many people have played it? No, that would be Solitaire/Freecell, hands down. Popular in terms of how many hours people have wasted on it? The Mario series probably has that sewn up, if you count it as a "computer" game; if you restrict it to just the PC platform, then we're probably back at Solitaire/Freecell again, but Myst would be _way_ down the list, far below Doom. Popular in terms of what percentage of the people who played it rave about how great it was? I'm not sure what gets that honor, but I'm fairly certain Myst isn't it. The Enchanter series maybe. Popular in terms of money spent on it? That's gotta be one of those MMORPGs you pay a monthly subscription fee for, probably. I can't think of any way to measure popularity that could put Myst on top.
> Any time a post has "Plenty of Pictures," it's usually bound to get > slashdotted. This is probably because when readers see the words "Plenty > of Pictures," they think, "Hey, even if I don't RTFA, I can STFP and > infer what TFA is about.
Your observation is correct, but the reason you speculate is probably not. The primary reason sites with plent of pictures get slashdotted easily is because pictures consume quite a lot more bandwidth than text.
> I went to search.cpan.org and did a search for Mork.
Yeah, but isn't using the CPAN almost cheating? I mean, there's code on there for practically everything.
> It should be left to guru perl coders making $500,000/yr or more to do > fancy things like convert timestamps to dates.
Man, I've gotta ask for a raise. Wait till my boss finds out I know how to use the DateTime module. Can I also get an annual bonus if I know how to use Net::Server and DBI?
> I suspect it would be very hard to thwarte a computer forensics expert
An encrypted filesystem would presumably make their job rather harder.
Of course, that only works for ex-post-facto forensics. If someone plants a hidden camera where it can see your screen and keyboard for a week, your encrypted filesystem has accomplised, to a first approximation, nothing.
Of course, the *best* way to avoid having computer forensics experts crack your computer is to just be innocuous, i.e., just don't do anything that will make computer forensics experts want to investigate your computer. Granted, not everyone can do this; if, for instance, you are an executive for a major international corporation, you should probably assume that at some point someone will attempt to investigate you and/or your computers -- if not law enforcement, then the competition or a freelance information seller. So you do want to think at least briefly about the question, "Who would want to break into my computer, and what will it cost me if they succeed?" In my case I've concluded, at least for the time being, "Maybe some neighborhood kid fooling around" and "Not much if I have offsite backups." YMMV.
Umm, if they want to require convicted sex offenders to use only approved software on their computers, I guess I can live with that. (They let them have access to the _internet_ while on parole? Convicted sex offenders? Isn't that, like, lenient *enough*? I think that's really fairly generous, to allow them that, under the circumstances, considering that there really aren't adequate resources to monitor it very closely at all.)
But as far as regular, non-convicted type people, I don't think it's reasonable to consider using an alternative browser to be "making trouble" for potential investigators. I mean, if having the web browser cache in a different place makes investigation hard, what would happen if a suspect had, I don't know, a Mac, for crying out loud? If the investigation doesn't warrant getting somebody who knows enough to find the browser cache in a slightly atypical place, is it even worth investigating the computer at all?
I mean, what would happen if the suspect had an MSIE icon on the desktop, and used it for normal stuff, but for subversive or illegal activities used something else, something with *no* shortcut icon on the desktop or in the start menu? You know, like a copy of Netscape 4 tucked away in a hidden directory underneath C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM16\ someplace?
C'mon, either *investigate* the computer, or else don't, but just casually going through the single most obvious place, does that really count as an investigation? That's the electronic equivalent of getting a warrant, looking for stolen merchandise on the kitchen table and in the bedroom closet, and ignoring the attic and basement. What kind of investigator operates that way? Seriously, act like your job might actually matter and be worth doing, or something.
Yeah. The conversation goes something like this...
Microsoft: We want to build a platform that is totally trustworthy. So I guess the question is, what should be trusted? Security Experts: That's actually a good, albeit complicated, question... Microsoft: Whom and what should users trust? Whom and what *do* they trust? Security Experts: Hmmmm... Microsoft: Lesse... First off, they're going to trust Microsoft, obviously... Security Experts: Err, good luck with that. Microsoft:... and our business partners,... Security Experts: Oh, dear... Microsoft:... and the government, and major corporations,... Security Experts: We're not sure we like where this is going. Microsoft: Hush. We've got it all figured out now.
Slashdot Mirror
> IIS Free ? Last time I looked you have to pay big money if you want to have .asp(x) app to a MSSQL server.
> more than 50 (IIRC) simultaneous concurrent user-connections from your
>
The price of MS SQL Server CALs is not really germaine to this discussion. I wouldn't call IIS free ("sunk cost", *maybe*, but not free), but the price of another product by the same vendor is neither here nor there.
> 2006 will see [stuff] ... the catalyst will be the release of
> Microsoft Windows Vista
Umm, does anyone at this point really believe Vista is going to make it out in 2006?
> > If you exorcise Nautilus from your Gnome session, memory usage goes down by more than half.''
> So how do I do that, in a clean way?
I don't know whether the Gnome people would officially consider this "clean" or not, but I just go into the control center to Advanced, Sessions, select the Current Session tab, select the thing I don't want, click the Remove button, Apply.
> By the way, the browser is what uses most memory on my system.
I wasn't counting the browser as part of Gnome, since I use a mozilla.org browser that I obtain separately from Gnome. I also wasn't counting the X server as part of Gnome. Those things do use RAM too, of course, but it was Gnome's memory usage we were discussing in this thread. Nautilus uses a significant amount of the RAM that *Gnome* uses; this may or may not be a significant amount of the total RAM use on your system, depending on your usage pattern.
For me it's probably not; I have this habbit of leaving a number of applications open all the time (at least three windows each of Emacs, OpenOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, and Deer Park, plus about eight gnome-terminal windows, and assorted other apps with fewer windows each... yeah, so this absolutely dwarfs what I save by not using Nautlus, but like you I've been doing all my file management from the command line since I discovered tab completion, plus I go weeks between minimizing enough windows to see the wallpaper, so having Nautilus running is pretty pointless). Oh, and my window manager probably uses more RAM than the one that Gnome ships by default, since I use sawfish instead of metacity, because of assorted minor features it has that I became addicted to back when sawfish *was* the default window manager in Gnome (Gnome was better then... the panel had more features then too... although the newer gnome-terminal is better. Actually, besides sawfish, which works fine with Gnome2, it's really only the panel from 1.4 that I want back.)
Why would this occasion a license change? It's a *port*, as in, the code will now run on more systems than it used to. Licensing doesn't have anything to do with that; it's still fundamentally the same codebase, so I'm sure the code will still be covered by the same licensing terms it already was released under.
To create a BSD-licensed version, someone would have to *clone* it, which is different from porting.
> What I don't understand about Gnome is how it can have so few features and
> take up so much memory.
This is *mostly* Nautilus. If you exorcise Nautilus from your Gnome session, memory usage goes down by more than half. It's a tradeoff, though, because Nautilus is what draws your wallpaper, so your background will be blank. Still, on a low-memory system it can be worth it. (I'm assuming here that you don't have any need for Nautilus as a graphical file manager, because the whole idea of graphical file managers is exceedingly inane, but if you are one of those people who like to have such a thing, then by all means, keep it around.)
The other thing that can make Gnome take up a lot of memory is the large number of libraries it depends on. Gnome depends on _approximately_ every library on your system, give or take half a dozen.
> Don't you mean "more creative than we are"? "Us" is an object pronoun, dude.
Conventionally. However, case inflections have been, over the course of the last several hundred years, in the process of gradually dropping out of the English language. The case inflection system has already been for some time (since before Gutenberg, really) all but gone from the language for nouns, leaving possessives as a last remnant proving that nouns were once inflected for case. Second-person personal pronouns have also already lost their inflective distinction for subjective versus objective case. (When was the last time you used the word "ye" for any reason _other_ than deliberately sounding archaic? The possessive form is again the still-common exception.)
The reason this is happening is that the language has rigidified its word order systems to the point where case can be determined based on that alone; it is obvious for instance that in the sentence, "It's me", the word "me" is functioning as the predicate nominative and so is in the nominative (or subjective) case, even if the form is one that used to always indicate the objective case, once upon a time. If "me" were *really* in the objective case, in terms of its function, there would be a transitive verb or preposition preceding it; there is not, so it is functioning in the subjective case. Every native speaker of the English language understands this intuitively, whether or not he's had any formal introduction to the concept of grammatical case, because the word order carries the meaning.
English, for as long as it has been English, has always been classified as an SVO language, in that that was the most common order, but this used to be rather more flexible and has rigidified considerably over the last several centuries. In another couple of centuries (give or take a bit; the exact timeframe is impossible to predict), the subjective/objective distinction will be carried *entirely* by word order, and the remaining case forms will consolidate or become synonymous, possibly excepting the possessive forms.
The days are pretty well gone when we can say things like "These things understandest thou?" and be easily understood by any random person whose first language is English. If you modernise the forms that becomes "These things you understand?" or possibly "These things you do understand?", but in order to make that comprehensibly valid English, the word order needs to be corrected: "Do you understand these things?" The pronoun here is theoretically objective (and plural!), or used to be, but we now consider the sentence correct, because the word order is correct; the other sentence, with the incorrect word order, is no longer valid in modern English.
> No, you should design for standards, and then sit back and relax. Let it
> look suboptimal in non-compliant browsers; it'll give them incentive to
> upgrade.
I take an approach that's sort of a compromise between these positions. First, I design the site using documentation that's based on standards (e.g., the XHTML and CSS documentation at w3schools.com is mostly pretty decent). Then I validate it at validator.w3.org. Then I test it in several web browsers and make sure it adheres to the following:
First, the site should look basically the way I intended it to look in recent versions of Gecko at resolutions from 640x480 through 1600x1200, at 24 bits per pixel. This generally is not a problem.
Second, the site should look reasonable (not necessarily exactly as intended) in the latest version of every major browser that I have at my disposal, at resolutions from 320x200 through 2560x2048, at 16 bits per pixel and higher. (I try to keep a copy of the latest at my disposal for this testing, even though it's usually the hardest one to please, because it's so widely deployed.) The definition of "reasonable" fluxes a little depending on how important aesthetics are to the site and how important the site is to me. Images are allowed to be ugly at 16bpp.
The site must be legible and navigable (i.e., the text can be read and the links can be followed) in all browsers, including really old and crufty and horrible ones, even at very low resolutions, and in 16-color mode (4bpp), and in 256-shade greyscale. It's allowed to look suboptimal, even very suboptimal, but it should be usable. This usually is not a problem with well-designed sites.
I do not attempt to support 1-bit color. Sorry, not going there.
> No, it's like MySQL _sold_ them something.
Oh, is that all? And people are *upset*? I'd have thought anything that takes money *away* from SCO would be widely viewed on slashdot as a Good Thing. Now, if MySQL had *paid* SCO money for something, then that would be Bad.
What am I missing?
> The problem with Mozilla is that they're so swamped with bugs that some
> developers at least seem to have stopped caring about *any* bugs at all
> whatsoever anymore - to the point where they will not only not fix them,
> but actively try to prevent others from fixing them. Give bug 18574 a
> look some time, for example...
If this bug is typical of the sort of thing you're complaining about, go soak your head. If it were me, I'd have closed that bug as NOTABUG aeons ago. There are an infinite number of bizarroid image formats out there that, for one reason or another (in some cases good reasons, in some cases not, but that is neither here nor there) have not become important or common on the web. MNG is an ideal example and practically a case study in irrelevancy; it has been languishing in irrelevancy for years and shows absolutely ZERO signs of EVER breaking out of that and gaining any significant mindshare or import. The component owner is absolutely right to exclude this sort of nonsense. Mozilla is *not* primarily an image viewer; it is primarily a web browser, so the image formats it should support are ones that are *used on the web*, not every single obscure image format someone thinks is cool. (And that's quite aside from the fact that the main selling point of MNG is that it supports animation, something right-thinking people have been wanting to rid the web of since some misguided cretinous loser decided to introduce looping animated GIFs in Netscape 2.0; the only thing worse than animations on the web was the <blink> tag, may it rest in pieces.)
You speak of preventing bugs from being fixed, but if this is what you're talking about, you should speak of preventing irrelevant features that aren't even vaguely web-related from being needlessly introduced into a web browser.
> Seeing a nice yellow "secure" address bar is reassuring for most people
Err, no. Yellow is *not* a reassuring color. Blue is a reassuring color. Green, maybe. Yellow is usually associated with warnings and danger. And of course there's the obvious truism that most computer users don't know what SSL is or what the implications are.
> You only know hard-core gamers
No, actually, I only know one hard-core gamer. Most of the people I know who own Doom only own half a dozen PC games or so. The *one* person I know who owned Myst also had at the time, I think, Freecell and Encarta.
A lot of people here are saying non-gamers bought Myst, but this must be non-gamers in some demographic I've never encountered. I know more non-gamers who own copies of the PC version of Wheel of Fortune than ones who have Myst. I know more non-gamers who own copies of Reader Rabbit than ones who have Myst.
And I still think the Mario series has "most popular computer game series of all time" totally sewn up.
> They have "Refill only with Kikkoman" printed on them. I've been tempted
> every time I see those to sneak a few drops of La Choy soy sauce into one
> of them
Refilling Kikkoman bottles with La Choy would be like refilling Dr. Pepper bottles with flat off-brand diet cola. Kikkoman makes soy sauce, as in, sauce made from soy beans, which has a distinctive soy flavour. La Choy makes colored saltwater, which does not taste anything like soy sauce.
> It's interesteding that everyone remembers the mind control parasites
> from "Star Trek II", but no one has mentioned the Goa'uld yet.
There are a handful of reasons for this.
Probably the most important reason is that STII:TWOK is almost certainly the best of all the Star Trek movies (or, at least, all the ones that have Shatner in them). Not that it's perfect or anything, but it's actually quite a solid movie in many respects. Additionally, scene with the critter in question is easily one of the three most famous scenes in the movie (the other two probably being when Kirk yells "Kahn!" and the scene at the end containing the line "His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking").
A second reason is that Star Trek is, in sci-fi, the *most* legendary franchise in terms of the abject fanaticism of such large numbers of fans. The reason for this, in my opinion, probably stems largely from the timing of its introduction -- when Star Trek debuted, the *best* television sci-fi up to that point was probably Doctor Who, which if you've ever seen it, is actually in a number of ways rather less well executed than Star Trek. (Note to Dr. Who fans: I don't want to get into a flamewar about this, and note that I said "in a number of ways", not "in all ways", and also please note that I called Dr. Who the best televised sci-fi up to that time.) When you look at sci-fi television from that era, there was a lot of utterly bogus zero-budget poorly-written, poorly-acted virtually-plotless stuff with few developed characters, a lot of real junk predicated on the assumption that one interesting sci-fi concept (e.g., Martians' blowing up the Earth to make room in its former orbit for Mars) was in and of itself enough interesting material for an entire series. (Yes, that was a real example, and Leonard Nimoy played one of the Martians. It was called, I kid you not, Zombies of the Stratosphere.) Sci-fi fans were *starved* for decent sci-fi television, and Star Trek stepped into that void. So it's got a rather large and devoted following. No other sci-fi series gets more people wearing ridiculous costumes, makeup, fake ears, and forehead ridges, spending hours reading starship technical manuals, and so on and so forth, than Star Trek.
> Killing the host produces stronger evolutionary pressure in the host
> species to find defenses.
The hosts here are insects. Insects' cheif defense against anything is to overwhelm the odds with sheer numbers. That doesn't really bother the parasite too much.
> A mellower strategy of letting the host live after releasing the parasite
> will reduce the selection pressure against it. Aids is sometimes considered
> an "immature" virus because of this.
HIV infects human hosts; this thing parasitizes grasshoppers. There are some differences in terms of the defense mechanisms of the host. Humans, for instance, have a rather more sophisticated immune system (which HIV attacks, incidentally, and disables when the virus succeeds). Humans have a much lower birth rate than grasshoppers, live longer, and value individual lives more, all of which goes together to make for rather different considerations when you're looking at us as a host.
> Why is it that scientists are quick to publish results they don't understand?
It has to do with the prestige of being published.
> I'd much rather read about this in six months or a year when they have
> more details and practical uses.
The thing in question has to do with brain function -- of simple organisms, granted, but brain function nonetheless. They're not going to fully understand it in six months to a year, much less have practical uses. The field of study is over fifty years old and we know, to a first approximation, nothing. Just the fact that this is *possible* is significant, because it has implications that would potentially allow some flawed models of brain function to be discarded.
But if you're looking for a technical reference guide that explains how and why brains work the way they do at a level that is adequately detailed for developing an understanding of exactly how it is that mind control can work, you're going to have to wait more than six months to a year, I think. You might as well ask Charles Babbage for production-ready Network Attached Storage.
I know Interactive Fiction games have gotten a *lot* easier over the decades. I mean, just compare the hit games from back then, such as Zork, Acheton, to more recent favorites, such as Photopia. Zork was *HARD*. Photopia is interesting, but it barely requires cognitive brain function to figure out the puzzles (err, what pass for puzzles). And the parsers are so much better in modern games... occasionally in a poorly-designed modern game you end up with a guess-the-verb issue, but you almost NEVER end up having to guess at the syntax or preposition words, and with nouns these days you can generally use any word the game uses to describe the thing. With a modern Inform game, you can almost forget you're talking to a parser.
> Most copies sold. Not so hard to come up with...
Did Myst really sell more copies than, say, Doom 2? I'd find that a fairly surprising statistic, and if it's true, Id must have suffered a terrible piracy rate, because I'm pretty sure there are about fifty times as many copies of the Doom series floating around, as compared to Myst.
(Not that I'm a Doom fan; I actually loathe the whole FPS genre. But that's another matter.)
> Myst, at its peak, was far more popular than Doom at its peak.
I have a pretty hard time believing that. Every gamer and 5% of the rest of the PC-owning world has a copy of at least one of the Doom games. I only ever actually met (IRL) *one* person who owned a copy of Myst.
But, again, how do are we defining "more popular"? More people played it? They spent more hours on it? They liked it better? They talked about it more? What exactly are we talking about here? You're making an assertion, but it's vague, and you neither explain it nor back it up with any reasoning or evidence.
> Until it was recently overtaken by The Sims, the Myst series was the
> most popular computer game series of all time.
I'm really struggling with this one, in terms of definitions. I'm not sure exactly how the word "popular", for instance, could be defined to make this true. Popular in terms of how many people have played it? No, that would be Solitaire/Freecell, hands down. Popular in terms of how many hours people have wasted on it? The Mario series probably has that sewn up, if you count it as a "computer" game; if you restrict it to just the PC platform, then we're probably back at Solitaire/Freecell again, but Myst would be _way_ down the list, far below Doom. Popular in terms of what percentage of the people who played it rave about how great it was? I'm not sure what gets that honor, but I'm fairly certain Myst isn't it. The Enchanter series maybe. Popular in terms of money spent on it? That's gotta be one of those MMORPGs you pay a monthly subscription fee for, probably. I can't think of any way to measure popularity that could put Myst on top.
> Any time a post has "Plenty of Pictures," it's usually bound to get
> slashdotted. This is probably because when readers see the words "Plenty
> of Pictures," they think, "Hey, even if I don't RTFA, I can STFP and
> infer what TFA is about.
Your observation is correct, but the reason you speculate is probably not. The primary reason sites with plent of pictures get slashdotted easily is because pictures consume quite a lot more bandwidth than text.
> I went to search.cpan.org and did a search for Mork.
Yeah, but isn't using the CPAN almost cheating? I mean, there's code on there for practically everything.
> It should be left to guru perl coders making $500,000/yr or more to do
> fancy things like convert timestamps to dates.
Man, I've gotta ask for a raise. Wait till my boss finds out I know how to use the DateTime module. Can I also get an annual bonus if I know how to use Net::Server and DBI?
> I suspect it would be very hard to thwarte a computer forensics expert
An encrypted filesystem would presumably make their job rather harder.
Of course, that only works for ex-post-facto forensics. If someone plants a hidden camera where it can see your screen and keyboard for a week, your encrypted filesystem has accomplised, to a first approximation, nothing.
Of course, the *best* way to avoid having computer forensics experts crack your computer is to just be innocuous, i.e., just don't do anything that will make computer forensics experts want to investigate your computer. Granted, not everyone can do this; if, for instance, you are an executive for a major international corporation, you should probably assume that at some point someone will attempt to investigate you and/or your computers -- if not law enforcement, then the competition or a freelance information seller. So you do want to think at least briefly about the question, "Who would want to break into my computer, and what will it cost me if they succeed?" In my case I've concluded, at least for the time being, "Maybe some neighborhood kid fooling around" and "Not much if I have offsite backups." YMMV.
Umm, if they want to require convicted sex offenders to use only approved software on their computers, I guess I can live with that. (They let them have access to the _internet_ while on parole? Convicted sex offenders? Isn't that, like, lenient *enough*? I think that's really fairly generous, to allow them that, under the circumstances, considering that there really aren't adequate resources to monitor it very closely at all.)
But as far as regular, non-convicted type people, I don't think it's reasonable to consider using an alternative browser to be "making trouble" for potential investigators. I mean, if having the web browser cache in a different place makes investigation hard, what would happen if a suspect had, I don't know, a Mac, for crying out loud? If the investigation doesn't warrant getting somebody who knows enough to find the browser cache in a slightly atypical place, is it even worth investigating the computer at all?
I mean, what would happen if the suspect had an MSIE icon on the desktop, and used it for normal stuff, but for subversive or illegal activities used something else, something with *no* shortcut icon on the desktop or in the start menu? You know, like a copy of Netscape 4 tucked away in a hidden directory underneath C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM16\ someplace?
C'mon, either *investigate* the computer, or else don't, but just casually going through the single most obvious place, does that really count as an investigation? That's the electronic equivalent of getting a warrant, looking for stolen merchandise on the kitchen table and in the bedroom closet, and ignoring the attic and basement. What kind of investigator operates that way? Seriously, act like your job might actually matter and be worth doing, or something.
> To say I don't trust "Trusted Computing".
... and our business partners, ... ... and the government, and major corporations, ...
Yeah. The conversation goes something like this...
Microsoft: We want to build a platform that is totally trustworthy. So I guess the question is, what should be trusted?
Security Experts: That's actually a good, albeit complicated, question...
Microsoft: Whom and what should users trust? Whom and what *do* they trust?
Security Experts: Hmmmm...
Microsoft: Lesse... First off, they're going to trust Microsoft, obviously...
Security Experts: Err, good luck with that.
Microsoft:
Security Experts: Oh, dear...
Microsoft:
Security Experts: We're not sure we like where this is going.
Microsoft: Hush. We've got it all figured out now.
> In the second case, it only permits more extreme piercings...
...
Yeah, man, we could get pierced right through muscle, bone, ligaments, eyeballs,