> Obviously, you don't order and consume a 'super-sized' beverage that is at > least twice the maximum human bladder capacity in the first hour of the film.
Either you have a very small bladder, or "super sized" beverages are much larger in your area than around here (32 floz). If you really can't hold 32oz through a three-hour movie, you must have a uterus taking up the space where your bladder would be if you were a real man, or something.
It wouldn't be any trouble for *me*. I can drink a 64oz glass of tea (black tea, preferably orange pekoe blend, brewed strong, with sugar and vanilla) an hour before bed and not need to use the facilities until morning, or drink a 64-oz Mt. Dew on an eight-hour car trip with no stops, so sitting through a measley three-hour movie would certainly not be any problem.
> If MS is so overly interested in SCO, isn't there a threat that MS > could purchase SCO?
I don't think there's a very good chance of that...
> What if SCO *wants* to be purchased by MS?
SCO would like to be purchased by anyone, MS included, but I can't think of any reason MS would do that. Buying a UnixWare license is one thing, but if MS bought SCO, it would raise all sorts of unpleasant questions about how SCO's current actions line up with the antitrust settlement terms. Microsoft will leave SCO as an independent entity, I think.
> What would happen to Linux if MS owned the rights to UNIX?
Nothing. The legal thing against IBM might last longer, but I don't think the outcome would change. Not even Microsoft's talented legal staff could ultimately make a winning case out of SCO's position.
Isn't Delphi based on Pascal?
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Kylix in Limbo
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And isn't Pascal positively infamous in *nix circles for being the canonical example of a language that binds the programmer up so tightly in stupid and annoying rules that it's impossible to get anything accomplished? Isn't Pascal the language where you can't return early from a subroutine or exit early from a loop or control structure, for example? And isn't it also true that people who use Linux tend as a general rule to dislike arbitrary and pointless constraints such as these?
So, *why*, exactly, did Borland think Pascal would be a good language to sell to Linux users? It could have been worse; they could have tried to sell us a COBOL compiler, I suppose.
*shrug*. If they'd picked a language that's actually popular among *nix geeks, it may have done better.
I should note that I'm commenting here on a reason why Delphi for Linux might not sell well; I'm not implying that Delphi, having been derived from Pascal, is necessarily as bad or as inflexible as Pascal per se. I'm only implying that it would tend to be perceived that way, barring any knowledge to the contrary, by Linux users who get their ideas about Pascal from the general sentiment in the *nix community, or from the jargon file.
> Even if you gave free classes to educate the voters a poor person is going > to be less able to take the classes.
Actually, no, poor people have more free time on average. Not that this is in any way relevant to the question of whether people should be tested for the right to vote. Either the testing would improve the quality of candidate, selected by the voting process, or it wouldn't. I'm not sure ecconomic class is really the key factor. There are poor conservatives and poor liberals, rich conservatives and rich liberals.
> We don't let you drive a car without at least some knowledge. We have tests > before you can do alot of things in this country, maybe voting should be one > of them?
Why not citizenship? Why not discard natural-birth citizenship and require everyone to take the same citizenship classes that immigrants take for the naturalisation process? This would do one of two things: either it would help mitigate the perception (internationally and particularly in Europe) that our citizens know little-to-nothing about our own government, or else we'd end up with a lot of non-citizen permanent residents -- probably we'd end up in three generations with a lot of third-generation non-citizen permanent residents, I suspect. The ramifications of such a situation are left as a question for further discussion.
Since obviously you need to be a citizen to vote, this would also have the side-effect that voters would in theory know (or would have known at some point, at least) a certain minimum amount of stuff about how the government works. It's not obvious to me that this would necessarily have a dramatic impact on the quality of the candidates selected by the voting, however. In fact, I rather suspect it would change very little. The percentage of turnout among eligible voters might increase...
> You give yourself a lot of credit for knowing all the answers to the > problems of homelessness, poverty and addiction.
Addiction is something I don't care to discuss at the moment, but as for homelessness and poverty, they are not a problem in this country.
Poverty? We have more people in the US dying of obesity than malnutrition. How many political candidates have you seen announce they want do deal with *that* problem? Homelessnes? We have more than one home per immediate family; that's so far above the world average it's astonishing. Are there homeless? Yeah, a handful. But there are much bigger problems. There are more violent crimes every year than the total number of homeless people. Heck, there are more fatal motorcycle accidents every year than the total number of homeless people. Homelessness has a big emotional pull, but it's not one of our larger problems.
Poverty we just plain don't *have*, period. Not for any definition of "poverty" that would make any sense in most of the world. Poverty is when the wrong amount of rain means none of the children in a fifty mile radius get enough rice to eat this week, or when entertaining a visitor uses up your quota of meat for a month. Poverty is when a significant percentage of women die in childbirth due to a complete and total lack of any health care, because they live a day's journey from the nearest proper first aid kit, much less hospital. Poverty is when you don't personally know anybody who has electrical power or running water. Half the world lives in poverty -- exactly zero of them are in the US. The poorest of our "poor" can get three meals a day, if they're willing to accept handouts and hungry enough to eat whatever food is set before them. The poorest of our "poor" live within reasonable walking distance of public drinking fountains with potable water available 360+ days a year. The poorest of our poor can walk into the emergency room and be treated any time they have a real medical problem. The treatment may not always be top quality, but they can get some form of treatment. If they have to wait in line for eight hours (which would be quite a lot in most US hospitals), that's *nothing* compared to what happens where there's poverty; it can take eight hours to *get* to a hospital, *if* you can find anyone with a car to drive you, and *then* they may just turn you away altogether.
Don't even think about replying and telling me I don't know what I'm talking about if you haven't even *been* to the third world. And if you only went to one of the three largest cities in the country, that doesn't count.
Addiction, now that's a real problem we actually have. It's also another thread.
Ah, you are a *thinking* person. Polls are not meant for you. FWIW, the inapplicability of polls to thinking persons has almost no impact on their outcome, as fewer than 1% of the people do enough thinking to have an opinion that doesn't fit into multiple choice questions. OTOH, the way questions are written *does* bias their outcome, often substantially; asking people whether they support the President, for example, and asking them whether they have reservations about the President's recent actions are in principle very similar questions, but the outcome on a poll is likely to be very different. That's without getting into the issues of how the group of people to be polled is selected and whether it constitutes a good sample. All told, polls are mostly meaningless; they're more useful for *convincing* people of things than for finding out what people think.
For Fair and Balanced coverage, you have to go to the Dave Barry for President campaign; Fair and Balanced is their legally trademarked motto (so he says).
Or, looking at it the other way, life is not fair and is not supposed to be fair, and if it were fair you wouldn't like it. As for balance, there's no such thing as a balanced, unbiased person. As Ken Ham would say, it's not a question of whether you're biased or not; it's a matter of which bias is the best bias to be biased with anyhow.
But hey, I may not be a presidential candidate, but I'm far more conservative than any of the current ones and I use Linux way more than Windows (albeit not exclusively); I administer Apache and won't go near IIS with a ten foot pole, so overgeneralisations should be taken cum shakero salis. Besides, as another poster pointed out, most of the candidates probably don't administer their own web servers. Even if they knew how, they'd be too busy running for office.
How can it be the "beginning of the end" for a company that has yet to acquire a useful purpose for existing or produce a product worth downloading for free? Would that be anything like IBM's support of Linux being the beginning of the end for SCO? Macromedia has, what, six programs out now? All cut from approximately the same cloth, and none of which anyone with taste would ever consider using. So if Microsoft clones off one of them, even if they *improve* on it (which is no guaranteed thing), how *exactly* would that matter?
The Matrix Reloaded was a lot like Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
My dad once commented on the latter, to the effect that while the movie was in some respects disappointing, ST fans had all liked it because it had special effects. It did, he said, definitely have that. "It had *hours* of special effects", he commented. Having seen the movie, it's difficult to disagree with this assessment. The special effects feel cheesy now, being technologically very obsolete, but they're very much undeniably present, just the same.
The Matrix Reloaded, similarly, had fight scenes -- *hours* of fight scenes.
> the DNC is hotly contested in court as possible free speech violations
That's a bluff and will go nowhere. Free speech is political; it's about not needing to worry that you'll be arrested if you express a dissenting view. This has absolutely nothing to do with forcing yourself down people's throats, bugging them in their own homes and workplaces (unlike in a public area where they can just leave if you're annoying), making them listen to you when they don't want to hear about it. That's not free speech; it's harrassment. (This is true whether you're trying to sell them something, or just trying to convince them of some philosophical view or even a political position; you can say what you want, but if people don't want to listen to you, they don't have to. Otherwise, none of us would ever get anything done *except* listen to people we don't want to listen to.)
Free speech is the right to discuss politics with your friend in a restaurant and say things like "I don't think [name of politician] is doing a very good job; look at how he blundered [current event]", without worrying that someone at the next table will overhear you and turn you in to thinkpol. Telemarketing *in general* is not in this category, and *certainly* calling people who have specifically said they don't want to be called cannot in any way be construed as protected speech. Harrassment is what it is.
Yes, but my point is, metadata is metadata. The difference between storing it as part of the file and storing it as part of a thingydoo attached to the file is a difference of paradigm, not of substance. The BeOS would store info about when a file was last printed in the filesystem metadata for the file; OO.o would store it in the metadata XML, not in the content portion of the file, but it would be part of the file as far as the filesystem is concerned. To the user, the approaches are equivalent (except that one is independent of the filesystem and therefore makes sense for a cross-platform application; the other is so highly platform-specific that no cross-platform app can use it, which makes it effectively redundant except for single-platform apps, which are hopefully a dying breed at this point).
There are some things it makes sense to store as metadata at the filesystem level. Mainly, things that apply to all files on the system, not just certain types of files. So, content-type, for example. (The BeOS stores the MIME content-type as filesystem-level metadata; DOS and Windows store a file extension that is essentially equivalent, albeit somewhat inferior. The Mac has its type and creator codes, which also are essentially equivalent albeit somewhat inferior.) Permissions are another example. (FAT filesystems lack here, but the other major ones are pretty decent. Especially with the introduction of ACLs.)
But things that only make sense for certain types of files (e.g., icons, which only make sense for applications, generally, or From headers, which only makes sense for internet messages, or phone numbers, which only make sense for address book entries) can be stored in a manner specific to that type of file, without loss of generality (since there was no generality in the first place).
> Your account is terminated, your copy of Windows DOA is deauthorized, you > get reported to Ashcroft as a dissenter, and the men in dark sunglasses pay > you a little visit! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Heh, let them come. The men in dark glasses may find it a little hard to see, when they come to visit me; I keep my place pretty dark. When I switch off the computer monitor, all that's left most of the time are a few LEDs. So they'll need nightvision equipment. Then they'll meet my dog, Wuss (who's very friendly, being a cross between a St. Barnard and a Great Dane), and while he's busy licking them to death, I'll put in my earplugs and activate my alarm system (based on air compressor and train whistles, wired together with a logic board hooked up to an old PC that causes it to play the the I Love You song from the Barney television programme), turn on the strobe that's hooked up to the old airport beacon I keep aimed at the entrance, and slip out the back while your little dark men recover from the shock. Then I'll circle around, scatter caltrops around their car tires and slip away into the darkness. When they raid my house for the computers, all they'll find are ssh clients (that I use to connect to my real computers, which are colocated) an X Server (for hosting X11-forwarded apps from the colocated computers), and an old 486 half-embedded in the cement of the basement floor that, if they turn it on, will take a bit to boot up and then send a signal across the serial cable (also buried in the cement floor) to the box in the laundry room, which will release its catch and drop a couple of pounds of sodium into that bucket of water, next to the gas line.
Oh, BTW, you're right that the laws of physics are different on a small scale, but you've got the scale wrong; a model rocket is well above the line wherein standard Newtonian physics generally apply. If you want to see the laws of physics go all weird, you have to get down to the submicroscopic level.
Don't know what physics book you've been reading, but last I checked gravity was a force, measured in Newtons, generally (or pounds, but for things like rocket physics it's easier to stick with SI). The acceleration due to gravity can be measured in m/(s^2), but that's neither here nor there, because it is only constant (on Earth at a given altitude) if no other force is being applied, which in practice is basically never the case. The other force comes from the fuel the rocket is expelling -- and, like the force of gravity, is propotional to the mass of the rocket. So, the physics are pretty similar.
The notable difference is that a smaller rocket has (relatively) further to go in order to reach orbit. But small rockets generally don't have reaching orbit as one of their main goals, so it's not a big deal.
> I don't know about you, but my web browsing relies heavily on Google to > find sites that I will look at.
So does mine, but only because Google is my favorite search engine. If it ceased to be my favorite search engine, I wouldn't use it nearly so much any more. AltaVista *used* to be my favorite search engine, but the advertising got completely out of hand (think: six or eight animated banners per page, and a preposterously short autorefresh period; it has since improved somewhat, probably due to competitive pressure from Google), so I switched away from it. Before I found AV, Yahoo was may fave search engine.
There are *dozens* of web search engines -- some better than others, but many of them quite good. Google, in my estimation, is currently the best one I know about, so I use it almost exclusively, but if something were to happen to Google to cause it to suck, I'd quickly go looking elsewhere.
Google Groups is another matter. It has no competitor, AFAIK.
I'd be most worried about Google Groups. The image search is neither original nor particularly vital. The directory is a pale shadow of Yahoo (albeit with less pervasive advertising). The web search is great, but we can find another web search engine to like. Google Groups is pretty much the only complete archive of usenet, as far as I am aware, a hugely valuable historical resource, to say nothing of its value as a way of finding information, and as such it is indeed irreplaceable.
> Generally speaking, a specific clause can be unenforceable but that does > not necessarily invalidate the whole contract.
IANAL, but doesn't the GPL contain language that expressly invalidates the whole thing if any part of it is invalid for some legal reason? I was thinking I had heard something to that effect.
> This is the standard MS embrace-and-extend technique. Only the GPL has > shown immunity to it.
The GPL (or something very like it) is the only major *license* that is immune to it, but there are other ways of overcoming embrace-and-extend, the most useful one being to have a popular and active project. The MPL, for example, is very unlike the GPL, but anybody who tries to embrace and extend Mozilla quickly runs into obsolescence. It's *painful* to maintain a fork -- or even a patch -- on code that comes from an active and popular project. Merging changes soaks up all your time, if you can even manage it all. The only way out of that madness is to commit your changes to the trunk, so that everybody *else* has to sync *their* changes with *your* stuff.
> The only way this feature can do that is if you're writing small > files continuously. That's very strange software behavior
Err, what? Writing small files is more than 99% of the writing that a typical filesystem does, and many applications cause them to be written fairly well continuously. Just three examples off the top of my head of applications that normally result in this behavior include email, usenet, web browsing (disk cache). Two of these are *extremely* common desktop end-user applications.
Any filesystem that has problems continouously writing small files is junk.
> I'm still confused as to why metadata isn't being taken seriously by the > rest of the computing world.
The rest of the world does take metadata seriously; we just don't store it the same way as the Mac does. What do you suppose email headers are, if not metadata? The thing is, different kinds of data have different kinds of associated metadata, so it's not a foregone conclusion that storing the metadata at the filesystem level is necessarily the only good way to do things. Making it a part of the file format in many cases makes a large amount of sense. OpenOffice files, for example, contain very significant amounts of metadata -- not just formatting, but things like the author of the document, when it was last edited, and so forth.
However, if you want to see a filesystem that goes hog-wild with storing metadata at the filesystem level, you should try out the BeOS, where (for example) your address book is just a folder containing a bunch of zero-byte files.
> Why is it that no one has yet intelligently handled deletion of files in > a mainstream operating system? When a file is deleted (unlinked?) I would > like it to go into a holding area from which files are automatically removed > one at a time when I run out of disk space for them, by some user-definable > criteria, but certainly age would be an acceptable place to start. > Are there any operating systems at all that have this functionality now?
Not as far as I know, bit it would be really easy to implement in userspace. First, set your OS to not show the trash/recyclebin/whatever on the desktop; instead, place a shortcut there that points to a "recycleable" folder or directory. You can even give it a trashcan icon if you want.
Then you write a script that checks the amount of free disk space, and if it's less than a certain amount, removes the oldest file from the recycleable folder and repeats (until there's enough disk space). This would be about six lines of Perl. Put it on a cron job (*nix) or scheduled task (Windows).
Then you just have to train yourself to "delete" things by moving them to the recycleable folder. If you're a GUI user, you'll drag them to the shortcut. If you use the command line, you'll want a shell script or batch file that moves its command-line arguments there. On *nix, you can alias 'rm' so that it calls your script instead of/bin/rm, but on Windows I think you might have to train yourself to type a different command than "del", unless maybe recent versions have added an ability I don't know about; last I knew, builtins are always used first, before checking the path.
> Python lovers want to flame me for incriminating their programming language?
I have no love for Python (tried it, didn't like it), but I think your concern about performance is overrated. This mattered in the days of 486 CPUs, but these days it's totally unimportant. interpreted and even VM-based languages perform just fine on modern hardware -- and the code is more maintainable, so there are *substantially* fewer critical bugs than with C code.
If you want to criticise Python, talk about significant whitespace, strong typing (which the Python people even have the gall to claim is an advantage), foisting a certain paradigm (OO) on every problem whether it fits or not, or the sort of structural bondage and discipline previously associated with Pascal. That ought to rile 'em up a bit. But don't talk about performance; they'll ignore you because, while it's technically true, it doesn't matter.
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> Obviously, you don't order and consume a 'super-sized' beverage that is at
> least twice the maximum human bladder capacity in the first hour of the film.
Either you have a very small bladder, or "super sized" beverages are much
larger in your area than around here (32 floz). If you really can't hold
32oz through a three-hour movie, you must have a uterus taking up the space
where your bladder would be if you were a real man, or something.
It wouldn't be any trouble for *me*. I can drink a 64oz glass of tea (black
tea, preferably orange pekoe blend, brewed strong, with sugar and vanilla) an
hour before bed and not need to use the facilities until morning, or drink a
64-oz Mt. Dew on an eight-hour car trip with no stops, so sitting through a
measley three-hour movie would certainly not be any problem.
> If MS is so overly interested in SCO, isn't there a threat that MS
> could purchase SCO?
I don't think there's a very good chance of that...
> What if SCO *wants* to be purchased by MS?
SCO would like to be purchased by anyone, MS included, but I can't think of
any reason MS would do that. Buying a UnixWare license is one thing, but
if MS bought SCO, it would raise all sorts of unpleasant questions about how
SCO's current actions line up with the antitrust settlement terms. Microsoft
will leave SCO as an independent entity, I think.
> What would happen to Linux if MS owned the rights to UNIX?
Nothing. The legal thing against IBM might last longer, but I don't think
the outcome would change. Not even Microsoft's talented legal staff could
ultimately make a winning case out of SCO's position.
And isn't Pascal positively infamous in *nix circles for being the canonical
example of a language that binds the programmer up so tightly in stupid and
annoying rules that it's impossible to get anything accomplished? Isn't
Pascal the language where you can't return early from a subroutine or exit
early from a loop or control structure, for example? And isn't it also true
that people who use Linux tend as a general rule to dislike arbitrary and
pointless constraints such as these?
So, *why*, exactly, did Borland think Pascal would be a good language to sell
to Linux users? It could have been worse; they could have tried to sell us a
COBOL compiler, I suppose.
*shrug*. If they'd picked a language that's actually popular among *nix
geeks, it may have done better.
I should note that I'm commenting here on a reason why Delphi for Linux might
not sell well; I'm not implying that Delphi, having been derived from Pascal,
is necessarily as bad or as inflexible as Pascal per se. I'm only implying
that it would tend to be perceived that way, barring any knowledge to the
contrary, by Linux users who get their ideas about Pascal from the general
sentiment in the *nix community, or from the jargon file.
> Even if you gave free classes to educate the voters a poor person is going
> to be less able to take the classes.
Actually, no, poor people have more free time on average. Not that this is in
any way relevant to the question of whether people should be tested for the
right to vote. Either the testing would improve the quality of candidate,
selected by the voting process, or it wouldn't. I'm not sure ecconomic class
is really the key factor. There are poor conservatives and poor liberals,
rich conservatives and rich liberals.
> We don't let you drive a car without at least some knowledge. We have tests
> before you can do alot of things in this country, maybe voting should be one
> of them?
Why not citizenship? Why not discard natural-birth citizenship and require
everyone to take the same citizenship classes that immigrants take for the
naturalisation process? This would do one of two things: either it would
help mitigate the perception (internationally and particularly in Europe)
that our citizens know little-to-nothing about our own government, or else
we'd end up with a lot of non-citizen permanent residents -- probably we'd
end up in three generations with a lot of third-generation non-citizen
permanent residents, I suspect. The ramifications of such a situation are
left as a question for further discussion.
Since obviously you need to be a citizen to vote, this would also have the
side-effect that voters would in theory know (or would have known at some
point, at least) a certain minimum amount of stuff about how the government
works. It's not obvious to me that this would necessarily have a dramatic
impact on the quality of the candidates selected by the voting, however.
In fact, I rather suspect it would change very little. The percentage of
turnout among eligible voters might increase...
> You give yourself a lot of credit for knowing all the answers to the
> problems of homelessness, poverty and addiction.
Addiction is something I don't care to discuss at the moment, but as for
homelessness and poverty, they are not a problem in this country.
Poverty? We have more people in the US dying of obesity than malnutrition.
How many political candidates have you seen announce they want do deal with
*that* problem? Homelessnes? We have more than one home per immediate
family; that's so far above the world average it's astonishing. Are there
homeless? Yeah, a handful. But there are much bigger problems. There are
more violent crimes every year than the total number of homeless people.
Heck, there are more fatal motorcycle accidents every year than the total
number of homeless people. Homelessness has a big emotional pull, but it's
not one of our larger problems.
Poverty we just plain don't *have*, period. Not for any definition of
"poverty" that would make any sense in most of the world. Poverty is when
the wrong amount of rain means none of the children in a fifty mile radius
get enough rice to eat this week, or when entertaining a visitor uses up
your quota of meat for a month. Poverty is when a significant percentage
of women die in childbirth due to a complete and total lack of any health
care, because they live a day's journey from the nearest proper first aid kit,
much less hospital. Poverty is when you don't personally know anybody who
has electrical power or running water. Half the world lives in poverty --
exactly zero of them are in the US. The poorest of our "poor" can get three
meals a day, if they're willing to accept handouts and hungry enough to eat
whatever food is set before them. The poorest of our "poor" live within
reasonable walking distance of public drinking fountains with potable water
available 360+ days a year. The poorest of our poor can walk into the
emergency room and be treated any time they have a real medical problem.
The treatment may not always be top quality, but they can get some form of
treatment. If they have to wait in line for eight hours (which would be
quite a lot in most US hospitals), that's *nothing* compared to what happens
where there's poverty; it can take eight hours to *get* to a hospital, *if*
you can find anyone with a car to drive you, and *then* they may just turn
you away altogether.
Don't even think about replying and telling me I don't know what I'm talking
about if you haven't even *been* to the third world. And if you only went to
one of the three largest cities in the country, that doesn't count.
Addiction, now that's a real problem we actually have. It's also another
thread.
Ah, you are a *thinking* person. Polls are not meant for you. FWIW, the
inapplicability of polls to thinking persons has almost no impact on their
outcome, as fewer than 1% of the people do enough thinking to have an opinion
that doesn't fit into multiple choice questions. OTOH, the way questions are
written *does* bias their outcome, often substantially; asking people whether
they support the President, for example, and asking them whether they have
reservations about the President's recent actions are in principle very similar
questions, but the outcome on a poll is likely to be very different. That's
without getting into the issues of how the group of people to be polled is
selected and whether it constitutes a good sample. All told, polls are mostly
meaningless; they're more useful for *convincing* people of things than for
finding out what people think.
> Where's my fair and balanced coverage?
For Fair and Balanced coverage, you have to go to the Dave Barry for President
campaign; Fair and Balanced is their legally trademarked motto (so he says).
Or, looking at it the other way, life is not fair and is not supposed to be
fair, and if it were fair you wouldn't like it. As for balance, there's no
such thing as a balanced, unbiased person. As Ken Ham would say, it's not a
question of whether you're biased or not; it's a matter of which bias is the
best bias to be biased with anyhow.
But hey, I may not be a presidential candidate, but I'm far more conservative
than any of the current ones and I use Linux way more than Windows (albeit not
exclusively); I administer Apache and won't go near IIS with a ten foot pole,
so overgeneralisations should be taken cum shakero salis. Besides, as another
poster pointed out, most of the candidates probably don't administer their own
web servers. Even if they knew how, they'd be too busy running for office.
How can it be the "beginning of the end" for a company that has yet to acquire
a useful purpose for existing or produce a product worth downloading for free?
Would that be anything like IBM's support of Linux being the beginning of the
end for SCO? Macromedia has, what, six programs out now? All cut from
approximately the same cloth, and none of which anyone with taste would ever
consider using. So if Microsoft clones off one of them, even if they *improve*
on it (which is no guaranteed thing), how *exactly* would that matter?
> By the way, Reloaded was a dreadful movie
The Matrix Reloaded was a lot like Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
My dad once commented on the latter, to the effect that while the movie was in
some respects disappointing, ST fans had all liked it because it had special
effects. It did, he said, definitely have that. "It had *hours* of special
effects", he commented. Having seen the movie, it's difficult to disagree with
this assessment. The special effects feel cheesy now, being technologically
very obsolete, but they're very much undeniably present, just the same.
The Matrix Reloaded, similarly, had fight scenes -- *hours* of fight scenes.
> the DNC is hotly contested in court as possible free speech violations
That's a bluff and will go nowhere. Free speech is political; it's about not
needing to worry that you'll be arrested if you express a dissenting view.
This has absolutely nothing to do with forcing yourself down people's throats,
bugging them in their own homes and workplaces (unlike in a public area where
they can just leave if you're annoying), making them listen to you when they
don't want to hear about it. That's not free speech; it's harrassment. (This
is true whether you're trying to sell them something, or just trying to
convince them of some philosophical view or even a political position; you
can say what you want, but if people don't want to listen to you, they don't
have to. Otherwise, none of us would ever get anything done *except* listen
to people we don't want to listen to.)
Free speech is the right to discuss politics with your friend in a restaurant
and say things like "I don't think [name of politician] is doing a very good
job; look at how he blundered [current event]", without worrying that someone
at the next table will overhear you and turn you in to thinkpol. Telemarketing
*in general* is not in this category, and *certainly* calling people who have
specifically said they don't want to be called cannot in any way be construed
as protected speech. Harrassment is what it is.
> I'm talking about FILE metadata.
Yes, but my point is, metadata is metadata. The difference between storing it
as part of the file and storing it as part of a thingydoo attached to the file
is a difference of paradigm, not of substance. The BeOS would store info about
when a file was last printed in the filesystem metadata for the file; OO.o
would store it in the metadata XML, not in the content portion of the file,
but it would be part of the file as far as the filesystem is concerned. To
the user, the approaches are equivalent (except that one is independent of the
filesystem and therefore makes sense for a cross-platform application; the
other is so highly platform-specific that no cross-platform app can use it,
which makes it effectively redundant except for single-platform apps, which
are hopefully a dying breed at this point).
There are some things it makes sense to store as metadata at the filesystem
level. Mainly, things that apply to all files on the system, not just certain
types of files. So, content-type, for example. (The BeOS stores the MIME
content-type as filesystem-level metadata; DOS and Windows store a file
extension that is essentially equivalent, albeit somewhat inferior. The Mac
has its type and creator codes, which also are essentially equivalent albeit
somewhat inferior.) Permissions are another example. (FAT filesystems lack
here, but the other major ones are pretty decent. Especially with the
introduction of ACLs.)
But things that only make sense for certain types of files (e.g., icons,
which only make sense for applications, generally, or From headers, which
only makes sense for internet messages, or phone numbers, which only make
sense for address book entries) can be stored in a manner specific to that
type of file, without loss of generality (since there was no generality in
the first place).
> If I'm browsing the web, it's going to be at least 10 seconds between
> cache writes, as the page loads and I read it.
Surf with images disabled, do you?
> Email or usenet would be similar - a bulk write every five minutes or so
You apparently get a lot less email than I do. When I check my mail, it
writes files every second for several minutes.
> Your account is terminated, your copy of Windows DOA is deauthorized, you
> get reported to Ashcroft as a dissenter, and the men in dark sunglasses pay
> you a little visit! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Heh, let them come. The men in dark glasses may find it a little hard to see,
when they come to visit me; I keep my place pretty dark. When I switch off
the computer monitor, all that's left most of the time are a few LEDs. So
they'll need nightvision equipment. Then they'll meet my dog, Wuss (who's
very friendly, being a cross between a St. Barnard and a Great Dane), and
while he's busy licking them to death, I'll put in my earplugs and activate
my alarm system (based on air compressor and train whistles, wired together
with a logic board hooked up to an old PC that causes it to play the the I
Love You song from the Barney television programme), turn on the strobe
that's hooked up to the old airport beacon I keep aimed at the entrance,
and slip out the back while your little dark men recover from the shock.
Then I'll circle around, scatter caltrops around their car tires and slip
away into the darkness. When they raid my house for the computers, all
they'll find are ssh clients (that I use to connect to my real computers,
which are colocated) an X Server (for hosting X11-forwarded apps from the
colocated computers), and an old 486 half-embedded in the cement of the
basement floor that, if they turn it on, will take a bit to boot up and
then send a signal across the serial cable (also buried in the cement floor)
to the box in the laundry room, which will release its catch and drop a
couple of pounds of sodium into that bucket of water, next to the gas line.
Oh, BTW, you're right that the laws of physics are different on a small scale,
but you've got the scale wrong; a model rocket is well above the line wherein
standard Newtonian physics generally apply. If you want to see the laws of
physics go all weird, you have to get down to the submicroscopic level.
> Except that gravity is in m/s(2)
Don't know what physics book you've been reading, but last I checked gravity
was a force, measured in Newtons, generally (or pounds, but for things like
rocket physics it's easier to stick with SI). The acceleration due to gravity
can be measured in m/(s^2), but that's neither here nor there, because it is
only constant (on Earth at a given altitude) if no other force is being applied,
which in practice is basically never the case. The other force comes from the
fuel the rocket is expelling -- and, like the force of gravity, is propotional
to the mass of the rocket. So, the physics are pretty similar.
The notable difference is that a smaller rocket has (relatively) further to
go in order to reach orbit. But small rockets generally don't have reaching
orbit as one of their main goals, so it's not a big deal.
Did anybody else read that this rocket is made by Apogee and start thinking
about a rocket made out of a baked bean can? Or was that just me?
> I don't know about you, but my web browsing relies heavily on Google to
> find sites that I will look at.
So does mine, but only because Google is my favorite search engine. If it
ceased to be my favorite search engine, I wouldn't use it nearly so much any
more. AltaVista *used* to be my favorite search engine, but the advertising
got completely out of hand (think: six or eight animated banners per page,
and a preposterously short autorefresh period; it has since improved somewhat,
probably due to competitive pressure from Google), so I switched away from it.
Before I found AV, Yahoo was may fave search engine.
There are *dozens* of web search engines -- some better than others, but many
of them quite good. Google, in my estimation, is currently the best one I
know about, so I use it almost exclusively, but if something were to happen to
Google to cause it to suck, I'd quickly go looking elsewhere.
Google Groups is another matter. It has no competitor, AFAIK.
> The point is: Google might be irreplaceable.
I'd be most worried about Google Groups. The image search is neither original
nor particularly vital. The directory is a pale shadow of Yahoo (albeit with
less pervasive advertising). The web search is great, but we can find another
web search engine to like. Google Groups is pretty much the only complete
archive of usenet, as far as I am aware, a hugely valuable historical resource,
to say nothing of its value as a way of finding information, and as such it is
indeed irreplaceable.
Reluctance is fictional. You will be assasinated. We are the br0g.
> Generally speaking, a specific clause can be unenforceable but that does
> not necessarily invalidate the whole contract.
IANAL, but doesn't the GPL contain language that expressly invalidates the
whole thing if any part of it is invalid for some legal reason? I was thinking
I had heard something to that effect.
> This is the standard MS embrace-and-extend technique. Only the GPL has
> shown immunity to it.
The GPL (or something very like it) is the only major *license* that is immune
to it, but there are other ways of overcoming embrace-and-extend, the most
useful one being to have a popular and active project. The MPL, for example,
is very unlike the GPL, but anybody who tries to embrace and extend Mozilla
quickly runs into obsolescence. It's *painful* to maintain a fork -- or even
a patch -- on code that comes from an active and popular project. Merging
changes soaks up all your time, if you can even manage it all. The only way
out of that madness is to commit your changes to the trunk, so that everybody
*else* has to sync *their* changes with *your* stuff.
> The only way this feature can do that is if you're writing small
> files continuously. That's very strange software behavior
Err, what? Writing small files is more than 99% of the writing that a typical
filesystem does, and many applications cause them to be written fairly well
continuously. Just three examples off the top of my head of applications that
normally result in this behavior include email, usenet, web browsing (disk
cache). Two of these are *extremely* common desktop end-user applications.
Any filesystem that has problems continouously writing small files is junk.
> I'm still confused as to why metadata isn't being taken seriously by the
> rest of the computing world.
The rest of the world does take metadata seriously; we just don't store it
the same way as the Mac does. What do you suppose email headers are, if not
metadata? The thing is, different kinds of data have different kinds of
associated metadata, so it's not a foregone conclusion that storing the
metadata at the filesystem level is necessarily the only good way to do
things. Making it a part of the file format in many cases makes a large
amount of sense. OpenOffice files, for example, contain very significant
amounts of metadata -- not just formatting, but things like the author of
the document, when it was last edited, and so forth.
However, if you want to see a filesystem that goes hog-wild with storing
metadata at the filesystem level, you should try out the BeOS, where (for
example) your address book is just a folder containing a bunch of zero-byte
files.
> Why is it that no one has yet intelligently handled deletion of files in
/bin/rm, but on Windows I think
> a mainstream operating system? When a file is deleted (unlinked?) I would
> like it to go into a holding area from which files are automatically removed
> one at a time when I run out of disk space for them, by some user-definable
> criteria, but certainly age would be an acceptable place to start.
> Are there any operating systems at all that have this functionality now?
Not as far as I know, bit it would be really easy to implement in userspace.
First, set your OS to not show the trash/recyclebin/whatever on the desktop;
instead, place a shortcut there that points to a "recycleable" folder or
directory. You can even give it a trashcan icon if you want.
Then you write a script that checks the amount of free disk space, and if
it's less than a certain amount, removes the oldest file from the recycleable
folder and repeats (until there's enough disk space). This would be about
six lines of Perl. Put it on a cron job (*nix) or scheduled task (Windows).
Then you just have to train yourself to "delete" things by moving them to
the recycleable folder. If you're a GUI user, you'll drag them to the
shortcut. If you use the command line, you'll want a shell script or batch
file that moves its command-line arguments there. On *nix, you can alias
'rm' so that it calls your script instead of
you might have to train yourself to type a different command than "del",
unless maybe recent versions have added an ability I don't know about;
last I knew, builtins are always used first, before checking the path.
> Python lovers want to flame me for incriminating their programming language?
I have no love for Python (tried it, didn't like it), but I think your concern
about performance is overrated. This mattered in the days of 486 CPUs, but
these days it's totally unimportant. interpreted and even VM-based languages
perform just fine on modern hardware -- and the code is more maintainable, so
there are *substantially* fewer critical bugs than with C code.
If you want to criticise Python, talk about significant whitespace, strong
typing (which the Python people even have the gall to claim is an advantage),
foisting a certain paradigm (OO) on every problem whether it fits or not, or
the sort of structural bondage and discipline previously associated with
Pascal. That ought to rile 'em up a bit. But don't talk about performance;
they'll ignore you because, while it's technically true, it doesn't matter.