> Seriously though, what is up with a 17 inch Powerbook?? Who the > hell will buy such a huge notebook?
I'm holding out for larger. Yes, really. I've been looking around at various laptops (e.g., at EmperorLinux), but the _largest_ displays I can find are 16" viewable, and that's just plain small. I went out a while back and bought myself a nineteen-inch monitor for a _reason_. Because I need every last millimeter of that screen space. A 16-inch display is just _not_ enough space. At that size, by the time you split your Emacs frame into three windows, you can't see enough lines in any of them to get context, or else you've split two of them horizontally and can't see an entire line, which is usually worse. Or maybe you're not editing text today; maybe today you're editing graphics instead. Your brushes and layers dialog and tools and tool options will take up more than half of that screen -- you won't have hardly any space left for an actual image. If you need to work on two images side-by-side, heaven help you. I suppose it would be alright if all you want to do is browse the web and get email... but I just can't function on a display that small, not if I have to do anything much.
I saw this 17 inch model, and my first reaction was, "Well, that's only an inch less than my 18-viewable display..." but then I saw the aspect ratio, did the calculations, and it turns out that my 18" viewable ("19 inch") CRT has a full 15% more display area than this PowerBook. (And yes, the resolution is also higher (1600x1200 if I max it out) although they both have a res in line with their size, so it really is the display area that counts; the pixels can only get so small and things still be easy to see.)
So if I were to use this PowerBook, I'd have to give up some 13% of my display area (as _well_ as my Avant keyboard). Nothing Doing. And that's the _largest_ I've seen. But the larger ones (16" and up) are starting to come out more and more, so I'm figuring if I wait long enough, some genious manufacturer will come out with a laptop that actually fills up my lap and gives me a real actual honest-to-goodness display area, and hopefully something that resembles a full-size keyboard too.
Sure, these models won't be popular with the folks who really want a wristwatch model, but that's a different market segment. Those people don't actually _use_ their computers, they just want to have something easy to tote around in a shirt pocket that they can claim is a computer. Me, what I basically want is a desktop system with fewer cords, built all in one piece that folds once, with lower power consumption and a battery built in, so that I can lug it around if I need to.
I also need a good deal of RAM. (The CPU, however, can be a pretty much anything that doesn't use much power. Bonus points if it's x86-compatible, but as long as it runs some form of unix and XFree and is _reasonably_ common so most apps will compile, it'll do. I'd definitely consider an Apple system if the more important things like screen size were what I want.)
The _idea_ of having something portable appeals to me -- as well as the idea of the battery built in, so that if the power goes out I don't have problems. (I could get a UPS, but then I've thrown _all_ pretenses of portability out the window.) But unless some company comes out with portables with a little more display area, my next computer will be... another desktop. That's why it's good to see Apple introducing this seventeen-incher. If it sells well, I can hope that other manufacturers will follow suit, and that at some point some genius will step it up a little more...
> The only thing it's missing is being able to > limit the number of times animated gifs run
That's a very significant thing to be missing. I've been disabling looping animations ever since I found a page on the web that described how to do it with Netscape 4.08, and since that day I WILL NOT use a browser that loops animations forever. (With Netscape 4, you had to use a hex editor; fortunately now that's not necessary.)
I wanted to post this over there, but their server has succumbed, so...
True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The ring had sharpened my senses--not destroyed-- not dulled them. Above all was the sense of seeing in the wraith world acute. I saw all things in the earth and under the earth. I saw many things from the crack of mount doom. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily -- how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the ring. It had never wronged me. It had never given me trouble. For its gold I had no desire. I think it was the eye! Yes, it was this! The one eye resembled that of a vulture--a fiery red eye, with a dark shroud over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold and so by degrees--very graduallyI made up my mind to take the old ring to the crack of doom, and thus to rid myself of the eye forever.
-- Opening section of The Telltale Ring, by Edgar Allen Poe
> 2.96283e-1850 According to kcalc, anyway. I'm no math guru, so > I'm not totally sure what that means,
It means different things to different people. To a physicist it probably sounds like a distance in meters or something. A math guru would immediately class it as epsilon. Non-technical people also have a word for this number: "zero"
The original poster who said that IE is "in the kernel" probably meant that IE is part of the internal guts of how Windows works. That probably means he has it mixed up with Windows Explorer, but that would be an easy mistake to make, especially if you've never seen earlier versions of the two programs from before they started sharing display libraries and WE started rendering HTML (c1998).
IE didn't _used_ to install a driver as such, but I haven't installed a recent version of IE. (I've used IE6, but it was preinstalled.)
Anyway, what the article describes isn't totally clear, but if I understood correctly, it's not talking about IE _really_ trying to send a request packet where no connection has ever been set up, but rather about the issue first being noticed as a result of a trace that showed behavior that _appeared_ to be that -- which it would, if the server closed the connection and IE pretended it was still open and tried to use it. I suspect that's what's really happening, but if you jump in in the middle you see that there's nothing on the server end in the way of a connection and this unsynchronised request packet appears out of the blue, _as if_ IE were skipping the handshake -- but perhaps it really just never closed its end of an earlier connection.
As far as whether that violates the TCP, you'd have to ask a TCP guru, which I'm not. If it did violate TCP, I can easily believe Microsoft might do it anyway, but I'm not ready to assume that it violates the protocol without checking, since many protocols leave room for behaviors that are not usually done, and it could be that Microsoft followed the protocol in a different way from others.
I had CoBOL, but I won't claim that it taught me much.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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> there are at least three alternative explanations for common DNA.
I thought of another. If you subscribe to Hume's epistemics, you can say you imagined the common DNA sequences. This is of course complete nonsense, but nobody can _prove_ that it's nonsense.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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> Evolutionary biology, as with archaeology, is an historical science.
Sometimes they are also called "soft" sciences. There are a number of such fields; my point is, none of them use the scientific method; they are called "sciences" because people don't understand science.
> The way to test theories in evolutionary biology is to continue > studying existing organisms and fossil specemins in ways that > determine their historical development.
That's not a valid way to test hypotheses. There are no predicted outcomes, no control groups, no doubleblindness... in short, there is no science in this method.
> With the tools of modern biochemistry, for instance, we can use > DNA sequencing to test whether organisms that we believe to be > related from previous studies actually share common DNA patterns > that are consistent with common descent.
Evolutionists _assume_ that common DNA means common descent because they believe that evolution has occurred, but there are at least three alternative explanations for common DNA. (In rough order of popularity, the three I can think of are common design, complete chance, or similar circumstances leading to similar development.) Meanwhile, the very basic idea of evolution (that one organism can evolve into another) has never been tested and cannot ever be tested in a scientific fashion.
> To find that the DNA sequences are incompatible or unrelated would > create a difficulty that must be resolved. If it can't be resolved > in the frame work of evolutionary theory, then that is disproof!
That's naive. Any number of unexpected things have been found over the years that have had to be resolved or explained, but regardless of how many such difficulties arrive, none of them ever disprove anything, because none of it has ever been tested in even a single experiment.
> As an extreme example, if the fossil record started showing (what > are currently belived to be) relatively recent forms (e.g. modern > humans) in much older sediments
That has happened repeatedly. It disproves nothing; the timetables are just adjusted, or the order in which various organisms evolved, or the age of the layer is changed, or gradualism passes out of vogue and is replaced by catastrophism. A few years later as the difficulties are forgotten and the difficulties with catastrophic evolution prove hard to explain, gradualism passes back into vogue, and a fresh crack is taken at explaining away its problems.
Evolutionism has much more in common with history than with physics.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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> There are many questions in human psychology that can be answered > scientifically, you just have to ask them right.
This is true to some extent, but generally accepted ethical standards prevent you from conducting most of the experiments that would really be interesting. Nobody complains very much about the unethical treatment of matter and energy, but you do one unethical thing to a human, and the rights groups are all over you.
> I would argue that accounting and programming appeal to similar > personality types (detail oriented, logical, likes to work with > numbers)
No. Accountants love routine; programmers hate routine. Accountants love working with numbers; programmers _don't_ work with numbers; they work with concepts. If a programmer has some numbers that need to be worked with, he'll write a program to do it. Programmers are (have to be) creative and like to think up original ways to do stuff; accountants like to have a formula that always works and use it every time they run into the same situation. Accountants memorise a whole bunch of formulas; programmer types don't learn formulas; they just understand the principle behind the thing and create the formula from scratch on the fly if they ever need it.
As far as "logical", you're talking about entirely different meanings of the word "logical". When we say programmers are logical thinkers, we mean that they can hold boolean expressions in their heads with five levels of nested parentheses, break a complex problem down into its basic components, or reason deductively. You seem to be under the impression that "logical" is antithetical to "emotional", but I would say it's orthogonal.
> while marketing and programming would appear to different > personality types (marketing = people person
Some programmers are people persons, and others are not. As for me, I'm a borderline reclusive type, the extreme sort who can spend twenty hours a day in an unlit basement room with a computer and emerge only to eat and use the restroom, the sort who considers parties and banquets to be torture, but even at that I'd _much_ rather give a public presentation than mess with a bunch of debit and credit arithmetic. I understand computers far better than I understand people, but people are at least interesting some of the time; marketing sound like a challenge, but not an impossible one, and programmers like challenges. It wouldn't be easy, but it could maybe be fun, at least for a while. Accounting just sounds painfully boring and tediously difficult. I'd rather chew tinfoil for a living than be an accountant.
> Programming is a subject in itself, there are concepts, languages > only implement those concepts
Indeed, and different langauges, in the process of implementing the various concepts in different ways, emphasise and teach different concepts with varying degrees of effectiveness. When I took a class in Pascal in high school, it revolutionised the way I wrote BASIC. Then I got to college and took other languages. ForTran, QBasic (yes, they had a class in that), Visual Basic, C++ -- none of these languages really made fundamental changes to the way I thought about programming, but each of them did teach me something. After Pascal, the next language that did completely change my thinking was Inform; in my spare time I read through the Inform Designer's Manual and messed around with Inform, which taught me far more about object oriented design than any amount of C++ ever could have done. After I graduated, I continued to learn yet more languages. Emacs lisp once _again_ revolutionised my programming, as did Perl. Since Perl I've played with a handful of languages, including Python and Javascript. No, not every one of these languages makes me a better programmer, but _some_ of them have. The influences of Inform and lisp are still with me when I program in Perl.
So while my resume doesn't claim that I'm fluent in 20 languages, it does say that I've had worked somewhat with a number of them, and then specifies the specific ones I'm most comfortable with. (Not that it probably matters; I'm not really trying to get work as a programmer per se.)
> > What's missing? What am I missing? > > The ability for my wife to walk into Best Buy and purchase > "Hoyle Card Games". Or "Reader Rabbit Preschool".
Oh, I see, a lot of crap is missing.
Upthread, the statement was made, "People use applications, not operating systems", but in fact it goes further than that: most people don't give two bits about either, as long as they can print their email, listen to CDs, browse the web and play Yahoo games, make stupid greeting cards and fliers, and so on. What's missing on Linux/Gnome? Mostly, ten hours' worth of reconfiguring things to appeal to people who don't know what they're doing: removing the foot menu, terminal, and so on, creating launchers for the six or seven apps the user might actually want to use (OOo, Netscape, and so on), making the wallpaper automatically rotate once a day through a directory full of pretty pictures, pointing the browser start page at Google or Yahoo, setting up an email account with a nice little envelope launcher on the panel and the settings already entered, and so on.
> "Apple should buy out Quark simply to get this app out," opined > Stuart Long. "It's the one app holding back the adoption of an > amazing Unix OS."
First off, the only thing holding back adoption of OS X is time; as people replace their old Macs with new ones, and as new apps and versions of apps are released that do not support Classic, adoption of OS X is a foregone conclusion. No one app matters, really. It can make the difference of a couple of years for some people, but in the long run it doesn't fundamentally change anything.
My other comment about this is that for Apple to buy out Quark in order to get XPress out would probably disgruntle Adobe, which is probably not something Apple particularly wants to do.
Re:You misunderstand completely
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> Why is it so frowned upon to question evolution?
Because, evolution has to do with origins and therefore fundamentally is not science. It falls into the same category as archeology, human psychology, and history -- there is no way to conduct experiments to test hyphotheses and theories in these areas. Put another way, there is no way to conduct science in these subject areas. So instead the people who study them do it by examining whatever existing evidence they can find and then sitting around thinking about what it probably might mean, and making up theories they will never be able to test or verify. No one will ever prove or disprove any of it.
Physics is somewhat different. In physics, as in math, if your theory isn't quite right, sooner or later somebody will *prove* that it's not right.
> As it is, I left the redeye in because it just looked less freaky > than what iPhoto did.
Working with Gimp, the best thing I've found for redeye so far (note that I'm neither a graphics professional nor a Gimp expert; I just started using Gimp for stuff like converting between.bmp and.png a few months ago, and learned more from there) is to use a selection tool to grab just the irises, copy them to a new layer, then go Filters->Colors->Map->Color Range Mapping
I'd be interested in hearing if other people have better techniques for doing this. Also, if both eyes are completely red, what's the best way to determine what target color range to use?
> All graphicians I know use those snazzy wacom tablets.
I know one who swears by trackballs, but yeah, the one-button mice that Apple ships are not so much for the graphics professionals as for the other people who buy Macs. Apple knows it's pointless to ship a better mouse with the Macs because the people who would know how to use them are going to replace the mouse with something else anyway.
Maybe he got the educational discount. Or maybe he's using an older version and can't afford to upgrade. I have a friend who works in graphic design at a publishing company, and he heard about Gimp and was experimenting with it. What he told me was, that it actually had some features he was wishing Photoshop had, until he got the latest version of Photoshop, which had them in spades. In other words, it is comparable enough that a new version of Gimp might be better than an old version of Photoshop.
Pffft. AMD does not claim trademarks on the individual words "Micro", "Devices", or "Advanced"; it's the combination. IBM does not claim trademarks on the indivual words "International", "Business", or "Machines", only on the combination. That's very reasonable; while other international companies make business machines, the machines are not international, so it's neither common nor necessary to call them international business machines.
Microsoft is a similar case; they can't trademark "soft" or "micro" per se, but they can certainly claim trademark on "Microsoft", and no sane company would challenge that; the combination of "micro" followed directly by "soft" was not used in the industry prior to the founding of that company.
"Windows" is entirely another matter. I'm not certain I wholly support Lindows.com, for a couple of reasons (not least of which that their founder used to be involved with mp3.com, a source of a great deal of spam then and now), and I'm not as condemning of Microsoft as a lot of people here (though certainly I like to have some alternatives), but there's only one right way for this suit to turn out. Computer windows are a general concept in GUIs and have been since before Microsoft started doing them; that point is not in dispute, and it is really the only question that matters to the case. Otherwise next year AOL Time Warner (or some other huge company) can start putting a metric tonne of thousand-dollar bills into marketing their new product called "the Internet" or "Necktie" or "Milk", and in ten years time go out and get a trade mark, and everyone else will have to stop using the term -- and that's plain wrong.
Besides that, Microsoft does not _need_ the name "Windows" anyway; they can (and should anyway, IMO, for other reasons) just start calling the OS Microsoft (with a version indicator).
I'm going off topic now... There are several reasons MS should do this; one is that their customers do it anyway half the time. Another reason is that the "Window" metaphor is old and Microsoft may decide to loose it in a future product. The best reason, though, is because of the added implication of compatibility it would lend to all their other products ("Microsoft Foo") -- a way to FUD competing ISV products without actually mentioning them at all.
Microsoft got a lot of mileage in the nineties out of there being loads of software for Windows, but what they need now, in order to expand, is to be the primary providers of said software. (Select ISVs could sign special contracts and get a "Microsoft Compatible" seal of approval if their products pass a Microsoft inspection, don't run on other platforms, pay royalties to MS, and swear eternal undying loyalty plus their firstborn sons...) Where else is MS going to expand, once everyone has it on their desktop? To keep growing the revenue stream they need more. The embedded market is not embracing them, and while they have had some gains in the server market, there's no future for Microsoft there, for two reasons: first, because the whole server market is much, much smaller than Microsoft's existing userbase, and second Linux. Where can they grow? Applications are the obvious place. Either that or branch into other industries than software, but they have more leverage going into software than, say, baby toys or cars.
So, all those ISVs that have got MS where they are? Microsoft now needs to kill them. That's my take on it. Systems that will only run signed code are one way to do that, but that's the hard way, because it can't be done gradually. FUD can be done in the lobster-boiling way: first kill off the two-bit nobody ISVs, then come back for medium-tier, and save the big boys until you have the users used to thinking in terms of your "Microsoft Compatible" seal of approval meaning compatibility, at which point you can drop each of them one at a time and make not just 90% of the OSes but 90% of _all_ software. Making it harder to download executable files with MSIE in the name of security would be one logical early step down this path; another would be dropping the "Windows" name in favour of calling the OS "Microsoft", starting with the next version.
So, err, back to topic: Microsoft (having lost their preliminary injunction thingy) should be trying to drag this case out for virtually ever and hope to have Microsoft ready to release and the Microsoft Compatible seal of approval ready to advertise just about a month after the verdict hits, before any other major company, can take any real advantage of the word windows.
Well, if GPL is Free Speech, and proprietary freeware is Free Beer, and BSD is free as in loose, untied, unrestricted, then I guess that most Microsoft stuff would mostly be Free* (with the purchase of...)
There is also some MS stuff that is really Free as in Beer, though the GPL zealots would say it's Free as in Cheese on a Mousetrap.
> Just because it isn't broke doesn't mean it can't be fixed. > Windows is universally understood
Windows is nothing like as universally understood as the back button. The back button is the only successful application of DWIM that I've ever seen; it consistently does exactly what users want it to do. 90 year-old people who don't have a computer at home and are afraid to put more than one finger on the mouse at once understand the back button the first time it is explained in a single sentence, and they never forget what it does. (I teach introductory computer classes at a public library.) Windows is *nothing* like that. The start menu can be explained twenty times to some of these people, and they never get it.
The list of computer things people understand as well as the back button is _very_ short. Off the top of my head, I can think of the bold B button for making text bold in word processors, and that's about it -- and even that runs into trouble when they aren't sure which text it applies to; nobody ever wonders which page the back button will effect.
It wasn't removed; it was just turned off by default -- for good reason; all it did was take up space; approximately 0.0000% of the web has _useful_ link tags, and even if you count non-useful ones it's still a pretty small minority. I used to set the thing to Show Only As Needed (meaning, when the site has at least one tag), but I ended up turning it to Never, because on the occasions that it does show up it's doubleplusunuseful, as near as I can tell.
If you do actually find it useful, you can easily turn it on by selecting View->Show/Hide->Site Navigation Bar->Show Always. While you're at it, point out an example of a site where it's useful.
> I'm not understanding what this team has changed, exactly.
Indeed. In particular: > They have replaced the current stacking system, which only records > index pages, with one that records every page in the order it was > visited.
Huh? What current stacking system are they talking about? I have NEVER seen that behavior. Nor would it make any sense whatsoever; the web is designed around the principle that all pages are horizontal from one another (which is why it's an href, not a vref).
Some experimentation has been done with the concept of "Up", either by using the link tags or by s/[^\/]+\/?// URI trimming, but while both have theoretical merit, such a small percentage of the web is structured in the expected way that these features turn out to be you never use or something you use very rarely (respectively).
As far as recording only index pages (does that mean only index.*, or does it mean something else?), I thought about that for almost four seconds, but in the end I concluded that it's imbecilic.
Indeed. I've had a forward button in every browser[1] I've used since 1994, and I've yet to discover a use for it. Is it in case you hit back by mistake, or what? If I were redesigning the web browser toolbars to conserve space, the forward button is the first thing I would drop. (Well, that's assuming you've already turned off the things Navigator's prefs dialog lets you turn off easily, such as print and home.) I'd probably remove stop too and use the extra space to make the history button a first-class citizen. (Oh, that's another thing about the forward button: the history list gives you all of its functionality plus a great deal more. This is also true of back, but back you use so constantly that it needs to be easy to hit quickly.)
[1] Except for non-GUI/non-mouse browsers, which have an equivalent
keystroke that does exactly the same thing. Oh, and telnet to
port 80 doesn't have it either.
Re:And fond memories they are!
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> The ability to learn something from someone who's clearly your tech > inferior, without any ego getting in the way...
Any decent techie knows he has limits -- you can't have both complete breadth of knowledge _and_ equal depth in all areas. I've had VMS techies ask me questions about DOS. I make no pretenses about my knowledge of VMS -- I can barely navigate the directory tree. (Okay, so that's fifty times more than the tech support people at APCC who support PowerChute for OpenVMS, but that's another story.) However, DOS is something I do know. Mac people ask me questions about Windows and Linux, I ask Mac people about Mac stuff. Everybody knows about different stuff; all true geeks understand this. The same people who can't believe I don't know who some actress is will marvel at my knowledge about computers or math, because it happens to be something they didn't know. I have picked up a concise way to say this: "They're all easy if you know the answers". What I mean by this is that different pieces of knowledge are not _inherently_ easier or more difficult than one another; what makes them easy or difficult is that you do or don't happen to know them.
So, yeah, if somebody who knows less about computers than I do can explain to me something I didn't know, I should listen, provided they're making something that resembles sense.
Re:Yeah, like when someone bitches about. . .
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> Buy tomorrow's NYT. Save it. Read it once a week for the rest of > your life. You'll pretty much be right up to date with the news > just following that stratagy. I'm not kidding.
This was discovered a long time ago. "There is nothing new under the sun", Solomon wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
> Seriously though, what is up with a 17 inch Powerbook?? Who the
> hell will buy such a huge notebook?
I'm holding out for larger. Yes, really. I've been looking around
at various laptops (e.g., at EmperorLinux), but the _largest_ displays
I can find are 16" viewable, and that's just plain small. I went
out a while back and bought myself a nineteen-inch monitor for a
_reason_. Because I need every last millimeter of that screen space.
A 16-inch display is just _not_ enough space. At that size, by
the time you split your Emacs frame into three windows, you can't
see enough lines in any of them to get context, or else you've
split two of them horizontally and can't see an entire line, which
is usually worse. Or maybe you're not editing text today; maybe
today you're editing graphics instead. Your brushes and layers
dialog and tools and tool options will take up more than half of
that screen -- you won't have hardly any space left for an actual
image. If you need to work on two images side-by-side, heaven
help you. I suppose it would be alright if all you want to do
is browse the web and get email... but I just can't function on
a display that small, not if I have to do anything much.
I saw this 17 inch model, and my first reaction was, "Well, that's
only an inch less than my 18-viewable display..." but then I saw
the aspect ratio, did the calculations, and it turns out that my
18" viewable ("19 inch") CRT has a full 15% more display area than
this PowerBook. (And yes, the resolution is also higher (1600x1200
if I max it out) although they both have a res in line with their
size, so it really is the display area that counts; the pixels can
only get so small and things still be easy to see.)
So if I were to use this PowerBook, I'd have to give up some 13% of
my display area (as _well_ as my Avant keyboard). Nothing Doing.
And that's the _largest_ I've seen. But the larger ones (16" and
up) are starting to come out more and more, so I'm figuring if I
wait long enough, some genious manufacturer will come out with a
laptop that actually fills up my lap and gives me a real actual
honest-to-goodness display area, and hopefully something that
resembles a full-size keyboard too.
Sure, these models won't be popular with the folks who really want
a wristwatch model, but that's a different market segment. Those
people don't actually _use_ their computers, they just want to
have something easy to tote around in a shirt pocket that they
can claim is a computer. Me, what I basically want is a desktop
system with fewer cords, built all in one piece that folds once,
with lower power consumption and a battery built in, so that I can
lug it around if I need to.
I also need a good deal of RAM. (The CPU, however, can be a
pretty much anything that doesn't use much power. Bonus points
if it's x86-compatible, but as long as it runs some form of unix
and XFree and is _reasonably_ common so most apps will compile,
it'll do. I'd definitely consider an Apple system if the more
important things like screen size were what I want.)
The _idea_ of having something portable appeals to me -- as well
as the idea of the battery built in, so that if the power goes out
I don't have problems. (I could get a UPS, but then I've thrown
_all_ pretenses of portability out the window.) But unless some
company comes out with portables with a little more display area,
my next computer will be... another desktop. That's why it's good
to see Apple introducing this seventeen-incher. If it sells well,
I can hope that other manufacturers will follow suit, and that at
some point some genius will step it up a little more...
> The only thing it's missing is being able to
> limit the number of times animated gifs run
That's a very significant thing to be missing.
I've been disabling looping animations ever since
I found a page on the web that described how to do
it with Netscape 4.08, and since that day I WILL
NOT use a browser that loops animations forever.
(With Netscape 4, you had to use a hex editor;
fortunately now that's not necessary.)
I wanted to post this over there, but their server has succumbed, so...
True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but
why will you say that I am mad? The ring had sharpened my senses--not
destroyed-- not dulled them. Above all was the sense of seeing in the
wraith world acute. I saw all things in the earth and under the
earth. I saw many things from the crack of mount doom. How, then, am
I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily -- how calmly I can tell
you the whole story.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once
conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none.
Passion there was none. I loved the ring. It had never wronged me.
It had never given me trouble. For its gold I had no desire. I think
it was the eye! Yes, it was this! The one eye resembled that of a
vulture--a fiery red eye, with a dark shroud over it. Whenever it
fell upon me, my blood ran cold and so by degrees--very graduallyI
made up my mind to take the old ring to the crack of doom, and thus to
rid myself of the eye forever.
-- Opening section of The Telltale Ring, by Edgar Allen Poe
> 2.96283e-1850 According to kcalc, anyway. I'm no math guru, so
> I'm not totally sure what that means,
It means different things to different people. To a physicist it
probably sounds like a distance in meters or something. A math
guru would immediately class it as epsilon. Non-technical people
also have a word for this number: "zero"
The original poster who said that IE is "in the kernel" probably
meant that IE is part of the internal guts of how Windows works.
That probably means he has it mixed up with Windows Explorer, but
that would be an easy mistake to make, especially if you've never
seen earlier versions of the two programs from before they started
sharing display libraries and WE started rendering HTML (c1998).
IE didn't _used_ to install a driver as such, but I haven't installed
a recent version of IE. (I've used IE6, but it was preinstalled.)
Anyway, what the article describes isn't totally clear, but if I
understood correctly, it's not talking about IE _really_ trying to
send a request packet where no connection has ever been set up, but
rather about the issue first being noticed as a result of a trace
that showed behavior that _appeared_ to be that -- which it would,
if the server closed the connection and IE pretended it was still
open and tried to use it. I suspect that's what's really happening,
but if you jump in in the middle you see that there's nothing on
the server end in the way of a connection and this unsynchronised
request packet appears out of the blue, _as if_ IE were skipping
the handshake -- but perhaps it really just never closed its end
of an earlier connection.
As far as whether that violates the TCP, you'd have to ask a TCP
guru, which I'm not. If it did violate TCP, I can easily believe
Microsoft might do it anyway, but I'm not ready to assume that it
violates the protocol without checking, since many protocols leave
room for behaviors that are not usually done, and it could be that
Microsoft followed the protocol in a different way from others.
I had CoBOL, but I won't claim that it taught me much.
> there are at least three alternative explanations for common DNA.
I thought of another. If you subscribe to Hume's epistemics, you
can say you imagined the common DNA sequences. This is of course
complete nonsense, but nobody can _prove_ that it's nonsense.
> Evolutionary biology, as with archaeology, is an historical science.
Sometimes they are also called "soft" sciences. There are a number
of such fields; my point is, none of them use the scientific method;
they are called "sciences" because people don't understand science.
> The way to test theories in evolutionary biology is to continue
> studying existing organisms and fossil specemins in ways that
> determine their historical development.
That's not a valid way to test hypotheses. There are no predicted
outcomes, no control groups, no doubleblindness... in short, there
is no science in this method.
> With the tools of modern biochemistry, for instance, we can use
> DNA sequencing to test whether organisms that we believe to be
> related from previous studies actually share common DNA patterns
> that are consistent with common descent.
Evolutionists _assume_ that common DNA means common descent because
they believe that evolution has occurred, but there are at least
three alternative explanations for common DNA. (In rough order of
popularity, the three I can think of are common design, complete
chance, or similar circumstances leading to similar development.)
Meanwhile, the very basic idea of evolution (that one organism can
evolve into another) has never been tested and cannot ever be
tested in a scientific fashion.
> To find that the DNA sequences are incompatible or unrelated would
> create a difficulty that must be resolved. If it can't be resolved
> in the frame work of evolutionary theory, then that is disproof!
That's naive. Any number of unexpected things have been found over
the years that have had to be resolved or explained, but regardless
of how many such difficulties arrive, none of them ever disprove
anything, because none of it has ever been tested in even a single
experiment.
> As an extreme example, if the fossil record started showing (what
> are currently belived to be) relatively recent forms (e.g. modern
> humans) in much older sediments
That has happened repeatedly. It disproves nothing; the timetables
are just adjusted, or the order in which various organisms evolved,
or the age of the layer is changed, or gradualism passes out of
vogue and is replaced by catastrophism. A few years later as the
difficulties are forgotten and the difficulties with catastrophic
evolution prove hard to explain, gradualism passes back into vogue,
and a fresh crack is taken at explaining away its problems.
Evolutionism has much more in common with history than with physics.
> There are many questions in human psychology that can be answered
> scientifically, you just have to ask them right.
This is true to some extent, but generally accepted ethical standards
prevent you from conducting most of the experiments that would really
be interesting. Nobody complains very much about the unethical
treatment of matter and energy, but you do one unethical thing to a
human, and the rights groups are all over you.
> I would argue that accounting and programming appeal to similar
> personality types (detail oriented, logical, likes to work with
> numbers)
No. Accountants love routine; programmers hate routine. Accountants
love working with numbers; programmers _don't_ work with numbers;
they work with concepts. If a programmer has some numbers that need
to be worked with, he'll write a program to do it. Programmers are
(have to be) creative and like to think up original ways to do stuff;
accountants like to have a formula that always works and use it every
time they run into the same situation. Accountants memorise a whole
bunch of formulas; programmer types don't learn formulas; they just
understand the principle behind the thing and create the formula
from scratch on the fly if they ever need it.
As far as "logical", you're talking about entirely different meanings
of the word "logical". When we say programmers are logical thinkers,
we mean that they can hold boolean expressions in their heads with
five levels of nested parentheses, break a complex problem down
into its basic components, or reason deductively. You seem to be
under the impression that "logical" is antithetical to "emotional",
but I would say it's orthogonal.
> while marketing and programming would appear to different
> personality types (marketing = people person
Some programmers are people persons, and others are not. As for
me, I'm a borderline reclusive type, the extreme sort who can spend
twenty hours a day in an unlit basement room with a computer and
emerge only to eat and use the restroom, the sort who considers
parties and banquets to be torture, but even at that I'd _much_
rather give a public presentation than mess with a bunch of debit
and credit arithmetic. I understand computers far better than I
understand people, but people are at least interesting some of the
time; marketing sound like a challenge, but not an impossible one,
and programmers like challenges. It wouldn't be easy, but it
could maybe be fun, at least for a while. Accounting just sounds
painfully boring and tediously difficult. I'd rather chew tinfoil
for a living than be an accountant.
> Programming is a subject in itself, there are concepts, languages
> only implement those concepts
Indeed, and different langauges, in the process of implementing the
various concepts in different ways, emphasise and teach different
concepts with varying degrees of effectiveness. When I took a class
in Pascal in high school, it revolutionised the way I wrote BASIC.
Then I got to college and took other languages. ForTran, QBasic
(yes, they had a class in that), Visual Basic, C++ -- none of these
languages really made fundamental changes to the way I thought about
programming, but each of them did teach me something. After Pascal,
the next language that did completely change my thinking was Inform;
in my spare time I read through the Inform Designer's Manual and
messed around with Inform, which taught me far more about object
oriented design than any amount of C++ ever could have done. After
I graduated, I continued to learn yet more languages. Emacs lisp
once _again_ revolutionised my programming, as did Perl. Since
Perl I've played with a handful of languages, including Python and
Javascript. No, not every one of these languages makes me a better
programmer, but _some_ of them have. The influences of Inform and
lisp are still with me when I program in Perl.
So while my resume doesn't claim that I'm fluent in 20 languages,
it does say that I've had worked somewhat with a number of them,
and then specifies the specific ones I'm most comfortable with.
(Not that it probably matters; I'm not really trying to get work
as a programmer per se.)
> > What's missing? What am I missing?
>
> The ability for my wife to walk into Best Buy and purchase
> "Hoyle Card Games". Or "Reader Rabbit Preschool".
Oh, I see, a lot of crap is missing.
Upthread, the statement was made, "People use applications, not
operating systems", but in fact it goes further than that: most
people don't give two bits about either, as long as they can print
their email, listen to CDs, browse the web and play Yahoo games,
make stupid greeting cards and fliers, and so on. What's missing
on Linux/Gnome? Mostly, ten hours' worth of reconfiguring things
to appeal to people who don't know what they're doing: removing
the foot menu, terminal, and so on, creating launchers for the six
or seven apps the user might actually want to use (OOo, Netscape,
and so on), making the wallpaper automatically rotate once a day
through a directory full of pretty pictures, pointing the browser
start page at Google or Yahoo, setting up an email account with
a nice little envelope launcher on the panel and the settings
already entered, and so on.
> "Apple should buy out Quark simply to get this app out," opined
> Stuart Long. "It's the one app holding back the adoption of an
> amazing Unix OS."
First off, the only thing holding back adoption of OS X is time; as
people replace their old Macs with new ones, and as new apps and
versions of apps are released that do not support Classic, adoption
of OS X is a foregone conclusion. No one app matters, really. It
can make the difference of a couple of years for some people, but
in the long run it doesn't fundamentally change anything.
My other comment about this is that for Apple to buy out Quark in
order to get XPress out would probably disgruntle Adobe, which is
probably not something Apple particularly wants to do.
> Why is it so frowned upon to question evolution?
Because, evolution has to do with origins and therefore fundamentally
is not science. It falls into the same category as archeology, human
psychology, and history -- there is no way to conduct experiments to
test hyphotheses and theories in these areas. Put another way, there
is no way to conduct science in these subject areas. So instead the
people who study them do it by examining whatever existing evidence
they can find and then sitting around thinking about what it probably
might mean, and making up theories they will never be able to test or
verify. No one will ever prove or disprove any of it.
Physics is somewhat different. In physics, as in math, if your
theory isn't quite right, sooner or later somebody will *prove*
that it's not right.
> As it is, I left the redeye in because it just looked less freaky
.bmp and .png
> than what iPhoto did.
Working with Gimp, the best thing I've found for redeye so far (note
that I'm neither a graphics professional nor a Gimp expert; I just
started using Gimp for stuff like converting between
a few months ago, and learned more from there) is to use a selection
tool to grab just the irises, copy them to a new layer, then go
Filters->Colors->Map->Color Range Mapping
I'd be interested in hearing if other people have better techniques
for doing this. Also, if both eyes are completely red, what's the
best way to determine what target color range to use?
> All graphicians I know use those snazzy wacom tablets.
I know one who swears by trackballs, but yeah, the one-button mice
that Apple ships are not so much for the graphics professionals as
for the other people who buy Macs. Apple knows it's pointless to
ship a better mouse with the Macs because the people who would know
how to use them are going to replace the mouse with something else
anyway.
Maybe he got the educational discount. Or maybe he's using an older
version and can't afford to upgrade. I have a friend who works in
graphic design at a publishing company, and he heard about Gimp and
was experimenting with it. What he told me was, that it actually had
some features he was wishing Photoshop had, until he got the latest
version of Photoshop, which had them in spades. In other words, it
is comparable enough that a new version of Gimp might be better than
an old version of Photoshop.
> Advanced Micro Devices? Hmm, a generic name
Pffft. AMD does not claim trademarks on the individual words "Micro",
"Devices", or "Advanced"; it's the combination. IBM does not claim
trademarks on the indivual words "International", "Business", or
"Machines", only on the combination. That's very reasonable; while
other international companies make business machines, the machines
are not international, so it's neither common nor necessary to call
them international business machines.
Microsoft is a similar case; they can't trademark "soft" or "micro"
per se, but they can certainly claim trademark on "Microsoft", and
no sane company would challenge that; the combination of "micro"
followed directly by "soft" was not used in the industry prior to
the founding of that company.
"Windows" is entirely another matter. I'm not certain I wholly
support Lindows.com, for a couple of reasons (not least of which
that their founder used to be involved with mp3.com, a source of
a great deal of spam then and now), and I'm not as condemning of
Microsoft as a lot of people here (though certainly I like to have
some alternatives), but there's only one right way for this suit
to turn out. Computer windows are a general concept in GUIs and
have been since before Microsoft started doing them; that point is
not in dispute, and it is really the only question that matters
to the case. Otherwise next year AOL Time Warner (or some other
huge company) can start putting a metric tonne of thousand-dollar
bills into marketing their new product called "the Internet" or
"Necktie" or "Milk", and in ten years time go out and get a trade
mark, and everyone else will have to stop using the term -- and
that's plain wrong.
Besides that, Microsoft does not _need_ the name "Windows" anyway;
they can (and should anyway, IMO, for other reasons) just start
calling the OS Microsoft (with a version indicator).
I'm going off topic now... There are several reasons MS should
do this; one is that their customers do it anyway half the time.
Another reason is that the "Window" metaphor is old and Microsoft
may decide to loose it in a future product. The best reason,
though, is because of the added implication of compatibility it
would lend to all their other products ("Microsoft Foo") -- a way to
FUD competing ISV products without actually mentioning them at all.
Microsoft got a lot of mileage in the nineties out of there being
loads of software for Windows, but what they need now, in order to
expand, is to be the primary providers of said software. (Select
ISVs could sign special contracts and get a "Microsoft Compatible"
seal of approval if their products pass a Microsoft inspection,
don't run on other platforms, pay royalties to MS, and swear
eternal undying loyalty plus their firstborn sons...) Where else
is MS going to expand, once everyone has it on their desktop? To
keep growing the revenue stream they need more. The embedded
market is not embracing them, and while they have had some gains
in the server market, there's no future for Microsoft there, for
two reasons: first, because the whole server market is much, much
smaller than Microsoft's existing userbase, and second Linux.
Where can they grow? Applications are the obvious place. Either
that or branch into other industries than software, but they have
more leverage going into software than, say, baby toys or cars.
So, all those ISVs that have got MS where they are? Microsoft
now needs to kill them. That's my take on it. Systems that will
only run signed code are one way to do that, but that's the hard
way, because it can't be done gradually. FUD can be done in the
lobster-boiling way: first kill off the two-bit nobody ISVs,
then come back for medium-tier, and save the big boys until you
have the users used to thinking in terms of your "Microsoft
Compatible" seal of approval meaning compatibility, at which point
you can drop each of them one at a time and make not just 90% of
the OSes but 90% of _all_ software. Making it harder to download
executable files with MSIE in the name of security would be one
logical early step down this path; another would be dropping the
"Windows" name in favour of calling the OS "Microsoft", starting
with the next version.
So, err, back to topic: Microsoft (having lost their preliminary
injunction thingy) should be trying to drag this case out for
virtually ever and hope to have Microsoft ready to release and
the Microsoft Compatible seal of approval ready to advertise just
about a month after the verdict hits, before any other major
company, can take any real advantage of the word windows.
Well, if GPL is Free Speech, and proprietary freeware is Free Beer,
and BSD is free as in loose, untied, unrestricted, then I guess that
most Microsoft stuff would mostly be Free* (with the purchase of...)
There is also some MS stuff that is really Free as in Beer, though
the GPL zealots would say it's Free as in Cheese on a Mousetrap.
> Just because it isn't broke doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
> Windows is universally understood
Windows is nothing like as universally understood as the back button.
The back button is the only successful application of DWIM that I've
ever seen; it consistently does exactly what users want it to do. 90
year-old people who don't have a computer at home and are afraid to
put more than one finger on the mouse at once understand the back
button the first time it is explained in a single sentence, and they
never forget what it does. (I teach introductory computer classes at
a public library.) Windows is *nothing* like that. The start menu
can be explained twenty times to some of these people, and they never
get it.
The list of computer things people understand as well as the back
button is _very_ short. Off the top of my head, I can think of
the bold B button for making text bold in word processors, and
that's about it -- and even that runs into trouble when they aren't
sure which text it applies to; nobody ever wonders which page the
back button will effect.
> This was removed right before 1.0 was released
It wasn't removed; it was just turned off by default -- for good
reason; all it did was take up space; approximately 0.0000% of the
web has _useful_ link tags, and even if you count non-useful ones
it's still a pretty small minority. I used to set the thing to
Show Only As Needed (meaning, when the site has at least one tag),
but I ended up turning it to Never, because on the occasions that
it does show up it's doubleplusunuseful, as near as I can tell.
If you do actually find it useful, you can easily turn it on by
selecting View->Show/Hide->Site Navigation Bar->Show Always. While
you're at it, point out an example of a site where it's useful.
> I'm not understanding what this team has changed, exactly.
Indeed. In particular:
> They have replaced the current stacking system, which only records
> index pages, with one that records every page in the order it was
> visited.
Huh? What current stacking system are they talking about? I have
NEVER seen that behavior. Nor would it make any sense whatsoever;
the web is designed around the principle that all pages are
horizontal from one another (which is why it's an href, not a vref).
Some experimentation has been done with the concept of "Up", either
by using the link tags or by s/[^\/]+\/?// URI trimming, but while
both have theoretical merit, such a small percentage of the web is
structured in the expected way that these features turn out to be
you never use or something you use very rarely (respectively).
As far as recording only index pages (does that mean only index.*,
or does it mean something else?), I thought about that for almost
four seconds, but in the end I concluded that it's imbecilic.
Indeed. I've had a forward button in every browser[1] I've used since
1994, and I've yet to discover a use for it. Is it in case you hit
back by mistake, or what? If I were redesigning the web browser
toolbars to conserve space, the forward button is the first thing I
would drop. (Well, that's assuming you've already turned off the
things Navigator's prefs dialog lets you turn off easily, such as
print and home.) I'd probably remove stop too and use the extra
space to make the history button a first-class citizen. (Oh, that's
another thing about the forward button: the history list gives you
all of its functionality plus a great deal more. This is also true
of back, but back you use so constantly that it needs to be easy to
hit quickly.)
[1] Except for non-GUI/non-mouse browsers, which have an equivalent
keystroke that does exactly the same thing. Oh, and telnet to
port 80 doesn't have it either.
> The ability to learn something from someone who's clearly your tech
> inferior, without any ego getting in the way...
Any decent techie knows he has limits -- you can't have both complete
breadth of knowledge _and_ equal depth in all areas. I've had VMS
techies ask me questions about DOS. I make no pretenses about my
knowledge of VMS -- I can barely navigate the directory tree. (Okay,
so that's fifty times more than the tech support people at APCC who
support PowerChute for OpenVMS, but that's another story.) However,
DOS is something I do know. Mac people ask me questions about
Windows and Linux, I ask Mac people about Mac stuff. Everybody
knows about different stuff; all true geeks understand this. The
same people who can't believe I don't know who some actress is will
marvel at my knowledge about computers or math, because it happens to
be something they didn't know. I have picked up a concise way to say
this: "They're all easy if you know the answers". What I mean by
this is that different pieces of knowledge are not _inherently_
easier or more difficult than one another; what makes them easy or
difficult is that you do or don't happen to know them.
So, yeah, if somebody who knows less about computers than I do can
explain to me something I didn't know, I should listen, provided
they're making something that resembles sense.
> Buy tomorrow's NYT. Save it. Read it once a week for the rest of
> your life. You'll pretty much be right up to date with the news
> just following that stratagy. I'm not kidding.
This was discovered a long time ago. "There is nothing new under
the sun", Solomon wrote.