> Detectives will tell you the reason a lot of criminals get > caught is because they have this attitude.
I think the main reason a lot of criminals get caught committing crimes is because they commit crimes. Yes, they also fail to cover their tracks, but if your tracks are clean, there's nothing to cover.
Now, I'm not saying I'm all gung-ho about giving up all pretenses of privacy, but the extreme privacy nuts are being silly. I don't particularly want any store I walk into to know my complete lifetime purchase history at other stores, but I sure don't have any objection to the government's knowing when and where I was born and how much money I made last year; that information is... harmless.
As far as aggregating information various branches of the same goverment already had into one large database... I don't see why this is objectionable; if some of that information is too sensitive, then why did they have it in the first place? The objections should have been raised long ago, then. If not, then what's the problem? Save your protests for when something happens that creates a new invasion of your privacy. If you whine continually about stupid things ("oh, no, the government will know about my gun if it has to be registered!"), nobody is going to listen when you object to having a radio-freqency ID tag and GPS locator inside your body, or whatever. Pick your battles. Speak up when it _matters_.
Shouldn't be any trouble -- cash is money, after all. It doesn't make you untraceable, however, because you still have to plonk down ID.
Re:In case you missed it the first time...
on
Spammer Gets Spam Mailed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> the satisfaction of signing Mr. Ralsky up for a few more mass > mailers
Signing him up for mass mailers lacks imagination and is easy for him to counter. (Bulk mail is usually obvious and easy to sort out.) Some better ideas...
* Send him a personal letter in a hand-addressed envelope.
(Don't be nasty; that would just be grounds for a lawsuit.
You could explain why you don't like spam, though, and ask
to be taken off all his lists. But be courteous about it.)
* Send "pen pal" mail to a few hundred thousand third-graders
with his name and return address. (This one might be illegal;
consult a lawyer first. IANAL, just brainstorming here.)
* Send him a can of Hormel product, nicely wrapped, with a
gift card.
> If you zoom in photo that has the car in the driveway the plates > have been blured out.
Photographs are always like that when you get to the limit of their resolution. The image just doesn't have enough information to pull out the plates. You have to zoom all the way in just to see for sure that there *is* a plate, and it's about six pixels high. It would, however, be easy enough for someone with a lot of spare time to watch his street over several weeks and see if a black jaguar comes to and from his house frequently... that wouldn't prove it was the same car, but it would provide a good lead for further investigation. Of course, asking somebody to have that kind of spare time is a little much. A hidden webcam might be a more realistic approach...
In his neighborhood, you'd probably need a zoning variance for that.
> Maybe we can put some Retina-Scorcher(tm) floodlights
Anybody got a spare airport beacon? Say, while we're getting a zoning variance, we could put in more than billboards across the street. A place of business, perhaps, something legitimate, though by pure coincidence it may be also a tad hard on property values. The ecconomy, being down, needs more industry, right?
> It's been my experience that criminal records or past have > nothing to do with taste.
That's true. I know plenty of people who (as far as I know) are law-abiding citizens but who have grotesquely bad taste. (On the bad taste scale, grotesquely bad is a couple of levels beyond bad and just one step shy of blinking lime green Courier New on a megenta background.)
> I'm not sure where Watergate and spammer fit on the Bad > Guy Continuum
Not even comparable. Watergate was a case of getting caught doing something illegal and underhanded, yes, but it was a case of getting caught doing that to a rival organisation that, you can be stone cold certain, was busy trying to think of a way to get away with doing approximately the same thing to the perpetrators. Politicians sneaking around doing illegal things to other politicians before they do something to them first. (Politics is a dirty game; you don't run for public office at the federal level if you can't handle the possibility someone might try to spy on you illegally. Sure, if you can catch them you nail them with it; their bad for getting caught; make sure you sweep your own dealings under the rug. Did I mention that politics is a dirty game?) Yes, it's illegal, and yes, it's wrong, and yes, all the ones we catch should pay the price, in jail if possible. But politicians spying illegally on other politicians is wrong in the same sense that it's wrong for mob hit men to assasinate other mob hit men. It's wrong, but it's only worth so much of society's resources to try to prevent it.
Spammers prey on people who have never heard of them and don't want anything to do with the whole business. That's different, not because the spammer himself is any more guilty (guilty is guilty), but because it's more important for society to act as necessary to stop it. If spammers mostly just sent junk email to other spammers, I'd say "sure, it's wrong, but who cares?"
Now, about that spammer: who has the nads to try to call him 1-800-COLLECT?
Firebombing might be just a wee bit over the top. Instead, see if you can't get a zoning variance for the lot across the street and put in a business. Like, maybe, a paper mill.
> Even so, I really doubt 3.0 came out before Intel managed to get > to 120mhz.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Note the all-important qualifier in my post about "the ones anyone could afford to buy"? Yes, the high-end Intel processors were probably doing 120MHz, at least in theory, but the cost of motherboards, to say nothing of the chips themselves, was a deterrent for many. Living on a college campus, the fastest computer I had actually seen as of 1997 was a DX4/100, which one guy I knew got during sprint semester. I walked across campus to see it. I had also seen a few Pentium systems, but none faster than 75MHz. (Yes, the Pentium did more per clock cycle than the 486 DX2, but so did the DX4, OSIWT. I suspect the system bus on the DX4 was not as fast, though, because I think they used motherboard technologies made for the DX2 originally to get the prices into consumer range.)
Maybe I had my Netscape release dates wrong, but I was thinking that Netscape 3 come out by 1996, and 4 in 1997. I know that my school had Netscape (I'm pretty sure it was 2.x) by 1995, and I was fairly sure they upgraded the following year -- and I _think_ that by May of '97 when I graduated I was using 4.0, because when I grabbed 4.5 in spring of '98 (when I first got the net at home) I did not notice any substantial differences (except that the first time I downloaded Communicator on a friend's recommendation, and it had a bunch of extra junk I had no use for, so I went and got the Navigator standalone and did the uninstall/reinstall thing -- but doing that gave me, I thought, exactly what I'd had at school).
And yes, I do remember Mosaic, but barely. The school had that when I first was shown the web, but after a small number of months they got Netscape Navigator.
> I guess what I'm saying is that the way it used to be, speaking > very generally, was that you had the choice between an OS that > was stable and reliable and one that was easy to use. In the days > hence, Microsoft has come leaps and bounds in the stability > realm...and Linux has come leaps and bounds in the useability
Oh. Yes I can go along with that. Windows '95 was pretty easy to use in 1996 (provided you didn't have to _install_ it, that is), and Linux was fairly stable, so I'm told; personally I didn't use Linux until early 1998 (though it was a secondhand copy of a CheapBytes Debian CD set, so it was probably really 1997 vintage stuff I was using), and at that point "easy to use" is not an adjective I would have used to describe it -- nor would I ever call Windows 95 stable (unless comparing it Mac System 6 or something along those lines, and I'm not sure that would be a useful comparison).
> Expect Google to get raped by lawsuits from Amazon et al
Three or four years ago, when Google was barely established, I might have been somewhat concerned about that. These days, Google is... well, they're not Yahoo!, of course, but they're not George Smith's Cool Web Stuff, either, if you know what I'm saying.
> the google bar. (BTW - when is a Mac version coming?)
You don't need a special version for the Mac. The same version that works on all other platforms should work on the Mac. It's written in XUL, so platform is basically a non-issue. (What version of the browser you have, on the other hand, does matter...)
> You know, another neat feature I'd like (which would be extremely > simple to add) would be a checkbox on their search forms, which, > when checked would make all the search result links open in new > windows.
I always just middle-click them, to open them in new tabs. While they are loading, I scroll down and middle-click several that look promising, then I usually close the tab with the search results. Each time I finish looking at one of the pages, I close that tab, and look at the next one, which by that time has finished loading.
I don't mind advertisements in general; I do mind popups. If popup blocking goes mainstream, all it means to me is legacy sites that require it for obscure reasons will be forced to be fixed or become irrelevant. Then I can happily leave popups disabled *all* the time and browse totally in one window (with multiple tabs if desired). If advertisers load banners into pages to compensate for the lost popups, that's fine with me.
So yes, I _do_ want IE to ship with popup blocking. On by default, if possible. Not because I use IE, but because IE exerts pressure on website authors.
> Actually Microsoft is great at leaving the value added innovations > to their clients. Try looking at "Crazy Browzer". It only takes a > few nights coding to add tabs to IE.
This is right, but it is only half the story. Microsoft is great at leaving the innovations to ISVs and then buying or cloning the ones that prove to be successful or useful. Think back...
DOSEDIT comes out, and people in-the-know declare that they can't live without it. Microsoft produces DOSKEY for 5.0. Stacker is successful. Microsoft produces DoubleSpace for the next version of DOS. Desqview gets rave reviews, and customers say they want windows like Macintosh has. Microsoft produces Windows. Central Point and Norton produce useful disk defragmentation utilities; Microsoft contracts for a defrag utility to include with DOS. Third-party full-screen editors are all the rage; Microsoft drops edlin and produces edit.com, leveraging the IDE editor that they already developed for QuickBasic (and, in the process, including a stripped-down QBasic to avoid the need to extract the editor from it; apparently it was too interwoven to separate before 5.0 shipped; later they did separate it out (or rewrite it) for Win 95). On and on the list goes.
Will the next IE include tabbed browsing? Maybe, but if it doesn't, the version after will. Will the next IE include popup blocking? Maybe, but if it doesn't, more people will use Netscape than already do, and Microsoft knows it; which does Microsoft value more, strong dominance in the browser market (not mere majority, but the kind of overwhelming majority only achieved after IE5 came out), or the support of popup advertisers?
Actually, Microsoft could weasel a way to get both: ship IE with popup blocking, but place "select partners" on a whitelist, and make it prohibitively difficult for casual users to remove sites from the whitelist. (HINT: involve regedit.) On the whole, this would be mostly good for user experience, since it would greatly reduce the sheer overwhelming quantity of popups. Microsoft could claim that "the competitive market" (Netscape) forced them to include popup blocking, elicit sympathy, use it as one more argument in any antitrust procedings (oh, you thought we'd seen the last of those?), and then turn around and tell strategic advertisers that it means less competition from nobody advertisers who didn't make the whitelist -- and use it as a negotiation point: doubleclick would probably bend over backwards and kiss strategic parts of Microsoft's corporate anatomy to be on the whitelist.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft just _bought_ CrazyBrowser. OTOH, popup blocking is not the hardest thing in the universe to implement, and they could just do it from scratch. CrazyBrowser would then have to offer more innovations or become irrelevant.
> "a sentence does not end with a preposition" > "ok. where's the library at, asshole?"
The problem with this is, the rule "never end a sentence with a preposition" is a mnemonic rule; it can be used as an aid to memory, but it does not tell the whole story of the way the grammar works. In particular, the structure of a prepositional phrase in English is as follows: preposition optional_modifiers object. i.e., a preposition is followed by an object (which may be immediately preceded by attributive modifiers, as any noun may be).
However, this doesn't tell the whole story either, because it assumes that the preposition is functioning as a preposition. There are other ways prepositions can function. In particular, many verbs can be used in conjunction with a following preposition, and this may alter their meaning (though in some cases it does not). For example, "Before varnishing the board, I had to sand off the rough parts." Here the preposition "off" goes with the verb "sand", and can be considered a part of the compound verb "sand off". The words that follow ("the rough parts") are the direct object of the verb; the preposition itself does not have an object. This is quite correct. The verb may in some cases also be intransitive, in which case there may be no words following, and the preposition can indeed end the sentence, without breaking any real rules of grammar. In addition, some of these verbs, together with their preposition, can be used as other parts of speech. For example, "We held a bake off". This also is correct: the preposition "off" does not have an object because it is not functioning as a preposition but rather forming the compound verb "bake off" (which is then used as a noun -- another grammar topic for another day).
"Where is the library at" is a marginal case. It could be argued that there is a compound verb "is at", but if that were the case we would expect it to sound natural if phrased differently, as "Where at is the library", and that just sounds wrong. So my take on the matter is that "Where is the library at" is incorrect grammar, although the most-commonly-stated reason is a gross oversimplification.
The rule about not starting sentences with conjunctions is also an oversimplification. Placing unrelated words before the conjunction does not change anything -- though it is true that in most cases a conjunction at the beginning of a sentence is being used incorrectly.
> No no no, you see everybody had Pentiums running at 120 mhz > when Netscape 3.0 was out.
Err, no, Pentiums didn't run that fast until a year or two later -- at least not the ones anyone could afford to actually buy. A 486 DX4/100 was still considered competitive as a new system even when Netscape 4.0 came out. (Which, incidentally, tells you how *old* Netscape 4.x is. Considering that Netscape 6 was really ony of beta quality, we can be quite thankful that the long wait is over and Netscape has a decent browser out again (since 7.0PR1, which "Preview" or not made 6.2.anything look like junk).) This new Netscape release, from what I've seen of it so far (admittedly, not extensive use) seems to be quite solid, though of course it lacks the majority of the features added during the 1.1 and 1.2 milestones. Which is fine; 1.1 lacked stability, and 1.2 is new enough that it's hard to say (though I'm using 1.2.1 and it seems very solid to me so far); Netscape is right to go with 1.0.2 for now. I'm thinking they'll stick with that 1.0.x branch through several minor releases and go back to the trunk for a new stable branch around 1.4 or 1.6 or so. (This is not inside information, just a prediction based on the pattern I've observed in their behavior over the last couple of years.) By then, the branch they are using will feel really obsolete to people who have been testing the Mozilla builds, but that means that when users upgrade to the next branch they'll notice a sudden influx of features. That branch could be 7.5, but I'm predicting it will be 8.0
Network cards are a bad example -- because they're server stuff (the strong home territory for Linux), and because many of them follow formal specifications. I've had more problems getting Windows to see network cards than I have with Linux. Admittedly, most of my troubles were with really old cards; anything recent works (assuming you feed it the disk with the OEM drivers when it asks, but that's the Windows Way for installing hardware). But anything recent works with Linux too, and I _don't_ have to feed it a driver disk; Hard Drake just sees the card, knows what it is, and starts asking me whether to get an IP addy automatically (DHCP) or assign one manually. And these are no-name 10/100 cards that I buy for $10 from an online wholesaler. The only thing I've had to drag out the command-line to accomplish is IP aliasing, and I still have yet to figure out how to do that at *all* with Windows.
Better examples of poorly-supported hardware would be printers (which all seem to work minimally, but none of them seem to have drivers that support all the features of the printer), scanners, digital cameras, and other desktop/end-user things.
> I'm pretty tired of waiting for hardware manufacturers to > support linux.
Agreed. It is time. Three years ago, the Linux community needed things like a better browser and a better office suite and better desktop tools... Today, there is nothing the Linux community needs more than one major OEM, to ship preconfigured, preinstalled systems designed (in terms of hardware selection) from the ground up for Linux/Gnome/etc.
I believe any one of them could benefit from making the switch, dumping MS entirely, and shipping _all_ Linux-based systems. But it's a substantial risk, because if I'm wrong, and people don't buy it, the switcher would have to bend over backwards and kiss MS's feet in order to recover. I don't think that would happen; I think the savings would be enough and the user satisfaction (if the configuration were done right -- i.e., for end-users; people who know what we are doing can change the config easily enough) good enough that they would sell just as many PCs as before. The problem is, if it does turn out to be successful, like I think, the other OEMs would all follow. Nobody wants to be the guinea pig, and it's hard to blame them. Like I said, there is a risk. So we have to wait while much more tentative steps are taken, toes slowly dipping in the edge of the pool, like Wal*Mart selling Microtel systems on their website... have patience. If the tentative steps are successful, further steps will be taken. The OEMs _want_ to tell Microsoft which bodily orifice to stick their licensing fees into, believe me. When they are confident that they safely can, they will.
I'm tired of waiting too, but actually we haven't been waiting for the OEMs for very long; OSS wasn't really ready for the desktop until somewhat recently (2000 at the earliest, really not until mozilla 1.0 and OO.o 1.0 came out, both in 2002), and before that we were waiting on end-user software to mature. If you think of it that way, we've only been waiting on the OEMs for less than a year. Adoption will be gradual; it might take five years or so. Think of yourself as an early adopter. And when the OEMs do defect, Microsoft will have a response. I'm not sure what it will be, but it will be significant.
I somehow failed to notice the "faster" part. I multiboot Mandrake 8 on the same hardware and it's very comparable, performance-wise. If anything, I'm not stressing WinXP as much, because I'm not running things like Apache and mysqld in the background, since I do most of my work on the other OS. I just boot WinXP to test stuff on it.
> I installed it 10 days ago
Well, I'm sure that's _plenty_ of time to discover all the problems with it. (Heck, I've been using Mandrake 8 extensively for going on a year and am still finding problems with it...)
> As for secure, well, who knows...
The privilege escalation that the other user was talking about is, in my opinion, irrelevant for most systems. Just don't give random untrusted people an account, simple as that. (Windows is not made for hosting shell accounts... any ISP that tries that is just asking for trouble.)
Of course, there are a number of well-known ways to exploit Windows systems remotely, but almost (?) all of them involve applications or services, not the OS as such. In particular, we all know IIS and Outlook and MSIE are insecure, but there's nothing stopping you from running Apache and Pegasus Mail and Netscape on Windows XP, if you actually care about security. (The question of so many clueless people who don't know better using the default config and allowing their PCs to become DDOS zombies is a separate discussion. Anyway, denial of service is a separate class of attack from actual breaches of security.)
All the shatter attack does is turn every remote exploit into a remote root exploit -- but in most cases, a remote root exploit is not substantially worse than a remote exploit with user privs, because user privs are almost always sufficent to do Very Bad Things (such as delete the user's data files, send personal information over the internet, or run a DDOS zombie). The major exception to this, of course, is when you have multiple internet services running on the same box (e.g., the same computer is your mail server and also is your web server). I'm quickly reaching the conclusion that for any important application (such as ISP stuff), one-service-per-box is a policy worthy of much repetition.
> In terms of usability and stability, MS has really come a long > way from then Windows 9X
I'll certainly grant Windows XP is more stable than Windows 9x. There really isn't any question about that. And it's stable enough for most home users, who turn the thing off every night anyway "to stop that noise". Some of us demand more... I use Mandrake 8, and I've become annoyed with the need to reboot each and every time I want to install new internal components, such as a new sound card, more RAM, new hard drive... it's a neverending reboot-fest. I want a platform that supports hot- swapping of everything including the motherboard and power supply, darnit.
That depends on how you define "read". Maybe 97% or more of Americans can read at a basic level, but quite a few of them get lost if you start using words that are moderately unusual, words with more than about two syllables, or sentences with more than two clauses, or if you require a reading speed that approaches the speed at which people normally talk. I could easily believe 23% can't read in a natural and easy fashion or read more advanced stuff. I'd be guessing at the figure, but that sounds pretty close to me. It's worse in some areas than others, of course. Galion is probably about 20%. The inner cities tend to be worse.
Also, the percentage who can write coherently is way lower than the percentage who can read; I would hesitate to call anywhere near 97% of the population literate if the ability to construct a sentence and put it to paper is part of the expectation.
Of course, computers write even worse than they read. (If they're making it up as they go, that is. If they have prefab stuff they can do pretty well, but that's different.)
> I can't wait for Notepad to get ported, the true killer app.
Actually, I'm waiting with baited breath for Microsoft Emacs. I'm
hoping it will sport the following features...
Ability to treat.lnk files as symlinks.
Backward-compatible, so you can run all Gnu Emacs lisp
modules.
Windows-user-friendly default keyboard and mouse bindings.
Microsoft Lisp extensions for your Windows desktop,
to help you perform common Windows tasks.
Integration with Windows Explorer to make common file
management tasks easier.
Editing modes for all.NET and MS Visual languages.
Modes for working with the Windows registry and
ActiveDirectory.
Wizards to help you through common text-editing tasks.
All documentation repackaged as Windows.hlp files.
Integration with Microsoft Office, so that Gnus can
easily display documents that you receive by email,
using Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, or Outlook.
Easily embed Office documents in your text files.
Helpful Office Assistant, so Emacs can finally compete
with vigor in the desktop text editor marketplace.
Feel free to mod down the mis-posted original; I have the karma
to spare.
> I can't wait for Notepad to get ported, the true killer app.
<p>Actually, I'm waiting with baited breath for Microsoft Emacs. I'm hoping it will sport the following features...</p>
<ul>
<li>Ability to treat.lnk files as symlinks.</li>
<li>Backward-compatible, so you can run all Gnu Emacs lisp
modules.</li>
<li>Windows-user-friendly default keyboard and mouse bindings.</li>
<li>Microsoft Lisp extensions for your Windows desktop,
to help you perform common Windows tasks.</li>
<li>Integration with Windows Explorer to make common file
management tasks easier.</li>
<li>Editing modes for all.NET and MS Visual languages.</li>
<li>Modes for working with the Windows registry and
ActiveDirectory.</li>
<li>Wizards to help you through common text-editing tasks.</li>
<li>All documentation repackaged as Windows.hlp files.</li>
<li>Integration with Microsoft Office, so that Gnus can
easily display documents that you receive by email,
using Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, or Outlook.</li>
<li>Easily embed Office documents in your text files.</li>
<li>Helpful Office Assistant, so Emacs can finally compete
with vigor in the desktop text editor marketplace.</li> </ul>
Slashdot Mirror
> Detectives will tell you the reason a lot of criminals get
> caught is because they have this attitude.
I think the main reason a lot of criminals get caught committing
crimes is because they commit crimes. Yes, they also fail to
cover their tracks, but if your tracks are clean, there's nothing
to cover.
Now, I'm not saying I'm all gung-ho about giving up all pretenses
of privacy, but the extreme privacy nuts are being silly. I don't
particularly want any store I walk into to know my complete lifetime
purchase history at other stores, but I sure don't have any objection
to the government's knowing when and where I was born and how much
money I made last year; that information is... harmless.
As far as aggregating information various branches of the same
goverment already had into one large database... I don't see
why this is objectionable; if some of that information is too
sensitive, then why did they have it in the first place? The
objections should have been raised long ago, then. If not,
then what's the problem? Save your protests for when something
happens that creates a new invasion of your privacy. If you
whine continually about stupid things ("oh, no, the government
will know about my gun if it has to be registered!"), nobody is
going to listen when you object to having a radio-freqency ID
tag and GPS locator inside your body, or whatever. Pick your
battles. Speak up when it _matters_.
> you forgot to return a value...
The value of the last statement evaluated in a block is returned
as the value of that block. The following two functions have
exactly the same effect:
sub ignore() { collect_data(); }
sub ignore() { return collect_data(); }
Of course, you're relying on the user not to have set %data=undef;
> Try buying air travel tickets with cash.
Shouldn't be any trouble -- cash is money, after all. It doesn't
make you untraceable, however, because you still have to plonk
down ID.
> the satisfaction of signing Mr. Ralsky up for a few more mass
> mailers
Signing him up for mass mailers lacks imagination and is easy for
him to counter. (Bulk mail is usually obvious and easy to sort
out.) Some better ideas...
* Send him a personal letter in a hand-addressed envelope.
(Don't be nasty; that would just be grounds for a lawsuit.
You could explain why you don't like spam, though, and ask
to be taken off all his lists. But be courteous about it.)
* Send "pen pal" mail to a few hundred thousand third-graders
with his name and return address. (This one might be illegal;
consult a lawyer first. IANAL, just brainstorming here.)
* Send him a can of Hormel product, nicely wrapped, with a
gift card.
> If you zoom in photo that has the car in the driveway the plates
> have been blured out.
Photographs are always like that when you get to the limit of their
resolution. The image just doesn't have enough information to pull
out the plates. You have to zoom all the way in just to see for
sure that there *is* a plate, and it's about six pixels high. It
would, however, be easy enough for someone with a lot of spare time
to watch his street over several weeks and see if a black jaguar
comes to and from his house frequently... that wouldn't prove it
was the same car, but it would provide a good lead for further
investigation. Of course, asking somebody to have that kind of
spare time is a little much. A hidden webcam might be a more
realistic approach...
> What if we erected bilboards
In his neighborhood, you'd probably need a zoning variance for that.
> Maybe we can put some Retina-Scorcher(tm) floodlights
Anybody got a spare airport beacon? Say, while we're getting a
zoning variance, we could put in more than billboards across the
street. A place of business, perhaps, something legitimate, though
by pure coincidence it may be also a tad hard on property values.
The ecconomy, being down, needs more industry, right?
> It's been my experience that criminal records or past have
> nothing to do with taste.
That's true. I know plenty of people who (as far as I know) are
law-abiding citizens but who have grotesquely bad taste. (On the
bad taste scale, grotesquely bad is a couple of levels beyond
bad and just one step shy of blinking lime green Courier New on
a megenta background.)
> I'm not sure where Watergate and spammer fit on the Bad
> Guy Continuum
Not even comparable. Watergate was a case of getting caught doing
something illegal and underhanded, yes, but it was a case of getting
caught doing that to a rival organisation that, you can be stone cold
certain, was busy trying to think of a way to get away with doing
approximately the same thing to the perpetrators. Politicians
sneaking around doing illegal things to other politicians before
they do something to them first. (Politics is a dirty game; you
don't run for public office at the federal level if you can't handle
the possibility someone might try to spy on you illegally. Sure,
if you can catch them you nail them with it; their bad for getting
caught; make sure you sweep your own dealings under the rug. Did
I mention that politics is a dirty game?) Yes, it's illegal, and
yes, it's wrong, and yes, all the ones we catch should pay the
price, in jail if possible. But politicians spying illegally on
other politicians is wrong in the same sense that it's wrong for
mob hit men to assasinate other mob hit men. It's wrong, but it's
only worth so much of society's resources to try to prevent it.
Spammers prey on people who have never heard of them and don't
want anything to do with the whole business. That's different,
not because the spammer himself is any more guilty (guilty is
guilty), but because it's more important for society to act as
necessary to stop it. If spammers mostly just sent junk email
to other spammers, I'd say "sure, it's wrong, but who cares?"
Now, about that spammer: who has the nads to try to call him
1-800-COLLECT?
> firebomb.... ya.... i like that....
Firebombing might be just a wee bit over the top. Instead, see if you
can't get a zoning variance for the lot across the street and put in
a business. Like, maybe, a paper mill.
> Even so, I really doubt 3.0 came out before Intel managed to get
> to 120mhz.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Note the all-important qualifier in my post
about "the ones anyone could afford to buy"? Yes, the high-end
Intel processors were probably doing 120MHz, at least in theory,
but the cost of motherboards, to say nothing of the chips themselves,
was a deterrent for many. Living on a college campus, the fastest
computer I had actually seen as of 1997 was a DX4/100, which one guy
I knew got during sprint semester. I walked across campus to see it.
I had also seen a few Pentium systems, but none faster than 75MHz.
(Yes, the Pentium did more per clock cycle than the 486 DX2, but so
did the DX4, OSIWT. I suspect the system bus on the DX4 was not as
fast, though, because I think they used motherboard technologies
made for the DX2 originally to get the prices into consumer range.)
Maybe I had my Netscape release dates wrong, but I was thinking
that Netscape 3 come out by 1996, and 4 in 1997. I know that my
school had Netscape (I'm pretty sure it was 2.x) by 1995, and I
was fairly sure they upgraded the following year -- and I _think_
that by May of '97 when I graduated I was using 4.0, because when
I grabbed 4.5 in spring of '98 (when I first got the net at home)
I did not notice any substantial differences (except that the first
time I downloaded Communicator on a friend's recommendation, and
it had a bunch of extra junk I had no use for, so I went and got
the Navigator standalone and did the uninstall/reinstall thing --
but doing that gave me, I thought, exactly what I'd had at school).
And yes, I do remember Mosaic, but barely. The school had that
when I first was shown the web, but after a small number of months
they got Netscape Navigator.
> I guess what I'm saying is that the way it used to be, speaking
> very generally, was that you had the choice between an OS that
> was stable and reliable and one that was easy to use. In the days
> hence, Microsoft has come leaps and bounds in the stability
> realm...and Linux has come leaps and bounds in the useability
Oh. Yes I can go along with that. Windows '95 was pretty easy
to use in 1996 (provided you didn't have to _install_ it, that
is), and Linux was fairly stable, so I'm told; personally I didn't
use Linux until early 1998 (though it was a secondhand copy of a
CheapBytes Debian CD set, so it was probably really 1997 vintage
stuff I was using), and at that point "easy to use" is not an
adjective I would have used to describe it -- nor would I ever
call Windows 95 stable (unless comparing it Mac System 6 or
something along those lines, and I'm not sure that would be a
useful comparison).
> My joke was funnier.
So mod me down as -1 Not Funny.
> Expect Google to get raped by lawsuits from Amazon et al
Three or four years ago, when Google was barely established, I might
have been somewhat concerned about that. These days, Google is...
well, they're not Yahoo!, of course, but they're not George Smith's
Cool Web Stuff, either, if you know what I'm saying.
> the google bar. (BTW - when is a Mac version coming?)
You don't need a special version for the Mac. The same version that
works on all other platforms should work on the Mac. It's written
in XUL, so platform is basically a non-issue. (What version of the
browser you have, on the other hand, does matter...)
> You know, another neat feature I'd like (which would be extremely
> simple to add) would be a checkbox on their search forms, which,
> when checked would make all the search result links open in new
> windows.
I always just middle-click them, to open them in new tabs. While
they are loading, I scroll down and middle-click several that look
promising, then I usually close the tab with the search results.
Each time I finish looking at one of the pages, I close that tab,
and look at the next one, which by that time has finished loading.
I don't mind advertisements in general; I do mind popups. If popup
blocking goes mainstream, all it means to me is legacy sites that
require it for obscure reasons will be forced to be fixed or become
irrelevant. Then I can happily leave popups disabled *all* the time
and browse totally in one window (with multiple tabs if desired).
If advertisers load banners into pages to compensate for the lost
popups, that's fine with me.
So yes, I _do_ want IE to ship with popup blocking. On by default,
if possible. Not because I use IE, but because IE exerts pressure
on website authors.
> Actually Microsoft is great at leaving the value added innovations
> to their clients. Try looking at "Crazy Browzer". It only takes a
> few nights coding to add tabs to IE.
This is right, but it is only half the story. Microsoft is great at
leaving the innovations to ISVs and then buying or cloning the ones
that prove to be successful or useful. Think back...
DOSEDIT comes out, and people in-the-know declare that they can't
live without it. Microsoft produces DOSKEY for 5.0. Stacker is
successful. Microsoft produces DoubleSpace for the next version of
DOS. Desqview gets rave reviews, and customers say they want
windows like Macintosh has. Microsoft produces Windows. Central
Point and Norton produce useful disk defragmentation utilities;
Microsoft contracts for a defrag utility to include with DOS.
Third-party full-screen editors are all the rage; Microsoft drops
edlin and produces edit.com, leveraging the IDE editor that they
already developed for QuickBasic (and, in the process, including
a stripped-down QBasic to avoid the need to extract the editor
from it; apparently it was too interwoven to separate before 5.0
shipped; later they did separate it out (or rewrite it) for Win
95). On and on the list goes.
Will the next IE include tabbed browsing? Maybe, but if it
doesn't, the version after will. Will the next IE include popup
blocking? Maybe, but if it doesn't, more people will use Netscape
than already do, and Microsoft knows it; which does Microsoft
value more, strong dominance in the browser market (not mere
majority, but the kind of overwhelming majority only achieved
after IE5 came out), or the support of popup advertisers?
Actually, Microsoft could weasel a way to get both: ship IE with
popup blocking, but place "select partners" on a whitelist, and
make it prohibitively difficult for casual users to remove sites
from the whitelist. (HINT: involve regedit.) On the whole, this
would be mostly good for user experience, since it would greatly
reduce the sheer overwhelming quantity of popups. Microsoft could
claim that "the competitive market" (Netscape) forced them to
include popup blocking, elicit sympathy, use it as one more argument
in any antitrust procedings (oh, you thought we'd seen the last of
those?), and then turn around and tell strategic advertisers that
it means less competition from nobody advertisers who didn't make
the whitelist -- and use it as a negotiation point: doubleclick
would probably bend over backwards and kiss strategic parts of
Microsoft's corporate anatomy to be on the whitelist.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft just _bought_ CrazyBrowser.
OTOH, popup blocking is not the hardest thing in the universe to
implement, and they could just do it from scratch. CrazyBrowser
would then have to offer more innovations or become irrelevant.
> "a sentence does not end with a preposition"
> "ok. where's the library at, asshole?"
The problem with this is, the rule "never end a sentence with a
preposition" is a mnemonic rule; it can be used as an aid to memory,
but it does not tell the whole story of the way the grammar works.
In particular, the structure of a prepositional phrase in English
is as follows: preposition optional_modifiers object. i.e., a
preposition is followed by an object (which may be immediately
preceded by attributive modifiers, as any noun may be).
However, this doesn't tell the whole story either, because it
assumes that the preposition is functioning as a preposition.
There are other ways prepositions can function. In particular,
many verbs can be used in conjunction with a following preposition,
and this may alter their meaning (though in some cases it does not).
For example, "Before varnishing the board, I had to sand off the
rough parts." Here the preposition "off" goes with the verb "sand",
and can be considered a part of the compound verb "sand off". The
words that follow ("the rough parts") are the direct object of the
verb; the preposition itself does not have an object. This is quite
correct. The verb may in some cases also be intransitive, in which
case there may be no words following, and the preposition can indeed
end the sentence, without breaking any real rules of grammar. In
addition, some of these verbs, together with their preposition,
can be used as other parts of speech. For example, "We held a
bake off". This also is correct: the preposition "off" does not
have an object because it is not functioning as a preposition but
rather forming the compound verb "bake off" (which is then used as
a noun -- another grammar topic for another day).
"Where is the library at" is a marginal case. It could be argued
that there is a compound verb "is at", but if that were the case
we would expect it to sound natural if phrased differently, as
"Where at is the library", and that just sounds wrong. So my
take on the matter is that "Where is the library at" is incorrect
grammar, although the most-commonly-stated reason is a gross oversimplification.
The rule about not starting sentences with conjunctions is also
an oversimplification. Placing unrelated words before the
conjunction does not change anything -- though it is true that
in most cases a conjunction at the beginning of a sentence is
being used incorrectly.
> No no no, you see everybody had Pentiums running at 120 mhz
> when Netscape 3.0 was out.
Err, no, Pentiums didn't run that fast until a year or two later --
at least not the ones anyone could afford to actually buy. A
486 DX4/100 was still considered competitive as a new system even
when Netscape 4.0 came out. (Which, incidentally, tells you how
*old* Netscape 4.x is. Considering that Netscape 6 was really
ony of beta quality, we can be quite thankful that the long wait
is over and Netscape has a decent browser out again (since 7.0PR1,
which "Preview" or not made 6.2.anything look like junk).) This
new Netscape release, from what I've seen of it so far (admittedly,
not extensive use) seems to be quite solid, though of course it
lacks the majority of the features added during the 1.1 and 1.2
milestones. Which is fine; 1.1 lacked stability, and 1.2 is new
enough that it's hard to say (though I'm using 1.2.1 and it seems
very solid to me so far); Netscape is right to go with 1.0.2 for
now. I'm thinking they'll stick with that 1.0.x branch through
several minor releases and go back to the trunk for a new stable
branch around 1.4 or 1.6 or so. (This is not inside information,
just a prediction based on the pattern I've observed in their
behavior over the last couple of years.) By then, the branch
they are using will feel really obsolete to people who have been
testing the Mozilla builds, but that means that when users upgrade
to the next branch they'll notice a sudden influx of features.
That branch could be 7.5, but I'm predicting it will be 8.0
Network cards are a bad example -- because they're server stuff (the
strong home territory for Linux), and because many of them follow
formal specifications. I've had more problems getting Windows to
see network cards than I have with Linux. Admittedly, most of my
troubles were with really old cards; anything recent works (assuming
you feed it the disk with the OEM drivers when it asks, but that's
the Windows Way for installing hardware). But anything recent works
with Linux too, and I _don't_ have to feed it a driver disk; Hard
Drake just sees the card, knows what it is, and starts asking me
whether to get an IP addy automatically (DHCP) or assign one
manually. And these are no-name 10/100 cards that I buy for $10
from an online wholesaler. The only thing I've had to drag out
the command-line to accomplish is IP aliasing, and I still have
yet to figure out how to do that at *all* with Windows.
Better examples of poorly-supported hardware would be printers (which
all seem to work minimally, but none of them seem to have drivers
that support all the features of the printer), scanners, digital
cameras, and other desktop/end-user things.
> I'm pretty tired of waiting for hardware manufacturers to
> support linux.
Agreed. It is time. Three years ago, the Linux community needed
things like a better browser and a better office suite and better
desktop tools... Today, there is nothing the Linux community needs
more than one major OEM, to ship preconfigured, preinstalled systems
designed (in terms of hardware selection) from the ground up for
Linux/Gnome/etc.
I believe any one of them could benefit from making the switch,
dumping MS entirely, and shipping _all_ Linux-based systems. But
it's a substantial risk, because if I'm wrong, and people don't
buy it, the switcher would have to bend over backwards and kiss
MS's feet in order to recover. I don't think that would happen;
I think the savings would be enough and the user satisfaction
(if the configuration were done right -- i.e., for end-users;
people who know what we are doing can change the config easily
enough) good enough that they would sell just as many PCs as
before. The problem is, if it does turn out to be successful,
like I think, the other OEMs would all follow. Nobody wants to
be the guinea pig, and it's hard to blame them. Like I said,
there is a risk. So we have to wait while much more tentative
steps are taken, toes slowly dipping in the edge of the pool,
like Wal*Mart selling Microtel systems on their website... have
patience. If the tentative steps are successful, further steps
will be taken. The OEMs _want_ to tell Microsoft which bodily
orifice to stick their licensing fees into, believe me. When
they are confident that they safely can, they will.
I'm tired of waiting too, but actually we haven't been waiting
for the OEMs for very long; OSS wasn't really ready for the
desktop until somewhat recently (2000 at the earliest, really
not until mozilla 1.0 and OO.o 1.0 came out, both in 2002), and
before that we were waiting on end-user software to mature.
If you think of it that way, we've only been waiting on the
OEMs for less than a year. Adoption will be gradual; it might
take five years or so. Think of yourself as an early adopter.
And when the OEMs do defect, Microsoft will have a response.
I'm not sure what it will be, but it will be significant.
> Have you used Windows XP lately?
I have at work.
> Not to be a troll, but it really is faster
I somehow failed to notice the "faster" part. I multiboot Mandrake 8
on the same hardware and it's very comparable, performance-wise. If
anything, I'm not stressing WinXP as much, because I'm not running
things like Apache and mysqld in the background, since I do most of
my work on the other OS. I just boot WinXP to test stuff on it.
> I installed it 10 days ago
Well, I'm sure that's _plenty_ of time to discover all the problems
with it. (Heck, I've been using Mandrake 8 extensively for going
on a year and am still finding problems with it...)
> As for secure, well, who knows...
The privilege escalation that the other user was talking about is,
in my opinion, irrelevant for most systems. Just don't give random
untrusted people an account, simple as that. (Windows is not made
for hosting shell accounts... any ISP that tries that is just asking
for trouble.)
Of course, there are a number of well-known ways to exploit Windows
systems remotely, but almost (?) all of them involve applications
or services, not the OS as such. In particular, we all know IIS
and Outlook and MSIE are insecure, but there's nothing stopping you
from running Apache and Pegasus Mail and Netscape on Windows XP,
if you actually care about security. (The question of so many
clueless people who don't know better using the default config
and allowing their PCs to become DDOS zombies is a separate
discussion. Anyway, denial of service is a separate class of
attack from actual breaches of security.)
All the shatter attack does is turn every remote exploit into a
remote root exploit -- but in most cases, a remote root exploit
is not substantially worse than a remote exploit with user privs,
because user privs are almost always sufficent to do Very Bad
Things (such as delete the user's data files, send personal
information over the internet, or run a DDOS zombie). The major
exception to this, of course, is when you have multiple internet
services running on the same box (e.g., the same computer is your
mail server and also is your web server). I'm quickly reaching
the conclusion that for any important application (such as ISP
stuff), one-service-per-box is a policy worthy of much repetition.
> In terms of usability and stability, MS has really come a long
> way from then Windows 9X
I'll certainly grant Windows XP is more stable than Windows 9x.
There really isn't any question about that. And it's stable
enough for most home users, who turn the thing off every night
anyway "to stop that noise". Some of us demand more... I use
Mandrake 8, and I've become annoyed with the need to reboot
each and every time I want to install new internal components,
such as a new sound card, more RAM, new hard drive... it's a
neverending reboot-fest. I want a platform that supports hot-
swapping of everything including the motherboard and power
supply, darnit.
> According to the UN, 97% of Americans can read.
That depends on how you define "read". Maybe 97% or more of Americans
can read at a basic level, but quite a few of them get lost if you
start using words that are moderately unusual, words with more than
about two syllables, or sentences with more than two clauses, or if
you require a reading speed that approaches the speed at which people
normally talk. I could easily believe 23% can't read in a natural and
easy fashion or read more advanced stuff. I'd be guessing at the
figure, but that sounds pretty close to me. It's worse in some areas
than others, of course. Galion is probably about 20%. The inner
cities tend to be worse.
Also, the percentage who can write coherently is way lower than the
percentage who can read; I would hesitate to call anywhere near 97%
of the population literate if the ability to construct a sentence
and put it to paper is part of the expectation.
Of course, computers write even worse than they read. (If they're
making it up as they go, that is. If they have prefab stuff they
can do pretty well, but that's different.)
Actually, I'm waiting with baited breath for Microsoft Emacs. I'm hoping it will sport the following features...
Feel free to mod down the mis-posted original; I have the karma to spare.
> I can't wait for Notepad to get ported, the true killer app.
.lnk files as symlinks.</li> .NET and MS Visual languages.</li> .hlp files.</li>
<p>Actually, I'm waiting with baited breath for Microsoft Emacs. I'm
hoping it will sport the following features...</p>
<ul>
<li>Ability to treat
<li>Backward-compatible, so you can run all Gnu Emacs lisp
modules.</li>
<li>Windows-user-friendly default keyboard and mouse bindings.</li>
<li>Microsoft Lisp extensions for your Windows desktop,
to help you perform common Windows tasks.</li>
<li>Integration with Windows Explorer to make common file
management tasks easier.</li>
<li>Editing modes for all
<li>Modes for working with the Windows registry and
ActiveDirectory.</li>
<li>Wizards to help you through common text-editing tasks.</li>
<li>All documentation repackaged as Windows
<li>Integration with Microsoft Office, so that Gnus can
easily display documents that you receive by email,
using Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, or Outlook.</li>
<li>Easily embed Office documents in your text files.</li>
<li>Helpful Office Assistant, so Emacs can finally compete
with vigor in the desktop text editor marketplace.</li>
</ul>
> The unix world is the one that screwed this one up.
;-)
Ah, but Apple screwed it up even *worse*