> Yea and while we are at it I think they should have to use > colors that colorblind people can distinguish,
People (like me) who don't like the colours most sites use can just disable page colours. (For me, the problem is not color blindness but an inability to tollerate the blinding white page background most of the web uses -- but the result is the same; I have to disable page colours most of the time.) As long as the site does not in some way rely on having its garish colours enforced, there's no accessibility problem.
> and large latters ooo gotta have lage letters
Just crank up your default and minimum font sizes. As long as the site does not in some way rely on having its specified font sizes obeyed, there's no accessibility problem.
> (none of this crap with small letters in picutre captions).
Okay, text rendered as graphics _are_ annoying, especially when they use non-alpha-channel antialiasing in conjunction with one-bit non-alpha-channel transparency (as in, transparent GIFs antialiased to a certain background colour). Still, using alt text (which has been recommended since 1994 and is _required_ in all remotely recent HTML versions) should fulfill the accessibility requirement for the blind.
Re:LinuxFromNotSoScratch.com
on
LFS 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> Okay, so what do these people mean by "Linux From Scratch"? > Installing another distro first to install "required tools" > is in my view not installing from scratch.
If I understand correctly, the other distro you use to build your LFS is not part of your finished project, and does not have to be installed on the same drive or end up running on the same hardware. i.e., you can take the hard drive from your 486 and pop it in any working Linux system and build LFS on it, then put it back in your 486 and use your shiny new LFS. At least, I think that's the theory.
> Well, I have had, or had access to, burners since 1996
Wow. We knew they _existed_ back then, in the same vague way that we knew satellites and hovercraft existed -- not something we ever figured a normal person would own. I didn't start seeing computers come with them until... what, circa 2000?
> Where I live (Sweden), the 'unmetered access' concept does not > exist except for ADSL or leased lines. Dialups cost per minute, > be it POTS, ISDN or mobile.
And here I had you figured for UK (where local phone calls cost per minute -- what is _that_ all about). ISDN never really caught on very well here in the US; too expensive for what you get. Most places that did use it (back when it was the only thing approaching broadband you could get in many areas) seem to have switched over to some other solution. POTS I'm not familiar with; almost all dialup here in the US is PPP.
I once did some arithmetic concerning why unmetered PPP is ecconomic for the ISP, and I concluded that they must be able to get their incoming phone lines in bulk from the phone company at a substantial discount. Because if they paid what I pay for a line, they'd be losing money on me if everything else including the bandwidth cost them nothing. So, then, they get a hefty discount for purchasing the lines in bulk. That leaves bandwidth as the major per-minute cost, and the bandwidth I can consume over a 33.6 dialup just doesn't add up all that fast. In practice, I don't think I could cost them money by overusing it.
There _is_ a monthly bandwidth cap on the webspace I have on their server. But not on what comes to and from my home. So I conclude that they're counting on the phone line to do the throttling for them -- only so much can go through that straw^H^H^H^H^Hpipe. Most ISPs in the area charge about the same, so I figure they've got it pretty well worked out what the margins are. There are some discount ISPs that charge a good deal less, and some ISPs (including mine) have discount plans where you get fewer hours per month, but those deals all involve some kind of limits. The unlimited/unmetered dialups all seem to be $21-25 a month, at least around here.
> You have a T1 at work but not a single CD-burner?
Yep. We've had the T1 since... I don't know, since before I was hired. I think _all_ public libraries in the state have them. CD burners are fairly new on the market, by comparison, and we don't happen to have one yet.
> For installing over the phone line, it's not just patience > (even if it would quite literally take days) but cost. I don't > know where you are and what kind of rates you would get dialing > up to an ISP, but I can easily imagine a hundred hours for a > typical desktop install.
It's a flat monthly fee. This is _dialup_. All dialup ISPs I know about charge a flat monthly fee for unmetered access. That doesn't guarantee you a 24/7 connection (though in my experience it's been close to that, with redials only needed a couple of times a day, probably due to line noise), but if you can get connected there's no extra charge for being on for more time. (I'm assuming here you only connect to the account from one line; trying to dial in on two lines at once is something they probably wouldn't like.)
> Google is way too smart as a company to have such a crappy > business be associated with them!
True, but I bet they can make him pay their legal costs in the matter. Seriously, this guy's a small fry, and Google is... well, I don't know for sure exactly how large Google is, but I know they're large enough to pay the monthly bill on all the bandwidth of a major search engine, plus the storage and maintenance costs (and backup, presumably) for archiving all the non-binary parts of usenet, so I'd say they ought to be able to drown this guy in a fair-sized sea of legal action, just for precedent value if nothing else. It is surely in their best financial interests to put a quick preemptive halt to anyone frivolously suing them over silly stuff like this. Plus, Google is sufficiently high-profile, that if they settle, they're going to be sued a lot of times. They can't afford that. So not only can they afford to defend themselves on this, I'd say they about _have_ to do so.
I said before that PetsWarehouse was being stupid; now there's no question.
> If the usual suspects were "sinners", then Franklin also > being a suspect really isn't all that unusual.
Hardly surprising. It's not as if he were a Christian or anything. (Yes, yes, I know, all the founding fathers were Christains; except, many of them weren't. If you read Franklin's autobio, it's clear that he was a deist, same as Jefferson. For those who don't pay attention to religions, a deist is one step further removed from Christianity than a theist; theists don't believe that Jesus is God (the defining element of Christianity) but they believe that there is a God who is relevant to what goes on in the world; deists believe there was a God who created stuff in the beginning, but that he's no longer active; they don't see a connection between any deity and morality, and any morality they have is based on human society.)
> A little ice age would not destroy all farmable land.
Even a complete ice age might not. I'd worry more about stuff in the atmosphere blotting out the sun.
> Those things must have been very thick.
Yes, glaciers are thick. The big ones are measured (their thickness, I mean) in miles.
> Two years? I heard only two weeks. Might be imporrant to find out.
Two weeks? I don't believe there are more than 5% of households in North America that don't have more than two weeks' worth of food sitting around the house, in the form of frozen dinners, canned goods, frozen meat and vegitables, and whatnot. Typical is more like a month -- already in the home. As far as what is sitting in warehouses and so forth, I don't have any trouble believing two years. However, we'd run out of certain things quickly.
North America could weather a year of no crops (_no_ crops, not just heavily reduced crops) without starving anybody from North America to death. I'm certain of it. (For the pedantic, I'm counting Mexico with Central America; the ecconomy there is unlike the US and Canada in every way.) It would hurt, though, and there are places overseas that would hurt more because of the food we'd be eating that they consequently wouldn't be eating. Third-world tropical areas would be hit hardest and soonest.
Yes, even if the problem is global cooling, tropical areas would still be hit hardest. They have more people, less surplus in the best of times, less infrastructure, less stockpiled, poorer soil, less livestock, less natural herbiage for the livestock to eat, less money (good for buying up the now very expensive commercial fish crop and whatever else might be left), fewer technological resources for improvising (e.g., burning tonnes of fossil fuels to run hundreds of thousands of heat lamps to grow crops expensively indoors, possibly making sugar in labs either synthetically or by harnessing bacteria in some way, or whatever -- somebody would think of something in a year's time), and in general fewer resources of almost every kind. If there were no crops for a second year, I don't know what would happen, but I'm sure it would be unpleasant. I don't know if there is any place on earth that could weather a third year of global famine.
Incidentally, a global famine is predicted in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. Interestingly, it is predicted that the prices of wine and olive oil don't change, but grain becomes unaffordable (as in, a day's wages for a quart of wheat). (For the curious, this is the third seal, see 6:5-6.) However, this falls short of no crops worldwide and is actually small potatoes compared to some of the other unpleasant things predicted in the book. It is later, for example, that the sun is blotted out over a third of the earth (presumably due to something in the atmosphere).
> > it's always bothered me in version numbers when 1.12 is newer > > than 1.2, for example. For some people that could be misleading. > > What, for stupid people?
No, for people who understand place value. HTH.HAND.
Re:"Linux kernel" because it's a trademark
on
Linux Kernel 3.0?
·
· Score: 1
> Under USA trademark law, product and brand names are adjectives > and should be followed by a generic noun. Thus, "Linux kernel", > "Windows operating system", "Mac OS", "Macintosh computer", > "Kleenex tissue", "SPAM luncheon meat", "Xerox copier", etc.
Oh, so...
Word word processor, Office office suite, Media Player media player (or is that Windows Media media player these days?), Paint painting program, Windows screen window user interface, MSN Messenger instant messanger... and lest we pick too much on any one vendor, OpenOffice office suite, America On Line online service, AOL Instant Messenger instant messenger, Unix operating system, BSD unix software distribution (for extra fun, spell out what BSD stands for), Solaris unix, Gnu's Not Unix unix, Laser Jet laser printer, DeskJet inkjet printer, Free Software Foundation foundation, Red Hat Linux brand Gnu unix distribution with Linux kernel,...
That way lies madness. In a context (and I am not saying all contexts qualify, but I am implying that slashdot is one context that does qualify in the case of Linux) where nearly everyone knows the product in question, the type of product does not need to be stated. It is sufficient to speak of Linux and know that it is a kernel, or to speak of Windows and know that it is a windowed user interface, or to speak of Spam and know that it is that stuff Hormel sells in the little blue and yellow and pink can. Where trademark law will cause you problems is where there is some doubt as to whether you were using the trademark to refer strictly to the product in question or to something else. Though an argument can probably be made that the Linux trademark has not been protected by its holder in that regard, since he actually encourages people to use the term to refer to more than just the kernel, but that is another kettle of fish. One imagines he might still try to protect against anyone using the trademark to refer to a product that does not _include_ Linux (e.g., a Hurd distribution) might still be.
Also, a couple of minor quibbles: where I come from, "tissue" has a meaning very different from anything Kleenex makes (it is a kind of paper often used for crafts; Puffs klenex or perhaps Kleenex nosewipes would be closer to the usage around here), and Spam is generally not on the menu at luncheons, but is more likely to be consumed in very informal settings, such as at home. (Not that I have much to do with it in _any_ setting, but then I don't really go in for greasy foods in general; I don't eat French brand fried potatoes, either.) But these issues are off-topic.
Re:Take a lesson from emacs here
on
Linux Kernel 3.0?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> The minor has become the de facto major, is what I am trying to > say. Their strict adherance to not incrementing the major has > accomplished the opposite of what they wanted.
No, no, you don't understand. Current versions are still numbered 0.21.n.n because the first major release hasn't been reached yet.
The version number won't be incremented to 1.0 until Emacs has all the fundamentally vital features it needs to be credibly called a text editor. Besides better threading (planned for 0.22 or 0.23), Emacs still needs thorough support for multiple human languages and OS platforms, a more extensive help system, and complete text manipulation functionality before a solid 1.0 release can be made. Better (reentrant) scriptability and networking support would also be very nice to have for the 1.0 release. Sure, the developers and early adopters don't bother to say the "0." part, but we all know it's there. As far as end users are concerned, Emacs really doesn't even exist yet, in fully-functional released form. Those of us who have started using it early only do so for testing, or because there are no alternatives. (If anyone is aware of any fully-functional text editing application, whether open or closed, commercial or non-commercial, I would like to know about it, but I have looked high and low and am under the impression that there is none available for any platform, at any price. Emacs 0.21, despite its obvious incompleteness, is the closest thing there is that I have been able to find.)
See, people may think Mozilla.org invented the fully-functional 1.0 release, but Emacs has had that philosophy all along. In spades. So, now you know;-)
> > and Gentoo (yes, over a dialup; I have patience) > You can, if you have access to a fast link elsewhere,
There's a T1 at work, but...
> get stuff using emerge -f (as in fetchonly) to get all the files > you need to build the system at a later date, with no Internet > access.
And carry them home on a floppy? Actually, I could probably carry a hard drive to work, install it in the (Mandrake) system there, let stuff download onto it while I'm doing something else, and carry the drive back home later, but I believe I have the patience to install over a dialup, particularly since I could plug my monitor into the normally-monitor-free Pentium/90 Mandrake 7 system I use as a router and do stuff ad interim that doesn't require X11 or the data that's stored on the multiboot system.
I really should get a second system, so I can store my data on the one system and use the other for evaluating stuff, like OSes and unstable applications and whatnot. Wait, I could migrate most of my data to the router system... but then it's on the box that's directly on the internet... none of it's sensitive, but there's always vandalism... I must ponder this. What I really need is to store everything in duplicate all the time...
For those who have been saying that the xbox-linux project is bad for MS because it costs them the loss leader, err, I think running W2K on it covers that loss leader fairly effectively. Not that it isn't intersting and all, but the price of W2K will chew up your savings pretty fast. At this point one of those Microtel PCs (without W2K) might actually be cheaper.
> Emacs goodness plus vi keystrokes is a beautiful thing.
I haven't taken the time to familiarise myself much with the vi keystrokes, but I must say I agree in principle that the default keybindings are the worst thing about Emacs. I love the functionality of Emacs, and I don't mind the size (come on, compare it to apps with comparable levels of functionality in other categories, such as OpenOffice or Mozilla), but I did have to do a whole lot of customisation to make it usable. With that done, though, it's great:-) And anyway, the nice thing about Emacs is that you _can_ fully customise it. Without writing any C or C++ (elisp is much easier to work with, IMO).
There are a couple of things Emacs needs to really qualify as an OS, though. First off, it needs filesystem drivers so it doesn't have to rely on the ones in an underlying OS, and then it also needs a way to be booted directly from a standard boot loader. Also, a TCP/IP stack, since currently it relies on the one in the OS. There are probably another couple of bits and pieces it would need too. However, Emacs could certainly qualify as a shell that runs on top of an OS, so it's at least as much an OS as Windows 3.1, if you look at it that way. (Of course, Windows was intended to function as a user's sole interface to the computer, and Emacs wasn't really originally, but nevermind _that_.)
> Run Win2000 in VMWare under Linux. > Or run Linux in VMWare under Win2000.
Run Win2000 in VMWare under Linux, which is running in VMWare under Win2000, which is running in VirtualPC under MacOS X, which is running on a Mac emulator under Linux, which is running on bochs under BeOS, which is running under an x86 emulator for VMS, which is running under a Vax emulator for glulx, running under glulxe.exe on PC-DOS 3.3 on an 8086.
> > NT can't exist on the same physical drive as 2000. > Yes, it can.
He's using partition hiding, which allows things to exist on the same drive that otherwise couldn't exist on the same system at all -- different versions of Windows 9x for example. (I've been using PowerBoot for this, but I guess I'll check out the xosl...) That makes this issue moot for him.
> That said, I miss... MS Longhorn Is that available yet? I thought they said 2005 and were being optimistic as usual? > SunOS 4.1.3, Solaris, NeXTStep These are mentioned in the interview, but he ended up not getting them to work. Solaris he specifically listed (along with NT3/4 and Plan9) as being too picky about hardware, by which I think he means too picky about the hardware he happens to have. His video card is less than ideal for a multiboot scenerio; a 2D Matrox card would have done better, I think. That was his problem with Plan9 at least. His motherboard may also have been an issue for some systems.
> Were there ever a VMS/OpenVMS version for the i386? I don't believe so. I had to get myself a Vax in order to have VMS in my bedroom. (I settled for a used one, though, so it didn't cost that much. They seem to be a glut on the used market, for some reason.)
> My workstations typically multiboot at least three OSes I can count DOS6, Win95, WinMe, RedHat 6, Mandrake 8, QNX, and the BeOS, so I say I have seven versions of five OSes. I've also dualbooted Windows 98SE with Mandrake, on another system, and WinXP Home with Mandrake, on _another_ system. I figure that's enough to qualify me as an experienced multibooter, but obviously I'm not a record-setter like this guy. I'm looking into Plan9. I was unable so far to get BSD installed (tried the three major free distros), but I think the problem may have been a lack of understanding on my part, in terms of how the BSD partitioning stuff works. If anyone knows of a good tutorial on that...
Oh, and I don't have six (!) drives to play with like this guy does; I'm sure I'd have more OSes installed if I had that kind of space to play with. I've just got a 4GB primary master and a 30GB primary slave. I used to have an ancient Debian (old enough, it didn't come with X11), but I toasted it to make space for RedHat some time ago, when I only had the one drive.
If I get a third drive, I want to do BSD (Free, Net, or Open, whichever is easiest to get installed) and Gentoo (yes, over a dialup; I have patience). I've also put thought into trying Solaris.x86; if the current version comes out under that hobbyist license program where you only pay the one-time-fee for the media that's about the same cost as Windows, I might try it out. It would be nice to put Solaris on my resume...
I have to agree with the interviewee's assessment of BeOS; it's a multibooter's dream. Like DOS, it blissfully ignores any partition it doesn't understand and needs no drivers for anything. Like Linux, it can mount most common types of filesystems. (Okay, ext2 is readonly, but NTFS is readonly in Linux.) Also like Linux, it can be booted from basically anywhere (nth logical partition on the nth logical drive, past the 1024th cyllinder, disk image stored on any FAT16 or FAT32 partition you like, wherever). Back to being like DOS, it can be transplanted by copying, or by transplanting the drive to a different system, and will Just Work with any supported hardware configuration. It's really a shame about what happened to the company; the OS is missing some basic features (such as the ability to change colour preferences globally and have all apps that use the standard widgets follow them) and because of the collapse of the company no longer supports modern hardware, but there are a lot of things other systems can learn from the BeOS. I wish the design people for both Microsoft and the Gnome and KDE projects would sit down with it and play for a few hours some time. Maybe Apple will; you know they know about it, because they thought about _buying_ it, and then picked NeXT instead.
# XML (Extended Markup Language) invisibly marks up a list of # executives' names in a PowerPoint slide, so that dropping the # list into an e-mail's "To" field turns the names into the # execs' e-mail addresses.
Let me get this straight: in the future office environment, every time you put together a slide show, Microsoft wants you to fill in all sorts of extra information that isn't relevant to the presentation and won't show up in the slideshow, in case at a later time someone wants to send an email? Huh?
What if I want to drop that list of names into Timidity or somesuch -- should the person who creates the slideshow also add each executive's favourite work of music to their markup? How about also filling in their birthdates, so I can drop the list on my calendar application? Riiiight.
It's nice to see MS talking about using XML, but you'd think they could come up with a use for it that would be... useful.
> Believe it or not, this is a feature I would use.
I suppose I might too, but it's fundamentally a feature we _already have_.
> Right now, copying a file between two computers involves: > 1. launch an ftp server, 2. copy the file to ftproot, > 3. run my script which automatically logs into said server, > 4 type "get ". It's not super-inconvenient, but definitely > not as easy as a laser pointer drag and drop.
The thing is, we already have drag-and-drop. Perhaps you are not aware of smbmount (Linux/OSX/otherunices) or the "assign drive letter" option in Network Neighborhood (Windows and NT). With that, there's no _need_ to drag the file clear to the other screen; you just drop it in the appropriate shortcut on your desktop, which points to the shared folder on the other computer, and that's that. Actually, smbmount is just the Windows-compatible way to do it on Unix; before that, there was NFS, which I'm told still works if you don't have to interoperate with MS systems. The nice thing is, neither of these technologies requires you to change anything when you reposition the computers, as you would have to do for the drag-from-screen-to-screen thing, unless the monitors have GPS built-in... which seems silly at best. It's much easier to just put a drop-point on your screen that symbolises the shared folder on the other PC and drop things there. That saves you about half the distance you have to move the mouse, if nothing else. Add Finder-style springloaded folders to drop things in, and you can drag your files quickly into a subdirectory of the shared folder in question. (Gnome really needs to get springloaded folders... preferably in such a way that they can be placed on panels as well as working in the file managers and on the desktop.)
Sure, there are security issues with the smb/nmb/cifs suite of protocols, but you can block the relevant ports at your firewall and cut out most of them, and almost all of the rest are internal issues, which are unavoidable because the people inside have physical access. (Okay, yeah, with VPNs they might not, but if you're doing that you've got more security concerns going than MS probably envisioned for this ideal office anyway.)
> Is it just me, or is that statement total technobabble? Say I put > a router in my house. Where does the data go through it to?
The OP was probably confused about what cable modems do, but he brings up an interesting point...
With a heirarchical routing system like what TCP/IP uses, it can pretty much only go upstream to the backbone. It is possible for a network to be designed so that there's no backbone, and the data can be routed wherever there are open connections -- so that if you have ethernet connections to the people in the houses nextdoor and a wireless connection to your relatives across town and another to your mobile phone (which connects to your phone service provider) and a DSL connection to an ISP, data could be routed in one of these connections and out the other.
Such a system would have higher latency, because it would have more hops, but the bandwidth could be okay, if _everybody_ runs fiber to the house nextdoor. TCP/IP won't work, because it can't do routing in that kind of environment; some kind of routing protocol would have to be devised that understood the topology of such a network (perhaps by using latitude and longitude as metrics for the routing, along with other factors such as "how busy is the network in that direction"). The really major problem with such a system is, how much do you charge your neighbors to route their data, and what about the people whose data your neighbors are routing (through you), and so on? Unless everyone suddenly becomes a fair player (haha), the network protocols (or their implementation) would have to include some kind of reciprocal quota system or somesuch, which would add complexity and drive the latency up, possibly beyond usefulness.
Slashdot Mirror
> Yea and while we are at it I think they should have to use
> colors that colorblind people can distinguish,
People (like me) who don't like the colours most sites use can
just disable page colours. (For me, the problem is not color
blindness but an inability to tollerate the blinding white page
background most of the web uses -- but the result is the same; I
have to disable page colours most of the time.) As long as the
site does not in some way rely on having its garish colours
enforced, there's no accessibility problem.
> and large latters ooo gotta have lage letters
Just crank up your default and minimum font sizes. As long
as the site does not in some way rely on having its specified
font sizes obeyed, there's no accessibility problem.
> (none of this crap with small letters in picutre captions).
Okay, text rendered as graphics _are_ annoying, especially when
they use non-alpha-channel antialiasing in conjunction with
one-bit non-alpha-channel transparency (as in, transparent GIFs
antialiased to a certain background colour). Still, using alt
text (which has been recommended since 1994 and is _required_
in all remotely recent HTML versions) should fulfill the
accessibility requirement for the blind.
> Okay, so what do these people mean by "Linux From Scratch"?
> Installing another distro first to install "required tools"
> is in my view not installing from scratch.
If I understand correctly, the other distro you use to build
your LFS is not part of your finished project, and does not have
to be installed on the same drive or end up running on the same
hardware. i.e., you can take the hard drive from your 486 and
pop it in any working Linux system and build LFS on it, then
put it back in your 486 and use your shiny new LFS. At least,
I think that's the theory.
> It's interesting that he is allowed to use a computer while
> Kevin Mitnick is just now allowed to use one?
The thing Mitnick shouldn't be allowed to use is not a computer
but rather a telephone. That's how he worked his worst mischief,
social engineering.
> Well, I have had, or had access to, burners since 1996
Wow. We knew they _existed_ back then, in the same vague way that
we knew satellites and hovercraft existed -- not something we ever
figured a normal person would own. I didn't start seeing computers
come with them until... what, circa 2000?
> Where I live (Sweden), the 'unmetered access' concept does not
> exist except for ADSL or leased lines. Dialups cost per minute,
> be it POTS, ISDN or mobile.
And here I had you figured for UK (where local phone calls cost
per minute -- what is _that_ all about). ISDN never really caught
on very well here in the US; too expensive for what you get. Most
places that did use it (back when it was the only thing approaching
broadband you could get in many areas) seem to have switched over to
some other solution. POTS I'm not familiar with; almost all dialup
here in the US is PPP.
I once did some arithmetic concerning why unmetered PPP is ecconomic
for the ISP, and I concluded that they must be able to get their
incoming phone lines in bulk from the phone company at a substantial
discount. Because if they paid what I pay for a line, they'd be
losing money on me if everything else including the bandwidth cost
them nothing. So, then, they get a hefty discount for purchasing
the lines in bulk. That leaves bandwidth as the major per-minute
cost, and the bandwidth I can consume over a 33.6 dialup just doesn't
add up all that fast. In practice, I don't think I could cost them
money by overusing it.
There _is_ a monthly bandwidth cap on the webspace I have on their
server. But not on what comes to and from my home. So I conclude
that they're counting on the phone line to do the throttling for
them -- only so much can go through that straw^H^H^H^H^Hpipe. Most
ISPs in the area charge about the same, so I figure they've got it
pretty well worked out what the margins are. There are some
discount ISPs that charge a good deal less, and some ISPs (including
mine) have discount plans where you get fewer hours per month, but
those deals all involve some kind of limits. The unlimited/unmetered
dialups all seem to be $21-25 a month, at least around here.
> The term is so generic that Muslims, Jews, and Christians all
> fall under the heading of "theist".
Yes, but deists do not, which was my point.
> You have a T1 at work but not a single CD-burner?
Yep. We've had the T1 since... I don't know, since before
I was hired. I think _all_ public libraries in the state have
them. CD burners are fairly new on the market, by comparison,
and we don't happen to have one yet.
> For installing over the phone line, it's not just patience
> (even if it would quite literally take days) but cost. I don't
> know where you are and what kind of rates you would get dialing
> up to an ISP, but I can easily imagine a hundred hours for a
> typical desktop install.
It's a flat monthly fee. This is _dialup_. All dialup ISPs
I know about charge a flat monthly fee for unmetered access.
That doesn't guarantee you a 24/7 connection (though in my
experience it's been close to that, with redials only needed
a couple of times a day, probably due to line noise), but if
you can get connected there's no extra charge for being on
for more time. (I'm assuming here you only connect to the
account from one line; trying to dial in on two lines at once
is something they probably wouldn't like.)
> Google is way too smart as a company to have such a crappy
> business be associated with them!
True, but I bet they can make him pay their legal costs in
the matter. Seriously, this guy's a small fry, and Google
is... well, I don't know for sure exactly how large Google
is, but I know they're large enough to pay the monthly bill
on all the bandwidth of a major search engine, plus the
storage and maintenance costs (and backup, presumably) for
archiving all the non-binary parts of usenet, so I'd say they
ought to be able to drown this guy in a fair-sized sea of
legal action, just for precedent value if nothing else. It
is surely in their best financial interests to put a quick
preemptive halt to anyone frivolously suing them over silly
stuff like this. Plus, Google is sufficiently high-profile,
that if they settle, they're going to be sued a lot of times.
They can't afford that. So not only can they afford to defend
themselves on this, I'd say they about _have_ to do so.
I said before that PetsWarehouse was being stupid; now there's
no question.
> If the usual suspects were "sinners", then Franklin also
> being a suspect really isn't all that unusual.
Hardly surprising. It's not as if he were a Christian or anything.
(Yes, yes, I know, all the founding fathers were Christains; except,
many of them weren't. If you read Franklin's autobio, it's clear that
he was a deist, same as Jefferson. For those who don't pay attention
to religions, a deist is one step further removed from Christianity
than a theist; theists don't believe that Jesus is God (the defining
element of Christianity) but they believe that there is a God who is
relevant to what goes on in the world; deists believe there was a God
who created stuff in the beginning, but that he's no longer active;
they don't see a connection between any deity and morality, and any
morality they have is based on human society.)
> A little ice age would not destroy all farmable land.
Even a complete ice age might not. I'd worry more about stuff
in the atmosphere blotting out the sun.
> Those things must have been very thick.
Yes, glaciers are thick. The big ones are measured (their thickness,
I mean) in miles.
> Two years? I heard only two weeks. Might be imporrant to find out.
Two weeks? I don't believe there are more than 5% of households
in North America that don't have more than two weeks' worth of
food sitting around the house, in the form of frozen dinners,
canned goods, frozen meat and vegitables, and whatnot. Typical
is more like a month -- already in the home. As far as what is
sitting in warehouses and so forth, I don't have any trouble
believing two years. However, we'd run out of certain things
quickly.
North America could weather a year of no crops (_no_ crops, not
just heavily reduced crops) without starving anybody from North
America to death. I'm certain of it. (For the pedantic, I'm
counting Mexico with Central America; the ecconomy there is unlike
the US and Canada in every way.) It would hurt, though, and there
are places overseas that would hurt more because of the food we'd
be eating that they consequently wouldn't be eating. Third-world
tropical areas would be hit hardest and soonest.
Yes, even if the problem is global cooling, tropical areas would
still be hit hardest. They have more people, less surplus in the
best of times, less infrastructure, less stockpiled, poorer soil,
less livestock, less natural herbiage for the livestock to eat, less
money (good for buying up the now very expensive commercial fish crop
and whatever else might be left), fewer technological resources for
improvising (e.g., burning tonnes of fossil fuels to run hundreds of
thousands of heat lamps to grow crops expensively indoors, possibly
making sugar in labs either synthetically or by harnessing bacteria
in some way, or whatever -- somebody would think of something in a
year's time), and in general fewer resources of almost every kind.
If there were no crops for a second year, I don't know what would
happen, but I'm sure it would be unpleasant. I don't know if there
is any place on earth that could weather a third year of global
famine.
Incidentally, a global famine is predicted in the Revelation of
Jesus Christ. Interestingly, it is predicted that the prices of
wine and olive oil don't change, but grain becomes unaffordable
(as in, a day's wages for a quart of wheat). (For the curious,
this is the third seal, see 6:5-6.) However, this falls short
of no crops worldwide and is actually small potatoes compared to
some of the other unpleasant things predicted in the book. It
is later, for example, that the sun is blotted out over a third
of the earth (presumably due to something in the atmosphere).
> Linux 2004 build 0x353E07-3489287 3.1.14
Hey, the Linux people could adopt the Mozilla method of versioning...
Linux/2.0 (CISC; gcc3.2; IA32 i686; en-US; rv:2.5b) Kernel/20021031
> > it's always bothered me in version numbers when 1.12 is newer
> > than 1.2, for example. For some people that could be misleading.
>
> What, for stupid people?
No, for people who understand place value. HTH.HAND.
> Under USA trademark law, product and brand names are adjectives
...
> and should be followed by a generic noun. Thus, "Linux kernel",
> "Windows operating system", "Mac OS", "Macintosh computer",
> "Kleenex tissue", "SPAM luncheon meat", "Xerox copier", etc.
Oh, so...
Word word processor, Office office suite, Media Player media player
(or is that Windows Media media player these days?), Paint painting
program, Windows screen window user interface, MSN Messenger
instant messanger... and lest we pick too much on any one vendor,
OpenOffice office suite, America On Line online service, AOL Instant
Messenger instant messenger, Unix operating system, BSD unix software
distribution (for extra fun, spell out what BSD stands for), Solaris
unix, Gnu's Not Unix unix, Laser Jet laser printer, DeskJet inkjet printer, Free Software Foundation foundation, Red Hat Linux brand
Gnu unix distribution with Linux kernel,
That way lies madness. In a context (and I am not saying all
contexts qualify, but I am implying that slashdot is one context
that does qualify in the case of Linux) where nearly everyone knows
the product in question, the type of product does not need to be
stated. It is sufficient to speak of Linux and know that it is a
kernel, or to speak of Windows and know that it is a windowed user
interface, or to speak of Spam and know that it is that stuff Hormel
sells in the little blue and yellow and pink can. Where trademark
law will cause you problems is where there is some doubt as to
whether you were using the trademark to refer strictly to the
product in question or to something else. Though an argument can
probably be made that the Linux trademark has not been protected
by its holder in that regard, since he actually encourages people
to use the term to refer to more than just the kernel, but that
is another kettle of fish. One imagines he might still try to
protect against anyone using the trademark to refer to a product
that does not _include_ Linux (e.g., a Hurd distribution) might
still be.
Also, a couple of minor quibbles: where I come from, "tissue"
has a meaning very different from anything Kleenex makes (it is
a kind of paper often used for crafts; Puffs klenex or perhaps
Kleenex nosewipes would be closer to the usage around here), and
Spam is generally not on the menu at luncheons, but is more likely
to be consumed in very informal settings, such as at home. (Not
that I have much to do with it in _any_ setting, but then I don't
really go in for greasy foods in general; I don't eat French brand
fried potatoes, either.) But these issues are off-topic.
> The minor has become the de facto major, is what I am trying to
;-)
> say. Their strict adherance to not incrementing the major has
> accomplished the opposite of what they wanted.
No, no, you don't understand. Current versions are still numbered
0.21.n.n because the first major release hasn't been reached yet.
The version number won't be incremented to 1.0 until Emacs has all
the fundamentally vital features it needs to be credibly called a
text editor. Besides better threading (planned for 0.22 or 0.23),
Emacs still needs thorough support for multiple human languages
and OS platforms, a more extensive help system, and complete text
manipulation functionality before a solid 1.0 release can be made.
Better (reentrant) scriptability and networking support would also
be very nice to have for the 1.0 release. Sure, the developers
and early adopters don't bother to say the "0." part, but we all
know it's there. As far as end users are concerned, Emacs really
doesn't even exist yet, in fully-functional released form. Those
of us who have started using it early only do so for testing, or
because there are no alternatives. (If anyone is aware of any
fully-functional text editing application, whether open or closed,
commercial or non-commercial, I would like to know about it, but I
have looked high and low and am under the impression that there is
none available for any platform, at any price. Emacs 0.21, despite
its obvious incompleteness, is the closest thing there is that I
have been able to find.)
See, people may think Mozilla.org invented the fully-functional
1.0 release, but Emacs has had that philosophy all along. In
spades. So, now you know
> # XML (Extended Markup Language)
>
> Um, I didn't read the article, but that's wrong.
Yes, but why nitpick Extended versus Extensible when the whole
point of the sentence is dubious?
> > and Gentoo (yes, over a dialup; I have patience)
> You can, if you have access to a fast link elsewhere,
There's a T1 at work, but...
> get stuff using emerge -f (as in fetchonly) to get all the files
> you need to build the system at a later date, with no Internet
> access.
And carry them home on a floppy? Actually, I could probably carry
a hard drive to work, install it in the (Mandrake) system there, let
stuff download onto it while I'm doing something else, and carry the
drive back home later, but I believe I have the patience to install
over a dialup, particularly since I could plug my monitor into the
normally-monitor-free Pentium/90 Mandrake 7 system I use as a router
and do stuff ad interim that doesn't require X11 or the data that's
stored on the multiboot system.
I really should get a second system, so I can store my data on the
one system and use the other for evaluating stuff, like OSes and
unstable applications and whatnot. Wait, I could migrate most of
my data to the router system... but then it's on the box that's
directly on the internet... none of it's sensitive, but there's
always vandalism... I must ponder this. What I really need is
to store everything in duplicate all the time...
For those who have been saying that the xbox-linux project is
bad for MS because it costs them the loss leader, err, I think
running W2K on it covers that loss leader fairly effectively.
Not that it isn't intersting and all, but the price of W2K will
chew up your savings pretty fast. At this point one of those
Microtel PCs (without W2K) might actually be cheaper.
Not all of them, but it does come with a number of them, not least of all the compiler
OTOH, every major distribution comes with pieces of BSD, too.
A 3D Flatscreen. See, it's flat, but it's 3D...
Aah, nevermind.
> Emacs goodness plus vi keystrokes is a beautiful thing.
:-) And anyway, the nice
I haven't taken the time to familiarise myself much with the
vi keystrokes, but I must say I agree in principle that the
default keybindings are the worst thing about Emacs. I love
the functionality of Emacs, and I don't mind the size (come
on, compare it to apps with comparable levels of functionality
in other categories, such as OpenOffice or Mozilla), but I
did have to do a whole lot of customisation to make it usable.
With that done, though, it's great
thing about Emacs is that you _can_ fully customise it.
Without writing any C or C++ (elisp is much easier to work
with, IMO).
There are a couple of things Emacs needs to really qualify
as an OS, though. First off, it needs filesystem drivers so
it doesn't have to rely on the ones in an underlying OS, and
then it also needs a way to be booted directly from a standard
boot loader. Also, a TCP/IP stack, since currently it relies
on the one in the OS. There are probably another couple of
bits and pieces it would need too. However, Emacs could
certainly qualify as a shell that runs on top of an OS, so
it's at least as much an OS as Windows 3.1, if you look at it
that way. (Of course, Windows was intended to function as a
user's sole interface to the computer, and Emacs wasn't really
originally, but nevermind _that_.)
> Run Win2000 in VMWare under Linux.
> Or run Linux in VMWare under Win2000.
Run Win2000 in VMWare under Linux, which is running in VMWare
under Win2000, which is running in VirtualPC under MacOS X,
which is running on a Mac emulator under Linux, which is
running on bochs under BeOS, which is running under an x86
emulator for VMS, which is running under a Vax emulator for
glulx, running under glulxe.exe on PC-DOS 3.3 on an 8086.
> No WinNT?
He said it was too picky about hardware, by which he means
it won't run on his setup. FWIW, Solaris and Plan9 also.
> > NT can't exist on the same physical drive as 2000.
... MS Longhorn
> Yes, it can.
He's using partition hiding, which allows things to exist on the
same drive that otherwise couldn't exist on the same system at
all -- different versions of Windows 9x for example. (I've been
using PowerBoot for this, but I guess I'll check out the xosl...)
That makes this issue moot for him.
> That said, I miss
Is that available yet? I thought they said 2005 and were
being optimistic as usual?
> SunOS 4.1.3, Solaris, NeXTStep
These are mentioned in the interview, but he ended up not
getting them to work. Solaris he specifically listed (along
with NT3/4 and Plan9) as being too picky about hardware, by
which I think he means too picky about the hardware he happens
to have. His video card is less than ideal for a multiboot
scenerio; a 2D Matrox card would have done better, I think.
That was his problem with Plan9 at least. His motherboard
may also have been an issue for some systems.
> Were there ever a VMS/OpenVMS version for the i386?
I don't believe so. I had to get myself a Vax in order
to have VMS in my bedroom. (I settled for a used one,
though, so it didn't cost that much. They seem to be
a glut on the used market, for some reason.)
> My workstations typically multiboot at least three OSes
I can count DOS6, Win95, WinMe, RedHat 6, Mandrake 8, QNX, and the
BeOS, so I say I have seven versions of five OSes. I've also
dualbooted Windows 98SE with Mandrake, on another system, and WinXP
Home with Mandrake, on _another_ system. I figure that's enough to
qualify me as an experienced multibooter, but obviously I'm not a
record-setter like this guy. I'm looking into Plan9. I was unable
so far to get BSD installed (tried the three major free distros),
but I think the problem may have been a lack of understanding on
my part, in terms of how the BSD partitioning stuff works. If
anyone knows of a good tutorial on that...
Oh, and I don't have six (!) drives to play with like this guy does;
I'm sure I'd have more OSes installed if I had that kind of space
to play with. I've just got a 4GB primary master and a 30GB primary
slave. I used to have an ancient Debian (old enough, it didn't come
with X11), but I toasted it to make space for RedHat some time ago,
when I only had the one drive.
If I get a third drive, I want to do BSD (Free, Net, or Open,
whichever is easiest to get installed) and Gentoo (yes, over a
dialup; I have patience). I've also put thought into trying
Solaris.x86; if the current version comes out under that hobbyist
license program where you only pay the one-time-fee for the media
that's about the same cost as Windows, I might try it out. It
would be nice to put Solaris on my resume...
I have to agree with the interviewee's assessment of BeOS; it's a
multibooter's dream. Like DOS, it blissfully ignores any partition it
doesn't understand and needs no drivers for anything. Like Linux, it
can mount most common types of filesystems. (Okay, ext2 is readonly,
but NTFS is readonly in Linux.) Also like Linux, it can be booted
from basically anywhere (nth logical partition on the nth logical
drive, past the 1024th cyllinder, disk image stored on any FAT16 or
FAT32 partition you like, wherever). Back to being like DOS, it can
be transplanted by copying, or by transplanting the drive to a
different system, and will Just Work with any supported hardware
configuration. It's really a shame about what happened to the
company; the OS is missing some basic features (such as the ability
to change colour preferences globally and have all apps that use the
standard widgets follow them) and because of the collapse of the
company no longer supports modern hardware, but there are a lot of
things other systems can learn from the BeOS. I wish the design
people for both Microsoft and the Gnome and KDE projects would sit
down with it and play for a few hours some time. Maybe Apple will;
you know they know about it, because they thought about _buying_ it,
and then picked NeXT instead.
Um, yeah, get a load of this quote:
# XML (Extended Markup Language) invisibly marks up a list of
# executives' names in a PowerPoint slide, so that dropping the
# list into an e-mail's "To" field turns the names into the
# execs' e-mail addresses.
Let me get this straight: in the future office environment,
every time you put together a slide show, Microsoft wants you
to fill in all sorts of extra information that isn't relevant
to the presentation and won't show up in the slideshow, in
case at a later time someone wants to send an email? Huh?
What if I want to drop that list of names into Timidity or
somesuch -- should the person who creates the slideshow also
add each executive's favourite work of music to their markup?
How about also filling in their birthdates, so I can drop the
list on my calendar application? Riiiight.
It's nice to see MS talking about using XML, but you'd think
they could come up with a use for it that would be... useful.
> Believe it or not, this is a feature I would use.
I suppose I might too, but it's fundamentally a feature we
_already have_.
> Right now, copying a file between two computers involves:
> 1. launch an ftp server, 2. copy the file to ftproot,
> 3. run my script which automatically logs into said server,
> 4 type "get ". It's not super-inconvenient, but definitely
> not as easy as a laser pointer drag and drop.
The thing is, we already have drag-and-drop. Perhaps you are
not aware of smbmount (Linux/OSX/otherunices) or the "assign
drive letter" option in Network Neighborhood (Windows and NT).
With that, there's no _need_ to drag the file clear to the
other screen; you just drop it in the appropriate shortcut on
your desktop, which points to the shared folder on the other
computer, and that's that. Actually, smbmount is just the
Windows-compatible way to do it on Unix; before that, there
was NFS, which I'm told still works if you don't have to
interoperate with MS systems. The nice thing is, neither of
these technologies requires you to change anything when you
reposition the computers, as you would have to do for the
drag-from-screen-to-screen thing, unless the monitors have
GPS built-in... which seems silly at best. It's much easier
to just put a drop-point on your screen that symbolises the
shared folder on the other PC and drop things there. That
saves you about half the distance you have to move the mouse,
if nothing else. Add Finder-style springloaded folders to
drop things in, and you can drag your files quickly into a
subdirectory of the shared folder in question. (Gnome
really needs to get springloaded folders... preferably in
such a way that they can be placed on panels as well as
working in the file managers and on the desktop.)
Sure, there are security issues with the smb/nmb/cifs suite of
protocols, but you can block the relevant ports at your firewall
and cut out most of them, and almost all of the rest are internal
issues, which are unavoidable because the people inside have
physical access. (Okay, yeah, with VPNs they might not, but if
you're doing that you've got more security concerns going than
MS probably envisioned for this ideal office anyway.)
> Is it just me, or is that statement total technobabble? Say I put
> a router in my house. Where does the data go through it to?
The OP was probably confused about what cable modems do, but he
brings up an interesting point...
With a heirarchical routing system like what TCP/IP uses, it can
pretty much only go upstream to the backbone. It is possible for
a network to be designed so that there's no backbone, and the data
can be routed wherever there are open connections -- so that if you
have ethernet connections to the people in the houses nextdoor and
a wireless connection to your relatives across town and another to
your mobile phone (which connects to your phone service provider)
and a DSL connection to an ISP, data could be routed in one of
these connections and out the other.
Such a system would have higher latency, because it would have
more hops, but the bandwidth could be okay, if _everybody_ runs
fiber to the house nextdoor. TCP/IP won't work, because it can't
do routing in that kind of environment; some kind of routing
protocol would have to be devised that understood the topology
of such a network (perhaps by using latitude and longitude as
metrics for the routing, along with other factors such as "how
busy is the network in that direction"). The really major problem
with such a system is, how much do you charge your neighbors to
route their data, and what about the people whose data your
neighbors are routing (through you), and so on? Unless everyone
suddenly becomes a fair player (haha), the network protocols
(or their implementation) would have to include some kind of
reciprocal quota system or somesuch, which would add complexity
and drive the latency up, possibly beyond usefulness.