> No, the most basic form of protection is to not have a card at all.
Well, that's what I do. Of course, you can still be defrauded, but they have to convince _you_ to put a check in the mail. Actually, the most basic form of financial protection would be to have no financial dealings whatsoever... but that might be impractical.
I thought we already had a Simple Message Transfer Protocol.
Okay, so not all email clients do the interrupt-the-user-at- once-so-he-can-reply-to-th e-message-instead-of-get -work-done thing, but that's strictly a client behavior issue and no reflection on the protocol. If you take any random mail client and rig it to burden the network by checking the server continuously for new messages and pop to the front of the user's workspace with an annoying beep every time an incoming message is received and steal keyboard focus, you've pretty much got IM, but without the proprietary protocols.
> Ok, a poll: how many of you went into the source > code today and fixed the vulnerability on your > own? Come on, raise your hands...
Very very few, obviously.
Perhaps you have a point, but I'm not sure what it is exactly. I would hope it would be obvious to everyone that it is only necessary for _one_ person to fix it himself, without waiting on the vendors, provided he shares his work. Then the rest of us who care at _all_ about security just grab and install the patch, or our vendors take the patch and backport it and we use the vendor security update facility.
Yes, you have your idiot majority who have never installed an update _ever_, but nothing can help them.
> Saying you've never gotten angry at a comptuer would just be a > flat out lie
I never got angry at DOS, and I only occasionally get angry at Linux. I have been angry at Windows plenty of times, however, and I've sometimes been a trifle upset with (pre-X) MacOS.
When I get angry at Windows, the first thing I do is Ctrl-Alt-Del. (For Mac, I hold all the buckies, since I can't recall which ones I actually need, and hit Esc.) If that doesn't give me satisfaction, I hit the reset key (only ever had to do this in Linux when I ran out of swap space; I've since learned to keep more swap files around than I can actually use, so I never run out), or in worse cases pull out the power cord. In extreme cases, I boot in command-prompt-only mode, copy off any needed data, and fire up fdisk. Nothing relieves the stress of working with a screwed-up system like deleting the partition(s) and creating nice fresh new empty clean ones. I've yet to have to do that with a Unix system, although I did once have to get out my Mandrake CDs and do a repair job by reinstalling some things. I didn't have to repartition, though. Lucky, perhaps. I've never damaged a computer because I was angry.
> I'd personally like to see the splash screen and the icons be > part of skins/themes. Is there any reason they couldn't be?
Short answer: Yes. (For long answer, search bugzilla for "icons" and read the comments in the various related bugs.)
However, the icons _are_ changeable. In your Mozilla installation directory, there's a directory, chrome/icons/default IIRC, where the icons are stored. You can replace them with different icons. If you're on the Windows platform, there are XPI icon packs freely available (e.g. at http://mozillako.hypermart.net/iconpacks/ ). Those are Windows.ico files, so you'll probably need to convert them for use on another platform. (It might be possible to persuade me to do this for Linux (although I wouldn't likely get to it until at least next week). I don't know what icon formats other platforms use.)
> I'd bet $50 that if you wrapped the chicken in a dozen layers of > dry aluminum foil instead of wet leaves it would be burned to a > crisp.
I believe you're right about that, unless a "shovel full" of lava is a lot less than I expect. Water is pretty amazing stuff -- like magic if you don't understand the chemistry behind it. What goes on is, first the water is raised from ambient temperature to boiling (this will happen almost immediately), absorbing a small amount of heat. Then the water goes from liquid to vapour, which will take longer and absorb _considerably_ more heat, without raising the actual temperature. Some of the steam will escape, as the original question noted, but not all of it. That which doesn't continues to absorb yet more heat as the temperature rises. It's that middle part, where heat is absorbed while the temperature remains constant, that works the magic.
There are some other notable points. The lava has already cooled sufficiently to not damage the shovel, so it's borderline on solid already. Then it gets carried away from the actual flow, which gives it a chance to cool further, before the cooking process is begun. It _is_ only a couple of shovelfuls, as has been noted, and so while it may be pretty hot initially, the amount of heat energy it can emmanate is limited, proportional to the mass. Compare that to an oven, which has a continuous supply of incoming energy that it draws from the power grid, warming everything inside the oven to the temperature you set the oven to. With the shovelful of lava, the chicken will not reach the temperature that the lava starts at, or even close to it. Being insulated by the steam, it is unlikely even to reach the final temperature of the lava (asserted to be 450F by the original question).
It still doesn't sound possible to me, but I don't know enough about the lava in question, in terms of what kind of rock it is, the amount of heat energy it can hold, how well it transmits heat, and so on to rule it out as the interviewee has done. This really is a question for a chemist, not a cook, because it's the physical properties of the rock that really need to be explained, not the way chicken cooks.
> The Mandrake download page [linux-mandrake.com] > requires you to either: > A. Have previously *paid* them a minimum of $60 > OR > B. *State* you *will* pay them a minimum of $60 > in future > There is no other option that allows you to > download their software.
Bear in mind, they're not required by the GPL to provide a public anonymous ftp server. What they _are_ required to do is to allow anyone who does acquire their software to also acquire the source code in similar fashion and with all the rights that the license grants. Translation: they can stop offering a public download and only sell the boxed set (with sources included), but they can't stop CheapBytes from purchasing one copy of the boxed set and burning copies of all the freely- licensed software in the distro and selling them at a reduced price. The public download is a service they choose to provide. Bear in mind that bandwidth costs money. They would be completely within their rights to shut down anonymous access to their ftp server and supply accounts to paid subscribers. Alternately, they could provide accounts only to mirrors, and make everyone use the mirrors instead of downloading from their own server directly. That would save them a lot of bandwidth and thus money. (Some of the mirrors might not care for it, though...)
> What's to stop them hiking this 'download > price' from $60 to $1000000? Nobody is likely to pay that much.
> The question is how are we going to build apps that > > 1) Havethe install flexibility of a website > 2) Have access to the local hard drive.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the install flexibility of a website", but XPI are very easy for the user to install. If we assume that JavaScript and Software Installation are enabled in the prefs, the user clicks on a link that says something like "click here to install SomeCoolApp", clicks "Install" on one dialog box (the other choice is cancel), watches a progress bar, clicks "ok", and restarts Mozilla.
As far as access to the hard drive goes, the app will run with chrome privileges once it's installed, so in most cases that means the same access that the user has, which generally should be adequate for normal applications.
If you want to see an example of this in action, go over to xulplanet.com and fetch the Preferences Toolbar. It's a very simple app, a toolbar addon for the browser, but it demonstrates how the install works very nicely. Plus, it's useful.
You're both exaggerating. A decent PC is more than 1/3 the price of a decent Mac, but it _is_ cheaper, and any Mac you get for $800 is going to be low-end. (And if you want to talk low-end, PCs go for cheaper and you know it.)
Part of the problem is that Apple doesn't really have a flexible midrange. If you don't need a ton of power but would like to use a fairly high resolution without needing a magnifying glass to see the screen, you've got to go to one of the PowerMac towers, which start at $1700 (without monitor) partly because they're souped up with stuff you may not need, and high-end processing power. If you go with anything less from Apple, you're stuck with a dinky little screen that's _built in_ so you can't even replace it if you want to write off its cost. Bleh. So you go with the PowerMac even though it has things you don't need... and you pay for those things anyway, and yes, it costs more.
The commodity nature of the PC hardware market encourages vendors to offer a more flexible product line, so that you can buy a system that has everything you need, without buying a system that has _everything_. It is not entirely fair to take a random PC system and say, "look, a Mac that has everything this has would be twice as much", but by the same token it's not entirely fair to take a Mac system and say, "look, a PC that has all this would cost just as much", because some of that stuff you are buying even though you don't really need it, just because it's part of the package.
And yes, there are people who shop for PCs that same way, so for them it doesn't really matter. But for people who have specific ideas about what features they want and what features they aren't willing to pay for, Apple may not fit like a glove.
Then you have the cost of software upgrades...
Re:Something similar can be found here...
on
Crushing Experience
·
· Score: 2
What I'd really be interested in seeing are some statistics on what percentage of people push the button, and what percentage push it the second time.
Re:Something similar can be found here...
on
Crushing Experience
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· Score: 2
The totl.net thing is cookie-based, which makes it really easy to get around on the client side and see the site again. If a firewall-based solution were used, you'd have to come back from a different IP address, which at minimum would mean redialing.
> ---Your proc has a unique ID that someone can retrieve over > the 'net? Yah, in most cases, so does your NIC. > Yeah, but in the case of the NIC, I can do a ifconfig and > fix that. Cant very well ifconfig/dev/cpu Mac blablabla > Now can I?
user_pref("general.useragent.override",
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020808"); (Or whatever you want to say you are.)
Potent narcotics you have been using. How about this definition: A piece of software is easy to use if for a given task that is to be performed with it less effort is required than would be needed to perform the same task using another piece of software.
Using that definition, a well-configured Emacs is _very_ easy to use (assuming you have a good idea how to use it). I figure Emacs saves me thirty minutes a day over using any other editor (or a couple of hours over one without keyboard macros), because of the various customisations I've been able to make to save myself time. (For example, when editing HTML, I can hit Ctrl-T and type in a tagname (say, table) and hit enter, and I get the open and close tags both, (like this: <table></table>) with my cursor sitting in between the two tags, ready for inserting content. That saves me a small number of keystrokes *many* times a day. I have dozens of little things like that set up. Trying to use a non-scriptable editor drives me out of my mind, because it's so much more work to get anything done.
Then there are the built-in features, like filetype-driven modes with automatic indentation and insertsions. I have a hard time imagining writing Perl scripts without Emacs.
> Sure, it may be easy after you've read a book
Or had someone explain a little. After I'd been using Emacs for a while, a new editing task presented itself: quizzing questions. These follow a certain format, so I set up a mode for Emacs to make it easy to do them in that format. So typing a question mark finishes the question and proceeds to the answer, and a colon causes automatic insertion of a reference prefix, and so on and so forth. (The details are not important, unless you write quizzing questions, in which case email me.) Then my sister (who had _no_ prior experience with Emacs) wanted to write some quiz questions, so I showed her Emacs with my quiz-question mode. I spent maybe five minutes acquainting her with how it worked and gave her a list of about ten keystrokes she'd need to learn. In no time flat, she loved it. It saves her a lot of time over using a regular editor and doing all the things by hand that the mode does automatically. Now, she couldn't have written the mode; it took knowledge of elisp to do that (and I did read a book (albeit not in dead tree format) to learn that). But just to use it, hey, that's easy, once it's set up.
The only thing that makes Emacs hard to use is that it doesn't come preconfigured for normal users out of the box. It comes preconfigured for people who fondly remember never changing the settings on Emacs 18 (i.e., insane people, people who think that Ctrl-x Ctrl-f might be a good keystroke sequence for opening a file). But with the right stuff in your configuration, it's as easy as Notepad, but without the utter lack of usefulness.
I have actually thought about creating and distributing a version of Emacs that is functionally identical but with all the key bindings changed around to cut the initial learning curve down to size. If I could get two other people to work on it with me, I'd do it. It would be a huge undertaking, though, because once you dork with Ctrl-X and Ctrl-C (which you have to do) you have to change all the keybindings that rely on those prefixes, in every major mode (well, every one that you distribute with your modified Emacs). So I'm not undertaking it alone.
> > you don't get anything when you spend money to pay your taxes. > > So having roads to travel on, schools for your children, and > armed forces to defend your nation count as nothing?
Sorry, I wasn't clear. You don't get those things (schools, armed forces, roads, et cetera) when (or because) the taxes are collected, but you do get them when the taxes are _spent_. Just like with a voluntary contribution: if I send you fifty bucks (not that I'm planning on it, but it's fun to pretend), the ecconomy is not boosted in any real way by that, _but_ when you spend the money, then it is boosted, just as if I had spent the money myself. It's the same if the contribution is a mandatory tax: nobody gets anything when the taxes are contributed, but when they are spent, then you do.
I made this distinction largely because there have been in history some governments that taxed in order to accumulate wealth (in the form of precious metals and things usually), and then stored large quatities of it under lock and key. That type of taxation serves to impoverish the entire nation. If the tax money is spent, however, it is returned to the system and continues to circulate as before. (Paying off debt counts as spending. So does paying the interest.)
> You're saying copyright is good because it will cause > people to spend money.
At least in theory, yes. Copyright allows books and things to be sold at a profit (rather than on razor-thin margins), which has augmented entire industries, employing millions of people. In essence, it creates more ways for money to usefully change hands.
> Spending money is only good in that it can encourage the > creation of wealth.
This is true, and the pro-copyright argument is predicated on the assumption that creative works can be considered a form of valuable wealth. I guess I wasn't clear on that.
> Without copyright, artists would presumably not bother > creating content
This is the sticking point. We all know that _some_ authors feel compelled to write and would do so even if there were no potential to make any significant amount of money by doing so. The more interesting question is not whether _any_ content would be created but how much -- is _more_ content created because of copyright law than would be otherwise? IOW, _fewer_ artists would bother.
> If copyright lasts longer than is necessary, it prohibits people > from acquiring wealth, and allows the publisher to collect money > for doing nothing.
Absolutely. After a point, most everyone who is going to buy the content has done so. The duration of this time period varies depending on the medium, the quality of the content, and so on, but at some point the copyright _needs_ to expire. I am of the opinion (as I stated) that our current copyright law makes this period of time too long, that it should be shorter. But I do not think it should be done away. Now, here's a question: how much shorter should it be? Why do we measure from the death of the author, rather than the date of first publication? How many years are required for a content creator to make a respectible earning from his work? I've said that I think seventy years is too long, but what about thirty years? Twenty? Ten? Not that this is actually going to have any chance of happening, but it's interesting to think about, IMO.
> Spending money for nothing is pointless. It allows some people > to collect money for doing nothing, when they should be out > creating wealth.
That's true, but it's not as bad as it seems. They're going to spend (or invest) that money in most cases, so it gets back into the system. They're not impoverishing the whole ecconomy by collecting that money. It is possible to argue that they are impoverishing the system by a failure to continue to produce more content, but then we have to raise the question, "is retirement bad for the ecconomy?" It's more ecconomics than I thought we really needed to go into in a DMCA thread.
> You do indeed get something for your taxes, you get all the > government services
Not until they spend the money, you don't. If they tax you and throw the money in a vault (as _has_ been done at some points in history, albeit not AFAIK in the USA) you get nothing. It's when the money is _spent_ that somebody gets something.
> I'm just not sure that you will actually own the > program, I believe the EULA will state that Adobe > owns it and are just licencing it to you.
Okay, but you get to use it, and that has value -- otherwise you wouldn't have spent the money on it. (It may be noted that I personally don't have a copy of Photoshop, but it was an example only.)
>..sooner or later everything comes from something.
Yes, this is true, but often what it comes from is human effort, which is often (albeit not always) motivated by a paycheck.
> Wealth does *not* come from thin air. Resources are used to create > it, even if those resources are just the nutrients in the soil that > eventually end up boosting somebody's brain power. Unless the > resources used are returned, sooner or later we find there's no > more resource.
Yes, but we're talking about copyrighted works here, not fossil fuels. Copyrighted works are produced _primarily_ by human effort, which is an extremely renewable resource. Yes, it comes from somewhere. Ultimately it comes from the food you eat. Maybe you've had science in elementary school: do you remember where the food chain starts? Photosynthesis is powered by sunlight. Basically, the human effort to create copyrightable works runs (indirectly) on solar power. But yeah, if we create too much then we'll exhaust the sun.
> Wealth 'creation' isn't a dream, its taking the bread off > someone else's table. This isn't some kind of self renewing > table, that 'wealth' comes from somewhere.
You apparently have never had ecconomics, and are operating under the assumption that there is a fixed amount of wealth, so that if it is transfered from one entity to another then that's that, and the rich can by selling a lot of stuff accumulate all of the wealth and starve out the poor. This is true of certain kinds of wealth (the most obvious example being real estate), but it is not true in general and is certainly not true of currency, at least not under our current system. I'm going to appear to stray off topic here for a bit, but I will get back to copyright law before I'm done.
If currency _did_ work that way, then we could increase the total amount of wealth by just printing tons more money. But in reality, that would just cause extra inflation. The ecconomy is not measured in terms of how much currency exists in the system, but more in terms of how many times it is spent[1].
Every time a buck is spent, somebody gets something for it. Let's say you go out and buy Photoshop. You fork over an outrageous sum of money, and Adobe takes it -- but you get a copy of Photoshop. Adobe now has your money, and they're going to do _something_ with it. (Hopefully something other than wallpaper the executive bathroom, because that would remove the money from circulation.) Maybe they pay a font designer for thirty minutes' worth of work. The font designer now has the money -- but Adobe (hopefully, if everything is working as it should) has something to show for it, maybe a nice glyph or something. The font designer will take the money and do something with it. Maybe he pays his phone bill, for example. AT&T now has the money (your money, remember?), but the font designer got to call his mom long distance. Every time the money changes hands, somebody gets something.
(There are exceptions. For example, you don't get anything when you spend money to pay your taxes. If the government takes the tax money and throws it in a vault, they've reduced your ability to spend money and are not spending it themselves either, and the whole system becomes impoverished. OTOH, if they tax you and then turn around and spend the money, then it is back in circulation and can be spent again.)
Now, this doesn't mean you should necessarily spend your money as fast as possible. If everyone did that it would boost the whole ecconomy, and people would have more stuff; you would have more stuff -- but it wouldn't necessarily be the stuff you wanted to have. It generally works best if you spend the money on something you actually want.
Savings are another topic for another day, but basically saving only hurts the ecconomy if you stuff a billion dollars in a matress. If you invest it (even in a savings account), it can to a large extent continue changing hands while you're not using it, and thus stay in circulation. That has value, which is why you get to collect interest.
Now, back to copyrights. Copyrights are (in general) good, because they cause more money to be spent more times. However, current copyright law may perhaps go too far. Seventy years after the death of the author, very few works are still in a position to generate any substantial amount of spending. That being the case, the duration of copyright is probably too long, and should probably be shortened. Copyright holders who have good sense often release their works after a few years (when they stop generating any real revenue) in order to collect good PR. (I don't mean they place them into the public domain -- although that is sometimes done too -- but that they start to give out permissions more liberally than they would have in the beginning. In software, this can mean taking a commercial product (e.g., the Zork series) and making it available for free public download (as Activision did).)
So, is the DMCA good, or bad? Well, waving it around like a club the way certain entities have been doing of late is a big pain for everyone concerned. It's annoying, and it accomplishes very little in the long term. But that goes back to the very litigation-friendly nature of our society and of our court system, more than to any given law per se. I've seen several people post with the opinion that the DMCA does not apply here and is being misused. Perhaps so; IANAL. It has been misused in several cases where it does not or should not apply, so that would not really be a big change.
I still haven't answered the question of whether the DMCA is good or bad... but I'm not going to do that in this post.
[1] We could quibble about the word "spent", but basically
I'm talking about forking over the money in exchange for
some desired good or service, rather than just giving it
over for nothing in return. Gifts don't harm the ecconomy
(since the givee can turn around and spend the money), but
they don't really contribute either. Taxes fall into the
same category; they are effectively contributions, albeit
mandatory ones, rather than spending in the sense I'm
talking about spending.
You apparently have seen different movies than I have. The movie desktops I've seen don't provide any facility for launching apps, switching between apps, or anything else useful. They usually consist of one big screen-filling dialog box containing options for performing impossible feats, such as trying all the possibilities for a sixteen-character password in thirty seconds, or uploading a fatal virus to an alien computer system about which nothing is known. Also, they have about 160x50 resolution, which is anything but modern and cool.
I'm afraid it's not that simple. The light striking your structure (whatever it is) won't all be coming in perpendicular to the surface.
I'll let that sink in...
Besides measuring wavelengths and intensities, you have to measure the _direction_ of every incoming bit of light and, without a delay that would be perceptible, send it to the appropriate point it would have reached if you weren't there and send it on its way aimed in the correct direction.
Further, all that gets you is a neat parlor trick. If you want to hide from people who know you might have a cloaking device (say, for military use), it gets harder. You have to account for polarity, or else all the other guy has to do is shine polarised light all around and use polarised sunglasses, and if you didn't reproduce the correct polarity, you'll glow. And as someone else has said you need to account for all wavelengths, not just visible light.
I'm guessing the reason you can't do those things in Linux is because you aren't a Linux user. You betray your ignorance on a number of points, but here are some of the most glaring...
> I scan in business cards for quarter page, free form text and > scanned images for large size ads. What Linux Frankenstein can > do that? Uh, one with a scanner? (Yes, there are some really cheap scanners that only work in Windows, but in terms of other criteria (quality, speed) they're junk anyway. Presumably, a Linux user shopping for a scanner would get one that would work with Linux, same as a Mac user shopping for a scanner would get one that works with Mac.)
> Word isn't so hot when printing JPEGs smaller than 50k. Who would use a lossily-compressed format for printing? The only reason to do such a thing would be to demonstrate that it looks bad by comparing it to something done right.
> what about formatting the pages? Open Office can't do it Erhm, I've not had any trouble with such simple tasks as that. Yes, you do have to set the properties on the image after you paste it in and drag it to the spot on the page where you want it, but how exactly is that hard?
> A program guide is a real world task. So is mail merging > 10,000 letters for a fund raising campaign. Or issuing 1000 > thank you letters in a day to donors. Or a baronial fold > brochure. Or a three fold brochure. If you have a problem doing any of these, you need to take a basic high-school-level computer class. There aren't even any major differences in _how_ you do any of these from one OS to the other.
Depends what you mix. Mixing Windows with MacOS Classic is a pain, as I've personally experienced. Mixing Linux with Windows is generally a lot more comfortable, however. Linux has very little problem reading and writing files on Windows fileshares, printing to Windows network print servers,... the usual office network activities. Deploying software to two different OSes is an issue, since you need two different binaries to deploy, but if the Linux systems are doing basic stuff (web, email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations) this concern will be manageable.
Red Hat is right: Linux may not be ready for _every_ desktop, but it is ready for _enough_ desktops to be worth offering.
> It's not the fact that it can be downloaded that's the problem. > It's the fact that the only distribution channels require going > out of your way to get the software that becomes a problem.
Oh, yes, I agree with that. The biggest thing the Linux community needs right now is a big-name OEM to ship desktop systems with an OSS distro (or their own distro of mostly OSS software) pre-installed, branded with the OEM's logos, preconfigured for the hardware, and set up to be easy for the end user (i.e., huge panel buttons for "get my email", "surf the web", and "create a document".) With 90 days free tech support, extendable to three years for a price.
Apple is closer to this than what we had two years ago, but their hardware is pricey and most of the end-user apps (such as AppleWorks) are not OSS. And anyway, it's not Linux, so while it's all well and good for Apple, the Linux community still is wanting a major OEM. Yes, I know there are such OEMs, but they're not the big guys who advertise on television.
Slashdot Mirror
> No, the most basic form of protection is to not have a card at all.
Well, that's what I do. Of course, you can still be defrauded, but
they have to convince _you_ to put a check in the mail. Actually,
the most basic form of financial protection would be to have no
financial dealings whatsoever... but that might be impractical.
I thought we already had a Simple Message Transfer Protocol.
h e-message-instead-of-get -work-done
Okay, so not all email clients do the interrupt-the-user-at-
once-so-he-can-reply-to-t
thing, but that's strictly a client behavior issue and no
reflection on the protocol. If you take any random mail
client and rig it to burden the network by checking the
server continuously for new messages and pop to the front of
the user's workspace with an annoying beep every time an
incoming message is received and steal keyboard focus, you've
pretty much got IM, but without the proprietary protocols.
> Ok, a poll: how many of you went into the source
> code today and fixed the vulnerability on your
> own? Come on, raise your hands...
Very very few, obviously.
Perhaps you have a point, but I'm not sure what
it is exactly. I would hope it would be obvious
to everyone that it is only necessary for _one_
person to fix it himself, without waiting on the
vendors, provided he shares his work. Then the
rest of us who care at _all_ about security just
grab and install the patch, or our vendors take
the patch and backport it and we use the vendor
security update facility.
Yes, you have your idiot majority who have never
installed an update _ever_, but nothing can help
them.
> Saying you've never gotten angry at a comptuer would just be a
> flat out lie
I never got angry at DOS, and I only occasionally get angry at
Linux. I have been angry at Windows plenty of times, however,
and I've sometimes been a trifle upset with (pre-X) MacOS.
When I get angry at Windows, the first thing I do is Ctrl-Alt-Del.
(For Mac, I hold all the buckies, since I can't recall which ones
I actually need, and hit Esc.) If that doesn't give me satisfaction,
I hit the reset key (only ever had to do this in Linux when I ran out
of swap space; I've since learned to keep more swap files around than
I can actually use, so I never run out), or in worse cases pull out
the power cord. In extreme cases, I boot in command-prompt-only
mode, copy off any needed data, and fire up fdisk. Nothing relieves
the stress of working with a screwed-up system like deleting the
partition(s) and creating nice fresh new empty clean ones. I've
yet to have to do that with a Unix system, although I did once have
to get out my Mandrake CDs and do a repair job by reinstalling some
things. I didn't have to repartition, though. Lucky, perhaps.
I've never damaged a computer because I was angry.
> try using emacs when your fingers are trained to vi
:-)
As long as the first thing you do is M-x viper-mode, you
should be just fine
> I'd personally like to see the splash screen and the icons be
.ico files, so you'll probably need to convert
> part of skins/themes. Is there any reason they couldn't be?
Short answer: Yes. (For long answer, search bugzilla for "icons"
and read the comments in the various related bugs.)
However, the icons _are_ changeable. In your Mozilla installation
directory, there's a directory, chrome/icons/default IIRC, where
the icons are stored. You can replace them with different icons.
If you're on the Windows platform, there are XPI icon packs freely
available (e.g. at http://mozillako.hypermart.net/iconpacks/ ).
Those are Windows
them for use on another platform. (It might be possible to
persuade me to do this for Linux (although I wouldn't likely get
to it until at least next week). I don't know what icon formats
other platforms use.)
> I'd bet $50 that if you wrapped the chicken in a dozen layers of
> dry aluminum foil instead of wet leaves it would be burned to a
> crisp.
I believe you're right about that, unless a "shovel full" of lava
is a lot less than I expect. Water is pretty amazing stuff -- like
magic if you don't understand the chemistry behind it. What goes on
is, first the water is raised from ambient temperature to boiling
(this will happen almost immediately), absorbing a small amount of
heat. Then the water goes from liquid to vapour, which will take
longer and absorb _considerably_ more heat, without raising the
actual temperature. Some of the steam will escape, as the original
question noted, but not all of it. That which doesn't continues to
absorb yet more heat as the temperature rises. It's that middle
part, where heat is absorbed while the temperature remains constant,
that works the magic.
There are some other notable points. The lava has already cooled
sufficiently to not damage the shovel, so it's borderline on solid
already. Then it gets carried away from the actual flow, which
gives it a chance to cool further, before the cooking process is
begun. It _is_ only a couple of shovelfuls, as has been noted, and
so while it may be pretty hot initially, the amount of heat energy
it can emmanate is limited, proportional to the mass. Compare that
to an oven, which has a continuous supply of incoming energy that
it draws from the power grid, warming everything inside the oven to
the temperature you set the oven to. With the shovelful of lava,
the chicken will not reach the temperature that the lava starts at,
or even close to it. Being insulated by the steam, it is unlikely
even to reach the final temperature of the lava (asserted to be
450F by the original question).
It still doesn't sound possible to me, but I don't know enough
about the lava in question, in terms of what kind of rock it is,
the amount of heat energy it can hold, how well it transmits heat,
and so on to rule it out as the interviewee has done. This
really is a question for a chemist, not a cook, because it's the
physical properties of the rock that really need to be explained,
not the way chicken cooks.
> The Mandrake download page [linux-mandrake.com]
> requires you to either:
> A. Have previously *paid* them a minimum of $60
> OR
> B. *State* you *will* pay them a minimum of $60
> in future
> There is no other option that allows you to
> download their software.
Bear in mind, they're not required by the GPL to
provide a public anonymous ftp server. What they
_are_ required to do is to allow anyone who does
acquire their software to also acquire the source
code in similar fashion and with all the rights
that the license grants. Translation: they can
stop offering a public download and only sell the
boxed set (with sources included), but they can't
stop CheapBytes from purchasing one copy of the
boxed set and burning copies of all the freely-
licensed software in the distro and selling them
at a reduced price. The public download is a
service they choose to provide. Bear in mind that
bandwidth costs money. They would be completely
within their rights to shut down anonymous access
to their ftp server and supply accounts to paid
subscribers. Alternately, they could provide
accounts only to mirrors, and make everyone use
the mirrors instead of downloading from their own
server directly. That would save them a lot of
bandwidth and thus money. (Some of the mirrors
might not care for it, though...)
> What's to stop them hiking this 'download
> price' from $60 to $1000000?
Nobody is likely to pay that much.
> The question is how are we going to build apps that
>
> 1) Havethe install flexibility of a website
> 2) Have access to the local hard drive.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the install flexibility of a
website", but XPI are very easy for the user to install. If
we assume that JavaScript and Software Installation are enabled
in the prefs, the user clicks on a link that says something
like "click here to install SomeCoolApp", clicks "Install" on
one dialog box (the other choice is cancel), watches a progress
bar, clicks "ok", and restarts Mozilla.
As far as access to the hard drive goes, the app will run
with chrome privileges once it's installed, so in most cases
that means the same access that the user has, which generally
should be adequate for normal applications.
If you want to see an example of this in action, go over to
xulplanet.com and fetch the Preferences Toolbar. It's a very
simple app, a toolbar addon for the browser, but it demonstrates
how the install works very nicely. Plus, it's useful.
You're both exaggerating. A decent PC is more than 1/3 the price
of a decent Mac, but it _is_ cheaper, and any Mac you get for $800
is going to be low-end. (And if you want to talk low-end, PCs
go for cheaper and you know it.)
Part of the problem is that Apple doesn't really have a flexible
midrange. If you don't need a ton of power but would like to use
a fairly high resolution without needing a magnifying glass to see
the screen, you've got to go to one of the PowerMac towers, which
start at $1700 (without monitor) partly because they're souped up
with stuff you may not need, and high-end processing power. If you
go with anything less from Apple, you're stuck with a dinky little
screen that's _built in_ so you can't even replace it if you want
to write off its cost. Bleh. So you go with the PowerMac even
though it has things you don't need... and you pay for those
things anyway, and yes, it costs more.
The commodity nature of the PC hardware market encourages vendors
to offer a more flexible product line, so that you can buy a system
that has everything you need, without buying a system that has
_everything_. It is not entirely fair to take a random PC system
and say, "look, a Mac that has everything this has would be twice
as much", but by the same token it's not entirely fair to take a
Mac system and say, "look, a PC that has all this would cost just
as much", because some of that stuff you are buying even though
you don't really need it, just because it's part of the package.
And yes, there are people who shop for PCs that same way, so for
them it doesn't really matter. But for people who have specific
ideas about what features they want and what features they aren't
willing to pay for, Apple may not fit like a glove.
Then you have the cost of software upgrades...
What I'd really be interested in seeing are some statistics
on what percentage of people push the button, and what percentage
push it the second time.
The totl.net thing is cookie-based, which makes it really easy
to get around on the client side and see the site again. If a
firewall-based solution were used, you'd have to come back from
a different IP address, which at minimum would mean redialing.
> ---Your proc has a unique ID that someone can retrieve over /dev/cpu Mac blablabla
> the 'net? Yah, in most cases, so does your NIC.
> Yeah, but in the case of the NIC, I can do a ifconfig and
> fix that. Cant very well ifconfig
> Now can I?
user_pref("general.useragent.override",
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020808");
(Or whatever you want to say you are.)
> Uh, Emacs? Not easy to use by any definition
Potent narcotics you have been using. How about this definition:
A piece of software is easy to use if for a given task that is to
be performed with it less effort is required than would be needed
to perform the same task using another piece of software.
Using that definition, a well-configured Emacs is _very_ easy
to use (assuming you have a good idea how to use it). I
figure Emacs saves me thirty minutes a day over using any
other editor (or a couple of hours over one without keyboard
macros), because of the various customisations I've been able
to make to save myself time. (For example, when editing HTML,
I can hit Ctrl-T and type in a tagname (say, table) and hit
enter, and I get the open and close tags both, (like this:
<table></table>) with my cursor sitting in between the two
tags, ready for inserting content. That saves me a small
number of keystrokes *many* times a day. I have dozens of
little things like that set up. Trying to use a non-scriptable
editor drives me out of my mind, because it's so much more work
to get anything done.
Then there are the built-in features, like filetype-driven
modes with automatic indentation and insertsions. I have a
hard time imagining writing Perl scripts without Emacs.
> Sure, it may be easy after you've read a book
Or had someone explain a little. After I'd been using Emacs for
a while, a new editing task presented itself: quizzing questions.
These follow a certain format, so I set up a mode for Emacs to
make it easy to do them in that format. So typing a question
mark finishes the question and proceeds to the answer, and a
colon causes automatic insertion of a reference prefix, and so
on and so forth. (The details are not important, unless you
write quizzing questions, in which case email me.) Then my sister
(who had _no_ prior experience with Emacs) wanted to write some
quiz questions, so I showed her Emacs with my quiz-question mode.
I spent maybe five minutes acquainting her with how it worked and
gave her a list of about ten keystrokes she'd need to learn. In no
time flat, she loved it. It saves her a lot of time over using a
regular editor and doing all the things by hand that the mode does
automatically. Now, she couldn't have written the mode; it took
knowledge of elisp to do that (and I did read a book (albeit not
in dead tree format) to learn that). But just to use it, hey,
that's easy, once it's set up.
The only thing that makes Emacs hard to use is that it doesn't
come preconfigured for normal users out of the box. It comes
preconfigured for people who fondly remember never changing the
settings on Emacs 18 (i.e., insane people, people who think that
Ctrl-x Ctrl-f might be a good keystroke sequence for opening a
file). But with the right stuff in your configuration, it's as
easy as Notepad, but without the utter lack of usefulness.
I have actually thought about creating and distributing a version
of Emacs that is functionally identical but with all the key
bindings changed around to cut the initial learning curve down
to size. If I could get two other people to work on it with me,
I'd do it. It would be a huge undertaking, though, because once
you dork with Ctrl-X and Ctrl-C (which you have to do) you have
to change all the keybindings that rely on those prefixes, in
every major mode (well, every one that you distribute with your
modified Emacs). So I'm not undertaking it alone.
> > you don't get anything when you spend money to pay your taxes.
>
> So having roads to travel on, schools for your children, and
> armed forces to defend your nation count as nothing?
Sorry, I wasn't clear. You don't get those things (schools, armed
forces, roads, et cetera) when (or because) the taxes are collected,
but you do get them when the taxes are _spent_. Just like with a
voluntary contribution: if I send you fifty bucks (not that I'm
planning on it, but it's fun to pretend), the ecconomy is not
boosted in any real way by that, _but_ when you spend the money,
then it is boosted, just as if I had spent the money myself. It's
the same if the contribution is a mandatory tax: nobody gets
anything when the taxes are contributed, but when they are spent,
then you do.
I made this distinction largely because there have been in history
some governments that taxed in order to accumulate wealth (in the
form of precious metals and things usually), and then stored large
quatities of it under lock and key. That type of taxation serves
to impoverish the entire nation. If the tax money is spent, however,
it is returned to the system and continues to circulate as before.
(Paying off debt counts as spending. So does paying the interest.)
> You're saying copyright is good because it will cause
> people to spend money.
At least in theory, yes. Copyright allows books and things to be
sold at a profit (rather than on razor-thin margins), which has
augmented entire industries, employing millions of people. In
essence, it creates more ways for money to usefully change hands.
> Spending money is only good in that it can encourage the
> creation of wealth.
This is true, and the pro-copyright argument is predicated
on the assumption that creative works can be considered
a form of valuable wealth. I guess I wasn't clear on that.
> Without copyright, artists would presumably not bother
> creating content
This is the sticking point. We all know that _some_ authors feel
compelled to write and would do so even if there were no potential
to make any significant amount of money by doing so. The more
interesting question is not whether _any_ content would be created
but how much -- is _more_ content created because of copyright law
than would be otherwise? IOW, _fewer_ artists would bother.
> If copyright lasts longer than is necessary, it prohibits people
> from acquiring wealth, and allows the publisher to collect money
> for doing nothing.
Absolutely. After a point, most everyone who is going to buy the
content has done so. The duration of this time period varies
depending on the medium, the quality of the content, and so on,
but at some point the copyright _needs_ to expire. I am of the
opinion (as I stated) that our current copyright law makes this
period of time too long, that it should be shorter. But I do not
think it should be done away. Now, here's a question: how much
shorter should it be? Why do we measure from the death of the
author, rather than the date of first publication? How many
years are required for a content creator to make a respectible
earning from his work? I've said that I think seventy years is
too long, but what about thirty years? Twenty? Ten? Not that
this is actually going to have any chance of happening, but
it's interesting to think about, IMO.
> Spending money for nothing is pointless. It allows some people
> to collect money for doing nothing, when they should be out
> creating wealth.
That's true, but it's not as bad as it seems. They're going to
spend (or invest) that money in most cases, so it gets back into
the system. They're not impoverishing the whole ecconomy by
collecting that money. It is possible to argue that they are
impoverishing the system by a failure to continue to produce
more content, but then we have to raise the question, "is
retirement bad for the ecconomy?" It's more ecconomics than
I thought we really needed to go into in a DMCA thread.
> You do indeed get something for your taxes, you get all the
> government services
Not until they spend the money, you don't. If they tax you
and throw the money in a vault (as _has_ been done at some
points in history, albeit not AFAIK in the USA) you get nothing.
It's when the money is _spent_ that somebody gets something.
> I'm just not sure that you will actually own the
> program, I believe the EULA will state that Adobe
> owns it and are just licencing it to you.
Okay, but you get to use it, and that has value --
otherwise you wouldn't have spent the money on it.
(It may be noted that I personally don't have a
copy of Photoshop, but it was an example only.)
Actually, I think the map of NT kernel looks more like a tourist
map of Camp David.
> ..sooner or later everything comes from something.
Yes, this is true, but often what it comes from is human effort,
which is often (albeit not always) motivated by a paycheck.
> Wealth does *not* come from thin air. Resources are used to create
> it, even if those resources are just the nutrients in the soil that
> eventually end up boosting somebody's brain power. Unless the
> resources used are returned, sooner or later we find there's no
> more resource.
Yes, but we're talking about copyrighted works here, not fossil
fuels. Copyrighted works are produced _primarily_ by human effort,
which is an extremely renewable resource. Yes, it comes from
somewhere. Ultimately it comes from the food you eat. Maybe
you've had science in elementary school: do you remember where
the food chain starts? Photosynthesis is powered by sunlight.
Basically, the human effort to create copyrightable works runs
(indirectly) on solar power. But yeah, if we create too much
then we'll exhaust the sun.
> Wealth 'creation' isn't a dream, its taking the bread off
> someone else's table. This isn't some kind of self renewing
> table, that 'wealth' comes from somewhere.
You apparently have never had ecconomics, and are operating
under the assumption that there is a fixed amount of wealth,
so that if it is transfered from one entity to another then
that's that, and the rich can by selling a lot of stuff
accumulate all of the wealth and starve out the poor. This
is true of certain kinds of wealth (the most obvious example
being real estate), but it is not true in general and is
certainly not true of currency, at least not under our current
system. I'm going to appear to stray off topic here for a bit,
but I will get back to copyright law before I'm done.
If currency _did_ work that way, then we could increase the
total amount of wealth by just printing tons more money.
But in reality, that would just cause extra inflation. The
ecconomy is not measured in terms of how much currency
exists in the system, but more in terms of how many times
it is spent[1].
Every time a buck is spent, somebody gets something for it.
Let's say you go out and buy Photoshop. You fork over an
outrageous sum of money, and Adobe takes it -- but you get
a copy of Photoshop. Adobe now has your money, and they're
going to do _something_ with it. (Hopefully something other
than wallpaper the executive bathroom, because that would
remove the money from circulation.) Maybe they pay a font
designer for thirty minutes' worth of work. The font designer
now has the money -- but Adobe (hopefully, if everything is
working as it should) has something to show for it, maybe
a nice glyph or something. The font designer will take the
money and do something with it. Maybe he pays his phone bill,
for example. AT&T now has the money (your money, remember?),
but the font designer got to call his mom long distance.
Every time the money changes hands, somebody gets something.
(There are exceptions. For example, you don't get anything
when you spend money to pay your taxes. If the government
takes the tax money and throws it in a vault, they've reduced
your ability to spend money and are not spending it themselves
either, and the whole system becomes impoverished. OTOH, if
they tax you and then turn around and spend the money, then
it is back in circulation and can be spent again.)
Now, this doesn't mean you should necessarily spend your money
as fast as possible. If everyone did that it would boost the
whole ecconomy, and people would have more stuff; you would
have more stuff -- but it wouldn't necessarily be the stuff
you wanted to have. It generally works best if you spend the
money on something you actually want.
Savings are another topic for another day, but basically saving
only hurts the ecconomy if you stuff a billion dollars in a
matress. If you invest it (even in a savings account), it can
to a large extent continue changing hands while you're not using
it, and thus stay in circulation. That has value, which is why
you get to collect interest.
Now, back to copyrights. Copyrights are (in general) good,
because they cause more money to be spent more times. However,
current copyright law may perhaps go too far. Seventy years
after the death of the author, very few works are still in a
position to generate any substantial amount of spending. That
being the case, the duration of copyright is probably too long,
and should probably be shortened. Copyright holders who have
good sense often release their works after a few years (when
they stop generating any real revenue) in order to collect good
PR. (I don't mean they place them into the public domain --
although that is sometimes done too -- but that they start to
give out permissions more liberally than they would have in
the beginning. In software, this can mean taking a commercial
product (e.g., the Zork series) and making it available for
free public download (as Activision did).)
So, is the DMCA good, or bad? Well, waving it around like a
club the way certain entities have been doing of late is a big
pain for everyone concerned. It's annoying, and it accomplishes
very little in the long term. But that goes back to the very
litigation-friendly nature of our society and of our court
system, more than to any given law per se. I've seen several
people post with the opinion that the DMCA does not apply here
and is being misused. Perhaps so; IANAL. It has been misused
in several cases where it does not or should not apply, so that
would not really be a big change.
I still haven't answered the question of whether the DMCA is
good or bad... but I'm not going to do that in this post.
[1] We could quibble about the word "spent", but basically
I'm talking about forking over the money in exchange for
some desired good or service, rather than just giving it
over for nothing in return. Gifts don't harm the ecconomy
(since the givee can turn around and spend the money), but
they don't really contribute either. Taxes fall into the
same category; they are effectively contributions, albeit
mandatory ones, rather than spending in the sense I'm
talking about spending.
> (modern and cool, like in movies)
You apparently have seen different movies than I have. The movie
desktops I've seen don't provide any facility for launching apps,
switching between apps, or anything else useful. They usually
consist of one big screen-filling dialog box containing options
for performing impossible feats, such as trying all the
possibilities for a sixteen-character password in thirty seconds,
or uploading a fatal virus to an alien computer system about
which nothing is known. Also, they have about 160x50 resolution,
which is anything but modern and cool.
I'm afraid it's not that simple. The light striking your structure
(whatever it is) won't all be coming in perpendicular to the surface.
I'll let that sink in...
Besides measuring wavelengths and intensities, you have to measure
the _direction_ of every incoming bit of light and, without a delay
that would be perceptible, send it to the appropriate point it would
have reached if you weren't there and send it on its way aimed in
the correct direction.
Further, all that gets you is a neat parlor trick. If you want to
hide from people who know you might have a cloaking device (say, for
military use), it gets harder. You have to account for polarity, or
else all the other guy has to do is shine polarised light all around
and use polarised sunglasses, and if you didn't reproduce the correct
polarity, you'll glow. And as someone else has said you need to
account for all wavelengths, not just visible light.
I'm guessing the reason you can't do those things in Linux is
because you aren't a Linux user. You betray your ignorance on
a number of points, but here are some of the most glaring...
> I scan in business cards for quarter page, free form text and
> scanned images for large size ads. What Linux Frankenstein can
> do that?
Uh, one with a scanner? (Yes, there are some really cheap
scanners that only work in Windows, but in terms of other
criteria (quality, speed) they're junk anyway. Presumably,
a Linux user shopping for a scanner would get one that would
work with Linux, same as a Mac user shopping for a scanner
would get one that works with Mac.)
> Word isn't so hot when printing JPEGs smaller than 50k.
Who would use a lossily-compressed format for printing?
The only reason to do such a thing would be to demonstrate
that it looks bad by comparing it to something done right.
> what about formatting the pages? Open Office can't do it
Erhm, I've not had any trouble with such simple tasks as
that. Yes, you do have to set the properties on the image
after you paste it in and drag it to the spot on the page
where you want it, but how exactly is that hard?
> A program guide is a real world task. So is mail merging
> 10,000 letters for a fund raising campaign. Or issuing 1000
> thank you letters in a day to donors. Or a baronial fold
> brochure. Or a three fold brochure.
If you have a problem doing any of these, you need to take
a basic high-school-level computer class. There aren't even
any major differences in _how_ you do any of these from one
OS to the other.
> Mixed networks are a pain.
... the usual office
Depends what you mix. Mixing Windows with MacOS Classic is a
pain, as I've personally experienced. Mixing Linux with Windows
is generally a lot more comfortable, however. Linux has very
little problem reading and writing files on Windows fileshares,
printing to Windows network print servers,
network activities. Deploying software to two different OSes
is an issue, since you need two different binaries to deploy,
but if the Linux systems are doing basic stuff (web, email,
documents, spreadsheets, presentations) this concern will be
manageable.
Red Hat is right: Linux may not be ready for _every_ desktop,
but it is ready for _enough_ desktops to be worth offering.
> It's not the fact that it can be downloaded that's the problem.
> It's the fact that the only distribution channels require going
> out of your way to get the software that becomes a problem.
Oh, yes, I agree with that. The biggest thing the Linux
community needs right now is a big-name OEM to ship desktop
systems with an OSS distro (or their own distro of mostly
OSS software) pre-installed, branded with the OEM's logos,
preconfigured for the hardware, and set up to be easy for
the end user (i.e., huge panel buttons for "get my email",
"surf the web", and "create a document".) With 90 days free
tech support, extendable to three years for a price.
Apple is closer to this than what we had two years ago, but
their hardware is pricey and most of the end-user apps (such
as AppleWorks) are not OSS. And anyway, it's not Linux,
so while it's all well and good for Apple, the Linux
community still is wanting a major OEM. Yes, I know there
are such OEMs, but they're not the big guys who advertise
on television.