How is the Dock anywhere near as eficient as the windows taskbar, let alone more? The fact that it always groups windoww from the same application into the same button is totally braindead, especially since you have to hold the mouse button down on a button for a second or so to get a menu, and even then the options to switch to idividual windows are farther away than everything else. The other problem is that it replaces the windows start menu by providing a way to launch new applications, but of course you can only fit a dozen or so icons on the screen, and opening any other app requires ten times the effort, opening finder and going into the applications folder, possibly opening subfolders to find the application. The Dock's broken window-switching model, which is also used in the alt-tab/apple-tab system, works fine when you're switching between two different applications, or two windows in the same application (albeit counter-intuitively), but if you want to quickly move around between two windows from app A and one from app B, you need 3 or 4 extra clicks each time.
I think you miss the point with your analogy. The reason you can't import automatic firearms is because you also can't buy them here. Buying music from AllOfMp3 while in Russia is assumed to be legal, as would be buying music in a similar fashion from a US merchant. AllOfMp3's critics are claiming that importing it is illegal, although the purchase itself would be legal in this country. With firearms, you're being restricted from having something that you wouldn't be allowed to have anyway, but in this case you're importing something you could legally buy here anyway.
Well, since The Gimp's developers are commited to keeping the program free, if one of those technologies is available only under an NDA or other restrictive license, they effectively can't use it.
I at least expected them to have some kind of copy protect feature for some applications. Even Palm Pilots do that (although there is readily available third party software that lets you toggle the copy protect bit at will).
No, I think the idea is that after this they will have more knowledge about DRM than they had before (that is, more than none), so when they buy another player, and, more importantly, buy music for it, they will do more research and stay away from DRMed content.
The kernel driver is open source, as is the userspace regulatory daemon. They're probably x86-only at the moment, only because the cards have only had significant use on x86 (although upcoming core 2 popularity might bring an x86_64 port). The binary blob is the firmware or microcode that runs on the chip inside the card; it's not one of those "shims" that ATI/nVidia do to keep the actual driver code secret. The firmware source is probably only useful to you if you're one of Intel's hadware engineers. Personally I don't think it's a huge deal that this isn't open, since the sources for it are only useful for symbolic, and maybe research purposes, and the restrictive redistribution license didn't seem to affect me (then again, Gentoo often bypasses these types of licenses).
Do you think it's right to ignore a part of history just because someone doesn't like the way it sounds or looks? Should a government be able to say "We don't like what this author is saying, let's make sure no one ever reads his books again?"
Finally, this is also an issue with computer files. Although copy protection is not much of an issue in this case, many files are no longer accessible because the program used to create them no longer exists. This has become a big problem with historical documents since they need to be accessible decades from now, and in some cases centuries from now.
This is a big reason to embrace ODF and other open file formats over proprietary ones. With open standards, it is more likely that 1. specifications for those formats in easily acessible formats will survive because they are available in more places, and 2. open source software implementing those standards will survive, making it even easier to understand the files. Proprietary formats die when the applications that use them die. The applications die when the developers stop working on them and the operating systems they use die. The OSs die when the hardware platforms become obsolete.
Why couldn't you spend the thirty seconds to paraphrase or at least quote a few sentences from that article about how he was incarcerated for breaking Adobe's eBook DRM? Then you might deserve those Inormative points. Instead you just posted a copy of the link everyone would have found on their own anyway. You comment adds nothing to the discussion, and is, at best, Redundant.
Actually, the difference is that BT lets you throttle or even disconnect torrents on an individual basis, while Skype is all-or-nothing. With Skype, you have no control over when you'll be forwarding some random person's phone call, but you can only send data to BitTorrent peers if that specific torrent is running, and you can always control how much bandwidth you allow them to use.
I think I have you beat. Back when I switched from Netscape 4.78 to Mozilla 1.0, Firefox was still called Phoenix. So that would have been Firefox day negative 400 something.
Explosives and firearms are regulated because illegitimate or irresponsible use of them can cause massive property damage and loss of life. Unregulated bittorrent does not create a public safety hazard; please don't try to compare it with something that does.
AFAIK, there is no such thing as a read-only partition. The U3 partition is just a partition formatted with ISO9660; and Windows can only read (not write) that filesystem since it was designed for read-only CD media. I assume all the remover tool does is erase the partition table and add one partition covering the entire device and format it with FAT. I don't get why slashdot users seem to have been completely lost and confused before they found the remover tool.
I don't like the way PHP handles libraries and extensions. Perl, and even Java, have much better systems. PHP's standard library is only distributed as one big chunk along with the php interpreter; adding and removing individual extensions requires recompiling the whole thing. There are no namespaces, so many functions have long or confusing names. And although PHP was born when OO programming was already quite mature, and the language has class-based OO, the standard library rarely uses objects. Instead of a high level easy to use structure present in most scripting languages, it looks more like a low level C library. The nice thing about Perl is that ALL of the libraries are available through CPAN, so you can even upgrade some of the "core" modules without reinstalling the interpreter. PHP seems like it was an attempt to be as powerful as perl (and the PHP language itself has all of Perl's important features) but corners were cut in other areas of the design.
This is why PDF sucks for on screen display. With paper there's no such thing as resizing the page while looking at it; there aren't even different sizes of paper to speak of. When I look at something on a large monitor, I should be able to make the lines longer but keep the same size type, just more words on a line. Also, if I have a small monitor I should be able to expand the text if I want without having the lines scroll off the edge. PDF is designed for printed page layout, and simply can't be used when dynamic resizing, modifying and editing are needed as with web pages.
Actually, Blender 3.0 would have come and gone years ago. At the rate they've been adding features, by now it should be "Blender WorldStudio CR 9.0 Professional." Oh well, at least they're helping put an end to the people who try to compare the maturity of completely different products by looking at version numbers alone.
Word and friends are not "IDEs for layout." It's Visual Basic for layout. Good IDEs augment standard editing and build processes (good ones, not Eclipse with its ad-hoc javac invocation); they don't completely replace them. You can always fall back to a simple text editor if you need to. Furthermore, while I won't debate about wether or not typing \textbf{...} is actually slower than clicking a toolbar button, there are IDEs for LaTeX such as emacs, TeXmaker, and LyX that handle those tasks in the same way as a standard run-of-the-mill word processor.
For instance, writers have to manually insert smart quotations (using a different key to create the quotation marks that begin a quotation and end a quotation)
Automatically inserting smart quote characters only makes sense in a WYSIWYG environment (which TeX is not). If it did that, there would be now way to override the default choice if necessary. Besides, if you have an editor like emacs that changes the " key to insert `` or '' as necessary, it doesn't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
How is the Dock anywhere near as eficient as the windows taskbar, let alone more? The fact that it always groups windoww from the same application into the same button is totally braindead, especially since you have to hold the mouse button down on a button for a second or so to get a menu, and even then the options to switch to idividual windows are farther away than everything else. The other problem is that it replaces the windows start menu by providing a way to launch new applications, but of course you can only fit a dozen or so icons on the screen, and opening any other app requires ten times the effort, opening finder and going into the applications folder, possibly opening subfolders to find the application. The Dock's broken window-switching model, which is also used in the alt-tab/apple-tab system, works fine when you're switching between two different applications, or two windows in the same application (albeit counter-intuitively), but if you want to quickly move around between two windows from app A and one from app B, you need 3 or 4 extra clicks each time.
I think you miss the point with your analogy. The reason you can't import automatic firearms is because you also can't buy them here. Buying music from AllOfMp3 while in Russia is assumed to be legal, as would be buying music in a similar fashion from a US merchant. AllOfMp3's critics are claiming that importing it is illegal, although the purchase itself would be legal in this country. With firearms, you're being restricted from having something that you wouldn't be allowed to have anyway, but in this case you're importing something you could legally buy here anyway.
Well, since The Gimp's developers are commited to keeping the program free, if one of those technologies is available only under an NDA or other restrictive license, they effectively can't use it.
No, what we really need to work on is rain power generation.
I at least expected them to have some kind of copy protect feature for some applications. Even Palm Pilots do that (although there is readily available third party software that lets you toggle the copy protect bit at will).
No, I think the idea is that after this they will have more knowledge about DRM than they had before (that is, more than none), so when they buy another player, and, more importantly, buy music for it, they will do more research and stay away from DRMed content.
The kernel driver is open source, as is the userspace regulatory daemon. They're probably x86-only at the moment, only because the cards have only had significant use on x86 (although upcoming core 2 popularity might bring an x86_64 port). The binary blob is the firmware or microcode that runs on the chip inside the card; it's not one of those "shims" that ATI/nVidia do to keep the actual driver code secret. The firmware source is probably only useful to you if you're one of Intel's hadware engineers. Personally I don't think it's a huge deal that this isn't open, since the sources for it are only useful for symbolic, and maybe research purposes, and the restrictive redistribution license didn't seem to affect me (then again, Gentoo often bypasses these types of licenses).
Do you think it's right to ignore a part of history just because someone doesn't like the way it sounds or looks? Should a government be able to say "We don't like what this author is saying, let's make sure no one ever reads his books again?"
This is a big reason to embrace ODF and other open file formats over proprietary ones. With open standards, it is more likely that 1. specifications for those formats in easily acessible formats will survive because they are available in more places, and 2. open source software implementing those standards will survive, making it even easier to understand the files. Proprietary formats die when the applications that use them die. The applications die when the developers stop working on them and the operating systems they use die. The OSs die when the hardware platforms become obsolete.
Why couldn't you spend the thirty seconds to paraphrase or at least quote a few sentences from that article about how he was incarcerated for breaking Adobe's eBook DRM? Then you might deserve those Inormative points. Instead you just posted a copy of the link everyone would have found on their own anyway. You comment adds nothing to the discussion, and is, at best, Redundant.
Actually, the difference is that BT lets you throttle or even disconnect torrents on an individual basis, while Skype is all-or-nothing. With Skype, you have no control over when you'll be forwarding some random person's phone call, but you can only send data to BitTorrent peers if that specific torrent is running, and you can always control how much bandwidth you allow them to use.
The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from...
http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/2246/moonflagzn 0.jpg
Sorry, I'm really bored tonight...
I think the answer to "How long?" is "Just in time to send back ultra-high-res photos of your ski trip to Hell."
Why does it have to be proprietary for someone to get paid to develop it?
I think I have you beat. Back when I switched from Netscape 4.78 to Mozilla 1.0, Firefox was still called Phoenix. So that would have been Firefox day negative 400 something.
Explosives and firearms are regulated because illegitimate or irresponsible use of them can cause massive property damage and loss of life. Unregulated bittorrent does not create a public safety hazard; please don't try to compare it with something that does.
AFAIK, there is no such thing as a read-only partition. The U3 partition is just a partition formatted with ISO9660; and Windows can only read (not write) that filesystem since it was designed for read-only CD media. I assume all the remover tool does is erase the partition table and add one partition covering the entire device and format it with FAT. I don't get why slashdot users seem to have been completely lost and confused before they found the remover tool.
You really need a remover program for that? what's wrong with a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX ?
I don't like the way PHP handles libraries and extensions. Perl, and even Java, have much better systems. PHP's standard library is only distributed as one big chunk along with the php interpreter; adding and removing individual extensions requires recompiling the whole thing. There are no namespaces, so many functions have long or confusing names. And although PHP was born when OO programming was already quite mature, and the language has class-based OO, the standard library rarely uses objects. Instead of a high level easy to use structure present in most scripting languages, it looks more like a low level C library. The nice thing about Perl is that ALL of the libraries are available through CPAN, so you can even upgrade some of the "core" modules without reinstalling the interpreter. PHP seems like it was an attempt to be as powerful as perl (and the PHP language itself has all of Perl's important features) but corners were cut in other areas of the design.
PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but in 1997 it was recoded & renamed to the recursive statement "PHP: Hypertext Processor."
or
PHP, which originally stood for Personal Home Page, was recoded & renamed to the recursive statement "PHP: Hypertext Processor" in 1997.
This is why PDF sucks for on screen display. With paper there's no such thing as resizing the page while looking at it; there aren't even different sizes of paper to speak of. When I look at something on a large monitor, I should be able to make the lines longer but keep the same size type, just more words on a line. Also, if I have a small monitor I should be able to expand the text if I want without having the lines scroll off the edge. PDF is designed for printed page layout, and simply can't be used when dynamic resizing, modifying and editing are needed as with web pages.
Actually, Blender 3.0 would have come and gone years ago. At the rate they've been adding features, by now it should be "Blender WorldStudio CR 9.0 Professional." Oh well, at least they're helping put an end to the people who try to compare the maturity of completely different products by looking at version numbers alone.
Word and friends are not "IDEs for layout." It's Visual Basic for layout. Good IDEs augment standard editing and build processes (good ones, not Eclipse with its ad-hoc javac invocation); they don't completely replace them. You can always fall back to a simple text editor if you need to. Furthermore, while I won't debate about wether or not typing \textbf{...} is actually slower than clicking a toolbar button, there are IDEs for LaTeX such as emacs, TeXmaker, and LyX that handle those tasks in the same way as a standard run-of-the-mill word processor.
Automatically inserting smart quote characters only makes sense in a WYSIWYG environment (which TeX is not). If it did that, there would be now way to override the default choice if necessary. Besides, if you have an editor like emacs that changes the " key to insert `` or '' as necessary, it doesn't matter.