Since you can't use CitiBank with Mozilla, I won't lose any sleep over it.
You know, the ONE site I use that I am unable to disable Javascript for is my installation of Feed on Feeds. I wish I could completly disable JS, except for when I access FoF.
That's because you might be STEALING frames from the decoded DVD (with Ethereal, or something). Microsoft, in assocation with the Department of "Justice" and the MPAA, is helping you avoid inadvertantly funding TERROR! Think of all the trouble Microsoft has just helped you avoid--and besides, orange just isn't your colour!
Erm, it was an id game. Their name was on the box. Did you _really_ expect anything better than a pretty tech demo of engine that our WW2 shooters due for 2005 release will be based on?:)
The Steam-ised Half Life client is truly a breath of fresh air, when compared to the bugfest that was HL 1.5 and earlier. The rest of Steam varies from 'minimalist and functional' to buggy as hell, but then again the server browser and instant messenger were never _in_ HL 1.5; we've had Jabber and the All-Seeing Eye for much longer, anyway!:)
The part which disturbs me is how, when you buy HL2 on Steam, you are not purchasing the game. You are paying for access to a service, via a subscription. Now, while I don't believe for a second that Valve would actually try and change the terms of the contract ex post facto (can you *really* be arsed to check the T&Cs on steampowered.com with your morning coffee, newspapers and RSS feeds?)... how permanent will your access to the service be?
If Valve goes belly up (maybe Vivendi prolong the court case past Valve's ability to sustain it. Maybe some HL2 fan goes postal on his classmates and the parents' amulance chasing attack-lawyers take them down) then will it still be possible to download HL2 after you next reinstall Windows? How will you play multiplayer games without the authorisation network being up?
Not to mention the BS about having to be connected to Steam to play the single player scenario, or for LAN games, etc...
I will wait and buy the game in a box. That way, I get a 'hardcopy' after a fashion. Even though beloved Looking Glass is dead, I can still pull out my (backup) of System Shock 2 and play it, without having to worry about a perpetual subscription service.
Has anyone noticed how the prices of AMD processors seem to have shot up in the last few months? My brother bought a retail Athlon XP 2800+ for £70 over the summer. Now a Sempron 2800+ is £76 and, and the Althon XP is £96.:(
But you're better off for it! Where in the real world could you find pills that will englarge your penis AND your breasts, while pre-approving your for a mortgage?
Silence, you communist! Your beloved government started the War on Terror--and once we in the Coalition of the Willing finally win it, no one will ever be terrified again, and those sniveling nations that were to afraid to join us will owe us, big time!
The following updates were not installed: Microsoft.NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (KB834707)
[Configure automatic updates] [Tough shit]
Thanks, Microsoft! What the hell am I supposed to do now! Oh well, this particular machine hasn't been installed for almost 1 year, it's about time I reset the cruft factor...
> Been there, done that doesn't work - unique filesnames and settings screw you > over when you put it on another user or the same user on another machine.
etc, etc. There appears to be a very simple mapping between gconf path and the name of the files to export and import.
I have just investigated the 'gconftool' program. It is a gconf-level (as opposed to poking around in the filesystem level) tool for querying and manipulating a gconf directory. One of the things it enables is exporting and importing of settings: you can export the entire directory with "gconftool --dump > blah", and import with "gconftool --load=blah".
> Also, say another user wants to have the same panel settings - you can't > export that to another users gconf. There is not even a flat text file you can > cut and paste from.
I don't see what prevents you from importing/exporting the/apps/panel heirachy with gconftool, or by taring up ~/.gconf/apps/panel/, or however else you want to do it. The one caveat is that you must be careful to copy the contents of the ~/.gnome2/panel2.d/<panel profile>/ directory as well: these files store the settings for any launchers the user might have added to his panel, or edited in his Applications menu.
> You just have to go into the GUI and click a lot to set up > the panel - the MS Windows way, or go into a gconf editor and click a lot - > then find what you want to change is not supported in that version - we've > imported the MS windows greyed out option that shouldn't be greyed out to a > wide range of platforms! An unfininished MS Windows style registry where there > isn't even a man page for the tools - oh joy!
Whilst I'm sure it is possible, I wouldn't attempt to customise my panel by hand in the gconf editor, for the same reason I wouldn't draw an application icon by writing the XPM directly in an editor. What is wrong with setting up the desktop how you want it, and exporting the/apps/panel/ tree?
Besides, these aren't criticisms of gconf itself--they are criticisms of the Gnome panel, which is not perfect.:)
> Try having a gnome-panel up from a remote machine as the same user on a local > machine or vice versa - gconf just can't handle it. It assumes you have a > shared home or something. If I'm running something remotely I would often > prefer it to know what machine it is on - gconf settings will often differ on > different machines. If I'm running gpanel remotely as user W on machine X, I > do not want it to use the gconf settings from user Y on machine Z just because > that is the user and machine that is my local X session - massive flaw in a > networked multi-user age, but completely forgivable in the days of MSDOS or on > a home computer with no network card.
I've never logged into another machine specifically to run the gnome panel. The idea that you have to bring up an entire desktop in order to run a graphical program on another machine, well, stinks of Windows-thinking, do you follow?
But, I just ssh'd into a uni machine and fired up gnome-panel... the panel has just appeared on my screen, customised just as it is when I log in having sat down in front of a uni machine. The panel doesn't appear to be confused about whether to get the settings from my own computer, or the one it's running off. Likewise if I fire up Gossip, or another random Gnome app.
> Trees, keys, obfiscated (larry, curly and moe in the file names no less!), > only editable with specific tools - it is similar but in some ways worse - > there's one for every user.
You would have them invent new terms? We could call trees hedge
How sensitive is the secret information? Perhaps you created the encrypted filesystem with a random key that you did not record anywhere. If the machine is pulled by the feds, the data is still safe!
Well it's the old tradeoff between security and convenience. Compare the inconvenience of having to enter the passphrase manually after a reboot, with the inconvenience of having your secrets discovered by the enemy.
I think it's illegal to withold passphrases and secret keys in the UK, too.:(
Yeah, I'm sorry you couldn't be arsed to plug four characters into the google search field too. They guy just _told_ you about the existance of Won2, in doing so, he gave you its name.
Did you expect to be furnished with a URL for the Kazaa Light web page too, instead of Googling for "Kazaa Light"? You copyright infringers are soooo lazy these days! When I were a lad, it took effort and ingenuity to track down our copies of Test Drive: The Duel, and Windows 2.0! And we were better for it!
Multiple backups, all over the place. I should have been more explicit about this.
If the digital domesday project files were plonked on an ftp somewhere, lots of people would mirror it--researchers and historians at universities, random curious members of the public who just want to take a look, etc.
Finally, it's not too difficult to copy the files to a variety of storage media, and (this is the important part) charge someone with the task of transferring the data to new media, as they are invented and move into common use. Although I think it's unlikely that we'll lose the ability to read data CDs in the short or medium term, relying on them working for all of time is foolish.:)
> Gconf - just try exporting settings! To a great degree it is a single user, > single computer app in a multiuser networked world.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this--it's very easy to cp, tar, rsync, etc, the.gconf directory. If you want an individual setting, you can always "gconftool --get/desktop/gnome/screen/default/0/resolution", for example.
Gconf is multi-user. Check/etc/gconf/2/path on your machine. Assuming you haven't altered it, the default configuration for a gconf app is to first check the systemwide mandatory settings directory (so that an admin can override a user's preferences), then the user's own settings directory, and then the system admin's suggested defaults directory.
As for it not coping with networks--I have logged into several machines at my Uni, and changed a setting in a Gconf app on one of them, and been amazed that the app running on the other host immediatly picks up the change and applies the setting.
> To this day it really looks like someone said "don't know much about unix, but > how about we put a windows style registry in linux - all these files in >/etc/, it's just too messy, and I don't want to know what a socket is, I'll do > some weird OLE thing, oh and XML is cool this week, so I'll do a non-standard > impelentation of it that will only work with gconf.".
Please don't make the assumption that because gconf looks like the Windows registry, it acts like the Windows registry.
Looks pretty much like XML to me. No idea what you mean by saying its a non-standard implementation. The benefits of using XML are that you don't have to write your own parser, and that you can extend the file format without having to change your file format specifications. For example, say Gnome 2.10 wanted to extend Gconf to record the hostname of the machine on which a setting was last changed (yeah, it's a crap example): gconf would simply have to look for a 'hostname' attribute when examining the elements that make up a %gconf.xml file.
As to sockets/OLE: care to be more specific? When gconf runs accross a network I believe it uses RPC+portmap, but I don't know the specifics.
"The Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 (as amended) is the primary legislation," says Anthony Hardwell, Policy Manager of the Post Office Policy Group. "Within this the licence fee is permission to receive or record television programme services using television receiving equipment, there is no definition of receiving equipment and...it doesn't matter how you receive the signal, it's whether or not you do. A simple statement in writing from a customer stating that they do not wish to receive or record television programme services is sufficient for our records, the simple fact of owning a television set does not and never has required licence cover. It is true that certain people may wish to try and 'cheat' the system however our regular checks of properties using detection equipment reveal who is breaking the law. The use of equipment for viewing pre-recorded videos or for that matter as a monitor for a game playing computer does not and never has required television licence cover."
What scares the hell out of me, is that once the "internet license" law is passed in Germany, an EU directive will be created and enforced accross the EU, in the interests of "harmonisation".
If you don't watch broadcast TV, you don't have to pay the license fee. If you only rent movies from blockbuster, well, guess what! You don't have to pay!:)
Slashdot Mirror
You heard it here first! Professional web surfers agree: disabling Javascript is "ridiculous"!
Seriously, Javascript is crap. The costs of using it far outweigh the benefits. You are not a slave to the web sites you visit!
Since you can't use CitiBank with Mozilla, I won't lose any sleep over it.
You know, the ONE site I use that I am unable to disable Javascript for is my installation of Feed on Feeds. I wish I could completly disable JS, except for when I access FoF.
Mozilla: Less Critical: Spoofing
Internet Explorer: Highly Critical: Security Bypass; System access
Please spead FUD elsewhere.
That's because you might be STEALING frames from the decoded DVD (with Ethereal, or something). Microsoft, in assocation with the Department of "Justice" and the MPAA, is helping you avoid inadvertantly funding TERROR! Think of all the trouble Microsoft has just helped you avoid--and besides, orange just isn't your colour!
Erm, it was an id game. Their name was on the box. Did you _really_ expect anything better than a pretty tech demo of engine that our WW2 shooters due for 2005 release will be based on? :)
The Steam-ised Half Life client is truly a breath of fresh air, when compared to the bugfest that was HL 1.5 and earlier. The rest of Steam varies from 'minimalist and functional' to buggy as hell, but then again the server browser and instant messenger were never _in_ HL 1.5; we've had Jabber and the All-Seeing Eye for much longer, anyway! :)
The part which disturbs me is how, when you buy HL2 on Steam, you are not purchasing the game. You are paying for access to a service, via a subscription. Now, while I don't believe for a second that Valve would actually try and change the terms of the contract ex post facto (can you *really* be arsed to check the T&Cs on steampowered.com with your morning coffee, newspapers and RSS feeds?)... how permanent will your access to the service be?
If Valve goes belly up (maybe Vivendi prolong the court case past Valve's ability to sustain it. Maybe some HL2 fan goes postal on his classmates and the parents' amulance chasing attack-lawyers take them down) then will it still be possible to download HL2 after you next reinstall Windows? How will you play multiplayer games without the authorisation network being up?
Not to mention the BS about having to be connected to Steam to play the single player scenario, or for LAN games, etc...
I will wait and buy the game in a box. That way, I get a 'hardcopy' after a fashion. Even though beloved Looking Glass is dead, I can still pull out my (backup) of System Shock 2 and play it, without having to worry about a perpetual subscription service.
If your nameserver considers names containing a _ character to be broken, then it itself is, well, broken. :)
Has anyone noticed how the prices of AMD processors seem to have shot up in the last few months? My brother bought a retail Athlon XP 2800+ for £70 over the summer. Now a Sempron 2800+ is £76 and, and the Althon XP is £96. :(
But you're better off for it! Where in the real world could you find pills that will englarge your penis AND your breasts, while pre-approving your for a mortgage?
Max Knight, Ultraspy! Save us!
Whatever you do, don't tell these two about Freeciv. Oops.
We can only hope you lose your license before you kill someone.
Silence, you communist! Your beloved government started the War on Terror--and once we in the Coalition of the Willing finally win it, no one will ever be terrified again, and those sniveling nations that were to afraid to join us will owe us, big time!
You might find Imendio Planner interesting. Some clever chap came up with an XSLT file to convert MS Project files to Planner files. Of course, there is no 1:1 mapping between the two programs. :)
Updates were unable to be successfully installed
.NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1
The following updates were not installed:
Microsoft
Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (KB834707)
[Configure automatic updates] [Tough shit]
Thanks, Microsoft! What the hell am I supposed to do now! Oh well, this particular machine hasn't been installed for almost 1 year, it's about time I reset the cruft factor...
> Been there, done that doesn't work - unique filesnames and settings screw you
/apps/panel heirachy with gconftool, or by taring up ~/.gconf/apps/panel/, or however else you want to do it. The one caveat is that you must be careful to copy the contents of the ~/.gnome2/panel2.d/<panel profile>/ directory as well: these files store the settings for any launchers the user might have added to his panel, or edited in his Applications menu.
/apps/panel/ tree?
:)
> over when you put it on another user or the same user on another machine.
I don't know what you mean by this:
$ tree ~/.gconf
/home/sam/.gconf
|-- %gconf.xml
|-- apps
| |-- %gconf.xml
| |-- CDDB-Slave2
| | `-- %gconf.xml
| |-- aisleriot
| | `-- %gconf.xml
etc, etc. There appears to be a very simple mapping between gconf path and the name of the files to export and import.
I have just investigated the 'gconftool' program. It is a gconf-level (as opposed to poking around in the filesystem level) tool for querying and manipulating a gconf directory. One of the things it enables is exporting and importing of settings: you can export the entire directory with "gconftool --dump > blah", and import with "gconftool --load=blah".
> Also, say another user wants to have the same panel settings - you can't
> export that to another users gconf. There is not even a flat text file you can
> cut and paste from.
I don't see what prevents you from importing/exporting the
> You just have to go into the GUI and click a lot to set up
> the panel - the MS Windows way, or go into a gconf editor and click a lot -
> then find what you want to change is not supported in that version - we've
> imported the MS windows greyed out option that shouldn't be greyed out to a
> wide range of platforms! An unfininished MS Windows style registry where there
> isn't even a man page for the tools - oh joy!
Whilst I'm sure it is possible, I wouldn't attempt to customise my panel by hand in the gconf editor, for the same reason I wouldn't draw an application icon by writing the XPM directly in an editor. What is wrong with setting up the desktop how you want it, and exporting the
Besides, these aren't criticisms of gconf itself--they are criticisms of the Gnome panel, which is not perfect.
> Try having a gnome-panel up from a remote machine as the same user on a local
> machine or vice versa - gconf just can't handle it. It assumes you have a
> shared home or something. If I'm running something remotely I would often
> prefer it to know what machine it is on - gconf settings will often differ on
> different machines. If I'm running gpanel remotely as user W on machine X, I
> do not want it to use the gconf settings from user Y on machine Z just because
> that is the user and machine that is my local X session - massive flaw in a
> networked multi-user age, but completely forgivable in the days of MSDOS or on
> a home computer with no network card.
I've never logged into another machine specifically to run the gnome panel. The idea that you have to bring up an entire desktop in order to run a graphical program on another machine, well, stinks of Windows-thinking, do you follow?
But, I just ssh'd into a uni machine and fired up gnome-panel... the panel has just appeared on my screen, customised just as it is when I log in having sat down in front of a uni machine. The panel doesn't appear to be confused about whether to get the settings from my own computer, or the one it's running off. Likewise if I fire up Gossip, or another random Gnome app.
> Trees, keys, obfiscated (larry, curly and moe in the file names no less!),
> only editable with specific tools - it is similar but in some ways worse -
> there's one for every user.
You would have them invent new terms? We could call trees hedge
How sensitive is the secret information? Perhaps you created the encrypted filesystem with a random key that you did not record anywhere. If the machine is pulled by the feds, the data is still safe!
Well it's the old tradeoff between security and convenience. Compare the inconvenience of having to enter the passphrase manually after a reboot, with the inconvenience of having your secrets discovered by the enemy.
:(
I think it's illegal to withold passphrases and secret keys in the UK, too.
Yeah, I'm sorry you couldn't be arsed to plug four characters into the google search field too. They guy just _told_ you about the existance of Won2, in doing so, he gave you its name.
Did you expect to be furnished with a URL for the Kazaa Light web page too, instead of Googling for "Kazaa Light"? You copyright infringers are soooo lazy these days! When I were a lad, it took effort and ingenuity to track down our copies of Test Drive: The Duel, and Windows 2.0! And we were better for it!
Multiple backups, all over the place. I should have been more explicit about this.
:)
If the digital domesday project files were plonked on an ftp somewhere, lots of people would mirror it--researchers and historians at universities, random curious members of the public who just want to take a look, etc.
Finally, it's not too difficult to copy the files to a variety of storage media, and (this is the important part) charge someone with the task of transferring the data to new media, as they are invented and move into common use. Although I think it's unlikely that we'll lose the ability to read data CDs in the short or medium term, relying on them working for all of time is foolish.
> Gconf - just try exporting settings! To a great degree it is a single user,
.gconf directory. If you want an individual setting, you can always "gconftool --get /desktop/gnome/screen/default/0/resolution", for example.
/etc/gconf/2/path on your machine. Assuming you haven't altered it, the default configuration for a gconf app is to first check the systemwide mandatory settings directory (so that an admin can override a user's preferences), then the user's own settings directory, and then the system admin's suggested defaults directory.
/etc/, it's just too messy, and I don't want to know what a socket is, I'll do
l
> single computer app in a multiuser networked world.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this--it's very easy to cp, tar, rsync, etc, the
Gconf is multi-user. Check
As for it not coping with networks--I have logged into several machines at my Uni, and changed a setting in a Gconf app on one of them, and been amazed that the app running on the other host immediatly picks up the change and applies the setting.
> To this day it really looks like someone said "don't know much about unix, but
> how about we put a windows style registry in linux - all these files in
>
> some weird OLE thing, oh and XML is cool this week, so I'll do a non-standard
> impelentation of it that will only work with gconf.".
Please don't make the assumption that because gconf looks like the Windows registry, it acts like the Windows registry.
$ cat ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/screen/default/0/%gconf.xm
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
<entry name="silent_away" mtime="1075298083" muser="sam" type="bool" value="true">
</entry>
<entry name="play_sounds" mtime="1089985771" muser="sam" type="bool" value="true">
</entry>
<entry name="silent_busy" mtime="1075298082" muser="sam" type="bool" value="true">
</entry>
</gconf>
Looks pretty much like XML to me. No idea what you mean by saying its a non-standard implementation. The benefits of using XML are that you don't have to write your own parser, and that you can extend the file format without having to change your file format specifications. For example, say Gnome 2.10 wanted to extend Gconf to record the hostname of the machine on which a setting was last changed (yeah, it's a crap example): gconf would simply have to look for a 'hostname' attribute when examining the elements that make up a %gconf.xml file.
As to sockets/OLE: care to be more specific? When gconf runs accross a network I believe it uses RPC+portmap, but I don't know the specifics.
etc, etc.
http://google.com/search?q=won2
Well then Germany sucks, in this regard. :)
What scares the hell out of me, is that once the "internet license" law is passed in Germany, an EU directive will be created and enforced accross the EU, in the interests of "harmonisation".
If you don't watch broadcast TV, you don't have to pay the license fee. If you only rent movies from blockbuster, well, guess what! You don't have to pay! :)