If they really did intend that only French residents should read the information, as the legalese states, do you really think they'd bother putting up a copy in English?
Surely you could do this better with a phone-sized Linux box - maybe with wireless networking - which has sound hardware. The CPU doesn't actually need to be that meaty for voice compression (GSM phones manage it).
Isn't there already a Palm-type device with built-in microphone and speaker which runs Linux? Use that!
Or better, sell some small 'base station' for your digital mobile phone which sends the GSM data across the net. You'd temporarily swap out the account details card from your mobile and replace it with one that contacts your home base station (which has a very weak transmitter covering a radius of about 200m).
The best content is free (or at least gratis) content. This is for two reasons: some of it is by individuals and nonprofit organizations, and it's likely to be more personal, friendly and honest than content that you'd pay for (one of the first things you learn on the web is that individual-run sites are usually much more useful than corporate ones). The other type of good free content is a web version of offline stuff like newspapers, which is good quality and free because the dead-tree sales pay for hiring writers and editors.
Also, gratis sites are more likely to give you the opportuntity to contribute back (like Slashdot, and more generally consider Usenet, IRC and other forms of graitis Net content).
Specialized stuff - particularly computer-related - is likely to be provided by 'hobbyist' or small organization websites. The only form of specialist content that people will reliably pay for online is stock quotes, AFAIK. Most pay sites would have to be general or 'entertainment' to get a large enough audience.
With the exception of porn, you view entertainment partly because other people do. Part of the enjoyment of watching the Simpsons is discussing it with others and being able to reuse catchphrases and be understood. There is a positive feedback effect where something popular becomes more worth watching. If you charge for content, it won't get that snowball effect. Would Slashdot be one-hundredth as popular today if it had charged subscription fees, however tiny, since starting in 1997?
It's funny, you don't usually hear about the authors of insecure software being liable. Yet they are just as much at fault as the people making the rootkits (from a simplistic 'if this code didn't exist, the exploit couldn't happen' point of view).
You should read the Bash-Prompt HOWTO for more
information.
My prompt changes colour according to the
logged-in user. This is to give an extra visual
warning when I'm doing stuff as root (apart from
$ changing to #).
[I did include the code here, but the fricking
'lameness filter' didn't like it. That
thing really needs to be turned off for
non-anonymous posts. Anyway, please look at
<http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~epa98/.bashrc> for my
prompt (roughly in the middle) and other fun
stuff.]
The prompt looks like
eavis@m/usr $
ie username@hostname current directory $
in light blue (cyan). When root, it's red with
the final character a #. When running as some
other user, it turns orange.
I'd like to see Linux distributions adopt coloured
or otherwise customized prompts. Each user could
have an ~/.prompt file or something. Easier than
editing your.bashrc.
Although actually Linux distros do a much better
hob of making the prompt informative than the
single character you get by default on many
proprietary Unixes.
Dammit, that's the second time it's happened this week... I post a question, the replies get moderated up, the original question gets moderated down! (I humbly submit this post at the score level of '1' in the earnest hope that the moderators may take pity on it and not consign it to the depths of -1, Troll...)
The ICFP organizers didn't want to work out a foolproof definition of 'functional', so they just decided that any language counts as a functional language. Then if OCaml, Haskell or Scheme win the competition it actually means something, since they were competing against imperative languages too.
I'm sure they're moving on to more interesting shapes. A dodecahedral computer, that'd be neat. Or a sphere,
floating in the air...
How about a dodecahedral computer, floating in the air, and rotating with a floppy or DVD drive at the front? You'd have to make sure your disk was rotating at the same rate as the computer as you slide it in.
What's wrong with grabbing a source package and doing rpm --rebuild? Okay, that's two steps instead of one, but it's not that much of a big deal.
If apt could download source packages, resolve dependencies, and install, that would be perfect. You could even unpack each source package in some special system-wide 'ports' directory for those who think having the whole source tree in one place is cute.
You only use applications that work exactly the way you want them to out of the box? Yikes.:)
You get accustomed to whatever the default settings are. The Emacs keybindings might not be ideal, but there's a good tutorial for them and once you've learnt them, you expect them to be present in other programs (like Bash or a web browser). If I switched to another editor I'd probably want it to have some sort of Emacs compatibility mode. Similarly Pine is what I'm used to, and I'm too lazy to bother learning something else right now. That's the problem. Users are lazy.
It would be great if there were a single config file for mutt that made it act as much like Pine as possible. There's already a set of keybindings, but there must be other differences. The one that stopped me switching to mutt a while ago was that it moved all the mail out of my spool file into its own 'inbox'. There's probably a way to configure that, but people won't switch from Pine to mutt readily if they have to configure mutt by hand first.
So what's needed is some kind of 'mutt for pine junkies'.
This is analogous to this site's 'web-based collaborative writing' where each poster does not bother to read what has been written in the adjacent postings.
What I mean is, if you ship an OS with a concoction of different scripts doing strange things behind a GUI interface, it's difficult to see what is going on. I still haven't figured it out, and I'm not a total newbie. OTOH if things have to be explicitly enabled, it's more likely that it'll be well documented and explained what you have to do.
I dunno, depends what group you visit. There are still plenty of groups uninfested by AOLers, spam and flame wars - though they tend to be only the more hardcore technical groups, as you'd expect. My favourite group is comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware - apart from the occasional poster who mistakes it for something about the PlayStation 2:-(.
Using ssh with X forwarding is much more convenient than futzing around with DISPLAY and xauth. And despite the traffic being sent in plain text, it's still more secure. I used to set DISPLAY by hand, but just running 'ssh -c none otherbox netscape' is much easier.
On some DOS machines you will get the memory count displayed by the BIOS, then only a few more lines of text before the C:\> prompt. That means you can start using the machine while still on the first screenful of text since it was switched on. I think that's cute.
On Linux you can usually Shift-PageUp to scroll all the way back to the beginning of time, but it's not the same.
BTW - drivers that are likely to crash must print something, so you know what crashed. Although in a production system you wouldn't expect anything to just hang the machine at boot time, so the suggestion of a special 'verbose mode' for kernel troubleshooting is a good one.
Like many Slashdot posters, I'm not sure I like the idea of 'slapped-on-top' security.
I installed Mandrake 8.0, played with the security levels a bit, and found that it had decided to firewall my machine so that no connections could be made to it. Reasonable enough for a paranoid setup, but switching the security level back to 'low' didn't fix it.
What annoyed me more was that there was no clear explanation of what had happened, so there wasn't an easy way to fix it. (I tried listing iptables/ipchains - nothing.) When stuff like this breaks, you need an obvious config file or two which you can fix by hand. 'man bastille' didn't help, and the files under/etc/sysconfig/ weren't well documented either.
Of course this is a problem with 'easy' graphical setup tools in any area, not just Mandrake's version of Bastille. But for security, I'm not sure that this approach is the right one.
It might be better to ship the OS in the most locked-down state by default and the user has to deliberately enable things like connections from the outside. Then at least the vendor would have an incentive to make this stuff robust and easy to set up.
They already do scale the images down; I'm just saying they could make them a little smaller. Or at least provide that as an option.
If they're currently generating thumbnails on the fly, it wouldn't be any slower to generate them a bit smaller. If they're currently saving the thumbnails to disk, a complementary set of extra-small thumbnails would take hardly any extra disk space (perhaps 20% as much).
As a modem user I would like an option for smaller thumbnails. Something like a 64x48 maximum size, reduced to 16 colours or fewer would be good. Then you could display all the matching results on a single page without it getting too big - another good thing for modem users (clicking through pages of results is too painful).
Until now, it hasn't really been important to choose meaningful filenames for images. But now you should make sure to pick long, descriptive names (probably with lots of underscores) so that Google will find them.
Also if Google uses 'alt text' to help the search, that's another good reason to add it to your images.
I wonder whether they will apply the page-ranking algorithm to client-side imagemaps with 'label' text?
Slashdot Mirror
If they really did intend that only French residents should read the information, as the legalese states, do you really think they'd bother putting up a copy in English?
How hard would it be to port Mono - if and when it is finished - to Windows? Probably not impossible if things like the GIMP or gcc are any example.
Surely you could do this better with a phone-sized Linux box - maybe with wireless networking - which has sound hardware. The CPU doesn't actually need to be that meaty for voice compression (GSM phones manage it).
Isn't there already a Palm-type device with built-in microphone and speaker which runs Linux? Use that!
Or better, sell some small 'base station' for your digital mobile phone which sends the GSM data across the net. You'd temporarily swap out the account details card from your mobile and replace it with one that contacts your home base station (which has a very weak transmitter covering a radius of about 200m).
The best content is free (or at least gratis) content. This is for two reasons: some of it is by individuals and nonprofit organizations, and it's likely to be more personal, friendly and honest than content that you'd pay for (one of the first things you learn on the web is that individual-run sites are usually much more useful than corporate ones). The other type of good free content is a web version of offline stuff like newspapers, which is good quality and free because the dead-tree sales pay for hiring writers and editors.
Also, gratis sites are more likely to give you the opportuntity to contribute back (like Slashdot, and more generally consider Usenet, IRC and other forms of graitis Net content).
Specialized stuff - particularly computer-related - is likely to be provided by 'hobbyist' or small organization websites. The only form of specialist content that people will reliably pay for online is stock quotes, AFAIK. Most pay sites would have to be general or 'entertainment' to get a large enough audience.
With the exception of porn, you view entertainment partly because other people do. Part of the enjoyment of watching the Simpsons is discussing it with others and being able to reuse catchphrases and be understood. There is a positive feedback effect where something popular becomes more worth watching. If you charge for content, it won't get that snowball effect. Would Slashdot be one-hundredth as popular today if it had charged subscription fees, however tiny, since starting in 1997?
It's funny, you don't usually hear about the authors of insecure software being liable. Yet they are just as much at fault as the people making the rootkits (from a simplistic 'if this code didn't exist, the exploit couldn't happen' point of view).
Surely the centre of mass of the Debian developers would be somewhere in the middle of the earth. It is round after all...
You should read the Bash-Prompt HOWTO for more
/usr $
.bashrc.
information.
My prompt changes colour according to the
logged-in user. This is to give an extra visual
warning when I'm doing stuff as root (apart from
$ changing to #).
[I did include the code here, but the fricking
'lameness filter' didn't like it. That
thing really needs to be turned off for
non-anonymous posts. Anyway, please look at
<http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~epa98/.bashrc> for my
prompt (roughly in the middle) and other fun
stuff.]
The prompt looks like
eavis@m
ie username@hostname current directory $
in light blue (cyan). When root, it's red with
the final character a #. When running as some
other user, it turns orange.
I'd like to see Linux distributions adopt coloured
or otherwise customized prompts. Each user could
have an ~/.prompt file or something. Easier than
editing your
Although actually Linux distros do a much better
hob of making the prompt informative than the
single character you get by default on many
proprietary Unixes.
Dammit, that's the second time it's happened this week... I post a question, the replies get moderated up, the original question gets moderated down! (I humbly submit this post at the score level of '1' in the earnest hope that the moderators may take pity on it and not consign it to the depths of -1, Troll...)
The ICFP organizers didn't want to work out a foolproof definition of 'functional', so they just decided that any language counts as a functional language. Then if OCaml, Haskell or Scheme win the competition it actually means something, since they were competing against imperative languages too.
Okay, so people are keen to add functionality to pay bills online, to send money via PayPal, and so on.
But what are the odds that the first feature implemented will be a button saying 'click here to donate money to the GnuCash project'?
How about a dodecahedral computer, floating in the air, and rotating with a floppy or DVD drive at the front? You'd have to make sure your disk was rotating at the same rate as the computer as you slide it in.
What's wrong with grabbing a source package and doing rpm --rebuild? Okay, that's two steps instead of one, but it's not that much of a big deal.
If apt could download source packages, resolve dependencies, and install, that would be perfect. You could even unpack each source package in some special system-wide 'ports' directory for those who think having the whole source tree in one place is cute.
It would be great if there were a single config file for mutt that made it act as much like Pine as possible. There's already a set of keybindings, but there must be other differences. The one that stopped me switching to mutt a while ago was that it moved all the mail out of my spool file into its own 'inbox'. There's probably a way to configure that, but people won't switch from Pine to mutt readily if they have to configure mutt by hand first.
So what's needed is some kind of 'mutt for pine junkies'.
D'oh! Try again:
This is analogous to this site's 'web-based collaborative writing' where each poster does not bother to read what has been written in the adjacent postings.
This is analogous to this site's 'web-based collaborative writing' where each poster bothers to read what has been written in the adjacent postings.
Who would you pick for your Fantasy XI?
What I mean is, if you ship an OS with a concoction of different scripts doing strange things behind a GUI interface, it's difficult to see what is going on. I still haven't figured it out, and I'm not a total newbie. OTOH if things have to be explicitly enabled, it's more likely that it'll be well documented and explained what you have to do.
I dunno, depends what group you visit. There are still plenty of groups uninfested by AOLers, spam and flame wars - though they tend to be only the more hardcore technical groups, as you'd expect. My favourite group is comp.sys.ibm.ps2.hardware - apart from the occasional poster who mistakes it for something about the PlayStation 2 :-(.
Using ssh with X forwarding is much more convenient than futzing around with DISPLAY and xauth. And despite the traffic being sent in plain text, it's still more secure. I used to set DISPLAY by hand, but just running 'ssh -c none otherbox netscape' is much easier.
On some DOS machines you will get the memory count displayed by the BIOS, then only a few more lines of text before the C:\> prompt. That means you can start using the machine while still on the first screenful of text since it was switched on. I think that's cute.
On Linux you can usually Shift-PageUp to scroll all the way back to the beginning of time, but it's not the same.
BTW - drivers that are likely to crash must print something, so you know what crashed. Although in a production system you wouldn't expect anything to just hang the machine at boot time, so the suggestion of a special 'verbose mode' for kernel troubleshooting is a good one.
Like many Slashdot posters, I'm not sure I like the idea of 'slapped-on-top' security.
/etc/sysconfig/ weren't well documented either.
I installed Mandrake 8.0, played with the security levels a bit, and found that it had decided to firewall my machine so that no connections could be made to it. Reasonable enough for a paranoid setup, but switching the security level back to 'low' didn't fix it.
What annoyed me more was that there was no clear explanation of what had happened, so there wasn't an easy way to fix it. (I tried listing iptables/ipchains - nothing.) When stuff like this breaks, you need an obvious config file or two which you can fix by hand. 'man bastille' didn't help, and the files under
Of course this is a problem with 'easy' graphical setup tools in any area, not just Mandrake's version of Bastille. But for security, I'm not sure that this approach is the right one.
It might be better to ship the OS in the most locked-down state by default and the user has to deliberately enable things like connections from the outside. Then at least the vendor would have an incentive to make this stuff robust and easy to set up.
They already do scale the images down; I'm just saying they could make them a little smaller. Or at least provide that as an option.
If they're currently generating thumbnails on the fly, it wouldn't be any slower to generate them a bit smaller. If they're currently saving the thumbnails to disk, a complementary set of extra-small thumbnails would take hardly any extra disk space (perhaps 20% as much).
As a modem user I would like an option for smaller thumbnails. Something like a 64x48 maximum size, reduced to 16 colours or fewer would be good. Then you could display all the matching results on a single page without it getting too big - another good thing for modem users (clicking through pages of results is too painful).
Until now, it hasn't really been important to choose meaningful filenames for images. But now you should make sure to pick long, descriptive names (probably with lots of underscores) so that Google will find them.
Also if Google uses 'alt text' to help the search, that's another good reason to add it to your images.
I wonder whether they will apply the page-ranking algorithm to client-side imagemaps with 'label' text?