What I mean is, suppose Belgium has a copyright term of twenty years from the date of publication. Then a work published in Spain in 1985 is copyright until 2005 in Belgium - even if Spanish copyright laws are different. The Belgian laws are not allowed to discriminate against foreign works (that would be some kind of trade barrier).
Foot and mouth affects several different species (sheep, cows, goats, basically anything with cloven hooves). So if it spreads from a sheep to a cow, you can hardly say that is due to lack of genetic diversity.
The trouble is, most of this stuff is decided by the European Commission - which is appointed, not elected - and its civil servants. A directly-elected Commission might help; or transferring more of its powers to the European Parliament; or transferring them downwards to elected national governments.
I don't really see the need for standardized European copyright law. It would be better to let each member state decide what laws were appropriate for its conditions. That would lead to better-quality, more friendly laws and competition between member states to make the best environment for business. All that the Commission would need to do is make sure that countries don't discriminate against copyrighted works created in other member states, treating them with exactly the same protection as those created at 'home'.
When I use the filename-completion on Windows (undocumented Registry key called CompletionChar), it always irritates me that it isn't case-sensitive. I go to a directory containing rezoink.c and README, type 'edit r', and it completes to README. Dammit, if I wanted a capital R, I would have typed a capital R!
It just shows that this is a matter of individual taste, and of course it should be programmable so you can choose the style you prefer.
You're not 'guaranteed' to have zsh on any given system, but the same goes for any shell except plain/bin/sh. (Ksh is not usually there on Linux; bash is not usually there on proprietary *nix.) What you do is use bash and, if you want your scripts to be portable, restrict yourself to the standard Bourne-shell features. But there is nothing to stop you doing the same with zsh, since it is pretty much a superset of ksh (and thus a superset of sh).
OTOH, if you aren't concerned with writing portable shell scripts, why deny yourself the benefits of a nicer shell for interactive use? Maybe it is not worth 'learning' zsh as some kind of chore or training exercise, but if there's a feature you would like to use, go and use it. If people took the same viewpoint with all software - don't bother learning it unless it is there on all Unixes - 90% of the stuff on a typical Linux system would disappear.
Finally, it's not usually hard to install something like zsh. Not hard at all on Linux, and Linux makes up the majority of Unix-like systems out there.
If X is glacial on your machine, the framebuffer will be just as bad and probably worse. The main cause of slow graphics in X is having an unaccelerated video card; operations like scrolling or window dragging must be done by the processor copying memory about. But the Linux framebuffer doesn't have any support at all for such acceleration (AFAIK), so it will be at least as slow. In my experience it is worse.
Perhaps what you mean is 'KDE is slow', in which case you could get the same speedup by keeping X, but not running KDE. Try a simple but neat-looking window manager (eg icewm) together with those apps you want to run.
In countries where you pay per-second phone charges to call your ISP, there are many 'free' ISPs which take a proportion of the call charges. This is a perfectly reasonable business model - there is actually money coming in, you're not relying on advertising.
Anyway, the longer a user stays online, the more money the ISP makes. If these free ISPs could track what sites users are visiting, they could pay a small proportion (perhaps 10%) of the profit to the website owner. That's a tiny, tiny amount, but it could add up if you have a popular enough site. In this way the free ISPs might encourage sites to develop content tailored to their subscribers. (To avoid just randomly giving away money, the ISP might pay only those sites with which they have an agreement, or which belong to some 'association of penniless websites' which provides a mechanism for payment.)
I don't know whether there is a level of payment low enough to make the ISPs try it, but high enough to sustain websites. It would probably never work. But I'd like to see at least one provider give it a try.
If it's a shared terminal in a computing lab or somewhere, the secure attention sequence is very useful. Otherwise it would be trivial for the previous user to put up a fake login prompt and capture your password. (The 'schoolboy attack'.)
I agree that it doesn't solve all the problems, but if you can close one out of three security holes, that's better than closing zero out of three.
To combat copying by competitors, cartographers often put deliberate mistakes in their maps. A 'phantom village' which doens't really exist, for example. Then it's easy to see if someone has copied your map.
I wonder whether Microsoft will be using the same tactic to help find the source of any source-code leaks. Will they put deliberate bugs in their code?
I wonder how long it will be before you will be able to get CDs with the complete source to MS Office, Visual Studio, Win2k, and so on via MSDN. Like how you get binary CDs now.
The standard distribution of Ghostscript won't handle PDF files that have the so-called 'protection'. You have to download an extra PostScript file from somewhere - the error message tells you what you need.
This file refuses to process PDFs where the author has requested that you do not print them. However, if you want to exercise your fair dealing rights despite the author's request, it is simple to patch the file so that your computer will do what you tell it.
Try running XEmacs over a 28.8Kb/s modem link. You'll see the 'send' light flash, then the 'receive' light, then 'send' again, and so on for several minutes. This indicates to me that a lengthy dialogue is happening between the X server on my machine and XEmacs running remotely; and that each side can only say one thing, then wait for an answer.
Most likely XEmacs is asking about all the fonts available and their sizes, or something like that. Maybe it is querying X properties one by one. But anyway, it would be a lot quicker if the X server could just send a single, highly compressed lump of information containing almost everything XEmacs (or any other X client) needs to know. Alternatively, make the communication more asynchronous so that X clients can send several requests at once, without waiting for an answer between each one. Going backwards and forwards across a modem link usually takes about a quarter of a second (for me) - do you want that sort of delay for each of a hundred messages?
VNC (even with compression) is a bandwidth hog compared to X, but it's not so much of a 'latency hog'. Running XEmacs over VNC, it starts much quicker, because the X server (Xvnc) and X client (XEmacs) are on the same machine. The communication that goes over the high-latency modem link does not consist of lots of small requests, (it's just raw pixel data) so the application's response time is a lot better. (At least when starting; if you wait several minutes for XEmacs to start with X-over-modem, it's just about usable once it's running.)
The irony is that compression, which is supposed to make the link effectively faster, actually increases the latency for sending short messages. Of course special compression designed for the X protocol will be designed to minimize the effect on latency.
Nothing wrong with rusting iron in your drinking water. Sometimes the water from a borehole is naturally full of iron - so much so that it comes out of the tap brown. Doesn't do you any harm AFAIK.
UFO was way better than Space: 1999. The first episodes of UFO lead the ratings in both New York and LA. Then the ratings dipped momentarially, the networks panicked, and the second series of UFO was cancelled to produce Space: 1999 instead. Uurgh.
The moon accidentally got detached from Earth's orbit and hurtled through space. Gerry Anderson said that this added a certain edge to the first series, because rather than intrepid space explorers, it was about people who never wanted to leave Earth's orbit and were not prepared for it.
In this way it's a bit like ST: Voyager. And in other ways too, if you consider the acting and general gloominess.
By Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Stingray, UFO, Terrahawks, Space Precinct and others). Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (husband and wife) were probably hired to appeal to American audiences. Fred Freiberger (writer of some of Star Trek's third season) was producer or something.
Leonard Nimoy was also on Mission: Impossible. And there was one episode, apparently, with William Shatner as guest star. Maybe this means that episode had the two main characters from both Star Trek and Space: 1999.
(BTW: I've heard rumours that Blake's 7 is making a comeback - with Gareth Thomas!)
A while ago, as an experiment, I installed the glibc from RedHat 7.0 on a 6.2 system. Almost everything worked exactly as before, the only thing that broke was Emacs due to some problem with Berkeley DB.
So I'd say it is Oracle that's being downright stupid. I don't know what is meant by 'tries to relink itself with the new library', but it sounds pretty unpleasant and unnecessary. Hundreds of other binary packages just kept on working when glibc was upgraded.
Oracle is well known for being a pig to install and get running, and this is just another thing to add to the list.
Bash is a shell. Tcsh is a shell. SSH is a program which makes a connection to another machine, authenticates, and causes a shell (like bash or tcsh) to be run on the remote machine.
The start and end of daylight saving time is now standardized across the EU. According to http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/leaflets/summer/summer.ht ml
, summer time starts at 01:00 on the last Sunday in March, and ends at 01:00 on the last Sunday in October. (That's 01:00 UT (01:00 GMT) in both cases, BTW.) This has been the case since 1998. I believe that this is decided at EU level: when France wanted to change timezone, the other EU countries (except Britain) refused to allow them to change.
I wrote code to handle this nonsense: uk_tz.pl. It's a few routines building on the Date::Manip Perl module - one day I should make it into a derived class, or something. Consider it GPL/Artistic dual-licensed.
Actually, twm is not particularly light. Fvwm started out as a version of twm with certain data structures rewritten to take less memory. This made fvwm more useful on 4Mbyte machines. Fvwm was originally called the Flimsy Virtual Window Manager - 'flimsy' being managementspeak for 'small and compact'. But like KDE, they soon deliberately forgot what the first letter stood for.
This is all IIRC of course. But I'm fairly sure that twm is not the lightest window manager out there; just relatively small compared to monstrosities like E:-).
It's a reason not to implement JavaScript or other scripting languages; it's a reason not to automatically fetch from the Web images and other objects embedded in messages. It's a reason not to do anything network-based just because of what you've received from an untrusted sender.
But to blame this on HTML is mistaken. HTML is just a language allowing you to mark up paragraphs, headings, lists and so on. The problem comes from those who are implementing HTML readers and making them automatically execute fragments of code and automatically download images which are linked to.
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What I mean is, suppose Belgium has a copyright term of twenty years from the date of publication. Then a work published in Spain in 1985 is copyright until 2005 in Belgium - even if Spanish copyright laws are different. The Belgian laws are not allowed to discriminate against foreign works (that would be some kind of trade barrier).
Foot and mouth affects several different species (sheep, cows, goats, basically anything with cloven hooves). So if it spreads from a sheep to a cow, you can hardly say that is due to lack of genetic diversity.
The trouble is, most of this stuff is decided by the European Commission - which is appointed, not elected - and its civil servants. A directly-elected Commission might help; or transferring more of its powers to the European Parliament; or transferring them downwards to elected national governments.
I don't really see the need for standardized European copyright law. It would be better to let each member state decide what laws were appropriate for its conditions. That would lead to better-quality, more friendly laws and competition between member states to make the best environment for business. All that the Commission would need to do is make sure that countries don't discriminate against copyrighted works created in other member states, treating them with exactly the same protection as those created at 'home'.
When I use the filename-completion on Windows (undocumented Registry key called CompletionChar), it always irritates me that it isn't case-sensitive. I go to a directory containing rezoink.c and README, type 'edit r', and it completes to README. Dammit, if I wanted a capital R, I would have typed a capital R!
It just shows that this is a matter of individual taste, and of course it should be programmable so you can choose the style you prefer.
You're not 'guaranteed' to have zsh on any given system, but the same goes for any shell except plain /bin/sh. (Ksh is not usually there on Linux; bash is not usually there on proprietary *nix.) What you do is use bash and, if you want your scripts to be portable, restrict yourself to the standard Bourne-shell features. But there is nothing to stop you doing the same with zsh, since it is pretty much a superset of ksh (and thus a superset of sh).
OTOH, if you aren't concerned with writing portable shell scripts, why deny yourself the benefits of a nicer shell for interactive use? Maybe it is not worth 'learning' zsh as some kind of chore or training exercise, but if there's a feature you would like to use, go and use it. If people took the same viewpoint with all software - don't bother learning it unless it is there on all Unixes - 90% of the stuff on a typical Linux system would disappear.
Finally, it's not usually hard to install something like zsh. Not hard at all on Linux, and Linux makes up the majority of Unix-like systems out there.
If X is glacial on your machine, the framebuffer will be just as bad and probably worse. The main cause of slow graphics in X is having an unaccelerated video card; operations like scrolling or window dragging must be done by the processor copying memory about. But the Linux framebuffer doesn't have any support at all for such acceleration (AFAIK), so it will be at least as slow. In my experience it is worse.
Perhaps what you mean is 'KDE is slow', in which case you could get the same speedup by keeping X, but not running KDE. Try a simple but neat-looking window manager (eg icewm) together with those apps you want to run.
In countries where you pay per-second phone charges to call your ISP, there are many 'free' ISPs which take a proportion of the call charges. This is a perfectly reasonable business model - there is actually money coming in, you're not relying on advertising.
Anyway, the longer a user stays online, the more money the ISP makes. If these free ISPs could track what sites users are visiting, they could pay a small proportion (perhaps 10%) of the profit to the website owner. That's a tiny, tiny amount, but it could add up if you have a popular enough site. In this way the free ISPs might encourage sites to develop content tailored to their subscribers. (To avoid just randomly giving away money, the ISP might pay only those sites with which they have an agreement, or which belong to some 'association of penniless websites' which provides a mechanism for payment.)
I don't know whether there is a level of payment low enough to make the ISPs try it, but high enough to sustain websites. It would probably never work. But I'd like to see at least one provider give it a try.
If it's a shared terminal in a computing lab or somewhere, the secure attention sequence is very useful. Otherwise it would be trivial for the previous user to put up a fake login prompt and capture your password. (The 'schoolboy attack'.)
I agree that it doesn't solve all the problems, but if you can close one out of three security holes, that's better than closing zero out of three.
To combat copying by competitors, cartographers often put deliberate mistakes in their maps. A 'phantom village' which doens't really exist, for example. Then it's easy to see if someone has copied your map.
I wonder whether Microsoft will be using the same tactic to help find the source of any source-code leaks. Will they put deliberate bugs in their code?
I wonder how long it will be before you will be able to get CDs with the complete source to MS Office, Visual Studio, Win2k, and so on via MSDN. Like how you get binary CDs now.
Five years? Ten years? Never?
The standard distribution of Ghostscript won't handle PDF files that have the so-called 'protection'. You have to download an extra PostScript file from somewhere - the error message tells you what you need.
This file refuses to process PDFs where the author has requested that you do not print them. However, if you want to exercise your fair dealing rights despite the author's request, it is simple to patch the file so that your computer will do what you tell it.
For more information, see Kyler Laird's PDF utilities.
FWIW, I think Debian should stand up for fair dealing rights and allow users to print PDFs - though it might have to go into non-US.
Bandwidth isn't the problem, it's *latency*.
Try running XEmacs over a 28.8Kb/s modem link. You'll see the 'send' light flash, then the 'receive' light, then 'send' again, and so on for several minutes. This indicates to me that a lengthy dialogue is happening between the X server on my machine and XEmacs running remotely; and that each side can only say one thing, then wait for an answer.
Most likely XEmacs is asking about all the fonts available and their sizes, or something like that. Maybe it is querying X properties one by one. But anyway, it would be a lot quicker if the X server could just send a single, highly compressed lump of information containing almost everything XEmacs (or any other X client) needs to know. Alternatively, make the communication more asynchronous so that X clients can send several requests at once, without waiting for an answer between each one. Going backwards and forwards across a modem link usually takes about a quarter of a second (for me) - do you want that sort of delay for each of a hundred messages?
VNC (even with compression) is a bandwidth hog compared to X, but it's not so much of a 'latency hog'. Running XEmacs over VNC, it starts much quicker, because the X server (Xvnc) and X client (XEmacs) are on the same machine. The communication that goes over the high-latency modem link does not consist of lots of small requests, (it's just raw pixel data) so the application's response time is a lot better. (At least when starting; if you wait several minutes for XEmacs to start with X-over-modem, it's just about usable once it's running.)
The irony is that compression, which is supposed to make the link effectively faster, actually increases the latency for sending short messages. Of course special compression designed for the X protocol will be designed to minimize the effect on latency.
Nothing wrong with rusting iron in your drinking water. Sometimes the water from a borehole is naturally full of iron - so much so that it comes out of the tap brown. Doesn't do you any harm AFAIK.
I think the best thing you can say for Galactica is that the brat and his mechanical dog make Wesley Crusher look bearable.
UFO was way better than Space: 1999. The first episodes of UFO lead the ratings in both New York and LA. Then the ratings dipped momentarially, the networks panicked, and the second series of UFO was cancelled to produce Space: 1999 instead. Uurgh.
The moon accidentally got detached from Earth's orbit and hurtled through space. Gerry Anderson said that this added a certain edge to the first series, because rather than intrepid space explorers, it was about people who never wanted to leave Earth's orbit and were not prepared for it.
In this way it's a bit like ST: Voyager. And in other ways too, if you consider the acting and general gloominess.
By Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Stingray, UFO, Terrahawks, Space Precinct and others). Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (husband and wife) were probably hired to appeal to American audiences. Fred Freiberger (writer of some of Star Trek's third season) was producer or something.
Leonard Nimoy was also on Mission: Impossible. And there was one episode, apparently, with William Shatner as guest star. Maybe this means that episode had the two main characters from both Star Trek and Space: 1999.
(BTW: I've heard rumours that Blake's 7 is making a comeback - with Gareth Thomas!)
They got sued for (alleged) plagiarism by the Star Wars people. That was another reason why they decided to pack it in.
With 400 megabytes per second, Mozilla might actually load quite fast!
A while ago, as an experiment, I installed the glibc from RedHat 7.0 on a 6.2 system. Almost everything worked exactly as before, the only thing that broke was Emacs due to some problem with Berkeley DB.
So I'd say it is Oracle that's being downright stupid. I don't know what is meant by 'tries to relink itself with the new library', but it sounds pretty unpleasant and unnecessary. Hundreds of other binary packages just kept on working when glibc was upgraded.
Oracle is well known for being a pig to install and get running, and this is just another thing to add to the list.
Why the 'shell' part? SSH isn't a shell.
Bash is a shell. Tcsh is a shell. SSH is a program which makes a connection to another machine, authenticates, and causes a shell (like bash or tcsh) to be run on the remote machine.
The start and end of daylight saving time is now standardized across the EU. According to http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/leaflets/summer/summer.ht ml
, summer time starts at 01:00 on the last Sunday in March, and ends at 01:00 on the last Sunday in October. (That's 01:00 UT (01:00 GMT) in both cases, BTW.) This has been the case since 1998. I believe that this is decided at EU level: when France wanted to change timezone, the other EU countries (except Britain) refused to allow them to change.
I wrote code to handle this nonsense: uk_tz.pl. It's a few routines building on the Date::Manip Perl module - one day I should make it into a derived class, or something. Consider it GPL/Artistic dual-licensed.
I've heard that it stood for 'Kool' or before that, for 'Kalle Dalleheimer's' (hope I spelled that right).
Actually, twm is not particularly light. Fvwm started out as a version of twm with certain data structures rewritten to take less memory. This made fvwm more useful on 4Mbyte machines. Fvwm was originally called the Flimsy Virtual Window Manager - 'flimsy' being managementspeak for 'small and compact'. But like KDE, they soon deliberately forgot what the first letter stood for.
:-).
This is all IIRC of course. But I'm fairly sure that twm is not the lightest window manager out there; just relatively small compared to monstrosities like E
It's a reason not to implement JavaScript or other scripting languages; it's a reason not to automatically fetch from the Web images and other objects embedded in messages. It's a reason not to do anything network-based just because of what you've received from an untrusted sender.
But to blame this on HTML is mistaken. HTML is just a language allowing you to mark up paragraphs, headings, lists and so on. The problem comes from those who are implementing HTML readers and making them automatically execute fragments of code and automatically download images which are linked to.