"In the beginning the programmer created the language and the code. And the code was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the screen of the computer. And the programmer moved upon the keyboard of the computer. And the programmer said, let there be Photoshop: and there was Photoshop. And the programmer saw Photoshop, that it was good: and the programmer divided the Command Parameter Modeling Code from the Underlying Framework." - The Book of Photoshop 1:1-4
After reading the full module overview I must say that this looks pretty nice. Note that releasing Adam and Eve won't let every program just take over Photoshop's look and feel (thank god!). You still need to provide all of your own widgets, all of your own event generation code, all your own application back end, as well as write the event handling and layout descriptions. The advantage of this system though, is that the event handling is described cleaning in Adam Expression language which can parsed to execute in any environment. Likewise, the layout can be simplified by describing it in an environment-neutral way that can then be bound to Adam values.
It doesn't seem revolutionary, but it is a nicely worked out evolution in interface building.
That's a great tutorial there! The simplicity of the examples was key to figuring out what the minimum important parts to using this system is without being confused by the many cool things you can do with the system, but are extra.
For those reading, I recommend that you follow that tutorial with this one which then goes into more depth on generic request/responce scripts and XML handling.
Oh yeah, it took me a while to find these, so I'll add this list of pages that explained how to do the things that I wanted to do while going through the tutorial. There are just so many crap sites that repeat the same rubbish tutorials about javascript that it can be really hard to find good info.
Accessing XML Nodes from Javascript: http://www.mozilla.org/xmlextras/xmldataislands/ Every other tutorial I found says to use something like node.firstChild.text for getting the value of an element, but I couldn't get that working on Firefox or Safari. This just mentions to use node.firstChild.nodeValue which did the trick for me.
how long until state treasuries across the country subpoena Amazon.com or other big online retailers to collect unpaid sales taxes?
> 18 months. You heard it here.
Quoth TFA, "It is illegal to bring any cigarettes into Michigan from other states unless by licensed sellers who pay the appropriate tax. People who bring less than $50 in cigarettes don't face penalties."
So don't worry about this action affecting future tax's on Amazon et al coming from the states as other products which are not as controlled as cigarettes do not usually have specific regulations on importing them to any given state. Additionally, the selling of many other products (such as books, cds, or little snowmen made of of styrofoam balls and glitter) does not require a special license.
That said, as interstate retail commerce grows in general states may have to go looking for new revenue sources.
tank treaded claw-mobile with a superfluous arm that sticks out the side to make the customer more emotionally comfortable before it destroys his house.
afranco@bullmoose:~$ cat "food in tin cans" cat: food in tin cans: No such file or directory afranco@bullmoose:~$ cat --version cat (coreutils) 5.0 Written by Torbjorn Granlund and Richard M. Stallman.
Copyright (C) 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. afranco@bullmoose:~$
...merely to point out Chomsky's politics, which are decidedly anti-capitalist, pro-socialist to begin with.
The point is acknowledged that Chomsky is far from "centrist", extremely so in fact.
To see a book written by Mr. Chomsky come to the conclusion that capitalism is bad, wealth and thatpower must be "evenly distributed" is about as surprising as hearing water is wet.
Please note that the views about Power/money/influence beginning with As far as I can tell, the nature of Power... are my own. If Mr. Chomsky has expressed similar views then I applaud him for reaching similar conclusions in his own inquiries into the state of the world.
Nowhere in my reading of Manufacturing Consent (MC) did I see any any anti-capitalist references. The only place MC comments on "even distribution of power" (that I noticed) is in discussing the 1984 elections in Guatemala. Chomsky and Herman question how meaningful elections could be in a state where power is concentrated in the hands of an authoritarian junta that has just executed or "disappeared" most of the journalists, political rivals, and judiciary in the country. I have not read any of Chomsky's other writings, so I cannot speak on them.
Nice sig: So let me ask you: are you more proud of your ignorance or your bias?
The question implies that ignorance and bias go together and encourages the reader to fix the bias by fixing the ignorance. I heartily agree with this viewpoint, which is part of why I found reading MC so interesting, even IF the the author's positions are in some way as baseless as those of Limbaugh. The important thing is to gather one's information from a variety of independent sources (including direct observation where possible) so that one can make informed opinions and choices about the world.
Though Rush pushes this limit, I do not believe that anyone can lie and misrepresent in everything that they say. Included in the deception are little scraps of truth buried in page B17, Appendix 25, or in what things one observes at events first hand, but are not said by others reporting on the event or using that event to push their agenda.
Your post induced me to read up on Mr. Chomsky as I didn't know much about the man or his views aside from reading one of his books. Wikipedia has a very in-depth article that discusses many points of view on the man and the cult of personality surrounding him. As with everything, somewhere amongst the words of critics and of followers lie small truths. That he (or any other person) is a lier and propagandist or an insightful thinker that cares more about ideals than opinion is something one must discover for one's self and is not something just to take a single source's word for.
More thoughts on capitalism, wealth, and power:
As they are by definition made up by more than one person, all societies are by definition compromises between the desires of their members. Various societies try to balance these desires by employing various economic systems. In a [completely fictional] utopia all people would be able to have anything that they want and never have to deal with fulfilling desires of others that conflict with their own. As the world is finite conflicts do arise and economic systems are employed to work these conflicts out. The general hope (I believe) is that the chosen economic system will provide a basis for supporting the other ideals of a society; be they listed in the US Bill of Rights or others such as a right to education, a right to health care, or a right to choose to garden in the nude. What ever they are, these ideals of a society provide the framework for discourse and function within it.
I have no problem with laizes-faire capitalism, regulated capitalism, socialism, communism, or any other economic system as long as the chosen one[s] allows the ideals of my society to flourish internally. The problem I have is
In your average newspaper and newscast it's almost impossible to find a single unbiased and non-propagandistic article. They're as rare as factually correct articles, and often the two go hand in hand. As journalists no longer appear to have the time, and few the integrity, try to do the factchecking yourself, and trace interests and bias in the article, and compare between different ones.
For a scholarly look at this issue read Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. In it they describe in detail many, many examples how "the powers that be" in the U.S. of A. have used the structure of the mass media to distort the world view of the citizens of this [USA] country.
What exactly are they protecting you from?
As far as I can tell, the nature of Power is such that for the most part, those with it want to keep it. Additionally, money and influence are both part of and equivalent to Power. With [enough] money you can buy influence and with [enough] influence you can obtain money. In order to retain Power those with it must ensure not that the populace is well off, but that they are content enough that they do not rebel or otherwise try to overthrow those in Power.
As much as the United States is a democracy, true democracy (in which all have a generally equal say) is impossible if there is a large concentration of Power (money and/or influence). If Power is not [relatively] evenly spread, then those with it can get a larger say by either force or by manipulating those without Power into agreeing with them.
So, what exactly are they protecting you from? In general, feelings of dissatisfaction with the state of your world (as it reflects on them) and your place in it. This manipulation can come in many forms, but several common ones that are repeated over and over are:
- Enemies: Enemies focus attention away from domestic problems to external entities, as well as providing a framework for "Be happy, at least you aren't in xxxxxx" comments.
- "Mindless" Entertainment: The more entertained you are, the less likely you are to rebel. "The Matrix" is an extreme example of this.
- Playing on dreams: The "American Dream" is partially summarized as the opportunity of anyone who "works hard enough" to climb the economic and social ladders. In the current day and age (as well as many past) this is no more true than elsewhere in the world. A very few people truly go from "rags to riches" while the rest of us stay plus or minus a few degrees from the place where we were born. The promise of the "American Dream" is repeated so often though that most people take it to be truth, thereby voting for tax cuts for the rich on the belief that they will soon be rich too.
These and other tools can and are used by those with Power to protect the rest of us from the harsh truth that we are being cheated and our situation would be better if those with Power didn't have it.
Like 1984, Manufacturing Consent is scary not because it tells you lots of things you've never heard of, but because it takes a closer look at this mass of things that never quite "seemed right" in the way they were portrayed or the reasoning behind them.
From TFA: "The tiny opaque box, about three inches square, is made of a superinsulating polymer. Mr. Cantu heats the box to 350 degrees in an oven and places a raw piece of Pacific sea bass inside it. A server then delivers it to diners, who can watch the fish cook."
I would have thought that it would have needed to be clear, or at least translucent to see the contents...
Even though the only difference is a web server they don't even know how to write web pages for.
This may not be the case now, but a few years ago when I was in college my room-mate got a new computer with XP Home on it. It wouldn't allow him to get onto the college network without upgrading to XP Pro. Apparently "networking" aside from dial-up (or maybe just connecting to a large subnets) was considered a Pro feature. With the recent proliferation of home networks I find it hard to believe that this is still the case, but I haven't sat at a computer running Windows recently enough to verify this.
The next programmer asks to have the program represented in his language-de-jour. If his language and your language are semantically similar, this can work. If they're not, it won't work, since you are trying to solve the UNCOL problem (the holy grail for the universal intermediate representation, which does not exist).
Even better, think about internationalization of the language constructs themselves. Take a loop through an iterator for example:
while (iterator.hasNext()) {
object = iterator.next(); }
An Argentine programmer, for instance, could open the same source in his editor with the Spanish pack for that language and be able to read the code as something like:
mientras (iterator.tienePróximo()) {
object = iterator.próximo(); }
Non-english speakers get by currently, but their lives could be made much easier with the language abstracted a level.
Additionally, I'm really hankering for in-code diagrams, links, and other non-"pure text" as part of the in-line comments. That sort of thing makes maintaining a separate manual for libraries/frameworks either unnecessary or simply a matter of translating the source comments into a full manual -- like JavaDoc on steroids.
[Well-to-do people] also pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, which is highly unfair...
This is not unfair, it is a counterweight specifically made to enable a democratic laissez-faire capitalist society to exist.
A democracy can not exist when 1% of the population controls 99% of the resources; see Europe in what were appropriately known as the Dark Ages or many "third world" countries today for examples of this. In a place with that sort of extreme wealth disparity there is no way for the poor 90% of the population to have a meaningful enough influence on the government to feel that their needs are being met and exploitation of them is kept to a minimum.
In the past few centuries many people now considered famous -- Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Locke, Immanual Kant, Karl Marx, etc -- have come up with a whole spectrum of ways to provide enough equity to all to allow a modern nation-state to exist. Though different parts of the spectrum have had varying degrees of success, they share (at least on the philosophical level, if not the implementation level) the same general notion of preventing the concentration of resources (and thereby power).
At one extreme you have communism (the new philosophical term collectivism is often used to differentiate the common philosophy of a collective societies from the generally awful implementations tried by the various Communist parties in many countries). In [ideal] communism, no one owns anything personally and the collective labors and benefits are shared equally by all. In practice this doesn't work in groups larger than about few thousand since it requires the good faith of most participants to not screw their fellow people. Successful implementations of this are "hippy communes", many tribal groups, monasteries, and isolated villages scattered the world over.
In the middle of the spectrum is modern socialism/socialist-capitalism as practiced by much of Europe, as well as Canada. Unlike communism, socialism allows for personal property but requires a large portion of that be pooled together on a national level to provide a smaller set of common services than communism; transportation, health care, elderly/disabled care, education, police, defense, arts and science. Businesses are generally heavily regulated to ensure that they do cause undo harm or consolidate too much power.
At the other end of the spectrum is [mostly] laissez-faire capitalism as practiced in the United States. In this system there is much less regulation and individuals and corporations are encouraged to do comparatively whatever they want in their pursuit of riches. The balance to this lack of regulation is a graduated tax scheme which taxes the wealthy more than the poor. The estate tax in particular exists to prevent that top 1% of families from consolidating their riches over generations and becoming defacto royalty. In the other systems mentioned above, the less able/wealthy members of the society would be provided for by social services. In the USA they get (comparatively) dropped, but aren't taxed as much.
The crux of the matter is that a democratic society needs some equity in what it provides its citizens if it is to survive by something other tyrannical rule. If you don't like the graduated taxes, move somewhere where they have high flat-tax rates and more regulation. Or go further and [try to] find a pure communist society with no taxes, but no personal ownership either.
but then you gotta ask, do you really need 80 GB of pictures? In all honesty - how many people take 80 GB of pictures on a vacation?...lets talk the average user - not some/.'er who is going to give us some outrageous number that is most likely a lie anyhow to help prove a point.
Two years ago I took a 2.5 week trip around Italy and am left with 507 images from my old Canon A70 point-and-shoot. This was after deleting at least as many that didn't come out for whatever reason. I've since gotten even more into photography and am now shooting with a Canon EOS-300D. In RAW mode (required for doing the color-correction later in Photoshop) each photo is ~7MB. Had I been shooting with the 300D in RAW mode, those 507 photos would have taken up 3.5GB, enough to fill one big, expensive card.
I am currently planing a month-long trip Turkey next year. Judging by how my shooting habits have changed, I am imagining that I will take well over a thousand photos on that trip, hence the need for at least 10GB of storage space to be safe. To me, it makes a lot more sense to buy a 40GB hd/reader for $300 than to spend $300 a pop on 4GB CF cards.
The when shooting in RAW (unprocessed) mode each image from the Canon EOS-1Ds is approximately 11MB.
40960MB/11MB = 3700 photos
While 3700 photos is quite a lot, its definately not rediculous for someone who is shooting a lot for a month, especially if they are bracketing many of their exposures. Since you can't really see which one were just right until you get them into Photoshop, something like 2/3 might be later trashed. This leaves you with about 1300 good-quality photos from Kerbleckistan and neighboring Funkministan should you travel there as well.
The last point is that 40GB might not be needed but 20GB most definately is. Since the price difference between a 20GB and a 40GB hd is virtually nill, you might as well just sell the bigger one.
Just the other day, my web designer complained that the only truly cross-browser javascript he trusted to work in all browsers was warn() and maybe onclick(). Even then he wasn't 100% sure.
I don't think onClick() works quite the same in all browsers. Last week I was designing an interface where I wanted to tie a help-window popup to disabled checkboxes and I seem to remember onClick() in the disabled checkboxes working for one of Safari or Firefox but not the other. A little question mark to the side now serves this function, taking up more space, but probably more usable too...
Come on mods. That was legitimately funny. I got a good chuckle! Don't you remember the stories several months ago about the British vans that could supposedly sniff out TV tuners in order catch people watching without a TV License?
So it sounds like you want CVS + merging for bookmarks. A bit heavy but then again multiple users at the same time is always a bear.
I've tried using CVS for several months, but it is not a solution for several reasons:
- First, it still requires quitting and opening the all of the browsers involved in order to write, then read the bookmarks.
- Second, even if the first one wasn't a problem, there's still the whole added complexity of committing/updating all of the time.
This shouldn't be that hard to do while the application is running. This is what calendaring systems do all of the time and bookmarks are in many ways simpler than calendar items.
it uploads/downloads on exit/start so everything's current
Hmmm.... I'm still waiting for the perfect solution. Or more acurately, I'm waiting till I figure out what I need so that I know a solution to my problem when I see one.
My problem? I need to have FireFox open on multiple computers at once and still keep the bookmarks synched. Like many here, I have several computers (both at home and work) which may be on and using their browsers and adding bookmarks at any given moment.
A normal situation is my desk at work (developing GPL software no less!):
1. My main dev computer, a Mac where I have my code on several screens and 20 Firefox tabs with application output, debug output, documentation, Slashdot, etc.
2. My work/home Powerbook where I keep notes, email, and stuff that I need to take home or to meetings.
3. A PC so that I can test our apps in IE.
Now, while actively using any one of these computers I need to make a bookmark. If bookmarks are synced only when the browser is started or stopped, then I need to quit two of the three browsers (yes, Tabbrowser Extensions helps a bit here, but still...), make the bookmark, close/open that browser, open the other two browsers back up. This is just plain unworkable. If this isn't how Bookmarks Synchronizer works, let me know as I couldn't find any info on the project website.
For a while I tried keeping my Firefox profiles synched via cvs, but it was a bit of a pain to keep remembering to do and there were always conflicts to be resolved which made it in all, a big hassle.
A preferable solution would be something along the lines of iCal/MozillaCallendar. An "authoritative" list is kept on the server, which is pinged for updates at a user settable time, i.e. 10min. Every time you go to add a bookmark, the server would be pinged again so that you have the latest version before the bookmark is added. After addition/modification, the changes are automatically published to the server.
The only way that I can see conflicts happening is if one browser adds bookmarks to a directory while off-line, then comes back online and tries to update the server but finds that the directory was removed by another client when rearranging the bookmarks folder. Due to the on-line nature of browsers though, this is probably a small worry, and un-synched bookmarks could be listed in a special "todo" file so as to prompt the user for re-addition if there is a conflict during the synch.
Actually, you probably can't. Assuming a 0.1" deformation of the bottom of your foot, you'd have to jump from 150" or 12.5 feet. If you landed without any other shock absorption (flex of your skeleton), you're almost certain to break somthing (you're ankles, most likely).
At first I mis-read that as 150'. From that height its not just your ankles breaking; your femura* will shoot right through yor pelvis. As to whether their final resting place is inside or outside of the body is left as an exercize to the reader.
Ok, I have grossed myself out for the morning. <<shudder>> Apologies.
It needs to be tested on a box with an older processor and only 128 megs ram (or 64 for that matter) for instance.
I currently have Xandros running on my digital picture frame, a Dell Inspiron 3000 with a 200MHz Mobile Pentium MMX processor and 64MB of Ram. Its pretty sluggish, not snappy by any means, but I think that is mostly a factor of using KDE. While its slow, it usable* and not that much slower than it was with the Win95 that was on it when I got it.
* I tried using it a bit with Xandros before converting it to picture-frame mode.
Ok, well, maybe I'm not uber in terms of the crowd around here, but I do write open source software for a living, made a linux digital picture frame, design my own parabolic WiFi dishes and manage 4 Linux servers (2 Debian, 1 Red Hat, 1 Suse) and a FreeBSD server. I'm not coding graphics applications in assembly just for the fun of it, but none-the less, I could run any distro I wanted without hitch.
Still, I run Xandros on my desktops. Why? Because it "just works". Its not quite OS X in that department, but its the closest thing I've seen on x86 (Maybe Win2k or WinXP is good in this respect, but I haven't tried either as I got out around the time of WinME). As much as I love computers and writing software and such, I despise spending 20 hours trying to get a piece of hardware working or configured. I do it, but I'm not a happy camper. I'm not saying that Xandros is perfect by any means, but like Knoppix most everything is working when you first boot it up.
The 100s of hours saved configuring hardware over the past year or so are definately worth $100. Its really just Debian with some nice add-ons. I've yet to find anything that I can do with Debian that I can't do with Xandros. Plus, I get the benefit of running Photoshop while waiting for the GIMP to become useful for MY needs.
The fact of the matter is Xandros is NOT a fully open source OS
You may have a valid point with XFM (Xandros File Manager) which was basically an in-house re-write of KDE's file manager. This may or may not be open source. That's really the only thing that they have "aquired" or built that is question.
The big proprietary part that you get with Xandros is Crossover Office. Note that they don't own this and haven't "aquired" it. They just license it to provide it in their distro. You could also license it directly from Codeweavers and run it on Red Hat, but Xandros (rightfully, based on their success) figures that they'll get more happy customers just including it than requiring that people buy, download, and install it separately. By putting it in by default they can advertise the "Ability To Run Windows Programs" that some people might want. If you don't, don't but the Deluxe Edition. If you remove Crossover Office, a-la the "Open Circulation Edition" you are left with an open source (or at least freely distributable in the case of XFM) distro.
To get Firefox to open the Thunderbird (or any other) email client when clicking on a "mailto" link, do the following steps:
1. Enter the address "about:config" in the Firefox address-bar. This will allow you to set new preferences.
2. Right-click somewhere on the window and select "New" --> "String".
3. In the window that pops up, enter:
network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
as the name of the preference.
4. Hit OK and then enter the path to your thunderbird executable in the next window. For me it is/usr/local/bin/thunderbird/thunderbird
To get Firefox to open when you click on links in Thunderbird, a similar process is followed.
Since thunderbird doesn't have an easy way to use about:config, you need to edit the preferences file with a text editor.
1. Close Thunderbird first as it will overwrite any configuration changes when it exits.
2. Open the Thunderbird "prefs.js" file located in you home directory, probably named something like:/home/afranco/.thunderbird/Profiles/jafwe232js.def ault/prefs.js
3. Add the following three lines to the prefs.js file:
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
You see, there are a number of products that one should use with php to deploy enterprise applications: Zend optimizer, encoder and accelerator.
For a free (at least as in beer) PHP extension to transparently cache the compiled version of you PHP scripts (instead of recompiling every page load), check out PHP-Accelerator.
Slashdot Mirror
From the modules description...
"In the beginning the programmer created the language and the code. And the code was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the screen of the computer. And the programmer moved upon the keyboard of the computer. And the programmer said, let there be Photoshop: and there was Photoshop. And the programmer saw Photoshop, that it was good: and the programmer divided the Command Parameter Modeling Code from the Underlying Framework." - The Book of Photoshop 1:1-4
After reading the full module overview I must say that this looks pretty nice. Note that releasing Adam and Eve won't let every program just take over Photoshop's look and feel (thank god!). You still need to provide all of your own widgets, all of your own event generation code, all your own application back end, as well as write the event handling and layout descriptions. The advantage of this system though, is that the event handling is described cleaning in Adam Expression language which can parsed to execute in any environment. Likewise, the layout can be simplified by describing it in an environment-neutral way that can then be bound to Adam values.
It doesn't seem revolutionary, but it is a nicely worked out evolution in interface building.
For those reading, I recommend that you follow that tutorial with this one which then goes into more depth on generic request/responce scripts and XML handling.
Oh yeah, it took me a while to find these, so I'll add this list of pages that explained how to do the things that I wanted to do while going through the tutorial. There are just so many crap sites that repeat the same rubbish tutorials about javascript that it can be really hard to find good info.
Every other tutorial I found says to use something like node.firstChild.text for getting the value of an element, but I couldn't get that working on Firefox or Safari. This just mentions to use node.firstChild.nodeValue which did the trick for me.
how long until state treasuries across the country subpoena Amazon.com or other big online retailers to collect unpaid sales taxes?
> 18 months. You heard it here.
Quoth TFA, "It is illegal to bring any cigarettes into Michigan from other states unless by licensed sellers who pay the appropriate tax. People who bring less than $50 in cigarettes don't face penalties."
So don't worry about this action affecting future tax's on Amazon et al coming from the states as other products which are not as controlled as cigarettes do not usually have specific regulations on importing them to any given state. Additionally, the selling of many other products (such as books, cds, or little snowmen made of of styrofoam balls and glitter) does not require a special license.
That said, as interstate retail commerce grows in general states may have to go looking for new revenue sources.
tank treaded claw-mobile with a superfluous arm that sticks out the side to make the customer more emotionally comfortable before it destroys his house.
Tank-dor the Burninator! *
* for those who missed the reference...
Not so great in Debian:
afranco@bullmoose:~$ cat "food in tin cans"
cat: food in tin cans: No such file or directory
afranco@bullmoose:~$ cat --version
cat (coreutils) 5.0
Written by Torbjorn Granlund and Richard M. Stallman.
Copyright (C) 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
afranco@bullmoose:~$
...merely to point out Chomsky's politics, which are decidedly anti-capitalist, pro-socialist to begin with.
The point is acknowledged that Chomsky is far from "centrist", extremely so in fact.
To see a book written by Mr. Chomsky come to the conclusion that capitalism is bad, wealth and thatpower must be "evenly distributed" is about as surprising as hearing water is wet.
Please note that the views about Power/money/influence beginning with As far as I can tell, the nature of Power... are my own. If Mr. Chomsky has expressed similar views then I applaud him for reaching similar conclusions in his own inquiries into the state of the world.
Nowhere in my reading of Manufacturing Consent (MC) did I see any any anti-capitalist references. The only place MC comments on "even distribution of power" (that I noticed) is in discussing the 1984 elections in Guatemala. Chomsky and Herman question how meaningful elections could be in a state where power is concentrated in the hands of an authoritarian junta that has just executed or "disappeared" most of the journalists, political rivals, and judiciary in the country. I have not read any of Chomsky's other writings, so I cannot speak on them.
Nice sig: So let me ask you: are you more proud of your ignorance or your bias?
The question implies that ignorance and bias go together and encourages the reader to fix the bias by fixing the ignorance. I heartily agree with this viewpoint, which is part of why I found reading MC so interesting, even IF the the author's positions are in some way as baseless as those of Limbaugh. The important thing is to gather one's information from a variety of independent sources (including direct observation where possible) so that one can make informed opinions and choices about the world.
Though Rush pushes this limit, I do not believe that anyone can lie and misrepresent in everything that they say. Included in the deception are little scraps of truth buried in page B17, Appendix 25, or in what things one observes at events first hand, but are not said by others reporting on the event or using that event to push their agenda.
Your post induced me to read up on Mr. Chomsky as I didn't know much about the man or his views aside from reading one of his books. Wikipedia has a very in-depth article that discusses many points of view on the man and the cult of personality surrounding him. As with everything, somewhere amongst the words of critics and of followers lie small truths. That he (or any other person) is a lier and propagandist or an insightful thinker that cares more about ideals than opinion is something one must discover for one's self and is not something just to take a single source's word for.
More thoughts on capitalism, wealth, and power:
As they are by definition made up by more than one person, all societies are by definition compromises between the desires of their members. Various societies try to balance these desires by employing various economic systems. In a [completely fictional] utopia all people would be able to have anything that they want and never have to deal with fulfilling desires of others that conflict with their own. As the world is finite conflicts do arise and economic systems are employed to work these conflicts out. The general hope (I believe) is that the chosen economic system will provide a basis for supporting the other ideals of a society; be they listed in the US Bill of Rights or others such as a right to education, a right to health care, or a right to choose to garden in the nude. What ever they are, these ideals of a society provide the framework for discourse and function within it.
I have no problem with laizes-faire capitalism, regulated capitalism, socialism, communism, or any other economic system as long as the chosen one[s] allows the ideals of my society to flourish internally. The problem I have is
In your average newspaper and newscast it's almost impossible to find a single unbiased and non-propagandistic article. They're as rare as factually correct articles, and often the two go hand in hand. As journalists no longer appear to have the time, and few the integrity, try to do the factchecking yourself, and trace interests and bias in the article, and compare between different ones.
For a scholarly look at this issue read Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. In it they describe in detail many, many examples how "the powers that be" in the U.S. of A. have used the structure of the mass media to distort the world view of the citizens of this [USA] country.
What exactly are they protecting you from?
As far as I can tell, the nature of Power is such that for the most part, those with it want to keep it. Additionally, money and influence are both part of and equivalent to Power. With [enough] money you can buy influence and with [enough] influence you can obtain money. In order to retain Power those with it must ensure not that the populace is well off, but that they are content enough that they do not rebel or otherwise try to overthrow those in Power.
As much as the United States is a democracy, true democracy (in which all have a generally equal say) is impossible if there is a large concentration of Power (money and/or influence). If Power is not [relatively] evenly spread, then those with it can get a larger say by either force or by manipulating those without Power into agreeing with them.
So, what exactly are they protecting you from? In general, feelings of dissatisfaction with the state of your world (as it reflects on them) and your place in it. This manipulation can come in many forms, but several common ones that are repeated over and over are:
- Enemies: Enemies focus attention away from domestic problems to external entities, as well as providing a framework for "Be happy, at least you aren't in xxxxxx" comments.
- "Mindless" Entertainment: The more entertained you are, the less likely you are to rebel. "The Matrix" is an extreme example of this.
- Playing on dreams: The "American Dream" is partially summarized as the opportunity of anyone who "works hard enough" to climb the economic and social ladders. In the current day and age (as well as many past) this is no more true than elsewhere in the world. A very few people truly go from "rags to riches" while the rest of us stay plus or minus a few degrees from the place where we were born. The promise of the "American Dream" is repeated so often though that most people take it to be truth, thereby voting for tax cuts for the rich on the belief that they will soon be rich too.
These and other tools can and are used by those with Power to protect the rest of us from the harsh truth that we are being cheated and our situation would be better if those with Power didn't have it.
Many other books have been written since -- some scholarly, some novels like 1984 -- but all further exploring this theme.
For those who haven't read it, Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a must-read in this category. In it they describe in detail many, many examples how "the powers that be" in the U.S. of A. have used the structure of the mass media to distort the world view of the citizens of this [USA] country.
Like 1984, Manufacturing Consent is scary not because it tells you lots of things you've never heard of, but because it takes a closer look at this mass of things that never quite "seemed right" in the way they were portrayed or the reasoning behind them.
From TFA:
"The tiny opaque box, about three inches square, is made of a superinsulating polymer. Mr. Cantu heats the box to 350 degrees in an oven and places a raw piece of Pacific sea bass inside it. A server then delivers it to diners, who can watch the fish cook."
I would have thought that it would have needed to be clear, or at least translucent to see the contents...
Even though the only difference is a web server they don't even know how to write web pages for.
This may not be the case now, but a few years ago when I was in college my room-mate got a new computer with XP Home on it. It wouldn't allow him to get onto the college network without upgrading to XP Pro. Apparently "networking" aside from dial-up (or maybe just connecting to a large subnets) was considered a Pro feature. With the recent proliferation of home networks I find it hard to believe that this is still the case, but I haven't sat at a computer running Windows recently enough to verify this.
The next programmer asks to have the program represented in his language-de-jour. If his language and your language are semantically similar, this can work. If they're not, it won't work, since you are trying to solve the UNCOL problem (the holy grail for the universal intermediate representation, which does not exist).
Even better, think about internationalization of the language constructs themselves. Take a loop through an iterator for example:
while (iterator.hasNext()) {
object = iterator.next();
}
An Argentine programmer, for instance, could open the same source in his editor with the Spanish pack for that language and be able to read the code as something like:
mientras (iterator.tienePróximo()) {
object = iterator.próximo();
}
Non-english speakers get by currently, but their lives could be made much easier with the language abstracted a level.
Additionally, I'm really hankering for in-code diagrams, links, and other non-"pure text" as part of the in-line comments. That sort of thing makes maintaining a separate manual for libraries/frameworks either unnecessary or simply a matter of translating the source comments into a full manual -- like JavaDoc on steroids.
[Well-to-do people] also pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, which is highly unfair...
This is not unfair, it is a counterweight specifically made to enable a democratic laissez-faire capitalist society to exist.
A democracy can not exist when 1% of the population controls 99% of the resources; see Europe in what were appropriately known as the Dark Ages or many "third world" countries today for examples of this. In a place with that sort of extreme wealth disparity there is no way for the poor 90% of the population to have a meaningful enough influence on the government to feel that their needs are being met and exploitation of them is kept to a minimum.
In the past few centuries many people now considered famous -- Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Locke, Immanual Kant, Karl Marx, etc -- have come up with a whole spectrum of ways to provide enough equity to all to allow a modern nation-state to exist. Though different parts of the spectrum have had varying degrees of success, they share (at least on the philosophical level, if not the implementation level) the same general notion of preventing the concentration of resources (and thereby power).
At one extreme you have communism (the new philosophical term collectivism is often used to differentiate the common philosophy of a collective societies from the generally awful implementations tried by the various Communist parties in many countries). In [ideal] communism, no one owns anything personally and the collective labors and benefits are shared equally by all. In practice this doesn't work in groups larger than about few thousand since it requires the good faith of most participants to not screw their fellow people. Successful implementations of this are "hippy communes", many tribal groups, monasteries, and isolated villages scattered the world over.
In the middle of the spectrum is modern socialism/socialist-capitalism as practiced by much of Europe, as well as Canada. Unlike communism, socialism allows for personal property but requires a large portion of that be pooled together on a national level to provide a smaller set of common services than communism; transportation, health care, elderly/disabled care, education, police, defense, arts and science. Businesses are generally heavily regulated to ensure that they do cause undo harm or consolidate too much power.
At the other end of the spectrum is [mostly] laissez-faire capitalism as practiced in the United States. In this system there is much less regulation and individuals and corporations are encouraged to do comparatively whatever they want in their pursuit of riches. The balance to this lack of regulation is a graduated tax scheme which taxes the wealthy more than the poor. The estate tax in particular exists to prevent that top 1% of families from consolidating their riches over generations and becoming defacto royalty. In the other systems mentioned above, the less able/wealthy members of the society would be provided for by social services. In the USA they get (comparatively) dropped, but aren't taxed as much.
The crux of the matter is that a democratic society needs some equity in what it provides its citizens if it is to survive by something other tyrannical rule. If you don't like the graduated taxes, move somewhere where they have high flat-tax rates and more regulation. Or go further and [try to] find a pure communist society with no taxes, but no personal ownership either.
but then you gotta ask, do you really need 80 GB of pictures? In all honesty - how many people take 80 GB of pictures on a vacation?...lets talk the average user - not some /.'er who is going to give us some outrageous number that is most likely a lie anyhow to help prove a point.
Two years ago I took a 2.5 week trip around Italy and am left with 507 images from my old Canon A70 point-and-shoot. This was after deleting at least as many that didn't come out for whatever reason. I've since gotten even more into photography and am now shooting with a Canon EOS-300D. In RAW mode (required for doing the color-correction later in Photoshop) each photo is ~7MB. Had I been shooting with the 300D in RAW mode, those 507 photos would have taken up 3.5GB, enough to fill one big, expensive card.
I am currently planing a month-long trip Turkey next year. Judging by how my shooting habits have changed, I am imagining that I will take well over a thousand photos on that trip, hence the need for at least 10GB of storage space to be safe. To me, it makes a lot more sense to buy a 40GB hd/reader for $300 than to spend $300 a pop on 4GB CF cards.
The when shooting in RAW (unprocessed) mode each image from the Canon EOS-1Ds is approximately 11MB.
40960MB/11MB = 3700 photos
While 3700 photos is quite a lot, its definately not rediculous for someone who is shooting a lot for a month, especially if they are bracketing many of their exposures. Since you can't really see which one were just right until you get them into Photoshop, something like 2/3 might be later trashed. This leaves you with about 1300 good-quality photos from Kerbleckistan and neighboring Funkministan should you travel there as well.
The last point is that 40GB might not be needed but 20GB most definately is. Since the price difference between a 20GB and a 40GB hd is virtually nill, you might as well just sell the bigger one.
Just the other day, my web designer complained that the only truly cross-browser javascript he trusted to work in all browsers was warn() and maybe onclick(). Even then he wasn't 100% sure.
I don't think onClick() works quite the same in all browsers. Last week I was designing an interface where I wanted to tie a help-window popup to disabled checkboxes and I seem to remember onClick() in the disabled checkboxes working for one of Safari or Firefox but not the other. A little question mark to the side now serves this function, taking up more space, but probably more usable too...
Parent Score:-1 Troll)
Come on mods. That was legitimately funny. I got a good chuckle! Don't you remember the stories several months ago about the British vans that could supposedly sniff out TV tuners in order catch people watching without a TV License?
Oh well... I guess its a lost cause.
That may be true on Linux, but not so on Windows.
;-)
Yeah, but who uses Windows these days...
So it sounds like you want CVS + merging for bookmarks. A bit heavy but then again multiple users at the same time is always a bear.
I've tried using CVS for several months, but it is not a solution for several reasons:
- First, it still requires quitting and opening the all of the browsers involved in order to write, then read the bookmarks.
- Second, even if the first one wasn't a problem, there's still the whole added complexity of committing/updating all of the time.
This shouldn't be that hard to do while the application is running. This is what calendaring systems do all of the time and bookmarks are in many ways simpler than calendar items.
it uploads/downloads on exit/start so everything's current
:-)
Hmmm.... I'm still waiting for the perfect solution. Or more acurately, I'm waiting till I figure out what I need so that I know a solution to my problem when I see one.
My problem? I need to have FireFox open on multiple computers at once and still keep the bookmarks synched. Like many here, I have several computers (both at home and work) which may be on and using their browsers and adding bookmarks at any given moment.
A normal situation is my desk at work (developing GPL software no less!):
1. My main dev computer, a Mac where I have my code on several screens and 20 Firefox tabs with application output, debug output, documentation, Slashdot, etc.
2. My work/home Powerbook where I keep notes, email, and stuff that I need to take home or to meetings.
3. A PC so that I can test our apps in IE.
Now, while actively using any one of these computers I need to make a bookmark. If bookmarks are synced only when the browser is started or stopped, then I need to quit two of the three browsers (yes, Tabbrowser Extensions helps a bit here, but still...), make the bookmark, close/open that browser, open the other two browsers back up. This is just plain unworkable. If this isn't how Bookmarks Synchronizer works, let me know as I couldn't find any info on the project website.
For a while I tried keeping my Firefox profiles synched via cvs, but it was a bit of a pain to keep remembering to do and there were always conflicts to be resolved which made it in all, a big hassle.
A preferable solution would be something along the lines of iCal/MozillaCallendar. An "authoritative" list is kept on the server, which is pinged for updates at a user settable time, i.e. 10min. Every time you go to add a bookmark, the server would be pinged again so that you have the latest version before the bookmark is added. After addition/modification, the changes are automatically published to the server.
The only way that I can see conflicts happening is if one browser adds bookmarks to a directory while off-line, then comes back online and tries to update the server but finds that the directory was removed by another client when rearranging the bookmarks folder. Due to the on-line nature of browsers though, this is probably a small worry, and un-synched bookmarks could be listed in a special "todo" file so as to prompt the user for re-addition if there is a conflict during the synch.
Well. I guess I have figured out what I need.
Now to find the time to write it...
Actually, you probably can't. Assuming a 0.1" deformation of the bottom of your foot, you'd have to jump from 150" or 12.5 feet. If you landed without any other shock absorption (flex of your skeleton), you're almost certain to break somthing (you're ankles, most likely).
At first I mis-read that as 150'. From that height its not just your ankles breaking; your femura* will shoot right through yor pelvis. As to whether their final resting place is inside or outside of the body is left as an exercize to the reader.
Ok, I have grossed myself out for the morning.
<<shudder>>
Apologies.
* Good word, huh?
It needs to be tested on a box with an older processor and only 128 megs ram (or 64 for that matter) for instance.
I currently have Xandros running on my digital picture frame, a Dell Inspiron 3000 with a 200MHz Mobile Pentium MMX processor and 64MB of Ram. Its pretty sluggish, not snappy by any means, but I think that is mostly a factor of using KDE. While its slow, it usable* and not that much slower than it was with the Win95 that was on it when I got it.
* I tried using it a bit with Xandros before converting it to picture-frame mode.
If you're an uber geek Xandros isn't for you.
I'm an uber geek and I take offense at that!
Ok, well, maybe I'm not uber in terms of the crowd around here, but I do write open source software for a living, made a linux digital picture frame, design my own parabolic WiFi dishes and manage 4 Linux servers (2 Debian, 1 Red Hat, 1 Suse) and a FreeBSD server. I'm not coding graphics applications in assembly just for the fun of it, but none-the less, I could run any distro I wanted without hitch.
Still, I run Xandros on my desktops. Why? Because it "just works". Its not quite OS X in that department, but its the closest thing I've seen on x86 (Maybe Win2k or WinXP is good in this respect, but I haven't tried either as I got out around the time of WinME). As much as I love computers and writing software and such, I despise spending 20 hours trying to get a piece of hardware working or configured. I do it, but I'm not a happy camper. I'm not saying that Xandros is perfect by any means, but like Knoppix most everything is working when you first boot it up.
The 100s of hours saved configuring hardware over the past year or so are definately worth $100. Its really just Debian with some nice add-ons. I've yet to find anything that I can do with Debian that I can't do with Xandros. Plus, I get the benefit of running Photoshop while waiting for the GIMP to become useful for MY needs.
The fact of the matter is Xandros is NOT a fully open source OS
You may have a valid point with XFM (Xandros File Manager) which was basically an in-house re-write of KDE's file manager. This may or may not be open source. That's really the only thing that they have "aquired" or built that is question.
The big proprietary part that you get with Xandros is Crossover Office. Note that they don't own this and haven't "aquired" it. They just license it to provide it in their distro. You could also license it directly from Codeweavers and run it on Red Hat, but Xandros (rightfully, based on their success) figures that they'll get more happy customers just including it than requiring that people buy, download, and install it separately. By putting it in by default they can advertise the "Ability To Run Windows Programs" that some people might want. If you don't, don't but the Deluxe Edition. If you remove Crossover Office, a-la the "Open Circulation Edition" you are left with an open source (or at least freely distributable in the case of XFM) distro.
Here you go, some "HowTos" I made up:
/usr/local/bin/thunderbird/thunderbird
/home/afranco/.thunderbird/Profiles/jafwe232js.def ault/prefs.js
To get Firefox to open the Thunderbird (or any other) email client when clicking on a "mailto" link, do the following steps:
1. Enter the address "about:config" in the Firefox address-bar. This will allow you to set new preferences.
2. Right-click somewhere on the window and select "New" --> "String".
3. In the window that pops up, enter:
network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
as the name of the preference.
4. Hit OK and then enter the path to your thunderbird executable in the next window. For me it is
To get Firefox to open when you click on links in Thunderbird, a similar process is followed.
Since thunderbird doesn't have an easy way to use about:config, you need to edit the preferences file with a text editor.
1. Close Thunderbird first as it will overwrite any configuration changes when it exits.
2. Open the Thunderbird "prefs.js" file located in you home directory, probably named something like:
3. Add the following three lines to the prefs.js file:
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
--Adam
You see, there are a number of products that one should use with php to deploy enterprise applications: Zend optimizer, encoder and accelerator.
For a free (at least as in beer) PHP extension to transparently cache the compiled version of you PHP scripts (instead of recompiling every page load), check out
PHP-Accelerator.