GCC is for compiling software from raw source code. If you're downloading open source software, you generally need a compiler to install it, because the software frequently isn't distributed in an executable form. Even if an executable form is available, most open source projects don't have the resources to provide version for every esoteric configuration people might be using (like, say, OSX -- most of this stuff is written for Linux after all, so OSX is a bit "exotic" from the average Linux developer's point of view).
If you're not developing software and you don't intend to install open source software from raw source, then you don't need a compiler.
Yeah, the Apple USB keyboards all work on Intel machines. The only catch is the key mappings of some of the bottom row keys: on an Intel keyboard, the [alt] key is typically to the immediate left & right of the [spacebar], but Apple puts the [cmd] keys in that position instead, and puts [option/alt] one key farther away. The Apple [alt] key works normally, it's just in the "wrong" place.
The catch is that [cmd] key -- Windows interprets it as the [win] key as found on modern keyboards, and brings up the system menu whenever it gets pressed. Some people really like that key, and find it useful: it's a big time saver for me to be able to use shortcuts like [win]+[E] (bring up Explorer), [win]+[R] (bring up a Run dialog), and [win]+[F] (bring up a Find dialog). However, more people seem to dislike it than like it, and in any case, the problem here is the position: with the system key placed where [alt] typically goes, it's almost inevitable that it'll accidentally get hit all the time -- and this will get annoying.
Another problem is if you go back & forth between Macs & Intel (Windows/Linux/whatever) using the same keyboard, the situation will get confusing. For example, cut/copy/paste are done on both the Mac & Windows by hitting, respectively, [X]/[C]/[V] and a modifier key. On the Mac, that modifier is next to the [spacebar]; on Windows, it's at the edges of the bottom keyboard row (typically). If you're using Apple keyboard on just Apples, and whatever keyboards on Wintel, then it doesn't seem to be as confusing (just as I don't get confused with the [caps lock] / [ctrl] swap on Sun keyboard), but if you're using the same keyboard on both systems, then it can start to get blurry -- you learn to avoid [cmd] because you don't want the system menu, but then you can't get cut/copy/paste to work because you're hitting [option] or [ctrl], etc.
This wouldn't be so bad if you could re-map the keys, but (parroting what I've been told by others here), Wintel keyboards just transmit codes for the key bring pressed, but Apple keyboards transmit the actual logical meaning for each key -- meaning that it's apparently not possible to re-
map (say) the [option/alt] and [cmd] keys to be in the standard Wintel arrangement. So you're stuck, and all you can do is train yourself to get used to little quirks like the ones noted above.
But that said, yes, it works, and it can work nicely. I've got a couple of spare Apple keyboards, and even with the funny keymappings they're still nicer to use than most laptop keyboards, so I tend to plug in an old iMac keyboard to use on my fiancee's Toshiba laptop, and for the most part there aren't any problems in doing this -- except for the bottom row of keys, everything works identically.
Pet Peeve #1: All Americans who whine about the price of gas. If you really want to whine, come to the UK where our Government has turned taxing petrol into an art form.
You say that as if it's a bad thing, but is it? The UK is a small country with, from what I hear, a pretty good rail network [1] and decent public transportation in most cities. From what I've read, getting by without a car is a viable option for lots of people in the UK, particularly city dwellers (doesn't something like half the population live in or near London?).
That's not at all the case here. Only the biggest cities have decent public transit systems, and for most mid-sized cities the options are weak or absent. The country is big, most of it is spread out (yay strip malls! yay wal-mart! *ugh*), and for the vast majority of Americans, even those living in the suburbs of the big cities, getting by without a car just isn't an option.
If gasoline taxes contribute in any way to the development of alternative means of transportation (alternative fuels, infrastructure, etc), then I think the price is worth it. Society would probably be better off in the long run if we could establish viable alternatives to petroleum based fuels now, before stocks start inevitably start running dry in coming decades.
If the price of operating a car bothers you, consider the possibilities of a bicycle -- in many cases, they're a perfect solution to the problem:-)
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[1] I realize that there have been issues with privatization of the rail system in recent years, but somehow I think the situation can't be half as bad as Amtrak is over here -- at least rail travel is viable for inter-city travel there, which really isn't the case in most of the USA.
The single greatest deterrent to identity theft is probably a paper shredder. Get one and use it for anything you throw away that contains personal information. Oh, and NEVER put outgoing mail in your mailbox for pickup by the carrier. Take it to the post office or to a local post office box.
Can someone explain the rationale behind this? Shredding makes sense to me, but why the warning about outgoing mail?
Is the danger that you can't trust the postal employee, or that someone can get into your mailbox before the mail can be collected?
If it's the former, and the postal employees shouldn't be trusted, then why is dropping the mail off at the post office any safer? For that matter, why trust the whole system?
If it's the latter, and the danger is that someone will get into your mailbox, does it help if your mailbox has a lock on it? In my building, the mailboxes are controlled by two keys: I've got the key for one lock, and the post office has the key for the other. Random passers-by can't just open the door & grab whatever may be in the box, which I've always assumed protects me a bit.
Is the recommendation to avoid sending mail from home boxes, even if you have a lock? If so, what's the argument for this? I'm genuinely curious...
A PC with various flavors of IE and Mozilla/Netscape
Short of buying a copy of VMWare, how exactly would one do this for IE? Remember, since IE is embedded in the operating system, you're normally not allowed to have multiple copies of the same IE DLL files resident on the same system.
Microsoft used to let you install a patch that allowed you to run IE5 in an IE4 emulation mode (or it may have even been IE4 in an IE3 mode -- it's been a while), but I seem to remember that the emulation wasn't perfectly identical to the earlier browser anyway. If a more recent version of that tool was ever produced, I'm not aware of it, and after poking aound on the official IE site for ten minutes or so, the only such add-on i can find is a beta for a "user rights mis-management" tool. Nice to see where the IE development focus is drifting these days.
Short of VMWare or multiple computers or *ugh* booting multiple copies of Windows on the same machine, I think MS has made it impossible to run multiple, concurrent versions of any modern IE version (5, 5.5, 6). If anyone knows of a less cumbersome way to do this -- because obviously it helps web developers to be able to test against multiple versions, even if average users don't need such a thing -- I'd love to learn how to do it.
On the other hand, it's not always that simple. Take a look at David Hyatt's Surfin' Safari blog some time, where he writes about how he is trying to make Safari adhere to the W3 specs, while also getting the browser to emulate the quirks in IE or Mozilla.
Some of the other browser's quirks are just bugs, but people have developed sites that depend on them -- if he went with the spec instead of the bug, people would assume that Safari was the broken browser, even though its behavior in such a situation would be technically correct.
In other cases, the spec is ambiguous, and IE & Mozilla have come up with what seem to be equally valid interpretations in their implementation. What should Safari do then but choose one of those paths or come up with yet another interpretation to follow.
Standards compliance is nice and all, but in practice a properly standards compliant page can still have quite a bit of variability in how it's rendered on different browsers.
In the end, the only way to really know is to test, test, test. Just as, unfortunately, it has always been...
It doesn't really matter if you buy it (or if I buy it for that matter).
The simple fact is that Apple Computer, in spite of a legal agreement never to do so, has entered a business that makes money by distributing music. This is an industry that Apple Records has been in since the sixties.
It doesn't matter, for the purposes of this suit, that Apple Computer makes other products in addition to their music business. That is completely immaterial.
It also doesn't matter if the original lawsuit was untenable on it's face, chest, or anywhere else, because the legal precedent has been set: Apple Computer lost, was forced to pay up, and entered into a legal agreement not to do what they are now doing.
If the legal precedent didn't exist, you'd have a point, but Apple Computer already lost this argument twice -- and in each of those situations they had a much stronger case than they do now.
I love my Mac, but this lawsuit doesn't surprise me in the least. They had to have known they were on shaky ground here, and were arguably neglegent in their due diligance duties if they didn't try to come to an agreement with Apple Records before launching iTMS.
But apparently, they did no such thing.
They made their bed, now they can lie in it.
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The big surprise is that Apple Computer didn't get sued for using John Lennon's image to sell computers. That whole "think differently" campaign left a bad, bad taste in my mouth, and now that I think about it it still bugs me to think that they thought they could inflate their products by associating them with people like Lennon or Gandhi. *yuck*
The only more clear cut case of bad taste I can think of is Kenny G's "duet" with Louis Armstrong, but the "think different" campaign was a close second.
Hands up who didn't see this coming -- nobody? That's what I thought.
Last time Apple Records sued Apple Computer, the computer company agreed never to go into the music industry.
Now I can see letting iTunes slide while it was just the software for playing music on MacOS/OSX, but building a music distribution service around the software seems like a plain violation of the agreement.
The only surprise to me is that the record company didn't bring suit before now. They plainly pre-date the computer company by a a decade, so Apple computer is painted pretty tightly into a corner now.
Hopefully they'll find some reasonable way to settle this. Conceivably, the iTunes Music Service &/or iPod divisions can be spun off into their own company, and everyone will be able to go back to being friends.
"In totalitarian states the military can compel scientists to perform research for weapons systems. That's not true in the United States, yet American scientists who refuse military work are exceedingly rare today. This may be in part because scientists, like most other citizens, agree that the U.S. is facing dangerous foes. But some dissidents argue the cause is more likely that Pentagon cash has become an addiction that scientists rationalize by working on 'dual use' technologies -- radar that maps planets and guides missiles; robots that peer through smoke in apartment fires to rescue victims, and through battlefield smoke to find human targets."
Err, which United States was this written from? Certainly not the North American superpower of the 20th & 21st centuries.
I mean, we're talking about the country where government subsidized research has produced or contributed to the production of nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, all manner of aircraft, the digital computer, electronic communications, and a host of others -- all of which have direct military applications, and might or might not have non-military uses.
The current norm, where the ultimate source of funding behind a significant portion of public, private, and academic research is the US federal government (and particularly, the defence department), goes back at least as far as World War II. That was sixty years ago now, yet the patterns you see today are substantially in lines with ones that ran through the Cold War and back to the Manhattan Project and other WW2 efforts.
To suggest that this all on "21st century counter-terrorism efforts" is to ignore that the trends being observed have been in place for many decades.
Do yourself a favor and go read some of Noam Chomsky's writings & talks. Among his political arguments is the idea that these structural arrangements have been around for a long, long time, and much of both the strengths & the weaknesses of America can be traced to these activities -- e.g. the collusion between military & industry directly leads both to America's economic dominance and to the fact that the USA is the world's biggest target.
A lot of people disagree with Chomsky's arguments, but it seems to me that anyone trying to have a serious conversation about such matters has to at least be aware of these views, or they're basically arguing from ignorance.
This weekend, I had to take a road trip to Long Island, New York with several people, one of whom was to pick up a rental car when we got to the area we were going.
<anecdote>
So I did the natural thing -- I pulled up to the airport's departure gate, she hopped out and walked in to the rental agency's counter, and I waited outside in the car. A minute or two later, a security guard walked up and told me, in fractured English, that unless I was helping a passenger with their luggage, I could not stay at the gate. I tried to explain that I was waiting for a person at the rental desk, pointing helpfully to the one person at that desk, but he didn't care: "you have one minute, then you must leave." This is silly, so I tried to stay put, but then another security guard came along, saying "you've already been warned once, now move your car -- nobody else is idling here."
My attempt to point out that there were in fact about half a dozen cars idling at the front door with me didn't seem to help, so I obediantly pulled out, circled the airport road, and came back to the gate. The security guards & cops give me a dirty look, walking towards me until I take the hint and drive off again.
This repeated three or four times -- drive around the loop (about half a mile), come back to the gate to see if my friend is ready yet, get the evil looks from the rentacops, drive away again. Lather, rinse, vomit, repeat.
</anecdote>
This to me perfectly illustrates the problems with modern airport security procedures. In what way is security enhanced by forcing people to drive around in circles like that? All it did was give me several chances to see where different buildings were and waste some gasoline. The airport, for those that don't know it, is a small, suburban airport that didn't seem to be very busy at all -- there was no line of cars waiting to get up to the gate, and I think I only attracted any interest in the first place because I was the only car driving around at all at the time.
I really wanted to step out of the car, walk up to the cop, and politely ask if he felt that procedures like this did anything at all to make anyone safer. It was obvious though that, had I done anything like that, it would have been taken as confrontational -- and probably would have gotten me arrested.
And the rent-a-cops were even worse: it was obvious that they were low-wage, low-skill people being paid to strictly follow written procedures; independent thought was obviously not what was expected of them.
Schneier is right -- the people putting these rules into place clearly aren't thinking things through. Low-paid drones inflexibly carrying out ill-conceived orders are not, as a rule, going to do anything to help anyone. We need effective policies, and we need the people carrying out these policies to be trusted to use their good judgement -- which in turn means that we need to be willing to invest in training for professional personnel.
Money spent that way will go much farther than any half-baked technological approach like face recognition systems...
While I happen to agree with you, I don't see what conclusions you are suggesting from this bit of insight. What are you implying?
At a guess, the average artisan churns out commodity works for a fair wage. On the other hand, a rarified class of artist is able to command a far higher price for their work, because the public generally acknowledges that the quality of the work is far higher & far rarer.
But what does that have to do with the music industry? While I personally would consider musicians like Miles Davis or Sonic Youth to be capital-"A" Artists, whose works are worth many times what I'd see in the product of many others, it doesn't matter, because the final product is mass produced and sold at a more or less uniform price.
Supply & demand doesn't really help here, because there is far more demand for crap like Britney Spears than for art like Davis' albums -- and there's really nothing wrong with that. Further, it's easy to respond to supply & demand by simply making more copies of the works that are in greater demand: if five million people want a copy of Spears' first album, her label will be perfectly happy to sell that many copies, and has little reason to charge more or less than they would charge for the few thousand copies of "Kind of Blue" that sells each year.
Pricing has little to do with value. "Art' in this industry has little to do with whether the creator was an artist, or an artisan.
This leaves me grasping for what exactly your point might be...
Most slashbots are probably familiar with price wars in computer hardware....perhaps we'll see some with regard to CD prices.
Would be an interesting situation where one could get an artist's release from two different labels, so there would be real competition between them.
Madness in the method indeed:-)
Price wars only work when the offerings from competitors are more or less perfectly interchangeable.
When trying to book an airfare from A to B, most people aren't concerned about whether they'll be sitting in a plane labelled X, Y, or Z -- they're just looking for a good deal on that seat.
Likewise for things like a tank of gasoline, a gallon of milk, or as you say a particular piece of commodity computer hardware.
But the economics don't work that way when the goods aren't pefectly interchangeable.
Apple doesn't have to deal with price wars, because their systems are significantly different from most of their competitors. Apple hardware is not a commodity.
French wine growers try to avoid being a commodity by establishing laws stating that only sparkling wines produced in a certain region are allowed to call themselves "champagne" (and likewise for merlot, etc). Greek farmers have been trying to get similar protection for the term "feta cheese", claiming that identical cheese produced by Scandinavian farmers cannot be sold under "their" name. In both of these cases, and a lot of others like them, the producers are trying to protect their profits by trying to avoid the commoditization of their product.
With music, it's much less of fight. Whenever a band signs that much wanted contract with the label, they're effectively locked into servitude to that label for several years &/or albums. The band might or might not earn much this way, but if they're popular they'll certainly earn a lot of money for their label (and if they don't become popular, oh well -- easy come, easy go). The only thing that could disrupt this would be for the labels to allow other companies to distribute "their" artists' music -- and I just don't see that happening any time soon. (I believe there are some minor exceptions -- Beck seems to have a contract that allows him to release minor indie albums in between his major label releases -- but these are not the norm, and I don't see any reason to assume that they would ever become the norm.)
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Interesting comparisons are the movie industry & major league sports.
In the early days of Hollywood, the "studio system" was a much stronger institution than it is today -- each of the major studios would own everything from the production to the distribution channels through to the individual cinemas. Complete vertical integration. And part of owning the production meant owning the talent as well: Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly might have been MGM guys, while Audrey & Katherine Hepburn might have belonged to Universal, for example. [1]. In the fifties, this system started to fall apart, and individuals were given more leeway to work where & with whom they chose -- but under the studio system, this almost never happened. [2]
Likewise, most professional athletes in team sports are contractually bound to their teams. I'm not a big sports fan and don't really follow these things (i.e., corrections here are welcome), but I'm not aware of many situations where an individual athlete can just stand up & say "I'm unhappy with the management & coaching here, but the team in Whoville just offered me a gazillion dollars to join them, so I'm ditching this place." As far as I know, that never happens. Rather, team management may chooose who to keep & who to trade, but players under contract do not seem to have the discretion to choose for themselves who they would like to work for -- they're locked in, and that's that.
This situation in modern sports, like the old studio system in Hollywood, is roughly how the music industry o
Welcome to American broadcast journalism. ABC & the other main networks aren't even that bad -- the coverage by the local affiliates is filled with garbage like this. I swear these morons write their nightly reports off a grade school mad libs form:
Ever wonder __SOMETHING NO ONE WONDERS__? What about __SOMETHING NO ONE ELSE WONDERS__? A __PROFESSIONAL__ has done some __RESEARCH__ and the results might surprise you.
It turns out that __SPECIOUS RESEARCH, TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT AND DEVOID OF NEARLY ALL EVIDENCE, FOLLOWED BY GRANDIOSE CONCLUSION__.
You and your family probably want to __SHIT YOUR PANTS IN FEAR__.
For more information, "log in" to __TV STATION'S SHITTY WEBSITE RATHER THAN SAY GOOGLE__.
At least this article, thankfully, didn't get into the typical fear mongering. It still had the obligatory "the results may surprise you" catch phrase, and the overall vapid tone was right on the nose.
After ten minutes of this shit I feel like I've been flunked back to the third grade. And yet the stations that are the most over the top with this drive to the bottom get the highest ratings, and the others all end up emulating them in every way possible.
No wonder it was so easy to hoodwink the American public into "electing" such a fucktard of a Presidente....:-(
You may be interested in reading about Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits Project for Microsoft Research.
It's an attempted implementation of a concept that was described in the article As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in 1945.
Quoting from the MLB home page:
MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks.
Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, television, and radio.
MyLifeBits software leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. It includes tools to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and browser integration. Its browser tool records a copy of every web page visited.
And there are links to papers published about it, articles written about it, etc.
Set aside the fact that from MS's point of view this is just a demo of SQL Server, and MLB is a pretty interesting piece of research -- and more to the point, it sounds like a more developed idea of what you're suggesting here.
pun moratorium, n.
The doomed campaign to deoxymoronize computer humor.
In particular, the vain attempt to demonstrate that plays on words such
as RISC and UNIX are unfunny if the player is unaware of their
historically built-in playfulness. Other puns assinorum deserving a
well-earned retirement relate PARADIGM, Paradise, and ten sents in
boringly obvious ways: "Paradigms Lost and Regained," "Brother, can you
s'paradigm?" and so on. Likewise, the cash/CACHE thing is surely
bankrupt: "Cache-only memory, no checks." Be assured, too, that every
known C homophone has had its weary, C-sick day at the C-Users
Journal's annual C-pun contest: C-through UNIX, C'est C Bon, Holy C,
Proficient C, Vitamin C, O say can you C? e = mC^2, Variations in C,
C-C Rider, Rauchen C?, The Cruel C from Cmantec, Mer-C Beaucoup... ad
nau-C-am.
One of Western Democracy's major flaws is that we cannot, without
pettifogging legal interference, publically hang, draw, and quarter
C-punsters.
People are moving from email to RSS? That's ironic -- I know someone that just released a service that translates RSS feeds to email, which seems like a knocking good idea to me.
Maybe the real lesson isn't "email bad, rss good", but that RSS has the nice property of allowing the user to select how she would prefer to access the resource in question -- maybe as email, maybe in a custom web page via Amphetadesk, or maybe in a special purpose application such as NetNewsWire. For that matter, maybe they'd like receiving info on a non-traditional device, such as a PDA or video game console, and RSS feeds can be more adaptable than other channels.
Personally, I like email, I've got processes for handling a silly volume of it, and the ability to get RSS feeds I'm interested mailed to me on some kind of schedule appeals to me -- even though the idea hadn't occurred to me before this weekend.
So the next question for me then is, for those of you that like RSS but don't care for email, how would you prefer to access such data? What software are you using today? What problems, if any, do you have with the way your RSS aggregator works? What properties would you like to see in such software tomorrow?
In some of my economics classes in college, textbook prices was one of the common case studies -- apparently it's a topic near & dear to student's wallets:-)
It turns out that a big reason for the high prices for new textbooks is the thriving used book market: a new book typically sells for some price N, and three months later most students sell their books back to the store for perhaps 20% of N, and a month later the store turns around and sells the now used books alongside fresh new ones for maybe 70% of N.
The only winner here is the bookstore.
The publisher is getting screwed by the discount price on used books, so they have to jack up the retail price to maintain their margins.
The students are getting screwed by that inflated price on new books, and the only way they can recover any of their outlay is on the used market.
The bookstore on the other hand gets to sell the same goods twice, and the second time around it's almost all profit.
----
Break the cycle. Stop selling books back.
It's not like you even earn back enough to make it worthwhile, even on a strapped college student's budget. Personally, I found it more valuable to be able to refer back to some of the material from my beginning level textbooks when working on upper level course work, and I've referred back to some of that material from time to time since leaving school as well.
I hope to god that I never have to touch COBOL again, but just in case I ever do, I've still got a decent reference book on the language as a fallback...:-)
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I used to think that, if enough students were aware of the economic dynamics of thee textbook market, the situation might change for the better as students started opting out of the used market en masse. Now I'm not so sure.
I'm assuming that, in addition to the upward pressure on prices from the used market, the relatively easy accessibility of digital texts is likely to have an even greater impact. Even if warez copies of books on PDF are never as widespread as the used market, the very existence of free, easily accessible electronic versions from some offshore website seems likely to have an impact on prices here.
And so the cycle seems likely to go: as the publishers' margins slip, they raise the price; as the price goes up students work harder to find cheap or free alternatives.
I'm not sure what the right way to break this cycle is, but if a fair solution is ever found, be sure to let the various textbook publishing houses know.
----
For that matter, you might want to let the RIAA & MPAA know of any solutions to this vicious cycle also. I seem to remember hearing that they are at a complete & total loss as to handle much the same situation with their respective publishing industries...
And just because you can't think of a good use (non military) doesn't mean there isn't one. Mark Twain had trouble imagining what use a telephone would get, and Bill Gates didn't believe in the internet for a long time.
A good point. Let's all brainstorm then.
Imagine -- just for the sake of argument -- that it were possible to build a device that could lift off from the ground and fly from one point to another, much like a bird or an insect.
Imagine also that such a device could be built large enough to carry, say, a handful of passengers or a small lot of cargo, and the device could travel for great distances -- perhaps 100 miles or more!
I can picture a situation where, decades from now when such wonderful flying machines are common, our major cities will build "thorni-ports" for these machines to land at, and every brave & moderately wealthy gentleman will have shared the experience of flying in one of them, and the risk of such fanciful experiments will claim the lives of no more than 10% of the people that try it. Tops!
Truly we live in such wonderous times!
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The cynics in the audience will note that there has been research on "fixed-wing" flying machines, and "rotary-wing" flying machines, going back a century, and that a "flapping wing" flying machine isn't likely to offer much that the existing prototypes have been doing for some time.
The people running operations at Mt Washington were probably just as interested in the publicity as the Segway folks -- I wouldn't be at all surprised if the idea started on their side, not on DEKA's.
"Picture it, the world famous New Hampshire invention climing the side of New Hampshire's most famous landmark."
Somehow I don't think that would have been a difficult sell...
Mount Washington is the highest point in New Hampshire (or New England for that matter, but not -- as is commonly believed around here -- the highest point on the US east coast: that title goes to North Carolina's Mount Mitchell).
As a popular landmark & attraction, Mount Washington has great appeal in New England. The "This car climbed Mt. Washington!" bumper stickers are ubiquitous, and driving up the mountain's wind-swept road in the family minivan or station wagon has been a rite of passage for generations of New Englanders.
That is why they had to drive Segways up the mountain. This is a New England transportation invention, but that just wouldn't be complete without the obligatory drive up Mount Washington.
The real question is whether or not the Segways they took up the mountain have any space for the bumper sticker:-)
Would an effective workaround at this point be for LiveJournal users to use a URL link shortening service like makeashorterlink or tinyurl? That way, the third party visitor links to the shortening service, and the browser is then redirected on to the AOL address. It seems like this could be an effective way to manipulate the referer field usefully.
Alternatively, link via a proxy service like Anonymizer, but in practice I'm not sure this would be as easy.
Where there's a will to get around roadblocks, there's usually a way to do it. If Anonymizer can allow 'net users in China & Iran to reach out to the rest of the world, I'm sure a way can be found around puny little AOL/TW.
Slashdot Mirror
GCC is for compiling software from raw source code. If you're downloading open source software, you generally need a compiler to install it, because the software frequently isn't distributed in an executable form. Even if an executable form is available, most open source projects don't have the resources to provide version for every esoteric configuration people might be using (like, say, OSX -- most of this stuff is written for Linux after all, so OSX is a bit "exotic" from the average Linux developer's point of view).
If you're not developing software and you don't intend to install open source software from raw source, then you don't need a compiler.
Yeah, the Apple USB keyboards all work on Intel machines. The only catch is the key mappings of some of the bottom row keys: on an Intel keyboard, the [alt] key is typically to the immediate left & right of the [spacebar], but Apple puts the [cmd] keys in that position instead, and puts [option/alt] one key farther away. The Apple [alt] key works normally, it's just in the "wrong" place.
The catch is that [cmd] key -- Windows interprets it as the [win] key as found on modern keyboards, and brings up the system menu whenever it gets pressed. Some people really like that key, and find it useful: it's a big time saver for me to be able to use shortcuts like [win]+[E] (bring up Explorer), [win]+[R] (bring up a Run dialog), and [win]+[F] (bring up a Find dialog). However, more people seem to dislike it than like it, and in any case, the problem here is the position: with the system key placed where [alt] typically goes, it's almost inevitable that it'll accidentally get hit all the time -- and this will get annoying.
Another problem is if you go back & forth between Macs & Intel (Windows/Linux/whatever) using the same keyboard, the situation will get confusing. For example, cut/copy/paste are done on both the Mac & Windows by hitting, respectively, [X]/[C]/[V] and a modifier key. On the Mac, that modifier is next to the [spacebar]; on Windows, it's at the edges of the bottom keyboard row (typically). If you're using Apple keyboard on just Apples, and whatever keyboards on Wintel, then it doesn't seem to be as confusing (just as I don't get confused with the [caps lock] / [ctrl] swap on Sun keyboard), but if you're using the same keyboard on both systems, then it can start to get blurry -- you learn to avoid [cmd] because you don't want the system menu, but then you can't get cut/copy/paste to work because you're hitting [option] or [ctrl], etc.
This wouldn't be so bad if you could re-map the keys, but (parroting what I've been told by others here), Wintel keyboards just transmit codes for the key bring pressed, but Apple keyboards transmit the actual logical meaning for each key -- meaning that it's apparently not possible to re- map (say) the [option/alt] and [cmd] keys to be in the standard Wintel arrangement. So you're stuck, and all you can do is train yourself to get used to little quirks like the ones noted above.
But that said, yes, it works, and it can work nicely. I've got a couple of spare Apple keyboards, and even with the funny keymappings they're still nicer to use than most laptop keyboards, so I tend to plug in an old iMac keyboard to use on my fiancee's Toshiba laptop, and for the most part there aren't any problems in doing this -- except for the bottom row of keys, everything works identically.
You say that as if it's a bad thing, but is it? The UK is a small country with, from what I hear, a pretty good rail network [1] and decent public transportation in most cities. From what I've read, getting by without a car is a viable option for lots of people in the UK, particularly city dwellers (doesn't something like half the population live in or near London?).
That's not at all the case here. Only the biggest cities have decent public transit systems, and for most mid-sized cities the options are weak or absent. The country is big, most of it is spread out (yay strip malls! yay wal-mart! *ugh*), and for the vast majority of Americans, even those living in the suburbs of the big cities, getting by without a car just isn't an option.
If gasoline taxes contribute in any way to the development of alternative means of transportation (alternative fuels, infrastructure, etc), then I think the price is worth it. Society would probably be better off in the long run if we could establish viable alternatives to petroleum based fuels now, before stocks start inevitably start running dry in coming decades.
If the price of operating a car bothers you, consider the possibilities of a bicycle -- in many cases, they're a perfect solution to the problem :-)
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[1] I realize that there have been issues with privatization of the rail system in recent years, but somehow I think the situation can't be half as bad as Amtrak is over here -- at least rail travel is viable for inter-city travel there, which really isn't the case in most of the USA.
One paragraph from the article recommends thus --
Can someone explain the rationale behind this? Shredding makes sense to me, but why the warning about outgoing mail?
Is the danger that you can't trust the postal employee, or that someone can get into your mailbox before the mail can be collected?
If it's the former, and the postal employees shouldn't be trusted, then why is dropping the mail off at the post office any safer? For that matter, why trust the whole system?
If it's the latter, and the danger is that someone will get into your mailbox, does it help if your mailbox has a lock on it? In my building, the mailboxes are controlled by two keys: I've got the key for one lock, and the post office has the key for the other. Random passers-by can't just open the door & grab whatever may be in the box, which I've always assumed protects me a bit.
Is the recommendation to avoid sending mail from home boxes, even if you have a lock? If so, what's the argument for this? I'm genuinely curious...
Short of buying a copy of VMWare, how exactly would one do this for IE? Remember, since IE is embedded in the operating system, you're normally not allowed to have multiple copies of the same IE DLL files resident on the same system.
Microsoft used to let you install a patch that allowed you to run IE5 in an IE4 emulation mode (or it may have even been IE4 in an IE3 mode -- it's been a while), but I seem to remember that the emulation wasn't perfectly identical to the earlier browser anyway. If a more recent version of that tool was ever produced, I'm not aware of it, and after poking aound on the official IE site for ten minutes or so, the only such add-on i can find is a beta for a "user rights mis-management" tool. Nice to see where the IE development focus is drifting these days.
Short of VMWare or multiple computers or *ugh* booting multiple copies of Windows on the same machine, I think MS has made it impossible to run multiple, concurrent versions of any modern IE version (5, 5.5, 6). If anyone knows of a less cumbersome way to do this -- because obviously it helps web developers to be able to test against multiple versions, even if average users don't need such a thing -- I'd love to learn how to do it.
On the other hand, it's not always that simple. Take a look at David Hyatt's Surfin' Safari blog some time, where he writes about how he is trying to make Safari adhere to the W3 specs, while also getting the browser to emulate the quirks in IE or Mozilla.
Some of the other browser's quirks are just bugs, but people have developed sites that depend on them -- if he went with the spec instead of the bug, people would assume that Safari was the broken browser, even though its behavior in such a situation would be technically correct.
In other cases, the spec is ambiguous, and IE & Mozilla have come up with what seem to be equally valid interpretations in their implementation. What should Safari do then but choose one of those paths or come up with yet another interpretation to follow.
Standards compliance is nice and all, but in practice a properly standards compliant page can still have quite a bit of variability in how it's rendered on different browsers.
In the end, the only way to really know is to test, test, test. Just as, unfortunately, it has always been...
It doesn't really matter if you buy it (or if I buy it for that matter).
The simple fact is that Apple Computer, in spite of a legal agreement never to do so, has entered a business that makes money by distributing music. This is an industry that Apple Records has been in since the sixties.
It doesn't matter, for the purposes of this suit, that Apple Computer makes other products in addition to their music business. That is completely immaterial.
It also doesn't matter if the original lawsuit was untenable on it's face, chest, or anywhere else, because the legal precedent has been set: Apple Computer lost, was forced to pay up, and entered into a legal agreement not to do what they are now doing.
If the legal precedent didn't exist, you'd have a point, but Apple Computer already lost this argument twice -- and in each of those situations they had a much stronger case than they do now.
I love my Mac, but this lawsuit doesn't surprise me in the least. They had to have known they were on shaky ground here, and were arguably neglegent in their due diligance duties if they didn't try to come to an agreement with Apple Records before launching iTMS.
But apparently, they did no such thing.
They made their bed, now they can lie in it.
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The big surprise is that Apple Computer didn't get sued for using John Lennon's image to sell computers. That whole "think differently" campaign left a bad, bad taste in my mouth, and now that I think about it it still bugs me to think that they thought they could inflate their products by associating them with people like Lennon or Gandhi. *yuck*
The only more clear cut case of bad taste I can think of is Kenny G's "duet" with Louis Armstrong, but the "think different" campaign was a close second.
But that's neither here nor there...
Hands up who didn't see this coming -- nobody? That's what I thought.
Last time Apple Records sued Apple Computer, the computer company agreed never to go into the music industry.
Now I can see letting iTunes slide while it was just the software for playing music on MacOS/OSX, but building a music distribution service around the software seems like a plain violation of the agreement.
The only surprise to me is that the record company didn't bring suit before now. They plainly pre-date the computer company by a a decade, so Apple computer is painted pretty tightly into a corner now.
Hopefully they'll find some reasonable way to settle this. Conceivably, the iTunes Music Service &/or iPod divisions can be spun off into their own company, and everyone will be able to go back to being friends.
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da...
Err, which United States was this written from? Certainly not the North American superpower of the 20th & 21st centuries.
I mean, we're talking about the country where government subsidized research has produced or contributed to the production of nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, all manner of aircraft, the digital computer, electronic communications, and a host of others -- all of which have direct military applications, and might or might not have non-military uses.
They don't call it the military-industrial complex for nothing.
The current norm, where the ultimate source of funding behind a significant portion of public, private, and academic research is the US federal government (and particularly, the defence department), goes back at least as far as World War II. That was sixty years ago now, yet the patterns you see today are substantially in lines with ones that ran through the Cold War and back to the Manhattan Project and other WW2 efforts.
To suggest that this all on "21st century counter-terrorism efforts" is to ignore that the trends being observed have been in place for many decades.
Do yourself a favor and go read some of Noam Chomsky's writings & talks. Among his political arguments is the idea that these structural arrangements have been around for a long, long time, and much of both the strengths & the weaknesses of America can be traced to these activities -- e.g. the collusion between military & industry directly leads both to America's economic dominance and to the fact that the USA is the world's biggest target.
A lot of people disagree with Chomsky's arguments, but it seems to me that anyone trying to have a serious conversation about such matters has to at least be aware of these views, or they're basically arguing from ignorance.
<anecdote>
So I did the natural thing -- I pulled up to the airport's departure gate, she hopped out and walked in to the rental agency's counter, and I waited outside in the car. A minute or two later, a security guard walked up and told me, in fractured English, that unless I was helping a passenger with their luggage, I could not stay at the gate. I tried to explain that I was waiting for a person at the rental desk, pointing helpfully to the one person at that desk, but he didn't care: "you have one minute, then you must leave." This is silly, so I tried to stay put, but then another security guard came along, saying "you've already been warned once, now move your car -- nobody else is idling here."
My attempt to point out that there were in fact about half a dozen cars idling at the front door with me didn't seem to help, so I obediantly pulled out, circled the airport road, and came back to the gate. The security guards & cops give me a dirty look, walking towards me until I take the hint and drive off again.
This repeated three or four times -- drive around the loop (about half a mile), come back to the gate to see if my friend is ready yet, get the evil looks from the rentacops, drive away again. Lather, rinse, vomit, repeat.
</anecdote>
This to me perfectly illustrates the problems with modern airport security procedures. In what way is security enhanced by forcing people to drive around in circles like that? All it did was give me several chances to see where different buildings were and waste some gasoline. The airport, for those that don't know it, is a small, suburban airport that didn't seem to be very busy at all -- there was no line of cars waiting to get up to the gate, and I think I only attracted any interest in the first place because I was the only car driving around at all at the time.
I really wanted to step out of the car, walk up to the cop, and politely ask if he felt that procedures like this did anything at all to make anyone safer. It was obvious though that, had I done anything like that, it would have been taken as confrontational -- and probably would have gotten me arrested.
And the rent-a-cops were even worse: it was obvious that they were low-wage, low-skill people being paid to strictly follow written procedures; independent thought was obviously not what was expected of them.
Schneier is right -- the people putting these rules into place clearly aren't thinking things through. Low-paid drones inflexibly carrying out ill-conceived orders are not, as a rule, going to do anything to help anyone. We need effective policies, and we need the people carrying out these policies to be trusted to use their good judgement -- which in turn means that we need to be willing to invest in training for professional personnel.
Money spent that way will go much farther than any half-baked technological approach like face recognition systems...
So what?
While I happen to agree with you, I don't see what conclusions you are suggesting from this bit of insight. What are you implying?
At a guess, the average artisan churns out commodity works for a fair wage. On the other hand, a rarified class of artist is able to command a far higher price for their work, because the public generally acknowledges that the quality of the work is far higher & far rarer.
But what does that have to do with the music industry? While I personally would consider musicians like Miles Davis or Sonic Youth to be capital-"A" Artists, whose works are worth many times what I'd see in the product of many others, it doesn't matter, because the final product is mass produced and sold at a more or less uniform price.
Supply & demand doesn't really help here, because there is far more demand for crap like Britney Spears than for art like Davis' albums -- and there's really nothing wrong with that. Further, it's easy to respond to supply & demand by simply making more copies of the works that are in greater demand: if five million people want a copy of Spears' first album, her label will be perfectly happy to sell that many copies, and has little reason to charge more or less than they would charge for the few thousand copies of "Kind of Blue" that sells each year.
Pricing has little to do with value. "Art' in this industry has little to do with whether the creator was an artist, or an artisan.
This leaves me grasping for what exactly your point might be...
Madness in the method indeed :-)
Price wars only work when the offerings from competitors are more or less perfectly interchangeable.
When trying to book an airfare from A to B, most people aren't concerned about whether they'll be sitting in a plane labelled X, Y, or Z -- they're just looking for a good deal on that seat.
Likewise for things like a tank of gasoline, a gallon of milk, or as you say a particular piece of commodity computer hardware.
But the economics don't work that way when the goods aren't pefectly interchangeable.
Apple doesn't have to deal with price wars, because their systems are significantly different from most of their competitors. Apple hardware is not a commodity.
French wine growers try to avoid being a commodity by establishing laws stating that only sparkling wines produced in a certain region are allowed to call themselves "champagne" (and likewise for merlot, etc). Greek farmers have been trying to get similar protection for the term "feta cheese", claiming that identical cheese produced by Scandinavian farmers cannot be sold under "their" name. In both of these cases, and a lot of others like them, the producers are trying to protect their profits by trying to avoid the commoditization of their product.
With music, it's much less of fight. Whenever a band signs that much wanted contract with the label, they're effectively locked into servitude to that label for several years &/or albums. The band might or might not earn much this way, but if they're popular they'll certainly earn a lot of money for their label (and if they don't become popular, oh well -- easy come, easy go). The only thing that could disrupt this would be for the labels to allow other companies to distribute "their" artists' music -- and I just don't see that happening any time soon. (I believe there are some minor exceptions -- Beck seems to have a contract that allows him to release minor indie albums in between his major label releases -- but these are not the norm, and I don't see any reason to assume that they would ever become the norm.)
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Interesting comparisons are the movie industry & major league sports.
In the early days of Hollywood, the "studio system" was a much stronger institution than it is today -- each of the major studios would own everything from the production to the distribution channels through to the individual cinemas. Complete vertical integration. And part of owning the production meant owning the talent as well: Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly might have been MGM guys, while Audrey & Katherine Hepburn might have belonged to Universal, for example. [1]. In the fifties, this system started to fall apart, and individuals were given more leeway to work where & with whom they chose -- but under the studio system, this almost never happened. [2]
Likewise, most professional athletes in team sports are contractually bound to their teams. I'm not a big sports fan and don't really follow these things (i.e., corrections here are welcome), but I'm not aware of many situations where an individual athlete can just stand up & say "I'm unhappy with the management & coaching here, but the team in Whoville just offered me a gazillion dollars to join them, so I'm ditching this place." As far as I know, that never happens. Rather, team management may chooose who to keep & who to trade, but players under contract do not seem to have the discretion to choose for themselves who they would like to work for -- they're locked in, and that's that.
This situation in modern sports, like the old studio system in Hollywood, is roughly how the music industry o
At least this article, thankfully, didn't get into the typical fear mongering. It still had the obligatory "the results may surprise you" catch phrase, and the overall vapid tone was right on the nose.
After ten minutes of this shit I feel like I've been flunked back to the third grade. And yet the stations that are the most over the top with this drive to the bottom get the highest ratings, and the others all end up emulating them in every way possible.
No wonder it was so easy to hoodwink the American public into "electing" such a fucktard of a Presidente.... :-(
You may be interested in reading about Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits Project for Microsoft Research.
It's an attempted implementation of a concept that was described in the article As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in 1945.
Quoting from the MLB home page:
And there are links to papers published about it, articles written about it, etc.
Set aside the fact that from MS's point of view this is just a demo of SQL Server, and MLB is a pretty interesting piece of research -- and more to the point, it sounds like a more developed idea of what you're suggesting here.
Their site seems to be kaput. How said.
Oh well, we all know they'll reconstitute themselves like the amoebas they are.
Let's offer them a new home page for next time around.
They can just feel free to save that as their index.html if they want. :-)
You asked for it... :-)
Quoted from The Computer Contradictionary, by Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Maybe the real lesson isn't "email bad, rss good", but that RSS has the nice property of allowing the user to select how she would prefer to access the resource in question -- maybe as email, maybe in a custom web page via Amphetadesk, or maybe in a special purpose application such as NetNewsWire. For that matter, maybe they'd like receiving info on a non-traditional device, such as a PDA or video game console, and RSS feeds can be more adaptable than other channels.
Personally, I like email, I've got processes for handling a silly volume of it, and the ability to get RSS feeds I'm interested mailed to me on some kind of schedule appeals to me -- even though the idea hadn't occurred to me before this weekend.
So the next question for me then is, for those of you that like RSS but don't care for email, how would you prefer to access such data? What software are you using today? What problems, if any, do you have with the way your RSS aggregator works? What properties would you like to see in such software tomorrow?
In some of my economics classes in college, textbook prices was one of the common case studies -- apparently it's a topic near & dear to student's wallets :-)
It turns out that a big reason for the high prices for new textbooks is the thriving used book market: a new book typically sells for some price N, and three months later most students sell their books back to the store for perhaps 20% of N, and a month later the store turns around and sells the now used books alongside fresh new ones for maybe 70% of N.
The only winner here is the bookstore.
The publisher is getting screwed by the discount price on used books, so they have to jack up the retail price to maintain their margins.
The students are getting screwed by that inflated price on new books, and the only way they can recover any of their outlay is on the used market.
The bookstore on the other hand gets to sell the same goods twice, and the second time around it's almost all profit.
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Break the cycle. Stop selling books back.
It's not like you even earn back enough to make it worthwhile, even on a strapped college student's budget. Personally, I found it more valuable to be able to refer back to some of the material from my beginning level textbooks when working on upper level course work, and I've referred back to some of that material from time to time since leaving school as well.
I hope to god that I never have to touch COBOL again, but just in case I ever do, I've still got a decent reference book on the language as a fallback... :-)
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I used to think that, if enough students were aware of the economic dynamics of thee textbook market, the situation might change for the better as students started opting out of the used market en masse. Now I'm not so sure.
I'm assuming that, in addition to the upward pressure on prices from the used market, the relatively easy accessibility of digital texts is likely to have an even greater impact. Even if warez copies of books on PDF are never as widespread as the used market, the very existence of free, easily accessible electronic versions from some offshore website seems likely to have an impact on prices here.
And so the cycle seems likely to go: as the publishers' margins slip, they raise the price; as the price goes up students work harder to find cheap or free alternatives.
I'm not sure what the right way to break this cycle is, but if a fair solution is ever found, be sure to let the various textbook publishing houses know.
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For that matter, you might want to let the RIAA & MPAA know of any solutions to this vicious cycle also. I seem to remember hearing that they are at a complete & total loss as to handle much the same situation with their respective publishing industries...
A good point. Let's all brainstorm then.
Imagine -- just for the sake of argument -- that it were possible to build a device that could lift off from the ground and fly from one point to another, much like a bird or an insect.
Imagine also that such a device could be built large enough to carry, say, a handful of passengers or a small lot of cargo, and the device could travel for great distances -- perhaps 100 miles or more!
I can picture a situation where, decades from now when such wonderful flying machines are common, our major cities will build "thorni-ports" for these machines to land at, and every brave & moderately wealthy gentleman will have shared the experience of flying in one of them, and the risk of such fanciful experiments will claim the lives of no more than 10% of the people that try it. Tops!
Truly we live in such wonderous times!
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The cynics in the audience will note that there has been research on "fixed-wing" flying machines, and "rotary-wing" flying machines, going back a century, and that a "flapping wing" flying machine isn't likely to offer much that the existing prototypes have been doing for some time.
I like cynics :-)
I think it's far to say that any conditioner that could ever hurt people, nevermind kill them, is very far from perfect indeed.
A/C just isn't worth dying for, I don't care how hot the summer was.
Better? :)
The people running operations at Mt Washington were probably just as interested in the publicity as the Segway folks -- I wouldn't be at all surprised if the idea started on their side, not on DEKA's.
"Picture it, the world famous New Hampshire invention climing the side of New Hampshire's most famous landmark."
Somehow I don't think that would have been a difficult sell...
Segway / DEKA Research is a New Hampshire company.
Mount Washington is the highest point in New Hampshire (or New England for that matter, but not -- as is commonly believed around here -- the highest point on the US east coast: that title goes to North Carolina's Mount Mitchell).
As a popular landmark & attraction, Mount Washington has great appeal in New England. The "This car climbed Mt. Washington!" bumper stickers are ubiquitous, and driving up the mountain's wind-swept road in the family minivan or station wagon has been a rite of passage for generations of New Englanders.
That is why they had to drive Segways up the mountain. This is a New England transportation invention, but that just wouldn't be complete without the obligatory drive up Mount Washington.
The real question is whether or not the Segways they took up the mountain have any space for the bumper sticker :-)
Would an effective workaround at this point be for LiveJournal users to use a URL link shortening service like makeashorterlink or tinyurl? That way, the third party visitor links to the shortening service, and the browser is then redirected on to the AOL address. It seems like this could be an effective way to manipulate the referer field usefully.
Alternatively, link via a proxy service like Anonymizer, but in practice I'm not sure this would be as easy.
Where there's a will to get around roadblocks, there's usually a way to do it. If Anonymizer can allow 'net users in China & Iran to reach out to the rest of the world, I'm sure a way can be found around puny little AOL/TW.
Man. question marks may lousy commas.
I mean? this is? like? third grade grammar? ya know?
:-)