There is a consistent behaviour defined for the clipboard on X. Here's a description for users (and the page links a description suited to developers).
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~njl98r/clipboard/
Are there some apps which don't work? Yes. I'm happy to add any specific apps which don't work to the list, so that users know not to bother using those apps.
Please report SPECIFIC bugs, preferably to the author or maintainer of the software. It's no good to say "it's not consistent" when you're talking about hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of pieces of software.
Most likely your GIFs are automatically converted to 8-bit and the PNGs are not. To have a like-for-like comparison tell your software to dither the PNGs down to just as few colors as the GIFs.
Most software assumes you're interested in preserving data first, and small files later. If that's not true you may need to tweak a config, or use an external app to do the conversion.
This is your "solution"? 3rd rate service and spiralling costs for a system that will, without any doubt cease functioning in less than a decade. A decade when the real fix will be even more expensive.
I want to use peer services with my phone. My solution is IPv6. Your solution "Don't do that".
I want to use peer services with my laptop in the kitchen, from a pad in the TV room, and with my games PC upstairs. My solution is IPv6. Your solution? "Don't do that".
Five billion more people want to use the Internet. My solution is IPv6. Your solution is to either deny them service or provide a 2nd class "host" service behind NAT.
You're not American by any chance are you? This "the customer can go fuck himself" type of solution reminds me of dealing with US banks, and certainly Americans are very smug about the fact that >50% of routable addresses are permanently assigned to their low population continent.
Sadly, people with this attitude will be saved at the last minute by the efforts of others, like those dopes who refuse to move from their home because "God is with me, and the floods won't come this high" and then have to be rescued by helicopter. Once in a while we should leave a few of you behind.
"by assigning a/48 to each subnet in the building"
Doh! That really would be excessive. I meant to say that you'd assign a/64 to each subnet. Still sounds like a lot, but it's really not when you consider how IPv6 autoconfig works.
If the upstream router from you (whether that's a $20k rack box from Cisco or some Pentium Linux box) has IPv6 connectivity then all you need to do on your hosts is turn on IPv6 and the rest happens automatically.
e.g RH Linux, set NETWORKING_IPV6=yes in/etc/sysconfig/network and restart networking
If you don't have upstream IPv6 then (1) Tell your provider that you think they should look into it sooner rather than later (2) round up the OS specific documentation for a technology called "6to4" tunnels.
A 6to4 tunnel can be created from any fully operational IPv4 host, even if it's a dialup link on some mom&pop ISP. Like the rest of IPv6 this is autoconfigured, you set a few options according to the documentation from your OS vendor and then it Just Works (TM).
If you have a typical small office/ geek house NAT setup with a single router & a lot of hosts spread around a building, the 6to4 tunnel will let you give all those hosts unique IPv6 addresses too, by assigning a/48 to each subnet in the building.
To check that it's working visit e.g. http://www.kame.net/ for visual confirmation. You may have to restart your browser if IPv6 wasn't installed when it was first started.
Your conclusion (use ASCII and stop moaning) is correct, but your reasoning is wrong.
The IDN system is for international domain names, not just Russian domain names, a moment's thought will reveal to you that this means it must be based on Unicode. So it is/implicit/ that they are encoded in a certain way and the IDN software sorts all this out for you just as it would with Arabic or Chinese.
The fact that some obsolete software only works in KOI8, or whatever is irrelevant, none of that software will work with IDN without hefty modification.
Why should we "just" use ASCII for Internet DNS?
Actually that's the wrong question. We don't use ASCII, we use a very restricted subset of ASCII. The DNS infrastructure is quite capable of permitting domains called e.g. _;_.~ but they aren't human readable, so all but the most easily recognised ASCII characters were simply banned.
[Yup, banned. Most Unix resolvers just fail requests for domains like this without ever going to the network]
If we don't permit case-sensitive & don't allow wacky ASCII characters, why should we allow all sixty or so variations on the character 'a' that are recognised by Unicode? Just to make Verisign more money?
That's what this is really about BTW, Verisign needs to invent more "variations" of coke.com that can be registered to protect them from "pirates" so that Verisign shareholders can see "growth". Ugh.
"The web browser I use at home has the copyright date set at 2002"
Sure, but the feature set of that browser would be more at home in 1997. Forget XML and DOM, these browsers have primitive Javascript and no CSS support at all.
To simulate this at home, get an early Netscape 4.x build and use a proxy to remove all style information from your web pages, then every time Netscape crashes, pull the power out from your computer (no crash protection in AmigaOS) and punch yourself in the side of the head hard.
Amigans are wrongly proud of their tradition of using inadequate, expensive and unsupported software. Misery, as they say, loves company.
If you're on a single user (or more or less single user, e.g. you and a couple of family members, housemates etc.) Unix system then there's an alternative way to disentangle plugins from the browser itself.
Create a directory ~/.mozilla/plugins (that's right, beneath Mozilla's own dot directory)
Then move plugins you want into that directory (but only real plugins, not the null plugin or any other Moz-provided stuff)
"Yes Apple licensed a codec, you want access to it find someone willing to pony up the cash like Apple did."
My understanding (and so this is 2nd hand, but I don't see you doing any better) is that when you call Apple they say "Ask Sorenson" and when you call Sorenson they say "Ask Apple".
Yes, they can/legally/ give everyone the run around like this, but I don't think it's/ethical/ for them to do so. It may even be bad business.
Worse, experience suggests that if a better alternative is developed and made free Apple AND Sorenson will do everything in their power to discourage their users from accessing this improved technology.
The duplicability versus scale problem hits big for this kind of stuff. Everyone hiring one or two academics, making them sign NDAs and keeping them apart is not the most effective way of delivering improved compression to real users. That's why we have a dozen competing "next generation" streaming audio codecs, none of which are universally available. [It would be nice to think that MS & Apple will see sense and ship Vorbis but don't count on it]
This/is/ rocket science and if Apple were serious about delivering for media people they'd put their codec money together with other people's and have the technology developed in the open. They can differentiate elsewhere without wasting all these resources on duplicated effort.
Cut and paste faults are BUGS in individual applications or toolkits. The XFree86 maintainers cannot fix these bugs by changing X, because X already does the right thing.
In every serious X app you should be able to do both of the following:
1) Cut, Copy and Paste things through the system clipboard using menu options, keyboard shortcuts etc. as appropriate. e.g. Ctrl-X for cut in most GNOME, KDE apps. This works almost exactly like Windows.
2) Quick copy using the middle mouse button, select text in any application, then press the middle mouse button to paste that text in any other application.
If they don't work in your favourite apps, check for a new version. If that doesn't work either, file a bug, post to the mailing list, write to your democratic representative or complain ABOUT THE SPECIFIC APP on Slashdot. If you aren't specific no-one can help you.
Caveats:
Old KDE (pre 3.0) and Qt (ditto) apps (e.g. Opera and many installs of KOffice) don't work because Trolltech screwed up. Upgrade
Venerable old xterm doesn't have Cut/Copy/Paste menu items (most users don't even know it has a menu) so you can't use the clipboard only the fast copy feature. Use one of the many other modern terminal apps if you/really/ care.
Earlier (e.g. few months old) stable releases of Gnumeric make the same mistake as Qt2.x. Upgrade to the latest release.
GNU Emacs (but not XEmacs) has totally bizarre clipboard behaviour unrelated to any standard, principle or sense of reason. Use XEmacs or complain to your favourite Emacs maintainer.
The airmiles and Hotmail sites work for me, is it possible that you didn't install the PSM (the bit of a Mozilla based browser that handles crypto) ?
Hotmail is unreliable anyway, I wouldn't read much into problems logging in to Hotmail unless they're consistent and IE still works on the same machine, same time of day, same OS. Microsoft have never really had Hotmail stable since they migrated.
The missing lock icon on IGN is caused by some Javascript which is, you guessed it, IE only. For some reason they check whether you have IE > 4.x or NS > 5 and then do loads of proprietary IE DOM mangling. Tell them it sucks and (especially if you're a subscriber) they might fix it one day.
If it's any comfort their "test" for the lock icon is more ugly than you'd imagine without looking. Way more ugly. So it was probably written by an intern or a frightened Mac user who thinks programming is like dark magic.
I disagree very strongly. This is a popular consumer protection law. Getting those "watered down" is hard because ordinary people care about this stuff, they understand how to ask direct questions about it.
So unlike an obscure tax accounting issue that really matters but requires a University education to undersand,/this/ issue will come up during re-election. Did you weaken our DNC laws ? Who asked you to do that? Did they pay you off ? Why am I getting more calls I don't want?
Even better the list cleaning / enforcement companies will lobby/in favour/ of these consumer laws because it means more business for them. Unlike people selling aluminum siding these guys aren't hurting anyone and DO offer jobs with real pay for skilled workers.
Building good distribution structures isn't disastrous. Setting expectations correctly (you buy software? For this price, I don't think you get support. Want some support? Pay for it) isn't disastrous.
The people who aren't thinking long term are the information hoarders. They imagine that they are creating wealth, but it's a spreadsheet illusion, just like Enron. Still Enron got their share of co-operation from the US government, and so do Bill and the Mouse. Illusory wealth is as good as the real thing so long as you don't try to spend it.
Real wealth is locked up in people. Copyright is a fools bargain unless you have more information than other people. When the US was younger it did exactly what Malaysia does now, in America printed books were cheaper because the foreign authors weren't getting paid.
So, on the one hand you can expect these nations to "grow out of it" if they are permitted an even standing in the market. On the other hand it's a bad deal for everyone anyway. Simple mental arithmetic is enough to tell us that charging for infinitely reproducible copies isn't a sustainable policy. With or without "pirates" the analogue age is over.
I'm not sure what you mean by "OLE type interaction" but if you want to paste smart "objects" that aren't really copies but references then it's not the cut/copy/paste clipboard any more. This sort of thing has never fared much better in Windows than it does in Unix, a few apps support it fairly well, a lot either don't support it at all or don't support it well enough to be useful. Typical users either don't know it exists or avoid it because the surprise factor is too high.
The X clipboard as defined in ICCCM and clarified by Freedesktop _does_ support content negotiation, so it can handle a lot more than text. Users need to file RFEs to get their favourite apps to actually use this stuff, and developers need to agree standards for the content (pixmaps are obvious, but what about audio, or spreadsheet data, or 3D models)
There's nothing phony about self-certification. Since Verisign and other companies in the CA business don't actually do any useful checks or offer a reliable revocation method, you are just saving everyone involved money. If they/really/ want to be sure you're the real deal they will use out of band methods to verify the fingerprint. Yeah, right.
After all >90% of Windows users went for years without a working CA validation check in their crypto subsystem, so without manually opening and verifying the cert they couldn't tell if it was signed by a real CA anyway.
SSL is provably effective against passive snooping, and has some deterrent value against people with low motivation and minimal resources (e.g. script kiddies) but if you think buying a cheap-ass Verisign cert protects you against black hats then you're just another Voodoo security guy.
Huh? Doesn't the US have consumer protection laws?
If you have working consumer protection then a DOA machine is a joke on *them* not you, because they're going to be either refunding the money AND taking away the broken junk on their own dollar, or replacing the machine with one that works AND paying all the additional carriage charges both ways. Allowing a vendor to "repair" something that was supposed to be brand new is a sucker's game.
I know you have lemon laws for cars, so surely you have ordinary mail order and retail protection too?
I have personally lost money because of patents, and you have personally gained money because of patents. Neither of these things changes the fact that patents are morally wrong.
The 1st justification offered for patents is that they give inventors exclusive control of "their" invention. That's good right? No it isn't...
The patent system says that if a Microsoft employee invents a powerful new compression technique, and I invent the same technique, independently, later the same day, Microsoft get to prevent ME from using using MY invention simply by filing a bunch of paperwork.
Why? It's my invention too! Yet the government promises to back up their monopoly on this compression technique with force of arms, and this is supposed to encourage inventors?
The 2nd justification offered for patents is that they include disclosure. Everyone can find out how the patented thing works and improve on it.
Except that this doesn't happen. Software patents are written in a bizarre way that deliberately obfuscates the claim. In fact the patent office doesn't require that your invention even works at all. If it doesn't and someone else figures out how to fix it -- well they're infringing so you can sue them, put them out of business and then steal the fix for your own product.
So, I hope this briefly illustrates why patents are not something any independent programmer or small company in the IT sector should be enthusiastic about. Don't buy this guy's hype, he won a lottery than a lot of people lose and now he thinks he has a "system".
Please people, use what we were given by GNU instead of relying on half-remembered things from school.
$ units
1948 units, 71 prefixes, 28 functions
You have: 4000km
You want: miles
* 2485.4848
At a very reasonable 30 meters per second it would take 37 hours. If you were driving more quickly, say 45 meters per second it would take just over 24 hours. Even on completely empty roads I would not recommend travelling at more than 40-50 meters per second for safety reasons. Neither the roads nor the cars were really designed for such high speeds.
We did the arithmetic and he's completely right, in the UK at least. With our high usage we started saving money in just six months. Try filling in figures for your local suppliers below and see for yourself.
1 kW hour electricity costs --> £0.05 Incandescent bulb costs ------> £0.40 Fluorescent bulb costs -------> £5.99 input power (Incandescent) ---> 100W input power (Fluorescent) ----> 22W life time (Incandescent) -----> ~1000h life time (Fluorescent) ------> ~5000h
After 1000 hours of use the incandescent bulb has cost £5.40 while the fluorescent bulb has cost £7.09. If you frequently destroy bulbs by accident or due to bad power this may be a deal breaker.
However after 3000 hours the conventional bulbs have cost you £17.00 and wasted half an hour of your life finding and installing replacement bulbs, while the fluorescent bulb has cost just £9.29 and is still running perfectly.
Many people object that fluorescent bulbs have a less pleasant color. Even if you find that to be the case, it's probably important only in a few areas of the house, places where you read or sew or use a PC. In utility areas, corridors etc. you can save a lot of money by using these low energy bulbs.
Adding focus-follows-eyes as a focus strategy is a poor approximation of the true pinnacle of X focus rules 'focus-follows-brain' in which the window manager arranges for focus to be given to the window you think has focus.
This satisfies the HCI principle of least surprise, because you will by definition never be surprised by this strategy. It is also more efficient than sloppy focus or even 'focus-follows-eyes' because it allows the operator to do lightning fast focus changes without losing track.
How many of you type while looking elsewhere? I know I do so all the time, and even if I just glance away for a moment a simple 'focus-follows-eyes' will be more frustrating than any 'click-to-focus' or 'root-gets-focus' strategy.
So we have to hold out for the big prize, focus-follows-brain and not accept anything less. A decent implementation will follow the brain not only to a window, but to individual graphical elements like entry widgets and this textbox.
All ICCCM compliant applications will work. We can't do any better than that, the ICCCM was published shortly after the last ice age, so anyone who hasn't read it, or didn't understand it is NOT OUR FAULT.
The GNOME developers cannot come to your house and fix the broken KDE 2.x install (which is the #1 reason for cut-copy-and-paste not working properly). Get KDE 3 and the problem goes away. That's not GNOME's fault.
The #2 most common complaint is caused by GNU Emacs, which has its own insane clipboard behaviour unique to that application. Use XEmacs instead if it bothers you, or complain to the Emacs maintainer. Not GNOME's fault.
The #3 source of problems is XChat, which does something moderately insane, I forget what exactly. If it bothers you, ask the XChat maintainer to fix it. Not GNOME's fault.
The #4 source of problems is Gnumeric 1.0, which has the same bug as KDE 2.x. This will be fixed in Gnumeric 1.2 even if I personally have to intervene.
If you find GNOME applications where Windows-style "Ctrl X/C/V" cut-n-paste doesn't work as expected, file a bug.
Personally I'm not a pro-audio person. I built XMMS LADSPA, which is pretty much the definition of "unprofessional". I do think this qualifies me to talk about the "state of the art" of audio on Linux though, so long as I don't use any audiophile phrases like 'warm, clean sound'
There definitely is decent soundcard support available for musicians. Not 100% coverage, but a good enough range that if you really wanted to do Linux audio work you'd find a pro card that is supported and meets your needs. The magic word here is 'ALSA'
Low-latency audio monitoring is definitely available, but not yet polished. See 'JACK'
24 Tracks? The limit here is your monitor (to see all the strips) and hard disk throughput. See 'Ardour'
There is an API for realtime effects on Linux. See 'LADSPA' but you might find the UIs a bit sparse compared to VST.
Even toy audio software like terminatorX has automation in Linux. I'm certain Ardour and other serious software must have it too if you ask.
If you join the Linux Audio Developer list you should be able to get help setting up a decent N-way digital I/O card with Ardour. That gives you a 24 channel 32bit 48kHz DAW, with realtime monitoring (as good as you'll get on Windows anyway), full automation, and a small but growing collection of effects (tape delays, pitch scaler, compress/expand etc.)
Is this as good as Logic today? No. Not really. Will it one day catch up with the state of the art on Windows or Mac? Well, maybe it will with your help:)
Amelie looks wonderful, doesn't it? The unreal use of colour in the movie must be a tribute to the flexibility and power of 35mm film?
Actually no, the colour was done digitally after filming was complete. No clever lighting, no messing around with optical effects when the film was developed, just some computer software and a lot of talented people.
If it was cheaper and easier (which, so far, it isn't) Amelie could have been shot digitally and the "film effect" applied as an additional stage in colour correction.
In case you're wondering why Bill doesn't like X11, he explains this on the Cosmoe mailing list. Basically Bill encountered the bug in Qt 2.x that means that you can't cut and paste between most KDE applications and most other apps.
So what did he do? Did he report the bug to the Trolls, or at least to KDE's devel team? No. He decided to create a new OS based on AtheOS, BeOS, Linux and anything else that creates hype. The only thing missing so far is a promise to build a next generation Amiga
Oh yeah, and Bill thinks X is ugly. But, he also thinks AtheOS and Cosmoe are ugly. He proposes to fix this by making Cosmoe look different, which will be very hard, rather than making X look different which is easy but doesn't get you on Slashdot.
Meanwhile every distro worth talking about either includes KDE 3.x or plans to do so very soon. So the bug that annoyed Bill is gone.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a consistent behaviour defined for the clipboard on X. Here's a description for users (and the page links a description suited to developers).
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~njl98r/clipboard/
Are there some apps which don't work? Yes. I'm happy to add any specific apps which don't work to the list, so that users know not to bother using those apps.
Please report SPECIFIC bugs, preferably to the author or maintainer of the software. It's no good to say "it's not consistent" when you're talking about hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of pieces of software.
Most likely your GIFs are automatically converted to 8-bit and the PNGs are not. To have a like-for-like comparison tell your software to dither the PNGs down to just as few colors as the GIFs.
Most software assumes you're interested in preserving data first, and small files later. If that's not true you may need to tweak a config, or use an external app to do the conversion.
This is your "solution"? 3rd rate service and spiralling costs for a system that will, without any doubt cease functioning in less than a decade. A decade when the real fix will be even more expensive.
I want to use peer services with my phone. My solution is IPv6. Your solution "Don't do that".
I want to use peer services with my laptop in the kitchen, from a pad in the TV room, and with my games PC upstairs. My solution is IPv6. Your solution? "Don't do that".
Five billion more people want to use the Internet. My solution is IPv6. Your solution is to either deny them service or provide a 2nd class "host" service behind NAT.
You're not American by any chance are you? This "the customer can go fuck himself" type of solution reminds me of dealing with US banks, and certainly Americans are very smug about the fact that >50% of routable addresses are permanently assigned to their low population continent.
Sadly, people with this attitude will be saved at the last minute by the efforts of others, like those dopes who refuse to move from their home because "God is with me, and the floods won't come this high" and then have to be rescued by helicopter. Once in a while we should leave a few of you behind.
"by assigning a /48 to each subnet in the building"
/64 to each subnet. Still sounds like a lot, but it's really not when you consider how IPv6 autoconfig works.
Doh! That really would be excessive. I meant to say that you'd assign a
If the upstream router from you (whether that's a $20k rack box from Cisco or some Pentium Linux box) has IPv6 connectivity then all you need to do on your hosts is turn on IPv6 and the rest happens automatically.
/etc/sysconfig/network and restart networking
/48 to each subnet in the building.
e.g RH Linux, set NETWORKING_IPV6=yes in
If you don't have upstream IPv6 then (1) Tell your provider that you think they should look into it sooner rather than later (2) round up the OS specific documentation for a technology called "6to4" tunnels.
A 6to4 tunnel can be created from any fully operational IPv4 host, even if it's a dialup link on some mom&pop ISP. Like the rest of IPv6 this is autoconfigured, you set a few options according to the documentation from your OS vendor and then it Just Works (TM).
If you have a typical small office/ geek house NAT setup with a single router & a lot of hosts spread around a building, the 6to4 tunnel will let you give all those hosts unique IPv6 addresses too, by assigning a
To check that it's working visit e.g. http://www.kame.net/ for visual confirmation. You may have to restart your browser if IPv6 wasn't installed when it was first started.
Your conclusion (use ASCII and stop moaning) is correct, but your reasoning is wrong.
/implicit/ that they are encoded in a certain way and the IDN software sorts all this out for you just as it would with Arabic or Chinese.
The IDN system is for international domain names, not just Russian domain names, a moment's thought will reveal to you that this means it must be based on Unicode. So it is
The fact that some obsolete software only works in KOI8, or whatever is irrelevant, none of that software will work with IDN without hefty modification.
Why should we "just" use ASCII for Internet DNS?
Actually that's the wrong question. We don't use ASCII, we use a very restricted subset of ASCII. The DNS infrastructure is quite capable of permitting domains called e.g. _;_.~ but they aren't human readable, so all but the most easily recognised ASCII characters were simply banned.
[Yup, banned. Most Unix resolvers just fail requests for domains like this without ever going to the network]
If we don't permit case-sensitive & don't allow wacky ASCII characters, why should we allow all sixty or so variations on the character 'a' that are recognised by Unicode? Just to make Verisign more money?
That's what this is really about BTW, Verisign needs to invent more "variations" of coke.com that can be registered to protect them from "pirates" so that Verisign shareholders can see "growth". Ugh.
There already IS a consistent method of cut n' pasting.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~njl98r/clipboard/
"The web browser I use at home has the copyright date set at 2002"
Sure, but the feature set of that browser would be more at home in 1997. Forget XML and DOM, these browsers have primitive Javascript and no CSS support at all.
To simulate this at home, get an early Netscape 4.x build and use a proxy to remove all style information from your web pages, then every time Netscape crashes, pull the power out from your computer (no crash protection in AmigaOS) and punch yourself in the side of the head hard.
Amigans are wrongly proud of their tradition of using inadequate, expensive and unsupported software. Misery, as they say, loves company.
If you're on a single user (or more or less single user, e.g. you and a couple of family members, housemates etc.) Unix system then there's an alternative way to disentangle plugins from the browser itself.
Create a directory ~/.mozilla/plugins
(that's right, beneath Mozilla's own dot directory)
Then move plugins you want into that directory (but only real plugins, not the null plugin or any other Moz-provided stuff)
This works for me, YMMV.
"Yes Apple licensed a codec, you want access to it find someone willing to pony up the cash like Apple did."
/legally/ give everyone the run around like this, but I don't think it's /ethical/ for them to do so. It may even be bad business.
/is/ rocket science and if Apple were serious about delivering for media people they'd put their codec money together with other people's and have the technology developed in the open. They can differentiate elsewhere without wasting all these resources on duplicated effort.
My understanding (and so this is 2nd hand, but I don't see you doing any better) is that when you call Apple they say "Ask Sorenson" and when you call Sorenson they say "Ask Apple".
Yes, they can
Worse, experience suggests that if a better alternative is developed and made free Apple AND Sorenson will do everything in their power to discourage their users from accessing this improved technology.
The duplicability versus scale problem hits big for this kind of stuff. Everyone hiring one or two academics, making them sign NDAs and keeping them apart is not the most effective way of delivering improved compression to real users. That's why we have a dozen competing "next generation" streaming audio codecs, none of which are universally available. [It would be nice to think that MS & Apple will see sense and ship Vorbis but don't count on it]
This
Cut and paste faults are BUGS in individual applications or toolkits. The XFree86 maintainers cannot fix these bugs by changing X, because X already does the right thing.
/really/ care.
In every serious X app you should be able to do both of the following:
1) Cut, Copy and Paste things through the system clipboard using menu options, keyboard shortcuts etc. as appropriate. e.g. Ctrl-X for cut in most GNOME, KDE apps. This works almost exactly like Windows.
2) Quick copy using the middle mouse button, select text in any application, then press the middle mouse button to paste that text in any other application.
If they don't work in your favourite apps, check for a new version. If that doesn't work either, file a bug, post to the mailing list, write to your democratic representative or complain ABOUT THE SPECIFIC APP on Slashdot. If you aren't specific no-one can help you.
Caveats:
Old KDE (pre 3.0) and Qt (ditto) apps (e.g. Opera and many installs of KOffice) don't work because Trolltech screwed up. Upgrade
Venerable old xterm doesn't have Cut/Copy/Paste menu items (most users don't even know it has a menu) so you can't use the clipboard only the fast copy feature. Use one of the many other modern terminal apps if you
Earlier (e.g. few months old) stable releases of Gnumeric make the same mistake as Qt2.x. Upgrade to the latest release.
GNU Emacs (but not XEmacs) has totally bizarre clipboard behaviour unrelated to any standard, principle or sense of reason. Use XEmacs or complain to your favourite Emacs maintainer.
The airmiles and Hotmail sites work for me, is it possible that you didn't install the PSM (the bit of a Mozilla based browser that handles crypto) ?
Hotmail is unreliable anyway, I wouldn't read much into problems logging in to Hotmail unless they're consistent and IE still works on the same machine, same time of day, same OS. Microsoft have never really had Hotmail stable since they migrated.
The missing lock icon on IGN is caused by some Javascript which is, you guessed it, IE only. For some reason they check whether you have IE > 4.x or NS > 5 and then do loads of proprietary IE DOM mangling. Tell them it sucks and (especially if you're a subscriber) they might fix it one day.
If it's any comfort their "test" for the lock icon is more ugly than you'd imagine without looking. Way more ugly. So it was probably written by an intern or a frightened Mac user who thinks programming is like dark magic.
I disagree very strongly. This is a popular consumer protection law. Getting those "watered down" is hard because ordinary people care about this stuff, they understand how to ask direct questions about it.
/this/ issue will come up during re-election. Did you weaken our DNC laws ? Who asked you to do that? Did they pay you off ? Why am I getting more calls I don't want?
/in favour/ of these consumer laws because it means more business for them. Unlike people selling aluminum siding these guys aren't hurting anyone and DO offer jobs with real pay for skilled workers.
So unlike an obscure tax accounting issue that really matters but requires a University education to undersand,
Even better the list cleaning / enforcement companies will lobby
Building good distribution structures isn't disastrous. Setting expectations correctly (you buy software? For this price, I don't think you get support. Want some support? Pay for it) isn't disastrous.
The people who aren't thinking long term are the information hoarders. They imagine that they are creating wealth, but it's a spreadsheet illusion, just like Enron. Still Enron got their share of co-operation from the US government, and so do Bill and the Mouse. Illusory wealth is as good as the real thing so long as you don't try to spend it.
Real wealth is locked up in people. Copyright is a fools bargain unless you have more information than other people. When the US was younger it did exactly what Malaysia does now, in America printed books were cheaper because the foreign authors weren't getting paid.
So, on the one hand you can expect these nations to "grow out of it" if they are permitted an even standing in the market. On the other hand it's a bad deal for everyone anyway. Simple mental arithmetic is enough to tell us that charging for infinitely reproducible copies isn't a sustainable policy. With or without "pirates" the analogue age is over.
I'm not sure what you mean by "OLE type interaction" but if you want to paste smart "objects" that aren't really copies but references then it's not the cut/copy/paste clipboard any more. This sort of thing has never fared much better in Windows than it does in Unix, a few apps support it fairly well, a lot either don't support it at all or don't support it well enough to be useful. Typical users either don't know it exists or avoid it because the surprise factor is too high.
The X clipboard as defined in ICCCM and clarified by Freedesktop _does_ support content negotiation, so it can handle a lot more than text. Users need to file RFEs to get their favourite apps to actually use this stuff, and developers need to agree standards for the content (pixmaps are obvious, but what about audio, or spreadsheet data, or 3D models)
There's nothing phony about self-certification. Since Verisign and other companies in the CA business don't actually do any useful checks or offer a reliable revocation method, you are just saving everyone involved money. If they /really/ want to be sure you're the real deal they will use out of band methods to verify the fingerprint. Yeah, right.
After all >90% of Windows users went for years without a working CA validation check in their crypto subsystem, so without manually opening and verifying the cert they couldn't tell if it was signed by a real CA anyway.
SSL is provably effective against passive snooping, and has some deterrent value against people with low motivation and minimal resources (e.g. script kiddies) but if you think buying a cheap-ass Verisign cert protects you against black hats then you're just another Voodoo security guy.
Huh? Doesn't the US have consumer protection laws?
If you have working consumer protection then a DOA machine is a joke on *them* not you, because they're going to be either refunding the money AND taking away the broken junk on their own dollar, or replacing the machine with one that works AND paying all the additional carriage charges both ways. Allowing a vendor to "repair" something that was supposed to be brand new is a sucker's game.
I know you have lemon laws for cars, so surely you have ordinary mail order and retail protection too?
I have personally lost money because of patents, and you have personally gained money because of patents. Neither of these things changes the fact that patents are morally wrong.
The 1st justification offered for patents is that they give inventors exclusive control of "their" invention. That's good right? No it isn't...
The patent system says that if a Microsoft employee invents a powerful new compression technique, and I invent the same technique, independently, later the same day, Microsoft get to prevent ME from using using MY invention simply by filing a bunch of paperwork.
Why? It's my invention too! Yet the government promises to back up their monopoly on this compression technique with force of arms, and this is supposed to encourage inventors?
The 2nd justification offered for patents is that they include disclosure. Everyone can find out how the patented thing works and improve on it.
Except that this doesn't happen. Software patents are written in a bizarre way that deliberately obfuscates the claim. In fact the patent office doesn't require that your invention even works at all. If it doesn't and someone else figures out how to fix it -- well they're infringing so you can sue them, put them out of business and then steal the fix for your own product.
So, I hope this briefly illustrates why patents are not something any independent programmer or small company in the IT sector should be enthusiastic about. Don't buy this guy's hype, he won a lottery than a lot of people lose and now he thinks he has a "system".
Please people, use what we were given by GNU instead of relying on half-remembered things from school.
$ units
1948 units, 71 prefixes, 28 functions
You have: 4000km
You want: miles
* 2485.4848
At a very reasonable 30 meters per second it would take 37 hours. If you were driving more quickly, say 45 meters per second it would take just over 24 hours. Even on completely empty roads I would not recommend travelling at more than 40-50 meters per second for safety reasons. Neither the roads nor the cars were really designed for such high speeds.
We did the arithmetic and he's completely right, in the UK at least. With our high usage we started saving money in just six months. Try filling in figures for your local suppliers below and see for yourself.
1 kW hour electricity costs --> £0.05
Incandescent bulb costs ------> £0.40
Fluorescent bulb costs -------> £5.99
input power (Incandescent) ---> 100W
input power (Fluorescent) ----> 22W
life time (Incandescent) -----> ~1000h
life time (Fluorescent) ------> ~5000h
After 1000 hours of use the incandescent bulb has cost £5.40 while the fluorescent bulb has cost £7.09. If you frequently destroy bulbs by accident or due to bad power this may be a deal breaker.
However after 3000 hours the conventional bulbs have cost you £17.00 and wasted half an hour of your life finding and installing replacement bulbs, while the fluorescent bulb has cost just £9.29 and is still running perfectly.
Many people object that fluorescent bulbs have a less pleasant color. Even if you find that to be the case, it's probably important only in a few areas of the house, places where you read or sew or use a PC. In utility areas, corridors etc. you can save a lot of money by using these low energy bulbs.
Adding focus-follows-eyes as a focus strategy is a poor approximation of the true pinnacle of X focus rules 'focus-follows-brain' in which the window manager arranges for focus to be given to the window you think has focus.
This satisfies the HCI principle of least surprise, because you will by definition never be surprised by this strategy. It is also more efficient than sloppy focus or even 'focus-follows-eyes' because it allows the operator to do lightning fast focus changes without losing track.
How many of you type while looking elsewhere? I know I do so all the time, and even if I just glance away for a moment a simple 'focus-follows-eyes' will be more frustrating than any 'click-to-focus' or 'root-gets-focus' strategy.
So we have to hold out for the big prize, focus-follows-brain and not accept anything less. A decent implementation will follow the brain not only to a window, but to individual graphical elements like entry widgets and this textbox.
All ICCCM compliant applications will work. We can't do any better than that, the ICCCM was published shortly after the last ice age, so anyone who hasn't read it, or didn't understand it is NOT OUR FAULT.
The GNOME developers cannot come to your house and fix the broken KDE 2.x install (which is the #1 reason for cut-copy-and-paste not working properly). Get KDE 3 and the problem goes away. That's not GNOME's fault.
The #2 most common complaint is caused by GNU Emacs, which has its own insane clipboard behaviour unique to that application. Use XEmacs instead if it bothers you, or complain to the Emacs maintainer. Not GNOME's fault.
The #3 source of problems is XChat, which does something moderately insane, I forget what exactly. If it bothers you, ask the XChat maintainer to fix it. Not GNOME's fault.
The #4 source of problems is Gnumeric 1.0, which has the same bug as KDE 2.x. This will be fixed in Gnumeric 1.2 even if I personally have to intervene.
If you find GNOME applications where Windows-style "Ctrl X/C/V" cut-n-paste doesn't work as expected, file a bug.
You are a heretic! Well, not quite...
:)
Personally I'm not a pro-audio person. I built XMMS LADSPA, which is pretty much the definition of "unprofessional". I do think this qualifies me to talk about the "state of the art" of audio on Linux though, so long as I don't use any audiophile phrases like 'warm, clean sound'
There definitely is decent soundcard support available for musicians. Not 100% coverage, but a good enough range that if you really wanted to do Linux audio work you'd find a pro card that is supported and meets your needs. The magic word here is 'ALSA'
Low-latency audio monitoring is definitely available, but not yet polished. See 'JACK'
24 Tracks? The limit here is your monitor (to see all the strips) and hard disk throughput. See 'Ardour'
There is an API for realtime effects on Linux. See 'LADSPA' but you might find the UIs a bit sparse compared to VST.
Even toy audio software like terminatorX has automation in Linux. I'm certain Ardour and other serious software must have it too if you ask.
If you join the Linux Audio Developer list you should be able to get help setting up a decent N-way digital I/O card with Ardour. That gives you a 24 channel 32bit 48kHz DAW, with realtime monitoring (as good as you'll get on Windows anyway), full automation, and a small but growing collection of effects (tape delays, pitch scaler, compress/expand etc.)
Is this as good as Logic today? No. Not really. Will it one day catch up with the state of the art on Windows or Mac? Well, maybe it will with your help
Amelie looks wonderful, doesn't it? The unreal use of colour in the movie must be a tribute to the flexibility and power of 35mm film?
Actually no, the colour was done digitally after filming was complete. No clever lighting, no messing around with optical effects when the film was developed, just some computer software and a lot of talented people.
If it was cheaper and easier (which, so far, it isn't) Amelie could have been shot digitally and the "film effect" applied as an additional stage in colour correction.
In case you're wondering why Bill doesn't like X11, he explains this on the Cosmoe mailing list. Basically Bill encountered the bug in Qt 2.x that means that you can't cut and paste between most KDE applications and most other apps.
So what did he do? Did he report the bug to the Trolls, or at least to KDE's devel team? No. He decided to create a new OS based on AtheOS, BeOS, Linux and anything else that creates hype. The only thing missing so far is a promise to build a next generation Amiga
Oh yeah, and Bill thinks X is ugly. But, he also thinks AtheOS and Cosmoe are ugly. He proposes to fix this by making Cosmoe look different, which will be very hard, rather than making X look different which is easy but doesn't get you on Slashdot.
Meanwhile every distro worth talking about either includes KDE 3.x or plans to do so very soon. So the bug that annoyed Bill is gone.