It's a matter of personal taste, but I was given a pair of very expensive noise-blocking earbuds, and I *hate* them. Firstly, to block the noise, you have to jam them into your ears till it hurts. And then, the "sound-stage" is moved to directly between the earbuds, so the orchestra sounds like it is inside my head(*). Ugh. I tend to prefer lightweight in-ear headphones with a folding headband for travel (much more comfortable), and proper fullsize headphones (not necessarily especially expensive) for non mobile listening. On aircraft, I've given up on classical music completely.
(*)If interested in this effect, try playing with sox, and the "earwax" plugin. Some samples are on the web too.
Admittedly I have quite a lot of open tabs (approx 200), but firefox is using approx 3GB. I have 2GB of RAM on a very fast PC, and a 6GB swapfile in order to keep it happy. What I don't understand is this: each tab should only consume a few kB for the actual tab state; the rest ought to be cached on *disk*. Also, storing just the html source of the page would be sufficient - it can re-render in near realtime anyway. So why such vast memory usage?
[The irony is, having a huge swapfile is essentially making firefox do what it should do anyway, namely using the disk for long-term storage]
I disagree. Brazil isn't "stealing" anything. They aren't stealing drugs whose manufacture, ingredients, packaging and transport Merck paid for. Brazil have just asserted that they will not grant Merck an intellectual *monopoly*. And why is it fair that Merck get all the profits, and nothing goes to the universities, scientists, doctors, farmers, (and probably the 3rd world country where they first found interesting plant compounds).
1)Brazil is a poor country, and people are dying. Merck aren't going to go bust any time soon, since they charge a fortune in the developed world.
2)The major problem with "IP" is that the "owners" didn't do very much of the work. Almost all the knowledge and research required for this drug was already done by other scientists, and placed in the public domain. Then the pharmaceuticals companies lay claim to *all* of it, via patent, when they ought only to receive payment for the work they actually did. Merck et al. do valuable work (extra research, testing, and manufacturing), and they do deserve payment for this - but they shouldn't have outright control.
That's fair to some extent. But remember:
1)Legally, you have a right to make fair-use excerpts. DRM prevents that.
2)Legally, everything goes into the public domain eventually. DRM prevents that.
3)DRM is an enabling technology for censorship (eg "un-leakable documents") Do we really want that?
Lastly, there is NO natural right to the so-called "intellectual property". Society grants a temporary monopoly to artists as a concession.
I really don't want to be governed by a party that people couldn't even be bothered to spend 10 minutes voting for. One advantage of the current system is that it explicitly disenfranchises anyone who doesn't care enough to vote.
Furthermore, the security/anonymity issues for e-voting are fatal. And it's not like the current system is even slightly broken: in the UK, you can vote from 8am-10pm, usually within 1/2 mile of your house, and never have to queue more than 5 minutes (usually not at all). Postal votes already cover the infirm/elderly/ex-pats.
No. The customers are already paying their DSL provider for the DSL line, and the ability to send $x GB/month over it. Your analogy isn't correct. Also, Verizon isn't playing fair by honest competition; they are doing something fundamentally dishonest, namely using a legal tool (which should never exist) to obtain a monoply.
Re pharmaceuticals, let me illustrate with the UK. Here, at least 95% of all health spending is spent by the NHS (National Health Service), therefore (indirectly), by the government/taxpayer. Drug development is financed by high sale prices. [Data: when a drug goes generic after patents expire, its cost falls to about 20%; also the big pharma companies spend about 15% of turnover on R therefore the true cost of a drug is about 35% of its sale price]. I think that govt/universities should fund all the research, and contract out clinical trials/manufacturing to the big pharma companies, but not give them any IP. The taxpayer still funds everything, but more efficiently.
There are some other important considerations:
1)Even now, most of the work on a new drug is done by universities or by charities. So most of the IP "belongs" to the citizens anyway. The drug companies get a disproportionate return for their share.
2)Ethical issues: people can make progress/cooperate/publish without worrying about legal issues; researchers can work on fields in which there is only a small market for sales; 3rd world citizens can have access to drugs at cost price; combinations of drugs in a single pill can be manufactured without needing approval from each IP owner.
3)Safety: there's no commercial pressure to market a dangerous drug.
I think the UK should unilaterally abandon patents - and it would be hugely good for our economy.
1. standardized operation for ALL applicatation. --> It does, check out dcop or it's replacement d-bus. Through shell, perl, c++, qt... you can communicate between any application in both fore- and background.
Except that dcop doesn't actually do very much that's useful, because most applications are missing the hooks. Klipper works great, eg:
echo "hello world" | dcop klipper klipper setClipboardContents "`cat`" #send STDOUT directly to clipboard
But why can't we script kcontrol? For example, it would be nice to be able to set up KDE preferences from a shell script. Eg:
dcop kcontrol 'window behaviour' 'window behaviour' focus 'Focus Follows Mouse'
Sadly, most of the things that one would really like to automate can't be done in practice by dcop.
>> 4. Uniform operation of input devices (mouse).. > What's your problem with that? Any mouse I connect works and the mouse buttons too. Mainly an issue of configuration (which can be done > from within KDE), doesn't matter which OS you use.
Would be nice to be able to (re-)configure mice from within X, and not have to re-start the X-server each time though./dev/input/mice does everything one could want, even allowing hotplugging of mice to a running X session. BUT, it's no good when you want to do anything advanced. For example, I use a 3-button trackpoint which has emulate-wheel + emulate-scroll + emulate-horizscroll, together with a regular USB wheelmouse. These have to be accessed directly from/dev/input/mouseX and separately configured.
I agree sort of - but the order of magnitudes are insignificant.
Wind/Solar will (very slightly) cool the planet, by converting solar enegery -> electricity - but this will be released as heat anyway, eventually. Likewise, tidal power will make the moon move further away, and slow down the day-length. However, the fractions involved are tiny! The preference for nuclear over renewables is simply a practical one. Fossil fuels don't significantly create global warming because of the energy released when we burn them; fossil fuels cause global warming because the byproduct (CO2) acts to trap solar-radiation, and is long-lived in the atmosphere.
Anyway, even if we could cut our energy use per head by 50%, the whole of the 3rd world is gaining in living standards, and ought to reach our standard of living (and energy use) within ~ 50 years. We need, therefore, to aim for a 90% cut in CO2/head within 20 years. There's no way we could cut our energy use by that much (without huge sacrifices) - the good news is we don't have to.
Much better to say "use as much electricity as you like", provided that "the electricity does not come from fossil fuels". Seriously, why do so many politicians confuse the amount of energy use with the source of that energy. Just ban coal/oil/gas fired power-stations, and global warming will be solved.(*)
(*)Slight oversimplification: we'd also need electric cars, and electric heat-pumps for houses. And I haven't considered aviation here.
Fair point about KDE/Gnome - it is a personal choice. One should try both though; also KDE has some apps which are definitely better than the Gnome ones (and vice-versa). I'd pick Abiword,Gnumeric,Gimp,Konsole,Konqueror,Amarok,Kwr ite. One snag with the wine appdb is that sometimes, a newer version of wine will temporarily break things. As for lack of ubuntu wiki updates, you know what to do about that:-)
Wine can indeed sometimes be painful. However, sometimes it works perfectly. It depends on the application. My recommendation is this: install Ubuntu, then install KDE on it (so you still get all the Gnome apps), then spend 1 hour on the ubuntu wiki to configure DVD/MP3 etc. Then, install the very latest release of wine from winehq.com (they release ubuntu builds). Try it, and see. Chances are, you'll be happy.
P.S. If you have enough RAM, you can temporarily install packages like wine while running the liveCD. This makes testing really really easy.
It would be much easier to just switch our electricity production to nuclear. Then, we can all continue to use energy as we like. Furthermore, instead of massive changes throughout the population (with little real effect), we only require changes from the electricity generating companies.
> I love the privacy and security features in FF 1.5, where you can easily disable images or cookies from external servers, without having > to manually edit the config file. Those options are missing in FF 2.0.
I hadn't spotted that, but you're right. Have you filed a bug report on this? If so, what is it, and I'll CC myself on it.
The fonts on Ubuntu 6.10 are a known bug. Sadly, it seems that 6.10 users will never get a bug fix (or backport), even though it has been fixed upstream, and we have to wait for the next Ubuntu release. The root cause of the font issue is Apple and their wretched software patent on the bytecode interpreter. Is there any way we can persuade the (supposedly free-software friendly) Apple to put this patent into the public domain - or at least promise not to enforce it?
Interesting point. Personally, I think that the so-called "widescreen" monitors ought to be re-named as "shortscreen". Apart from watching DVDs, they are a real nuisance. Furthermore, the screen area of an (apparently larger) widescreen monitor is less than its standard monitor equivalent: a 17" widescreen LCD (at 16x9) has almost exactly the same area as a 15" regular (3x4) screen.
[There's a lot to like about the T60p laptop's monitor: 15" 1600x1200 pixels:-) ]
Unfortunately, DRM that allows for fair use and for copyright expiration isn't even theoretically possible. Also, even if the DRM rules permitted every reasonable use they could think of, some future development in technology would be sure to clash with it.
Not a bad point - but when the machine in question is a desktop (therefore unlikely to have proper power management), and is also a web-server, dhcp-server, NAT firewall, gets used 14 hours a day, and runs automated backups (both ways, several systems) at 3 in the morning, switching it off isn't quite such a good idea!
What's the point of shutting down a computer (except for hardware upgrades)? My desktop stays on for months at a time, so it's always ready to use. Furthermore, I can return to the 30 or so open windows (on several virtual desktops) and be exactly where I left. Also, if I'm away from my desk, I know I can ssh in. And it can run all the cron jobs at night, rather when it is restarted. [Of course, I do save power by getting the screensaver to DPMS off the monitor after 20 minutes]
So, if I only boot once every 100 days, what does an extra 30 seconds mean? Admittedly, on laptops you have more of a point, but you can leave it running for 2 hours on battery, or suspend to ram/disk.
Yes, but escape sequences in English look barbarous! May I suggest either avoiding the problem, by using square brackets:
"[that was funny:)]" or at least regaining clarity by inserting an extra space:
"(that was funny:) )" It's a similar problem in English to ending a sentence with a URL. I usually insert spaces:
"Please visit http://www.example.com/."
All the above are, of course, quote-delimited. Actually, it would be nice if we had separate ASCII for all 5 of:
{open,close}{single,double}-quote,apostrophe.
This could have been handled much better. Google ought to have offered whatever assistance necessary to help the gaia project become an offical client, perhaps by helping them to use google's API, and adding to this API if it was insufficient. Then, everyone would have been happy.
Furthermore, google's license with their upstream provider is not binding upon any 3rd party. If they want to deny access, then they should be doing so on the basis of an encrypted connection. [Actually, even that might fall foul of interoperability laws]
Slashdot Mirror
Now, combine that with a high efficiency keyboard illuminator (eg thinkLight), and it can power itself in the dark!
It's a matter of personal taste, but I was given a pair of very expensive noise-blocking earbuds, and I *hate* them. Firstly, to block the noise, you have to jam them into your ears till it hurts. And then, the "sound-stage" is moved to directly between the earbuds, so the orchestra sounds like it is inside my head(*). Ugh. I tend to prefer lightweight in-ear headphones with a folding headband for travel (much more comfortable), and proper fullsize headphones (not necessarily especially expensive) for non mobile listening. On aircraft, I've given up on classical music completely.
(*)If interested in this effect, try playing with sox, and the "earwax" plugin. Some samples are on the web too.
about 20 windows.
Admittedly I have quite a lot of open tabs (approx 200), but firefox is using approx 3GB. I have 2GB of RAM on a very fast PC, and a 6GB swapfile in order to keep it happy.
What I don't understand is this: each tab should only consume a few kB for the actual tab state; the rest ought to be cached on *disk*. Also, storing just the html source of the page would be sufficient - it can re-render in near realtime anyway. So why such vast memory usage?
[The irony is, having a huge swapfile is essentially making firefox do what it should do anyway, namely using the disk for long-term storage]
I disagree. Brazil isn't "stealing" anything. They aren't stealing drugs whose manufacture, ingredients, packaging and transport Merck paid for. Brazil have just asserted that they will not grant Merck an intellectual *monopoly*. And why is it fair that Merck get all the profits, and nothing goes to the universities, scientists, doctors, farmers, (and probably the 3rd world country where they first found interesting plant compounds).
Remember:
1)Brazil is a poor country, and people are dying. Merck aren't going to go bust any time soon, since they charge a fortune in the developed world.
2)The major problem with "IP" is that the "owners" didn't do very much of the work. Almost all the knowledge and research required for this drug was already done by other scientists, and placed in the public domain. Then the pharmaceuticals companies lay claim to *all* of it, via patent, when they ought only to receive payment for the work they actually did. Merck et al. do valuable work (extra research, testing, and manufacturing), and they do deserve payment for this - but they shouldn't have outright control.
That's fair to some extent. But remember:
1)Legally, you have a right to make fair-use excerpts. DRM prevents that.
2)Legally, everything goes into the public domain eventually. DRM prevents that.
3)DRM is an enabling technology for censorship (eg "un-leakable documents") Do we really want that?
Lastly, there is NO natural right to the so-called "intellectual property". Society grants a temporary monopoly to artists as a concession.
I really don't want to be governed by a party that people couldn't even be bothered to spend 10 minutes voting for. One advantage of the current system is that it explicitly disenfranchises anyone who doesn't care enough to vote.
Furthermore, the security/anonymity issues for e-voting are fatal. And it's not like the current system is even slightly broken: in the UK, you can vote from 8am-10pm, usually within 1/2 mile of your house, and never have to queue more than 5 minutes (usually not at all). Postal votes already cover the infirm/elderly/ex-pats.
No. The customers are already paying their DSL provider for the DSL line, and the ability to send $x GB /month over it.
Your analogy isn't correct. Also, Verizon isn't playing fair by honest competition; they are doing something fundamentally dishonest, namely using a legal tool (which should never exist) to obtain a monoply.
Re pharmaceuticals, let me illustrate with the UK. Here, at least 95% of all health spending is spent by the NHS (National Health Service), therefore (indirectly), by the government/taxpayer. Drug development is financed by high sale prices. [Data: when a drug goes generic after patents expire, its cost falls to about 20%; also the big pharma companies spend about 15% of turnover on R therefore the true cost of a drug is about 35% of its sale price]. I think that govt/universities should fund all the research, and contract out clinical trials/manufacturing to the big pharma companies, but not give them any IP. The taxpayer still funds everything, but more efficiently.
There are some other important considerations:
1)Even now, most of the work on a new drug is done by universities or by charities. So most of the IP "belongs" to the citizens anyway.
The drug companies get a disproportionate return for their share.
2)Ethical issues: people can make progress/cooperate/publish without worrying about legal issues; researchers can work on fields in which there is only a small market for sales; 3rd world citizens can have access to drugs at cost price; combinations of drugs in a single pill can be manufactured without needing approval from each IP owner.
3)Safety: there's no commercial pressure to market a dangerous drug.
I think the UK should unilaterally abandon patents - and it would be hugely good for our economy.
1. standardized operation for ALL applicatation.
/dev/input/mice does everything one could want, even allowing hotplugging of mice to a running X session. BUT, it's no good when you want to do anything advanced. For example, I use a 3-button trackpoint which has emulate-wheel + emulate-scroll + emulate-horizscroll, together with a regular USB wheelmouse. These have to be accessed directly from /dev/input/mouseX and separately configured.
--> It does, check out dcop or it's replacement d-bus. Through shell, perl, c++, qt... you can communicate between any application in both fore- and background.
Except that dcop doesn't actually do very much that's useful, because most applications are missing the hooks. Klipper works great, eg:
echo "hello world" | dcop klipper klipper setClipboardContents "`cat`" #send STDOUT directly to clipboard
But why can't we script kcontrol? For example, it would be nice to be able to set up KDE preferences from a shell script. Eg:
dcop kcontrol 'window behaviour' 'window behaviour' focus 'Focus Follows Mouse'
Sadly, most of the things that one would really like to automate can't be done in practice by dcop.
>> 4. Uniform operation of input devices (mouse)..
> What's your problem with that? Any mouse I connect works and the mouse buttons too. Mainly an issue of configuration (which can be done
> from within KDE), doesn't matter which OS you use.
Would be nice to be able to (re-)configure mice from within X, and not have to re-start the X-server each time though.
I agree sort of - but the order of magnitudes are insignificant.
Wind/Solar will (very slightly) cool the planet, by converting solar enegery -> electricity - but this will be released as heat anyway, eventually. Likewise, tidal power will make the moon move further away, and slow down the day-length. However, the fractions involved are tiny! The preference for nuclear over renewables is simply a practical one. Fossil fuels don't significantly create global warming because of the energy released when we burn them; fossil fuels cause global warming because the byproduct (CO2) acts to trap solar-radiation, and is long-lived in the atmosphere.
Anyway, even if we could cut our energy use per head by 50%, the whole of the 3rd world is gaining in living standards, and ought to reach our standard of living (and energy use) within ~ 50 years. We need, therefore, to aim for a 90% cut in CO2/head within 20 years. There's no way we could cut our energy use by that much (without huge sacrifices) - the good news is we don't have to.
Much better to say "use as much electricity as you like", provided that "the electricity does not come from fossil fuels". Seriously, why do so many politicians confuse the amount of energy use with the source of that energy. Just ban coal/oil/gas fired power-stations, and global warming will be solved.(*)
(*)Slight oversimplification: we'd also need electric cars, and electric heat-pumps for houses. And I haven't considered aviation here.
Fair point about KDE/Gnome - it is a personal choice. One should try both though; also KDE has some apps which are definitely better than the Gnome ones (and vice-versa). I'd pick Abiword,Gnumeric,Gimp,Konsole,Konqueror,Amarok,Kwr ite. One snag with the wine appdb is that sometimes, a newer version of wine will temporarily break things. As for lack of ubuntu wiki updates, you know what to do about that :-)
Wine can indeed sometimes be painful. However, sometimes it works perfectly. It depends on the application. My recommendation is this: install Ubuntu, then install KDE on it (so you still get all the Gnome apps), then spend 1 hour on the ubuntu wiki to configure DVD/MP3 etc. Then, install the very latest release of wine from winehq.com (they release ubuntu builds). Try it, and see. Chances are, you'll be happy.
P.S. If you have enough RAM, you can temporarily install packages like wine while running the liveCD. This makes testing really really easy.
It would be much easier to just switch our electricity production to nuclear. Then, we can all continue to use energy as we like. Furthermore, instead of massive changes throughout the population (with little real effect), we only require changes from the electricity generating companies.
> I love the privacy and security features in FF 1.5, where you can easily disable images or cookies from external servers, without having
> to manually edit the config file. Those options are missing in FF 2.0.
I hadn't spotted that, but you're right. Have you filed a bug report on this? If so, what is it, and I'll CC myself on it.
The fonts on Ubuntu 6.10 are a known bug. Sadly, it seems that 6.10 users will never get a bug fix (or backport), even though it has been fixed upstream, and we have to wait for the next Ubuntu release. The root cause of the font issue is Apple and their wretched software patent on the bytecode interpreter. Is there any way we can persuade the (supposedly free-software friendly) Apple to put this patent into the public domain - or at least promise not to enforce it?
Interesting point. Personally, I think that the so-called "widescreen" monitors ought to be re-named as "shortscreen". Apart from watching DVDs, they are a real nuisance. Furthermore, the screen area of an (apparently larger) widescreen monitor is less than its standard monitor equivalent: a 17" widescreen LCD (at 16x9) has almost exactly the same area as a 15" regular (3x4) screen.
:-) ]
[There's a lot to like about the T60p laptop's monitor: 15" 1600x1200 pixels
Unfortunately, DRM that allows for fair use and for copyright expiration isn't even theoretically possible. Also, even if the DRM rules permitted every reasonable use they could think of, some future development in technology would be sure to clash with it.
Not a bad point - but when the machine in question is a desktop (therefore unlikely to have proper power management), and is also a web-server, dhcp-server, NAT firewall, gets used 14 hours a day, and runs automated backups (both ways, several systems) at 3 in the morning, switching it off isn't quite such a good idea!
What's the point of shutting down a computer (except for hardware upgrades)? My desktop stays on for months at a time, so it's always ready to use. Furthermore, I can return to the 30 or so open windows (on several virtual desktops) and be exactly where I left. Also, if I'm away from my desk, I know I can ssh in. And it can run all the cron jobs at night, rather when it is restarted. [Of course, I do save power by getting the screensaver to DPMS off the monitor after 20 minutes]
So, if I only boot once every 100 days, what does an extra 30 seconds mean? Admittedly, on laptops you have more of a point, but you can leave it running for 2 hours on battery, or suspend to ram/disk.
There are still some slim ones, eg DSL and puppylinux. I think that you can also optimise gentoo quite easily for small size.
Yes, but escape sequences in English look barbarous! May I suggest either avoiding the problem, by using square brackets: ."
"[that was funny:)]"
or at least regaining clarity by inserting an extra space:
"(that was funny:) )"
It's a similar problem in English to ending a sentence with a URL. I usually insert spaces:
"Please visit http://www.example.com/
All the above are, of course, quote-delimited. Actually, it would be nice if we had separate ASCII for all 5 of:
{open,close}{single,double}-quote,apostrophe.
This could have been handled much better. Google ought to have offered whatever assistance necessary to help the gaia project become an offical client, perhaps by helping them to use google's API, and adding to this API if it was insufficient. Then, everyone would have been happy.
Furthermore, google's license with their upstream provider is not binding upon any 3rd party. If they want to deny access, then they should be doing so on the basis of an encrypted connection. [Actually, even that might fall foul of interoperability laws]