Could these moves signal the beginning of a period of rapid improvement in Free drivers for video cards?
Only if nVidia and/or ATI follow suit. (I know that in some cases they can't, but they could take an approach like Netscape and Sun did, release everything you do own and leave out the stuff you don't).
Since when is it the RIAA's job to enforce the Internet2 terms of service (or spirit or whatever)? Has Internet2 actually complained about all the file sharing?
I believe the subversion refered to the act of "researchers" sharing files, not the RIAA invading the Internet2 (or however you want to characterize their activity). Though, both activites certainly qualify. Think about it, the RIAA can make that statement about both what they did and what the researches did, as the researches can make the same statement about what they did as well as what the RIAA did.
I honestly don't know which I find more troubling: the researches misappropriating a network designed with the express purpose of furhtering research, or the RIAA gaining dubious access to the same network. In the former case, I think it erodes public trust in academia. Statements like "a Johns Hopkins study shows..." won't carry the same weight if people don't trust academia. In the latter case, well I don't think I need to say much about the bad precedent it sets to let a private corporate entity have pseudo-law enforcement power.
You know, that a Best Buy would have such an ignorant cashier (who now claims the bills were "smudged" and so "appeared to be counterfeit") does not surprise me in the least. It happens. Lots of people are stupid.
You should try paying in Susan B. Anthony dollars someplace. Even though coins are struck with "One dollar" right on the face, some people insist that they are quarters. Very annoying.
I'd be more interested in looking at a brief history of Internet Explorer, for the same reasons that they teach kids history in school. (to prevent it from repeating).
I know you are trying to be funny, but only a fool feels that his own history is not worth examining. (Hint: Mozilla has made mistakes in its own past that we should try and avoid repeating in the future.)
I'm not judging anything other than his lack of foresight that got him into this mess in the first place.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. My last comment was directed at the collective-knee-jerk-reacting-slashbots that come frothing at the mouth to every YRO article. I agree that some questionable things have happened, but it is still too early to tell what is really going on in this case.
Freedom of speech does not exist, don't try to test it. They will come bust down your door - for real - point a gun to your head and pull the trigger if you refuse to comply.
Someone that is so against government control and intrusion should have known that this inevitability would occur at some point. Why didn't they take the time to protect themselves especially when they (and/or their family) could be harmed by the very people they host discussions for who could become enraged by their actions?
Not only that, but did his site(s) get shutdown? My guess is that this currently an investigation in progress. If people start disappearing without due process or his sites are shut down, then he has a legitimate gripe. Contrary to popular belief, freedom of speech does not entitle you to say anything you want (e.g., threatening to kill someone, yelling fire! in a crowded building, etc.)
We should reserve judgment until the details become available.
I feel sorry for the poor bastards that would have to go back to storing and reproducing everything to and from microfiche if and when we find out that digital media might not have the necessary longevity we require.
I feel sorry for our society and culture when I think of how much information and content is now only available digitally. Don't get me wrong, digital is good: it provides quick access, easy searching, etc. However, It is still new technology (especially with the constant advances in material science) and we don't really understand how it will last over the long haul. Look at the recent push to move to acid-free paper for archival of books and journals. I think that for the longhaul, we should continue to archive in tried and true (microfiche is a good example) media.
Really? Just a troll? So you think that it does NOT desensitize children to see video footage of ACTUAL PEOPLE being mutilated, hear about ACTUAL PEOPLE being tortured, beheaded, etc. but it DOES desensitize children to play a game that PRETENDS to do these things? Wow.
YES. It is just a troll. He blamed it on the government. I think it is wrong for children to see that stuff. It is also wrong to blame the government for the immoral actions of the ratings hungry mass media. Please blame, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX instead.
The government is not using television to desensitize kids (please examine how much more willing we as a society accepted casualties in WWII versus the Gulf). The media is using this to generate higher ratings and ad revenues and they don't care a whit whether or not children are exposed to it.
Hmmm, what about the US Government desensitizing these same children using the same television by killing and torturing real people during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or announcing that the head of the US Government was getting his...
This is just a troll.
The parents are letting their children play GTA and they are letting them watch the news. It's up to the parents of these children to give them direction in life not Senator Clinton or anyone else.
Ah, you finally get it. The Government is neither responsible for causing this phenomenon (as you claim above), nor should it be responsible for putting a stop to it. Let parents to the parenting. Don't ban or blast these games or their makers, educate the parents on the responsibility of parenthood.
Seriously, you must have a license, to drive a car, fish, hunt, act as a business, and so on. No such requirement for being a parent. Not saying that we should license people to be parents, but does it not strike anyone else as odd that a certain level of competency must be demonstrated before you can get in an automobile and drive, but not to have a child.
I'd like someone to sit down the youngsters in our country and try to explain to them how killing or torturing someone in a war that was permitted under false pretenses is morally acceptable but allowing an incapacitated woman to pass away peacefully is not.
This is an even better troll.
Or how the President willed a young woman to... was still allowed to run this "moral" country after he was found guilty of lying?
Did you write your congressman about it?
Let's have our parents teach us the morals they believe not the mixed messages that the US Government is sending.
This makes sense now.
Too bad you troll for half your post. Otherwise, a couple of insightful points.
Thus my standard sequence of events is to go to one of the PC labs on campus, print to PDF using Acrobat and setting it to 9-up, then copying the PDF file to my commp sci network space, going to the Solaris labs, and printing the PDF. I'd like to streamline this process. Any idea?
You can't even print multiple copies of a document using xpdf/gpdf.
I don't know about gpdf (don't use it), but in xpdf, when you hit the print button, in the "Print with command box", just add a '-#' (without quotes) followed by the number of copies you want. It is a standard option to the lpr command and CUPS obeys it as well.
Bloat or not, it is still the best reader for Adobe Acrobat files.
It's only bloated if you have a problem with sacrificing ~100 MB of hard drive space. Seriously who worries about that on a reasonably modern desktop? I just bought to 160 GB drives the other day for US$ 80 each. Drive space is not a problem.
I have been using the new version for a week and much more impressed with it than I was with version 5.
Here are the things I like:
Uses GTK. I am not GTK fanboy (I prefer GNUStep), but at least it is better than that awful interface the previous versions had.
Mozilla plugin that works just like it does on the popular legacy operating system still floating around out there.
It is basically a tar file, no hidden toolbars to install for you.
Way snappier than the previous version.
No more having to mess with numlock to get pgup/pgdn working.
Has preference settings for a MUA a web browser and several other apps you can launch for various functions (e.g., I open a PDF in Firefox and click the email button to see it open a new compose window in Thunderbird with the PDF I am viewing in Firefox already attached. Sweet!)
Things I don't like:
The went to that blasted MDI. I want every flipping document to open in its own window. Is that so hard? Is it too much to ask?
The OK button in all the dialogs is squished, quite annoying.
You must manually include it in your menu. It should at least hit the majors (GNOME, KDE).
We also demand that you provide us with information concerning the extent of your uses of any elements of the SCRABBLE game, as well as information regarding the distribution of your electronic Scrabble game to enable us to assess more precisely the extent of the damage done.
Ummm. He doesn't charge people anything and the "distribution" is limited to people coming to his website. Heck, the site even has a disclaimer at the bottom. Really, is this any different than hosting a big 24/7 get together in some public park where people can come play Scrabble all they want?
Yes, Symantec have a vested interest up the wazoo for that press release.
No kidding. It's not like they sell products for the Mac. They would stand in no way to benefit from alerting the community to this issue. They are doing it out of an altruistic sense of responsibility to the public.
If you release complete documentation of said hardware...
True. The trend seems to be that many F/OSS projects prefer to develop the drivers themselves (as it assures them a known level quality from reliable developers). That is not to say they don't trust the developers in many hardware companies. But let's face it, a EE sometimes makes a crappy programmer (and I have pleny of EE-wielding friends that work for hardware companies and end up getting pressed into service writing drivers for hardware when they would rather be designing the next batch of hardware).
Failing that, as long as the F/OSS people can QA the stuff and suggest modifications it will eventually make it in. This can be seen in the all the back-and-forth between the Linux kernel developers and SGI over getting support for XFS into the kernel, which ultimately resulted the XFS patches getting accepted into Linus' tree.
Why do they stick their heads in the holy sand all the time, why can't they just accept that people have different views and should be allowed to express them.
It makes me sick that religious wackos are given all the freedom to worship/teach/live as they please, but fuck everyone else over with their righteous bullshit.
Why is it that people insist on categorizing all fundamentalists as being the same? I am a fundamentalist Bible-believing Christian, but that doesn't mean that I checked my intelligence at the door.
It makes me sick that people can't fathom the concept that within such a large group you will have people at all extremes. Is it OK to assume that all black people are violent gang members and criminals because a few make the evening news for doing a drive by shooting? I didn't think so. That would be racist and prejudicial, you know assuming that every member of a particular diverse group is the same based on the actions of a few?
What about 4 space tabs? That's IMHO the best compromise between readability & vertical space use, and what I have been using for the last 12 years.
From "Code Complete":
Indentation has been shown to be correlated with increased programmer comprehension. The artcile "Program Indentation and Comprehensibility" reported that several studies found correlations between indentation and improved comprehension (Miaria et al. 1983). Subjects scored 20 to 30 percent higher on a test of comprehension when programs had a two-to-four-spaces indentation scheme than they did when programs had no indentation at all.
The same study found that it was important to neither under-emphasize nor over-emphasize a program's logical structure. The lower comprehension scores were achieved on programs that were not indented at all. The second lowest were achieved on programs that used six-space indentation. The studey concluded that two-to-four-space indentation was optimal. Interestingly, many subjects in the experiment felt that the six-space indentation was easier to use than the smaller indentations, even though their scores were lower. That's probably because six-space indentation looks pleasing. Bet regardless of how pretty it looks, six-space indentation turns out to be less readable. This is an example of a collision between aesthetic appeal and readbility.
The moral of the story is that even if you think it looks nice, it can impact the ability of people to understand the code. In an open source project where you want people to contribute, you need to lower the barrier as much as possible to ensure that there is a larger pool of potential contributors.
And if you have only had problems with position: fixed you must not ever work with floats, margins, max-width, hovers on things that aren't links, etc.etc. the list goes on and on.
In fact, I use each and every one of the elements you mention. I haven't encountered anything serious with them. Occasionally I'll get an element whose placement is a few pixels off from where I would like in one browser or another, but I can live with that.
Even when you design a standards compliant webpage you still need to use hacks to get things to work and validate correctly.
This is something I never understood. Granted I don't develop huge pages, but the pages that I have developed (personal, for my church and other small organizations) have these criteria/features:
All validate XHTML 1.0 Strict
All validate CSS
All look good in Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, IE5.5, IE6, Dillo, Lynx, Links and eLinks
The only thing that works in Moz/Firefox/Opera that does not work in IE is the "position: fixed" attribute on some things. But that is not crucial to the look of the page, it is just nice to have.
The thing is that it delivers the exact same HTML/CSS to every browser (no UserAgent checking) and even looks correct in the browsers that ignore CSS.
I got the idea for the design of the sites I have done from Eric Meyer's CSS site. The only difference is that I have made some minor tweaks to get the page to look good in pretty much every browser.
If you were developing some massive site, I could see running into some problems. However, the biggest issue with IE is CSS, and once you have the CSS how you like it, you include the same one in every page.
Also, anyone know of a client program that will recursively create folders on an IMAP server (maybe a server issue. In which case, what server?)
AFAIK, most IMAP servers support only messages OR folders in any particular folder. The only one of which I am aware that supports both messages AND folders in the same folder is Cyrus. It happens to be the one I run, but it takes some work to get it setup properly.
or even to batch remail each message one at a time if your new email client uses some undocumented storage format, or is an online service like GMail.
This neat little procmail recipe (I came across it a while back, but I forget exactly where) does exactly what you describe. First, create a file (i use forwarder in this example) with these contents:
Slashdot Mirror
Could these moves signal the beginning of a period of rapid improvement in Free drivers for video cards?
Only if nVidia and/or ATI follow suit. (I know that in some cases they can't, but they could take an approach like Netscape and Sun did, release everything you do own and leave out the stuff you don't).
Since when is it the RIAA's job to enforce the Internet2 terms of service (or spirit or whatever)? Has Internet2 actually complained about all the file sharing?
I believe the subversion refered to the act of "researchers" sharing files, not the RIAA invading the Internet2 (or however you want to characterize their activity). Though, both activites certainly qualify. Think about it, the RIAA can make that statement about both what they did and what the researches did, as the researches can make the same statement about what they did as well as what the RIAA did.
I honestly don't know which I find more troubling: the researches misappropriating a network designed with the express purpose of furhtering research, or the RIAA gaining dubious access to the same network. In the former case, I think it erodes public trust in academia. Statements like "a Johns Hopkins study shows ..." won't carry the same weight if people don't trust academia. In the latter case, well I don't think I need to say much about the bad precedent it sets to let a private corporate entity have pseudo-law enforcement power.
Quote: "Linux is free, but the support for it is not."
So what? It's not free for Windows either.
You know, that a Best Buy would have such an ignorant cashier (who now claims the bills were "smudged" and so "appeared to be counterfeit") does not surprise me in the least. It happens. Lots of people are stupid.
You should try paying in Susan B. Anthony dollars someplace. Even though coins are struck with "One dollar" right on the face, some people insist that they are quarters. Very annoying.
Is Obtaining a Windows Refund Still Difficult?
No. It is practically impossible. Next question, please.
I'd be more interested in looking at a brief history of Internet Explorer, for the same reasons that they teach kids history in school. (to prevent it from repeating).
I know you are trying to be funny, but only a fool feels that his own history is not worth examining. (Hint: Mozilla has made mistakes in its own past that we should try and avoid repeating in the future.)
I'm not judging anything other than his lack of foresight that got him into this mess in the first place.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. My last comment was directed at the collective-knee-jerk-reacting-slashbots that come frothing at the mouth to every YRO article. I agree that some questionable things have happened, but it is still too early to tell what is really going on in this case.
Someone that is so against government control and intrusion should have known that this inevitability would occur at some point. Why didn't they take the time to protect themselves especially when they (and/or their family) could be harmed by the very people they host discussions for who could become enraged by their actions?
Not only that, but did his site(s) get shutdown? My guess is that this currently an investigation in progress. If people start disappearing without due process or his sites are shut down, then he has a legitimate gripe. Contrary to popular belief, freedom of speech does not entitle you to say anything you want (e.g., threatening to kill someone, yelling fire! in a crowded building, etc.)
We should reserve judgment until the details become available.
I feel sorry for the poor bastards that would have to go back to storing and reproducing everything to and from microfiche if and when we find out that digital media might not have the necessary longevity we require.
I feel sorry for our society and culture when I think of how much information and content is now only available digitally. Don't get me wrong, digital is good: it provides quick access, easy searching, etc. However, It is still new technology (especially with the constant advances in material science) and we don't really understand how it will last over the long haul. Look at the recent push to move to acid-free paper for archival of books and journals. I think that for the longhaul, we should continue to archive in tried and true (microfiche is a good example) media.
Really? Just a troll? So you think that it does NOT desensitize children to see video footage of ACTUAL PEOPLE being mutilated, hear about ACTUAL PEOPLE being tortured, beheaded, etc. but it DOES desensitize children to play a game that PRETENDS to do these things? Wow.
YES. It is just a troll. He blamed it on the government. I think it is wrong for children to see that stuff. It is also wrong to blame the government for the immoral actions of the ratings hungry mass media. Please blame, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX instead.
The government is not using television to desensitize kids (please examine how much more willing we as a society accepted casualties in WWII versus the Gulf). The media is using this to generate higher ratings and ad revenues and they don't care a whit whether or not children are exposed to it.
Hmmm, what about the US Government desensitizing these same children using the same television by killing and torturing real people during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or announcing that the head of the US Government was getting his ...
This is just a troll.
The parents are letting their children play GTA and they are letting them watch the news. It's up to the parents of these children to give them direction in life not Senator Clinton or anyone else.
Ah, you finally get it. The Government is neither responsible for causing this phenomenon (as you claim above), nor should it be responsible for putting a stop to it. Let parents to the parenting. Don't ban or blast these games or their makers, educate the parents on the responsibility of parenthood.
Seriously, you must have a license, to drive a car, fish, hunt, act as a business, and so on. No such requirement for being a parent. Not saying that we should license people to be parents, but does it not strike anyone else as odd that a certain level of competency must be demonstrated before you can get in an automobile and drive, but not to have a child.
I'd like someone to sit down the youngsters in our country and try to explain to them how killing or torturing someone in a war that was permitted under false pretenses is morally acceptable but allowing an incapacitated woman to pass away peacefully is not.
This is an even better troll.
Or how the President willed a young woman to ... was still allowed to run this "moral" country after he was found guilty of lying?
Did you write your congressman about it?
Let's have our parents teach us the morals they believe not the mixed messages that the US Government is sending.
This makes sense now.
Too bad you troll for half your post. Otherwise, a couple of insightful points.
Thus my standard sequence of events is to go to one of the PC labs on campus, print to PDF using Acrobat and setting it to 9-up, then copying the PDF file to my commp sci network space, going to the Solaris labs, and printing the PDF. I'd like to streamline this process. Any idea?
Try these:
You can't even print multiple copies of a document using xpdf/gpdf.
I don't know about gpdf (don't use it), but in xpdf, when you hit the print button, in the "Print with command box", just add a '-#' (without quotes) followed by the number of copies you want. It is a standard option to the lpr command and CUPS obeys it as well.
Bloat or not, it is still the best reader for Adobe Acrobat files.
It's only bloated if you have a problem with sacrificing ~100 MB of hard drive space. Seriously who worries about that on a reasonably modern desktop? I just bought to 160 GB drives the other day for US$ 80 each. Drive space is not a problem.
I have been using the new version for a week and much more impressed with it than I was with version 5.
Here are the things I like:
Things I don't like:
You still can't read each and every PDF document with xpdf, especially DRM protected files are impossible to view...
You also can't fill out fillable PDFs with anything except acroread
Ummm. He doesn't charge people anything and the "distribution" is limited to people coming to his website. Heck, the site even has a disclaimer at the bottom. Really, is this any different than hosting a big 24/7 get together in some public park where people can come play Scrabble all they want?
Yes, Symantec have a vested interest up the wazoo for that press release.
No kidding. It's not like they sell products for the Mac. They would stand in no way to benefit from alerting the community to this issue. They are doing it out of an altruistic sense of responsibility to the public.
</sarcasm>
If you release complete documentation of said hardware ...
True. The trend seems to be that many F/OSS projects prefer to develop the drivers themselves (as it assures them a known level quality from reliable developers). That is not to say they don't trust the developers in many hardware companies. But let's face it, a EE sometimes makes a crappy programmer (and I have pleny of EE-wielding friends that work for hardware companies and end up getting pressed into service writing drivers for hardware when they would rather be designing the next batch of hardware).
Failing that, as long as the F/OSS people can QA the stuff and suggest modifications it will eventually make it in. This can be seen in the all the back-and-forth between the Linux kernel developers and SGI over getting support for XFS into the kernel, which ultimately resulted the XFS patches getting accepted into Linus' tree.
religious fundamentalists
What is wrong with these people?
Why do they stick their heads in the holy sand all the time, why can't they just accept that people have different views and should be allowed to express them.
It makes me sick that religious wackos are given all the freedom to worship/teach/live as they please, but fuck everyone else over with their righteous bullshit.
Why is it that people insist on categorizing all fundamentalists as being the same? I am a fundamentalist Bible-believing Christian, but that doesn't mean that I checked my intelligence at the door.
It makes me sick that people can't fathom the concept that within such a large group you will have people at all extremes. Is it OK to assume that all black people are violent gang members and criminals because a few make the evening news for doing a drive by shooting? I didn't think so. That would be racist and prejudicial, you know assuming that every member of a particular diverse group is the same based on the actions of a few?
What about 4 space tabs? That's IMHO the best compromise between readability & vertical space use, and what I have been using for the last 12 years.
From "Code Complete":
The moral of the story is that even if you think it looks nice, it can impact the ability of people to understand the code. In an open source project where you want people to contribute, you need to lower the barrier as much as possible to ensure that there is a larger pool of potential contributors.
Hovers on things that aren't links simply DO NOT WORK in IE.
My mistake. You are correct on this one. I only use hovers for links and had not previously noted this.
And if you have only had problems with position: fixed you must not ever work with floats, margins, max-width, hovers on things that aren't links, etc.etc. the list goes on and on.
In fact, I use each and every one of the elements you mention. I haven't encountered anything serious with them. Occasionally I'll get an element whose placement is a few pixels off from where I would like in one browser or another, but I can live with that.
Even when you design a standards compliant webpage you still need to use hacks to get things to work and validate correctly.
This is something I never understood. Granted I don't develop huge pages, but the pages that I have developed (personal, for my church and other small organizations) have these criteria/features:
The only thing that works in Moz/Firefox/Opera that does not work in IE is the "position: fixed" attribute on some things. But that is not crucial to the look of the page, it is just nice to have.
The thing is that it delivers the exact same HTML/CSS to every browser (no UserAgent checking) and even looks correct in the browsers that ignore CSS.
I got the idea for the design of the sites I have done from Eric Meyer's CSS site. The only difference is that I have made some minor tweaks to get the page to look good in pretty much every browser.
If you were developing some massive site, I could see running into some problems. However, the biggest issue with IE is CSS, and once you have the CSS how you like it, you include the same one in every page.
Also, anyone know of a client program that will recursively create folders on an IMAP server (maybe a server issue. In which case, what server?)
AFAIK, most IMAP servers support only messages OR folders in any particular folder. The only one of which I am aware that supports both messages AND folders in the same folder is Cyrus. It happens to be the one I run, but it takes some work to get it setup properly.
or even to batch remail each message one at a time if your new email client uses some undocumented storage format, or is an online service like GMail.
This neat little procmail recipe (I came across it a while back, but I forget exactly where) does exactly what you describe. First, create a file (i use forwarder in this example) with these contents:
Then execute this command:
Viola!