Hmmm. Mobile phone numbers in the US have area codes? That's wacky.
Here in the UK, all you can tell from the dialling code is what telco the number is run by, and now that contract (rather than pre-pay) phones are gaining popularity, even that isn't true anymore as people regularly transfer their numbers between telcos.
I could never get Full Throttle to work under ScummVM. It would always crash on the long video sequences, which I could skip of course... but that spoils the game. It also seemed to quit at the same points when trying to run the old DOS version under Windows NT.
It was great for playing tonnes of other Scumm games, though. When I found ScummVM, I started buying all of the old games from budget labels just to get the game code to play them. At about 2 a game it was great to get into the adventure genre again without having to have an MS-DOS installation hanging around.
I did say my reasoning depends on copyright to still exist. I was merely trying to put forth the idea that although some people will inevitably get the product for free, there will always be people who are willing to pay in order to improve their experience of the product.
You can't sue every kid who shares your book on Kazaa, but you can sue someone who attempts to publish and sell your book en-masse without a licence... and if they don't do it en-masse, it will probably cost them so much that they won't be able to compete with your mass-produced printed copies anyway.
I personally would still buy your book because I prefer reading from a small, portable bundle of paper than an expensive, fragile light source.
I would also still be willing to pay to see a movie at a cinema because I don't watch sufficient films to justify envesting in a large screen and sound system for my home, and prefer the emmersion a cinema offers.
Sure, some people would shun these benefits in order to save a few bucks, reading their books on their laptops/PDAs and watching movies on a computer screen with peedy little speakers, but there would still be money to be made.
This won't work with copyright completely removed, since the creator of the content would not make any money when a publisher prints and sells copies of a book. You won't be able to afford to track down and sue the people who distribute your works electronically, but you can still sue a publisher who tries to sell your book en masse without buying a licence to do so from you.
I guess my point is that, even with a few people distributing your content for free, there will always be money to be made because in general people are willing to pay to enhance their experience of your work. You could also sell your work online for a tiny amount of money for anyone who doesn't care about paper or cinemas but wants to give you some money.
While the redistributable version of DirectX is handy if you've got more than one box from the same family (95 vs NT), since you only have to get the data once, you just know that dialup users (which make up a large proportion of Internet users) will shun the 32MB download (or the slightly less which the intelligent installer will pull down) does not outweigh the risk.
Microsoft should provide a patch which just addresses this issue, rather than forcing users to download the entirity of DirectX 9. There will be lots of people who don't bother until some game comes bundled with DirectX 9b and says it requires it.
The State doesn't give you life; it does give you liberty.
I think this is by far the most pertinant point. The state gives you liberty, and thus can take it away. However, life is given to you naturally, so noone has any right to deprive you of it unnaturally.
It would be nice if web browsers would start to support SFTP in similar vein to how they support FTP.
It's handy to be able to fall back on a web browser (which pretty much everyone has) rather than having to download and install a special client for a one-off task.
The only major complication is that SFTP does not (to my knowledge) have a standard way to do an anonymous login.
I think the original poster was saying that in the olden days we had "conventional ports" for services. We still have this for the older, more-ingrained services on the Internet. The conventional port for a web server is port 80, and the conventional port for SMTP is 25.
Protocols of old are built on these assumptions. For example, MX and A records in DNS do not include port information, so in order to have a domain accepting mail the recieving server must be listening on port 25.
We have DNS which provides reasonably-friendly names for hosts, but it doesn't map to a particular service. A single host will often have a multitude of different names which are all interchangable to get any service. If we are to stop using standardized port numbers, we will need to extend DNS so that 'www.google.com' can resolve to 216.239.39.99 port 80, not just 216.239.39.99 and leave the 80 up to the client to guess.
Hell, there's really no reason an ISP needs to give out public IPs, either.
NAT works okay when I'm controlling the box doing it. I can hack in special stuff to handle esoteric protocols which expect a public IP.
If my ISP runs the box doing NAT, there's suddenly a bunch of things I won't be able to do anymore, and I'll promptly switch ISPs to one which will let me use the Internet as it's intended.
As disappointing as it I imagine can be to see foreign language words infiltrating your mother toungue, I found that when I spent some time in Holland I at least could read Nederlandic signs and menus with minimal floundering.
With my quite limited knowledge of German and my English I was able to read almost everything, in extreme cases falling back on context to pick out the missing nouns I couldn't get.
I was impressed that many Dutch people had almost perfect spoken English, even well outside the standard tourist spots. One guy I spoke to for a while said he mostly picked it up from watching subtitled American TV, which I guess is why everyone seems to know all of the American slang but were set back by my occasional British slang.
I'm not really sure what my point is, anymore, so I'll just post this as a hats-off to the Dutch for being, on the whole, the nicest people I've encountered on my travels.
You can work around this by supplying a CSS stylesheet with your document (served as text/xml) which tells IE how to render everything. I used Mozilla's html.css for this once, which was probably a little naughty, but since most documents only use a subset of HTML anyway you can get away with just writing your own stylesheet containing what you are using.
This also has the fun side-benefit that all browsers will be using the same base ruleset to render your document, which will make it look a lot more uniform cross-platform aside from differences in CSS implementation.
Obviously the embedded SVG still isn't going to render in IE, but at least the HTMLy bit will.
My P2-350 seems perfectly happy running Windows 2000. Unless they have some insanely small amount of RAM, those 400MHz boxen should run Windows 2000 just fine assuming the school/charity can afford Windows 2000 licences.
First, have the trucks not quite bumper-to-bumper and have the drivers sense the road (with their eyes) before entering.
Then install a microphone in the garage which detects the sound of a truck collision, and if it hears one triggers the retransmission of old data after a random delay.
The previous description did not account for the fact that public roads contain unrelated traffic going to and from other buildings and the need to keep your distance to reduce the impact of colissions.
I call this algorithm Driver Sense Road Access with Pileup Detection, or DSRA/PD. It should maximize throughput of data along the National Road Network. (NRN)
Sure, mum and dad (or mom and pop) often aren't interested in games, but the kids soon will be. My brother was once happy with his Playstation or whatever it is he had, but once the family PC was upgraded he effectively binned it in favour of PC games, which generally provide a richer gaming experience. (I guess)
My family has a PC similar to that you described the salesman selling. I'm still using a PII-350.:)
I read your parent as sarcasm: the page size of the PDF is often not the same as the paper I'd want to print on, unless I made the document. Sure, PDF can scale it, but that doesn't make optimal use of my paper. I can't reflow it to fit my paper because the text is specified on a line-by-line basis.
What we need is for browsers to get around to supporting print stylesheets properly, at which point we can create documents which have both pretty screen rendering (complete with user stylesheet input) and good print rendering at any paper size. Last I checked Opera was closest, but I've not looked at Mozilla's print rendering in a while.
The spaces are added to any long string of non-space characters. This is so that long lines can't be added to make the tables that the default site scheme uses unusually wide. A better fix would be not to do the site layout with tables, but I digress!
However, you should probably be creating HTML links anyway:
Apple is renowned for its consistant UI design and Mac users renowned for demanding such consistancy from vendors.
This leaves me wondering, then, what the reasoning isbehind having two completely different types of application window? What sets a brushed-metal window apart from a conventionally-bordered window?
This is not intended as an anti-Mac troll. I don't often get to use Mac OS X, so this is just simple curiosity.
The reason alpha-transparent PNGs don't work "the normal way" in IE is due to an old design decision which came back and bit them in the ass.
If you look at what happens when IE renders an alpha-transparent PNG you will see that it is actually using the alpha channel accurately, but it is rendering it onto an offscreen bitmap which itself only has one-bit transparency, so when the rendered image gets passed back to IE the transparent bits don't reflect the underlying page, they only reflect the initial background colour of that offscreen bitmap.
IE was designed to load images in an abstract way, but at the time they didn't make it abstract enough. The latest versions of Windows support ARGB bitmaps in GDI so a future version of IE tied strictly to a future version of Windows is more likely to get support for this due to them not having to worry about dealing with alpha-transparent bitmaps on their older platforms which have no underlying support.
Microsoft makes available a free version of their C++ compiler whose only limitation is limited support for the advanced optimisation features in the version which comes with Visual C++ (the expensive IDE)
Sadly, it can be hard to locate the free version of the compiler. Last I cared, you could get it with the.NET Framework SDK, but I don't know if that's available anymore now that Visual Studio.NET is available.
Of course, this is just the compiler. You have to get your own text editor or IDE. Alternatively, GCC has been ported to Windows, so you can use Microsoft's freely-available (as in beer) header files with Win32 GCC to produce Windows executables. See Bloodshed Dev-C++ for an example of a free (if slighly quirky) IDE for Windows based around GCC.
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Hmmm. Mobile phone numbers in the US have area codes? That's wacky.
Here in the UK, all you can tell from the dialling code is what telco the number is run by, and now that contract (rather than pre-pay) phones are gaining popularity, even that isn't true anymore as people regularly transfer their numbers between telcos.
I could never get Full Throttle to work under ScummVM. It would always crash on the long video sequences, which I could skip of course... but that spoils the game. It also seemed to quit at the same points when trying to run the old DOS version under Windows NT.
It was great for playing tonnes of other Scumm games, though. When I found ScummVM, I started buying all of the old games from budget labels just to get the game code to play them. At about 2 a game it was great to get into the adventure genre again without having to have an MS-DOS installation hanging around.
I did say my reasoning depends on copyright to still exist. I was merely trying to put forth the idea that although some people will inevitably get the product for free, there will always be people who are willing to pay in order to improve their experience of the product.
You can't sue every kid who shares your book on Kazaa, but you can sue someone who attempts to publish and sell your book en-masse without a licence... and if they don't do it en-masse, it will probably cost them so much that they won't be able to compete with your mass-produced printed copies anyway.
I personally would still buy your book because I prefer reading from a small, portable bundle of paper than an expensive, fragile light source.
I would also still be willing to pay to see a movie at a cinema because I don't watch sufficient films to justify envesting in a large screen and sound system for my home, and prefer the emmersion a cinema offers.
Sure, some people would shun these benefits in order to save a few bucks, reading their books on their laptops/PDAs and watching movies on a computer screen with peedy little speakers, but there would still be money to be made.
This won't work with copyright completely removed, since the creator of the content would not make any money when a publisher prints and sells copies of a book. You won't be able to afford to track down and sue the people who distribute your works electronically, but you can still sue a publisher who tries to sell your book en masse without buying a licence to do so from you.
I guess my point is that, even with a few people distributing your content for free, there will always be money to be made because in general people are willing to pay to enhance their experience of your work. You could also sell your work online for a tiny amount of money for anyone who doesn't care about paper or cinemas but wants to give you some money.
While the redistributable version of DirectX is handy if you've got more than one box from the same family (95 vs NT), since you only have to get the data once, you just know that dialup users (which make up a large proportion of Internet users) will shun the 32MB download (or the slightly less which the intelligent installer will pull down) does not outweigh the risk.
Microsoft should provide a patch which just addresses this issue, rather than forcing users to download the entirity of DirectX 9. There will be lots of people who don't bother until some game comes bundled with DirectX 9b and says it requires it.
Cooperate with fellow students and set up your own wireless LAN which only exists for the duration of a lecture.
You don't need to use the Internet to send packets to people in the same room as you.
I think this is by far the most pertinant point. The state gives you liberty, and thus can take it away. However, life is given to you naturally, so noone has any right to deprive you of it unnaturally.
You are allowed to omit parts of IPv6 addresses when connecting to hosts in the same subnet as you.
It would be nice if web browsers would start to support SFTP in similar vein to how they support FTP.
It's handy to be able to fall back on a web browser (which pretty much everyone has) rather than having to download and install a special client for a one-off task.
The only major complication is that SFTP does not (to my knowledge) have a standard way to do an anonymous login.
I think the original poster was saying that in the olden days we had "conventional ports" for services. We still have this for the older, more-ingrained services on the Internet. The conventional port for a web server is port 80, and the conventional port for SMTP is 25.
Protocols of old are built on these assumptions. For example, MX and A records in DNS do not include port information, so in order to have a domain accepting mail the recieving server must be listening on port 25.
We have DNS which provides reasonably-friendly names for hosts, but it doesn't map to a particular service. A single host will often have a multitude of different names which are all interchangable to get any service. If we are to stop using standardized port numbers, we will need to extend DNS so that 'www.google.com' can resolve to 216.239.39.99 port 80, not just 216.239.39.99 and leave the 80 up to the client to guess.
NAT works okay when I'm controlling the box doing it. I can hack in special stuff to handle esoteric protocols which expect a public IP.
If my ISP runs the box doing NAT, there's suddenly a bunch of things I won't be able to do anymore, and I'll promptly switch ISPs to one which will let me use the Internet as it's intended.
As disappointing as it I imagine can be to see foreign language words infiltrating your mother toungue, I found that when I spent some time in Holland I at least could read Nederlandic signs and menus with minimal floundering.
With my quite limited knowledge of German and my English I was able to read almost everything, in extreme cases falling back on context to pick out the missing nouns I couldn't get.
I was impressed that many Dutch people had almost perfect spoken English, even well outside the standard tourist spots. One guy I spoke to for a while said he mostly picked it up from watching subtitled American TV, which I guess is why everyone seems to know all of the American slang but were set back by my occasional British slang.
I'm not really sure what my point is, anymore, so I'll just post this as a hats-off to the Dutch for being, on the whole, the nicest people I've encountered on my travels.
If your disk is rewritten from an image, anything added to the disk since the image was taken will be overwritten.
This includes all user data and applications which were not installed before the image was taken.
You can work around this by supplying a CSS stylesheet with your document (served as text/xml) which tells IE how to render everything. I used Mozilla's html.css for this once, which was probably a little naughty, but since most documents only use a subset of HTML anyway you can get away with just writing your own stylesheet containing what you are using.
This also has the fun side-benefit that all browsers will be using the same base ruleset to render your document, which will make it look a lot more uniform cross-platform aside from differences in CSS implementation.
Obviously the embedded SVG still isn't going to render in IE, but at least the HTMLy bit will.
That's great until you have a power cut while you're out and your box reboots.
My P2-350 seems perfectly happy running Windows 2000. Unless they have some insanely small amount of RAM, those 400MHz boxen should run Windows 2000 just fine assuming the school/charity can afford Windows 2000 licences.
Word does not come with Windows.
First, have the trucks not quite bumper-to-bumper and have the drivers sense the road (with their eyes) before entering.
Then install a microphone in the garage which detects the sound of a truck collision, and if it hears one triggers the retransmission of old data after a random delay.
The previous description did not account for the fact that public roads contain unrelated traffic going to and from other buildings and the need to keep your distance to reduce the impact of colissions.
I call this algorithm Driver Sense Road Access with Pileup Detection, or DSRA/PD. It should maximize throughput of data along the National Road Network. (NRN)
Games!
Sure, mum and dad (or mom and pop) often aren't interested in games, but the kids soon will be. My brother was once happy with his Playstation or whatever it is he had, but once the family PC was upgraded he effectively binned it in favour of PC games, which generally provide a richer gaming experience. (I guess)
My family has a PC similar to that you described the salesman selling. I'm still using a PII-350. :)
I read your parent as sarcasm: the page size of the PDF is often not the same as the paper I'd want to print on, unless I made the document. Sure, PDF can scale it, but that doesn't make optimal use of my paper. I can't reflow it to fit my paper because the text is specified on a line-by-line basis.
What we need is for browsers to get around to supporting print stylesheets properly, at which point we can create documents which have both pretty screen rendering (complete with user stylesheet input) and good print rendering at any paper size. Last I checked Opera was closest, but I've not looked at Mozilla's print rendering in a while.
The spaces are added to any long string of non-space characters. This is so that long lines can't be added to make the tables that the default site scheme uses unusually wide. A better fix would be not to do the site layout with tables, but I digress!
However, you should probably be creating HTML links anyway:
HTML links are much nicer than bare URLs!
Apple is renowned for its consistant UI design and Mac users renowned for demanding such consistancy from vendors.
This leaves me wondering, then, what the reasoning isbehind having two completely different types of application window? What sets a brushed-metal window apart from a conventionally-bordered window?
This is not intended as an anti-Mac troll. I don't often get to use Mac OS X, so this is just simple curiosity.
The reason alpha-transparent PNGs don't work "the normal way" in IE is due to an old design decision which came back and bit them in the ass.
If you look at what happens when IE renders an alpha-transparent PNG you will see that it is actually using the alpha channel accurately, but it is rendering it onto an offscreen bitmap which itself only has one-bit transparency, so when the rendered image gets passed back to IE the transparent bits don't reflect the underlying page, they only reflect the initial background colour of that offscreen bitmap.
IE was designed to load images in an abstract way, but at the time they didn't make it abstract enough. The latest versions of Windows support ARGB bitmaps in GDI so a future version of IE tied strictly to a future version of Windows is more likely to get support for this due to them not having to worry about dealing with alpha-transparent bitmaps on their older platforms which have no underlying support.
The programmers will find that they're suddenly getting paid a lot more.
Microsoft makes available a free version of their C++ compiler whose only limitation is limited support for the advanced optimisation features in the version which comes with Visual C++ (the expensive IDE)
Sadly, it can be hard to locate the free version of the compiler. Last I cared, you could get it with the .NET Framework SDK, but I don't know if that's available anymore now that Visual Studio.NET is available.
Of course, this is just the compiler. You have to get your own text editor or IDE. Alternatively, GCC has been ported to Windows, so you can use Microsoft's freely-available (as in beer) header files with Win32 GCC to produce Windows executables. See Bloodshed Dev-C++ for an example of a free (if slighly quirky) IDE for Windows based around GCC.