You are right. MAC (or 'Ethernet') addresses are used only between nodes on an Ethernet-type network on some kind of broadcast medium to, for example, differentiate between the computers on a LAN.
The theoretical RIAA scanning computer will only see the Ethernet address of its nearest router, since the router will retransmit the packet with its own Ethernet address as the source and the next node's Ethernet address as the destination, and this process continues until the recieving computer notices that the packet it just recieved has its IP address in the IP packet header.
The easiest way to remember is that Ethernet frames only go between nodes, but the IP packets encapsulated in them will (theoretically) be identically copied and persist from end to end.
Also, it would be easy for them to grep their list for addresses with their name as the username (since loads of people do this these days) and be reasonably sure that changing that username to something generic will form a valid address, since most of these are "anything-at" setups.
People using this trick would be better off making up real names that don't look anything like the company name, and keep a list of which went with which. At the moment, this isn't much of an issue, but I can see the shadier spammers pulling tricks like this in the future.
That argument only comes from the misguided fools which try to transfer their on-paper design experience to the world wide web. Fortunately, more and more designers are realising that web design is less about getting pixel-perfect rendering and more about getting the message across in the least-intrusive way possible.
It's been my observation that things are getting better. I hope it continues.
Tunnelling IP over some TCP-based protocol and running TCP connections inside is usually a bad plan. The two layers of TCP will interfere with each other due to TCP's automatic speed control mechanisms so that, after a short period of time, the TCP connection in the tunnel will be so slow to be unusable.
Similar warnings apply to running ppp over SSH connections. I tried that once when I was lacking other options, and it wasn't pretty.
I believe that 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.
So... 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 (well, GDI+ at least), 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.
Take a close look at what ActiveState Perl.NET does some time. You'll see that it's nothing but a clever hack. Their.NET "compiler" is similar in operation to their PerlApp tool, and I don't think anyone could keep a straight face while saying that the support for creating assemblies from perl is clean and elegant.
For most purposes, what ActiveState have produced works well enough, but perl is far from integrated into the grand scheme of things.
Since UT2003 is available for linux, the engine has already been ported so Unreal 2 should be an easy port. The only reason why they may not publish it for linux is due to an estimated lack of demand making it not financially worthwhile, but I suspect that even then it should be possible to just borrow the engine from UT2003 and use the Unreal 2 data and game code to play the game, since the developers seem to write everything in UnrealScript these days.
I didn't necessarily mean that it had to be DNS between the phone and the service provider, only that some protocol would interface to a gateway between whatever protocol resolves the name and the DNS. I don't know how WAP works, but I never said WAP had to be involved.
I chose DNS because it's already implemented and already has all of the administrative infrastructure in place, plus practically every company and geek has at least one domain name.
Whatever it is, it must be standardized so that companies/people can stop giving out phone numbers and instead give out meaningful, memorable names.
We should add a new DNS record type for international telephone numbers. It'd be reasonably easy to have a DNS gateway over cellphone networks so that phones can resolve the phone number from a name before dialling.
Sure, it would be harder to enter the number the first time on a numeric keypad, but you'd store the name in your phone's memory so that you only have to type it once, and those with phones with QWERTY keyboards would be set!
It sure would be nice to be able to dial sales.somecompany.com rather than having to look up their number first. The main benefit, though, is the abstraction -- people can change their numbers and only be out of touch for the time it takes for the DNS record to expire.
The benefit of using a separate record type is that, like with MX records, it could coexist with other record types so that, for example, support.ibm.com could resolve to both an IP address and a telephone number.
I'm sure some company would soon step in with cheap 'catchy' phone hostnames in similar vein to free, throwaway email for those who don't have the know-how, desire or funds to run their own domain.
Why DNS? Because it's already there, and it works well.
Re:I don't agree with the article
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think Linux (any flavor) or Windows (any flavor) has recieved nearly the same amount of scrutiny and criticism with regard to UI. Why is that?
I'd say that is because Mac users are a lot more opinionated about how their little world should be than most. There are lots of quirks in the Windows UI, but people just learn to deal with them and move on. Mac users write five-page articles.
I'll agree with that. I have two identical boxes that I've had for years. Ickle is my dependable friend, always on and ready to do my bidding. Kahuna, its evil twin, tends to be more concerned with its own bidding than helping me.
Then there's Dark, which I have an unconditional love for. I refused to retire it even though it was getting a bit grey-haired and occasionally locked up inexplicably. My faith was well-placed, as Dark hasn't failed in more than three months.
Those are my linux boxes. I tend to be less attached to my Windows boxes, because they lack character. They are just Windows boxes -- all the same. I don't own any Macs. They are too expensive for me. My boxes are all carefully designed to exactly suit their task because I prefer not to waste my money on frills. I like what my computers for what they do, not for what they look like.
Everyone who uses a Mac seems to think that everyone else cares. Use what suits you and whatever you want to achieve, and let everyone else do the same. Everyone's needs and desires are different.
You'd probably also need to purchase a floppy controller on a card. I'm assuming that since they're dropping the drives, their motherboards won't have floppy controllers on them, or else there'd be no point in dropping the drives in the first place.
My phone has a very distinctive sounding "Ring ring..." (British standard) tone. That alone is pretty distinctive today where practically everyone else has "customized" their phone by changing the ring tone to something else.
Sadly no geek thrill, though. Instead, I feel like a telecommunications standards weenie.
It's just typical of slashdot folks to think it's great when Vorbis has a monopoly, but it's just plain evil when Microsoft makes just a few more sales than everyone else.
You're all so two-faced.
Re:XBOXBochsLinuxWineWin98Virtual PC...
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 1
On a serious note, is there actually a version of UAE capable of running Linux now? Last I saw, no available UAE had MMU emulation, but UAE keeps moving around and I'm having trouble tracking it these days.
id Software released the 'game code' for all three Quake games very early on so that modifications could be created.
However, I'm not sure if this code becomes GPL when the rest does. As distributed, the 'game code' normally comes with a clause which says something along the lines of 'you may distribute modifications only for those who have a full, retail version of the game.'
The models, textures and so on are, as you stated, still controlled by id in all cases.
The.us country-code domain is not organised by entity type except in some special cases way down into the heirarchy.
First, there's a state code which uses the standard two-letter abbreviations for the states, then there's a 'region code' which will either be a city, region or large town. Under that people are free to register whatever they like, with some special cases.
The special cases are 'state' for special state-running bodies (are they called 'state government'?) and then a 'k-12' domain under which schools are organised by their respective school district.
The.us domain, then, is a lot more organised and distributed than most other countries, which is probably a good thing given its size. The RFC which proposed the organisation of the.us domain (whose number escapes me now -- try looking on the.us registry site) explains that they did not create.gov.us and similar because it would cause confusion, and that the US Federal Government alone would use.gov while state governments use.state.tx.us (or similar). At this stage in the game, moving the.gov domain to.gov.us would just cause a lot of problems as invalidating that many URLs en-masse is never a good idea.
0x201C : Left Double Quotation Mark 0x201D : Right Double Quotation Mark 0x2033 : Double Prime 0x0022 : Quotation Mark (") (Unicode character codes)
The generic quotation mark character is used in cases where the other three symbols are not available (software which only accepts ASCII) or when the writer is lazy.
I personally always use the left and right curly quotation marks when I'm sure I'm typing into something which can accept them. Most people never conciously notice, but it makes parsing the quotation a lot easier I find. I also don't use or even own a copy of Microsoft Word.
My old Win95 box now has one too. It was created when I installed Microsoft Word 97.
The operating system, as installed, did not have the directory. Even now that Word has created it, Windows sees no special significance to it because it doesn't have the concept of a personal data directory. It doesn't even get that special folder icon with the paper in it.
I certainly don't keep my wastepaper bin on my desk, nor do I store things there. My folders live in my drawer, and my bin sits on the floor under my desk.
I think the desktop being initially completely empty makes perfect sense. When you open documents from a "drawer" (which contains folders, not other drawers) they appear in a window on the desktop labelled only with their name. The user doesn't need to care which application opened the document.
In this metaphor, the root environment wouldn't be the desktop, it'd be a "workspace" which had in it a desktop, a trashcan and a bunch of drawers. I'm not quite sure how to handle networking, since that concept really doesn't exist in a physical office... you can't just reach over and grab a document from a drawer on the other side of an ocean.
Remember, of course, that in the bad old days of Win95 there wasn't a My Documents folder, and because users launched things from the start menu or desktop, they'd inherit the current path of Explorer.exe which was invariably the desktop, and thus always default to the desktop.
I suspect this is a major reason why people persist in doing this despite the fact that applications now have better ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right. MAC (or 'Ethernet') addresses are used only between nodes on an Ethernet-type network on some kind of broadcast medium to, for example, differentiate between the computers on a LAN.
The theoretical RIAA scanning computer will only see the Ethernet address of its nearest router, since the router will retransmit the packet with its own Ethernet address as the source and the next node's Ethernet address as the destination, and this process continues until the recieving computer notices that the packet it just recieved has its IP address in the IP packet header.
The easiest way to remember is that Ethernet frames only go between nodes, but the IP packets encapsulated in them will (theoretically) be identically copied and persist from end to end.
Also, it would be easy for them to grep their list for addresses with their name as the username (since loads of people do this these days) and be reasonably sure that changing that username to something generic will form a valid address, since most of these are "anything-at" setups.
People using this trick would be better off making up real names that don't look anything like the company name, and keep a list of which went with which. At the moment, this isn't much of an issue, but I can see the shadier spammers pulling tricks like this in the future.
That argument only comes from the misguided fools which try to transfer their on-paper design experience to the world wide web. Fortunately, more and more designers are realising that web design is less about getting pixel-perfect rendering and more about getting the message across in the least-intrusive way possible.
It's been my observation that things are getting better. I hope it continues.
Tunnelling IP over some TCP-based protocol and running TCP connections inside is usually a bad plan. The two layers of TCP will interfere with each other due to TCP's automatic speed control mechanisms so that, after a short period of time, the TCP connection in the tunnel will be so slow to be unusable.
Similar warnings apply to running ppp over SSH connections. I tried that once when I was lacking other options, and it wasn't pretty.
I believe that 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.
So... 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 (well, GDI+ at least), 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.
Log into your wired system and download from there, silly!
(You also probably shouldn't be playing with a peesee while you're driving)
Take a close look at what ActiveState Perl.NET does some time. You'll see that it's nothing but a clever hack. Their .NET "compiler" is similar in operation to their PerlApp tool, and I don't think anyone could keep a straight face while saying that the support for creating assemblies from perl is clean and elegant.
For most purposes, what ActiveState have produced works well enough, but perl is far from integrated into the grand scheme of things.
If killing people is wrong (and thus warrants a harsh punishment), why is it morally right to kill people who kill?
I'm of the opinion that taking someone's life is always wrong, regardless of circumstance, since it is an irrevocable action.
Double-standards are at their worst when they manifest in the judicial system.
Since UT2003 is available for linux, the engine has already been ported so Unreal 2 should be an easy port. The only reason why they may not publish it for linux is due to an estimated lack of demand making it not financially worthwhile, but I suspect that even then it should be possible to just borrow the engine from UT2003 and use the Unreal 2 data and game code to play the game, since the developers seem to write everything in UnrealScript these days.
All uninformed speculation, of course.
I didn't necessarily mean that it had to be DNS between the phone and the service provider, only that some protocol would interface to a gateway between whatever protocol resolves the name and the DNS. I don't know how WAP works, but I never said WAP had to be involved.
I chose DNS because it's already implemented and already has all of the administrative infrastructure in place, plus practically every company and geek has at least one domain name.
Whatever it is, it must be standardized so that companies/people can stop giving out phone numbers and instead give out meaningful, memorable names.
Don't forget what the "C" stands for.
We should add a new DNS record type for international telephone numbers. It'd be reasonably easy to have a DNS gateway over cellphone networks so that phones can resolve the phone number from a name before dialling.
Sure, it would be harder to enter the number the first time on a numeric keypad, but you'd store the name in your phone's memory so that you only have to type it once, and those with phones with QWERTY keyboards would be set!
It sure would be nice to be able to dial sales.somecompany.com rather than having to look up their number first. The main benefit, though, is the abstraction -- people can change their numbers and only be out of touch for the time it takes for the DNS record to expire.
The benefit of using a separate record type is that, like with MX records, it could coexist with other record types so that, for example, support.ibm.com could resolve to both an IP address and a telephone number.
I'm sure some company would soon step in with cheap 'catchy' phone hostnames in similar vein to free, throwaway email for those who don't have the know-how, desire or funds to run their own domain.
Why DNS? Because it's already there, and it works well.
I'd say that is because Mac users are a lot more opinionated about how their little world should be than most. There are lots of quirks in the Windows UI, but people just learn to deal with them and move on. Mac users write five-page articles.
I hate mice with side buttons. I always click them by accident when moving them.
I'd much rather have mouse gestures!
I'll agree with that. I have two identical boxes that I've had for years. Ickle is my dependable friend, always on and ready to do my bidding. Kahuna, its evil twin, tends to be more concerned with its own bidding than helping me.
Then there's Dark, which I have an unconditional love for. I refused to retire it even though it was getting a bit grey-haired and occasionally locked up inexplicably. My faith was well-placed, as Dark hasn't failed in more than three months.
Those are my linux boxes. I tend to be less attached to my Windows boxes, because they lack character. They are just Windows boxes -- all the same. I don't own any Macs. They are too expensive for me. My boxes are all carefully designed to exactly suit their task because I prefer not to waste my money on frills. I like what my computers for what they do, not for what they look like.
Everyone who uses a Mac seems to think that everyone else cares. Use what suits you and whatever you want to achieve, and let everyone else do the same. Everyone's needs and desires are different.
You'd probably also need to purchase a floppy controller on a card. I'm assuming that since they're dropping the drives, their motherboards won't have floppy controllers on them, or else there'd be no point in dropping the drives in the first place.
My phone has a very distinctive sounding "Ring ring..." (British standard) tone. That alone is pretty distinctive today where practically everyone else has "customized" their phone by changing the ring tone to something else.
Sadly no geek thrill, though. Instead, I feel like a telecommunications standards weenie.
It's just typical of slashdot folks to think it's great when Vorbis has a monopoly, but it's just plain evil when Microsoft makes just a few more sales than everyone else.
You're all so two-faced.
On a serious note, is there actually a version of UAE capable of running Linux now? Last I saw, no available UAE had MMU emulation, but UAE keeps moving around and I'm having trouble tracking it these days.
id Software released the 'game code' for all three Quake games very early on so that modifications could be created.
However, I'm not sure if this code becomes GPL when the rest does. As distributed, the 'game code' normally comes with a clause which says something along the lines of 'you may distribute modifications only for those who have a full, retail version of the game.'
The models, textures and so on are, as you stated, still controlled by id in all cases.
The .us country-code domain is not organised by entity type except in some special cases way down into the heirarchy.
First, there's a state code which uses the standard two-letter abbreviations for the states, then there's a 'region code' which will either be a city, region or large town. Under that people are free to register whatever they like, with some special cases.
The special cases are 'state' for special state-running bodies (are they called 'state government'?) and then a 'k-12' domain under which schools are organised by their respective school district.
The .us domain, then, is a lot more organised and distributed than most other countries, which is probably a good thing given its size. The RFC which proposed the organisation of the .us domain (whose number escapes me now -- try looking on the .us registry site) explains that they did not create .gov.us and similar because it would cause confusion, and that the US Federal Government alone would use .gov while state governments use .state.tx.us (or similar). At this stage in the game, moving the .gov domain to .gov.us would just cause a lot of problems as invalidating that many URLs en-masse is never a good idea.
0x201C : Left Double Quotation Mark
0x201D : Right Double Quotation Mark
0x2033 : Double Prime
0x0022 : Quotation Mark (")
(Unicode character codes)
The generic quotation mark character is used in cases where the other three symbols are not available (software which only accepts ASCII) or when the writer is lazy.
I personally always use the left and right curly quotation marks when I'm sure I'm typing into something which can accept them. Most people never conciously notice, but it makes parsing the quotation a lot easier I find. I also don't use or even own a copy of Microsoft Word.
My old Win95 box now has one too. It was created when I installed Microsoft Word 97.
The operating system, as installed, did not have the directory. Even now that Word has created it, Windows sees no special significance to it because it doesn't have the concept of a personal data directory. It doesn't even get that special folder icon with the paper in it.
I certainly don't keep my wastepaper bin on my desk, nor do I store things there. My folders live in my drawer, and my bin sits on the floor under my desk.
I think the desktop being initially completely empty makes perfect sense. When you open documents from a "drawer" (which contains folders, not other drawers) they appear in a window on the desktop labelled only with their name. The user doesn't need to care which application opened the document.
In this metaphor, the root environment wouldn't be the desktop, it'd be a "workspace" which had in it a desktop, a trashcan and a bunch of drawers. I'm not quite sure how to handle networking, since that concept really doesn't exist in a physical office... you can't just reach over and grab a document from a drawer on the other side of an ocean.
Remember, of course, that in the bad old days of Win95 there wasn't a My Documents folder, and because users launched things from the start menu or desktop, they'd inherit the current path of Explorer.exe which was invariably the desktop, and thus always default to the desktop.
I suspect this is a major reason why people persist in doing this despite the fact that applications now have better ideas.