You do know there's a plugin called Firesomething, right? Call it what you want. Or install Firesomething and "All your branding are belong to Firesomething." Every time it starts it can have a different name.
Yes, it's for 1.x Firefox. There are instructions in the link to fix it so it works with versions up to 4.0.
I almost hope Silverlight takes off so Adobe have some serious, commercially driven competition for Flash.
I hope Adobe takes note of your comment. Microsoft is eating Adobe's product lines one by one. Soon they'll be after Photoshop. Adobe could go cross platform. Or they could just keep feeding the mouth that bites them. The list of companies that chose option B is quite long, so I'm not holding my breath.
If you're that worried, connect through wireless to your neighbor's open wireless access point. Then open a VM and boot it to Ubuntu or some other Live CD and use that to browse whatever you want.
And remember dear: there's nothing to be embarassed or ashamed about, but wash your hands afterward.
Yellowstone will erupt in this dramatic fashion. The Siberian Traps will too. The 1.5km-diameter (or much more) space rock will definitely strike earth in the future. A comet will too. These aren't tinfoil hat ideas - everybody in the related sciences agrees that these events will occur. It's just a matter of time. Maybe it will be a long time, as we think about it usually, or maybe it will be a short one. Each of these events is neither more likely nor less likely to happen on a particular Monday a million years hence than they are on July 4, 2012.
They will happen and when they happen there's a good chance they'll wipe out all human life still on the Earth. Events like these don't have to wipe out mankind. We can choose to not let that happen. Or not.
A "few meters" of ash covering most of the US would be a pretty major issue. Almost none of the roofs are rated to carry that. All the planted crops, except trees, are killed. All trees less than a few meters die, naturally. You can't plow it. Most plants won't grow in it. Cars won't run for very long when it's in the air and nobody's digging a car out of a few meters of ash without patience, and if you did there's no where to drive it where you won't get bogged down in soft crunchy ash. The ash is suffused with toxic gases, some of which precipitate as acids. When it rains it kills all the life in all the rivers, and the silt changes the course of major rivers and minor streams. When it gets to the Atlantic and the Gulf it kills almost all of the fish in the ocean. It interferes with cell phone reception, TV and radio. A few meters of ash is enough to clog every hydro power plant, every nuclear power plant in the country. It blocks all the railways and all the highways of course, and that's how we move food around. And if you're not directly affected but you don't like America, that would be a fine day to attack. In summary, it's a big deal. Lava? A local issue where a good plan is not to touch the lava, not to get downstream of the lava. Ash, though, it'll wreck your whole week.
Link. A few inches of ash is a big deal. I've been there. A few meters? It boggles the imagination.
You're right I'm not doing anything for open source -- I'm choosing for myself what I think is best. Two years from now when there's good open source drivers for ATI hardware I will have good open source drivers for the ATI hardware I'm about to buy for my linux boxes. I'll have good hardware for my Windows boxes too, and if I decide to migrate them to OSS I will have the option. That might be especially handy if W7 turns out not to be a platform I want to go forward with because by then XP will be too old to maintain and there's no way I'm installing Vista again in anything but a virtual machine.
If I chose nVidia hardware and they choose not to follow suit I'd have neither the open drivers nor the option.
I agree. I'm buying four ATI in the next few months personally, and I'll be influencing technology purchasers for many thousands of units a year. NVidia can come open or go home now for all of me. I don't even care that the vast majority of those PCs will run Windows. I can't in good conscience help people choose a lock-in. I can't do it.
I've been favoring nv for their early proprietary Linux driver support for a long time. I really thought they would have been first with this.
I'll give the guy some recognition for spending his own money to do good. It's not like I have a billion dollars to spend eradicating malaria. Good on him.
But when his company uses sham "donations" of software licenses to reduce their tax liability, I have a problem with that. That means I have to pay some of their share. And when they do it to try to get a lock on the software market in the third world I have a problem with that too because now they're taking my money and spending it to harm people. That's the opposite of philanthropy.
If they care so much about Vista Licensee counts, sure, ship 8 million Vista licenses to people in Zimbabwe who have neither computers nor electricity but put each license in a box with a case of MREs and a few water purification tablets (or at least an edible box) so they actually get something useful out of it, ok? Is that so much to ask?
I'm not as crazy as you think. It'll take a while, but yeah that's what's going to happen. It's not because people care about the FLOSS. It's about the secondary effects - code quality, clever applications, creative leverage on having a real view of the underlying architecture. That, and more eyes on the problem.
No, I'm not crazy enough to think the vast majority of people care about this for the inevitable fully functional GPL video drivers that will come of it. Some do, but in the grand scale not enough to shift the market faster than the technologies go obsolete.
When your company has an 80% margin and you donate stuff that costs you nothing, like "the right to use your software" and record the gift at retail price, you net a greater tax benefit than it costs you to make the gift. That's net profit for giving, which is not generous -- it's just good accounting. If, from your profits for giving stuff that costs you nothing, you also give "medicine" that's generous because it's not required. Still, if you net a profit from giving, your giving can't be considered anything more than an accounting trick because some good no matter how unlikely, might have been served by paying the tax - some tax money is spent generously or well and wisely after all.
It's not really philanthropy unless you give more than you got. This is charity. Here's my money. Give it away in the best way you can. That's also trust. They say trust is earned. Let's hope BillG deserved Warren Buffet's trust because the ill that can be done with that much gelt is serious.
Nearly all of the African continent is inflamed with horrors beyond imagining. Terror rules more of the modern world than it has for a very long time. The fate of South America is uncertain. Maybe the best use of the Gates Foundation would be to husband their resources well until such a time as they might have some hope to turn the tide. Now is not it. This groundbreaking of the $500M Gates Foundation Campus is definitely not it. You can do a lot of philanthropy for half a billion dollars.
No. You can be forgiven for asking the question, given history, but... no.
TFA:
The microcode for the newest GPUs has also been released.
This is the real deal. Actual specifications about how the hardware interfaces actually work in a format that can't be encumbered by copyrights or patents. NVidia and Intel will follow with their own release announcements within weeks, or watch their proprietary crap die. This is "a race to the bottom" where the "bottom" is "fully open". The funny thing is that the "bottom" is a door to a whole new world of opportunity.
To be fair Intel has been fairly open, and Nvidia has been opening up. Windows only video drivers are soon to be a legacy best forgotten. Please hold a moment of silence for the brave chairs that are about to lose their integrity in Redmond.
I'd call it not math. Math is the only place where you can prove things; everywhere else, you can only falsify things.
Math is a game of circular reasoning played with symbols. I'm not a math pro but I do know a thing about symbols: they're fungible.
Math proves nothing. At best it is a tool to build models of what we might expect when we can measure. It helps us improve the tools with which we measure. When we can measure and the measurements disagree with the math, we improve the math. The current state of math seems to be very good and when used properly often delivers predictions that anticipate measurements -- but it's not "proof". Measurements are proof. Samples are proof. Math proofs are paper, and most of them have more to offer as a form of carbon fuel.
Generally, it doesn't add programs. From a user interface point of view that would be a negative. Yeah, it can be configured, SMS, yadda yadda. For the vast majority of real situations you can't add programs with add/remove programs.
Sorry. They are near enough to Seattle that I could deliver them but I've now promised a school they could have them.
If that falls through I'll let you know. This problem does come up for me regularly so I'll keep you in mind for when it happens again. I have some constraints on what I can do with them. Grey market is strictly out.
I am told a heat pump is more efficient -- unless you're also doing something else with the watts.
I don't see this listed, and it's an important issue:
On the model M when the buckle surrenders and the key is registered, you can feel the buckle surrender giving your keypress, but the key continues to travel past this distance. It's not necessary to slam each key against the backstop like you have to do with so many others - which many people find is easier on their finger joints. After a little practice you press each key with just enough force to clear the buckle, and the buckle snaps your finger back as if the keyboard is urging you to your next keystroke. It's remarkable.
They're not kidding. Try it. Really. The Cherry switch keyboards are nice too, but if there's an improvement on the model M I haven't seen it in 25 years and literally thousands of samples. The switch and buckle spring technology is the critical issue - the more modern versions which have this are also good.
Make the product "hot". This is how you turn the Borg Bill meme to your advantage. Everybody knows geeks fantasize about being assimilated by Jeri Ryan. Then bring back Bill as a commercial actor as a Borg and remind us why "It's good to be king." Spin off some merchandising.
They won't, though. Probably shoot 30 seconds of some balding guy on his analyst's couch saying something like "I like this Seven more than Mojave." Marketing idiots!
To use the provided Windows Vista, simply follow the instructions provided. To use the Downgrade Right to Microsoft Windows XP Professional, simply start the system.
So not only does it have XP rights, it's XP that's installed. Cute.
Slashdot Mirror
Ammo can help you keep that food you are growing for yourself.
Or help you harvest the food your neighbour is growing for you.
The odds are definitely with the house.
Will become valuable intellectual property, and a useful survival skill.
You do know there's a plugin called Firesomething, right? Call it what you want. Or install Firesomething and "All your branding are belong to Firesomething." Every time it starts it can have a different name.
Yes, it's for 1.x Firefox. There are instructions in the link to fix it so it works with versions up to 4.0.
I almost hope Silverlight takes off so Adobe have some serious, commercially driven competition for Flash.
I hope Adobe takes note of your comment. Microsoft is eating Adobe's product lines one by one. Soon they'll be after Photoshop. Adobe could go cross platform. Or they could just keep feeding the mouth that bites them. The list of companies that chose option B is quite long, so I'm not holding my breath.
If you're that worried, connect through wireless to your neighbor's open wireless access point. Then open a VM and boot it to Ubuntu or some other Live CD and use that to browse whatever you want.
And remember dear: there's nothing to be embarassed or ashamed about, but wash your hands afterward.
Prozac
Yellowstone will erupt in this dramatic fashion. The Siberian Traps will too. The 1.5km-diameter (or much more) space rock will definitely strike earth in the future. A comet will too. These aren't tinfoil hat ideas - everybody in the related sciences agrees that these events will occur. It's just a matter of time. Maybe it will be a long time, as we think about it usually, or maybe it will be a short one. Each of these events is neither more likely nor less likely to happen on a particular Monday a million years hence than they are on July 4, 2012.
They will happen and when they happen there's a good chance they'll wipe out all human life still on the Earth. Events like these don't have to wipe out mankind. We can choose to not let that happen. Or not.
If we spanked it with a ground burst of this 50 megaton supernuke, it would behave itself.
Or maybe that would just make it angry.
A "few meters" of ash covering most of the US would be a pretty major issue. Almost none of the roofs are rated to carry that. All the planted crops, except trees, are killed. All trees less than a few meters die, naturally. You can't plow it. Most plants won't grow in it. Cars won't run for very long when it's in the air and nobody's digging a car out of a few meters of ash without patience, and if you did there's no where to drive it where you won't get bogged down in soft crunchy ash. The ash is suffused with toxic gases, some of which precipitate as acids. When it rains it kills all the life in all the rivers, and the silt changes the course of major rivers and minor streams. When it gets to the Atlantic and the Gulf it kills almost all of the fish in the ocean. It interferes with cell phone reception, TV and radio. A few meters of ash is enough to clog every hydro power plant, every nuclear power plant in the country. It blocks all the railways and all the highways of course, and that's how we move food around. And if you're not directly affected but you don't like America, that would be a fine day to attack. In summary, it's a big deal. Lava? A local issue where a good plan is not to touch the lava, not to get downstream of the lava. Ash, though, it'll wreck your whole week.
Link. A few inches of ash is a big deal. I've been there. A few meters? It boggles the imagination.
You're right I'm not doing anything for open source -- I'm choosing for myself what I think is best. Two years from now when there's good open source drivers for ATI hardware I will have good open source drivers for the ATI hardware I'm about to buy for my linux boxes. I'll have good hardware for my Windows boxes too, and if I decide to migrate them to OSS I will have the option. That might be especially handy if W7 turns out not to be a platform I want to go forward with because by then XP will be too old to maintain and there's no way I'm installing Vista again in anything but a virtual machine.
If I chose nVidia hardware and they choose not to follow suit I'd have neither the open drivers nor the option.
You choose for yourself. You have free will.
I agree. I'm buying four ATI in the next few months personally, and I'll be influencing technology purchasers for many thousands of units a year. NVidia can come open or go home now for all of me. I don't even care that the vast majority of those PCs will run Windows. I can't in good conscience help people choose a lock-in. I can't do it.
I've been favoring nv for their early proprietary Linux driver support for a long time. I really thought they would have been first with this.
I'll give the guy some recognition for spending his own money to do good. It's not like I have a billion dollars to spend eradicating malaria. Good on him.
But when his company uses sham "donations" of software licenses to reduce their tax liability, I have a problem with that. That means I have to pay some of their share. And when they do it to try to get a lock on the software market in the third world I have a problem with that too because now they're taking my money and spending it to harm people. That's the opposite of philanthropy.
If they care so much about Vista Licensee counts, sure, ship 8 million Vista licenses to people in Zimbabwe who have neither computers nor electricity but put each license in a box with a case of MREs and a few water purification tablets (or at least an edible box) so they actually get something useful out of it, ok? Is that so much to ask?
I'm not as crazy as you think. It'll take a while, but yeah that's what's going to happen. It's not because people care about the FLOSS. It's about the secondary effects - code quality, clever applications, creative leverage on having a real view of the underlying architecture. That, and more eyes on the problem.
No, I'm not crazy enough to think the vast majority of people care about this for the inevitable fully functional GPL video drivers that will come of it. Some do, but in the grand scale not enough to shift the market faster than the technologies go obsolete.
My mistake.
When your company has an 80% margin and you donate stuff that costs you nothing, like "the right to use your software" and record the gift at retail price, you net a greater tax benefit than it costs you to make the gift. That's net profit for giving, which is not generous -- it's just good accounting. If, from your profits for giving stuff that costs you nothing, you also give "medicine" that's generous because it's not required. Still, if you net a profit from giving, your giving can't be considered anything more than an accounting trick because some good no matter how unlikely, might have been served by paying the tax - some tax money is spent generously or well and wisely after all.
It's not really philanthropy unless you give more than you got. This is charity. Here's my money. Give it away in the best way you can. That's also trust. They say trust is earned. Let's hope BillG deserved Warren Buffet's trust because the ill that can be done with that much gelt is serious.
Nearly all of the African continent is inflamed with horrors beyond imagining. Terror rules more of the modern world than it has for a very long time. The fate of South America is uncertain. Maybe the best use of the Gates Foundation would be to husband their resources well until such a time as they might have some hope to turn the tide. Now is not it. This groundbreaking of the $500M Gates Foundation Campus is definitely not it. You can do a lot of philanthropy for half a billion dollars.
Yeah... is there a catch?
No. You can be forgiven for asking the question, given history, but... no.
TFA:
The microcode for the newest GPUs has also been released.
This is the real deal. Actual specifications about how the hardware interfaces actually work in a format that can't be encumbered by copyrights or patents. NVidia and Intel will follow with their own release announcements within weeks, or watch their proprietary crap die. This is "a race to the bottom" where the "bottom" is "fully open". The funny thing is that the "bottom" is a door to a whole new world of opportunity.
To be fair Intel has been fairly open, and Nvidia has been opening up. Windows only video drivers are soon to be a legacy best forgotten. Please hold a moment of silence for the brave chairs that are about to lose their integrity in Redmond.
I'd call it not math. Math is the only place where you can prove things; everywhere else, you can only falsify things.
Math is a game of circular reasoning played with symbols. I'm not a math pro but I do know a thing about symbols: they're fungible.
Math proves nothing. At best it is a tool to build models of what we might expect when we can measure. It helps us improve the tools with which we measure. When we can measure and the measurements disagree with the math, we improve the math. The current state of math seems to be very good and when used properly often delivers predictions that anticipate measurements -- but it's not "proof". Measurements are proof. Samples are proof. Math proofs are paper, and most of them have more to offer as a form of carbon fuel.
Still, math can be a very useful tool.
what's so confusing about add/remove programs?
Generally, it doesn't add programs. From a user interface point of view that would be a negative. Yeah, it can be configured, SMS, yadda yadda. For the vast majority of real situations you can't add programs with add/remove programs.
Sorry. They are near enough to Seattle that I could deliver them but I've now promised a school they could have them.
If that falls through I'll let you know. This problem does come up for me regularly so I'll keep you in mind for when it happens again. I have some constraints on what I can do with them. Grey market is strictly out.
I am told a heat pump is more efficient -- unless you're also doing something else with the watts.
Today's common keyboards are very programmer-hostile.
Tell me about it. They don't even have the APL symbols on them. How lame is that?
I don't see this listed, and it's an important issue:
On the model M when the buckle surrenders and the key is registered, you can feel the buckle surrender giving your keypress, but the key continues to travel past this distance. It's not necessary to slam each key against the backstop like you have to do with so many others - which many people find is easier on their finger joints. After a little practice you press each key with just enough force to clear the buckle, and the buckle snaps your finger back as if the keyboard is urging you to your next keystroke. It's remarkable.
They're not kidding. Try it. Really. The Cherry switch keyboards are nice too, but if there's an improvement on the model M I haven't seen it in 25 years and literally thousands of samples. The switch and buckle spring technology is the critical issue - the more modern versions which have this are also good.
Make the product "hot". This is how you turn the Borg Bill meme to your advantage. Everybody knows geeks fantasize about being assimilated by Jeri Ryan. Then bring back Bill as a commercial actor as a Borg and remind us why "It's good to be king." Spin off some merchandising.
They won't, though. Probably shoot 30 seconds of some balding guy on his analyst's couch saying something like "I like this Seven more than Mojave." Marketing idiots!
And.... here's a quote...
To use the provided Windows Vista, simply follow the instructions provided. To use the Downgrade Right to Microsoft Windows XP Professional, simply start the system.
So not only does it have XP rights, it's XP that's installed. Cute.
Power utilities are authorized to provide communications services.
No more power wires. All wires strung or buried must be composites with fiber as well as electrical conductors.
Power meters must report usage over the fiber internet - no more meter readers.
The subsidy should cover the difference in price for composite cables, and some switching equipment, less the savings in meter reading.
That and retrofitting fiber on existing poles should fix the rest, which is a jobs program.