Although it's quite vulnerable in one sense, a denial-of-service does not in and of itself expose data to people who weren't meant to see it. If that's the kind of security vulnerability you're desperate to avoid, the risk of a DoS might be an acceptable price to pay. (Although, as things turned out, it did make arbitrary code execution possible..... hence why it was upgraded.)
Think of it as being a choice between locking people in a burning building, or having a fire exit which can also be used as an entrance. Depending on what's inside the building, it might be better for the workers to burn up with it, than to risk anybody removing it.
Re:I can't feel any responsiveness improvements.
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
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· Score: 1
I use Kate all the time. I like the fact that I can have several documents open and flick easily between them without having multiple windows or browser-style tabs. I like the fact that I can have "sessions" which load several documents to work on together -- a bit like "projects" in Visual Basic for DOS (I'm sure that Microsoft's newer Windows compilers took the project idea further, but I've never used any of them). There's also a handy terminal window for checking out scripts.
All that being said, you do need a big monitor -- at least 1280x1024 -- to make proper use of Kate. But it's not really cluttered; everything you see on that screen does something important. You could certainly have a more minimalist-looking editor, but if you wanted to keep the same level of functionality, you'd end up having to learn a lot of keystrokes and/or master a complex menu structure.
On some level, the Authorities quite like heroin addicts, because at least they're predictable. The addict needs to score every so often, and scoring shuts them up for awhile -- if they're "kicking the gong around", they're not out protesting. Of course, they still want "normal" people to think that heroin is a bad and evil substance; the side effects of its illegality certainly present this impression.
The point is, there are some people who are never going to buy Microsoft Office -- not at the full price, anyway -- and Microsoft would be stupid if they hadn't figured that out. From Microsoft's point of view, it's better that these people are using a pirated MS Office than a competitor's product. They're still learning the MS Office Way Of Doing Things, so if/when they get jobs involving computers they will want their employers to use MS Office; and they're still acting as adverts for MS Office. And they're generating files in Microsoft's ill-documented, proprietary formats -- thus ensuring that anyone with whom they exchange documents is obliged to use MS Office. As long as some of those people might be dissuaded from piracy, Microsoft benefit from a few pirates.
Of course Microsoft can't be overt about all this. And they do have to set some sort of a barrier against piracy. Otherwise literally everybody would be using pirated copies of Office, since there would be no benefit to using paid-up software. But the simple fact is that as a private individual, or even a small business in the early years of trading, you are extremely unlikely to be prosecuted for using pirated software. And if you ever do, the chances are greater that you'll stick with the devil you know than turn around and say "screw you".
As for MAC OS X: it may be easy to copy, which isn't all that surprising considering how much of it is actually FreeBSD; but last I heard, it required an expensive dongle.....
Not true. If you pass on a modified version of a GPL program and refuse to hand over the Source Code on request, as clause 3 of the GPL requires, then you have acted other than in compliance with the licence. If you were not given some other permission to do this, then you are violating copyright law. In other words, a pirate.
How the hell can you pirate Gentoo?! With GPL software, it's only piracy if you pass on a binary without the Source Code. But since Gentoo is a source-built distro, you must have the Source Code in order to install it! In fact, I'd go so far as to say Gentoo probably is a truly unpiratable operating system. Not the only one, though -- FreeBSD is even less piratable, since it's not even piracy if you pass on a binary without Source Code. (But under the terms of the BSD licence, you're entitled to pass on source code you weren't even given; which implies you have a right to take it by some unspecified, forcible means.)
Many people are addicted to nicotine, but that doesn't mean they like fags..... just that they prefer coughing their guts up in the morning and smelling like an ashtray, to the "fuckmeiwantafagiwantafagsobadlyohjesusiwantafag" feeling. They probably never even liked them when they were kids; but you've got to smoke because it's what all the cool kids do because it's what grown-ups do. By the time you realise you don't really enjoy it much, it's too late. You sold your freedom to choose for the price of twenty Bensons and you can't get it back.
You aren't screwing The System at all by pirating a proprietary application that you were never going to buy anyway. All you're doing is proving you're dependent on The System. And they already know that.
If, on the other hand, you actually applied yourself to learning how to use a competing, Open Source application instead of their proprietary one (sure, the keyboard shortcuts and menu items may not be in the same place, and the procedures to accomplish certain tasks might be a little different -- are you really telling me you are so fucking thick that you can't learn the new ones?), you would be doing something to screw The System. You'd be breaking your dependency on The System.
Microsoft have driven competitors out of business by tolerating piracy. Thanks to closed protocols which make for poor interoperability, it's more attractive to use a Microsoft product than a competing product. And ease of piracy means that, for those who are prepared to do it, all software is effectively available gratis; price is not an issue. Thus, "everybody" pirates MS Office, and vendors of alternative office software lose out on sales. Now, if it were technically impossible (or just highly undesirable) to pirate MS Office, then maybe we'd see competing office suites.
Open Source Software throws another spanner in the works. Sun can't be driven out of business by Microsoft's tolerance of piracy, since their bottom line isn't affected by people not using OpenOffice.org; which is why Microsoft hate OSS so.
I have been a product tester. And electronic components are more likely to fail at elevated temperatures: 165 degrees is the Kiss of Death for silicon. In practice, if you can't bear to keep your finger on a device (so about 60 degrees, but this is a person-to-person variable), it's probably too hot.
Certain parts for agricultural and earth-moving vehicles (possibly ordinary cars, too, but we were a bit specialised) have to go through a "burn-in" test. This involves loading special test firmware, which will exercise all the inputs and outputs; then packing them into an oven at 80 degrees, attached to a PSU and load bank, and seeing how they fare over a given time. According to the "bathtub" curve, a unit is most likely to fail in the first few hours or the last few hours of its design lifespan. By stressing them hard, we were able to weed out the duff ones (better they fail in the factory than in the field) and possibly identify process changes that could increase reliability. Of course, the units also had to be re-loaded with the real firmware; but this was done as the first stage in the end-of-line parametric test.
This procedure was not carried out on all products, but every new design was subjected to fairly extensive validation testing to ensure fitness for purpose. For instance, the ignition sequence controller in a gas boiler must never leave the gas valve open without a flame, except during the ignition timeout while the spark generator is in operation; and no single component failure (or cascade triggered by a single component failure) may shorten the pre-purge timeout (after the fan has been detected as running, but with the gas off to draw fresh air through the firebox) or lengthen the ignition timeout. All this was tested by FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis -- i.e. thought experiment) and deliberate sabotage; and obviously, validation testing included tests at higher temperatures than would be encountered in the appliance (just below the firebox in a simple up-firing boiler gets into the mid-70s; by contrast, the top of a down-firing condensing boiler near the air intake is fairly cool at 55 degrees, but higher temperatures may be seen under overheat conditions) but end-of-line parametric testing just consisted of running the control through one or more full cycles, possibly at extremes of voltage if the design was inherently susceptible to mains fluctuations, and verifying that operation was within parameters.
We never made Flash drives; but TTBOMK they are able to withstand a hot wash cycle, immersion in a WC and even an hour's playing-with by a three-year-old.
Shame you were an AC, because this is actually quite an insightful post. Many people today are leaving secondary school barely-numerate, thanks to the proliferation of idiot-calculators. When I took my maths O-level, calculators were not allowed; we were, however, given log tables, and simplifying was the last thing you did.
Nowadays I see people using an idiot-calculator to add up £1.95 and £1.80, and I want to scream. "No! You do not need a f***ing calculator! £1.95 is 5p less than £2. So take the 5p off the £1.80 and add it to £2. It's £3.75, you f***ing moron, although I think you should give them to me for nothing just because you can't add up -- and if you kept having to do that, maybe you'd learn to add the f**k up!"
If I was Minister for Mathematics, idiot-calculators would be banned altogether; all calculators would be scientific. No computers or calculators would be allowed anywhere in schools. Innumeracy would be a criminal offence, with offenders imprisoned for as long as it takes for them to pass their O-level maths (not that pussy GCSE with a pass mark of 18% where you can write "2+2=5" and still get marks for being close). There would be random multiplication-table tests; and the lowest scorers would be marched around the town in clown costumes, led by a "headmaster" with a mortar-board and cane proclaiming "THESE PEOPLE CAN'T DO MATHS!" through a loud-hailer.
Zork was probably included for its unnecessarily-complicated parser. Colossal Cave worked on simple VERB NOUN commands (good job it wasn't written in Forth, else it'd've been NOUN VERB) and part of the fun of playing the game was derived from distilling what you needed to do down to just two words. Being able to process commands like "TAKE EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE DUCK, GO EAST AND DIP THE BRASS RING IN THE FOUNTAIN" was just showing off.
On Yule, we get the minimum amount of daylight available at our own latitude. On Midsummer, we get the maximum. On Ostara and Mabon, we get exactly 12 hours of daylight. The amount of daylight received never changes by more that 7'53" per day, and is distributed more or less evenly about a moment we call Midday.
"Daylight saving time" is nothing more than artificially re-numbering the clock face, so Midday falls at 13:00 instead of 12:00. It would make more sense to keep Midday at 12:00 all year round, and have business hours from 09:00 to 17:00 in Winter and from 08:00 to 16:00 in Summer. (Or, as some are suggesting, 08:00 to 16:00 in Winter and 07:00 to 15:00 in Summer.) This would not really be any more confusing than what already happens at present, when almost everyone turns up for work an hour late or early on the first Monday after the changeover anyway. An additional benefit would be that different businesses probably would change hours on different days; so for the times (sometime around Ostara and Mabon) when half a city was working 9-5 and the rest 8-4, traffic would be less dense.
I already knew about `ls` and `mail` before I ever used anything X-based (think it was OpenWindows on Sun), and so could see clearly the relationship between what was coming through on the X terminal and what was going on in the underlying unix layer. I could bring up information about a file, including its permissions -- the exact same "rwx" stuff that `ls` shows you.
I think enormous damage is done by the pretence that the command line is "bad". I'll admit that the MS-DOS command line was much less powerful than the unix or VAX/VMS command line, and this probably is what has done so much to tarnish the reputation of the command line in general; BUT it's still often the quickest way of getting stuff done, because the GUI metaphor with its baby-talk, baby-steps emphasis can actually get in the way of the task you're trying to accomplish. This is especially the case if you want to do similar operations on a set of files, because the GUI expects continuous human interaction -- and sometimes, you just want to tell the computer what to do and let it get on with it.
Once you know how to type
$ for PIC in *.jpg; do MINI=`basename $PIC.jpg`_mini.jpg; convert -resize 200x200 $PIC $MINI && echo "Shrunk $PIC to $MINI"; done
it's a damn sight quicker and easier than fart-arsing about, dragging and resizing images in your favourite graphics editor. The main underlying concept (the for loop) really isn't that hard to grasp. And once you know about basename and convert, it should be obvious.
Now, perhaps you could conceive of a "smart" way of creating batch jobs via the GUI -- perhaps by demonstrating an operation and then selecting a whole bunch of files on which to perform it. But I don't really think it would be any easier to do it this way, than via the command line. The hard bit is knowing the commands which you need to use in order to perform a particular operation -- and it's really no more effort to learn a command-line command (type ls -al) than it is to learn a GUI command (right-click in the file list and select "view details").
The point is, I think, that unix takes the view that ignorance is merely a transient phase; while Windows seeks to prolong that ignorance.
Maybe back on your old Amiga programmers had to manually generate Postscript, but these days it is all abstracted. Heck, OS X doesn't even use postscript directly. Programs generate PDF when they print, AFAIK.
Oh, the Amiga had word processors that could generate PostScript output. (And I had much good fun learning about the language by changing things and examining the output in a text editor!) The OS could handle drivers for many different printers; the programmer only had to worry about ANSI escape codes, which the OS would translate to printer-specific codes. This was back in the days when most DOS software supported the IBM Proprinter and that was pretty much it. Mind, by then almost every printer on the market was emulating an Epson FX-80 or IBM Proprinter (and they're embarrassingly similar until you try to invoke some of the more advanced features. The main difference being the extended charset: the IBM has graphics characters from 128-255, where the Epson has control codes from 128-159 and italic versions of the main character set from 160-255).
OS X is "just" a BSD unix variant, and so would almost certainly use PostScript natively for printing -- that's the unix standard. All applications expect all printers to speak PostScript; and for the ones that don't, you just run a PostScript interpreter (as likely as not, GhostScript, which is GPL) on the host computer and turn PostScript into the printer's own native control codes.
Considering the way that modern printing works, yes, there are reasons why a Word Processor can't always (if ever) create editable PostScript.
No, I'm just saying I'm hardcore:) I'd rather be working in vi than waiting for something prettier to redraw itself. When I can type faster than the screen can keep up with me, something's being too slow. Does anyone really need a continuous preview of what things are going to look like on the printed page?
You're right that not everyone has teh l33t h4x0r 5ki11z. And I'm not complaining, because it means there are opportunities for people who do have them! But there's no reason in principle why a word processor shouldn't be able to output "editable" PostScript (with macro-based rendering rather than just a static page description; PS is a computationally-complete programming language, and it's a shame to waste that). You should never assume your program is the last thing between data and its destination; it's polite always to allow for post-processing.
Agreed. A two-player chess game (or draughts, or backgammon; hell, even Snakes and Ladders or Ludo for that matter) over the built-in wireless link-up is almost a no-brainer. You already get a menu of "people nearby", so one of the options should be to play a game with someone! If the person you've chosen to play against hasn't got the game client (actually, it's behaving as a server whenever it's that player's move, but let's not split hairs) installed on their machine, you just upload it to them automatically.
Apart from transferring the client code (which need only be done once, unless it ever has to be deleted to save precious storage space; maybe this will teach kids a few lessons about resource management) the actual protocol can be quite lightweight once a game is in progress. Every client keeps a local copy of the game's state, and only the player who is making their move ever needs to transmit any data. A single player's move in chess could be reduced to 12 bits: three each for the starting rank, starting file, destination rank and destination file. In practice, you would probably need more bits to allow for non-standard moves (like setting up a starting position so as to resume an interrupted game).
There's a lot of reusable material common to all board and card game implementations, which belongs in a library; the actual logic to implement the rules of a game would be tiny. And if all this is being written in Python, then it oughtn't to be too hard to write whole new games. Nothing you couldn't already do with the side of an old grocery carton and some felt-tip pens, but easier to share the results.
I made the PostScript file myself using vi. I just defined a few useful constants, macros and functions to make things easier. What you need to write is mostly just function calls, and I could do that using a script except it was easier to hard-code them in. (Next time, I will write a script to turn a text file with a bit of markup into PostScript.) I used absolute positioning so as just to print the address on the page, lined up against the window of the envelope. If I ever need to do sheets of standard labels, I'll just add constants for the positions of each label on the sheet. (I have a file that generates a 5mm. / 1cm. grid, to help with finding positions on a page.)
I've noticed a few modern word processors produce a slightly weirdy PostScript output with spacing information per-character, and it requires the strings to be broken up. Wordworth on the Amiga never used to do that; its PostScript output just had the human-readable text right there in it. It was a bit more primitive, though.....
I usually do my own mail-merging at quite a low level. First I create (by whatever means) a PostScript document with ==PLACEHOLDER== data in it. In my Perl script, I read the whole of this file into a scalar variable. I take my data from an SQL database or CSV file. For each record, I make a copy of the PS (so I don't have to read the file again) and do a series of $ps_copy =~ s/==NAME==/$record[0]/g; -type things. (The CSV version is even smarter, in that the first line of the CSV file is treated as a header and expected to contain the placeholder field names, so I can use a loop and $ps_copy =~ s/==$fields[$i]==/$record[$i]/g.) Then I just chuck the munged PostScript out to the printer, using open PRINTER, "|lpr -"; print PRINTER $ps_copy; close PRINTER; .
There's a problem with this, and the problem is there's no such thing as tamperproof.
If there's the ability for someone on the ground to land the plane by remote control, it can be abused; and if it can be abused, then it will be abused. All this effectively means is that you no longer need actually to be on board an aircraft in order to hijack it! If the remote system can't be overridden by the cockpit controls, then the plane is vulnerable to remote hijacking. But if the remote system can be overridden from the cockpit, then what purpose is it serving anyway?
It's like copy-prevention, insofar as it is mathematically impossible to do perfectly. And the stakes are high enough that eventually, somebody will have a go, sooner or later.
Your OpenPGP-protected e-mail isn't secure because OpenPGP is secure. It's just that nobody is so desperate to read your e-mail that they would try to crack your OpenPGP key; if The Authorities want information, they have easier ways of getting it (which include locking you up on an unrelated-but-plausible charge and fabricating evidence after the event). But there are people who are desperate enough to fetch down aircraft, and we've already seen examples showing what sort of things they will try. Whether it's a case of building a transmitter that can be used to land a plane, getting hold of a "real" one somehow from one of the "secure" landing sites, modifying the plane's electronics so the system will not work, or just switching tactics and relying on killing passengers to get a message across, people will do it if they have a good enough reason to.
You don't have to do mail-merging with Google Apps directly. You can do that locally. It takes like, what, about a dozen lines of Perl? And that's allowing for use strict;. Every Linux distro has Perl. Or if you don't like Perl, you can always do it in Java. It'll take a couple of dozen screenfuls, is all.
Re:When patents expire
on
How MP3 Was Born
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· Score: 4, Informative
They were never valid anyway in the EU or the UK, since MP3 encoding is a mathematical operation and beyond the scope of patentability in those jurisdictions.
Best illustration I ever saw for these was in high school. Someone had drawn a picture of a cooker with a pan on the hob, labelled "conduction"; a joint of m**t in the oven, labelled "convection"; and something under the grill, labelled "radiation".
I wonder why we don't just keep GMT (or whatever your local time zone is in Winter, when midday occurs about 12:00) all year around, but have businesses open from 19:00 to 17:00 in the Winter and 08:00 to 16:00 in the Summer? That way, there is no need for messing about with clocks or anything (except the alarm). After all, the hours of daylight (which increase steadily from Yule until Midsummer) are always split evenly around midday, whether you call it 12:00, 13:00 or even 14:00. But 12:00 is just a nice figure to use when it's midday.
Oh, come on. If Microsoft had clamped down on illegal copies of MS Office, then alternative office suites costing one tenth of the price of MS Office would have taken over already by now. Microsoft Office has become the industry standard because, to all intents and purposes, it's free. So people learn word processing (using spaces for formatting) and spreadsheets (using a calculator to add up figures) in their own time using a pirated copy of Office, then businesses have to pay for Office because that's what all their staff know. And people who work in businesses where Office is used get a pirate copy to use at home, because that's what they know from work. It's a vicious circle.
Imagine a small company, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. They manufacture someting called Cheap Office. It can't boast all the features of MS Office, but it has most of the ones people actually use. (It also defaults to A4 paper, so your printer won't insist for you to press the "paper" button after printing each page.) So it's ideal for writing everyday letters, doing accounts and keeping track of your CD collection, and it retails at £50. Now, our hypothetical customer John Thomas (who has letters to write, accounts to do and a CD collection to keep track of) sees Cheap Office and figures he could save £450 by buying it instead of MS Office. But then he figures he could pirate MS Office and save £500. If enough people do that, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. go out of business, due to piracy -- even though nobody has ever pirated a Mom + Pop product!
This is how Microsoft have traditionally killed off the competition. But unfortunately, Open Source software isn't susceptible to the same technique. If people aren't making heavy use of OpenOffice.org, nobody has lost anything. In fact it could give the developers time to move on and produce something different. (Watch that dark horse KOffice, too. It isn't even pretending to be like MS Office -- which could well turn out to be its salvation.) I'm sort of reminded of an episode of King of the Hill, in which the kid starts kicking people in the bollocks and grows to think he's unstoppable..... till he finds himself up against his own mother!
If you can do what you want with your own stuff, the big corporations can't sell you more stuff. Therefore, the big corporations deliberately keep you from using your stuff how you want to. And your 14-year-old with a Ph. D. is a dangerous criminal!
The decision for Notepad not to open Linux text files (which, like other unix-like systems and AmigaDOS, use just a linefeed character at the end of each line; where MS-DOS usually uses a carriage return and linefeed) correctly was both deliberate and intentional. Microsoft did it on purpose, for no good reason except to make Linux look bad. The old MS-DOS editor could handle files with bare LF endings, no problem. It would take maybe one or two extra lines of source code to make Notepad handle bare LFs. In fact, I strongly suspect that the code is in there, but commented out.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends.
..... hence why it was upgraded.)
Although it's quite vulnerable in one sense, a denial-of-service does not in and of itself expose data to people who weren't meant to see it. If that's the kind of security vulnerability you're desperate to avoid, the risk of a DoS might be an acceptable price to pay. (Although, as things turned out, it did make arbitrary code execution possible
Think of it as being a choice between locking people in a burning building, or having a fire exit which can also be used as an entrance. Depending on what's inside the building, it might be better for the workers to burn up with it, than to risk anybody removing it.
I use Kate all the time. I like the fact that I can have several documents open and flick easily between them without having multiple windows or browser-style tabs. I like the fact that I can have "sessions" which load several documents to work on together -- a bit like "projects" in Visual Basic for DOS (I'm sure that Microsoft's newer Windows compilers took the project idea further, but I've never used any of them). There's also a handy terminal window for checking out scripts.
All that being said, you do need a big monitor -- at least 1280x1024 -- to make proper use of Kate. But it's not really cluttered; everything you see on that screen does something important. You could certainly have a more minimalist-looking editor, but if you wanted to keep the same level of functionality, you'd end up having to learn a lot of keystrokes and/or master a complex menu structure.
On some level, the Authorities quite like heroin addicts, because at least they're predictable. The addict needs to score every so often, and scoring shuts them up for awhile -- if they're "kicking the gong around", they're not out protesting. Of course, they still want "normal" people to think that heroin is a bad and evil substance; the side effects of its illegality certainly present this impression.
.....
The point is, there are some people who are never going to buy Microsoft Office -- not at the full price, anyway -- and Microsoft would be stupid if they hadn't figured that out. From Microsoft's point of view, it's better that these people are using a pirated MS Office than a competitor's product. They're still learning the MS Office Way Of Doing Things, so if/when they get jobs involving computers they will want their employers to use MS Office; and they're still acting as adverts for MS Office. And they're generating files in Microsoft's ill-documented, proprietary formats -- thus ensuring that anyone with whom they exchange documents is obliged to use MS Office. As long as some of those people might be dissuaded from piracy, Microsoft benefit from a few pirates.
Of course Microsoft can't be overt about all this. And they do have to set some sort of a barrier against piracy. Otherwise literally everybody would be using pirated copies of Office, since there would be no benefit to using paid-up software. But the simple fact is that as a private individual, or even a small business in the early years of trading, you are extremely unlikely to be prosecuted for using pirated software. And if you ever do, the chances are greater that you'll stick with the devil you know than turn around and say "screw you".
As for MAC OS X: it may be easy to copy, which isn't all that surprising considering how much of it is actually FreeBSD; but last I heard, it required an expensive dongle
Not true. If you pass on a modified version of a GPL program and refuse to hand over the Source Code on request, as clause 3 of the GPL requires, then you have acted other than in compliance with the licence. If you were not given some other permission to do this, then you are violating copyright law. In other words, a pirate.
How the hell can you pirate Gentoo?! With GPL software, it's only piracy if you pass on a binary without the Source Code. But since Gentoo is a source-built distro, you must have the Source Code in order to install it! In fact, I'd go so far as to say Gentoo probably is a truly unpiratable operating system. Not the only one, though -- FreeBSD is even less piratable, since it's not even piracy if you pass on a binary without Source Code. (But under the terms of the BSD licence, you're entitled to pass on source code you weren't even given; which implies you have a right to take it by some unspecified, forcible means.)
Many people are addicted to nicotine, but that doesn't mean they like fags ..... just that they prefer coughing their guts up in the morning and smelling like an ashtray, to the "fuckmeiwantafagiwantafagsobadlyohjesusiwantafag" feeling. They probably never even liked them when they were kids; but you've got to smoke because it's what all the cool kids do because it's what grown-ups do. By the time you realise you don't really enjoy it much, it's too late. You sold your freedom to choose for the price of twenty Bensons and you can't get it back.
You aren't screwing The System at all by pirating a proprietary application that you were never going to buy anyway. All you're doing is proving you're dependent on The System. And they already know that.
If, on the other hand, you actually applied yourself to learning how to use a competing, Open Source application instead of their proprietary one (sure, the keyboard shortcuts and menu items may not be in the same place, and the procedures to accomplish certain tasks might be a little different -- are you really telling me you are so fucking thick that you can't learn the new ones?), you would be doing something to screw The System. You'd be breaking your dependency on The System.
Microsoft have driven competitors out of business by tolerating piracy. Thanks to closed protocols which make for poor interoperability, it's more attractive to use a Microsoft product than a competing product. And ease of piracy means that, for those who are prepared to do it, all software is effectively available gratis; price is not an issue. Thus, "everybody" pirates MS Office, and vendors of alternative office software lose out on sales. Now, if it were technically impossible (or just highly undesirable) to pirate MS Office, then maybe we'd see competing office suites.
Open Source Software throws another spanner in the works. Sun can't be driven out of business by Microsoft's tolerance of piracy, since their bottom line isn't affected by people not using OpenOffice.org; which is why Microsoft hate OSS so.
I have been a product tester. And electronic components are more likely to fail at elevated temperatures: 165 degrees is the Kiss of Death for silicon. In practice, if you can't bear to keep your finger on a device (so about 60 degrees, but this is a person-to-person variable), it's probably too hot.
Certain parts for agricultural and earth-moving vehicles (possibly ordinary cars, too, but we were a bit specialised) have to go through a "burn-in" test. This involves loading special test firmware, which will exercise all the inputs and outputs; then packing them into an oven at 80 degrees, attached to a PSU and load bank, and seeing how they fare over a given time. According to the "bathtub" curve, a unit is most likely to fail in the first few hours or the last few hours of its design lifespan. By stressing them hard, we were able to weed out the duff ones (better they fail in the factory than in the field) and possibly identify process changes that could increase reliability. Of course, the units also had to be re-loaded with the real firmware; but this was done as the first stage in the end-of-line parametric test.
This procedure was not carried out on all products, but every new design was subjected to fairly extensive validation testing to ensure fitness for purpose. For instance, the ignition sequence controller in a gas boiler must never leave the gas valve open without a flame, except during the ignition timeout while the spark generator is in operation; and no single component failure (or cascade triggered by a single component failure) may shorten the pre-purge timeout (after the fan has been detected as running, but with the gas off to draw fresh air through the firebox) or lengthen the ignition timeout. All this was tested by FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis -- i.e. thought experiment) and deliberate sabotage; and obviously, validation testing included tests at higher temperatures than would be encountered in the appliance (just below the firebox in a simple up-firing boiler gets into the mid-70s; by contrast, the top of a down-firing condensing boiler near the air intake is fairly cool at 55 degrees, but higher temperatures may be seen under overheat conditions) but end-of-line parametric testing just consisted of running the control through one or more full cycles, possibly at extremes of voltage if the design was inherently susceptible to mains fluctuations, and verifying that operation was within parameters.
We never made Flash drives; but TTBOMK they are able to withstand a hot wash cycle, immersion in a WC and even an hour's playing-with by a three-year-old.
Shame you were an AC, because this is actually quite an insightful post. Many people today are leaving secondary school barely-numerate, thanks to the proliferation of idiot-calculators. When I took my maths O-level, calculators were not allowed; we were, however, given log tables, and simplifying was the last thing you did.
Nowadays I see people using an idiot-calculator to add up £1.95 and £1.80, and I want to scream. "No! You do not need a f***ing calculator! £1.95 is 5p less than £2. So take the 5p off the £1.80 and add it to £2. It's £3.75, you f***ing moron, although I think you should give them to me for nothing just because you can't add up -- and if you kept having to do that, maybe you'd learn to add the f**k up!"
If I was Minister for Mathematics, idiot-calculators would be banned altogether; all calculators would be scientific. No computers or calculators would be allowed anywhere in schools. Innumeracy would be a criminal offence, with offenders imprisoned for as long as it takes for them to pass their O-level maths (not that pussy GCSE with a pass mark of 18% where you can write "2+2=5" and still get marks for being close). There would be random multiplication-table tests; and the lowest scorers would be marched around the town in clown costumes, led by a "headmaster" with a mortar-board and cane proclaiming "THESE PEOPLE CAN'T DO MATHS!" through a loud-hailer.
Zork was probably included for its unnecessarily-complicated parser. Colossal Cave worked on simple VERB NOUN commands (good job it wasn't written in Forth, else it'd've been NOUN VERB) and part of the fun of playing the game was derived from distilling what you needed to do down to just two words. Being able to process commands like "TAKE EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE DUCK, GO EAST AND DIP THE BRASS RING IN THE FOUNTAIN" was just showing off.
The idea of "daylight saving time" is laughable.
On Yule, we get the minimum amount of daylight available at our own latitude. On Midsummer, we get the maximum. On Ostara and Mabon, we get exactly 12 hours of daylight. The amount of daylight received never changes by more that 7'53" per day, and is distributed more or less evenly about a moment we call Midday.
"Daylight saving time" is nothing more than artificially re-numbering the clock face, so Midday falls at 13:00 instead of 12:00. It would make more sense to keep Midday at 12:00 all year round, and have business hours from 09:00 to 17:00 in Winter and from 08:00 to 16:00 in Summer. (Or, as some are suggesting, 08:00 to 16:00 in Winter and 07:00 to 15:00 in Summer.) This would not really be any more confusing than what already happens at present, when almost everyone turns up for work an hour late or early on the first Monday after the changeover anyway. An additional benefit would be that different businesses probably would change hours on different days; so for the times (sometime around Ostara and Mabon) when half a city was working 9-5 and the rest 8-4, traffic would be less dense.
I already knew about `ls` and `mail` before I ever used anything X-based (think it was OpenWindows on Sun), and so could see clearly the relationship between what was coming through on the X terminal and what was going on in the underlying unix layer. I could bring up information about a file, including its permissions -- the exact same "rwx" stuff that `ls` shows you.
I think enormous damage is done by the pretence that the command line is "bad". I'll admit that the MS-DOS command line was much less powerful than the unix or VAX/VMS command line, and this probably is what has done so much to tarnish the reputation of the command line in general; BUT it's still often the quickest way of getting stuff done, because the GUI metaphor with its baby-talk, baby-steps emphasis can actually get in the way of the task you're trying to accomplish. This is especially the case if you want to do similar operations on a set of files, because the GUI expects continuous human interaction -- and sometimes, you just want to tell the computer what to do and let it get on with it.
Once you know how to type it's a damn sight quicker and easier than fart-arsing about, dragging and resizing images in your favourite graphics editor. The main underlying concept (the for loop) really isn't that hard to grasp. And once you know about basename and convert, it should be obvious.
Now, perhaps you could conceive of a "smart" way of creating batch jobs via the GUI -- perhaps by demonstrating an operation and then selecting a whole bunch of files on which to perform it. But I don't really think it would be any easier to do it this way, than via the command line. The hard bit is knowing the commands which you need to use in order to perform a particular operation -- and it's really no more effort to learn a command-line command (type ls -al) than it is to learn a GUI command (right-click in the file list and select "view details").
The point is, I think, that unix takes the view that ignorance is merely a transient phase; while Windows seeks to prolong that ignorance.
OS X is "just" a BSD unix variant, and so would almost certainly use PostScript natively for printing -- that's the unix standard. All applications expect all printers to speak PostScript; and for the ones that don't, you just run a PostScript interpreter (as likely as not, GhostScript, which is GPL) on the host computer and turn PostScript into the printer's own native control codes. Such as? (Apart from bad programming, obviously.)
No, I'm just saying I'm hardcore :) I'd rather be working in vi than waiting for something prettier to redraw itself. When I can type faster than the screen can keep up with me, something's being too slow. Does anyone really need a continuous preview of what things are going to look like on the printed page?
You're right that not everyone has teh l33t h4x0r 5ki11z. And I'm not complaining, because it means there are opportunities for people who do have them! But there's no reason in principle why a word processor shouldn't be able to output "editable" PostScript (with macro-based rendering rather than just a static page description; PS is a computationally-complete programming language, and it's a shame to waste that). You should never assume your program is the last thing between data and its destination; it's polite always to allow for post-processing.
Agreed. A two-player chess game (or draughts, or backgammon; hell, even Snakes and Ladders or Ludo for that matter) over the built-in wireless link-up is almost a no-brainer. You already get a menu of "people nearby", so one of the options should be to play a game with someone! If the person you've chosen to play against hasn't got the game client (actually, it's behaving as a server whenever it's that player's move, but let's not split hairs) installed on their machine, you just upload it to them automatically.
Apart from transferring the client code (which need only be done once, unless it ever has to be deleted to save precious storage space; maybe this will teach kids a few lessons about resource management) the actual protocol can be quite lightweight once a game is in progress. Every client keeps a local copy of the game's state, and only the player who is making their move ever needs to transmit any data. A single player's move in chess could be reduced to 12 bits: three each for the starting rank, starting file, destination rank and destination file. In practice, you would probably need more bits to allow for non-standard moves (like setting up a starting position so as to resume an interrupted game).
There's a lot of reusable material common to all board and card game implementations, which belongs in a library; the actual logic to implement the rules of a game would be tiny. And if all this is being written in Python, then it oughtn't to be too hard to write whole new games. Nothing you couldn't already do with the side of an old grocery carton and some felt-tip pens, but easier to share the results.
I made the PostScript file myself using vi. I just defined a few useful constants, macros and functions to make things easier. What you need to write is mostly just function calls, and I could do that using a script except it was easier to hard-code them in. (Next time, I will write a script to turn a text file with a bit of markup into PostScript.) I used absolute positioning so as just to print the address on the page, lined up against the window of the envelope. If I ever need to do sheets of standard labels, I'll just add constants for the positions of each label on the sheet. (I have a file that generates a 5mm. / 1cm. grid, to help with finding positions on a page.)
.....
I've noticed a few modern word processors produce a slightly weirdy PostScript output with spacing information per-character, and it requires the strings to be broken up. Wordworth on the Amiga never used to do that; its PostScript output just had the human-readable text right there in it. It was a bit more primitive, though
I usually do my own mail-merging at quite a low level. First I create (by whatever means) a PostScript document with ==PLACEHOLDER== data in it. In my Perl script, I read the whole of this file into a scalar variable. I take my data from an SQL database or CSV file. For each record, I make a copy of the PS (so I don't have to read the file again) and do a series of $ps_copy =~ s/==NAME==/$record[0]/g; -type things. (The CSV version is even smarter, in that the first line of the CSV file is treated as a header and expected to contain the placeholder field names, so I can use a loop and $ps_copy =~ s/==$fields[$i]==/$record[$i]/g .) Then I just chuck the munged PostScript out to the printer, using open PRINTER, "|lpr -"; print PRINTER $ps_copy; close PRINTER; .
There's a problem with this, and the problem is there's no such thing as tamperproof.
If there's the ability for someone on the ground to land the plane by remote control, it can be abused; and if it can be abused, then it will be abused. All this effectively means is that you no longer need actually to be on board an aircraft in order to hijack it! If the remote system can't be overridden by the cockpit controls, then the plane is vulnerable to remote hijacking. But if the remote system can be overridden from the cockpit, then what purpose is it serving anyway?
It's like copy-prevention, insofar as it is mathematically impossible to do perfectly. And the stakes are high enough that eventually, somebody will have a go, sooner or later.
Your OpenPGP-protected e-mail isn't secure because OpenPGP is secure. It's just that nobody is so desperate to read your e-mail that they would try to crack your OpenPGP key; if The Authorities want information, they have easier ways of getting it (which include locking you up on an unrelated-but-plausible charge and fabricating evidence after the event). But there are people who are desperate enough to fetch down aircraft, and we've already seen examples showing what sort of things they will try. Whether it's a case of building a transmitter that can be used to land a plane, getting hold of a "real" one somehow from one of the "secure" landing sites, modifying the plane's electronics so the system will not work, or just switching tactics and relying on killing passengers to get a message across, people will do it if they have a good enough reason to.
You don't have to do mail-merging with Google Apps directly. You can do that locally. It takes like, what, about a dozen lines of Perl? And that's allowing for use strict;. Every Linux distro has Perl. Or if you don't like Perl, you can always do it in Java. It'll take a couple of dozen screenfuls, is all.
They were never valid anyway in the EU or the UK, since MP3 encoding is a mathematical operation and beyond the scope of patentability in those jurisdictions.
Best illustration I ever saw for these was in high school. Someone had drawn a picture of a cooker with a pan on the hob, labelled "conduction"; a joint of m**t in the oven, labelled "convection"; and something under the grill, labelled "radiation".
I wonder why we don't just keep GMT (or whatever your local time zone is in Winter, when midday occurs about 12:00) all year around, but have businesses open from 19:00 to 17:00 in the Winter and 08:00 to 16:00 in the Summer? That way, there is no need for messing about with clocks or anything (except the alarm). After all, the hours of daylight (which increase steadily from Yule until Midsummer) are always split evenly around midday, whether you call it 12:00, 13:00 or even 14:00. But 12:00 is just a nice figure to use when it's midday.
Oh, come on. If Microsoft had clamped down on illegal copies of MS Office, then alternative office suites costing one tenth of the price of MS Office would have taken over already by now. Microsoft Office has become the industry standard because, to all intents and purposes, it's free. So people learn word processing (using spaces for formatting) and spreadsheets (using a calculator to add up figures) in their own time using a pirated copy of Office, then businesses have to pay for Office because that's what all their staff know. And people who work in businesses where Office is used get a pirate copy to use at home, because that's what they know from work. It's a vicious circle.
..... till he finds himself up against his own mother!
Imagine a small company, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. They manufacture someting called Cheap Office. It can't boast all the features of MS Office, but it has most of the ones people actually use. (It also defaults to A4 paper, so your printer won't insist for you to press the "paper" button after printing each page.) So it's ideal for writing everyday letters, doing accounts and keeping track of your CD collection, and it retails at £50. Now, our hypothetical customer John Thomas (who has letters to write, accounts to do and a CD collection to keep track of) sees Cheap Office and figures he could save £450 by buying it instead of MS Office. But then he figures he could pirate MS Office and save £500. If enough people do that, Mom + Pop Software Ltd. go out of business, due to piracy -- even though nobody has ever pirated a Mom + Pop product!
This is how Microsoft have traditionally killed off the competition. But unfortunately, Open Source software isn't susceptible to the same technique. If people aren't making heavy use of OpenOffice.org, nobody has lost anything. In fact it could give the developers time to move on and produce something different. (Watch that dark horse KOffice, too. It isn't even pretending to be like MS Office -- which could well turn out to be its salvation.) I'm sort of reminded of an episode of King of the Hill, in which the kid starts kicking people in the bollocks and grows to think he's unstoppable
It all comes down to money.
If you can do what you want with your own stuff, the big corporations can't sell you more stuff. Therefore, the big corporations deliberately keep you from using your stuff how you want to. And your 14-year-old with a Ph. D. is a dangerous criminal!
The decision for Notepad not to open Linux text files (which, like other unix-like systems and AmigaDOS, use just a linefeed character at the end of each line; where MS-DOS usually uses a carriage return and linefeed) correctly was both deliberate and intentional. Microsoft did it on purpose, for no good reason except to make Linux look bad. The old MS-DOS editor could handle files with bare LF endings, no problem. It would take maybe one or two extra lines of source code to make Notepad handle bare LFs. In fact, I strongly suspect that the code is in there, but commented out.