of course it does that. it's a cultural artifact which reflects the process it developed out of.
that is the general way a brain works. as we search for things, our instinctive subconsciously-directed actions to find our comfort zone and stick to it.
the problem they're describing with google is analogous to trying to tell someone a difficult truth. they prefer to first bend toward their comforting delusions, and it takes an amazing subtlety (or a conscientious argument) to influence a stupid person to hear all the right ideas in the right order so that they can personally infer a painful truth. the self-humiliating recognition of ignorance doesn't sit well with anyone's feelings. avoiding that end-result (which is pretty much last on the "want" list) is what drives people to define their relationship to the world. it's very gratifying to feel supported in a safe little bubble where you don't even have to pay attention to anything but your self-satisfaction. challenging your own preference for ego-boosting activities is what keeps people dumb already.
how popular would google be if its algorithm responded to people trending to reinforcing disprovable belief by producing results filled with obvious, painful truth which contradicts the way people want to believe? goog's all like: i see you like religion still, let's sow some seeds of doubt in your search results mwah ha haha
well, being a math prodigy is fine and all that. just, the thing is that it means he probably spends a lot of time with mathematicians. and if he's working on a refinement of special relativity, i hope for his sake that he doesn't get mired in the same thought processes which turned the field of physics into an quagmire forty years ago. yes, it's necessary to understand where we are to see where we're going, but frankly if you listen to a modern physicist, they are so utterly lost in the minutiae of particle decays that they're missing the right-in-their-face boots-on-the-ground reality. the last few decades of research have brought us practically nothing except the word "string". and even then it is inconsistently applied, poorly conceived of, and utterly obtuse to a layperson anyhow.
sure kid, it's neat that someone proved the photon can be particle or wave purely on circumstance. but if you start obsessing over trying to make a followup experiment to prove some minor particle effect, you will end up just as gobsmacked by the new reality as the rest of the physics faculty.
Yes the fact that human sexuality involves human emotion and intimacy is worth bringing up. But i think you are being a little bit hopeful there. I don't think the average Joe Bloggs is going to sit and explain those parts terribly well even if they already are trying to explain the facts of life. If a child is already being socialized by parents who are warm and understanding, they're probably also learning most of the fundamental skills to achieve satisfying emotional intimacy with a future love anyhow. If they aren't, because the family home is maybe awkward or slightly dysfunctional, then sure it would be great if they had it pointed out to them by someone, but i'm pretty sure they would have to either learn how to do so by themselves, through personal growth, or perhaps be a bit of social failure. A big part of why young kids get something from porn is just to see the technical aspects, what goes where, what moves does one use, how can a woman have sex with a donkey? What you're suggesting, Tom, is a much more elementary set of social skills, which hopefully they've already picked up on before they're even actively interested in porn.
ah, why does no-one see the irony.
if Douglas Adams was still alive, he'd find it deliciously funny that the universe couldn't quite manage to spell 1337 correctly...
to expand on the above, fair use is applied specifically to things such as academics being able to reference another's work without having to pay copyright, or is used to defend the right to satirise another's work, like making an iPod ad that features characters from a Disney/Pixar movie.
even under a very liberal reading of the fair use laws, it would be hard to legitimately shield news.google under Fair Use
in fact, one of the most obvious objections other media outlets would have is that news.google as it stands is practically a news outlet on its own. there are numerous people who really don't even want to read entire articles -- they're quite content to read the headlines and feel like they have read enough. in my own town, there are three free dailies competing with exactly that same amount of content. whereas with google, you get a few lines from the beginning of the story, with these "papers" you end up getting even less detail (but bigger pictures). hard to believe, even to see them in your hand, but one of those papers that specialise in nothing but glossy headlines also manages to distribute farther than most other print media in town. if i was running one of those papers, i'd be that i'd be thinking that news.google was a competitor.
/postscript for a solid overview of what Fair Use entails, Stanford University has a very thorough overview
for my own situation, i have two machines side-by-side. one is a rackmount linux server and one is a windows game-playing machine (also using a monitor switch to dual-monitor the windows box). if both sound-cards use spdif connexions, then i highly recommend taking the spdif-out from one box and wiring it to the spdif-in on the sound card that has the speakers. alternately, if you have sound cards that only have one-eigth inch headphone jacks, take the line-out from one and get a patch cable to the line-in or mic jack on the other.
if you patch it in through a mic jack, make sure you turn off the decibel boost on the mic jack or otherwise you'll get hideous distortion. if you're running it to the line-in, then go into the mixer and set line-in between half and three-quarter volume at first. then adjust the line-out on the slave machine up to it's highest and see where you're at.
in my case, i seldom use the server for full audio or video playback (but will occasionally), so i tend to leave the line-in closer to halfway because i mostly want to hear the sound events from the server, but have the option to use it to watch a movie while i play a game.
One of the things that i think might have been a key to Ubuntu's success is the very fact that they didn't ship with the various multimedia libraries necessary. Yes it's all true that it installs easily on almost any hardware, and yes the chocolate coloured theme is quite pleasant. But i think there was a real magic trick to leaving out mp3's and avi's.
let me put it this way: you get a fresh clean install and there's nothing at all to configure or fuss with. seems great but you can't play mp3's. hunh? it's a small thing, you can figure it out. so you go and do a little search at Ubuntu and they explain that it's not free. you're a newbie to linux and you don't understand how it's different here than on your windows box. so you drift over to GNU and do a little reading. maybe you learn about free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech.
then you go back to the friendly forums and find a nice step by step on how to add in extra repositories. wow, all this stuff is free, and hey look how much there is in the Universe, and then in the Multiverse. yoiks! this linux thing is amazing. and it's not so tough.
and i think that might be the whole point. someone waltzing into a full distro with everything in the world (even a program that will time how long your tea steeps) is a lot more intimidating than most of us really think. and of course the exact same goes for a distro that you're compiling from scratch. if there is any single thing i think Ubuntu has going for it, it is that it gives you everything a complete OS really needs to have (office, web, photos) but somehow sneaks in just a small lesson here and there about what the linux world is really about. if your parents can read a help menu (and the Breezy Badger help is one of the best i've ever read) they can figure out those little things that will eventually convert them to being true penguin lovers for life
omg i'm sorry i didn't read this comment on the day this story posted. "what is the Katrix?" that's comedy. and incidentally how i feel as well. i'm going to liberally use that phrase until the final days of this debate
in fact one of the most amazing things about the economics is that they don't feel the 64-bit market is worth it. oddly enough, when discussing this with a young associate of mine who was in the process of upgrading a computer lab at a drop-in center, i considered basing the entire argument against 64-bit machines based on the flash problem.
i can't imagine how their coprorate people justify not doing so. though i can imagine the programmers would be ready to make it happen with precious little effort. remember that macromedia has talked about porting over its Studio to linux, and the financial fuss of that probably is not going to make a huge amount of sense either -- people in the linux community have (in some places) a religious adherence to free.
but if you want to talk about who is driving Flash content creation, i'd imagie that there are a lot of people who've already moved to full 64-bit, on each of the the three major OS's and in any field where creative matters. every web designer, video editor, page layout and general artist i know has moved to 64-bit, and since they are the type of people that are already creating Flash, then it seems like Macromedia is shooting itself in the foot here.
yes i am aware of group policy settings. in Active Directory, it is remarkably useful to give everyone the same set of folders regardless of what machine they've logged in with. notably, you can also pre-mount network drives in explorer so that everyone automatically logs in with the same links to shared folders.
what i meant, and i apologise for not being more explicit, is that i'd like the capability to change the base location of system variable folders such as "my pictures" and "my music" so that when i start up a videogame that will play the mp3's from "my music" it will just go to the right folder, even though my mp3's aren't in a subfolder of "my documents" and aren't even on the same hard drive as "my documents"
incidentally, as someone who already had a perfectly functional filing system in place, i never really had much use for the My* folders. Admittedly my filing was clunkier (FILES -*) but they did line up alphabetically and always bunched together in the folder tree.
what i would much rather see is a system where i can reassign any one of those folders to a different one much the same way that you can change My Documents to a different one so i can have folders called vids, tunage, pix etc...
You see, i hate using all these miscellaneous programs to find trojans. partly because i want to go in and quickly fix a person's problems.
The first thing i recommend is the Startup Control Panel which installs a very handy control panel. It will show you every startup that Windows has, including the registry-only ones that aren't apparent to the user. Install, run, and see what starts with the computer.
open the Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc), and using "End Process Tree," shut off any programs that you found in the Startup Control Panel
Then go in to the Startup Control Panel and turn off their registry entries for startup. If you've shut down the process, it won't reregister. then you can worry about tracking down the files later.
This has never failed me, regardless of the malware. Frankly, it surprises me how reliable it is. The one other concern is maybe you end up shutting down an infected vital system process (one virus not worth mentioning that infected lsass.exe). If in the process of killing processes, the computer suddenly says it's shutting down in 30 seconds (which happens when you kill the lsass process), then hit Windows-R for a run dialogue, and type "shutdown/a" which will abort the shutdown command, and allow you to continue your cleanup.
no i obviously do not support the filtering of Chinese internet access. nor do i support the filtering of American journalists covering wars such as Gulf War I or Gulf War II. nor do i support tv stations that won't let high school students air commercials about non-smoking. nor do i support radio stations that play the same content across the continent. nor do i support the concentratrion of media ownership in the hands of a very powerful few much to the detriment of people like us.
free speech isn't just about being able to shout, it's also about hearing every voice you need to hear. for analysis of how speech is not truly free in North America see Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
However flawed it is, support Indy Media in your town.
and what are we talking about? we're talking about Free Speech It is not just about howling to keep the Right, it is remembering that it has to be exercised continually in defense of it -- and that includes questioning how we exercise it.
oh and in answer to the first question about "upset" about it, well we're talking about the Toronto Sun which is just desperate to be seen as a hot and important news source.
Rules for whomever, rules for whomever else. Free speech is free speech regardless of who it is for. As written by Beatrice Hall... but i will defend to the death your right to say it and you know what, it does apply in Canada.
as a few people have pointed out in other threads, there is no brand-new news in Mr Blogger's comments. This has been an ancient scandal in Canada that frankly barely gets mentioned in any more excited a tone than mentioning I like pepper on my steak
what makes me respond to your post is that there is a fundamental difference in how we value and express our freedom of speech. whereas in some countries, shocking testimony at an inquiry calls for a media circus, it does not necesarily mean the same thing in Canada. yes we are a boring, yawny people. i've never been in a city in Canada where i saw the day reported by the Channel 11 Action News Team (now with fewer carbs). it's true that if there's a riot in Canada there's nothing to mention. unleess of course it involves hockey.
but since the commission has been open to the public, has had reporters sitting there the whole time, and is specifically a very boring and old story, you can't really argue that free speech is being limited.
the publication ban is only a limit placed on the story being disseminated widely by the press; in practice it is mostly voluntary, because publication bans are breached whenever a publisher or even TV scum (sorry, "reporter") decide that the story must be told. it is a politeness of the system meant to ensure a fair trial, but it certainly doesn't mean you can't go to Tim Horton's down the street and find out exactly what's going on. nor does it mean that you can't turn on your television and watch the news reports from the States (which most of us are able to figure out how to do).
the inalienable Right of Free Speech is important, but it seems like it should come with the Responsibility of Intelligence as well. i care about my right, but wouldn't want to hear the incessant minutiae of these "scandals" as if it all happened in the girl's locker room in high school.
ah yes granted in truth i am blurring the distinctions between patent and copyright. i'm fully aware of the difference and ought to have explicitly remarked upon it.
i actually look at the process of the patent system as being relatively effective (with some caveats). and if it came down to it, i would actually much rather see any form of intellectual property be treated with the same law, from a certain perspective they come from the imagination of someone and benefit many -- whether the benefit is a product which saves lives or a fancy that makes my heart sing doesn't seem to really justify the difference.
the fact that patent encourages competition and continued improvement is a wonderful innovation. it allows for things such as generic drugs to enter the market eventually at prices which are far more reasonable. there are places where the length of a patent makes very little sense (i.e. computers) but if we look at the patent process as fostering competition, we would also really have to argue that it promotes a very specific kind of innovation. in the case of medicine, companies are successful because they anticipate precisely that twenty year profitable period and don't necessarily need to innovate any faster than that. in certain cases (maybe psychiatric medicine? someone?) they will continue with drugs that are not so effective, in part because they know they've got another decade before they have to innovate on their own
i wouldn't argue that copyright necessarily needs to be re-written specifically with the idea of fostering "competition" in the arts. but on the other hand, i don't see any particularly valid argument for extending copyright much beyond that same generational mark. whereas with patents, it's obviously useful to have new and improved products come to market (i love my microwave). i don't see any inherent usefulness in continuing to pay an artist long after they're dead, or for that matter more than twenty years after the work. it neither fosters nor stifles new art (changing trends will do that regardless of whether any money was inovled).
i guess one of the biggest concerns i have about copyright is still that after the death of the artist, i don't feel like i should be paying any cost beyond the actual plastic or paper that it takes to get that content to me. as a ridiculous example, imagine if you will that copyright had been around much longer, that the copyright had somehow been extended to cover 500 years post-mortem. that would make the Shakespeare family easily the richest family on the planet. and old Bill himself? heck, when he died, he left his wife the bed in his will. of course, by this point Sony or BMG or Michael Jackson would own the rights to the Shakespeare catalogue.
i'm not going to even touch the particular argument about whether P2P software or activities are inherently illegal or not because i'll make my vote on my own.
what bothers me is the inherent idea of copyrighting materials. i believe as most people presumably do that it is fair to expect to make a living off the work you produce. but i don't see how it is an automatic right that anything you make muscially should sustain you for years, particularly if you never do anything again.
as an activist for freedom of speech, i will certainly allow that a song of revolution is equally valuable as a novel that shook the world. but as a consumer, i'll tell you that i think the average Britney Spears schmaltz isn't worth even listening to the ads on the radio, let alone paying money for it. and the fact that twenty years from now, they'll be selling minivans to her current fans using that song just saddens me. the fact that any person can cruise talentlessly through the music industry and then get huffy about protecting their right to live off that "work" just makes me laugh
but what makes me cry is something different. take the example of Happy Birthday. one of those universal songs, you might end up singing it every month for the rest of your life (certainly around my office you do). it is one of the cornerstones of Western culture, a part of our collective social imaginary. we as a people sing this song in celebration time and again.
unless of course you're in the movies or a commercial or television. because yes, somebody wrote it and they expect to get paid. who cares if they're ninety year old ladies at this point. or for that matter, who cares if it's the children of those 90 year old ladies. or for that matter if it's Vivendi Universal or BMG or Sony who bought the rights to the copyright off the children of those now-dead 90 year-old ladies but still stand up demanding their 18 cents everytime it's played in a commercial setting.
yes it makes sense that you should get a living out of the works you produce, but frankly with patents and copyrights being given extensions time and again, these works are money-earning products so long past any human lifespan that the idea of the creator making a living from it has been lost. give them five years. give them twenty years. i think it's fair that a generation should pass before something enters the public domain (though it still seems too long).
the fact is that copyright has become an inalienable right to be greedy about some cute catchy riff that has all the weight or importance of that pothole i ran over yesterday. it protects the rights of singularly untalented people and defies the truth that some songs have been embraced and loved by humanity.
whoa son, hang on there. FYI, Mac OS Classic was riddled with viruses. It had a design flaw with it's macro system that was terribly easy to exploit. If you like, i could send you samples of dozens of documents with macros from the years i spent having to work in a Mac shop. It speaks to the savviness of Mac users that while claiming their computers to be immune to virii (which they did say a lot even then) that if you ran a virus checker on any one of those machines, there'd be hundreds of files with the same couple dozen infetions
the first thing is that they won't give 50000 USD to a virus that's harmful. which pretty much means that they'll only be paying off a proof-of-concept that got out in the wild.
they also will not open any attachments at all; and since one of the primary ways that virii propagate is through lusers opening up mystery programs that takes a huge one chunk out of the running.
oh yeah, and if you're writing a non-harmful virus that doesn't rely on an attachment, you still also have to have your virus found by a commercial virus checker -- which means that it will likely only be found by a heuristic checker.
i was inclined to say "Pride goeth before the fall" but since they only give you until the end of July, i'm guessing that they're actually not feeling all that proud and secure in reality
as someone who has developed software under a couple of different processes, i actually find this a compelling question...
if it came to a choice or not, i'd not be very inclined to following any porcess. my favourite programming tools are a clipboard and a mechanical pencil -- and frankly after i've drawn up a UML i end up wanting to be an Agile programmer almost by default. it depends on how you're defining Agile.
for that matter, IBM claims that its Rational Unified Process is inherently flexible, but having had to program in that process a few times, i'll argue that it's not.
let's argue that one of the key tenets of the Agile Method is to encourage the talented and motivated to do a good job and lead through their individualism. in a small or even medium sized business, that is a good way to run things (and this is true of fields other than IT). it encourages random improvements and magic features that might not have been planned in the roadmap since version 0.1.1. and if you are running a particularly small group, it is brilliant way to do things.
by comparison, if i was managing the development of a prodcut like M$ Word, i would live in dread of a rogue coder doing something brilliant but failing to properly check that every object and variable behaved like it was supposed to. i'm reminded of a blog by a microsoft programmer with a bug that caused havoc with the mac version
bringing it back to the sysadmin question: i thik there is a lot of potentilal in using Agile Methods. flexible and fast are what the cutsomers want. but i think there needs to be a further defining of what the "official" Agile Method is because i can certainly see problems with it.
as someone who sysadmins some very strange situations, i can imagine horrible problems if one of my junior admins decided to go all rogue elephant on a DNS server using some OS that is incompatible in a weird and unknown way
i love and encourage people to find their magic solutions to scertain questions, but yes i must admit that if you do something that means a batch of our users can no longer find the network then i'm a little worried.
to my future junior sysadmins: yes we can already run the directory and network with any damn OS you choose, they all fit. magic improvements are highly welcomed and i look forward to them. but please, follow the damn chart, there are a couple things that are in place and already work.
Yes it does work quite nicely in fact. of course i tried it instantly and since i already use it store a large number of files, i' already installed it remotely on one of the servers i admin.
i also have a little 512MB card reader which took a 5MB file in 10 seconds (over a USB 1 connexion at that). posting the file to gmail is, um, slower. i stopped counting after ten seconds, started writing this paragraph, and wow i look at the progress meter... and it just stopped. so it's not a faster storage. but then again, some days i just leave the card reader at home y'know.
it has a quirk of naming files as part01.bin which is a small thing, given that the filename is right there in the subject line, but if i download a couple using the gmail interface, i'll have to remember to actually use Save As
and yes as others have pointed out, there's the smegging 10MB limit (which incidentally is the same size limit as half the email accounts i already have) so it's not going to be a practical thing for my daily backups or even any mp3 i can think of.
i'll still keep it though, just because i do enjoy virtual drives. let's see:
well obviously i start with winrar & smartftp. one out of necessity, and the other because there is no better. but more importantly i can't live without these:
startup control panel & startup monitor which i use to see if any worms, viruses or adware get onto my PC and have to ask my permission to register as a starup program
zone alarm so i don't have to worry about any program trying to get into my computer or even worst
irfan view as my all-purpouse image viewer and sound player. i use it as my primary file association for all of these, particularly since i often want to just double-click an mp3 etc.
Slashdot Mirror
oh it sure does, but the how of it is weird to explain...
of course it does that. it's a cultural artifact which reflects the process it developed out of. that is the general way a brain works. as we search for things, our instinctive subconsciously-directed actions to find our comfort zone and stick to it. the problem they're describing with google is analogous to trying to tell someone a difficult truth. they prefer to first bend toward their comforting delusions, and it takes an amazing subtlety (or a conscientious argument) to influence a stupid person to hear all the right ideas in the right order so that they can personally infer a painful truth. the self-humiliating recognition of ignorance doesn't sit well with anyone's feelings. avoiding that end-result (which is pretty much last on the "want" list) is what drives people to define their relationship to the world. it's very gratifying to feel supported in a safe little bubble where you don't even have to pay attention to anything but your self-satisfaction. challenging your own preference for ego-boosting activities is what keeps people dumb already. how popular would google be if its algorithm responded to people trending to reinforcing disprovable belief by producing results filled with obvious, painful truth which contradicts the way people want to believe? goog's all like: i see you like religion still, let's sow some seeds of doubt in your search results mwah ha haha
well, being a math prodigy is fine and all that. just, the thing is that it means he probably spends a lot of time with mathematicians. and if he's working on a refinement of special relativity, i hope for his sake that he doesn't get mired in the same thought processes which turned the field of physics into an quagmire forty years ago. yes, it's necessary to understand where we are to see where we're going, but frankly if you listen to a modern physicist, they are so utterly lost in the minutiae of particle decays that they're missing the right-in-their-face boots-on-the-ground reality. the last few decades of research have brought us practically nothing except the word "string". and even then it is inconsistently applied, poorly conceived of, and utterly obtuse to a layperson anyhow. sure kid, it's neat that someone proved the photon can be particle or wave purely on circumstance. but if you start obsessing over trying to make a followup experiment to prove some minor particle effect, you will end up just as gobsmacked by the new reality as the rest of the physics faculty.
Yes the fact that human sexuality involves human emotion and intimacy is worth bringing up. But i think you are being a little bit hopeful there. I don't think the average Joe Bloggs is going to sit and explain those parts terribly well even if they already are trying to explain the facts of life. If a child is already being socialized by parents who are warm and understanding, they're probably also learning most of the fundamental skills to achieve satisfying emotional intimacy with a future love anyhow. If they aren't, because the family home is maybe awkward or slightly dysfunctional, then sure it would be great if they had it pointed out to them by someone, but i'm pretty sure they would have to either learn how to do so by themselves, through personal growth, or perhaps be a bit of social failure. A big part of why young kids get something from porn is just to see the technical aspects, what goes where, what moves does one use, how can a woman have sex with a donkey? What you're suggesting, Tom, is a much more elementary set of social skills, which hopefully they've already picked up on before they're even actively interested in porn.
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "Way to go, sport!" (you started a new game!)
ah, why does no-one see the irony. if Douglas Adams was still alive, he'd find it deliciously funny that the universe couldn't quite manage to spell 1337 correctly...
to expand on the above, fair use is applied specifically to things such as academics being able to reference another's work without having to pay copyright, or is used to defend the right to satirise another's work, like making an iPod ad that features characters from a Disney/Pixar movie.
even under a very liberal reading of the fair use laws, it would be hard to legitimately shield news.google under Fair Use
in fact, one of the most obvious objections other media outlets would have is that news.google as it stands is practically a news outlet on its own. there are numerous people who really don't even want to read entire articles -- they're quite content to read the headlines and feel like they have read enough. in my own town, there are three free dailies competing with exactly that same amount of content. whereas with google, you get a few lines from the beginning of the story, with these "papers" you end up getting even less detail (but bigger pictures). hard to believe, even to see them in your hand, but one of those papers that specialise in nothing but glossy headlines also manages to distribute farther than most other print media in town. if i was running one of those papers, i'd be that i'd be thinking that news.google was a competitor.
/postscript
for a solid overview of what Fair Use entails, Stanford University has a very thorough overview
for my own situation, i have two machines side-by-side. one is a rackmount linux server and one is a windows game-playing machine (also using a monitor switch to dual-monitor the windows box). if both sound-cards use spdif connexions, then i highly recommend taking the spdif-out from one box and wiring it to the spdif-in on the sound card that has the speakers. alternately, if you have sound cards that only have one-eigth inch headphone jacks, take the line-out from one and get a patch cable to the line-in or mic jack on the other.
if you patch it in through a mic jack, make sure you turn off the decibel boost on the mic jack or otherwise you'll get hideous distortion. if you're running it to the line-in, then go into the mixer and set line-in between half and three-quarter volume at first. then adjust the line-out on the slave machine up to it's highest and see where you're at.
in my case, i seldom use the server for full audio or video playback (but will occasionally), so i tend to leave the line-in closer to halfway because i mostly want to hear the sound events from the server, but have the option to use it to watch a movie while i play a game.
One of the things that i think might have been a key to Ubuntu's success is the very fact that they didn't ship with the various multimedia libraries necessary. Yes it's all true that it installs easily on almost any hardware, and yes the chocolate coloured theme is quite pleasant. But i think there was a real magic trick to leaving out mp3's and avi's.
let me put it this way: you get a fresh clean install and there's nothing at all to configure or fuss with. seems great but you can't play mp3's. hunh? it's a small thing, you can figure it out. so you go and do a little search at Ubuntu and they explain that it's not free. you're a newbie to linux and you don't understand how it's different here than on your windows box. so you drift over to GNU and do a little reading. maybe you learn about free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech.
then you go back to the friendly forums and find a nice step by step on how to add in extra repositories. wow, all this stuff is free, and hey look how much there is in the Universe, and then in the Multiverse. yoiks! this linux thing is amazing. and it's not so tough.
and i think that might be the whole point. someone waltzing into a full distro with everything in the world (even a program that will time how long your tea steeps) is a lot more intimidating than most of us really think. and of course the exact same goes for a distro that you're compiling from scratch. if there is any single thing i think Ubuntu has going for it, it is that it gives you everything a complete OS really needs to have (office, web, photos) but somehow sneaks in just a small lesson here and there about what the linux world is really about. if your parents can read a help menu (and the Breezy Badger help is one of the best i've ever read) they can figure out those little things that will eventually convert them to being true penguin lovers for life
omg i'm sorry i didn't read this comment on the day this story posted. "what is the Katrix?" that's comedy. and incidentally how i feel as well. i'm going to liberally use that phrase until the final days of this debate
in fact one of the most amazing things about the economics is that they don't feel the 64-bit market is worth it. oddly enough, when discussing this with a young associate of mine who was in the process of upgrading a computer lab at a drop-in center, i considered basing the entire argument against 64-bit machines based on the flash problem.
i can't imagine how their coprorate people justify not doing so. though i can imagine the programmers would be ready to make it happen with precious little effort. remember that macromedia has talked about porting over its Studio to linux, and the financial fuss of that probably is not going to make a huge amount of sense either -- people in the linux community have (in some places) a religious adherence to free.
but if you want to talk about who is driving Flash content creation, i'd imagie that there are a lot of people who've already moved to full 64-bit, on each of the the three major OS's and in any field where creative matters. every web designer, video editor, page layout and general artist i know has moved to 64-bit, and since they are the type of people that are already creating Flash, then it seems like Macromedia is shooting itself in the foot here.
okay, you are officially my hero of the day. thx
yes i am aware of group policy settings. in Active Directory, it is remarkably useful to give everyone the same set of folders regardless of what machine they've logged in with. notably, you can also pre-mount network drives in explorer so that everyone automatically logs in with the same links to shared folders.
what i meant, and i apologise for not being more explicit, is that i'd like the capability to change the base location of system variable folders such as "my pictures" and "my music" so that when i start up a videogame that will play the mp3's from "my music" it will just go to the right folder, even though my mp3's aren't in a subfolder of "my documents" and aren't even on the same hard drive as "my documents"
incidentally, as someone who already had a perfectly functional filing system in place, i never really had much use for the My* folders. Admittedly my filing was clunkier (FILES -*) but they did line up alphabetically and always bunched together in the folder tree.
what i would much rather see is a system where i can reassign any one of those folders to a different one much the same way that you can change My Documents to a different one so i can have folders called vids, tunage, pix etc...
You see, i hate using all these miscellaneous programs to find trojans. partly because i want to go in and quickly fix a person's problems.
/a" which will abort the shutdown command, and allow you to continue your cleanup.
The first thing i recommend is the Startup Control Panel which installs a very handy control panel. It will show you every startup that Windows has, including the registry-only ones that aren't apparent to the user. Install, run, and see what starts with the computer.
open the Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc), and using "End Process Tree," shut off any programs that you found in the Startup Control Panel
Then go in to the Startup Control Panel and turn off their registry entries for startup. If you've shut down the process, it won't reregister. then you can worry about tracking down the files later.
This has never failed me, regardless of the malware. Frankly, it surprises me how reliable it is. The one other concern is maybe you end up shutting down an infected vital system process (one virus not worth mentioning that infected lsass.exe). If in the process of killing processes, the computer suddenly says it's shutting down in 30 seconds (which happens when you kill the lsass process), then hit Windows-R for a run dialogue, and type "shutdown
no i obviously do not support the filtering of Chinese internet access. nor do i support the filtering of American journalists covering wars such as Gulf War I or Gulf War II. nor do i support tv stations that won't let high school students air commercials about non-smoking. nor do i support radio stations that play the same content across the continent. nor do i support the concentratrion of media ownership in the hands of a very powerful few much to the detriment of people like us.
free speech isn't just about being able to shout, it's also about hearing every voice you need to hear. for analysis of how speech is not truly free in North America see Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
However flawed it is, support Indy Media in your town.
and what are we talking about? we're talking about Free Speech It is not just about howling to keep the Right, it is remembering that it has to be exercised continually in defense of it -- and that includes questioning how we exercise it.
oh and in answer to the first question about "upset" about it, well we're talking about the Toronto Sun which is just desperate to be seen as a hot and important news source.
Rules for whomever, rules for whomever else. Free speech is free speech regardless of who it is for. As written by Beatrice Hall ... but i will defend to the death your right to say it and you know what, it does apply in Canada.
as a few people have pointed out in other threads, there is no brand-new news in Mr Blogger's comments. This has been an ancient scandal in Canada that frankly barely gets mentioned in any more excited a tone than mentioning I like pepper on my steak
what makes me respond to your post is that there is a fundamental difference in how we value and express our freedom of speech. whereas in some countries, shocking testimony at an inquiry calls for a media circus, it does not necesarily mean the same thing in Canada. yes we are a boring, yawny people. i've never been in a city in Canada where i saw the day reported by the Channel 11 Action News Team (now with fewer carbs). it's true that if there's a riot in Canada there's nothing to mention. unleess of course it involves hockey.
but since the commission has been open to the public, has had reporters sitting there the whole time, and is specifically a very boring and old story, you can't really argue that free speech is being limited.
the publication ban is only a limit placed on the story being disseminated widely by the press; in practice it is mostly voluntary, because publication bans are breached whenever a publisher or even TV scum (sorry, "reporter") decide that the story must be told. it is a politeness of the system meant to ensure a fair trial, but it certainly doesn't mean you can't go to Tim Horton's down the street and find out exactly what's going on. nor does it mean that you can't turn on your television and watch the news reports from the States (which most of us are able to figure out how to do).
the inalienable Right of Free Speech is important, but it seems like it should come with the Responsibility of Intelligence as well. i care about my right, but wouldn't want to hear the incessant minutiae of these "scandals" as if it all happened in the girl's locker room in high school.
ah yes granted in truth i am blurring the distinctions between patent and copyright. i'm fully aware of the difference and ought to have explicitly remarked upon it.
i actually look at the process of the patent system as being relatively effective (with some caveats). and if it came down to it, i would actually much rather see any form of intellectual property be treated with the same law, from a certain perspective they come from the imagination of someone and benefit many -- whether the benefit is a product which saves lives or a fancy that makes my heart sing doesn't seem to really justify the difference.
the fact that patent encourages competition and continued improvement is a wonderful innovation. it allows for things such as generic drugs to enter the market eventually at prices which are far more reasonable. there are places where the length of a patent makes very little sense (i.e. computers) but if we look at the patent process as fostering competition, we would also really have to argue that it promotes a very specific kind of innovation. in the case of medicine, companies are successful because they anticipate precisely that twenty year profitable period and don't necessarily need to innovate any faster than that. in certain cases (maybe psychiatric medicine? someone?) they will continue with drugs that are not so effective, in part because they know they've got another decade before they have to innovate on their own
i wouldn't argue that copyright necessarily needs to be re-written specifically with the idea of fostering "competition" in the arts. but on the other hand, i don't see any particularly valid argument for extending copyright much beyond that same generational mark. whereas with patents, it's obviously useful to have new and improved products come to market (i love my microwave). i don't see any inherent usefulness in continuing to pay an artist long after they're dead, or for that matter more than twenty years after the work. it neither fosters nor stifles new art (changing trends will do that regardless of whether any money was inovled).
i guess one of the biggest concerns i have about copyright is still that after the death of the artist, i don't feel like i should be paying any cost beyond the actual plastic or paper that it takes to get that content to me. as a ridiculous example, imagine if you will that copyright had been around much longer, that the copyright had somehow been extended to cover 500 years post-mortem. that would make the Shakespeare family easily the richest family on the planet. and old Bill himself? heck, when he died, he left his wife the bed in his will. of course, by this point Sony or BMG or Michael Jackson would own the rights to the Shakespeare catalogue.
I suppose i'm not a good capitalist
i'm not going to even touch the particular argument about whether P2P software or activities are inherently illegal or not because i'll make my vote on my own.
what bothers me is the inherent idea of copyrighting materials. i believe as most people presumably do that it is fair to expect to make a living off the work you produce. but i don't see how it is an automatic right that anything you make muscially should sustain you for years, particularly if you never do anything again.
as an activist for freedom of speech, i will certainly allow that a song of revolution is equally valuable as a novel that shook the world. but as a consumer, i'll tell you that i think the average Britney Spears schmaltz isn't worth even listening to the ads on the radio, let alone paying money for it. and the fact that twenty years from now, they'll be selling minivans to her current fans using that song just saddens me. the fact that any person can cruise talentlessly through the music industry and then get huffy about protecting their right to live off that "work" just makes me laugh
but what makes me cry is something different. take the example of Happy Birthday. one of those universal songs, you might end up singing it every month for the rest of your life (certainly around my office you do). it is one of the cornerstones of Western culture, a part of our collective social imaginary. we as a people sing this song in celebration time and again.
unless of course you're in the movies or a commercial or television. because yes, somebody wrote it and they expect to get paid. who cares if they're ninety year old ladies at this point. or for that matter, who cares if it's the children of those 90 year old ladies. or for that matter if it's Vivendi Universal or BMG or Sony who bought the rights to the copyright off the children of those now-dead 90 year-old ladies but still stand up demanding their 18 cents everytime it's played in a commercial setting.
yes it makes sense that you should get a living out of the works you produce, but frankly with patents and copyrights being given extensions time and again, these works are money-earning products so long past any human lifespan that the idea of the creator making a living from it has been lost. give them five years. give them twenty years. i think it's fair that a generation should pass before something enters the public domain (though it still seems too long).
the fact is that copyright has become an inalienable right to be greedy about some cute catchy riff that has all the weight or importance of that pothole i ran over yesterday. it protects the rights of singularly untalented people and defies the truth that some songs have been embraced and loved by humanity.
whoa son, hang on there. FYI, Mac OS Classic was riddled with viruses. It had a design flaw with it's macro system that was terribly easy to exploit. If you like, i could send you samples of dozens of documents with macros from the years i spent having to work in a Mac shop. It speaks to the savviness of Mac users that while claiming their computers to be immune to virii (which they did say a lot even then) that if you ran a virus checker on any one of those machines, there'd be hundreds of files with the same couple dozen infetions
the first thing is that they won't give 50000 USD to a virus that's harmful. which pretty much means that they'll only be paying off a proof-of-concept that got out in the wild.
they also will not open any attachments at all; and since one of the primary ways that virii propagate is through lusers opening up mystery programs that takes a huge one chunk out of the running.
oh yeah, and if you're writing a non-harmful virus that doesn't rely on an attachment, you still also have to have your virus found by a commercial virus checker -- which means that it will likely only be found by a heuristic checker.
i was inclined to say "Pride goeth before the fall" but since they only give you until the end of July, i'm guessing that they're actually not feeling all that proud and secure in reality
as someone who has developed software under a couple of different processes, i actually find this a compelling question...
if it came to a choice or not, i'd not be very inclined to following any porcess. my favourite programming tools are a clipboard and a mechanical pencil -- and frankly after i've drawn up a UML i end up wanting to be an Agile programmer almost by default. it depends on how you're defining Agile.
for that matter, IBM claims that its Rational Unified Process is inherently flexible, but having had to program in that process a few times, i'll argue that it's not.
let's argue that one of the key tenets of the Agile Method is to encourage the talented and motivated to do a good job and lead through their individualism. in a small or even medium sized business, that is a good way to run things (and this is true of fields other than IT). it encourages random improvements and magic features that might not have been planned in the roadmap since version 0.1.1. and if you are running a particularly small group, it is brilliant way to do things.
by comparison, if i was managing the development of a prodcut like M$ Word, i would live in dread of a rogue coder doing something brilliant but failing to properly check that every object and variable behaved like it was supposed to. i'm reminded of a blog by a microsoft programmer with a bug that caused havoc with the mac version
bringing it back to the sysadmin question: i thik there is a lot of potentilal in using Agile Methods. flexible and fast are what the cutsomers want. but i think there needs to be a further defining of what the "official" Agile Method is because i can certainly see problems with it.
as someone who sysadmins some very strange situations, i can imagine horrible problems if one of my junior admins decided to go all rogue elephant on a DNS server using some OS that is incompatible in a weird and unknown way
i love and encourage people to find their magic solutions to scertain questions, but yes i must admit that if you do something that means a batch of our users can no longer find the network then i'm a little worried.
to my future junior sysadmins: yes we can already run the directory and network with any damn OS you choose, they all fit. magic improvements are highly welcomed and i look forward to them. but please, follow the damn chart, there are a couple things that are in place and already work.
http://www.appro.com/product/server_1142h.asp
i also have a little 512MB card reader which took a 5MB file in 10 seconds (over a USB 1 connexion at that). posting the file to gmail is, um, slower. i stopped counting after ten seconds, started writing this paragraph, and wow i look at the progress meter... and it just stopped. so it's not a faster storage. but then again, some days i just leave the card reader at home y'know.
it has a quirk of naming files as part01.bin which is a small thing, given that the filename is right there in the subject line, but if i download a couple using the gmail interface, i'll have to remember to actually use Save As
and yes as others have pointed out, there's the smegging 10MB limit (which incidentally is the same size limit as half the email accounts i already have) so it's not going to be a practical thing for my daily backups or even any mp3 i can think of.
i'll still keep it though, just because i do enjoy virtual drives. let's see:
oh hell what do i need another drive for?