Open-source Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out, and it's decidedly less buggy than IE.
Funny. I just got through restarting Firefox 1.5 because, like every other version of Firefox for OS X, the keyboard shortcuts stop working.
Strong words aside, the guy is right. Open Source authors tend to be rather bad about listening to their user base- the snotty answer is "if YOU want it to do X, then code it yourself", and many times reported bugs that are annoying current users are put off or ignored, often because the development version is almost ready to go stable, and fixing the bug would be "a pain".
Then people wonder why reviews of open source distros get panned, why people try it and often run right back to Windows, etc. Open Source software, at least many of the Linux distros, present a rather half-assed front to the user. I've used Linux since about 1995, and I still can't stand all the -bullshit- that's necessary to get hardware working; I last used Linux as a workstation back in 2000, and a few months ago I found not much had changed.
Want an example? I dropped an Ubuntu 5.10 CD into my athlon workstation which has a Geforce3 card in it, and a 17" Viewsonic monitor. When it finished installing, X came up, but at a resolution and frequency rate the monitor didn't support, so I could barely read the screen. I got that fixed, then discovered OpenGL wasn't hardware accelerated, so I installed the nvidia driver package.
X windows promptly locked up on the next reboot, and did so until I removed all the nvidia-related packages. I downloaded drivers from Nvidia's site, and installed them by hand, and it finally worked.
I then tried to figure out how to change my screen saver. It wasn't in the Gnome menus- I finally found it under a "debian" menu elsewhere. Apparently my system has at least two "system settings" menus. What the...
There are some truly brilliant, talented people working on linux and open-source. Unfortuntely, they're bogged down in nearly useless work, or busy infighting. My favorite time-sinks are the incredibly obscure security holes that are so impractical nobody could ever exploit them...
Ask yourself this: what does Linux do better today compared with in 2000, almost 6 years ago? I'm not talking about crap like antialiased text- I mean things that actually MATTER to users...
Ask yourself this as well: when was the last time an open-source project you help out with surveyed its users to find out what was most important to THEM? And then based your efforts off that survey? The m0n0wall group just did that, and I was very pleased to see it happen.
All extensions carried over for me, although I had to reset my Tabbed Browser Preferences.
Looking at my extensions folder:
Switchproxy Tool: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
Save Image in Folder: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
View Formatted Source: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
MapIt!: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
Download Statusbar: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
Bookmarks Synchronizer: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
Redirect Remover: Disabled, not compatible with Firefox 1.5
The only compatible extensions I have installed are Linkification (which takes "h##p://www.boo.com" links and makes them clickable, even if the "http" part has been munged) and Flashblock, which is a godsend.
I just clicked "Find Updates", and not a single one of the plugins has an update available yet. I'm sorry, but I think it's pretty clear that a large number of popular extensions have yet to be updated for 1.5. I also really hope all my extensions don't break yet AGAIN with 1.6, because that'd be at least #3.
Highlights are: Automated update, drag and drop reordering for browser tabs, improvements to popup blocking, better accessibility and better support for Mac OS X
Dark alley corners are:
Nightmarish cookie management. You can now search (which is nice), but you can't select more than one cookie at a time (the usual key modifiers do nothing). Hitting delete does nothing. I filed a bug about the selection thing and the answer was "oh well, next release, not going to make it for 1.5" Said bug was filed almost a month ago.
Select text in the URL-bar on the Macintosh. Hit the left arrow key, which should put you at the start of the block of text. But doen't- unlike the behavior in the text entry boxes on a webpage. WTF?
Every. Single. Time. You. Download. Something. You. Get. Asked. What. To. Do. Even. If. You. Checked. Do. This. Every. Time. ARRGGGGGGGG. Why can't it remember these preferences!?
Keyboard shortcuts randomly stop working. Command-W being the most obvious, as you go to close a tab or window...and nooooothing happens.
Plugin "security" is completely non-sensical. If I'm visiting a website of a plugin author, you're forced to navigate to the prefs panel and then go back and click the link again. Instead of blocking the installation of anything, why doesn't this do what IE does with DirectX controls and such, ie say "hey, this page WANTS to do this, SHOULD I let it?", with an option of "Yes please"? Instead we get "I blocked this. Just thought you'd like to know. Go here if you want to enable it." Especially since it encourages two very insecure things: a)permitting the entire hostname access b)permanently (since few users are likely to go BACK and DELETE the entry)
That's all that I can think of right off the top of my head- but the cookie and URL bar problems are driving me nuts.
Am I doing something wrong? The last version of VLC was completely unusable on OS X.
I've had virtually the same experience; it loves to start skipping frames heavily and then grind to a complete stop- despite using only about 1/3rd of the available CPU power according to top. The only solution is to pause and wait a good 10-15 seconds. Also, doing things in other programs now seems to heavily influence VLC; I can load up a rather simple webpage in Firefox and VLC will drop video+audio frames all over the place.
It also stutters when playing back over anything slower than local disk; 100BaseT isn't fast enough for a 256kB/sec file to play properly, and over 802.11g (full signal yadda yadda) it's even worse. Nobody on the VLC IRC channel has been able to explain why, but it seems that the buffer is completely exhausted, then a read is performed to fill the buffer, and playback continues. Why the buffer isn't "floating" or doesn't at LEAST intelligently adjust how soon it refills the buffer is beyond me- but not being able to play a 256KB stream over 802.11G is absolutely inexcuseable.
Lengthening the buffer sort of helps- but VLC takes at least the buffer length to respond to rew/fw/pause, so a 1 second buffer means you hit pause, and one second later it actually pauses.
A more general beef I have is that unlike Xine on Linux, you can't do variable speed playback or frame-by-frame advance/rewind. I've often had times I wished I could take a screengrab of something, but after a half dozen tries I still wasn't able to pause exactly where I wanted. Mplayer has this sort of functionality (I THINK), but I haven't been able to find ANY documentation as to what the default keyboard shortcuts are for Mplayer on ANY platform.
I've long thought that the only reason MS decided to go with the smaller laptop drives is their drastically reduced capacity.
That doesn't really make any sense. More likely: heat, power consumption, shock resistance, noise, and physical size. Especially heat/power/size, which are critical for a "console" game; just look at the problems with the overheating power adapters...
Does running some tap water over part of the urinal really help stop the spread of diseases and germs?
This may not apply to urinals, but with toilets flushing ends up atomizing some of the contents. Which means it's spraying a little bit of urine alllllll over the bathroom...
That's not really the problem with germs and bathrooms though; it's WASHING YOUR HANDS. Hot water, soap, lather, and get it under the nails as much as possible.
I recall at a conference on infection control for doctors and surgeons, they put some researchers in the bathrooms and counted how many people (doctors! Many of them infection control specialists!) did/did not wash their hands. A HUGE number of them didn't bother. And we wonder why staph infection rates in US hospitals are astronomical...
One doctor recently infected several patients via a staph infection in his nose- he knew about the infection because several patients came back with staph infections, and he continued to operate. A woman he performed a back operation on (AFTER he KNEW he had the infection!) died as a result of a massive staph infection in her body.
The doctor was even told by the hospital prior to the operation that given the number of staph infections coming from his patients post-op, they wanted him to take an antibiotic regimen. The asshole REFUSED...and was still allowed to operate.
I have zero sympathy for doctors these days complaining about malpractice insurance costs; I see plenty of evidence they just don't give a shit about their jobs. Sloppyness on their part accounts for a huge number of prescription errors. You're willing to spend years studying the best way to care for someone, and you can't be fucking bothered to PRINT LEGIBLY on their prescription so that they don't get a drug overdose? And you can't wash your hands after going to the can, so your patients don't die from staph infections?
However, here in the US, particularly in water restricted areas you see standard high-flow toilets.
Uh, no...maybe in high-traffic public restrooms, but everywhere else I've seen low-flush toilets. MANY towns and cities in the US REQUIRE them.
The problem with adoption in the US is partially that many early low-flush toilets didn't work well. I know because I vacation in an old cabin where we have very limited water supply, so all the cabins were required to replace the toilets ASAP with low-flush units. The first cabins that did ended up with toilets that constantly clogged. Cabins that waited a few years ended up with toilets that worked far better.
Uh, no. Fastest almost any drive can transfer data off the platters is about 60-70MB/sec, and that's only the very tip-top of the line drives.
What they mean is that it is a SATA-2 drive, which has a maximum wirespeed of 300MB/sec.
I know this gives you faster access to the 16MB of cache- but main memory is much more 'accessible'(Gigabytes/sec makes even 300MB/sec seem slow), there's a hell of a lot more of it, and the OS is in a much better position to use the system's memory cache more intelligently. The drive has no "knowledge" of the "big picture" - ie what the user is doing, system load, the IO pipeline, the filesystem, etc.
Guess what? Scienceblog and themachineworks are both hosted out of an EV1servers hosting facility in Houston, Texas. They're so close to each other, they share the second-to-last router in a traceroute.
Second- brainblog and bensullivan.com are hosted from exactly the same server (or behind the same firewall) at theplanet.com. Again- in Houston. Ben Sullivan seems awfully cozy with Mounir Elabridi.
Ben Sullivan is a busy blogger bee and socialite (that photo was taken rather close by to the Price Street address- at King King, on Hollywood Boulevard.)
Seems to also be involved in scienceblog.com, among other things. Which has the exact same address in whois- 4404-1/2 Price Street (sorry- first comment, I omitted the "1/2" by mistake.) Scienceblog.com also happens to feature the same story. He's pretty cheap about hosting, too- flickr seems to host a lot of the images he uses on his blog entries.
DNS servers for that domain are ns1/ns2.themachineworks.com, and it has an address in France: 7 impasse toufixe de la mort, F-75025, Paris. Kind of a dead end there for me.
Visiting www.themachineworks.com, there is what appears to be a generic hosting help page. Click through one, and you can see that the page was last modified by "h-68-164-115-163.lsanca54.dynamic.covad.net". "lsanca" looks like "Los Angeles, CA", and a traceroute confirmed it- one of the last hops was through a router with a hostname containing "losangeles1".
Call me crazy, but why is an "internet marketing specialist" working with Mr. Sullivan? And what is with the super-ritzy address? Hmmmmm.
"Maroc Internet - Management
Mounir Elabridi, a globally recognized innovator in Internet marketing, founded
Maroc Internet in 2002. Mr Elabridi brings to this venture a proven track...
Well, now how about that.
The domain name servers for the domain are NS1/NS2.BENSULLIVAN.COM. Mr. Sullivan lives at 4404 Price St, Los Angeles, CA 90027- about a 15 minute drive from University California Los Angeles. It's a stretch, but also an interesting coincidence.
PS: I didn't say Apache would be a better product. I said a long-standing complaint from USERS of Apache is that configuration is a royal pain in the ass. And that the Apache project has done absolutely NOTHING to address it.
I've used Apache for years and I understand it just fine. It doesn't make working with it any less confusing, and I resent the character assassination attempt.
See the presentation I linked to. The format, organization, directives, and parsing of Apache config files are all downright STRANGE sometimes.
PPS: I don't take seriously the words of a man who picks as his username, a character from the worst movie ever made (Hackers.) Furthermore- maybe you should make sure your website is up and running (it isn't) before you go lecturing us about how easy webservers are to configure.
There is also a follow up article written by one of the httpd developers about 'What Apache brings to the table.' The article cites community, experience, legal framework, diversity, brand strength, and networking as reasons why developers and companies should consider bringing their projects over to Apache."
Two words why you shouldn't use Apache unless you absolutely need to (and most apache users don't NEED apache): configuration complexity.
Apache's configuration file hasn't changed dramatically since the days of v1.3, and it's still an absolute train wreck. It is seconded in nightmarish complexity and eccentricities by Sendmail- and barely at that. See the old slashdot story Why I hate The Apache Webserver.
I have an idea. Let's see replies here, suggesting Apache alternatives that are a)lightweight b)easy to configure c)open source with BSD or GPL (or similar) licensing. Why? IMHO, the Apache group has gotten a little too comfy with their market dominance and years of blind faith from unix users. Sounds like it's time to remind them that especially if you're already on an open-source platform, you have a lot of choices.
Let's see lots of people trying out different webservers, helping improve them if they come across problems, and helping integrate these different webservers into distributions better, and so on. (That debian package for "joeserve" out of date? Help update it! Init scripts a mess? Spend 15 minutes coding up some improvements and email in a diff to the maintainer. Etc.)
With electricity prices skyrocketing I'm noticing which lights are on the most and replacing them with full spectrum compact flourescents [fullspectr...utions.com] that have a really nice, white light but use about 1/5 the juice.
And cost 15-30 times regular compact flourescents, which are available for $1 apiece at your local "home improvement" store, and even less with rebates/incentives from electric companies and Energy Star?
$15 for a 15W CF bulb? You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Afterwards the US officer tells the translator to tell the police that he had to hold his fire because he did not know where they were and that they must let him know when they leave the group. Subtitles show that the translator really says something like: You idiots! You completely screwed up the mission... So much for the diplomacy and professionalism the US officer was trying to convey.
Body language plays a clear part in these sorts of situations. The Iraqis aren't stupid- they see the US officer saying something carefully and quietly and calmly...and then the translator starts waving his arms around and calling them idiots, I think they have a pretty good idea that the translator is full of shit, or at least that the US officer isn't the one being rude.
Let's put it this way- if the US officer came over and started yelling and waving his arms around, and the translator says "The general wishes to express his slight displeasure with how the operation went, but asks that you honor him by coming to dinner"...do you really think they're not going to realize the translator is fluffing things?
I strongly suspect the translator was taking the cushy-nice-guy talk which would earn the soldier zero respect, and -fully- translating it into something the Iraqi police would expect. It's like the difference between a project meeting to decide how to fix the mail server, versus a construction site. Your boss doesn't say, "hey ya stupid moron, ya dropped that SCSI disk and now we're gonna be 3 days behind! Get yer ass into the server room and if you don't have 20 machines racked by the end of the day, don't show up tomorra!", and a construction supervisor doesn't say, "Hey Charlie, how's it going? Your kid feeling better? Yeah, about backing up the cement mixer into the side of the building. Well, next time, please be a little more careful and maybe solicit Bob's help next time in making sure there's adequate clearance."
reminding Congress that in the end the 1st Amendment, along with the rest are ultimately preserved by a willingness to exercise the 2nd Amendment.:)
The second amendment has been, for quite some time, evaluated by the Supreme Court to guarantee the right of states to form a regulated militia for self protection of its people. Ie- your National Guard. It's a state's rights issue, not a personal rights issue. It was never intended to be a guarantee that citizens can posess firearms and you have no such right. Hence the regulations on the gun industry, merchants, and owners. Hence the continual failure of the NRA and other organizations to get gun regulations ruled unconstitutional.
Here's the full text of the second amendment. Note the bit in bold, which the NRA doesn't really like to talk about:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
PS:There's a minor difference between the objectivity of an individual publishing whatever the hell they want to, and the objectivity of a business employing an editorial review process, using employees who have studied journalism. WEBLOGGERS ARE NOT JOURNALISTS.
I wish I could find the original slashdot comment I saved this from. I googled for it briefly and found the slashdot story but couldn't find the comment. If you do, please reply with it.
--The following was written by someone else--.
"Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!"
"If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
I wrote about this a while ago. Here's the text:
"If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Ever heard that one? I work in information security, so I have heard it more than my fair share. I've always hated that reasoning, because I am a little bit paranoid by nature, something which serves me very well in my profession. So my standard response to people who have asked that question near me has been "because I'm paranoid." But that doesn't usually help, since most people who would ask that question see paranoia as a bad thing to begin with. So for a long time I've been trying to come up with a valid, reasoned, and intelligent answer which shoots the holes in the flawed logic that need to be there.
And someone unknowingly provided me with just that answer today. In a conversation about hunting, somebody posted this about prey animals and hunters: "Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!" but in a brilliant (and very funny) retort, someone else said: "If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
Suddenly it made sense, that nagging thing in the back of my head. The logical reason why a reasonable dose of paranoia is healthy. Because it's one thing to be afraid of the TRUTH. People who commit murder or otherwise deprive others of their Natural Rights are afraid of the TRUTH, because it is the light of TRUTH that will help bring them to justice.
But it's another thing entirely to be afraid of hunters. And all too often, the hunters are the ones proclaiming to be looking for TRUTH. But they are more concerned with removing any obstactles to finding the TRUTH, even when that means bulldozing over people's rights (the right to privacy, the right to anonymity) in their quest for it. And sadly, these people often cannot tell the difference between the appearance of TRUTH and TRUTH itself. And these, the ones who are so convinced they have found the TRUTH that they stop looking for it, are some of the worst oppressors of Natural Rights the world has ever known.
They are the hunters, and it is right and good for the prey to be afraid of the hunters, and to run away from them. Do not be fooled when a hunter says "why are you running from me if you have nothing to hide?" Because having something to hide is not the only reason to be hiding something.
Richard Feynman, when he was in college, once helped steal and hide the door of two guys in the fraternity who were being obnoxious twits about keeping the door to their room closed.
They searched the place high and low, never finding the door. Someone suggested the fraternity President ask each member, on their honor as a member of the fraternity, if they had stolen the door. So he worked his way down the line, and came to Feynman.
"Richard Feynman, on your honor as a member of the fraternity, did you steal the door?"
"Yes."
He replied, "Quit screwing around, Feynman!", and moved on to the next guy. Everyone else denied having taken the door.
Eventually Feynman took pity on the guys and returned the door and (I believe) confessed. When he did, there was an uproar, as people claimed he had lied.
The Herald seems to think that allowing workers to dress comfortably is a *bad* thing. How strange.
Sure, why not? After all, we're the first to get "downsized", first to have our budgets cut- this despite the fact that IT workers have the highest attrition rate of virtually any other job category. We're often the only people in an entire company "required" to carry a pager. Our managers won't stick up for us, we work in a job which we're visible only when something is wrong (so no matter how good a job we do, the question is "why did this break in the first place). We spend all day listening to people whine and have little "chats" with the boss when we don't bed over far enough. We're the #1 excuse of why business doesn't get done ("oh, I didn't get that out for fedex by 6 because my laptop stopped working right before I was going to save it! Those IT people can't do anything right!").
Tell you what? Give me that salary review I was promised when I signed up. Give me a competitive wage even half that of the slick-haired assholes in sales, or the ditzy bleached bimbos in marketing. Take me out to lunch when the mail server crashes and I get everything back up and running in record time, yet again.
...that he once rode the MBTA(aka the T subway) for one stop (yep, just one) to show "how safe it is", in a publicity stunt to assure Boston residents that the T was safe after the London bombings.
Except along the way he was accosted by a bum who asked him if he was running for President or not (I'm dead serious) and was nearly attacked on one of the subway platforms by a woman who was in the news for keeping about a hundred cats in her house (a fair number of them dead, and a bunch of the dead ones in several freezers.) MBTA and State Police took care of both problems.
Adding insult to injury, a reporter asked him how much the fare was, and he said "a buck". Except the MBTA has been $1.25 for over a year. The MBTA comissioner became enraged when reporters made something of it. "The governor can't be aware of everything". Except it was a MAJOR issue in the eastern end of the state- the rate hike affected commuter rail, bus, and subway customers.
It pretty much proved that not only did he not give a shit about issues that affected citizens in his state, and that he could barely be bothered to take the subway for one stop- he didn't even pay for the fare himself.
I live in MA, and Romney has been one colossal pain in the ass.
Countless "initiatives" and campaign platforms of his have barely seen the light of day. He immediately took a "tough guy" stance with the legislature, assuring he's been a "lame duck governor" since before he was sworn in. He claimed his business experience (he headed Bain Capital, an aquisition firm which oppertunistically bought up companies, "trimmed the fat" by firing huge numbers of employees, etc. He was infamous for his my-way-or-the-highway attitude; very much a stereotypical rich white power broker asshole.) About the only good thing to come of Romney's "tough guy" stance was that Thomas Finneran (former speaker of the house) is gone.
He has fought relentlessly against public opinion and the court system to ban gay marriage. Loves to talk about the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, but doesn't like to mention in the same discussion that he's a Mormon- a religion which used to promote treating women like cattle and marrying as many as you like.
He claims the US Olympics as one of his greatest victories, "turning them around"- except the only reason it worked was because of massive bailouts by the federal government. He doesn't like to talk about the stories of him going into screaming rages at teenage Olympic volunteers- in public.
Has spent virtually all of his time in office sucking up to conservative Republicans on a national level, clearly desperate to run for President. He's always taking trips internationally and around the country, pretty clearly trying to make himself a national/international player. Keeps dropping hints about "aspirations" but then denying them categorically. Uses his wife's chronic illnesses as an excuse for why he hasn't decided if he's running or not. More likely, he's trying to decide if the Republican party has even the slimmest chance of putting anybody in office higher than "senator", and if he should settle for that instead of trying to secure a presidential nomination.
The man is a calculating, cold, arrogant, mean, power-brokering son of a bitch.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny. I just got through restarting Firefox 1.5 because, like every other version of Firefox for OS X, the keyboard shortcuts stop working.
Strong words aside, the guy is right. Open Source authors tend to be rather bad about listening to their user base- the snotty answer is "if YOU want it to do X, then code it yourself", and many times reported bugs that are annoying current users are put off or ignored, often because the development version is almost ready to go stable, and fixing the bug would be "a pain".
Then people wonder why reviews of open source distros get panned, why people try it and often run right back to Windows, etc. Open Source software, at least many of the Linux distros, present a rather half-assed front to the user. I've used Linux since about 1995, and I still can't stand all the -bullshit- that's necessary to get hardware working; I last used Linux as a workstation back in 2000, and a few months ago I found not much had changed.
Want an example? I dropped an Ubuntu 5.10 CD into my athlon workstation which has a Geforce3 card in it, and a 17" Viewsonic monitor. When it finished installing, X came up, but at a resolution and frequency rate the monitor didn't support, so I could barely read the screen. I got that fixed, then discovered OpenGL wasn't hardware accelerated, so I installed the nvidia driver package.
X windows promptly locked up on the next reboot, and did so until I removed all the nvidia-related packages. I downloaded drivers from Nvidia's site, and installed them by hand, and it finally worked.
I then tried to figure out how to change my screen saver. It wasn't in the Gnome menus- I finally found it under a "debian" menu elsewhere. Apparently my system has at least two "system settings" menus. What the...
There are some truly brilliant, talented people working on linux and open-source. Unfortuntely, they're bogged down in nearly useless work, or busy infighting. My favorite time-sinks are the incredibly obscure security holes that are so impractical nobody could ever exploit them...
Ask yourself this: what does Linux do better today compared with in 2000, almost 6 years ago? I'm not talking about crap like antialiased text- I mean things that actually MATTER to users...
Ask yourself this as well: when was the last time an open-source project you help out with surveyed its users to find out what was most important to THEM? And then based your efforts off that survey? The m0n0wall group just did that, and I was very pleased to see it happen.
Looking at my extensions folder:
The only compatible extensions I have installed are Linkification (which takes "h##p://www.boo.com" links and makes them clickable, even if the "http" part has been munged) and Flashblock, which is a godsend.
I just clicked "Find Updates", and not a single one of the plugins has an update available yet. I'm sorry, but I think it's pretty clear that a large number of popular extensions have yet to be updated for 1.5. I also really hope all my extensions don't break yet AGAIN with 1.6, because that'd be at least #3.
Dark alley corners are:
That's all that I can think of right off the top of my head- but the cookie and URL bar problems are driving me nuts.
I've had virtually the same experience; it loves to start skipping frames heavily and then grind to a complete stop- despite using only about 1/3rd of the available CPU power according to top. The only solution is to pause and wait a good 10-15 seconds. Also, doing things in other programs now seems to heavily influence VLC; I can load up a rather simple webpage in Firefox and VLC will drop video+audio frames all over the place.
It also stutters when playing back over anything slower than local disk; 100BaseT isn't fast enough for a 256kB/sec file to play properly, and over 802.11g (full signal yadda yadda) it's even worse. Nobody on the VLC IRC channel has been able to explain why, but it seems that the buffer is completely exhausted, then a read is performed to fill the buffer, and playback continues. Why the buffer isn't "floating" or doesn't at LEAST intelligently adjust how soon it refills the buffer is beyond me- but not being able to play a 256KB stream over 802.11G is absolutely inexcuseable.
Lengthening the buffer sort of helps- but VLC takes at least the buffer length to respond to rew/fw/pause, so a 1 second buffer means you hit pause, and one second later it actually pauses.
A more general beef I have is that unlike Xine on Linux, you can't do variable speed playback or frame-by-frame advance/rewind. I've often had times I wished I could take a screengrab of something, but after a half dozen tries I still wasn't able to pause exactly where I wanted. Mplayer has this sort of functionality (I THINK), but I haven't been able to find ANY documentation as to what the default keyboard shortcuts are for Mplayer on ANY platform.
That doesn't really make any sense. More likely: heat, power consumption, shock resistance, noise, and physical size. Especially heat/power/size, which are critical for a "console" game; just look at the problems with the overheating power adapters...
This may not apply to urinals, but with toilets flushing ends up atomizing some of the contents. Which means it's spraying a little bit of urine alllllll over the bathroom...
That's not really the problem with germs and bathrooms though; it's WASHING YOUR HANDS. Hot water, soap, lather, and get it under the nails as much as possible.
I recall at a conference on infection control for doctors and surgeons, they put some researchers in the bathrooms and counted how many people (doctors! Many of them infection control specialists!) did/did not wash their hands. A HUGE number of them didn't bother. And we wonder why staph infection rates in US hospitals are astronomical...
One doctor recently infected several patients via a staph infection in his nose- he knew about the infection because several patients came back with staph infections, and he continued to operate. A woman he performed a back operation on (AFTER he KNEW he had the infection!) died as a result of a massive staph infection in her body.
The doctor was even told by the hospital prior to the operation that given the number of staph infections coming from his patients post-op, they wanted him to take an antibiotic regimen. The asshole REFUSED...and was still allowed to operate.
I have zero sympathy for doctors these days complaining about malpractice insurance costs; I see plenty of evidence they just don't give a shit about their jobs. Sloppyness on their part accounts for a huge number of prescription errors. You're willing to spend years studying the best way to care for someone, and you can't be fucking bothered to PRINT LEGIBLY on their prescription so that they don't get a drug overdose? And you can't wash your hands after going to the can, so your patients don't die from staph infections?
Uh, no...maybe in high-traffic public restrooms, but everywhere else I've seen low-flush toilets. MANY towns and cities in the US REQUIRE them.
The problem with adoption in the US is partially that many early low-flush toilets didn't work well. I know because I vacation in an old cabin where we have very limited water supply, so all the cabins were required to replace the toilets ASAP with low-flush units. The first cabins that did ended up with toilets that constantly clogged. Cabins that waited a few years ended up with toilets that worked far better.
That should be Mr. Kottos. Mr. Ponce is the story submitter. Whoops!
The submitter, whose email address is under the domain name ohgizmo.com, lives at:
The company's contact:
Mount Royal is a borough of Montreal.
Now isn't that just a wild coincidence that the story submitter lives about 15 minutes away from Mr. Ponce? I confirmed Mr. Kottos's address via a Google search on his name.
PS: Here's another wild coincidence.
Uh, no. Fastest almost any drive can transfer data off the platters is about 60-70MB/sec, and that's only the very tip-top of the line drives.
What they mean is that it is a SATA-2 drive, which has a maximum wirespeed of 300MB/sec.
I know this gives you faster access to the 16MB of cache- but main memory is much more 'accessible'(Gigabytes/sec makes even 300MB/sec seem slow), there's a hell of a lot more of it, and the OS is in a much better position to use the system's memory cache more intelligently. The drive has no "knowledge" of the "big picture" - ie what the user is doing, system load, the IO pipeline, the filesystem, etc.
Previously mentioned sites: www.scienceblog.com www.bensullivan.com www.themachineworks.com.
Guess what? Scienceblog and themachineworks are both hosted out of an EV1servers hosting facility in Houston, Texas. They're so close to each other, they share the second-to-last router in a traceroute.
Second- brainblog and bensullivan.com are hosted from exactly the same server (or behind the same firewall) at theplanet.com. Again- in Houston. Ben Sullivan seems awfully cozy with Mounir Elabridi.
Seems to also be involved in scienceblog.com, among other things. Which has the exact same address in whois- 4404-1/2 Price Street (sorry- first comment, I omitted the "1/2" by mistake.) Scienceblog.com also happens to feature the same story. He's pretty cheap about hosting, too- flickr seems to host a lot of the images he uses on his blog entries.
DNS servers for that domain are ns1/ns2.themachineworks.com, and it has an address in France: 7 impasse toufixe de la mort, F-75025, Paris. Kind of a dead end there for me.
Visiting www.themachineworks.com, there is what appears to be a generic hosting help page. Click through one, and you can see that the page was last modified by "h-68-164-115-163.lsanca54.dynamic.covad.net". "lsanca" looks like "Los Angeles, CA", and a traceroute confirmed it- one of the last hops was through a router with a hostname containing "losangeles1".
Call me crazy, but why is an "internet marketing specialist" working with Mr. Sullivan? And what is with the super-ritzy address? Hmmmmm.
Third google hit on Mr. Elabridi's name is:
"Maroc Internet - Management Mounir Elabridi, a globally recognized innovator in Internet marketing, founded Maroc Internet in 2002. Mr Elabridi brings to this venture a proven track ...
Well, now how about that.
The domain name servers for the domain are NS1/NS2.BENSULLIVAN.COM. Mr. Sullivan lives at 4404 Price St, Los Angeles, CA 90027- about a 15 minute drive from University California Los Angeles. It's a stretch, but also an interesting coincidence.
I've used Apache for years and I understand it just fine. It doesn't make working with it any less confusing, and I resent the character assassination attempt.
See the presentation I linked to. The format, organization, directives, and parsing of Apache config files are all downright STRANGE sometimes.
PPS: I don't take seriously the words of a man who picks as his username, a character from the worst movie ever made (Hackers.) Furthermore- maybe you should make sure your website is up and running (it isn't) before you go lecturing us about how easy webservers are to configure.
Is that why Postfix is miles easier to configure than Sendmail- and is faster, more secure, and just as flexible if not moreso?
*crickets chirping*
Two words why you shouldn't use Apache unless you absolutely need to (and most apache users don't NEED apache): configuration complexity.
Apache's configuration file hasn't changed dramatically since the days of v1.3, and it's still an absolute train wreck. It is seconded in nightmarish complexity and eccentricities by Sendmail- and barely at that. See the old slashdot story Why I hate The Apache Webserver.
I have an idea. Let's see replies here, suggesting Apache alternatives that are a)lightweight b)easy to configure c)open source with BSD or GPL (or similar) licensing. Why? IMHO, the Apache group has gotten a little too comfy with their market dominance and years of blind faith from unix users. Sounds like it's time to remind them that especially if you're already on an open-source platform, you have a lot of choices.
Let's see lots of people trying out different webservers, helping improve them if they come across problems, and helping integrate these different webservers into distributions better, and so on. (That debian package for "joeserve" out of date? Help update it! Init scripts a mess? Spend 15 minutes coding up some improvements and email in a diff to the maintainer. Etc.)
Make that "hot off the press releases" department.
Or the "paid adverstory"
And cost 15-30 times regular compact flourescents, which are available for $1 apiece at your local "home improvement" store, and even less with rebates/incentives from electric companies and Energy Star?
$15 for a 15W CF bulb? You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Body language plays a clear part in these sorts of situations. The Iraqis aren't stupid- they see the US officer saying something carefully and quietly and calmly...and then the translator starts waving his arms around and calling them idiots, I think they have a pretty good idea that the translator is full of shit, or at least that the US officer isn't the one being rude.
Let's put it this way- if the US officer came over and started yelling and waving his arms around, and the translator says "The general wishes to express his slight displeasure with how the operation went, but asks that you honor him by coming to dinner"...do you really think they're not going to realize the translator is fluffing things?
I strongly suspect the translator was taking the cushy-nice-guy talk which would earn the soldier zero respect, and -fully- translating it into something the Iraqi police would expect. It's like the difference between a project meeting to decide how to fix the mail server, versus a construction site. Your boss doesn't say, "hey ya stupid moron, ya dropped that SCSI disk and now we're gonna be 3 days behind! Get yer ass into the server room and if you don't have 20 machines racked by the end of the day, don't show up tomorra!", and a construction supervisor doesn't say, "Hey Charlie, how's it going? Your kid feeling better? Yeah, about backing up the cement mixer into the side of the building. Well, next time, please be a little more careful and maybe solicit Bob's help next time in making sure there's adequate clearance."
The second amendment has been, for quite some time, evaluated by the Supreme Court to guarantee the right of states to form a regulated militia for self protection of its people. Ie- your National Guard. It's a state's rights issue, not a personal rights issue. It was never intended to be a guarantee that citizens can posess firearms and you have no such right. Hence the regulations on the gun industry, merchants, and owners. Hence the continual failure of the NRA and other organizations to get gun regulations ruled unconstitutional.
Here's the full text of the second amendment. Note the bit in bold, which the NRA doesn't really like to talk about:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
PS:There's a minor difference between the objectivity of an individual publishing whatever the hell they want to, and the objectivity of a business employing an editorial review process, using employees who have studied journalism. WEBLOGGERS ARE NOT JOURNALISTS.
I wish I could find the original slashdot comment I saved this from. I googled for it briefly and found the slashdot story but couldn't find the comment. If you do, please reply with it.
--The following was written by someone else--.
"Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!"
"If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
I wrote about this a while ago. Here's the text:
"If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Ever heard that one? I work in information security, so I have heard it more than my fair share. I've always hated that reasoning, because I am a little bit paranoid by nature, something which serves me very well in my profession. So my standard response to people who have asked that question near me has been "because I'm paranoid." But that doesn't usually help, since most people who would ask that question see paranoia as a bad thing to begin with. So for a long time I've been trying to come up with a valid, reasoned, and intelligent answer which shoots the holes in the flawed logic that need to be there.
And someone unknowingly provided me with just that answer today. In a conversation about hunting, somebody posted this about prey animals and hunters:
"Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals - they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!"
but in a brilliant (and very funny) retort, someone else said:
"If the're not guilty, why are they running?"
Suddenly it made sense, that nagging thing in the back of my head. The logical reason why a reasonable dose of paranoia is healthy. Because it's one thing to be afraid of the TRUTH. People who commit murder or otherwise deprive others of their Natural Rights are afraid of the TRUTH, because it is the light of TRUTH that will help bring them to justice.
But it's another thing entirely to be afraid of hunters. And all too often, the hunters are the ones proclaiming to be looking for TRUTH. But they are more concerned with removing any obstactles to finding the TRUTH, even when that means bulldozing over people's rights (the right to privacy, the right to anonymity) in their quest for it. And sadly, these people often cannot tell the difference between the appearance of TRUTH and TRUTH itself. And these, the ones who are so convinced they have found the TRUTH that they stop looking for it, are some of the worst oppressors of Natural Rights the world has ever known.
They are the hunters, and it is right and good for the prey to be afraid of the hunters, and to run away from them. Do not be fooled when a hunter says "why are you running from me if you have nothing to hide?" Because having something to hide is not the only reason to be hiding something.
They searched the place high and low, never finding the door. Someone suggested the fraternity President ask each member, on their honor as a member of the fraternity, if they had stolen the door. So he worked his way down the line, and came to Feynman.
"Richard Feynman, on your honor as a member of the fraternity, did you steal the door?"
"Yes."
He replied, "Quit screwing around, Feynman!", and moved on to the next guy. Everyone else denied having taken the door.
Eventually Feynman took pity on the guys and returned the door and (I believe) confessed. When he did, there was an uproar, as people claimed he had lied.
Sure, why not? After all, we're the first to get "downsized", first to have our budgets cut- this despite the fact that IT workers have the highest attrition rate of virtually any other job category. We're often the only people in an entire company "required" to carry a pager. Our managers won't stick up for us, we work in a job which we're visible only when something is wrong (so no matter how good a job we do, the question is "why did this break in the first place). We spend all day listening to people whine and have little "chats" with the boss when we don't bed over far enough. We're the #1 excuse of why business doesn't get done ("oh, I didn't get that out for fedex by 6 because my laptop stopped working right before I was going to save it! Those IT people can't do anything right!").
Tell you what? Give me that salary review I was promised when I signed up. Give me a competitive wage even half that of the slick-haired assholes in sales, or the ditzy bleached bimbos in marketing. Take me out to lunch when the mail server crashes and I get everything back up and running in record time, yet again.
I'll be more than happy to dress nicer in return.
Except along the way he was accosted by a bum who asked him if he was running for President or not (I'm dead serious) and was nearly attacked on one of the subway platforms by a woman who was in the news for keeping about a hundred cats in her house (a fair number of them dead, and a bunch of the dead ones in several freezers.) MBTA and State Police took care of both problems.
Adding insult to injury, a reporter asked him how much the fare was, and he said "a buck". Except the MBTA has been $1.25 for over a year. The MBTA comissioner became enraged when reporters made something of it. "The governor can't be aware of everything". Except it was a MAJOR issue in the eastern end of the state- the rate hike affected commuter rail, bus, and subway customers.
It pretty much proved that not only did he not give a shit about issues that affected citizens in his state, and that he could barely be bothered to take the subway for one stop- he didn't even pay for the fare himself.
I live in MA, and Romney has been one colossal pain in the ass.
The man is a calculating, cold, arrogant, mean, power-brokering son of a bitch.