Ah, but you gave the author of the web page you are looking at permission to use your screen, implicitly, but visiting his web page. Thus, any code he includes, as long as it is non-destructive, is permitted, implicitly, on your screen by you.
If all you have to do to get me to stop leaving burn bags of dog crap on your front porch is to ask me, does that make it ok for me to leave those shitbombs until you say otherwise?
The difference is that you are talking about putting something offensive on a person's private property, while X10 simply buys a bit of code from someone who owns a web page.
Re:Here's the actual bill, look at the language
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The Drone War
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· Score: 2
H.R. 3076 -- September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001 will grant President Bush the authority to issue letters of marque and reprisal to capture, alive or dead, Osama bin Laden and the others responsible for the September 11 attacks.
It will give President Bush the option, if he chooses, but does not require the use of this weapon of war.
GAK! I would not think that the Constitution allows the Congress to delegate a power specifically given it by the Constitution. This would be like allowing the Congress to authorize the President to declare war on his own, or to organize the courts.
The real test will be when two technologically advanced nations start fighting - I strongly suspect we'll be seeing huge numbers of civilian casualties on each side instead of the 'ideal' where it's just the drones that get destroyed.
Actually, that's not it. When two similarly-equipped countries fight, it will be a faster and deadlier version of traditional warfare. Besides, enemies don't stop fighting because of civilian casualties, they stop fighting because one side loses the ability to prevent the other side from doing what it wants, or it becomes apparent that this will eventually happen and cannot be prevented.
War results from miscalculation of relative power. If the Afghans knew what they were facing, and that we weren't the Soviets and weren't going to fight the same kind of war, do you think that they would not have handed over bin Laden to save their regime? OK, maybe they weren't rational, but I suspect that if they had understood what they were facing, they would have capitulated at least in part.
The reason that this war looks so different than previous wars is only peripherally because of drones and remote warfare. This is a prime example of asymmetrical warfare in its extreme.
In the past, until very recently, any two opponents met with similar capabilities. There were examples of industrial forces meeting iron age or stone age forces (like the American westwards expansion), which were certainly not fun for the less well-equipped force. Normally, though, forces in conflict would have very similar equipment. Take, for example, Panama, where the US massively outnumbered the Panamanians and quickly crushed them. Still, the weaponry was similar. US guided weapons technology was not as well advanced, and the fight was largely an infantry fight, with small amounts of armor, and some specialized air support (like AC-130 Spectres).
The difference here is that the US has a capability that does not exist in any other country in the world. We have not only unmanned aerial recon platforms and satellites, but also laser designators and laser-guided bombs, camera-guided missiles, satellite guided bombs, night-vision gear and the like. Each capability fills in a niche that others don't cover, with a huge amount of overlap. Each multiplies the capabilities of the force. In the end, the multiplier is so large that you get staggering results, like the Gulf War, Somalia, and Afghanistan.
The combination of usage of proxy forces on the ground with small amounts of US, British and similar special forces to bring in all of the US capabilities for warfighting, means that the US has the capability to deliver devastating force with few US casualties.
It's good to be American, really.
Of course, we also have to be mindful of the other side of asymmetrical warfare. The lower-technology force is not ipso facto stupid, and there have been examples of successful attacks (such as 9/11) and even whole wars (Afghanistan) carried out by technologically inferior and outnumbered forces. This means that intelligence and ruthlessness are needed to prevent attacks on the civilian populace. In the past, the civilian populace couldn't be attacked until you got through the military. That is no longer the case.
Not correct. The Congress has declared war, as it did in the Gulf, by passing a resolution authorizing the President to use armed force against a particular enemy. Nowhere does the Constitution require the Congress to pass a resolution saying, "The United States is at war with [insert entity]."
The Task Switcher - requires 2 clicks to switch application, compared to 1 click with a Windows-style taskbar. This is one of the disadvantages of having a single top-level menubar, as there isn't enough screen real estate to have a taskbar as well. Of course OS X has both a panel and a top-level menubar, which is great. Except that now about a third of your screen is unavailable for application windows.
Of course, you can tear off the application menu and have one-click switching. And in OS X, you can configure your panel to autohide, and/or configure it with small icons that magnify fully as the cursor passes over them.
The Finder - yes, Finder has usability problems. People crow about the Finder being 'spatial', meaning that directory windows and the icons contained within retain the same size and position as when they were previously opened. This is good, as the human brain is very good at remembering sizes and positions.
What isn't mentioned is the side effect this causes - when every directory is opened in a new window, the screen rapidly fills up with windows, overwhelming the user. It is possible to tell the Finder to close the previous directory window when opening a new one, but only with a non-obvious keyboard modifier when double-clicking.
All interfaces are learned. MacOS 7.x-9.x is easier to learn, and more consistent, than most other OS interfaces.
Also, if the previous directory window has been closed, it is now impossible to navigate backwards. Other systems (Windows included) have found solutions to this problem - why hasn't the Mac?
Command click the title of the window, and you will get a pop-down of the full path to the current folder. I certainly prefer that to having a button bar with a web-like interface.
Context Menus - The lack of a second button on the standard Mac mouse is for some a boon in terms of simplicity. However, for anyone past beginner level it is a serious usability handicap.
Then get a two-button mouse and plug it in. My father knows not of context menus. I use them extensively. He has the original mouse, while I use a Logitech optical mouse. I have no interest in teaching him the difference between right and left clicking, and he has no interest in learning, since he can do everything he needs to do with one button.
Context menus have been shown to be a major enhancement to mousing efficiency, but by and large, Mac apps ignore them as they require use of a keyboard modifier or a non-standard mouse. It is amusing to note that the Mac, the most mouse-centric of all desktops, requires the keyboard for something as simple as a context menu.
I don't see this as a major weakness. Context menus are important to Windows and Linux users (and I use both) because the UI is so poorly designed that they actually help. On Mac, the context menus are a minor assistance at best - in fact I mainly use them to quickly eject disks.
Keyboard navigation - or the lack of it. You're stuffed on a Mac if you can't use the mouse. The menubar is totally off limits to you, which makes the computer all but useless. The Finder allows a certain amount of keyboard navigation, but again, without access to the menubar you have a problem. Remember, not everyone has the faculties to use a mouse, and if this is the case for you, forget every other question about usability - a Mac just isn't usable.
Or you could buy a tablet, or one of the many input devices designed for the disabled, and supported by the Mac, or just install one of several shareware or freeware programs which add full keyboard navigation to the Mac.
Note also that both Windows and the Linux GUIs have avoided all these problems,
While adding their own far more crippling problems and inefficiencies.
Don't even get me started on OS X, right now it's an ill thought-out usability nightmare. I'm sure it will get better, but right now it's the last place to be looking for usability ideas. It's pretty, yes, but pretty does not equal easy to use.
I find it quite easy to use, though not as easy or seamless as the classic interface. The multicolumn directory browser is growing on me. At first, it annoyed me, but it is actually turning out to provide a faster move through directories in depth. Plus, being a long-time UNIX type, I like having the underlying BSD layer with a standard UNIX command line - it means that I will be able to consolidate my mix of Linux and Mac boxes into all OS X boxes, which will save me time administering my home net. If you like, you can always just run FFree86 and Gnome on OS X and work that way.
Blindly following anyone is a seriously poor idea.
Having been a cable modem customer, and now a DSL customer, I've had mixed experiences.
With cable, until the @Home debacle, I had 3 static IPs and ran my domain off the cable modem. I had decent performance, but the it was expensive, not as highly available as I would have liked, and I knew that I could lose access at any time for running a server.
Now I have DSL, albeit the consumer service. Soon, it will be set up with static IPs and my domain will be back up (grumble). It will be even more expensive, for probably less performance, but is supposed to be more reliable (certainly has been so far), and I won't have to worry about running the domain (plus I'll get another pair of static IPs).
Both cable and DSL share a common downfall, and it is the reason that most dial up customers I've talked to are slow to switch: no choice of ISPs. With a phone line, I can sign up for any ISP, and can leave for another if I don't like the service I'm getting. With DSL or cable modem, I get one ISP, and cannot switch providers and keep my connection otherwise. There is therefore no price or service incentive for the vendor to improve.
For me, I'd select no ISP. My wife would use AOL. My father-in-law would use his current local provider, and my Dad would be happy just to get broadband at all. The imposition of service has nothing to do with the architecture, and everything to do with decisions made by the broadband access providers. However, as a consumer, I am forced to pay for services I do not want and will never use.
Certainly, content should not be a problem: every web designer out there seems to assume that you are plugged into the server room judging by the amount of bloated Flash and Java pages out there.
Ummm, yes they are. In broad theory, a democracy decides governmental issues by popular vote, while a republic decides governmental actions through the votes of representatives, who aggregate the will of their served segment of the population. That said, it can be argued that we have not been a republic since the Progressive Movement (which passed popular election of Senators and got most states to go to popular vote, winner-take-all Presidential electoral contests with the Electors bound to their votes by law). Since then, the three elected parts of the Federal government are all elected, in effect, by the voting populace at large, with only the amount of people voting for a particular person varying by office. That would make us a representative democracy, rather than a republic.
That was most likely a troll, but I'll respond anyways.
Isn't funny how a bunch of (mostly partisan hack) appointees who don't know what real work is get to decide what you can take and what you must put up with?
The people who wrote the laws (that is, the Representatives and Senators) are not appointees, but elected representatives. The people who judged this case (that is, the Supreme Court justices) are appointees, but hardly partisan hacks (with a couple of exceptions).
I wonder what your alternative method of dispute resolution would be? Shall we get the plaintiff and a lawyer for the company to fight it out? Perhaps we should elect judges to the Supreme Court, so that we can bring to the Supreme Court all of the integrity and discipline that so characterizes the Congress?
You suggest moving the government "closer to the people." Are you suggesting that trials should be held in the Anglo-Saxon method, where whomever gets the most people of the highest social rank to speak for them wins? Or shall we vote on who wins cases?
Also, you might check out iDSRK from iPlanet. It's a set of performance testing tools, a tool for generating bulk loads, etc. Quite useful in some circumstances.
FWIW, Novell's NDS has been the only enterprise-class directory service since the mid-90's and AD is a play into this arena.
Nope. iPlanet was there before AD (as Netscape) and is far ahead of AD in stability and scalability, as well as performance. I have not used NDS enough to comment intelligently about it. AD is LDAP, but in a quite broken way - much as Win2K supports DNS and DHCP, but in broken ways.
I've been working with LDAP for the past four years as a manager, consultant, administrator, project manager and architect in various situations and for various companies and clients. My experience has been with Netscape/iPlanet, OpenLDAP and Active Directory. I've worked on very small and very large projects. LDAP has the potential to bring amazing efficiency gains to an enterprise or Internet-based organization (ISP or ASP), but it also is fairly immature.
Let me rephrase that: the protocol is mature and useful, and the servers by and large are mature and useful, but the support tools stink, as a general rule. Since it sounds like you are mostly concerned with user administration, I will stick to just that, and let other people mention tools they've found useful.
If you are using Solaris, AIX or Macintosh, using LDAP for accounts is pretty trivial, since the OS supports it directly - you'll need to have the POSIX user schema loaded, and point the OS's naming service to LDAP instead of its local database. Win2K/XP kind of force you to use Active Directory, so you are also taken care of there. In all of these cases, accounts other than the system superuser will be in LDAP, and so therefore synchronization is not a problem.
useradd, userdel, usermod and passwd are all replaced by ldapmodify, or you can use the tools included with some servers (the iPlanet console being a good example of how to do this right). Right now, there doesn't seem to be any substitute for thoroughly learning ldapsearch and ldapmodify, Perl and Net::LDAP. You can use ldapsearch and ldapmodify for quick actions (adding, modifying or deleting a single user, or changing a password) and Perl and Net::LDAP for more complex operations (or for putting together a CGI for common functions like changing a user's password).
I find I end up writing built-to-purpose Perl tools just about everywhere I go. In some cases, this is because of differences in admin policy at different sites, or differences in schema. In others, the issue is more contractual (whomever is paying me gets ownership of the code I write, so I have to rewrite from a clean sheet at the next site).
The good news is, it is fairly quick and painless to write replacements for useradd, usermod, userdel and passwd which can be run from the command line or as a CGI, and you only have to write them once for your site, if you write them well in the first place.
Well, one of the ports in the back holds the keyboard, and one of the ports in the keyboard holds the mouse. That adds up to 3 usable ports. Hook up the printer, camera and Palm cradle, and I'm done with USB ports. For now, that's OK, but what happens when I add something else? Guess I could plug the camera into the keyboard, since I could then easily swap that cable with whatever device I might need to add next.
Just imagine if this were possible! We could just put the screens in our living rooms, and people could broadcast all kinds of entertainment to us! It would be a sort of Radio but with moving pictures!
There is really only one thing missing from the (high-end, at least) new iMac: if it's to be the center of the digital house, why does it not have more USB ports? Admittedly, you can buy a USB hub, but the iMac is supposed to be "the" digital hub.
I use a logitech optical mouse - easily available, cheap and effective. I don't really care what mouse comes with the machine, and am not sure why anyone else does, either. At least Apple's mouse is better than the cheap-ass $6 mice that come with most PCs these days.
Ah, but you can get a Solaris X-windows display on it, by running XDarwin (or whatever it might be called now) which is XFree86 compiled under MacOS X/Darwin.
Bring back the mac cube, at least it was a shape geeks could get into.
I just have to ask: did you buy a cube?
Re:who cares? move on and think like the commercia
on
Apple PDA?
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· Score: 2
I'll be impressed when pocket pc's have good voice recognition, a small footprint rules engine, 1 gig of memory, 50gig hard drive, heads up display and supports multiple wireless standards for secure transaction.
No, you won't, because anyone who would make a statement like this is inherently disinterested in any product that is within 2 years of possible. So, at the time such a device comes out, you'll be noting that it is underpowered, without sufficient RAM, and doesn't have a quantum processor anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but you gave the author of the web page you are looking at permission to use your screen, implicitly, but visiting his web page. Thus, any code he includes, as long as it is non-destructive, is permitted, implicitly, on your screen by you.
GAK! I would not think that the Constitution allows the Congress to delegate a power specifically given it by the Constitution. This would be like allowing the Congress to authorize the President to declare war on his own, or to organize the courts.
Actually, that's not it. When two similarly-equipped countries fight, it will be a faster and deadlier version of traditional warfare. Besides, enemies don't stop fighting because of civilian casualties, they stop fighting because one side loses the ability to prevent the other side from doing what it wants, or it becomes apparent that this will eventually happen and cannot be prevented.
War results from miscalculation of relative power. If the Afghans knew what they were facing, and that we weren't the Soviets and weren't going to fight the same kind of war, do you think that they would not have handed over bin Laden to save their regime? OK, maybe they weren't rational, but I suspect that if they had understood what they were facing, they would have capitulated at least in part.
The reason that this war looks so different than previous wars is only peripherally because of drones and remote warfare. This is a prime example of asymmetrical warfare in its extreme.
In the past, until very recently, any two opponents met with similar capabilities. There were examples of industrial forces meeting iron age or stone age forces (like the American westwards expansion), which were certainly not fun for the less well-equipped force. Normally, though, forces in conflict would have very similar equipment. Take, for example, Panama, where the US massively outnumbered the Panamanians and quickly crushed them. Still, the weaponry was similar. US guided weapons technology was not as well advanced, and the fight was largely an infantry fight, with small amounts of armor, and some specialized air support (like AC-130 Spectres).
The difference here is that the US has a capability that does not exist in any other country in the world. We have not only unmanned aerial recon platforms and satellites, but also laser designators and laser-guided bombs, camera-guided missiles, satellite guided bombs, night-vision gear and the like. Each capability fills in a niche that others don't cover, with a huge amount of overlap. Each multiplies the capabilities of the force. In the end, the multiplier is so large that you get staggering results, like the Gulf War, Somalia, and Afghanistan.
The combination of usage of proxy forces on the ground with small amounts of US, British and similar special forces to bring in all of the US capabilities for warfighting, means that the US has the capability to deliver devastating force with few US casualties.
It's good to be American, really.
Of course, we also have to be mindful of the other side of asymmetrical warfare. The lower-technology force is not ipso facto stupid, and there have been examples of successful attacks (such as 9/11) and even whole wars (Afghanistan) carried out by technologically inferior and outnumbered forces. This means that intelligence and ruthlessness are needed to prevent attacks on the civilian populace. In the past, the civilian populace couldn't be attacked until you got through the military. That is no longer the case.
Not correct. The Congress has declared war, as it did in the Gulf, by passing a resolution authorizing the President to use armed force against a particular enemy. Nowhere does the Constitution require the Congress to pass a resolution saying, "The United States is at war with [insert entity]."
The study of history is largely the study of what-ifs. Without them, you have a non-fiction story. With them, you have a learning experience.
"More choice is always better than less."
Of course, you can tear off the application menu and have one-click switching. And in OS X, you can configure your panel to autohide, and/or configure it with small icons that magnify fully as the cursor passes over them.
All interfaces are learned. MacOS 7.x-9.x is easier to learn, and more consistent, than most other OS interfaces.
Command click the title of the window, and you will get a pop-down of the full path to the current folder. I certainly prefer that to having a button bar with a web-like interface.
Then get a two-button mouse and plug it in. My father knows not of context menus. I use them extensively. He has the original mouse, while I use a Logitech optical mouse. I have no interest in teaching him the difference between right and left clicking, and he has no interest in learning, since he can do everything he needs to do with one button.
I don't see this as a major weakness. Context menus are important to Windows and Linux users (and I use both) because the UI is so poorly designed that they actually help. On Mac, the context menus are a minor assistance at best - in fact I mainly use them to quickly eject disks.
Or you could buy a tablet, or one of the many input devices designed for the disabled, and supported by the Mac, or just install one of several shareware or freeware programs which add full keyboard navigation to the Mac.
While adding their own far more crippling problems and inefficiencies.
I find it quite easy to use, though not as easy or seamless as the classic interface. The multicolumn directory browser is growing on me. At first, it annoyed me, but it is actually turning out to provide a faster move through directories in depth. Plus, being a long-time UNIX type, I like having the underlying BSD layer with a standard UNIX command line - it means that I will be able to consolidate my mix of Linux and Mac boxes into all OS X boxes, which will save me time administering my home net. If you like, you can always just run FFree86 and Gnome on OS X and work that way.
No truer thing was ever said.Speak not of what you do not know. Not only is iPlanet replication quite solid, it does run on (some versions of) Linux.
Having been a cable modem customer, and now a DSL customer, I've had mixed experiences.
With cable, until the @Home debacle, I had 3 static IPs and ran my domain off the cable modem. I had decent performance, but the it was expensive, not as highly available as I would have liked, and I knew that I could lose access at any time for running a server.
Now I have DSL, albeit the consumer service. Soon, it will be set up with static IPs and my domain will be back up (grumble). It will be even more expensive, for probably less performance, but is supposed to be more reliable (certainly has been so far), and I won't have to worry about running the domain (plus I'll get another pair of static IPs).
Both cable and DSL share a common downfall, and it is the reason that most dial up customers I've talked to are slow to switch: no choice of ISPs. With a phone line, I can sign up for any ISP, and can leave for another if I don't like the service I'm getting. With DSL or cable modem, I get one ISP, and cannot switch providers and keep my connection otherwise. There is therefore no price or service incentive for the vendor to improve.
For me, I'd select no ISP. My wife would use AOL. My father-in-law would use his current local provider, and my Dad would be happy just to get broadband at all. The imposition of service has nothing to do with the architecture, and everything to do with decisions made by the broadband access providers. However, as a consumer, I am forced to pay for services I do not want and will never use.
Certainly, content should not be a problem: every web designer out there seems to assume that you are plugged into the server room judging by the amount of bloated Flash and Java pages out there.
-jeff
Ummm, yes they are. In broad theory, a democracy decides governmental issues by popular vote, while a republic decides governmental actions through the votes of representatives, who aggregate the will of their served segment of the population. That said, it can be argued that we have not been a republic since the Progressive Movement (which passed popular election of Senators and got most states to go to popular vote, winner-take-all Presidential electoral contests with the Electors bound to their votes by law). Since then, the three elected parts of the Federal government are all elected, in effect, by the voting populace at large, with only the amount of people voting for a particular person varying by office. That would make us a representative democracy, rather than a republic.
-jeff
And a test in November.
That was most likely a troll, but I'll respond anyways.
The people who wrote the laws (that is, the Representatives and Senators) are not appointees, but elected representatives. The people who judged this case (that is, the Supreme Court justices) are appointees, but hardly partisan hacks (with a couple of exceptions).
I wonder what your alternative method of dispute resolution would be? Shall we get the plaintiff and a lawyer for the company to fight it out? Perhaps we should elect judges to the Supreme Court, so that we can bring to the Supreme Court all of the integrity and discipline that so characterizes the Congress?
You suggest moving the government "closer to the people." Are you suggesting that trials should be held in the Anglo-Saxon method, where whomever gets the most people of the highest social rank to speak for them wins? Or shall we vote on who wins cases?
Also, you might check out iDSRK from iPlanet. It's a set of performance testing tools, a tool for generating bulk loads, etc. Quite useful in some circumstances.
-jeff
Nope. iPlanet was there before AD (as Netscape) and is far ahead of AD in stability and scalability, as well as performance. I have not used NDS enough to comment intelligently about it. AD is LDAP, but in a quite broken way - much as Win2K supports DNS and DHCP, but in broken ways.
-jeff
I've been working with LDAP for the past four years as a manager, consultant, administrator, project manager and architect in various situations and for various companies and clients. My experience has been with Netscape/iPlanet, OpenLDAP and Active Directory. I've worked on very small and very large projects. LDAP has the potential to bring amazing efficiency gains to an enterprise or Internet-based organization (ISP or ASP), but it also is fairly immature.
Let me rephrase that: the protocol is mature and useful, and the servers by and large are mature and useful, but the support tools stink, as a general rule. Since it sounds like you are mostly concerned with user administration, I will stick to just that, and let other people mention tools they've found useful.
If you are using Solaris, AIX or Macintosh, using LDAP for accounts is pretty trivial, since the OS supports it directly - you'll need to have the POSIX user schema loaded, and point the OS's naming service to LDAP instead of its local database. Win2K/XP kind of force you to use Active Directory, so you are also taken care of there. In all of these cases, accounts other than the system superuser will be in LDAP, and so therefore synchronization is not a problem.
useradd, userdel, usermod and passwd are all replaced by ldapmodify, or you can use the tools included with some servers (the iPlanet console being a good example of how to do this right). Right now, there doesn't seem to be any substitute for thoroughly learning ldapsearch and ldapmodify, Perl and Net::LDAP. You can use ldapsearch and ldapmodify for quick actions (adding, modifying or deleting a single user, or changing a password) and Perl and Net::LDAP for more complex operations (or for putting together a CGI for common functions like changing a user's password).
I find I end up writing built-to-purpose Perl tools just about everywhere I go. In some cases, this is because of differences in admin policy at different sites, or differences in schema. In others, the issue is more contractual (whomever is paying me gets ownership of the code I write, so I have to rewrite from a clean sheet at the next site).
The good news is, it is fairly quick and painless to write replacements for useradd, usermod, userdel and passwd which can be run from the command line or as a CGI, and you only have to write them once for your site, if you write them well in the first place.
-jeff
Well, one of the ports in the back holds the keyboard, and one of the ports in the keyboard holds the mouse. That adds up to 3 usable ports. Hook up the printer, camera and Palm cradle, and I'm done with USB ports. For now, that's OK, but what happens when I add something else? Guess I could plug the camera into the keyboard, since I could then easily swap that cable with whatever device I might need to add next.
But then I'd be stuck replacing my TV....
There is really only one thing missing from the (high-end, at least) new iMac: if it's to be the center of the digital house, why does it not have more USB ports? Admittedly, you can buy a USB hub, but the iMac is supposed to be "the" digital hub.
I use a logitech optical mouse - easily available, cheap and effective. I don't really care what mouse comes with the machine, and am not sure why anyone else does, either. At least Apple's mouse is better than the cheap-ass $6 mice that come with most PCs these days.
Ah, but you can get a Solaris X-windows display on it, by running XDarwin (or whatever it might be called now) which is XFree86 compiled under MacOS X/Darwin.
I just have to ask: did you buy a cube?
No, you won't, because anyone who would make a statement like this is inherently disinterested in any product that is within 2 years of possible. So, at the time such a device comes out, you'll be noting that it is underpowered, without sufficient RAM, and doesn't have a quantum processor anyway.
Since the chip is going to have to be less than 1mm square, it seems that a needle would do the trick nicely, once you know where to poke.