While I agree that this isn't likely to have much effect - I expect the list will be almost empty if they are careful, and full of 'regular' porn sites if not - it's not as bad as I was afraid when I first read the headline. They could have just said that ISP's were required to block child porn, and let the ISP's do the choosing. This way, everyone is working from the same list, so if the list gets munged up it only has to be fixed once.
Is it 5th-7th or 6th-8th? Debian Planet says 5th-7th, Slashdot says 6th-8th, the "official announcement" email says, "Friday, July 6, to Sunday, July 8, 2002". My calendar says the 6th is a Saturday.
So is it Fri-Sun, or the 6th-8th? (I'm guessing Fri-Sun, but I want to be sure.)
World's best bar: Smokeless Joe's. I used to work just down the street from it. 250 imported beers, and I worked through most of em. Well, a lot of em. Mmmm.... Belgian lambic... (Pricey, though.)
OSO: The benefits of a consistent interface are only fully realized when the
interface is well designed to start with. What would you say to those individuals who
have a bad default desktop? Is it more ideal for them to skin their OS, or are they
better off moving to another platform that has a well-designed default interface?
Jef: I remember one client of mine who boasted about his customizable desktop and
how he never had to reboot his software. I set the system font to red and the background
to red. You couldn't see a thing. He spent a few minutes trying to find and open the
now-invisible menus that would let him change one of the colors.
He had to reboot. His system was good in that it automatically saved the user
preferences, so it came up red on red. He had not only to reboot, but to reload the
software, losing all his demo data.
So, because you were an asshole, his design was bad? I don't get it.
I really don't understand the point that Raskin's trying to make here. That a UI shouldn't even allow changing colours? That seems pretty draconian. That people might change your settings behind your back, so there shouldn't be any settings? That seems pretty incoherant. That a system shouldn't automatically save settings without some way to undo the change easily? Good advice, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the question that was asked.
What is the point of this anecdote, and why is it here?
...for fixed wireless. (No, I'm not an employee. Just a former employee.)
DSL (and cable) suffer from the last-mile problem: getting that last bit of cable to your hourse is really, really expensive. Every service call they have to make (including turning the thing on in the first place) is a huge loss for them. Right now, smaller competitors are able to get in only because they can piggyback on the big carriers' infrastructure, but this has its own problems. For instance, Sympatico DSL here in Canada has chosen to use this awful PPP-over-Ethernet technology to share the lines. I'd prefer to use Sympatico over Rogers, cause I've mostly gotten better service, but the PPPoE is just too much hassle.
Without having to share the lines, the big companies will be able to give better service. I know Sympatico's losing business over the PPPoE thing. Of course, without competition, there's no incentive to actually improve. But without the option of using the big networks, smaller companies will have to start looking for other solutions - like wireless, for instance. No physical cable = no last mile problem = less overhead = better business for the little guy.
The current DSL situation is a bit of a mess, and not going to get better without a major shakeup. (I don't think it's as bad as a lot of people make out, but I may have just been lucky in my service on the whole.) Think of this as an opportunity...
Focus-follows-mouse wouldn't work too well on a Mac, though - every time you ram the cursor up to the menu bar, it would pass over other windows. I started using the Mac-style menu bar with KDE, and found that I kept accidently raising windows when I headed for the menu. (Raising the timeout doesn't help, because then when I want to raise a window, it's infuriatingly slow, and when I fumble the mouse I raise windows by accident anyway.)
So now I'm torn - I really like focus-follows-mouse, but I've also gotten used to the mac-style menu bar and I can't decide which I like more.
> Either way, the government is doing something which looks immoral but has practical reasons behind it...
Er, I should clarify that I don't mean, "looks immoral but actually isn't". I think it's pretty damn immoral. I just mean that if you look at it from another point of view, you *could* see their actions as justified. Justifiable. Whatever.
> WARNING: The remainder of this post may in fact be advocating "terrorism" under the new definitions put forth by the U.S. gov with respect to "computer crimes".
Well, yeah. You *are* advocating terrorism. There's no real difference except in scale between, "The US government installed a snooper on my computer, so I'm going to run DOS attacks on all their servers!" and "The US government installed a dictator in my country, so I'm going to send car bombs at all their embassies." Either way, the government is doing something which looks immoral but has practical reasons behind it, and the victim is responding vengefully.
The last two are British variants ("behaviour" is also common here in Canada, and I believe "optimised" would be considered the official spelling here, though I've never seen it.) I don't know what you were thinking with "recommended".
Microsft's [SIC]
This is, yes, a typo. Gasp.
recommending [SIC]
See "recommended".
dissappointed [SIC]
Possibly a typo, possibly a genuine spelling mistake. Either way, you only have a 1 in 3 hit rate. Combined with the fact that you made some truly bizarre misspellings - such as "I'll" for "ill" and "Nick try" - and I would say you just shot yourself in the foot nicely.
Why exactly did you think that flaming the spelling would add to your argument, when there was so much demented ranting about the use of Basic in systems programming and the volunteer status of Apache to pick on? And having decided to flame the spelling, why didn't you take the time to run your assumptions through a spell-checker? (I used www.m-w.com.) "recommended" doesn't even have any variant spellings to confuse you - what were you thinking?
If the issue had been much less clear-cut, that bit of dumb-ass grandstanding might have cost you the argument. You're lucky you were replying to such a flake. If this had been posted on sci.math instead of Slashdot, it would have contained the phrase, "I consider myself to be very mathematically inclined having worked with elementary algebra for the last 8 years proving Fermat's Last Theorem."
We are getting to the point that we are seriously considering not supporting distributions that don't support the LSB. I've been very encouraged by SuSE's work in this direction, and disappointed at how bad RedHat and Mandrake are.
Go for it - the LSB won't do anything if there isn't significant developer pressure to support it. If everyone packages an LSB version plus "exception" versions for major vendors who still aren't compliant, the vendors won't have any incentive to switch.
They have plans for fiber, but are waiting for the money to be there-what's the point of having lots of bandwidth with no customers to use it...
That's the most insightful thing I've ever read on Slashdot. A lot (most?) of Nortel's current problems stem from exactly that - massive growth of the infrastructure without the customers to support it. IIRC, only 6% of the current fiber-optic infrastructure is actually in use. (This is from my Economics prof, from memory - we'll see how good that memory is when exams roll around in a few weeks.) There was just too much money pumped into IT, and nothing to do with it, so everybody used to upgrade their network. Now that the money's stopped flowing in, Nortel and others can't sell anymore: why would people shell out when their only using a fraction of what they've got?
As I understand it, the problem isn't with wine vs. libwine, it's with GCC. The sources still use template functions and similar complicated things which work under VC++ (or Borland, or whichever they use for Windows development) but aren't (or weren't at the time) supported 100% with GCC. So for now they have to compile under Windows and use Wine as a binary loader.
(I work at Corel, but on a different project, and I haven't talked to anyone else here about it. As a matter of fact, I think I know this cause I read it here during the last go round. So don't take my word for this.)
On the one hand: the voice acting sucks, the character photos are laughable, and the interface is pretty glitchy. And the writing is just this side of atrocious. On the other hand: the graphic design is very cool (the graphics themselves are a bit behind the curve, but the design itself is nice), the overall storyline and concept (the world advancing whether you intervene or not) sounds great, and - the most important thing - the flight model is lots of fun. Gripping hand is: Not sure if I'll buy it. I'm low on cash (gotta pay that tuition!) and I've got two chunks set aside for Descent 3 and Alpha Centauri. This one's getting slotted in as #3 if the price is right, though.
One of the drawbacks to the GPL is that it is ONLY compatable with the GPL. If the author of a piece of code chooses to use another copyleft-style license (such as the QPL or MPL) their code cannot be linked with any GPL software. The LGPL, however, allows linking with proprietary licenses, so it is not useful for an author who wishes to disallow use of their code in commercial software.
Would you be receptive to the idea of a license which is midway between the GPL and LGPL in restrictiveness? One which allows linking to code under any license satisfying the definition of "Free Software"? This would need to involve a certification process, such as the OSI Certified mark, and a precise definition of the attributes such a license must have. If the GPL 3 were made to work in this manner, currently existing GPL'd code could be grandfathered in, which would go a long way towards sorting out the license incompatability problem which seems to be on the horizon.
Unfortunately, these are the exact two genres that aren't really doing well on Windows, either...
I'd love to have Planescape: Torment, but I'm almost finished it on my Windows partition, anyway so for me there's not much point anymore. Whatever comes out next from the Planescape team, for sure.
LucasArts games! Grim Fandango! Again, I've finished it on my Windows partition already, but with their next game I hope to avoid all that ugly mess. (BTW, it works under Wine, except for the sound - but without the sound, what's the point?)
System Shock II! Please let's get Looking Glass on board for their next game, whatever it turns out to be! You know it'll be good!
Oh, and Diablo II, as well. Not so much for me, but so I can get in on those 24-hour Diablo marathons with my roommates without having to reboot all the time...
> Now, I'd be most impressed if somebody from Corel showed up on the thread and asked us how the form could be better, since it's obviously widely hated.
Hi, I'm from Corel. Well, not currently - I was a co-op there last term, and I'm going back next term. So a little biased, but:
As I recall, the Linux OS form inspired a flood of negative comments because it still had Windows-specific information on it (like, "What version of Windows do you have?") This form is obviously Linux tailored: it asks about kernel version, X server, window manager, etc.
Hardware is obviously a major concern for the QA department. One of the reasons to distribute the beta is to be sure it works on hardware that Corel doesn't have in house. This wouldn't be as important for an app as for the OS, but there's still always SOMETHING that can go wrong. Of all the items listed, the only one that looks like it has NOTHING to do with Corel Draw is the sound card. (And possibly CD-ROM drive.) Also, bear in mind this form will probably be used for Word Perfect Office and other Linux products which DO use these other pieces of hardware as well. Better to collect too much than too little.
Filling this stuff in will only take a few minutes of your time - less than it takes to compile and install a typical source-distributed program from a tarball. And it makes QA's job infinitely easier. I don't really see anything that's asked for that isn't a reasonable request, and most of it is just one or two word answers.
(Note: in case it's not clear, I'm not at Corel right now, and I don't have any behind-the-scenes knowledge of the Corel Draw beta. I read it here, same as you.)
Joe
Re:Five people make a consipracy, right?
on
Review:Toy Story 2
·
· Score: 1
Also the bad guy from the Wallace and Gromit episode.
>The restraining order is not for all of Usenet but for a specific newsgroup. The individual's freedom of speech is therefore not curtailed.
Sure it is. I don't know anything about the skiing heirarchy, but there are a lot of subjects where there is exactly one group for their discussion, and all related groups have that discussion strictly forbidden.
So if you were banned from posting in rec.arts.foo, and you tried to post something about foo in rec.arts.bar, you would be doing the Wrong Thing. The law is either curtailing your freedom of speech, or forcing you to post in an inappropriate forum.
alt.revisionism is a perfect example of this. Quite a lot of groups (such as soc.history.what-if) explicitly disallow Holocaust denial, on the grounds that alt.revisionism is available for discussion of this topic. If someone's access to alt.revisionism were disallowed, that's tantamount to denying *any* discussion of the Holocaust on Usenet by that individual.
I would regard that as sufficient to make me believe in a Creator. The Creator coming down from heaven tomorrow and tapping me on the shoulder would also be sufficient. Neither one are gonna happen.
ObSF: Contact. Bad book, but I was impressed by Carl Sagan's proof of the existence of God.
"Changeling" doesn't mean "shapechanger". The changeling myth is that faeries would steal human children and leave changelings in their place. (See _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and Yeats' "The Stolen Child". If reading poetry isn't your thing, try Loreena McKennitt's version.)
I don't recall if stories give changelings a consistent shape, or if they were supposed to be almost undetectable, or what. (If a misshapen child is born, though, blaming it on fairies stealing the real baby is a plausible origin of this myth.)
ObSF: Miles Vorkosigan. Although nobody really suspected him of being a fairy. (No, this is not a gay joke.)
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that this isn't likely to have much effect - I expect the list will be almost empty if they are careful, and full of 'regular' porn sites if not - it's not as bad as I was afraid when I first read the headline. They could have just said that ISP's were required to block child porn, and let the ISP's do the choosing. This way, everyone is working from the same list, so if the list gets munged up it only has to be fixed once.
Yeah, I have a question:
Is it 5th-7th or 6th-8th? Debian Planet says 5th-7th, Slashdot says 6th-8th, the "official announcement" email says, "Friday, July 6, to Sunday, July 8, 2002". My calendar says the 6th is a Saturday.
So is it Fri-Sun, or the 6th-8th? (I'm guessing Fri-Sun, but I want to be sure.)
World's best bar: Smokeless Joe's. I used to work just down the street from it. 250 imported beers, and I worked through most of em. Well, a lot of em. Mmmm.... Belgian lambic... (Pricey, though.)
I really don't understand the point that Raskin's trying to make here. That a UI shouldn't even allow changing colours? That seems pretty draconian. That people might change your settings behind your back, so there shouldn't be any settings? That seems pretty incoherant. That a system shouldn't automatically save settings without some way to undo the change easily? Good advice, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the question that was asked.
What is the point of this anecdote, and why is it here?DSL (and cable) suffer from the last-mile problem: getting that last bit of cable to your hourse is really, really expensive. Every service call they have to make (including turning the thing on in the first place) is a huge loss for them. Right now, smaller competitors are able to get in only because they can piggyback on the big carriers' infrastructure, but this has its own problems. For instance, Sympatico DSL here in Canada has chosen to use this awful PPP-over-Ethernet technology to share the lines. I'd prefer to use Sympatico over Rogers, cause I've mostly gotten better service, but the PPPoE is just too much hassle.
Without having to share the lines, the big companies will be able to give better service. I know Sympatico's losing business over the PPPoE thing. Of course, without competition, there's no incentive to actually improve. But without the option of using the big networks, smaller companies will have to start looking for other solutions - like wireless, for instance. No physical cable = no last mile problem = less overhead = better business for the little guy.
The current DSL situation is a bit of a mess, and not going to get better without a major shakeup. (I don't think it's as bad as a lot of people make out, but I may have just been lucky in my service on the whole.) Think of this as an opportunity...
Focus-follows-mouse wouldn't work too well on a Mac, though - every time you ram the cursor up to the menu bar, it would pass over other windows. I started using the Mac-style menu bar with KDE, and found that I kept accidently raising windows when I headed for the menu. (Raising the timeout doesn't help, because then when I want to raise a window, it's infuriatingly slow, and when I fumble the mouse I raise windows by accident anyway.)
So now I'm torn - I really like focus-follows-mouse, but I've also gotten used to the mac-style menu bar and I can't decide which I like more.
> Either way, the government is doing something which looks immoral but has practical reasons behind it...
Er, I should clarify that I don't mean, "looks immoral but actually isn't". I think it's pretty damn immoral. I just mean that if you look at it from another point of view, you *could* see their actions as justified. Justifiable. Whatever.
> WARNING: The remainder of this post may in fact be advocating "terrorism" under the new definitions put forth by the U.S. gov with respect to "computer crimes".
Well, yeah. You *are* advocating terrorism. There's no real difference except in scale between, "The US government installed a snooper on my computer, so I'm going to run DOS attacks on all their servers!" and "The US government installed a dictator in my country, so I'm going to send car bombs at all their embassies." Either way, the government is doing something which looks immoral but has practical reasons behind it, and the victim is responding vengefully.
Gives you a sense of perspective, hmm?
"recommended" is correct.
optimised [SIC]
"optimised" is also correct.
behaviour [SIC]
As is "behaviour".
The last two are British variants ("behaviour" is also common here in Canada, and I believe "optimised" would be considered the official spelling here, though I've never seen it.) I don't know what you were thinking with "recommended".
Microsft's [SIC]
This is, yes, a typo. Gasp.
recommending [SIC]
See "recommended".
dissappointed [SIC]
Possibly a typo, possibly a genuine spelling mistake. Either way, you only have a 1 in 3 hit rate. Combined with the fact that you made some truly bizarre misspellings - such as "I'll" for "ill" and "Nick try" - and I would say you just shot yourself in the foot nicely.
Why exactly did you think that flaming the spelling would add to your argument, when there was so much demented ranting about the use of Basic in systems programming and the volunteer status of Apache to pick on? And having decided to flame the spelling, why didn't you take the time to run your assumptions through a spell-checker? (I used www.m-w.com.) "recommended" doesn't even have any variant spellings to confuse you - what were you thinking?
If the issue had been much less clear-cut, that bit of dumb-ass grandstanding might have cost you the argument. You're lucky you were replying to such a flake. If this had been posted on sci.math instead of Slashdot, it would have contained the phrase, "I consider myself to be very mathematically inclined having worked with elementary algebra for the last 8 years proving Fermat's Last Theorem."
Joe
Go for it - the LSB won't do anything if there isn't significant developer pressure to support it. If everyone packages an LSB version plus "exception" versions for major vendors who still aren't compliant, the vendors won't have any incentive to switch.
That's the most insightful thing I've ever read on Slashdot. A lot (most?) of Nortel's current problems stem from exactly that - massive growth of the infrastructure without the customers to support it. IIRC, only 6% of the current fiber-optic infrastructure is actually in use. (This is from my Economics prof, from memory - we'll see how good that memory is when exams roll around in a few weeks.) There was just too much money pumped into IT, and nothing to do with it, so everybody used to upgrade their network. Now that the money's stopped flowing in, Nortel and others can't sell anymore: why would people shell out when their only using a fraction of what they've got?
As I understand it, the problem isn't with wine vs. libwine, it's with GCC. The sources still use template functions and similar complicated things which work under VC++ (or Borland, or whichever they use for Windows development) but aren't (or weren't at the time) supported 100% with GCC. So for now they have to compile under Windows and use Wine as a binary loader.
(I work at Corel, but on a different project, and I haven't talked to anyone else here about it. As a matter of fact, I think I know this cause I read it here during the last go round. So don't take my word for this.)
Joe
On the one hand: the voice acting sucks, the character photos are laughable, and the interface is pretty glitchy. And the writing is just this side of atrocious. On the other hand: the graphic design is very cool (the graphics themselves are a bit behind the curve, but the design itself is nice), the overall storyline and concept (the world advancing whether you intervene or not) sounds great, and - the most important thing - the flight model is lots of fun. Gripping hand is: Not sure if I'll buy it. I'm low on cash (gotta pay that tuition!) and I've got two chunks set aside for Descent 3 and Alpha Centauri. This one's getting slotted in as #3 if the price is right, though.
One of the drawbacks to the GPL is that it is ONLY compatable with the GPL. If the author of a piece of code chooses to use another copyleft-style license (such as the QPL or MPL) their code cannot be linked with any GPL software. The LGPL, however, allows linking with proprietary licenses, so it is not useful for an author who wishes to disallow use of their code in commercial software.
Would you be receptive to the idea of a license which is midway between the GPL and LGPL in restrictiveness? One which allows linking to code under any license satisfying the definition of "Free Software"? This would need to involve a certification process, such as the OSI Certified mark, and a precise definition of the attributes such a license must have. If the GPL 3 were made to work in this manner, currently existing GPL'd code could be grandfathered in, which would go a long way towards sorting out the license incompatability problem which seems to be on the horizon.
Check out http://opensource.corel.com/printlib.html for Corel's Application Printing Services API.
Joe
filfre starts X, obviously... :-)
Unfortunately, these are the exact two genres that aren't really doing well on Windows, either...
I'd love to have Planescape: Torment, but I'm almost finished it on my Windows partition, anyway so for me there's not much point anymore. Whatever comes out next from the Planescape team, for sure.
LucasArts games! Grim Fandango! Again, I've finished it on my Windows partition already, but with their next game I hope to avoid all that ugly mess. (BTW, it works under Wine, except for the sound - but without the sound, what's the point?)
System Shock II! Please let's get Looking Glass on board for their next game, whatever it turns out to be! You know it'll be good!
Oh, and Diablo II, as well. Not so much for me, but so I can get in on those 24-hour Diablo marathons with my roommates without having to reboot all the time...
Joe
There's a nice little form under "User Preferences" that lets you pick what stories Slashdot will show you. Just go there and turn off the legal ones.
Oh, and I don't think "prosecuting is lame" is a valid legal defence. I like the idea of a "bite me" defence, though...
Except that the Opera browser's a pre-alpha...
> Now, I'd be most impressed if somebody from Corel showed up on the thread and asked us how the form could be better, since it's obviously widely hated.
Hi, I'm from Corel. Well, not currently - I was a co-op there last term, and I'm going back next term. So a little biased, but:
As I recall, the Linux OS form inspired a flood of negative comments because it still had Windows-specific information on it (like, "What version of Windows do you have?") This form is obviously Linux tailored: it asks about kernel version, X server, window manager, etc.
Hardware is obviously a major concern for the QA department. One of the reasons to distribute the beta is to be sure it works on hardware that Corel doesn't have in house. This wouldn't be as important for an app as for the OS, but there's still always SOMETHING that can go wrong. Of all the items listed, the only one that looks like it has NOTHING to do with Corel Draw is the sound card. (And possibly CD-ROM drive.) Also, bear in mind this form will probably be used for Word Perfect Office and other Linux products which DO use these other pieces of hardware as well. Better to collect too much than too little.
Filling this stuff in will only take a few minutes of your time - less than it takes to compile and install a typical source-distributed program from a tarball. And it makes QA's job infinitely easier. I don't really see anything that's asked for that isn't a reasonable request, and most of it is just one or two word answers.
(Note: in case it's not clear, I'm not at Corel right now, and I don't have any behind-the-scenes knowledge of the Corel Draw beta. I read it here, same as you.)
Joe
Also the bad guy from the Wallace and Gromit episode.
>The restraining order is not for all of Usenet but for a specific newsgroup. The individual's freedom of speech is therefore not curtailed.
Sure it is. I don't know anything about the skiing heirarchy, but there are a lot of subjects where there is exactly one group for their discussion, and all related groups have that discussion strictly forbidden.
So if you were banned from posting in rec.arts.foo, and you tried to post something about foo in rec.arts.bar, you would be doing the Wrong Thing. The law is either curtailing your freedom of speech, or forcing you to post in an inappropriate forum.
alt.revisionism is a perfect example of this. Quite a lot of groups (such as soc.history.what-if) explicitly disallow Holocaust denial, on the grounds that alt.revisionism is available for discussion of this topic. If someone's access to alt.revisionism were disallowed, that's tantamount to denying *any* discussion of the Holocaust on Usenet by that individual.
I would regard that as sufficient to make me believe in a Creator. The Creator coming down from heaven tomorrow and tapping me on the shoulder would also be sufficient. Neither one are gonna happen.
ObSF: Contact. Bad book, but I was impressed by Carl Sagan's proof of the existence of God.
"Changeling" doesn't mean "shapechanger". The changeling myth is that faeries would steal human children and leave changelings in their place. (See _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and Yeats' "The Stolen Child". If reading poetry isn't your thing, try Loreena McKennitt's version.)
I don't recall if stories give changelings a consistent shape, or if they were supposed to be almost undetectable, or what. (If a misshapen child is born, though, blaming it on fairies stealing the real baby is a plausible origin of this myth.)
ObSF: Miles Vorkosigan. Although nobody really suspected him of being a fairy. (No, this is not a gay joke.)
"A Canadian is someone who hates being called a foreigner by Americans, and an American by foreigners." -- The Globe Challenge