"The brothers told TIME magazine they had written it to protect their medical software from piracy and was supposed to target copyright infringers only."
True. I had forgotten about that. Besides they proudly displayed their phone number in contrast to the AIDS program author, who just gave the company name "PC Cyborg Corporation" and address (a PO box in Panama).
Am I the only one who recalls the AIDS "trojan horse"? It is called a trojan by Wikipedia, but it seems very possible that the author thought himself in the right to use this form of extreme copy protection.
According to Koingo Software's entry on the discussion at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 26767&page=3 (direct link may or may not work), they actually had a home directory erased by the program. And the programmers response (next entry) is not really customer friendly. It seems clear that there has been versions of the program that really erase your home directory.
I suppose the regular disclaimers like "make sure you have all the dependencies installed" apply. It's a pity GNU/Linux distributions are still like that...
Yes. This is going a bit off topic, but in case anyone is interested...
I downloaded the Mac version of the program and clicked on the installer. I got a generic error message, that did not tell me what was wrong.
I then browsed the readme, and learnt that I needed to install Tex separately.
I downloaded the recommended i-Installer, and found that it simply was a tool to install Tex - it did not contain Tex, which I had hoped (but not really expected).
So I followed the instructions to use i-Installer to install Tex, which was not in the list of installable programs. However, there was a product called gwTeX with six different packages, each of which might be what I wanted. I took the first one, "gwTeX based on TeX Live". It took well above five minutes, perhaps a quarter of an hour, to install. It hang with the sliders at 100% for another five minutes, but when I tried to close it, is assured me that it was still doing things. In the end I got a message that all was fine.
I could now finally successfully launch the XeTeX installer. Hooray! I am done! I can start typing!
Not really.
There was no program icon for XeTeX to be found. Now, I know, but my grandmother does not, that anything with TeX often is a command line tool. So I went back to the XeTeX readme, where they suggested a number of different tools to use with XeTeX. I went for the recommended TexShop. It is a drag and drop installation, and I sighed of relief.
In TexShop I selected UTF8 and XeLaTeX, settings that were not retained unless I also changed in the Preferences, by the way.
I then tried opening several of the sample files that came with XeTeX. All of them failed with... yes! a generic error message!
This is where I gave up. If I had had a file in front of me, which I knew was written by an 18th century pirate, who was describing where he had hidden his treasure, I would have gone on trying, and I am sure I would have succeeded in the end. But my more generic curiosity has faded away, and I will let this lie for another five years, before I try again with updated versions.
Thanks for the XeTeX link. I'm sure that will be useful for many of us (even though the installation failed for me).
However, I think the parent post's main point was that LaTeX is not here and now usable across the globe. With MS Word or OpenOffice, I can type and mix Japanese, Korean, Russian and French in one and the same document, and I can share it with millions of users on different platforms.
With the default installations of LaTeX, that is impossible.
I sick and tired of all this talk about making Wikipedia "reliable". We need something that quickly can be updated with interesting and potentially accurate information, which then needs to be verified against other sources by the reader. That's Wikipedia's niche. Let it stay that way.
There is of course room for other slightly more reliable web encyclopaedias, but in the end all of them have to be verified by the reader to be trusted.
I think Bill was insinuating that Apple stole "file..edit..view" from Xerox-PARC, which is a lame tactic...
Yes, I cannot make the statement make any sense no matter how I read it.
Reading: "The menus came from Xerox". Even if it were true, how does that bring any glory to MS?
Reading: "The menus came from Windows". Obviously false.
Reading: "The menus were originally developed in early versions of MS Word for DOS." Even if it had been true, no one knows about it, so it makes no sense asking a rhetoric question about it.
The best explanation I can see is that Bill was upset and blurbed something out without thinking.
I'm seeing File/Edit/View in the very first version of Mac OS.
Yes, but at the time MS were already working on the first version of MS Word for MacOS, and it is possible (but not necessarily likely), that MS influenced Apple. But then, even if it is true, Bill could hardly assume in the interview that everyone knew that this was the case.
MS has no good track record with their Mac versions. Office 2004 introduced peculiar and buggy things like the "Project Center" and the "Notebook Layout". It was great that they introduced functionality that was not in the Windows version, but it was unfortunate that the added functionality was useless.
Besides Office is still not Services aware, and that removes part of the purpose of having a Mac.
If they now leave VBA out, will there be any reason left to buy MS Office instead of downloading the free NeoOffice?
The goal of open source is to keep source open, right? The only way MS can sue, is if they find source that is not open but proprietary in some way or other. Even if they sue here and there, the result is that that part of the code will have to be taken out and rewritten, which it should have been done anyhow.
It seems like this is an efficient way to make sure that the code is clean.
I am not quite sure what your point is. Of course no one forces you to use your native language Wikipedia. If your native language is for example Irish, I would personally even advice against sticking only to your native Wikipedia for all information. Its 4000 articles may be well written, but I guess there is something missing compared to the one million and a half of articles in the English W. It may be a good idea to write articles in your native Wikipedia as a service to other people, but the choice is of course up to you.
If your point is that the English Wikipedia is "international" and therefore "better", I would advice you to look again. There are plenty of articles written in other languages that are much more useful than the English ones.
The article says that the Chinese and English-speaking wikipedias display different information. However, that is not only a Chinese vs. English difference. A lot of things are perceived different in different environments. I imagine that the articles about the invasion of Iraq is portrayed very different in the Arabic and American versions for example. Or the Turkish and French articles on the Armenian genocide.
Likewise an article about homosexuality written in a hypothetical English Wikipedia from the 1930s would likely have a very different angle on it than we have today, even without any active government censorship.
If the Republican party had its own Wikipedia written by its members and the Democratic one its own, no censorship would be needed for them to have very different articles on president Bush. A similar difference would apply for the hypothetical state Wikipedias by Massachusetts and Utah residents on Bush.
Neither do Korean and Japanese Wikipedias always agree on what is accurate information when it comes to history.
The great thing with Wikipedia is that it makes it so much easier to see what is written in other languages about a subject. Just click on the link in the lower left for the language you want. Some differences will probably stay for ever, but the easy access to other languages to some extent diminishes national misunderstandings.
This article cites one report which happens to show it goes one way. However, there is also statistics showing it going the other way. Check out MS market share at netcraft. The last year they gained about 10% and Apache lost about as much. IDC talk about a "solid growth" for Microsoft, which beat Unix with Linux far behind.
None of these reports is faultless, and they measure different things from what the parent article measures. But there seems to be no crisis for Microsoft for the time being.
What I do not understand is why any science article from CNN, BBC or other mainstream media ever makes it to Slashdot. If something they write is really interesting news, it is because a real article has been published in a peer reviewed journal. So give us the original! Not that filtered and distorted thing that has gone through the keyboard of a journalist who never is a specialist anyhow.
I like reading popular science because it often is entertaining and quick. But I would never use it as basis for any serious discussion.
"the adult human brain is roughly equivalent to 1E+18 operations/sec., and the brain stores roughly one petabyte of data"
Do you have sources for that? I had assumed our knowledge on how data was stored and processed in our brain was so limited that any calculation of its power were wild guesses. Sure, we can count the number of brain cells and connections, but we do not know how much information is stored there. The idea of a quantum brain for example may not be very likely, but neither has anyone been able to falsify it.
Am I the only one with a queasy feeling about slashdot quoting MSNBC on science? There are plenty of real science publications out there. One might have hoped that the average geek could stay away from sources at MSNBC's level.
"But then don't complain when it isn't held as authoritative as Encyclopedia Britannica."
How come so many people who are critical of Wikipedia seem completely uncritical to other publications?
EB is not authoritative. It is, just like Wikipedia, a collection of suggestions, that need thorough checks before one uses them for any serious purpose.
Instead of (or at least in addition to) writing about one phisher, it would be interesting to know what the odds are for identity thefts. Are almost all cases based on "reactivate your account" mails? How often are working keyboard sniffers installed and used? Does anyone really have to worry about remote surveillance of screens through windows and across streets, or is it just a theoretical thought experiment, which never is used?
I feel a little sad about that list, as it contains no academic applications at all. No physical simulations. No Latin verb conjugators. No statistical calculators. Are there none around, or are they all ugly? Or are they simply outside the journalists sphere of interest?
Slashdot Mirror
It is not clear to me, but I thought different versions deleted different things.
True. I had forgotten about that. Besides they proudly displayed their phone number in contrast to the AIDS program author, who just gave the company name "PC Cyborg Corporation" and address (a PO box in Panama).
Am I the only one who recalls the AIDS "trojan horse"? It is called a trojan by Wikipedia, but it seems very possible that the author thought himself in the right to use this form of extreme copy protection.
According to Koingo Software's entry on the discussion at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 26767&page=3 (direct link may or may not work), they actually had a home directory erased by the program. And the programmers response (next entry) is not really customer friendly. It seems clear that there has been versions of the program that really erase your home directory.
Yes. This is going a bit off topic, but in case anyone is interested...
I downloaded the Mac version of the program and clicked on the installer. I got a generic error message, that did not tell me what was wrong.
I then browsed the readme, and learnt that I needed to install Tex separately.
I downloaded the recommended i-Installer, and found that it simply was a tool to install Tex - it did not contain Tex, which I had hoped (but not really expected).
So I followed the instructions to use i-Installer to install Tex, which was not in the list of installable programs. However, there was a product called gwTeX with six different packages, each of which might be what I wanted. I took the first one, "gwTeX based on TeX Live". It took well above five minutes, perhaps a quarter of an hour, to install. It hang with the sliders at 100% for another five minutes, but when I tried to close it, is assured me that it was still doing things. In the end I got a message that all was fine.
I could now finally successfully launch the XeTeX installer. Hooray! I am done! I can start typing!
Not really.
There was no program icon for XeTeX to be found. Now, I know, but my grandmother does not, that anything with TeX often is a command line tool. So I went back to the XeTeX readme, where they suggested a number of different tools to use with XeTeX. I went for the recommended TexShop. It is a drag and drop installation, and I sighed of relief.
In TexShop I selected UTF8 and XeLaTeX, settings that were not retained unless I also changed in the Preferences, by the way.
I then tried opening several of the sample files that came with XeTeX. All of them failed with... yes! a generic error message!
This is where I gave up. If I had had a file in front of me, which I knew was written by an 18th century pirate, who was describing where he had hidden his treasure, I would have gone on trying, and I am sure I would have succeeded in the end. But my more generic curiosity has faded away, and I will let this lie for another five years, before I try again with updated versions.
However, I think the parent post's main point was that LaTeX is not here and now usable across the globe. With MS Word or OpenOffice, I can type and mix Japanese, Korean, Russian and French in one and the same document, and I can share it with millions of users on different platforms.
With the default installations of LaTeX, that is impossible.
What a severe judgement of the human race!
Don't say that anymore.
Ok. I think once should suffice.
There is of course room for other slightly more reliable web encyclopaedias, but in the end all of them have to be verified by the reader to be trusted.
Yes, I cannot make the statement make any sense no matter how I read it.
Reading: "The menus came from Xerox". Even if it were true, how does that bring any glory to MS?
Reading: "The menus came from Windows". Obviously false.
Reading: "The menus were originally developed in early versions of MS Word for DOS." Even if it had been true, no one knows about it, so it makes no sense asking a rhetoric question about it.
The best explanation I can see is that Bill was upset and blurbed something out without thinking.
Yes, but at the time MS were already working on the first version of MS Word for MacOS, and it is possible (but not necessarily likely), that MS influenced Apple. But then, even if it is true, Bill could hardly assume in the interview that everyone knew that this was the case.
What could he be thinking of?
He cannot possibly claim that Windows came before the MacOS.
It is unlikely that he wants to give homage to Xerox.
Could it be that the early versions of MS Word for Mac in some way affected the menu items in MacOS? Does anyone know?
Or does he refer to something completely different?
Besides Office is still not Services aware, and that removes part of the purpose of having a Mac.
If they now leave VBA out, will there be any reason left to buy MS Office instead of downloading the free NeoOffice?
It seems like this is an efficient way to make sure that the code is clean.
If your point is that the English Wikipedia is "international" and therefore "better", I would advice you to look again. There are plenty of articles written in other languages that are much more useful than the English ones.
Likewise an article about homosexuality written in a hypothetical English Wikipedia from the 1930s would likely have a very different angle on it than we have today, even without any active government censorship.
If the Republican party had its own Wikipedia written by its members and the Democratic one its own, no censorship would be needed for them to have very different articles on president Bush. A similar difference would apply for the hypothetical state Wikipedias by Massachusetts and Utah residents on Bush.
Neither do Korean and Japanese Wikipedias always agree on what is accurate information when it comes to history.
The great thing with Wikipedia is that it makes it so much easier to see what is written in other languages about a subject. Just click on the link in the lower left for the language you want. Some differences will probably stay for ever, but the easy access to other languages to some extent diminishes national misunderstandings.
None of these reports is faultless, and they measure different things from what the parent article measures. But there seems to be no crisis for Microsoft for the time being.
I like reading popular science because it often is entertaining and quick. But I would never use it as basis for any serious discussion.
I agree. They seem to be lazy today. Could be the heat, I guess. But aren't there some moderators Iceland? They could mod you up.
Thanks for that answer! It was exactly what my brain was looking for.
Do you have sources for that? I had assumed our knowledge on how data was stored and processed in our brain was so limited that any calculation of its power were wild guesses. Sure, we can count the number of brain cells and connections, but we do not know how much information is stored there. The idea of a quantum brain for example may not be very likely, but neither has anyone been able to falsify it.
I don't think it does. My impression is that most people who claim it has it, haven't themselves understood what an adjustment layer is.
Am I the only one with a queasy feeling about slashdot quoting MSNBC on science? There are plenty of real science publications out there. One might have hoped that the average geek could stay away from sources at MSNBC's level.
How come so many people who are critical of Wikipedia seem completely uncritical to other publications?
EB is not authoritative. It is, just like Wikipedia, a collection of suggestions, that need thorough checks before one uses them for any serious purpose.
Instead of (or at least in addition to) writing about one phisher, it would be interesting to know what the odds are for identity thefts. Are almost all cases based on "reactivate your account" mails? How often are working keyboard sniffers installed and used? Does anyone really have to worry about remote surveillance of screens through windows and across streets, or is it just a theoretical thought experiment, which never is used?
I feel a little sad about that list, as it contains no academic applications at all. No physical simulations. No Latin verb conjugators. No statistical calculators. Are there none around, or are they all ugly? Or are they simply outside the journalists sphere of interest?