I'm just saying that the reason people use faxes is not because the security capabilities are actually better than e-mail. The security capabilities of faxing are not better than those of e-mail. Any supposed security benefits are probably illusory, and most of the reason some people use fax machines is because it's the technology they're accustomed to.
As far as I'm concerned, fax should be considered an obsolete technology that we have to use when interacting with someone who isn't comfortable using newer/better technology.
I don't think my comment is irrelevant, but rather I wasn't sure what the issue was (which is why I asked). The fact that it doesn't display things that it doesn't know how to handle is valid. Whether it asks you to download or downloads automatically, it seems to me, should be a setting. Either way is valid, IMO, but ideally the user should be able to choose. Now, if you said it was *running* files without asking, it'd be a different issue, but downloading shouldn't be a huge deal.
But so the problem is that it's allowing pages to force automatic downloads an unlimited number of files, without asking? That does sound like it's potentially annoying problem. Still not sure it's a very critical security vulnerability, but if it's hard to cancel once it has started, then it would be annoying.
Also setting your backlight lower during the screensaver would help too.
Or turning your screen off (or "power saving mode") instead of going to screensaver. Screensavers also don't make a ton of sense in the modern world. Burn-in is much less of a problem on modern monitors, and computers can power down the screen instead of going to screensaver.
In truth, I still use a screensaver as a sort of warning system. The screensaver comes on 3 minutes before the computer sleeps, so if I want to keep it from sleeping, I have a couple minutes to stop it. But if you're using some kind of cool 3D screensaver, I'd guess that it might use more power to display it than to just keep showing your desktop.
It's also to provide a purpose for government agencies that would have otherwise become obsolete when prohibition ended. Government always expands, never contracts. If you create an agency to keep people from getting illegal substances, they'll make substances illegal just to give that agency something to do.
Multi-touch isn't going to help me do my job any easier and I really don't want users pinching and dragging their dirty mits around the new LCD monitors...
Well certainly not anything in their multi-touch demo. A touch-screen piano on a laptop screen-- I doubt anyone who knows how to play a piano will find this is be a worthwhile solution.
The thing is, I'm sure multi-touch is a good practical solution for many things. And for many other things, it's a gimmick. What I wonder about this presentation is, am I supposed to be impressed? We've seen tech demos of this technology for over a year now, and we know you can use it to rotate and scale pictures. I've been scaling pictures and maps on my iPhone for a year now, and it's only worth mentioning there because it's a good solution for a device that has no keyboard or mouse.
But for general computing, it's not that useful to be able to arrange random photos on my desktop and set them at various sizes and rotate them to various degrees. That's a cool tech demo from a year ago, but in itself not a useful interface for anything. It reminds me of Active Desktop from years ago, or a little animated paper clip that answers your questions. It may be cute, but it's awful interface design.
The question for Microsoft/Apple is, can you create sensible interface conventions from this technology that will actually be of any use? If this demo is Microsoft's answer, then I guess their answer is "no".
(and yes I know powershell was released as an addon)
I'm curious, does anyone use the powershell to good effect? I tried downloading it at some point. I didn't get very far because for some reason (I don't know why this would be, given that it's just a shell) it ran too slowly to deal with. Like it took 30 seconds to get started, and then when I typed something there was a delay. It might have just been some kind of weird problem, because the system was fast enough to get a 4 on Vista's little speed rating thing.
Anyway, just wondering if anyone had anything to say on this, since the subject was raised. Does anyone use it? How does it compare to the old shell, or say bash?
Yes, it's just a plist file, but I don't think editing it is any easier than running the command. The command just writes the setting to that file and restarts the dock. If you don't know enough to run the command, there are a coupledifferentapps that can do it for you.
IMHO, it's better than how this sort of thing works in Windows. In Windows, it's usually in the registry, which is a big ugly file that's dangerous to screw around in. OSX has individual files for each program, and if you mess something up, you can usually just delete the file and it will write a new one next time you run the app.
Are you kidding? This is an unsupported interface tweak-- the command line is just a quick way to make the change. There are several ways to make this change, including downloading a freeware utility that lets you tweak your system.
Personally, I think this is *exactly* the way things like this should be handled. Give people an interface for making the most common tweaks, and expose the more complicated tweaks in such a way that 3rd party developers can come up with other ways to handle it. That way, you're not cluttering your default interface with every little setting, but you're also not preventing anyone from changing the setting. If the tweak is popular, then there will probably be a few different programs that will make the tweak for you.
Anyway, the system is entirely functional for "normal users" without this tweak. And if someone really wanted to make this change, all they have to do is copy/paste the command into their terminal window and hit enter.
Of course, I don't recommend that people run random commands they see on the internet in terminal without understanding what they do. Otherwise you'll be in deep the first time you see "cd/;sudo rm -rf *" posted online.
...competitors might copy the drugs before they get on the market, so the original developer pays for the research without having a benefit.
That is, in fact, the primary valid concern with all intellectual property. With copyright, the publishers might spend money developing and editing a piece of work, only to have competitors copy the work and distribute it early and/or at a cut price. For patents, the fear is that a company might spend resources developing a technology only to have a competitor copy that technology.
It's a valid concern, certainly. For patents, I don't think the problem is the idea of patents itself, but rather that patents are handed out to liberally. I'm not sure what exact tests should be put in place, but it seems like you should only be able to patent a specific non-obvious process that took significant investment to invent. Then *maybe* patents would be ok again.
Copyrights need to exist to protect commercial entities from each other. However, enforcement against distribution that is carried out by private individuals for free, with no economic gain, should be controversial. And the term is far too long. Also, I think we might want to ease up on derivative works, since creative arts have long been driven by taking familiar works and adapting/interpreting them.
Right. In fact, many P2P applications (at least bittorrent stuff) allows you to set max up/down rates. These can even be set on-the-fly, meaning you could let them download full-speed most of the time, but ask them nicely to throttle back when you're using the Internet. You know, like "Hey man, I'm trying to do something online, could you drop down to 20kbps for the next few hours?" Or whatever. Find a bitrate that won't hurt your usage
Unless your roommate is completely unreasonable, he'll go along with it. If your roommate is entirely unreasonable, you might want to consider not living with him.
I agree. I mean, I didn't RTFA, so I'm assuming you're right that he got paid for it, but I agree that it makes a world of difference.
To me, copyright law's original intent is valid. The system was set up in a time when making copies and distributing them on a wide scale took serious money. So the problem was that a book publisher, for example, might front a writer development costs for writing a book. Then the publishing house prints up copies and starts selling them. Without any laws in place, another book publisher could then buy a copy of the book, print their own copies, and sell them at a discount. This second book publisher would necessarily be at an economic advantage because their production costs would be the same, but they had no development costs. Copyright protection was created specifically to stop that sort of poaching by competing commercial entities.
The problem with copyright law now is that it has become trivially easy for private individuals to create copies of large works and distribute on a wide scale for free. Individuals have been accustomed to sharing content, e.g. loaning a record to your friend, and in fact this behavior has always been to the benefit of creators/distributers. However, once the "record" is a computer file, the line between "loaning" and "making a copy" becomes a bit blurred, and so the difference between "sharing with friends" and "copyright infringement" is also blurred. We haven't yet adjusted fully to this development.
However, a professional "pirate" who *sells* copies in violation of a copyright is a pretty unambiguous case. i have no problem with those cases being prosecuted in civil court, and in serious enough situations, criminal court.
This seems really silly. Since the employee is the one giving notice, he probably would not have motivation to cause damage before leaving. Furthermore, if he wanted to open a back door or steal code before leaving, he could simply do it before he gave notice.
I've seen people happily give notice, and then over the next two weeks become increasingly frustrated and bitter as they realize how little they're actually needed, and how much they won't be missed. I've seen those people become negligent and even destructive as a result.
And don't forget the main rule here, no one is irreplaceable. No one! Not even you. (Yes, I even mean you there in the back with four digit/. id and the smug look on your face!) If you drop off the face of the Earth tomorrow the world is not going to end. Sure, there may be a few glitches here and there but someone will step in and keep things going. People that feel like they are irreplaceable are going to have a major ego correction at some point in their life. Some sooner than later.
I think this is a really good thing to remember, on a sort of philosophic level. Someone else responded with an example of a worker who, when she left, might have cost her company "a few million dollars" in lost man-hours and such. And that's an interesting thing to think about.
But what's also an interesting thing to think about is that, when you expand the scale to look at human history in general, that event of losing "a few million", even if it is a few million, probably wasn't even a blip.
Yes, yes, sometimes one person or one event can shape history. On the other hand, nobody should have a big enough ego to think that the world won't keep spinning without them.
In addition to this (I point this out whenever relevant) the Bill of Rights were specifically designed to allow the citizenry to rebel against the government. That's why the right to bear arms is in there, in case anyone ever wondered. It wasn't to permit people to hunt, it was specifically to allow the citizens to mount a military rebellion.
If you look at each of the rights enumerated in those first 10 amendments, you'll find that every one was denied to the Americans by the British government in an attempt to quell the rebellion. They were trying to set up their new government so that, if the government started getting out of line, they could overthrow it.
and give them some of your time and effort by reporting bugs, making some code (if you can), helping with documentation, helping newbies on their support lists, etc.
sometimes our time is as good as some cash.
Not my time. I'm stupid, and me spending time helping only means more of other people's time fixing my mistakes. Oh, no, my money is much more useful to others.
Can't tell if you're joking, but yes. Right now, they're hyping a tablet Mac, the iPhone 2, new designs for laptops and Mac minis, and new features for the Apple TV.
Some of the iPhone 2 stuff is real, but the rest is mostly speculation.
The GPL **IS** a License -- It's right there in the name. Same goes for BSD, Apache, MIT, etc. They are licenses.
The GPL really only applies to distribution. The GPL is not a EULA, and I can install and use software that has been released under the GPL without agreeing to anything or "licensing" anything. From a user perspective, I'm just as free to use the software "unlicensed" as if it were in the public domain. I can't run afoul of the GPL until I try to distribute.
Oh, yeah and IANAL, but why do developers releasing software under GPL insist on printing up the GPL and making you clicking "I agree" before it will install? Is that necessary?
I even tried talking about a site redesign on #debian on freenode once and got flamed by someone saying "why the hell should the look of a website matter?"
The same person who flamed you probably also get annoyed that Ubuntu gets more attention and praise than Debian. Some people just can't make the connection.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just saying that the reason people use faxes is not because the security capabilities are actually better than e-mail. The security capabilities of faxing are not better than those of e-mail. Any supposed security benefits are probably illusory, and most of the reason some people use fax machines is because it's the technology they're accustomed to.
As far as I'm concerned, fax should be considered an obsolete technology that we have to use when interacting with someone who isn't comfortable using newer/better technology.
Ah. I see. Thanks for your answer.
I don't think my comment is irrelevant, but rather I wasn't sure what the issue was (which is why I asked). The fact that it doesn't display things that it doesn't know how to handle is valid. Whether it asks you to download or downloads automatically, it seems to me, should be a setting. Either way is valid, IMO, but ideally the user should be able to choose. Now, if you said it was *running* files without asking, it'd be a different issue, but downloading shouldn't be a huge deal.
But so the problem is that it's allowing pages to force automatic downloads an unlimited number of files, without asking? That does sound like it's potentially annoying problem. Still not sure it's a very critical security vulnerability, but if it's hard to cancel once it has started, then it would be annoying.
That's all this is about? Safari downloads some things instead of displaying them? Is that even a security bug?
If my browser doesn't know how to display it, I think I'd rather it didn't try. Trying seems like it might be even more dangerous. Am I wrong?
Or turning your screen off (or "power saving mode") instead of going to screensaver. Screensavers also don't make a ton of sense in the modern world. Burn-in is much less of a problem on modern monitors, and computers can power down the screen instead of going to screensaver.
In truth, I still use a screensaver as a sort of warning system. The screensaver comes on 3 minutes before the computer sleeps, so if I want to keep it from sleeping, I have a couple minutes to stop it. But if you're using some kind of cool 3D screensaver, I'd guess that it might use more power to display it than to just keep showing your desktop.
It's also to provide a purpose for government agencies that would have otherwise become obsolete when prohibition ended. Government always expands, never contracts. If you create an agency to keep people from getting illegal substances, they'll make substances illegal just to give that agency something to do.
So humans were "invented" huh? I guess that tells us where you come down on the whole "religion" issue.
Multi-touch isn't going to help me do my job any easier and I really don't want users pinching and dragging their dirty mits around the new LCD monitors...
Well certainly not anything in their multi-touch demo. A touch-screen piano on a laptop screen-- I doubt anyone who knows how to play a piano will find this is be a worthwhile solution.
The thing is, I'm sure multi-touch is a good practical solution for many things. And for many other things, it's a gimmick. What I wonder about this presentation is, am I supposed to be impressed? We've seen tech demos of this technology for over a year now, and we know you can use it to rotate and scale pictures. I've been scaling pictures and maps on my iPhone for a year now, and it's only worth mentioning there because it's a good solution for a device that has no keyboard or mouse.
But for general computing, it's not that useful to be able to arrange random photos on my desktop and set them at various sizes and rotate them to various degrees. That's a cool tech demo from a year ago, but in itself not a useful interface for anything. It reminds me of Active Desktop from years ago, or a little animated paper clip that answers your questions. It may be cute, but it's awful interface design.
The question for Microsoft/Apple is, can you create sensible interface conventions from this technology that will actually be of any use? If this demo is Microsoft's answer, then I guess their answer is "no".
I'm curious, does anyone use the powershell to good effect? I tried downloading it at some point. I didn't get very far because for some reason (I don't know why this would be, given that it's just a shell) it ran too slowly to deal with. Like it took 30 seconds to get started, and then when I typed something there was a delay. It might have just been some kind of weird problem, because the system was fast enough to get a 4 on Vista's little speed rating thing.
Anyway, just wondering if anyone had anything to say on this, since the subject was raised. Does anyone use it? How does it compare to the old shell, or say bash?
Yeah, that follows the pattern.
Yes, it's just a plist file, but I don't think editing it is any easier than running the command. The command just writes the setting to that file and restarts the dock. If you don't know enough to run the command, there are a couple different apps that can do it for you.
IMHO, it's better than how this sort of thing works in Windows. In Windows, it's usually in the registry, which is a big ugly file that's dangerous to screw around in. OSX has individual files for each program, and if you mess something up, you can usually just delete the file and it will write a new one next time you run the app.
Are you kidding? This is an unsupported interface tweak-- the command line is just a quick way to make the change. There are several ways to make this change, including downloading a freeware utility that lets you tweak your system.
Personally, I think this is *exactly* the way things like this should be handled. Give people an interface for making the most common tweaks, and expose the more complicated tweaks in such a way that 3rd party developers can come up with other ways to handle it. That way, you're not cluttering your default interface with every little setting, but you're also not preventing anyone from changing the setting. If the tweak is popular, then there will probably be a few different programs that will make the tweak for you.
Anyway, the system is entirely functional for "normal users" without this tweak. And if someone really wanted to make this change, all they have to do is copy/paste the command into their terminal window and hit enter.
Of course, I don't recommend that people run random commands they see on the internet in terminal without understanding what they do. Otherwise you'll be in deep the first time you see "cd /;sudo rm -rf *" posted online.
I don't know if this will be helpful, but I found I liked the Leopard dock better after running:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
It gets rid of the 3D look and gives the same look that the dock takes when you move it to the side of the screen.
Because no other countries would ever read your e-mail?
Unless your e-mail is encrypted, assume others can read it.
Where any of the answers "acute triangle"?
Or are you making some kind of joke I don't get?
...competitors might copy the drugs before they get on the market, so the original developer pays for the research without having a benefit.That is, in fact, the primary valid concern with all intellectual property. With copyright, the publishers might spend money developing and editing a piece of work, only to have competitors copy the work and distribute it early and/or at a cut price. For patents, the fear is that a company might spend resources developing a technology only to have a competitor copy that technology.
It's a valid concern, certainly. For patents, I don't think the problem is the idea of patents itself, but rather that patents are handed out to liberally. I'm not sure what exact tests should be put in place, but it seems like you should only be able to patent a specific non-obvious process that took significant investment to invent. Then *maybe* patents would be ok again.
Copyrights need to exist to protect commercial entities from each other. However, enforcement against distribution that is carried out by private individuals for free, with no economic gain, should be controversial. And the term is far too long. Also, I think we might want to ease up on derivative works, since creative arts have long been driven by taking familiar works and adapting/interpreting them.
Trademark-- fine? I think. I don't see a problem.
Right. In fact, many P2P applications (at least bittorrent stuff) allows you to set max up/down rates. These can even be set on-the-fly, meaning you could let them download full-speed most of the time, but ask them nicely to throttle back when you're using the Internet. You know, like "Hey man, I'm trying to do something online, could you drop down to 20kbps for the next few hours?" Or whatever. Find a bitrate that won't hurt your usage
Unless your roommate is completely unreasonable, he'll go along with it. If your roommate is entirely unreasonable, you might want to consider not living with him.
I agree. I mean, I didn't RTFA, so I'm assuming you're right that he got paid for it, but I agree that it makes a world of difference.
To me, copyright law's original intent is valid. The system was set up in a time when making copies and distributing them on a wide scale took serious money. So the problem was that a book publisher, for example, might front a writer development costs for writing a book. Then the publishing house prints up copies and starts selling them. Without any laws in place, another book publisher could then buy a copy of the book, print their own copies, and sell them at a discount. This second book publisher would necessarily be at an economic advantage because their production costs would be the same, but they had no development costs. Copyright protection was created specifically to stop that sort of poaching by competing commercial entities.
The problem with copyright law now is that it has become trivially easy for private individuals to create copies of large works and distribute on a wide scale for free. Individuals have been accustomed to sharing content, e.g. loaning a record to your friend, and in fact this behavior has always been to the benefit of creators/distributers. However, once the "record" is a computer file, the line between "loaning" and "making a copy" becomes a bit blurred, and so the difference between "sharing with friends" and "copyright infringement" is also blurred. We haven't yet adjusted fully to this development.
However, a professional "pirate" who *sells* copies in violation of a copyright is a pretty unambiguous case. i have no problem with those cases being prosecuted in civil court, and in serious enough situations, criminal court.
I've seen people happily give notice, and then over the next two weeks become increasingly frustrated and bitter as they realize how little they're actually needed, and how much they won't be missed. I've seen those people become negligent and even destructive as a result.
I think this is a really good thing to remember, on a sort of philosophic level. Someone else responded with an example of a worker who, when she left, might have cost her company "a few million dollars" in lost man-hours and such. And that's an interesting thing to think about.
But what's also an interesting thing to think about is that, when you expand the scale to look at human history in general, that event of losing "a few million", even if it is a few million, probably wasn't even a blip.
Yes, yes, sometimes one person or one event can shape history. On the other hand, nobody should have a big enough ego to think that the world won't keep spinning without them.
In addition to this (I point this out whenever relevant) the Bill of Rights were specifically designed to allow the citizenry to rebel against the government. That's why the right to bear arms is in there, in case anyone ever wondered. It wasn't to permit people to hunt, it was specifically to allow the citizens to mount a military rebellion.
If you look at each of the rights enumerated in those first 10 amendments, you'll find that every one was denied to the Americans by the British government in an attempt to quell the rebellion. They were trying to set up their new government so that, if the government started getting out of line, they could overthrow it.
Not my time. I'm stupid, and me spending time helping only means more of other people's time fixing my mistakes. Oh, no, my money is much more useful to others.
Can't tell if you're joking, but yes. Right now, they're hyping a tablet Mac, the iPhone 2, new designs for laptops and Mac minis, and new features for the Apple TV.
Some of the iPhone 2 stuff is real, but the rest is mostly speculation.
The GPL really only applies to distribution. The GPL is not a EULA, and I can install and use software that has been released under the GPL without agreeing to anything or "licensing" anything. From a user perspective, I'm just as free to use the software "unlicensed" as if it were in the public domain. I can't run afoul of the GPL until I try to distribute.
Oh, yeah and IANAL, but why do developers releasing software under GPL insist on printing up the GPL and making you clicking "I agree" before it will install? Is that necessary?
The same person who flamed you probably also get annoyed that Ubuntu gets more attention and praise than Debian. Some people just can't make the connection.