- The "offensive, embarassing, pornographic" clause is overly broad (there were a lot of other words included like "distressing" and "threatening"... ridiculous). They explicitly state that all these things are against terms of use regardless of their legality. The terms of use policy only has to prohibit using the connection for anything illegal, that would protect them when their users do illegal things like distributing child pornography.
- Restrictions on business/comercial use, servers (also banned by my ISP) and routers are similarly ridiculous. If they don't want you using all the bandwidth, then do it the direct way: with a bandwidth cap! Some idiot that got owned by viruses or someone sharing massive files on p2p will use more bandwidth than I will if I set up wifi securely so I can check my e-mail from my living room or whatever useless crap people use wifi for. You're right that there's no way to detect a router if done properly (I have two NICs in my PC and use the extra one to route Internet to my laptop, and there's no way to detect that), but they supposedly send people around the building with equipment to detect wireless routers.
- Why should I put up with a restriction on sharing my connection with my neighbor? It's my connection! If my neighbor uses too much bandwidth we'll hit the bandwidth cap and realize, "oh no, we'd better buy another connection!"
- NoIP doesn't solve my problem: http://www.no-ip.com/faq/catid/3/id/14 . And guess out what my IP address is: aldimond@cartoofar ~ $/sbin/ifconfig... eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:5A:7C:2D:3A
inet addr:10.71.0.122 Bcast:10.71.15.255 Mask:255.255.240.0
My ISP has NAT set up on routers I can't control. Unless there's a tunneling feature of NoIP that I don't know about, NoIP doesn't help me.
I know that if you think from the perspective of an ISP most of their provisions have benefits for them. But as a customer what I want is a real Internet connection: some bandwidth, a routable IP address (I don't care if it's dynamic, because dynamic IPs don't actually change that often; last year we had a different ISP that gave us routable but dynamic IPs and I just checked my IP every morning to make sure it handn't changed, and it never did. I used www.mysteryrobot.com to remember it), and no restrictions besides legality on use. That is what I consider real Internet service, and if you sell me anything less and call it "Internet service" I consider that a lie and an insult. Which is what I consider my current situation.
They're also technically incompetant: for some reason there was some proxy server software running on some of their equipment that blocked people from accessing anything on port 8080. My University runs some web services on port 8080, and people were having a hard time getting to them. The error message was from TinyProxy and really looked to me like something that clearly was the ISP's fault. I googled to find websites on 8080 and checked them from within and without our network and found them all to work outside but fail with the same error message inside. I reported these results to the ISP. They sent out an e-mail to our building saying that the University was blocking people from our building. They contacted the University. The admin responsible for the site in question was understandably skeptical. It took the ISP more than a month to fix the problem, and the whole time they kept repeating that there was nothing in their equipment that would block 8080. Then after it was fixed and I asked for an explanation they simply didn't respond.
In a certain sense you can only access locations that have a contract with the ISP, because of the way that Internet peering works. Certainly SBC would be doing something quite insidious with VoIP, no doubt about it. But the point o
You and I "just want to buy packets in and packets out". Most other people could be fooled by the ISP into thinking that any company that does allow unfettered VOIP is a saintly company with special equipment or something, and that there's a good reason for it to be disallowed.
Hopefully you're right about the quick death of companies that act deny access. Hopefully there are some ISPs that will figure out how to get word out to the people in a way they understand that these scummy ISPs are denying the fundamental nature of the Internet. Of course, if it's the cable companies they'll probably be working on trying to block streaming video. Jerks.
Honestly, they probably didn't promise to provide access to the Internet. I live in an apartment building with central Internet (I'm a college student and these apartments are aimed at students that will only live there a short time and so we can't go installing cables in our walls and stuff). It is a convenient setup, but we're pretty much stuck with the terms of our provider, which this year was switched to Insight Broadband (a cable company). I actually read their contract and there's a lot of stuff that you aren't allowed to do with your connection, such as use the connection for anything that might be considered offensive, "embarassing" (wtf?), pornographic, and a whole host of other things. You also aren't allowed to use the connection for business/commercial use of any kind (the wording is that it can only be used for "personal" and "entertainment" uses). We're not allowed to install routers of any kind, including of course wifi. And we're stuck behind NAT (when I asked the building tech. about that he asked the company and told me that they said that it was impossible to set up cable Internet service any other way), so I can't ssh into my computer. Except for the NAT thing, I knew about all that when I signed the contract, but I really had no choice. So basically.... I never signed up for real Internet service and I bet that a lot of other people didn't either.
Yeah, why does Windows deliberately disobey your orders when you tell it to show file extensions? There are a few other extensions with this behavior, I believe one of them is.maf (if you have certain versions of Access installed; I ran into this because Mozilla's MAF extension tried to use that as its extension). Anybody know some of these other wierd ones? Is there a way, when programs register an extension with Windows, to get this behavior? If so, WHY!?!?!?!?
It also won't spread to everyone on your buddy list if your "buddies" have a grain of intelligence. If you get an IM with a download link for an executable, ask the person what it is before downloading it, or at least say something to them to verify. This is not rocket science...
If your partitions are split up like many people's, that's exactly the effect./boot is a small ext2 partition (or whatever your bootloader recognizes), / is a fairly small partition, usually ext2 or ext3 (or whatever your kernel will recognize w/o modules). Then/var and/usr are whatever you like, and usually/usr takes most of the drive (if/home isn't a link to/usr/home then you'd probably want a/home as well). Personally I don't have seperate/usr or/var partitions right now but that's just because my hard drive has a large Windows partition from when I used Windows that I just haven't felt like backing up and reclaiming for the last 2 years, so I have limited space for my GNU/Linux system and can't justify "wasting" potential storage space on empty space in / or/var. But the multiple partitions usually make recovery from certain types of HD failure easier, so when I do get around to doing that I'll probably make most of that space/usr and a decent chunk for/home.
Correct me if I don't know what I'm talking about (I'm sure I don't), but if one of the features (FUSE) allows filesystem userspace file system drivers, wouldn't that bypass the whole issue? Reiser can use different style than the kernel guidelines and use whatever kind of plugin system he likes, and the kernel folks won't have to worry about it?
Many people have mentioned missing hardware/software components, I will chime in here with a sound card (if there's an onboard one it wasn't mentioned) and a network interface (same here). These parts can often be pulled from old machines if they weren't onboard on the old machines, but a sound card with no acceleration can put more load on the CPU. A cheap NIC runs $10-15, and if I recall correctly tends to offload more work to the CPU than a better one (not that I think many people plunk down the money for better ones... I sure didn't, but I'm no gamer).
The other thing that's really missing from this article is a test. Clearly, Tom didn't actually build this computer, so we have some idea based on his discussion of the compromises what kind of performance his stuff would have, but no concrete numbers. How do all of his compromises compound? Has he looked at inter-device interactions, or performance bottlenecks? No evidence of that in the article. For all I can see he just spent a half hour on NewEgg or some similar site. Bah.
Yeah seriously. Now I am a USian that has never owned an iPod or a single piece of DRMed music, but I don't understand what stops Australians or anyone else from visiting the American iTunes store. Can't credit card companies just automatically do the currency conversion?
I'm guessing it's like DVD country codes, a completely artificial restriction put on the download to try to manipulate the markets. If this is the case, then it seems to me that all the people here posting that widespread iTunes use subverts the old **AA distribution model are badly mistaken.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of having to recite the alphabet backwards is that it's something that almost nobody can do. So it takes a lot of concentration and thought to attempt it. They ask you to do something else, like walk a straight line or stand on one foot while touching your nose, and simultaneously recite the alphabet backwards. You consciously focus on the backwards alphabet and stop concentrating on your balance, and thus lose it if you're impaired. My guess is that this probably works pretty well, but if you want to find out it's not hard to test. Perhaps some night if I'm bored I'll give it a shot.
Another great program for those that want nice equations (and nice documents in general) is LyX, which is essentially a GUI for building LaTeX. It has its own document format, but it compiles to TeX in order to generate output. As a college student I think it's great for quickly throwing together homework assignments with a mixture of text, equations, figures and code samples (I end up using it quite a bit in DSP classes). I don't think you really *have* to know anything about TeX to use LyX, unless you have specific requirements about how your document looks (for example, for courses in the humanities where I have to use MLA format... there's a LaTeX MLA package that I ended up having to modify becaue it was incorrect, and to use it within LyX you need to know a bit about how TeX works).
Sure, the cost is passed on to the consumer. So it becomes more expensive for consumers to buy throwaway goods, therefore they're less inclined to do it. This puts pressure on the businesses selling the goods.
I guess in theory tax revenue from such an scheme could cause other taxes to be lowered (ha, ha, good one) or could support vital programs (wow I'm on fire today) such that it wouldn't be an actual increased burden in the aggregate.
Quoth parent: "Any tax large enough to significantly impact the companies bottom line (assuming that demand isn't too elastic) will probably be enough to make the product not worth making in the first hand." I thought that was the point. Make it economically less viable to produce disposable products by making producers pay for the disposal.
I think a big problem with such a proposal is that it would require a precise definition of disposable goods. That definition would be crafted by legislators influenced by corporate lobbyists, and even if it was constructed entirely in good faith would almost surely contain both loopholes allowing the people it was intending to tax to walk away scot-free, and apply in other areas for which it was never intended.
The trouble with trying to save money from a telemarketing call is that the seller is trying to get you to buy something right there on the phone. If something is costing me between $40 and $90/month it's probably a pretty major service and something that I really ought to do at least a bit more investigation of than I could do during the scope of a phone call, when I don't have all the facts about the service at the top of my head. You shouldn't buy anything from a telemarketing call ever unless you already know a lot about the particular service. And if you do, then you're probably not getting ripped off as it is.
Yeah, so I've seen the "Add engines..." button and clicked on the links there. And exactly as I said, it doesn't do anything to the googlebox itself. Well, unless you're root, that is. Don't you think that should at least be advertised to users? Shouldn't there be an error message, "hey, we couldn't actually install this search plugin to the Googlebox because you're not root".
And doesn't that seem like something that should be configurable per-user and not system-wide? Ah well, I think I'm making a trip to ye olde Bugzilla.
Well, thanks for explaining this to me, I was getting to think that there was a menu item in FF that was really badly placed. So LordSnooty runs as root all the time? Hope all his net-facing software is secure!
It doesn't spell anything for other browsers. They just have to have their own way to raise funds. They can do that however they want.
If FF and Opera can get Google to pay them for their users searching with Google, more power to 'em. Many would already be using Google in the first place, and the "Google box" is really convenient and easily switchable to some other search engine.
Of course, that last sentence reminds me a lot of "It's very convenient to bundle a web browser with an operating system and it's easy to choose a different one". Which is a true statement as well. With MSN and other competitors trying to take Google's place in search, Google is trying to keep their name first in the minds of the population running Opera and FF -- the population that often thinks of itself at the "net-elite" and is very likely to recommend things to "not-elite" friends. Which is exactly the advantage that Microsoft's IE has, that it's the first one there.
Interestingly enough, at least on FF1.0.6/GNULinux, you can't add new searches to the "googlebox". There's an "Add buttons" item, but it only adds a particular kind of bookmark that lets you type, say, "wp foobar" into the address bar and give you a wikipedia search for foobar. And they don't exactly document that fact well at all. So it does look like the "googlebox" is an exclusive space for Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Dictionary.com, eBay and Creative Commons (one of these things is not like the others?). I mean, of course, FF is open source and I could go through the code and change it. It's probably really easy. But what's interesting is the total lack of acknowledgement of the pay-for-space aspect of FF/Moz. I'd have thought I would have heard of it by now.
Whatever. It's non-intrusive and useful. If it gets intrusive I'll use something else. (Actually Opera getting rid of its adbar caused me to download it and I use it from time to time... so that bit of non-intrusiveness does count.)
This Firefox release is an opportunity for me to ask a question I've been thinking a lot about lately: on GNU/Linux, is the web browser a package that's better handled outside of the context of the distribution's package manager? I'm running Gentoo right now, and I love Portage, but there will at least be some delay between the Firefox release and a new ebuild being available. And in order to emerge this new release I'd need to sync my Portage tree again, which I don't have any other particular need to do right now (once or twice emerge sync has caused me problems, usually because it causes me to subsequently update some package that I originally emerged with USE flags set that I neglected to add to my make.conf).
Anyhow, the basic idea is that Firefox is a package that has to be updated at specific times, and I know when those times are, and they aren't necessarily times that my system as a whole needs to be updated.
There are few other packages that depend on Firefox; all I can really think of are plugins and extensions. Plugins don't typically require a specific FF version, and I get my extensions centrally from mozdev. So can you guys think of anything I'd lose by unmerging FF from Portage, installing a stub in its place, and just using the official builds from mozilla.org? Besides the potential optimization? (I would say integration and consistency with the overall system in terms of file placement and stuff, but... that doesn't seem to happen anyway. It's not an easy thing to fit a huge X application into Unix directory conventions based on the concept of many small programs doing one thing well...)
The main other package to which I'd apply this type of thinking is OOo. I wouldn't apply it to KDE or Gnome (though I don't directly use either) because they contain many useful libraries, and I feel that the handling of libraries is a real strength of package management systems. Can you guys think of any other packages that might not be best handled by package management?
I imagine this type of thing could pick out Backspace quite well... but what of the readline keys? Could it figure out if you typed the middle of your password, ^a, the beginning, ^e, the end?
Unfortunately not all password fields accept these characters. Password fields in Firefox/Linux with gtk keybindings set to "emacs" allows this... however, if I open up a terminal and try to "su" to another user, that prompt doesn't work (although it does recognize backspace, as we all know).
If you're coding in ColdFusion you can generate flash based on server-side data to send to the client. Or maybe it's a client-side flash that can be cached on the client but dials up a server to get some data... or the data is passed to the flash object as a parameter... something like that. I've played around with it a bit but none of the flash controls that ship with ColdFusion were all that flexible or useful for what I was doing and I don't know anything about rolling my own flash.
Yup, the content-disposition thing was exactly what I was thinking. It's actually kinda funny, because if you don't read the HTTP specification for content-disposition it actually looks like other browsers are broken. Sites like Yahoo mail (unless it's been fixed since I last used it, which was long ago) use the (wrong) method that only works in IE for file downloads with spaces in their names, making other browsers look like they're on crack.
Yeah, you'd think that the whole HTTP thing wouldn't be too hard... especially given that the server-side code should be usually written by at least reasonably-clueful people (wait... I've read a few web scripting discussion boards and maybe I should retract that). I think it would be cool to go through bug complaints about the major browsers' various HTTP problems and create an ACID-style test (or perhaps test suite) for HTTP. 'Cause it's pretty embarassing for browsers not to handle HTTP correctly.
The "Spaniard" part is because the word "español" when used as a noun can refer to anything that's Spanish.
The "mear" thing is wierd; also I would think they woulda wanted to conjugate "mear" in the preterite rather than the imperfect (although knowing that really requires knowledge of the author's intention... perhaps a translator that asks questions to the user to find out stuff like that would be useful...). But I haven't spoken or studied much Spanish in the last four years or so, so I may be missing something.
The other thing is the "sus" at the end automatically going to "its" rather than trying to get some context on it. Obviously it reads some context to figure out the subject of English verbs, so in a simple sentence like that it may have been able to figure out that "sus" was "de ellos". Although that, also, does require knowledge of the intentions of the Spanish author.
Well... I've never had X crash that badly on me, but as far as I know (and correct me if I'm wrong) the Alt+Fn key combos are actually built into the kernel as a way of switching through terminals; when a program takes control of a terminal (as X typically does with, say,/dev/vt7) it can disable these commands, since in the case of X and many other graphical programs there are things that need to be done before the console is switched. The keycombos ctrl-alt-Fn from within X basically ask X to do whatever must be done, and then switch consoles (I don't know whether this is handled completely by X but I'd assume so). So if X is totally fucked to the point that ctrl-alt-bcksp doesn't work, I doubt that ctrl-alt-F1 and its brethren would work either. But again, I've never tried. I have been in situations where X was slowed to a near-halt because I was being dumb, and it took a long time for ctrl-alt-f1 to take effect so I could drop to the console and kill my stupid task.
The Amish would be biased since they would want to add into their TCO estimate the costs of getting the place wired for electricity. Thus they would conclude that the pencil and paper offer the best TCO, despite the massive potential improvements in efficeincy that could follow a computer installation.
However, the Amish might also take into account previously unthought of aspects of TCO, like workers wasting more time on games, or the cost of exorcising daemons from the computers.
Well... as I understand the online poker scene, to play you must have an executable program installed on your computer that must be running in order for the game to be played. Seems pretty simple to make a program that would do something at least somewhat nasty to cheaters. Particularly those that run with admin rights.
I mean, some of these sites let you win real stuff without paying any money in. They're probably already installing adware on your computer as it is.
(All this said, I've never really played any online poker so I might have some of my facts wrong)
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- The "offensive, embarassing, pornographic" clause is overly broad (there were a lot of other words included like "distressing" and "threatening"... ridiculous). They explicitly state that all these things are against terms of use regardless of their legality. The terms of use policy only has to prohibit using the connection for anything illegal, that would protect them when their users do illegal things like distributing child pornography.
/sbin/ifconfig ...
- Restrictions on business/comercial use, servers (also banned by my ISP) and routers are similarly ridiculous. If they don't want you using all the bandwidth, then do it the direct way: with a bandwidth cap! Some idiot that got owned by viruses or someone sharing massive files on p2p will use more bandwidth than I will if I set up wifi securely so I can check my e-mail from my living room or whatever useless crap people use wifi for. You're right that there's no way to detect a router if done properly (I have two NICs in my PC and use the extra one to route Internet to my laptop, and there's no way to detect that), but they supposedly send people around the building with equipment to detect wireless routers.
- Why should I put up with a restriction on sharing my connection with my neighbor? It's my connection! If my neighbor uses too much bandwidth we'll hit the bandwidth cap and realize, "oh no, we'd better buy another connection!"
- NoIP doesn't solve my problem: http://www.no-ip.com/faq/catid/3/id/14 . And guess out what my IP address is:
aldimond@cartoofar ~ $
eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:5A:7C:2D:3A
inet addr:10.71.0.122 Bcast:10.71.15.255 Mask:255.255.240.0
My ISP has NAT set up on routers I can't control. Unless there's a tunneling feature of NoIP that I don't know about, NoIP doesn't help me.
I know that if you think from the perspective of an ISP most of their provisions have benefits for them. But as a customer what I want is a real Internet connection: some bandwidth, a routable IP address (I don't care if it's dynamic, because dynamic IPs don't actually change that often; last year we had a different ISP that gave us routable but dynamic IPs and I just checked my IP every morning to make sure it handn't changed, and it never did. I used www.mysteryrobot.com to remember it), and no restrictions besides legality on use. That is what I consider real Internet service, and if you sell me anything less and call it "Internet service" I consider that a lie and an insult. Which is what I consider my current situation.
They're also technically incompetant: for some reason there was some proxy server software running on some of their equipment that blocked people from accessing anything on port 8080. My University runs some web services on port 8080, and people were having a hard time getting to them. The error message was from TinyProxy and really looked to me like something that clearly was the ISP's fault. I googled to find websites on 8080 and checked them from within and without our network and found them all to work outside but fail with the same error message inside. I reported these results to the ISP. They sent out an e-mail to our building saying that the University was blocking people from our building. They contacted the University. The admin responsible for the site in question was understandably skeptical. It took the ISP more than a month to fix the problem, and the whole time they kept repeating that there was nothing in their equipment that would block 8080. Then after it was fixed and I asked for an explanation they simply didn't respond.
In a certain sense you can only access locations that have a contract with the ISP, because of the way that Internet peering works. Certainly SBC would be doing something quite insidious with VoIP, no doubt about it. But the point o
You and I "just want to buy packets in and packets out". Most other people could be fooled by the ISP into thinking that any company that does allow unfettered VOIP is a saintly company with special equipment or something, and that there's a good reason for it to be disallowed.
Hopefully you're right about the quick death of companies that act deny access. Hopefully there are some ISPs that will figure out how to get word out to the people in a way they understand that these scummy ISPs are denying the fundamental nature of the Internet. Of course, if it's the cable companies they'll probably be working on trying to block streaming video. Jerks.
Honestly, they probably didn't promise to provide access to the Internet. I live in an apartment building with central Internet (I'm a college student and these apartments are aimed at students that will only live there a short time and so we can't go installing cables in our walls and stuff). It is a convenient setup, but we're pretty much stuck with the terms of our provider, which this year was switched to Insight Broadband (a cable company). I actually read their contract and there's a lot of stuff that you aren't allowed to do with your connection, such as use the connection for anything that might be considered offensive, "embarassing" (wtf?), pornographic, and a whole host of other things. You also aren't allowed to use the connection for business/commercial use of any kind (the wording is that it can only be used for "personal" and "entertainment" uses). We're not allowed to install routers of any kind, including of course wifi. And we're stuck behind NAT (when I asked the building tech. about that he asked the company and told me that they said that it was impossible to set up cable Internet service any other way), so I can't ssh into my computer. Except for the NAT thing, I knew about all that when I signed the contract, but I really had no choice. So basically.... I never signed up for real Internet service and I bet that a lot of other people didn't either.
Yeah, why does Windows deliberately disobey your orders when you tell it to show file extensions? There are a few other extensions with this behavior, I believe one of them is .maf (if you have certain versions of Access installed; I ran into this because Mozilla's MAF extension tried to use that as its extension). Anybody know some of these other wierd ones? Is there a way, when programs register an extension with Windows, to get this behavior? If so, WHY!?!?!?!?
It also won't spread to everyone on your buddy list if your "buddies" have a grain of intelligence. If you get an IM with a download link for an executable, ask the person what it is before downloading it, or at least say something to them to verify. This is not rocket science...
If your partitions are split up like many people's, that's exactly the effect. /boot is a small ext2 partition (or whatever your bootloader recognizes), / is a fairly small partition, usually ext2 or ext3 (or whatever your kernel will recognize w/o modules). Then /var and /usr are whatever you like, and usually /usr takes most of the drive (if /home isn't a link to /usr/home then you'd probably want a /home as well). Personally I don't have seperate /usr or /var partitions right now but that's just because my hard drive has a large Windows partition from when I used Windows that I just haven't felt like backing up and reclaiming for the last 2 years, so I have limited space for my GNU/Linux system and can't justify "wasting" potential storage space on empty space in / or /var. But the multiple partitions usually make recovery from certain types of HD failure easier, so when I do get around to doing that I'll probably make most of that space /usr and a decent chunk for /home.
Correct me if I don't know what I'm talking about (I'm sure I don't), but if one of the features (FUSE) allows filesystem userspace file system drivers, wouldn't that bypass the whole issue? Reiser can use different style than the kernel guidelines and use whatever kind of plugin system he likes, and the kernel folks won't have to worry about it?
Many people have mentioned missing hardware/software components, I will chime in here with a sound card (if there's an onboard one it wasn't mentioned) and a network interface (same here). These parts can often be pulled from old machines if they weren't onboard on the old machines, but a sound card with no acceleration can put more load on the CPU. A cheap NIC runs $10-15, and if I recall correctly tends to offload more work to the CPU than a better one (not that I think many people plunk down the money for better ones... I sure didn't, but I'm no gamer).
The other thing that's really missing from this article is a test. Clearly, Tom didn't actually build this computer, so we have some idea based on his discussion of the compromises what kind of performance his stuff would have, but no concrete numbers. How do all of his compromises compound? Has he looked at inter-device interactions, or performance bottlenecks? No evidence of that in the article. For all I can see he just spent a half hour on NewEgg or some similar site. Bah.
Yeah seriously. Now I am a USian that has never owned an iPod or a single piece of DRMed music, but I don't understand what stops Australians or anyone else from visiting the American iTunes store. Can't credit card companies just automatically do the currency conversion?
I'm guessing it's like DVD country codes, a completely artificial restriction put on the download to try to manipulate the markets. If this is the case, then it seems to me that all the people here posting that widespread iTunes use subverts the old **AA distribution model are badly mistaken.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of having to recite the alphabet backwards is that it's something that almost nobody can do. So it takes a lot of concentration and thought to attempt it. They ask you to do something else, like walk a straight line or stand on one foot while touching your nose, and simultaneously recite the alphabet backwards. You consciously focus on the backwards alphabet and stop concentrating on your balance, and thus lose it if you're impaired. My guess is that this probably works pretty well, but if you want to find out it's not hard to test. Perhaps some night if I'm bored I'll give it a shot.
Another great program for those that want nice equations (and nice documents in general) is LyX, which is essentially a GUI for building LaTeX. It has its own document format, but it compiles to TeX in order to generate output. As a college student I think it's great for quickly throwing together homework assignments with a mixture of text, equations, figures and code samples (I end up using it quite a bit in DSP classes). I don't think you really *have* to know anything about TeX to use LyX, unless you have specific requirements about how your document looks (for example, for courses in the humanities where I have to use MLA format... there's a LaTeX MLA package that I ended up having to modify becaue it was incorrect, and to use it within LyX you need to know a bit about how TeX works).
Sure, the cost is passed on to the consumer. So it becomes more expensive for consumers to buy throwaway goods, therefore they're less inclined to do it. This puts pressure on the businesses selling the goods.
I guess in theory tax revenue from such an scheme could cause other taxes to be lowered (ha, ha, good one) or could support vital programs (wow I'm on fire today) such that it wouldn't be an actual increased burden in the aggregate.
Quoth parent: "Any tax large enough to significantly impact the companies bottom line (assuming that demand isn't too elastic) will probably be enough to make the product not worth making in the first hand." I thought that was the point. Make it economically less viable to produce disposable products by making producers pay for the disposal.
I think a big problem with such a proposal is that it would require a precise definition of disposable goods. That definition would be crafted by legislators influenced by corporate lobbyists, and even if it was constructed entirely in good faith would almost surely contain both loopholes allowing the people it was intending to tax to walk away scot-free, and apply in other areas for which it was never intended.
The trouble with trying to save money from a telemarketing call is that the seller is trying to get you to buy something right there on the phone. If something is costing me between $40 and $90/month it's probably a pretty major service and something that I really ought to do at least a bit more investigation of than I could do during the scope of a phone call, when I don't have all the facts about the service at the top of my head. You shouldn't buy anything from a telemarketing call ever unless you already know a lot about the particular service. And if you do, then you're probably not getting ripped off as it is.
Yeah, so I've seen the "Add engines..." button and clicked on the links there. And exactly as I said, it doesn't do anything to the googlebox itself. Well, unless you're root, that is. Don't you think that should at least be advertised to users? Shouldn't there be an error message, "hey, we couldn't actually install this search plugin to the Googlebox because you're not root".
And doesn't that seem like something that should be configurable per-user and not system-wide? Ah well, I think I'm making a trip to ye olde Bugzilla.
Well, thanks for explaining this to me, I was getting to think that there was a menu item in FF that was really badly placed. So LordSnooty runs as root all the time? Hope all his net-facing software is secure!
It doesn't spell anything for other browsers. They just have to have their own way to raise funds. They can do that however they want.
If FF and Opera can get Google to pay them for their users searching with Google, more power to 'em. Many would already be using Google in the first place, and the "Google box" is really convenient and easily switchable to some other search engine.
Of course, that last sentence reminds me a lot of "It's very convenient to bundle a web browser with an operating system and it's easy to choose a different one". Which is a true statement as well. With MSN and other competitors trying to take Google's place in search, Google is trying to keep their name first in the minds of the population running Opera and FF -- the population that often thinks of itself at the "net-elite" and is very likely to recommend things to "not-elite" friends. Which is exactly the advantage that Microsoft's IE has, that it's the first one there.
Interestingly enough, at least on FF1.0.6/GNULinux, you can't add new searches to the "googlebox". There's an "Add buttons" item, but it only adds a particular kind of bookmark that lets you type, say, "wp foobar" into the address bar and give you a wikipedia search for foobar. And they don't exactly document that fact well at all. So it does look like the "googlebox" is an exclusive space for Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Dictionary.com, eBay and Creative Commons (one of these things is not like the others?). I mean, of course, FF is open source and I could go through the code and change it. It's probably really easy. But what's interesting is the total lack of acknowledgement of the pay-for-space aspect of FF/Moz. I'd have thought I would have heard of it by now.
Whatever. It's non-intrusive and useful. If it gets intrusive I'll use something else. (Actually Opera getting rid of its adbar caused me to download it and I use it from time to time... so that bit of non-intrusiveness does count.)
This Firefox release is an opportunity for me to ask a question I've been thinking a lot about lately: on GNU/Linux, is the web browser a package that's better handled outside of the context of the distribution's package manager? I'm running Gentoo right now, and I love Portage, but there will at least be some delay between the Firefox release and a new ebuild being available. And in order to emerge this new release I'd need to sync my Portage tree again, which I don't have any other particular need to do right now (once or twice emerge sync has caused me problems, usually because it causes me to subsequently update some package that I originally emerged with USE flags set that I neglected to add to my make.conf).
Anyhow, the basic idea is that Firefox is a package that has to be updated at specific times, and I know when those times are, and they aren't necessarily times that my system as a whole needs to be updated.
There are few other packages that depend on Firefox; all I can really think of are plugins and extensions. Plugins don't typically require a specific FF version, and I get my extensions centrally from mozdev. So can you guys think of anything I'd lose by unmerging FF from Portage, installing a stub in its place, and just using the official builds from mozilla.org? Besides the potential optimization? (I would say integration and consistency with the overall system in terms of file placement and stuff, but... that doesn't seem to happen anyway. It's not an easy thing to fit a huge X application into Unix directory conventions based on the concept of many small programs doing one thing well...)
The main other package to which I'd apply this type of thinking is OOo. I wouldn't apply it to KDE or Gnome (though I don't directly use either) because they contain many useful libraries, and I feel that the handling of libraries is a real strength of package management systems. Can you guys think of any other packages that might not be best handled by package management?
If the woman is telling the truth, that she deleted the software right after it was installed, how did the music get on there in the first place?
I imagine this type of thing could pick out Backspace quite well... but what of the readline keys? Could it figure out if you typed the middle of your password, ^a, the beginning, ^e, the end?
Unfortunately not all password fields accept these characters. Password fields in Firefox/Linux with gtk keybindings set to "emacs" allows this... however, if I open up a terminal and try to "su" to another user, that prompt doesn't work (although it does recognize backspace, as we all know).
If you're coding in ColdFusion you can generate flash based on server-side data to send to the client. Or maybe it's a client-side flash that can be cached on the client but dials up a server to get some data... or the data is passed to the flash object as a parameter... something like that. I've played around with it a bit but none of the flash controls that ship with ColdFusion were all that flexible or useful for what I was doing and I don't know anything about rolling my own flash.
Actually, you can mod me whatever you want.
Who the fuck would publicly admit that they listen to Fountains of Wayne?
Yup, the content-disposition thing was exactly what I was thinking. It's actually kinda funny, because if you don't read the HTTP specification for content-disposition it actually looks like other browsers are broken. Sites like Yahoo mail (unless it's been fixed since I last used it, which was long ago) use the (wrong) method that only works in IE for file downloads with spaces in their names, making other browsers look like they're on crack.
Yeah, you'd think that the whole HTTP thing wouldn't be too hard... especially given that the server-side code should be usually written by at least reasonably-clueful people (wait... I've read a few web scripting discussion boards and maybe I should retract that). I think it would be cool to go through bug complaints about the major browsers' various HTTP problems and create an ACID-style test (or perhaps test suite) for HTTP. 'Cause it's pretty embarassing for browsers not to handle HTTP correctly.
The "Spaniard" part is because the word "español" when used as a noun can refer to anything that's Spanish.
The "mear" thing is wierd; also I would think they woulda wanted to conjugate "mear" in the preterite rather than the imperfect (although knowing that really requires knowledge of the author's intention... perhaps a translator that asks questions to the user to find out stuff like that would be useful...). But I haven't spoken or studied much Spanish in the last four years or so, so I may be missing something.
The other thing is the "sus" at the end automatically going to "its" rather than trying to get some context on it. Obviously it reads some context to figure out the subject of English verbs, so in a simple sentence like that it may have been able to figure out that "sus" was "de ellos". Although that, also, does require knowledge of the intentions of the Spanish author.
Well... I've never had X crash that badly on me, but as far as I know (and correct me if I'm wrong) the Alt+Fn key combos are actually built into the kernel as a way of switching through terminals; when a program takes control of a terminal (as X typically does with, say, /dev/vt7) it can disable these commands, since in the case of X and many other graphical programs there are things that need to be done before the console is switched. The keycombos ctrl-alt-Fn from within X basically ask X to do whatever must be done, and then switch consoles (I don't know whether this is handled completely by X but I'd assume so). So if X is totally fucked to the point that ctrl-alt-bcksp doesn't work, I doubt that ctrl-alt-F1 and its brethren would work either. But again, I've never tried. I have been in situations where X was slowed to a near-halt because I was being dumb, and it took a long time for ctrl-alt-f1 to take effect so I could drop to the console and kill my stupid task.
The Amish would be biased since they would want to add into their TCO estimate the costs of getting the place wired for electricity. Thus they would conclude that the pencil and paper offer the best TCO, despite the massive potential improvements in efficeincy that could follow a computer installation.
However, the Amish might also take into account previously unthought of aspects of TCO, like workers wasting more time on games, or the cost of exorcising daemons from the computers.
Well... as I understand the online poker scene, to play you must have an executable program installed on your computer that must be running in order for the game to be played. Seems pretty simple to make a program that would do something at least somewhat nasty to cheaters. Particularly those that run with admin rights.
I mean, some of these sites let you win real stuff without paying any money in. They're probably already installing adware on your computer as it is.
(All this said, I've never really played any online poker so I might have some of my facts wrong)